[Foundation-l] 10 thoughts on how to improve the quality of Swedish Wikipedia‏

[Lennart Guldbrandsson]

Hello,

Just to let you know a bit of what's happening at the Swedish Wikipedia.

In the middle of February I published an essay. As it was I who wrote it, I
am perhaps a bit biased here, so I will try to put it mildly: it created the
largest number of positive actions I have seen in… well, forever, at Swedish
Wikipedia. It has since become a document that many Swedish Wikipedians
refer to as a standard document. It will certainly be a main topic at our
general assembly of Wikimedia Sverige. I recently posted this to internal-l,
and got questions about reposting it on foundation-l. It has since been
"released" on Meta as well, both in English and the orginal Swedish.

Therefore I thought I'd share the essay with you. Hopefully some of you will
see it fit to publish somewhere on your Wikipedia. For maximum effect, cut
and paste into an edit box and see all the beautiful pictures and links
(though some may have to be corrected on your Wikipedia, it has been
converted into fitting in on English Wikipedia).

Please excuse any language errors. Also, apologies to Frank Schulenburg for
misunderstanding everything that he said during his visit to Sweden in
January.

The original essay appears as a subpage of my user page: *
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal/10_tankar_om_kvalitet*<http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal/10_tankar_om_kvalitet>

Best wishes
Lennart Guldbrandsson, chair of Wikimedia
Sverige<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Sverige>


---

[[Image:Lennart Guldbrandsson Ordförande WikimediaSverige.jpg|thumb|
[[:sv:User:Hannibal|Hannibal]]]]
==Ten possibly provoking thoughts about improving the quality of Swedish
Wikipedia==
Right now we have [roughly 276 000] articles on Swedish Wikipedia.

For a long time that has been the most publicized measure of how good we
are. Obviously it's good to have many articles. But already in 2006 Jimmy
Wales spoke at Wikimania about how he wanted Wikipedia to go from a quantity
based point of view (the maximum number of articles) to a quality based.
This you could divide into two phases. ''Phase one'', where we've been so
far, could be likened with [[Star Trek|"boldly going where no one has gone
before"]]. "Phase two", which we are entering now, is rather about seeing to
it that [[Deadwood (TV series)|the frontier town will get some law and
order]].

[[Image:Frank in gothenburg.JPG|thumb|Frank Schulenburg during the meeting
in Gothenburg.]]
During my two days long meeting with [[:de:Benutzer:Frank_Schulenburg|Frank
Schulenburg]], vice chair from [http://www.wikimedia.de/ Wikimedia
Deutschland] in January of 2008, we therefore discussed, in general terms,
why [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite the German Wikipedia] often is
considered one of the best versions of Wikipedia. In the magazine [[Stern]],
there was last year a comparison between German Wikipedia (dewp) and
[[Brockhaus Enzyklopädie|Brockhaus]] (the German equivalent of our
[[Nationalencyklopedin]]), where dewp's grades were much better than
Brockhaus's, see [http://www.stern.de/magazin/heft/604448.html The front
page of the Stern issue where the comparison is published]. That could not
be said about Swedish Wikipedia - yet. But not about English Wikipedia
either.

One explanation that has floated around is that [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page English Wikipedia] to some extent is
written by users with other mother tongues than English, which makes the
level of the text lower and hence the quality. Since Swedish Wikipedia in
that respect is more like the dewp than the English Wikipedia (enwp), we can
leave that theory and instead concentrate on two more important questions:
* what have dewp done to reach such a high quality ''and''
* could Swedish Wikipedia (svwp) reach the same high quality

The answer to question number 2 is: Frank thought so. And I think so, too.

The answer to question number 1 is what the rest of this essay is about.

I wish to stress that these are no more than thoughts, if provoking
thoughts. I am aware that not all these proposals neither can nor should be
implemented. That is not the goal. (I am, for example, not sure that I agree
with each and every proposal that I write about.) The goal is instead to get
all regular users to think about quality (phase two), rather than quantity
(phase one), but also rather than various other considerations. But we will
get there.

Quite simply, this is my take on '''dewp's recipe to become a better
encyclopedia'''.

===Thought number one: delete the bad articles===
I want to begin with a controversial proposal. It was controversial on dewp
and the result there is still not totally clear, but I think that it may be
good to start with a jolt.

The proposal is to '''remove all bad articles'''. Bad articles come in many
forms: stubs and substubs, articles with low real content (e.g. peacock and
weasel terms), articles without proper language, articles that are
confusing, lists that can never be completed, etc, etc. By deleting them we
won't have a [[:Category:Wikipedia maintenance|maintenance page]] that's
always full of things to do and has become a constant guilty conscience,
rather than a project which some time will be more or less fulfilled.

How would this be done? Well, the active users in a particular topic, for
example a [[:Wikipedia:WikiProject|project]] or a
[[:Wikipedia:Portal|portal]] (in other words: people who are interested),
regularly go through "their" categories and weed out the worst articles -
''of course, they should enhance the articles they can". Enhancements are
naturally better, but in many instances it would take such a long time that
it's better to simply remove the articles.

'''Summary:''' This deletion proposal would lead to svwp downsizing the
article count. We could even go below 250,000 articles. But think of it like
this: what kind of press release we could issue! "Wikipedia takes out all
garbage."

===Thought number two: remove all conflicts===
It take up a lot of energy, the conflicts,  the arbitrations, and the
bothersome users that push their agenda and spend most of their time on svwp
discussing the topic instead of writing articles.

The proposal, which is also based on discussions with [
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Notafish Delphine Ménard], about her
experiences from French Wikipedia, is to remove the conflicts from svwp.

Remove the conflicts? Is that even possible? Most likely there will always
be differences of opinion about how articles should read, but lately these
conflicts have come to deal more and more about the topics themselves than
how the articles should look. It can be fun to take a break from writing
articles by discussing something, but it also create a lot of conflict and
draw focus away from the goal of making an encyclopedia. It has become too
much "communism is bad" instead of "how should the article about communism
be balanced?" (This is *not* solely about how communism should be portrayed,
but representative of two different ways of working. One way works on
webforums where the goal isn't anything else than discussing, the other way
works better when the goal is [[WP:NOT|to write an encyclopedia]].)

What I am talking about is a '''lower tolerance level''':
* Faster blocking for things that are not vandalism (personal attacks,
bullshitting, for example). It doesn't necessarily have to be long blocks,
and sometimes warnings are enough - or why not a question on the user's talk
page?
* Letting people know when the discussion goes too far off-topic.
* Telling people to take a [[:Wikipedia:Wikibreak|wikibreak]] when they seem
to be stressed.
* Focus more on [[WP:mediation Cabal|mediation]] than on getting admins to
take action against the other part.

And this will require:
* More admins and less prestige about having the admin tools
* Less [[Jante Law|tall poppy syndrome]] (admins, including me, have let
irritating behavior through, most likely because of the "should I's" -I who
don't know the subject, who hasn't been through every part of the
discussion, who recently became an admin, who doesn't want to make enemies,
etc.) and more ''"can do"'' (it's not that hard to know what a personal
attack looks like, eh?)
* More barnstars and other forms of kudos for those who take an active part
in conflict resolution

'''Summary:''' Think of being able to spend your time here to actually make
the articles better rather than answering people on talk pages. And every
conflict is another risk to alienating yet another active user.

===Thought number three: add a quality meter===
At the moment, the following message welcomes users at the Main page of
svwp:

<div style=text-align:center>
<h1 style="font-size: 162%; border: none; margin: 0; padding:.1em;">
Välkommen till [[Wikipedia]],</h1>
<div style="font-size: 95%">den '''fria encyklopedin''' som '''[[Hjälp:Hur
man redigerar en sida|alla kan redigera]].</div>
<div style="font-size:85%;">Just nu finns det
[[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] artiklar på svenska</div>
</div>

Read it carefully. I don't think this message gives the impression that we
focus very much on quality. At all. We just want to show how many articles
we have got, and that everybody can edit them.

But maybe that isn't very surprising, since there even isn't a "magic word"
to indicate how many featured articles a specific language version of
Wikipedia has got. There are magic words to show the number of users, the
number of admins, the number of edits, the number of uploaded files, etc,
but none for quality. However, we now have created the template
[[:sv:Mall:Antal utvalda artiklar]], which says how many featured and good
articles Swedish Wikipedia has at the moment.

Hence, I'd like to add one thing: a meter that shows the quality of the
encyclopedia, already at the Main page. This is an example, that has been
created quite quickly (maybe some kind of graph would be nice?), just to
show what I mean:

<div style=text-align:center>
<h1 style="font-size: 162%; border: none; margin: 0; padding:.1em;">
Välkommen till [[Wikipedia]],</h1>
<div style="font-size: 95%">den '''fria encyklopedin''' som '''[[Hjälp:Hur
man redigerar en sida|alla kan redigera]].</div>
<div style="font-size:85%;">Just nu finns det
[[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] artiklar på svenska, varav
[[Wikipedia:Statistik över utvalda artiklar|1,3‰ är utvalda för sin
kvalitet]]</div>
</div>

Then we wouldn't focus just on how many articles we have got, but also on
the quality of them, already from the start. By putting the textbox there,
we would almost be forced to increase our quality. (And when I say "Main
page" I don't mean only the Main page, but for this should be a number
that's seen on various places.)

As you can see, we count our featured and good articles in permille, not
even in percent. Just imagine what an inspiration it would be to increase
this percentage to maybe 1%. (As of today, this would mean that 2700 of our
articles were either featured or good. As an comparison, dewp has
1260 featured and 2295 good articles. After all, dewiki is about ten times
as big as svwp, but if you see to the percentage of featrued articles, we
are about equal (dewp's 1,81 permille compared to svwp's 1,3 permille).

The user [[:en:User:Danny|Danny]] of the English Wikipedia - the same person
that started [http://en.veropedia.com/ Veropedia] and
[[:en:Wikipedia:Danny's contest|the competition about best new articles]] -
did write in September 2006, that English Wikipedia should aim for 100 000
featured articles. 100 000 featured articles! Now, that would have been
something. (Also see [[:en:Wikipedia:100%2C000_feature-quality_articles|100
000 feature-quality articles]].)

Enwp also has a list of which users that have been the main authors of the
greatest number of featured articles, [[:en:Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by
featured article nominations|here]]. Would that be something to introduce
just to make more writers to do that last little something? Who is first to
reach 10 featured articles? Has someone already reached 10? How about 20
then?

'''Summary:''' Just imagine that svwp could reach 1% featured articles. Then
we would be five times as good as German Wikipedia!

===Thought number four: get money===
[[Image:WMF 2007-2008 spending plans.svg|thumb|How Wikimedia Foundation want
to spend their money]]
Wikipedia is nonprofit - I know. But to get Wikipedia work at all, donations
are needed. (By the way, please donate [
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Insamling here] or to bank giro
5822-9915 to support
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_SverigeWikimedia Sverige].)
The money goes to servers, bandwidth, technical staff,
and the expenditure of the organisation (see [
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008planned
expenses 2007-2008]).

It would be sad though if the donations just would be about getting
Wikipedia to work. Donations are also about increasing the quality.

The counterpart of Wikimedia Sverige in Germany, Wikimedia Deutschland,
works hard with their money to increase the quality:
*buying expensive reference literature for research of heavy subjects (which
later is "stored" by the users)
*travel expenses so that the Wikipedians could meet and discuss projects, or
just meet (because it is easier to discuss with people you know - a German
Wikipedian who was living in Finland could meet other German Wikipedians for
the first time thanks to WMDE)
*prize money in article-writing-contests, for example
[[Wikipedia:Academy|Zedler-medaljen which is recieved during Wikipedia
Academy]] (dewp has the contest two times a year - 40% of the contributions
becomes featured articles)
*arrange fairs and so on, for example Wikipedia Academy
*fix scanning of pictures to Wikisource (other local chapters of WMF sends
out photographers to photograph etc.)

More than that: The contributions sent to Wikimedia Deutschland have also
led to them gaining more respect - according to the thought "if grant
institution X have seen that Wikimedia Deutschland/Wikipedia is good, maybe
we should help them as well" (which have led to them gaining more
contributions and so on). They have also been able to send out press
releases about their successes, which have given them positive PR. It is
often just about getting throught the first application procedure, and the
next time it is easier to pass.

On the longer run we hope that Wikimedia Sverige will be able to take the
same types of initiatives. But we need more ideas of where money should come
from, and where they should go. All such proposals/ideas are appreciated.
You can also, of course, help. Please sign up on [
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Sverige/Medlemssidan the member
list of Wikimedia Sverige].

To dream even more: what if Wikimedia Foundation could recieve enough money
(the last fundraising didn't correspond with the expectations and some
planned projects are therefore cut down) to spend its energy on more
''important things'' than to think about money all the time. Then they would
be able to design an interface that is [[WYSIWYG|more like the result]] than
today's complicated tags, templates and and tables.

'''Summary:''' With more money it would be much easier to get our press
releases publicated in media which would increase the interest of editing on
Wikipedia. "Wikipedia awards the best article", "She got her student books
from Wikipedia", or preferably, "Swede makes Wikipedia simple to edit".

===Thought number five: more clearly defined projects===
Frank told me about two or three users on dewp who decided to create
articles about ''all lillies''. They made it. It took about a year. We've
had similiar projects on svwp: [[:sv:Wikipedia:Projekt Tintin|Project
Tintin]] for example, where the goal to create articles was accomplished in
less than a few months. After that, some think, the project has reached a
stand still. I would say that the project largly has reached its goal.

But there's no shortage of projects on svwp. Presently there a couple of
hundred projects. Far from all of them have any clear goal, nor any
attainable goal. Not many of them document their progress, somthing which is
good for both the group behind the project and other interested parties.
This leads me to a couple of questions: How many of our projects have served
their purposes? How many of them are dead? Anyone willing to go to town with
the template {{:sv:Mall:Färdigt projekt|This project is done}}?

Recently there was a project on svwp with amazing results, see
[[:sv:Wikipedia:Projekt wikifiering|Project wikify]]. One thing that I
believe contributed to the success of that project is that they calculated
what needed to be done and what was done and presented that on the project
page. The goal became very clear.

'''Summary''' With clearer goals for the projects we can accomplish great
things. Then we should dismantle that project.

===Thought number six: rally more Wikipedians===
Right now there are [57 000] registrered users on svwp. We need to be many
more if we are to raise the quality in any mentionable measure. As it is
now, around half a percent makes roughly 50 percent of all edits. That means
that there are 300 very active Wikipedians against 56 500 rather indifferent
Wikipedians.
There are several dangers here: intellectual inbreed, reduced article
growth, conflicts that can risk the future of the project, wikistress, POV
and blindness to the systematic bias, and last but not least, that outsiders
begin to think of the users here as a group that's very hard to get into.
Considering that Sweden, Finland and almost all the other countries where
Swedish is a large language have such a large portion of the population
connected to the internet, we should, with no big problems, be able to rally
more users.

[[Image:WT-träff om wikipedia academy.jpg|thumb|Wikipedians meet to discuss
Wikipedia Academy: [[:sv:User:Hannibal|Hannibal]],
[[:de:Benutzer:Frank_Schulenburg|Frank Schulenburg]],
[[:sv:User:Moralist|Moralist]] (on his knee), [[:sv:User:Grillo|Grillo]],
[[:sv:User:Boivie|Boivie]], [[:sv:User:Mnemo|Mnemo]] and
[[:sv:User:LA2|LA2]].]]
Some proposals for rainy or sunny days:
* make the [[:meta:Edit_Wikipedia_Week|Edit Wikipedia week]] a bigger event
* mention for your friends and family that you edit Wikipedia (and why) and
encourage them to do the same
* ask someone you know to be an expert on a particular topic to read the
article on Wikipedia and help make it better
* ask your school if they can't do a project creating articles with the
framework of a certain subject, see [[:en:Wikipedia:School and university
projects|Using Wikipedia in school]]
* mention Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia Foundation projects) as a
source when you post on internet forums
* use images and other media from Wikimedia Commons, quotes from Wikiquote,
word explanations from Wiktionary, etc, in essays, articles and other
written texts
* greet and guide new users in a friendly way - even the not-so-nice ones
* attent a Wikipedia meetup
* attend the local chapter general assembly (and join, of course, a 100
kronors in the case of Wikimedia Sverige is not a lot of money)
* "accidentally forget" the web browser at the main page of Wikipedia when
you finish surfing a public computer - and if possible, bookmark it among
the favourites
* buy Wikipedia things from
[http://325837.spreadshirt.net/se/SE/ShopWikimedia Sverige's webshop]
or [
http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia CafePress] and wear them in a public
place
* start a contest around who can produce the highest number of new users.

''Any cooperations'' would be good ideas: what if Amazon.com, national
record archives, radio stations, book review sites, MySpace and similar
sites linked to the appropriate page on Wikipedia. Then the webb traffic
(and probably also the number of users) increase dramatically.

'''Summary:''' More users equals higher quality. How about "10 000
registrered users on Swedish Wikipedia"? Everyone with more than 10 edits.

===Thought number seven: educate the general public in how Wikipedia
works===
[[Image:Consolation-Lake-Szmurlo.jpg|thumb|Not everybody know that Commons
contains pictures this good. Please let them know that.]]
I have myself started a cooperation with Gothenburg City Library to see if
we can do seminars and workshops for the general public. The library have
shown great interest. I doubt that other libraries would be less interested:
right now there is a great discussion about how Library 2.0 should look and
feel and many already work with databases. And in that contact I have also
gotten proposals to speak in front of two senior citizens' internet groups
about how Wikipedia works. There are more such groups. What if there were
200 senior citizens adding information about their era's movie stars, tools
that are almost forgotten nowadays or aspects on our history that we younger
people cannot possibly be aware of.

Teachers need lesson plans for how to view material on the internet. There
many of us Wikipedians can teach a lot - about Wikipedia's quality programs
(version handling, adminship, recent changes, blocking, oversight, etc) as
well as source critizism. By getting the teachers on our side, we could
potentially get approximately 100 000 new users each year (the mean number
of children born each year in Sweden).

Based on Wikimedia Deutschland's material, Wikimedia Sverige is in the
process of developing leaflets to hand out and presentations that
practically anyone with a month's worth of experience from Wikipedia could
do, about how Wikipedia works. Please help with this!  [[:sv:User
talk:Hannibal|Contact me]] for more information. If you don't want to do the
presentationen yourself there shouldn't be to hard finding someone else to
do it, if you pay for travel expenses.

'''Summary:''' Think about the headline "Wikipedia visits school" or why not
"Confront Wikipedia at the library"? "The mean age of Wikipedia is now 55
years" may not be a dream, or is it?

===Thought number eight: educate the experts in how Wikipedia works===
But it's not only ''more'' users we need. We also need expert competence in
lots of different subjects to make sure the articles not only scratch on the
surface. (That's also one of the disadvantages of having so few regular
users: we cannot possibly be experts on everything and hence the articles
are less deep than if we could stay in our respective areas.)

So, how do we get more experts to contribute to Wikipedia, other than the
proposals I've already mentioned?

[[Image:Academy Goettingen Moeller 0824.JPG|thumb|One of the workshops
during Wikipedia Academy in Göttingen 2006.]]
One proposal that we are already in the process of making come true through
Wikimedia Sverige is staging a '''Wikipedia Academy'''. In Germany, France
and South Africa these meetings between Wikipedia and the academic world
have become very successful and have wetted the respective countries and
chapters an appetite for more. For dewp Wikipedia Academy meant among other
things an increase in media exposure, but also more contributions from
scientists. The best example is a [[emeritus]] in [[agriculture]] who was so
fascinated by Wikipedia that he started writing two or three articles a day.
So far he's written about 300 of them - on a scholarly level. Since he has a
personal image library Commons now have a treasure trove the price of which
can hardly be overestimated.
The first Swedish Wikipedia Academy will take place in [[Lund]], in
cooperation with [[Lunds universitet|the university]]. There you can both
make new contacts and make yourself useful (we need everything from
organisers to kitchen staff).

Another proposal is getting experts for money (or not) to participate as
'''judges in article writing contests'''. Through seeing that way how good
Wikipedia's articles actually can get, they may be lured into writing for
Wikipedia, at least some time or another. Imagine [some local celebrity
expert editing in his or her expert subject].

A third proposal is approaching '''expert organizations''' and ask them to
help with their areas of expertise. The article on [[torture]] could for
example need an hours work from a specialist at [[Amnesty International]].
And if we only give them an introductory course in how to enter sources etc
into the article, I do not believe that questions about [[WP:NOT|no original
research]] and [[WP:NPOV|bias]] should be overwhelmingly large. It's
definitely in ''their'' interest to look good on Wikipedia - and as long as
we explain that the best way to get respect is to be neutral, I believe that
we can handle the organizations that cannot manage that trust.

'''Summary:''' Image the headlines "Now you can correct [some famous
know-it-all] on Wikipedia" or "The founder of Wikipedia comes to Sweden ―
checking the collaboration with Lund's university".

===Thought nine: concentration on the basic articles===
Okay, say nothing in this essay will happen: no deletion of bad articles, no
lowering of the tolerance level for conflicts, no quality meter, no money,
no clearly defined projects (but already a project has started to check
articles for relevancy, so the risk of nothing happening here is nil), no
massive increase in Wikipedians, no education of either the general public
nor the experts - what do we do then?

There is still plenty we can do, on both large and small scale, to increase
quality: one of my favourite examples is to '''make it easier for newbies to
edit Wikipedia'''. That's one area with lots to do. Image yourself to be new
to Wikipedia and clicking the edit button. To put it mildly: it's not
entirely clear what everything in the edit box [
http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gustav_Vasa&action=edit here]
means.

It's not easy to learn what rules apply on Wikipedia. I have for a long time
planned to make some big changes to the
[[:en:Wikipedia:Community_Portal|Community Portal]] and several other pages
listed on the menu to the left of every page. They are a mess.

But that's not what I suggest we concentrate for the near future.

[[Image:Size of English Wikipedia broken down.png|thumb|This is how
Wikipedia should look. Or?]]
My suggestion is rather that we take a good look at what people a) most
likely need and b) really seem to want. There two tools are the starting
point for a bigger project:
# [[:sv:Wikipedia:Kvalitetsgranskningstabeller|our quality assessing
tables]] which uses the 1000 articles long [[meta:List of articles all
languages should have|list of articles all Wikipedias should have]] but also
includes assessements of how svwp's versions are.
# [[:sv:Wikipedia:Populära artiklar|lists of our most popular articles]]

Using these two tools we have identified the most important articles. It's
basically these articles that Wikipedia is judged upon.

'''The project is quite simply to during the near future making sure that a)
all 1000 articles in the quality assessing table either attain featured or
good quality status, and b) the 200 most popular articles every month at
least is presentable (does not have template warning of low quality), but
ideally also attain featured or good quality status.'''

I am aware of the fact that this will be no picknick. But it is important,
and if we work together it can happen pretty fast. If everyone of the
regular Wikipedians (all perhaps 300) take upon themselves three or four
articles to enhance until the end of December 2008, we have reached the
goal. It's actually not harder than that.

===Thought number ten: (surprise)===
<div class="boilerplate metadata plainlinks" id="stub">
{| cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background-color:transparent;"
| [[Image:Wiki letter w.svg|19px| ]]
| ''&nbsp;<sup>This [[Wikipedia:Stub|section]] needs
[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} to be expanded]. It's no
coincidence that this last point is empty. I don't have all the answers. In
fact, I would like more suggestions. So make a new section and present your
thoughts of how best to improve Wikipedia.''
|}</sup></div>


-- 
Lennart Guldbrandsson, ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt för
svenskspråkiga Wikipedia