WikiEN-l March 2007

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181 participants
397 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Hypothetical question about how certain admin behavior would be handled on Wikipedia
by wikipedia2006＠dpbsmith.com 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

For the record, the actual way it was handled there, their Jimbo-Wales-like-figure, who does deign to intervene in the affairs of mortals, unblocked the non-sysop, called the action overzealous, and complimented both parties (but "particularly" the sysop), on their contributions to the project. I'm still interested in peoples' answers to my hypothetical.

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Hypothetical question about how certain admin behavior would be handled on Wikipedia
by wikipedia2006＠dpbsmith.com 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

An... interesting... situation has arisen on another Wiki. (Yesyesyes some of you can guess but never mind). Mind you, it _is not Wikipedia_ and it is young, small, and its policies far from codified. It involves a sysop (they call them sysops there) who was given sysop privileges for the purposes of editing a protected page. (I told you, it's not Wikipedia!). The sysop is arguably aligned with the Wiki's official point of view (yes, it has one). The sysop is an active editor of a different page, one that is not protected. The page also has an active non-sysop editor who is arguably not as well aligned, perhaps detectably opposed, to the site's official point of view. But I don't think he is perceived as a problem editor by most users there. He is civil, his changes are well supported by sources, he adds a lot of uncontroversial content, etc. There was a lot of back-and-forth editing, but neither of them would have even been close to being violation of Wikipedia's 3RR. (This site doesn't have any such rule). In order to prevail in the dispute, the sysop blocked the non-sysop. For three months. (No, the non-sysop in question is _not_ me). What I want here is: which of our policies here would such an admin be violating, and what is people's best and most realistic judgement of what, in practice, would be the likely course of events if a Wikipedia admin did that. (I'm thinking: an RFC, an overwhelming yelling-at by other admins, and perhaps a warning. I'm thinking that a _pattern_ of such behavior really could get someone de-adminned eventually... but how many actual incidents do you think it would take for that to happen?)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia
by Michael Snow 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '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 Michael Snow 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

George Herbert wrote: > Random idea to throw into pot: > > We use AFD right now to cover a whole lot of different reasons by > which one might want to delete an article. > > Possible improvement: Develop separate processes for each reason one > might have for deleting an article. > > Some ideas along these lines: > > Unreferenced and thought to be unreliable - something like Prod, with > a longer timeout, see if anyone will come along and provide suitable > refs, else it goes. Soft deletion (can be restored if someone comes > along with good refs) > > Notability - still a sticking point. > > (and so on) I've favored something like this for a long time, even when it was still called Votes for deletion. I figured it would be the most sensible way to keep the process organized when the date pages became unmanageable. Categories could have been a helpful tool in this regard, but instead people have used them to group the deletion nominations by the subject matter of the article. We could do both, I suppose. This approach has several benefits. It requires people seeking deletion of an article to figure out and articulate why they want it deleted, which is sometimes done poorly or not at all. It also would allow those who want to salvage worthwhile material to focus their efforts on the justifications they find most problematic. Experience would further help us better shape the acceptable grounds for deletion. --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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WikiEN-l March 2007