THANKS to WSC
Those are good points -- I have a few days to make edits to the page
proofs; the article will appear in Oct 2012 J Military History.
Comments: I have not seen any editor make actual use of the Article
Feedback tool -- are there examples? Yes Wikipedians are very proud of
their vast half-billion-person audience. However they do not ask "what
features are most useful for a high school student or teacher/ a university
student/ etc"
As for who does the work, I looked closely at the big military articles
especially 1812, & also WWI, WW2, Am Civil War, Am Revolution and found
that the occasional editors & IP's contributed very little useful content.
That is also my experience with the political articles on presidents &
prime ministers & main political parties.
Boasting like Mike Fink?-- well I read 500+ requests for access to
Questia, Highbeam etc. and looked for what boasts editors actually make.
As for higher degrees and scholarly publications, that does not cut much
mustard on talk pages. Very few editors -- maybe 2%--mention their
professional expertise on their user pages. Fewer than 1% give real names
that would permit validation of their claims. in Academe these rates would
be 99%
In a larger sense (but it's not in my article), perhaps there are two wiki
communities, one for law enforcement & one for content. That is, we have
vigilantes policing the encyclopedia and ranchers herding ideas and moving
them to market. (I would use the farmer metaphor but growing a new crop
sounds too much like OR). The cash market, however, consists of praise from
other ranchers (as in FA), not from the half-billion customers whose
opinion about the beef is not of interest.
At 05:59 PM 9/5/2012, you wrote:
Hi Richard, Interesting read, I noticed a few
things, though its possible
that some may simply be that you are writing in American English.
"The article itself runs 14,000 words" - suggest "The article itself runs
to 14,000 words"
"That perspective is not of much concern inside Wikipedia, for it is
operated by and for the benefit of the editors.i Only readers who write
comments are listened to, and fewer than one in a thousand comments."
That's an interesting point of view, I've heard concerns that we don't know
enough as to what our readers want, however one of the primary motives of
most editors that I know is to make humanity's knowledge freely available
to the world, <http://commons.wikimedia.org/**
w/index.php?title=File:Editor_**Survey_Report_-_April_2011.**pdf&page=8…
Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.…
I've met a number of editors who are extremely focussed on the number
of people who've read their work and ways to acquire more readers such as
getting their work on Wikipedia's mainpage. Your own later comment "
Working on Wikipedia was most rewarding because it opened up a very
large, new audience" being a typical Wikipedian sentiment. Neither of which
accords with the idea that Wikipedia is operated for its editors. If you've
found that to be the view of some of Wikipedia's academic critics it might
be worth balancing that with information on the readership survey <
http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Readership_survey<http://meta.wikimedia…
http://**meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/**Readership_survey<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey>and
the way that and other metrics have been used to try and find out what
our readers
want. I suspect that such criticisms also pre-date developments
such as the Article Feedback tool.
"That task is handled by the "Wikipedia community," which in practice
means a self-selected group of a couple thousand editors." As well as
adding an of I'd suggest that your numbers are out. Most of the vandal
fighting, categorisation, new page patrol and spam deletion is done a
relatively small community of a few thousand. But the people who add
content are an overlapping and rather larger group. How you measure the
size of the community is complex, and many people ignore the IP editors who
actually write a large part of the content and focus on the currently
active editors who have done over a 100 edits in the last month - at 3400
or so that group isn't far from being a couple of thousand. <
http://stats.wikimedia.org/**EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm<http://stats.wikim…
http:**//stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**TablesWikipediaEN.htm<http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm>But
it is much larger when you consider the number of people who have
contributed
content in the past but may be less active now. Our 2,000 most
active editors accounted for 20% of total edits a little over a year ago, <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_**
to_the_rest_of_the_community.**png<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top…
compared_to_the_rest_of_the_**community.png<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
even that grossly overstates our importance as the minor edits such as
typo fixes are disproportionately done by us. Suggest: "That task is
handled by the "Wikipedia community," which in practice means a
self-selected group of a few thousand frequent editors and a much larger
number of occasional participants.
"Wikipedia editors almost never claim authorship of published scholarly
books and articles. That sort of expertise is not welcome in Wikipedia;
editors rarely mention they possess advanced training or degrees" According
to the editor survey 26% of our editors have either a masters or a PhD.
Academic expertise is highly valued in Wikipedia, but it is best
demonstrated by the quality of ones edits and especially your sourcing.
Afterall most of our editors are here to share their expertise <
http://commons.wikimedia.org/**w/index.php?title=File:Editor_**
Survey_Report_-_April_2011.**pdf&page=8<http://commons.wikimedia.org…
Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.…
"Wikipedia editors will boast like river boatmen about their output: how
many years they have worked on the encyclopedia, how many tens or hundreds
of thousands of edits they have made." There is some truth in that, but in
terms of status within the community featured article contributions are a
higher value currency than either tenure or edit count.
"They do not gain by selling their product, and anyone suspected of
writing articles for pay on behalf public relations for an entity comes
under deep suspicion.i As a result how many people read an article, or how
its audience has grown or fallen, or how useful it has been to the general
public are not among the criteria used to evaluate quality." That's an
interesting synthesis, there certainly is a distrust of those who edit for
pay, especially if they are from the PR industry. But I would suggest that
the distrust is more a product of people's experience with editors who have
difficulty writing neutrally about topics that they are being paid to
promote. A couple of good contrasts were mentioned in the translation
sessions at Wikimania in Gdansk in 2010, Google and its charity arm Google
org both presented about paid editing they'd commissioned in Indic
languages. The uncontentious operation was done by the charity arm,
translating English Wikipedia articles on medical articles into various
south Asian Wikipedia versions. Rather more contentious was the commercial
part of Google, they created missing articles for their most common search
terms, this lead to criticism from at least one editor that they were
writing an encyclopaedia and didn't need articles on Hollywood stars. But
the criticism
"The Wikipedia community uses kangaroo courts where the accused are
brought before a self-constituted jury, operating without formal rules or
defense counsel." That isn't too bad a description of the RFC process but
ARBCOM is elected, and for things that don't reach Arbcom, only admins can
block other editors and admins are not simply self selected.
"I taught military history but he never wrote on the war of 1812, and
usually skipped over it in my lectures."
- Suggest dropping the word "he"
"That is a handful of established editors strongly resist any new
additions." Suggest "That is when a handful of established editors strongly
resist any new additions."
"The Military History Project is one of the largest and most energetic of
these. It enrolls over 700 editors and is coordinated by Dank and a dozen
volunteers who ride heard on 51,000 different articles. " I'm pretty sure
it is the biggest WikiProject, and would suggest herd not heard.
"The problem is less severe in military history because academia does not
favor the field and much of the next writing is done by self-trained
scholars." next seems odd, best or new sound a little more plausible to me
- but both would be guesses.
"My recommendation for improving military history on Wikipedia is to set
up a program to help the most active military editors gain better access to
published scholarship, gain an appreciation of the historiography, and
start attending military history conferences." You might be interested in
some of our GLAM outreach work, thus far I think that the military museums
have been under-represented, but in London Wikimedia UK recently ran this: <
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/**2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-**
join-forces-for-world-war-one-**editathon/<http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-world-war-one-editathon/>
forces-for-world-war-one-**editathon/<http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-world-war-one-editathon/>
"Germany has a strong chapter that handles the German language
Wikipedia." I think you'll find that the Austrians and Swiss also get
involved in DE wiki affairs, I suspect that there are several other
languages where a chapter more closely aligns with a language. English of
course has the UK, Australian and and Indian chapters as well as the three
North American ones and many editors not covered by a chapter.
On a broader note, you might want to look through the logs for War of
1812 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/**index.php?title=Special:Log&**
page=War+of+1812<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&a…
1812<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=War+…
was first semi protected briefly in February 2006, was open for anyone
to edit for most of 06 and 07, but with a few short gaps has been semi
protected continually since 2010. There are very few articles that have
been semi protected for as long, and much if not all of its subsequent
reduced editing level will be from that. Semi Protection is known to
sharply reduce editing. There is also a theory that people are reluctant to
edit articles that have gone beyond their expertise, and this article will
clearly be beyond the expertise of many.
Regards
WSC
On 5 September 2012 18:52, Richard Jensen <<mailto:rjensen@uic.edu>rjens*
*en(a)uic.edu <rjensen(a)uic.edu>> wrote:
I have an essay that has just been accepted by the Journal of Military
History on
Military History on the Electronic Frontier:
Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812
It deals with the history of the "War of 1812" article on Wikipedia, in
context of military history and how Wikipedia operates.
<http://www.**americanhistoryprojects.com/**downloads/6jensen-1812.docx<http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/6jensen-1812.docx>
I would welcome any feedback.
Richard Jensen
<mailto:rjensen@uic.edu>rjense**n@uic.edu <rjensen(a)uic.edu>
User:Rjensen
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