In my view, "undue weight" might be as likely to stifle a minority view
which will later win a Nobel Prize as it would stifle a "flat earth"
argument. Again, in my view, all views deserve the light of day. In the
context of current events, i think it can be argued that "majority views"
might actually be the wrong views worth emphasizing.
Consider the "benefits" of Google's miracle -- page rank -- which, for
those of us who started using Google before it was a verb, really was a
miracle. Right up until we discovered that we had to dive into maybe a
dozen or more pages of hits before we discovered the novel idea we were
after in the first place. Popularity contests mask novelty.
Consider current affairs centered on Ebola. Many Americans read The Hot
Zone many years ago, and are already conditioned with one "point of view",
and are finding it really difficult to deal with "science" which is telling
them a story much different from what they read about many years ago. How,
really, does one decide what is "majority" and what is not majority? Which
drone does MediaWiki unleash on the universe to make such decisions?
It may actually be the case that deciding the way forward for Wikipedia is
as wicked as are the problematic topics and entailed organizational issues
which started this conversation.
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 9:41 AM, Pierre-Carl Langlais <
pierrecarl.langlais(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I do not think we have too much of an issue here,
thanks to Undue Weight
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources_and_undue_weight>:
an encyclopedic article has to show the respective weight of every
viewpoint. Of course, whenever the coverage topic is frenquently changing
(typically, a current event) or quite small, you're likely to report "all
points of view". I don't know how often Undue Weight is quoted on the
English Wikipedia, but the French adaptation I've drafted, Wp:PROPORTION
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Importance_disproportionn%C3%A9e>,
has proven quite useful to solve this regular encyclopedic challenge…
As an aside, a good idea to ease the verification of Wikipedia sources
would be to exploit the current expansion of open access sources and
develop a side-to-side checking feature: you would get the wikipedia
article on one side and the original source text on the other (with perhaps
even some markup on the likely parts covered by the reference, thanks to
some text mining magic). Wikisource has already a similar feature (with the
pdf on one side and the translated text on the other) to ease
retranscription. That's typically the kind of suggestions that would rather
appear within the community (and here we get back to my suggestion of a
wishlist).
PCL
Le 28/10/14 17:20, Jack Park a écrit :
Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through
which to view the present situation.
Let me preface a question with this:
NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text
book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily
submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the
issues in play.
My question is this:
Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in
the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible
justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation?
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien <
Nicolas.Jullien(a)telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:
Hello,
to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by
Marwell and Oliver
"The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.h…
which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and
need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood
(which is, sometime, boring)
Nicolas
Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :
> Hi everyone,
>
> I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
> *"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
> even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have certainly
> allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
> so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
> still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
> active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
> far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
> have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
> like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
> 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
> sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
> basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
> necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you
> want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would
> have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
> current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
> *"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I
> would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the
> WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
> <http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021> on Wikipedia
> politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level
> of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important
> features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have
> any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this
> link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
> *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities
> tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
> The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
> <http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241> after 2012. This is not because these
> communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is
> way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in
> addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a
> rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these
> current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within
> the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly
> not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for
> women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
> patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of
> home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on
> enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project
> <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil> to greet
> newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an
> inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to
> enhance participation would be to make some global change on society
> (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time,
> creating a basic income, you name it…).
>
> That's all, folks
>
> PCL
>
> Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :
>
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really
>> relevant to the thread it appeared in.
>>
>> Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the nature of
>> socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case
>> study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but
>> personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems
>> work & break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata
>> will benefit from what I have learned.
>>
>> -Aaron
>>
>>
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