WikiEN-l February 2007

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

164 participants
215 discussions

User:UBX
by Jeremy Cushman 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

I created the User:UBX account solely to host userboxes migrated via the Userbox Migration (formerly called The German Solution). I have been using my bot, User:MetsBot, to migrate many useboxes to a subpage of User:UBX. I started by migrating only clearly controversial userboxes, but then moved into userboxes about interests, etc, which was met by opposition from some. Just to be clear, isn't the consensus that we're migrating basically all userboxes which cannot directly help the project, and keeping ones such as languages, education level and expertise, WikiProject affiliations, time zones, locations, and a few others? Should a userbox like "This user was a boy scout" really not be migrated? Thanks. --Mets501

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia
by Michael Snow 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

T P wrote: > On 2/26/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > >> Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with >> whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? >> Either now or fifteen years from now? > > It means there's no hurry. Funny, that's not at all the message I get from that essay. It looks to me to be all about making sure you're not in a fit of "edit rage" or otherwise lashing out at people. It's not a piece about eventualism. To tie it back to the theme that started this, if we cover webcomics or other forms of "cruft", whatever their merits otherwise the articles probably aren't "trampling" anybody. And as several people have pointed out, there are significant future benefits in recording information from the present that will be the subject of later synthesis and study. So I don't understand why we should hold off on documenting subjects of interest now. While the field of interest may not be fully coherent, and we should not declare it so prematurely, it's not wise to reject the pieces needed for it to ultimately come together. --Michael Snow

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia
by Sheldon Rampton 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

John Lee wrote: > Indeed - I noticed it was disappearing in 2005, and by 2006 it > seemed to > have almost completely vanished. I recognise that part of my > feelings about > this are just irrational wishing for the "good old days" (I have > noticed > it's always the same with any online community people have been > members of > for a long time - we tend to get nostalgic and hype up how good > things once > were). But still, there was a culture of mutual respect for each > other. Even > if you thought someone was dead wrong, you didn't get into a wheel > war or > edit war with them. I don't know how accurate your perceptions are on this point. I've been involved with Wikipedia since late 2002 and haven't noticed a huge change in the amount of respect that Wikipedians show for one another. The main thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a bigger corpus of formalized rules, and a correspondingly higher likelihood that disputes will turn into officious rule-wielding rather than debates directly about articles and their merits. I don't know whether this change is a good thing or a bad thing -- some of both, probably. As for the "culture of mutual respect," though, I remember some knock- down-dragout fights, ideological wars, and some incredibly nasty experiences with trolls, vandals and cranks. Moreover, this seems to have been going on at Wikipedia since its earliest days. Larry Sanger (who left Wikipedia before I got here) recalls its early history as follows: > Jimmy and I agreed early on that, at least in the beginning, we > should not eject anyone from the project except perhaps in the most > extreme cases. Our first forcible expulsion (which Jimmy performed) > did not occur for many months, despite the presence of difficult > characters from nearly the beginning of the project. Again, we were > learning: we wished to tolerate all sorts of contributors in order > to be well-situated to adopt the wisest policies. But--and in > hindsight this should have seemed perfectly predictable--this > provisional "hands off" management policy had the effect of > creating a difficult-to-change tradition, the tradition of making > the project extremely tolerant of disruptive (uncooperative, > "trolling") behavior. And as it turned out, particularly with the > large waves of new contributors from the summer and fall of 2001, > the project became very resistant to any changes in this policy. I > suspect that the cultures of online communities generally are > established pretty quickly and then very resistant to change, > because they are self-selecting; that was certainly the case with > Wikipedia, anyway. http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213&tid=95 Elsewhere, Sanger goes so far as to say that the "poisonous social or political atmosphere" is one of the reasons why he left the project: > There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet > groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed > Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects > poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to > take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant > disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry > "censorship," attack you, and even come to the defense of the > troll. This drama has played out thousands of times over the years > on unmoderated Internet groups, and since about the fall of 2001 on > the unmoderated Wikipedia. [SNIP] > A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word > on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who > can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational, > reasonably well-informed people--which is to say, to be sure, most > people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off- > putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I > am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely > knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 I don't know whether the Wikipedia commmunity today is overall more or less successful than it was in the past at fostering a "culture of mutual respect," but if John Lee thinks it used to be better, I suspect that this may simply reflect his early good luck rather than an actual change. My own experience suggests that the overall culture hasn't changed much. If anything, it probably has gotten marginally better over the years. -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another Slate article
by Geoffrey Burling 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

David Gerard wrote: > But our present notability guidelines suffer from (a) their > original purpose (as an excuse) (b) arbitrary numerical cutoffs. > There's something important being missed: what precisely are we > talking about? The reason why anyone would bother wanting to read the article in question. Well, that's what I'm trying to convey whenever I use the words "notable" or "notability". Even then, my concerns can often be satisfied simply by rewriting the article's opening paragraph. For example, if an article begins with "Linus Torvalds is a Finnish computer programmer", that sentence would greatly tempt me to nominate the article for deletion on the basis that Torvalds was not notable. However, I know something about computers, so I know that hypothetical opening sentence should be rewritten as "Linus Torvalds created and manages the development of the Linux operating system." I'll admit that biographies are the low-hanging fruit in this exercise; when one begins to consider articles about ideas, literature, groups and businesses & so on that it gets more difficult or separate the notable from the cruft. Still, if an article has a strong lead paragraph that explains the significance of its subject in a few sentences, notability should not be an issue. It's when the writing is bad (or the requirements of NPOV or attribution force the opening to be undeniably uninformative) -- or someone is attempting to slip in yet another example of vanity, PR or other garbage -- that the issue of "notability" is raised. But I'm probably unique in this usage. Geoff

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another Slate article
by Sheldon Rampton 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

There are a couple of things that I think can be be done to address in a positive way the concerns raised in Tim Noah's articles: (1) Develop better, more comprehensive notability standards for more topics. (2) Improve the section of WP:N titled "Rationale for requiring a level of notability." ==1. Develop better, more comprehensive notability standards for different topics.== With regard to journalists in particular, I think Wikipedia should have a fairly inclusive standard. Tim Noah uses Wikipedia's notability standard for porn stars to mock the concept of notability standards at all. (He seems not to realize that the reason for a porn star standard is precisely to *limit* the number of porn stars who will be included.) Even so, however, Wikipedia's porn star standard in practice has permitted quite a few entries. For example, it allows an article about [[Dolores Del Monte]], whose sole criterion for notabilty is that she was Playboy's 1954 Playmate of the Month (a distinction so minor that she herself was unaware of until 1979, because the photographer sold her pictures to Hefner without her knowledge). If simply having your picture appear in Playboy is sufficient notability to merit an article, I think the standard for journalists should allow inclusion of anyone who writes or reports regularly for a notable publication. At present, however, the draft notability policy for journalists says that they must be either a "SENIOR staff writer" or the writer of a "nationally syndicated column." If a publication itself is notable enough to include, its employment of a writer (senior or not) on a regular basis constitutes sufficient "note" having been made of the writer for him/her to be considered noteworthy. ==2. Improve the section of WP:N titled "Rationale for requiring a level of notability." == In Tim Noah's second article, he characterized the thrust of his criticism as follows: > [G]iven the seeming infinity of cyberspace and volunteer expertise > available to Wikipedia—the only plausible reason Wikipedia's > gatekeepers would exclude anyone or anything as insufficiently > notable for an encyclopedia entry would have to be the secret > thrill of exclusion itself This argument is patently false, and Noah himself might have realized this if the notability policy clearly explained the reasons why it exists. Some of those reasons have been discussed just now on this listserv. The most important, I think, are that (a) Wikipedia strives to be accurate, and is difficult if not impossible to fact-check articles on topics that are not sufficiently notable to have been written about elsewhere, and (b) Wikipedia's popularity creates a temptation for people to use it for self-promotional purposes by creating articles about their small businesses, personal blogs, garage bands, crank scientific theories, etc. The notability policy provides a criterion for separating this self-promotional material from information that has been deemed sufficiently interesting to have been noted by someone other than the topic's own creator. If these explanations for WHY the policy exists were stated more explicitly in the notability policy itself, it might make it harder for someone like Noah to imagine that the "secret thrill or exclusion" (or some other fantasized motive) is "the only plausible reason" for the policy to exist. However, the "Rationale for requiring a level of notability" section currently doesn't do a very good job of explaining why the policy exists. It contains the following three points: > 1. In order to have a verifiable article, a topic should be > notable enough that the information about it will have been > researched, checked, and evaluated through publication in > independent reliable sources. > > 2. In order to have a neutral article, a topic should be notable > enough that the information about it will be from unbiased and > unaffiliated sources; and that those interested in the article will > not be exclusively partisan or fanatic editors. > > 3. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate directory of businesses, > websites, persons, etc. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia The language of points 1 and 2 ("a topic should be notable enough ...") sounds more like a simple re-statement of the policy than an explanation of its purpose. The explanation of "why" is embedded in these points if you read carefully, but it is easy to misread them as mere normative assertions rather than explanations. Likewise, point #3 states that Wikipedia is not an indiscrimate directory, but it doesn't explain WHY it would be bad for Wikipedia to be an indiscriminate directory. Again, this point sounds more like a mere description of Wikipedia policy than a rationale for why it should be so. I've taken a stab at rewriting this section, including changing its subhead from "Rationale for requiring a level of notability" to "Why Wikipedia has a notability policy." If you want to see my changes, you can find them at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Wikipedia:Notability&oldid=111589127 (I wasn't sure my change would meet the consensus test, so I made the change and then rolled it back, pending comments and approval from others.) -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia
by Michael Snow 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

T P wrote: > There's nothing stupid about a prestigious reference work (as > Wikipedia has > become) waiting for a field to become significant before writing about > it. > If it becomes significant in fifteen years, we can write about it in > fifteen > years. [[WP:MASTODON]] Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia? Either now or fifteen years from now? As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now, the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example, there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the articles we have might look better for it today. --Michael Snow

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another Slate article
by Jeff Raymond 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote: > "A topic is notable if it has been the subject of at least one > substantial or multiple, non-trivial published works from sources > that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other. > > All we need to do now is define what constitutes a reliable source for > different content areas. And what constitutes "multiple." And "substantial." And "non-trivial." And "independent." Like I said before - a film "notable" enough to be added to the United States Film Registry fails to meet this guideline. Massive failure. > The subject-specific guidelines often boil down to "this is an area > where impassioned fans of the subject think Wikipedia should be a > directory, and where it is therefore acceptable to draw the entire > content of the article from primary sources". Oh, come on Guy. That's a huge straw man, and one I've never seriously seen presented. The subject-specific guidelines say "This is what actually makes something 'notable'." Nothing more, nothing less. -Jeff

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Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another Slate article
by Keith Old 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

Folks, Tim Noah has published another article on Slate about consideration about whether he was notable enough for Wikipedia. http://www.slate.com/id/2160644/?nav=fix Noah concludes: *The pro-Tims tended to agree with me that the notability standard ought to be eliminated outright. The anti-Tims argued that the notability standard was a necessary bulwark against anarchy and noted that I myself had asserted that it rendered me ineligible. Eventually an administrator (handle: JDoorjam) cut the process short, which is allowed under a **Wikipedia rule*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR> * that says you can ignore all other rules when the site's basic health is at stake. JDoorjam decreed that I would be "speedy kept" (i.e., reinstated immediately), and he explained he had short-circuited discussion because it was inviting "troll magnetry" (i.e., lots of uncouth people logging on and saying rude things) and "edit warring" (i.e., people repeatedly doing and undoing the same edits). As I write this, the final entered comment reads as follows:* *Wow. That's just shameful. A run of the mill columnist intimidated you into keeping his article by bitching in a public forum. If that's all it takes, Wiki has a long way to go before it can be considered at all legitimate.* *Not my intent, but also not my concern. I continue to believe that Wikipedia should stop putting on airs about legitimacy and repeal its notability standard. In a future column, I'll consider the arguments against my open-the-floodgates position as readers have presented them to me over the last few days.* I don't think I agree wholeheartedly with that conclusion but it will continued to be argued long and hard on various Wikipedia forums. Regards *Keith Old*

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Wikipedia timesearch
by Angela 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

http://www.timesearch.info/wikipedia HistoryWorld have just launched an interactive timeline of world history with each event linking to the appropriate article in Wikipedia. It was suggested to me that many Wikipedians would find it useful, so I'm passing it on in case you do. :) Angela

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JuryBot (was: Scott McCloud on Wikipedia)
by Michael Noda 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

On 2/27/07, Rich Holton <richholton(a)gmail.com> wrote: > FWIW, I think that decreasing the average workload of the "hyperactives" > should be a major priority. The quality of their work will improve, the > number of fatigue-related problems will decrease, and there may be less > hesitation in de-sysopping one of them. I wholeheartedly agree. One thing that jumps out from the list of deleters that geni posted (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/deleterlist> if you missed it) is that about a third of the 840 admins listed have not made a single deletion in the last 500,000. Hardly an example of leveraging of the long tail! This is not to say that these admins aren't doing their jobs. Indeed, Charles Matthews and Mindspillage are both in the first screenful of 0.00% admins, and both are quite busy enough with more important things than deletions. :-) However, there might be plenty of admins (and non-admins, for that matter) who wouldn't mind doing a few deletion-related tasks a week, even if (especially if?) they don't want to focus on deletion full time. What might work is to have a process similar to jury duty: have a registry of volunteer admins who are assigned a very small, manageable number of tasks randomly by bot once per week. This would clear backlogs, and take a lot of the pressure off the current top workers to clear backlogs. Anyone who screws up, of course, would be stricken from the list of volunteers in minor cases, or could face desysopping in cases of flagrant error. The coding of the assignment bot is certainly beyond any of my skills, but there are other other processes that currently rely on an overworked core of regulars who tend to burn out, which could be improved by introducing capable but non-daily-regular editor input. These are (I believe not coincidentally) the same processes that are most frequently described as "broken": !votes in RFA, AFD, and to a lesser extent the other xFDs. By explicitly balancing more of the editors' load, we can prevent various bad things like burnout and criteria drift that result from overwork at the core. Implementation of any of this would, of course, require some (mostly social) shifts in the affected process(es), but as this is not a finished proposal, I will assume that the community is smarter than I am and is capable of ironing out most bugs beforehand. --Michael Noda

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WikiEN-l February 2007