On 06/11/2007, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think perhaps a better statement of that last sentence is "...should not be an assumption." A lot of problems - certainly back when I was still regularly dealing with OTRS earlier in the year - came from patrollers assuming that an imperfect or confusing contribution was vandalism, was spam, was malicious. They acted accordingly - reverted or deleted and warned - which just confused and upset the subject. "If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Andrew Gray wrote: And even when it is clearly vandalism, I think it's often worth not it treating as vandalism. A while back somebody brought up the example of somebody replacing the Earth article with "mostly harmless". I think most would call that clear vandalism, but that doesn't stop it from being a well-meant joke. The person posting that clearly didn't think things through, but it's not clear to me that a virtual yelling-at would improve their thinking skills any. Most of the obviously worthless contributions I see are people just playing around. The problem isn't that they are playing. It's that they're playing at too low a level, like some enthusiastic kindergarteners running onto the field of a major-league game. We don't want them to stop playing, just to play better, and to avoid ruining things for the audience in the meantime. William -- William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri

Andrew Gray wrote: In my own patrolling (admittedly infrequent these days since I find writing new articles less annoying), I've gone back to my circa-2003 way of dealing with the problem, before user-warning templates existed: just post a short note on the user's talk page telling them that you undid their edit and why. For example, if someone removes an entire section with no edit comment, I'll write something like, "Please don't remove sections of articles without discussing on the talk page or at least providing a reason in the edit summary. I've added it back for now. Thanks!". (Credit goes to Brianna Laugher at Wikimania '07 for suggesting that approach.) I do find a pretty large percentage of things that aren't *obvious* vandalism are good-faith errors, and some of the people who made them even respond with apologies after being "warned". Some amount of judgment is needed of course---if the edit is from an IP address that's been tagged as belong to a library or school computer, I usually don't bother to spend time doing that. A totally different and somewhat circular problem I've noticed lately is newbies biting other newbies (or even non-newbie editors) by taking on new-pages patrolling duties before they really know what's going on. That requires basically a nice way of saying, "look, you should really stick around a bit more before you start going on new-page patrol and tagging articles with cleanup/delete/unreferenced/etc. tags". Heck, I had one of my articles tagged as "unreferenced" by a new-ish editor because it "only" referenced a book---as he explained, it didn't count as verifiable if there were no links he could click on to verify it. =] -Mark

On Nov 6, 2007 9:57 AM, <joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu> wrote: Examples please? Simply saying "don't bite" is going to have approximately zero effect. If people realized what they were doing was inappropriate they would, for the most part, not be doing it. Instead we probably need so say things like "Don't assume that people have any clue what they are doing wrong. New users are often lost and confused. Our policy pages amount to megabytes of text. Taking a moment to be kind and helpful will pay off over time. Vandalism can wait a moment." ... and being able to provide *good* example of what to do and what not to do would be very helpful.

On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Good heavens, man, do you /want/ to be taken out and shot? :-) Seriously, a lot of what some term "newbie-biting" comes from the concept held dear by many that our old creed of eventualism is dead, and that expedient removal of vandalism trumps all other concerns, including having a project worth defending. But yes, exactly as you said - don't expect users, even if they're moderately 'old' (a few dozen - two hundred edits or so) to understand policy. Don't say "You did X, in clear violation of Y. Do it again and you will get blocked."; say "I saw that you did X, but you may not be aware that one of our guiding principles is Z which has led to the concept of Y, which suggests doing things differently. In this case, what if you did...?". Of course, this isn't easily replicated in a bot or human-driven script (which amounts to much the same thing), so sysops' editcountitis habit can't be fed. Yours, -- James D. Forrester jdforrester(a)wikimedia.org | jdforrester(a)gmail.com [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

On 06/11/2007, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu <joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu> wrote: We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away." (The usual response to pointing this out is "but I can't possibly keep up with the flood of responses otherwise." To which the response is "so don't.") - d.

On Nov 6, 2007, at 11:24 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Mine, at least, is to point out that we seem to be having no problems skyrocketing in the Alexa rankings and in popularity despite this. That does not mean we should not fight vandalism. But it does mean that our userbase seems relatively accepting of the fact that sometimes you'll load an article on Earl Grey tea and get a picture of a man's distended anus. Yes, we get a few upset e-mails from people who are not accepting of this every day at OTRS. But it doesn't seem to be having a crippling effect on our perceived usability at present. -Phil

On 11/6/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well...I think we all agree on the end/goal/aim "Wikipedia as accurate / correct / vandalism-free as possible" [choose what you like best from these terms]. However, if I understand this discussion correctly, it's rather about the means we use to get there. I.e., is there a way in which we fix vandalism (or: remedy subobtimal edits[ without at the same time driving away many new users who are potentially valuable contributors. I'm not saying that I have the solution up my sleeve but I guess mass-flooding new users with templates which are only barely appropriate to their personal situation ("Your edit was reverted, please use the sandbox for testing" triggers often something like "eh, I didn't want to test, I wanted to improve this specific article") can't be a very good approach either. Michael

On Nov 6, 2007 4:41 PM, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter(a)gmail.com> wrote: I too have been a fan of this stable versions concept for three related reasons: * Removing urgency * Protecting readers who we can't expect to understand the operation of Wikipedia * Reducing the incentive for people to make intentionally malicious edits Wikimedia has instead decided to go the 'flagged version' route. The flagged versions software, which is not quite complete, can be used in a way similar to what you have described, and I believe the German Wikipedia plans to use it this way. But the software is more flexible and can be used in many other ways. One of the other ways is purely advisory way, where a record of good versions is kept in the history but users still see whatever is most recent. Recent commentary from Florence, Erik, and Sue Gardiner have indicated to me that they hope and expect English Wikipedia will only implement flagging, and only make the stable version the default for pages which are currently protected. I'm concerned that this weak form of stable versions has little advantage over the old 'mark as patrolled' feature, and that because setting the flag will not accomplish anything people will not change their vandal fighting efforts to flagging efforts. The failure of the system would then be self-fulfilling. I'm also concerned that whatever decisions are made, be they by consensus or fiat, will be made based only on speculation on the impact of the changes, and not based on any concrete evidence of measurement. You can learn more about the English Wikipedia's community discussion of this subject at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions/Sighted_versi… If this subject interests you, please take the time to look through the look through the archives there.

On Nov 6, 2007 1:54 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's an overstatement. But you're kidding yourself if you don't think it will happen eventually. We've had childporn vandalism. We've had people claim to get in trouble at work because of WP vandalism. And, of course, people have been fired in relation to their statements. Like I said at the start of this thread... concrete examples would be really really helpful. I think we need to educate through examples. I've been looking at the use of the boilerplate warnings, and I'm finding a lot of cases where I'm wondering why we warned rather than blocking. (For an example, Look at the talk page of the author of the vandalism diff I used earlier in the thread)

William Pietri wrote: Sorry, that's obviously idiotic now that I re-read it. I mean something more like "purely harmful"; I still think getting rid of errors and cruft is good. My point is that problems are indeed problems, but in that they serve as a call to involvement and an easy way to get started, we derive some benefit from them, too. William -- William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri

David Gerard wrote: The primary role of the welcome is, I think, informing the newcomers of the community expectations. When I look at the current template, I think it is rather good, but I find interesting that the most important expectations we are mentionning on the talk page of the newcomers are about "naming conventions" or "manual of style". Other expectations, such as code of conduct or consensus building, are only mentionned on a second page, where the newcomer will have to go. Note that I like the five pillars page very much. It is bright, concise, to the point. ant

I think that should be the general idea of all of our welcoming. "To succeed here, write [[WP:NPOV|neutral]], [[WP:V|verifiable]], [[WP:RS|well-referenced]] material on [[WP:N|appropriate subjects]]. Remember to take special care with a [[WP:BLP|biography of a living person]]. Remember that [[WP:OWN|others can and will edit your writing]]. Don't worry so much about stylistic consideratons, someone can always clean up your syntax, style, or formatting later, and don't worry-if need be, someone will! However, for help with such issues, visit our [[WP:MOS|manual of style]]." I honestly don't see why the welcome template can't say something like that, perhaps with a -link- to a full policy set rather than the whole intimidating lot right there. I don't honestly care if someone never learns the manual of style so long as they don't write crap that's not worth fixing anyway, it's easy to clean up for MOS issues and the like. On 11/6/07, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On Nov 7, 2007, at 12:31 AM, Delirium wrote: We need to be careful here - [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]] are important pages (and the latter is finally well-written! Or, at least, not horribly wrong), but citing sources is not a primary policy so much as one we have trouble getting the level of compliance with that we want. The truth of the matter is that we don't want every statement in every article sourced. This is not a standard we put up for any article. The actual standard is much closer to "we want any statement that anybody has ever raised an eyebrow about to be sourced, and we want our articles to point readers to places where they can learn more and get more reliable sources than us." This is a very vital distinction, because the former - cite everything - is a standard that most contributors, and especially idle "Hey, I found a mistake" contributors cannot possibly meet. It is further a standard that destructively pushes online sources - because if a contributor really only wants to spend 5 minutes on the edit they don't have the ability to look anywhere Google doesn't send them. We must remember the difference between "unsourced material may be removed" and "unsourced material should not be added." There's a very big difference, and the {{fact}} tag exists as a way of navigating that gulf. It is more accurate to say that sourcing, like wikifying, copyediting, and other such things, is a step that articles should go through as they advance towards the good and featured levels. It is an important step. We need more people who are willing to work with sources. But sourcing is not a basic concern, except inasmuch as people need to be *ready* to provide sources. The better standard to push after NPOV is verifiability, with a reminder that sometimes, if people are skeptical of information, they will be expected to actually verify their information. -Phil

On Nov 7, 2007, at 8:30 PM, Delirium wrote: One thing we should look at once new article creation by anons and new accounts gets re-activated is how many days, on average, it takes a new user to create a new article. This gives a useful sense of how much we need to weight our advice one way or the other. Of course, I also tend to think that deletion is not the first choice for a new unsourced article - one should ask the creator for a source first. -Phil

On 06/11/2007, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Close generally it means "at the present time I don't believe non template communication would be sufficiently beneficial to the project to be worth doing" You can keep up but it doesn't help. I can type "hi did you take this pic?" nearly as fast as {{subst:nsd}} then copy ({{subst:di-no source-notice|1=Prithvi s.jpg}} ~~~~ onto the talk page. If you are faced with needing to convey the same information repeatedly you are going to standardise. "hi did you take this pic?" scores higher on the higher I'm a human treating you like a human treat me like one scale (welcome templates score rather low) than copyvio templates but it isn't massively polite. -- geni

On 11/6/07, James Forrester &lt;jdforrester(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: My idea for making vandalism much more catchable: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Omegatron/Most_needed_software_features#Diff_summaries> On 11/6/07, David Goodman &lt;dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: "One of the best available"? Really? On 11/6/07, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think it's more important that the general Google-linked public realize this. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Tagline#.22that_anyone_can_edit.22> Sigh. On 11/6/07, William Pietri &lt;william(a)scissor.com&gt; wrote: I also sometimes wonder if allowing kids to write crappy articles about their high schools might not actually be so harmful in the long run. Let them learn about neutrality and collaborative editing on pages that no one outside their microcosm is going to read anyway.