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@gmail.com> wrote:
I do not think we have too much of an issue here, thanks to 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, 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@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.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y

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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