>An "award" for a good post or encyclopedia edit can simply be a
>compliment:
>"nice post" or "good edit". This is also at the heart of civility, and
>should be done much more than it is in the Project.
That's why I like barnstars so much. They are easy to award, and people
don't get obsessed over them to the point of dedicating their wikipedia
time to the purpose of solely getting barnstars.
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== Balancing our Wikipedia editing energies - "Can't we all just get
along?" ==
I think we are discussing where to apply energies. Some of us are
suggesting being more spacious to newbies. Let's not confuse that with
clearing out spam, vandalism, and off topic contributions. These are
totally different subjects. Sadly, admins use tools intended for spam,
vandalism, and off-topic contributions, on newbies and oldies when they
consider the content of a wiki page. I'm asking admins to leave
anything that is not spam, not vandalism, not off-topic. If it's sux,
is poorly written, duplicates or is unclear, leave it, and let someone
edit it if you have no energy for it at the moment.
I know I'm asking for a lot, but I'm just trying to move the bar BACK to
spam, vandalism, and off-topic contributions.
I appreciate that may feel irresponsible for someone to leave a crappy
page alone, but that is EXACTLY what I am asking for.
How about a compromise? How about a template that says,
"Hi, I'm an experienced Wikipedian, and I'm overwhelmed at trying to
edit this particular article/page/section into compliance with our goal
of accuracy, appropriateness, neutral point of view, well, I challenge
anyone here to write a concise summary of what Wikipedia's credo is and
how to find it equally concisely documented in .. .how many keystrokes /
mouse clicks? I'm up to 7 and still can't find a list with NPOV and all
other criteria for editing and writing styles.
I can find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars but I
cannot find it quickly or directly from the front page. It leads to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines which
then looses me in this list:
1 Sources of Wikipedia policy
2 Policy-related articles
2.1 Official policy articles
2.2 Official guideline articles
2.3 Non-official essays or proposals
2.4 Processes relating to policy, guideline, essay, and proposal
articles
3 Other types of policy or consensus-related articles
3.1 Wikiprojects
3.2 Feature requests
3.3 "How to" or help pages
4 How are policies enforced?
5 Other essays and discussions about Wikipedia
6 See also says
Ooops, we've wandered away from what's expected from editors and
writers.
And we wonder why people have such divergent experienced on Wikipedia?!?
How would anybody find
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simplified_ruleset ?!?
----
== Material Harm ==
"Material harm" from a web page? Interesting postulation!
I looked up Google [define:harm] at
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=define
%3Aharm but Google [define:material harm] got no responses.
Definitions of harm on the Web:
injury: any physical damage to the body caused by violence or accident
or fracture etc.
damage: the occurrence of a change for the worse
cause or do harm to; "These pills won't harm your system"
damage: the act of damaging something or someone
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Harm is physical or psychological/emotional damage or injury to a
person, animal, or other entity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm
represents physical injury, death, ill health, property and equipment
damage and any form of appropriate loss.
http://www.astro.cardiff.ac.uk/safety/
Undesired consequences of an action or event. It can apply equally to
people, the environment, or property. For instance, the German (DIN VDE
3100-2) standard states that, "Harm is any detriment caused by a
violation of a legal interest, as a result of a certain technical
process or state".
http://www.fz-juelich.de/inb/inb-mut//vdi/vdi_bericht_e/glossar_e.html
--
I'm presuming that "material harm" just reinforces the belief that a web
page can cause harm to someone, especially a web page containing spam,
vandalism or some other supposed inaccuracy or inappropriate or
mismatched content that has not been cleaned up yet (though the visitor
can clean it up - hey, it's a wiki - EDIT EVERY PAGE!) or, worse,
outright poorly written content, oh my!
----
> Earlier: How not to bite the n00bs?
... removing teeth would be nice.
Since admins CAN delete and ban, they think their job is to look
for people to delete and ban. Why not remove delete and ban features
and be done with all this carping about abusive deleting and banning,
and the damage done to Wikipedians one and all.
More to the point, why are we so afraid of crappy pages? If a
page is truly crap, it will be ignored - nobody will go there. Or
someone will edit it and make it better, especially the original creator
of that so-called "crappy" page, but ONLY if they are encouraged, are
and allowed to get some wiki reading, editing, and writing experience.
Conversely, [Search] will bring us to the pages we really want anyway,
so we will bypass the crappy pages - they do not need to be so
diligently and abusively deleted.
The goal is not a 100% perfect encyclopedia. The goal is a
COMMUNITY building an encyclopedia. BUILDING, not BUILT. It will never
be "built". It will and should always be "in process", "under
construction", IMPERFECT! We will continue to increase the number and
quality of good pages - I am not worried ... unless the deletionists
keep bashing the life out of Wikipedians, newbies and oldies alike!
So long as it's not spam or vandalism, everything's good. And
crappy pages are good starter pages for people to learn NPOV and so on.
Anyone without the patience to help by participating with all
editors of any page - MOVE ON and do something else! Stop deleting and
banning! ... and quit complaining about bad contributions - make 'em
better (or move on and let someone else have a hand at it).
So, I suggest preventing n00b-biting by removing admin teeth,
and let's get back to building Wikipedia, rather than this constant
discussion about how to delete, delete, delete.
==
Now, for non-admins, let's talk about general curtsey, having a
positive and helpful attitude, setting an example of our preference for
editing, community building, ...
>The relationship I see with Wikipedia is our near complete lack of a
>reward or approval system. There's no official merit ladder, no
>point-scoring system, no way to trade your edit count in for valuable
>prizes, no special goodies for the editor of the month. We do have
>barnstars, but those don't imply a power relationship between giver and receiver, and they're never dangled as bait.
This is my first attempt to reply via a mailing list so excuse any mistakes that I've made and let me know if I have made any.
Concerning the post, I believe that having some actual reward system would indeed cause problems and stifle creativity
and motivation for one simple reason. Many individuals who do work for wikipedia would resort to only doing work for the rewards,
whatever they may be. I notice currently that a lot of editors seem to have only one goal in mind on wikipedia and that is becoming
an administrator. This is perceived as an "award" for hard work and many editors seem to base all of their edits on this one goal,
with disregard for actually improving the encyclopedia. This is why reward systems are harmful, people would tend to do the work purely
for the specific reward offered by others rather than the actual award of doing good work to help people.
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Wiki Dudeman wrote
> I notice currently that a lot of editors seem to have only one goal in mind on wikipedia and that is becoming
> an administrator. This is perceived as an "award" for hard work and many editors seem to base all of their edits on this one goal,
> with disregard for actually improving the encyclopedia. >This is why reward systems are harmful, people would tend to do the work purely
> for the specific reward offered by others rather than the actual award of doing good work to help people.
Perhaps the logic there is more of having forms of recognition other than adminship, though. We are indeed a bit light on forms of recognition.
Charles
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On 5 Nov 2007 at 00:32:25 -0700, "Todd Allen" <toddmallen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
Doesn't freedom also give you the right to say that 2+2=5?
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"Phoenix wiki" wrote
> I remember a previous email where I mentioned that those with 3200+ contribs
> are responsible for 52% of wikipedias edits. This study seems quite
> interesting:
>
> http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/news_details.php?release=071105_3621&page=UMNN
Yes, but more for what it says about vandalism. How many editors does enWP have? You can't count accounts to get a sensible number. So "percentage of all editors" is not a good concept. We really need to be talking about an area under some graph.
Charles
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