Our rules exist for a reason. Every one of them was agreed to by a
consensus of editors. And also, just because other publications may not
have an academic standard of truth, doesn't mean we shouldn't have one. The
Stanford prison experiment forced subjects into a dehumanizing,
adversarial, torturous experiment. I do not think being criticized for
making a non notable BLP is on the same level.
On Oct 27, 2014 8:08 PM, "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm 100% with you both on this matter of having
tried the obvious easy
solutions. If I hear one more person to propose outreach as the solution to
the gender gap or new editor retention, I think I will <insert threat of
choice here>. I do a lot of outreach here in Australia and, yes,
hand-holding works as long as you in the room with them but stops working
once they are at the mercy of the community (who will "attack" even during
the outreach). And also that kind of handholding is not scalable. We don't
just need 10 new active editors; we need 10K or even 100K new active
editors. It is indeed time to tackle the hard problem and that is changing
the "crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere". The
solution does not lie in training people to conform to that regime. Even if
people are taught how to engage with it, if people don't enjoy the
experience, of course they will walk away. Those of us still here are all
probably as stubborn as mules and with the hides of rhinoceroses (or just
enjoy being a bully safely hidden behind a pseudonym).
Although "academic standards of publication" appears to held up as the
ideal behind some of the Wikipedia quality guidelines, I must say they are
higher standards than I've seen enforced at most journals or in most
conferences. And certainly I've never seen the rigid enforcement of the
nit-picking rules in the Manual of Style. I do think we are operating our
own version of the Stanford Prison Experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
only the difference is that they cancelled their experiment in about a
week. Ours has been running for years ....
The Wikipedia article above says ...
The results of the experiment have been argued to demonstrate the
impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing
ideology and social and institutional support.
"Quality control" is Wikipedia's legitimising ideology and our processes
provide it with the social and institutional support. When did you ever see
someone in an Article for Deletion discussion or similar say "let's look at
the big picture here, the WMF have a strategic priority to reverse editor
attrition or close the gender gap, let's consider our decision here with
that in mind". No, it's always "we must decide this according to our
rules", raising any other point is discouraged (you get slapped down for
it). Of course, I question why WMF allows the community to make and enforce
rules when the outcome appears to be working against their stated
priorities. That's not strong governance, that's weakness. I don't think
WMF needs to control everything top-down (and indeed it would not be
scalable if they did) but they do need to set boundaries in some places in
relation to the community's control over policy and process to ensure the
success of the WMF strategic plan. For example, I would say that if a new
editor creates a new article which isn't obviously spam/vandalism, does it
really matter to let that article survive because it isn't notable enough
according to the guidelines for that category of article. At the very least
could we defer the discussion of deletion for a few months in the hope it
is further developed to a better standard by then? Perhaps a two stage
process, first communicate with the contributor(s) with **precise**
concerns about how it needs to be improved and they have a month to do it,
and that help is available (at the TeaHouse or wherever). (Feedback is
often too vague, saying "not notable" is not helpful and saying WP:ANYTHING
is not helpful either as it looks like a string of gibberish written like
that and even if the link is clicked, the resulting page is full of jargon
and often meaningless to the newbie).
Maybe we should introduce a karma system (like Slashdot). You can only do
certain actions if you have high karma. So "positive emotional" actions
like thanking, wikilove, writing nice sentiment messages, making
uncontested contributions to articles, etc earn you karma and only high
karma people can take "negative emotional" actions (undoing - other than
vandalism), proposing for deletion, voting to delete, because they reduce
your karma etc. This might at least slow down the out-and-out bullies who
engage in lots of "emotionally negative" behaviours ...
Kerry
------------------------------
*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Aaron Halfaker
*Sent:* Tuesday, 21 October 2014 12:08 AM
*To:* Pine W
*Cc:* WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org; Editor Engagement; Rachel diCerbo;
Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase theparticipation of
women within Wikimedia projects.; Wiki Research-l; A mailing list for the
Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has aninterest in Wikipedia and
analytics.
*Subject:* Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for
Wikipedia
Hey Pine,
Thanks for prod'ing the conversation. See also the discussion about
Wikipedia's decreasing adaptability on the Wikimedia analytics mailing list
here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-October/002651.html
IMO, the critical piece of evidence that English Wikipedia is suffering
from a lack of adaptive flexibility is the lack of any substantial change
to the treatment of newcomers since the massive decline in retention of
good-faith newcomers started in 2007[2]. A secondary piece of evidence is
the increasing resistance to policy/guideline (formalized norm) changes for
all editors, but especially newcomers[3].
We've seen some follow-up work that suggests that Wikipedia's complexity
itself is a barrier for new editors[7] and that these issues extend to
spaces specifically designed to support newcomers' work[6]. There have
been some interesting efforts to address the symptoms of the problem. For
example, see WP:Teahouse[4], WP:Snuggle[5] and Onboarding Research[8].
Personally, I think that the way forward is to recognize that *hard
problems are hard* because others have tried the easy/intuitive solutions
already. I think it is time to dig in and understand the fundamental,
socio-technical nature of Wikipedia. To that end, I'm working on building
data resources of strategic importance (see [9, 10, 11, 12]). I'm also
working towards experimenting with the effects of increased reflexive power
by surfacing a value-added measurement service[13]. And of course, I'm
advertising our socio-technical problems at research showcase like the one
Pine linked and when giving talks (e.g. [14]) so that we can grow our army
of wiki researchers.
OMG WALL OF REFERENCES:
1. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2012). The
rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia's reaction
to popularity is causing its decline. *American Behavioral Scientist*,
0002764212469365.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfa…
2.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desirable_newcomer_survival_over_time.…
from [1] Figure 4, pg. 12
3. Page 17, table 2 and the two pgs preceeding it.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfa…
4. Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013,
February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on
wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported
cooperative work* (pp. 839-848). ACM.
http://jtmorgan.net/jtmorgan/files/morgan_cscw2013_final.pdf
5. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., & Terveen, L. G. (2014, April). Snuggle:
designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique. In *Proceedings
of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems* (pp.
311-320). ACM.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-…
6. Schneider, J., Gelley, B. S., & Halfaker, A. (2014, August). Accept,
decline, postpone: How newcomer productivity is reduced in English
Wikipedia by pre-publication review. In *Proceedings of The International
Symposium on Open Collaboration* (p. 26). ACM.
http://cse.poly.edu/~gelley/acceptdecline.pdf
7. Ford, H., & Geiger, R. S. (2012, August). Writing up rather than
writing down: Becoming wikipedia literate. In *Proceedings of the Eighth
Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration* (p. 16).
ACM.
http://www.opensym.org/ws2012/p21wikisym2012.pdf
8.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians
9.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Ideas/MediaWiki_events:_a_generali…
10.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Editor_Interaction_Data_Extracti…
11.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection
12.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
13.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiCredit
14.
https://www.si.umich.edu/events/201409/icos-lecture-aaron-halfaker
-Aaron
On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 1:23 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Both of the presentations at the October Wikimedia Research Showcase were
fascinating and I encourage everyone to watch them [1]. I would like to
continue to discuss the themes from the showcase about Wikipedia's
adaptability, viability, and diversity.
Aaron's discussion about Wikipedia's ongoing internal adaptations, and
the slowing of those adaptations, reminded me of this statement from MIT
Technology Review in 2013 (and I recommend reading the whole article [2]):
"The main source of those problems (with Wikipedia) is not mysterious. The
loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male,
operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that
deters newcomers who might increase partipcipation in Wikipedia and broaden
its coverage."
I would like to contrast that vision of Wikipedia with the vision
presented by User:CatherineMunro (formatting tweaks by me), which I re-read
when I need encouragement:
"THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
One gateway
to the wide garden of knowledge,
where lies
The deep rock of our past,
in which we must delve
The well of our future,
The clear water
we must leave untainted
for those who come after us,
The fertile earth,
in which truth may grow
in bright places,
tended by many hands,
And the broad fall of sunshine,
warming our first steps
toward knowing
how much we do not know."
How can we align ouselves less with the former vision and more with the
latter? [3]
I hope that we can continue to discuss these themes on the Research
mailing list. Please contribute your thoughts and questions there.
Regards,
Pine
[1]
youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw
[2]
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikiped…
[3] Lest this at first seem to be impossible, I will borrow and tweak a
quote from from George Bernard Shaw and later used by John F. Kennedy:
"Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' Let us dream things
that never were and say, 'Why not?'"
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