Carbonite wrote:
>I agree with Tony that it would be difficult to sustain a very large number
>of arbitrators. However, if we had an efficient system for replacing
>arbitrators, I could see maintaining a "steady state" of 25-35. Replacements
>could be appointed by Jimbo, be elected as alternates during the regular
>ArbCom elections or we could utilize a system like the one suggested by
>Dragons's Flight.
At present we have the election, then people drop out, then Jimbo
drafts people to cover until December. So far the draftees have been
appointed following detailed thought and discussion amongst the
existing and previous AC on the AC mailing list (which contains all
present AC and any past AC who want to be on it.) About half shudder
in horror and say "No thank you!" which doesn't surprise me. I'm not
sure it's a sustainable method in the long run. Also, en: is far too
big for us to know everyone even a bit.
(This may create worries of cabalism amongst the AC. Let me assure
you, speaking from the view inside the sausage factory, that the AC
members frequently agree on things even less than admins do. Oh boy.
But we do respect each others' general cluefulness.)
- d.
> Let's not continue subject tags that imply someone is guilty. Most of
> the time it's a baseless complaint from someone who was banned or
> blocked for a very good reason.
>
> I have changed the Subject in the e-mail thread as follows:
>
> * Tag-teaming (was: Fvw's abuse of admin powers)
>
> And when you reply to _this_ message, please strip off the part in
> parentheses, so it looks like this:
>
> * Tag-teaming
Maybe the next reply can strip it off. By accusing Fvw of abuse I was making a point, and that point was not the Fvw is somehow worse than other admins, but rather to make the point that using a system to implement 24 hour blocks that for a long time has been known to routinely block people for much longer is an abuse of admin powers. Regardless of the fact that some oppose the 3RR rule, when the prescribed punishment is a 24 hour block, putting someone in a system that almost certainly will result in a longer block without careful monitoring and intervention by the admin is abusive. Of course having to track the times to make sure this abuse does not happen is a burden for the admins, and they should not be put in this position. The admins should insist the blocking software be fixed, or refuse to use it, rather than abuse either by intent or oversight.
-- Silverback
Ray Saintonge
>I agree that most things won't draw such a debate, and even if a lot of
>the articles proposed for deletions really are deletable there is still
>that small obsessive group determined to preserve our "bodily humours"
>in the manner of Dr. Strangelove. They need to be more sensitive to the
>efforts of others, and to understand that many of these most bitter
>disputes are not about what's in the articles, but about a small group
>that wants to control the work of others.
Yes. The opposed groups are not "inclusionists" versus deletionists,
but *contributors* versus deletionists. (This is still the case even
though the deletionists contribute elsewhere.) Then the deletionists
wonder why the contributors get so damn stroppy.
- d.
On 10/5/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>On 10/5/05, Phroziac <phroziac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Where and how do you run?
>
> Nominations have not yet opened. When they do thry >
will be hard to miss.
Well I don't know about what has officially opened,
but there are already 7 people offering statements
about why they would be a good candidate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_Dece…
-DF
Let's not continue subject tags that imply someone is guilty. Most of
the time it's a baseless complaint from someone who was banned or
blocked for a very good reason.
I have changed the Subject in the e-mail thread as follows:
* Tag-teaming (was: Fvw's abuse of admin powers)
And when you reply to _this_ message, please strip off the part in
parentheses, so it looks like this:
* Tag-teaming
Thank you.
Ed Poor
One of several mailing list admins
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phroziac [mailto:phroziac@gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 4:52 PM
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Fvw's abuse of admin powers
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> steve v wrote:
> > If the autoblocker actually adds additional time to a
> > block just because someone attempts to edit a page
> > before the block is up, then that is a completely
> > bullshit configuration for the block script.
> It does, and I agree. It blocks you for 24 hours, even if the
> block is less then 24 hours. I have no idea who thought this
> was a good idea...
>
> > 3RR was intended to be a protective measure against
> destructive revert
> > wars, and instead has been turned into a kind punitive
> measure which
> > often is only unilaterally applied. Some people have gotten into the
> > habit of simply gaming the system, by getting a buddy
> > to assist in tag-teaming someone else --producing an
> > apparent greater culpability on the part of the one
> > individual over the other group.
> If they are tag teaming, then the article can be protected to
> force them to discuss it. Additionally, gaming the system
> about 3RR is actually against the 3RR, if you read it
> closely. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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> Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFDRDzSVLzO3sKvVBcRAqcgAJ92W77p0rjaMILXRWxlUEN+8qgXrgCffErB
> 8TtYCDrLWg2BSpNFfustcCs=
> =//oj
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>
>
Why? Arbcom largely decides how to handle personality
disputes, and in the process must deal somewhat with
applications of principle -neutrality being first
among them.
It seems to be popular belief that the Arbcom is
understaffed relative to Wikipedia size, anyway. As a
consequence, it seems to only thinly treat its duty to
be treat each specific point/issue/claim, and in turn
this means that its rulings offer only a decree, and
show little about the thinking process. Of course,
things are open to discussion, but IAC, NPOV is clear
enough for a committee to deal with regard to its
application to certain points, and is separate from
personality issues.
Growth often means diversification.
SV
--- Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/05, steve v <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Would this "lower court filter" resemble a
> > Wikipedia:NPOV committee?
> >
> > SV
>
> At this time, I'm opposed to either ArbCom or any
> body subordinate to
> it being involved deciding content disputes.
>
> Kelly
>
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Neil Harris wrote:
>
>> Phroziac wrote:
>>
>>> No way would we fit in the 30 volumes of Britannica for this
>>> hypothetical print release! Anyway, what if we had a feature in the
>>> Wikipedia 1.0 idea, where we could rate how useful the inclusion of an
>>> article in a print version would be. This would allow anyone making a
>>> print version, be it the foundation, or someone else, to trim wikipedia
>>> easier. Certainly you could do it by hand, but eek. that's huge. With
>>> our current database dumps, it would already not be unreasonable to
>>> make
>>> a script to automatically remove articles with stub tags in them.
>>> Obviously these would be worthless in a print version.
>>
>>
>> In my opinion, an article ranking system would be an ideal way to
>> start collecting data for trying to place articles in rank order for
>> inclusion in a fixed amount of space.
>>
>> One interesting possibility is, in addition to user rankings, using
>> the number of times the article's title is mentioned on the web --
>> the Google test -- as an extra input to any hypothetical ranking system.
>
>
> The thing to remember if a ranking system is used is that it is a tool
> rather than a solution. It can point to problem articles that need
> work. We don't need to be limited to a single algorithm for
> evaluating an article. The Google test can be added, but so can
> others too.
>
> Ec
>
That's right. The _gold standard_ for article assessment is peer review;
the next best is based on manual ranking by a sufficiently large and
well-distributed group of users; the next best is based on
carefully-chosen algorithms which blend together machine-generated
statistics and human-generated statistics.
Given that we have 750,000+ articles in the English-language Wikipedia
alone, it is likely to take some time for reasonable amounts of votes to
be accumulated for all articles. According to my earlier calculation, if
we wanted to trim en: Wikipedia into 32 volumes, we would need to keep
out five out of six articles. (We could keep Wikilinks in, thinly
underlined with page/volume references in the margin, for those in the
print version, and say dotted underlines for those which exist online
but are not in the print version, to let people know there is an online
article on that topic).
This raises the possibility of using machine-generated statistics to act
as a proxy for manual review where it is not yet available. Given a
sufficient number of human-rated articles, and a sufficient number of
machine-generated statistics for articles, we could use machine learning
(a.k.a function approximation) algorithms to attempt to predict the
scores of as-yet-unranked articles. This could then be used as a "force
multiplier" for human-based ranking, to rank articles which have not yet
received sufficient human rankings to be statistically significant.
This approach could easily be sanity-checked by taking one random sample
of articles as a training set, and another disjoint random sample as a
testing set: the predictive power of a machine-learning algorithm
trained on the training set could be determined by measuring the quality
of its predictions of the true user rankings of the training set. As the
number of articles with statistically significant human rankings
increase, the algorithm can be re-trained repeatedly; this would also
help resist attempt to "game" the ranking algorithm.
What statistics could be used as input to this kind of approach? It's
not hard to think of possible measures:
0. any available user rankings, by value and number or rankings
0a. stub notices
0b. "disputed" notices, "cleanup" notices, "merge" notices, now,
0c. ...or in the past
0d. has it survived an AfD process? by what margin?
0e. what fraction of edits are reverts?
0f. has it been a featured article?
0g. has it ever been a featured article?
0h. log10(page view rate via logwood)
...and so on...
1. log10(total Google hits for exact phrase searches for title and
redirects)
1a. same as above, but limited to .gov or .edu sites
1b. same as above, but using matches _within en: Wikipedia itself_
1c. same as above, but using _the non-en: Wikipedias_
1d. same as above, but using matches _within the 1911 EB_
1e. same as above, but using matches _within the Brown corpus_
1f. ditto, but within the _NIMA placename databases_
1g, h. _Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_, _Gray's Anatomy_
1i, j, k, l... the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, the Rig Veda...
1m, n... the collected works of Dickens, Shakespeare...
... and so on, for various other corpora...
2. log10(number of distinct editors for an article)
3. log10(total number of edits for this article, conflating sequential
edits by same user)
4. log10(age of the article)
5. size of the article text in words
6. size of the article source in bytes
7. approx. "reading age/ease" of the article, using...
7a. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
7b. Gunning-Fog Index
7c. SMOG Index
8. number of inter-language links from/to this article
9. inwards wikilinks, including via redirects, perhaps weighted by
referring article scores (although we should be careful not to infringe
the Google patents)
10. # of outwards wikilinks
11. # of categories assigned
12. # of redirects created for this article
13. Bayesian scoring for individual words, using the "bag of words" model
13a. as above, but using assigned categories as tokens
13b. as above, but for words in the article title
13c. as above, but for words in edit comments
13d. as above, but for text in talk pages
13e. as above, but for names of templates
13f. as above, but for _usernames of contributing authors_, ho ho ho!
14. shortest category distance from the "fundamental" category
15. shortest wikilink distance from various "seed" pages
16. length of article title, in characters (shorter is "more fundamental"?)
17. length of article title, in words
18. what fraction of the article text contains letters from which other
scripts?
19. does it contain images? how many?
19a. what is the images-to-words ratio?
20. what is the average paragraph length?
21. how many subheadings does it have?
22. how many external links does it have in its "external links" section?
23. how many inline links does it contain in the main article body?
23. how many "see also"s does it have?
24. what is the ratio of list items to overall words?
25. what is the ratio of proper nouns (crudely measured) to overall words?
..and so on, and so forth. Some of these are easy to calculate, some are
hard. Can anyone think of better ones?
Individually, I doubt whether any of these are a really good predictor
of article quality. However, learning algorithms are surprisingly good
at pattern recognition from very noisy multi-dimensional data. It's
quite possible that this approach would work with only a limited number
of reasonably statistically independent input metrics (ten?); the huge
list above is only to give an idea of the large number of possible
choices of article metrics, ranging from the simple to the complex.
The corpus-based measures are particularly interesting; they mean we
don't need to bug Google for a million search keys.
The machine learning algorithm of choice is probably a support vector
machine; they're powerful, simple to use, capable of learning highly
non-linear functions (for example, recognising handwritten Han
characters from preprocessed bitmaps), and there are numerous
pre-packaged GPL'd implementations available as tools.
No doubt there will be lots of academics who might be willing to assign
this as a project or PhD topic to one of their research students. ;-)
Before any of this could be possible, we would in any case need the
article ranking system to be up and running for some time, which we need
anyway for the manual approach.
-- Neil
It is frequently said that Wikipedia is not paper. Specifically,
"Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. This means that there is no
practical limit to number of topics we can cover other than
verifiability and the other points presented on this page."
But paper is not paper, either. That is, paper encyclopedias are NOT
physically limited in size. Some encylopedias (Columbia) have one
volume. Some have more. The first edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica had three volumes; the Eleventh Edition had 29. The
current Britannica 3 has 32 volumes.
(By the way, the Britannica states, rather hyperbolically, that those
32 volumes offer "a boundless range of information.")
Is the print Britannica limited to 32 volumes by some kind of
physical law? Certainly not. In fact, tens of thousands of households
that purchase print encyclopedias wisely or foolish subscribe to
yearbook programs, often for many years, until they get tired of
gluing little cross-reference stickers into their volumes. So the
number of books on the shelf actually grows.
But there is a practical limit of about thirty volumes for a print
publication, isn't there? No, there isn't. The existence proof is any
journal. Journals can and do grow linearly, year after year, into
long rows of bound volumes which libraries, if not homes, manage to
find room for on their shelves. I am sure that some homes have more
than 30 bound-volumes-worth of the National Geographic neatly stacked
up in attics or basements.
So what DOES set the limit to what an encyclopedia can include? It is
not any physical characteristic, whether measured in quarto leaves or
in bytes.
It is that little detail, "verifiability and the other points
presented on this page."
The limit to what an encyclopedia can include is governed basically
by the available labor of editors to integrate, synthesize, verify,
copy-edit, and fact-check.
What this tells me is that it should be possible to get some kind of
reasonable estimate of an appropriate size for Wikipedia by
estimating the number of work-hours WIkipedias volunteers put in, and
comparing it with the number of work-hours available to the Britannica.
If we're putting in three times as much work, we should be able to
cover three times as much content.
If we try to cover more content than the Britannica without putting
in more work than the Britannica, then our reach is exceeding our grasp.
I have no idea how to even begin estimating these numbers, but I
think it would be instructive to try.
I appreciate your help on peer review! I think there are plenty of fields
in which layman assistance is essential to keep Wikipedia's audience as
broad as possible, and I find thorough reviews by non-astronomers of my
astronomy articles very helpful in that respect. Just remember that
astronomy is the father of all science, and only bad writing can make an
astronomy article less than utterly fascinating :)
Cheers,
WT
-----Original Message-----
From: Ryan Norton [mailto:wxprojects@comcast.net]
Sent: 05 October 2005 4:11 PM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
Hi there :),
> Ouch! Do you mean astronomy is boring, or my writing about astronomy?
> I
> do try to write articles that are interesting for people who might only
> have a passing interest in astronomy but it's easy for a scientist to
> forget what's interesting to people not in the field. That's partly
> why I
> sought peer review for Herbig-Haro object, because I was half afraid I
> was
> going to spend lots of time on something no-one would be interested in.
> Astrocruft, if you like. Please tell me if I'm heading that way!
>
> The general point is that for many featured articles, only one person
> might be interested in writing about a subject, but its appeal should
> be
> broad based if it really represents the best of Wikipedia. I'm not
> particularly fussed about architects in colonial New Zealand, for
> example,
> but Giano's articles on Benjamin Mountfort etc are interesting enough
> to
> keep me reading right through.
>
> WT
Don't get discouraged! You're articles are some of the best around
here! I think often though with technical subjects like this it can be
tough to write for the layman :). Anyway, I'm still offering responses
on your peer reviews :).
Thanks,
Ryan