On 3/30/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 31/03/07, Kirill Lokshin
<kirill.lokshin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/30/07, Kelly Martin
<kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
* A mapping of categories onto Subject Working
Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the
maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories
assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple
SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative
components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for
it.)
And *why* exactly would we need this all-pervading bureaucracy? Who
cares which group is "primarily" responsible for the article? You're
confusing the idea of the SWG as a place to ask for help with the
article with that of the SWG as a place to excercise control over it;
unless the primary group is to be given some unique function relative
to the non-primary ones, knowing which one it happens to be is
useless.
(You do realize that virtually every article will be in such an
intersected scope, if only because subject-oriented groups are
orthogonal to country-oriented ones, yes?)
I think bureaucracy is the wrong word. The idea is to impose a
radically different, prescriptive structure onto Wikipedia to ensure
that all articles are managed and brought to a particular standard.
Where bureaucracy suggests evolutionary build up of layers of
redundancy, this system would, ideally, be technical and streamlined.
This technicality would eliminate the need for bureaucratic layers.
No, it'd merely make sure that the bureaucratic layers are planned in
advance. ;-)
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration
models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast
majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their
choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll
simply refuse. This proposal, basically, assumes that there's a
supply of editors somewhere willing to do work (which happens to be
"not fun" in a major way) according to some central bureaucracy's
dictates; in my experience, there simply isn't such a supply
available.
* SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all
articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
* Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of
the article and the need to source it.
So, basically, mass deletions of hundreds of thousands of articles.
(The groups will not, in general, have either the manpower or the
motivation to really fix any substantial portion of what's unsourced.
The only result you're likely to see is that editors will start
pasting in references -- *any* references -- in an attempt to avoid
having the articles deleted.)
This hasn't occurred under the organic system where a lot of pressure
is on to verify with references, why would it occur under this system?
Um, right now, there isn't *any* pressure for anything that's not a
BLP or a controversial topic. We have enormous numbers of
unreferenced articles on more obscure topics that few people visit;
the vast majority of them will never see anyone trying to remove them
based on being unreferenced, which this proposal would do.
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with
varying degrees of
organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the
automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently
present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel
personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their
SWG.
And how, precisely, are you intending to do that? Rounding up the
WikiProjects and telling them that they're doomed unless they source
all their articles is going to be extremely counterproductive; faced
with a negative motivational strategy, the volunteer editors will
simply leave.
I don't think introducing a new system is equivalent to "rounding up
WikiProjects and telling them they're doomed unless they source the
articles". WikiProjects will be identified as existing SWGs and the
contributors will be asked to join the SWG.
And then what? The key element of this proposal seems to be that
these SWGs (let us call them "WikiProjects") would somehow magically
start sourcing everything with nary a complaint. The fundamental
underpinning theory here is that (a) occasional editors can be forced
to join project en masse and (b) project members can be forced to do
sourcing work en masse; in my experience, neither of those reflects
reality. The more likely reaction is that many of the active projects
will simply move somewhere else, and the rest will fail to actually
accomplish anything substantial.
Kirill