"David Gerard" wrote
>Also, they're tending to organise
> into subject-area working groups (like our wikiprojects) very early
> on, and new contributors are getting recruited a speciality at a time.
I have failed to find any CZ "collaboration of the week". I have found this forum comment: "If an article crosses into two or more workgroups, then we can require both editorial groups to give their OK (via their editors) before approving it."
Here there are roughly two poles of WikiProject in a topic area: those liking the idea of collaboration, and those rather liking prescriptive views of how to write. With any luck you can divert the prescribers into making templates, an activity that at least is going to put fewer authors off.
There is a certain fascination in this "reinvention of the wheel" over at CZ. But if the workgroups are really so deep into ownership, they have a whole "guild" culture coming along.
Charles
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"Steven Walling" wrote
>Is it 5,000 GA and/or FA quality articles,
> like they profess they are going to build better than Wikipedia? Or is it
> 5,000 total, with lots of schlock thrown in?
It's not the former, as "Random page" reveals. Some decent if stodgy articles. Some slight. If [[cz:Middle East]] is at all typical, they are ducking some areas.
Redlinks: plenty you'd have thought someone would have filled out by now. Deficiency of vitamin gnome. It doesn't look like anyone searches the site for common spelling errors like "neccesary" or "comittee".
The quality is probably more consistent than early-model enWP. But the coverage is not really very far along the timeline, if that's a fair metric.
Charles
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Were_They_Thinking%3F
Basically, once the editor has been around longer and others have
contributed in the same style this will be a permanent grievance page
against 'admin abuse' and other actions deemed folly by the creator.
There is a messy MfD going, but while it lives its a nice case study
on what type of couching and leavening with praise you need to do in
order to have your attack page kept on Wikipedia.
"Peter Ansell" <ansell.peter(a)gmail.com> writes
<snip>
> It would be nice to have meta-templates, but it won't help with people
> who see infoboxes as ugly and not able to portray their POV Truth(tm).
Well they often are, and they can't. Or rather, they aren't very good
with anything that isn't simple, and in lots of areas things are
rarely simple. Give people an infobox with fields to be filled in and,
no surprises here, they'll be filled in sooner or later. The basic
biographical infobox, {{Infobox Person}}, has fields for place and
date of birth and death, and so do the endless variants. These are a
perpetual temptation for the well-intentioned wikignome to spend ten
seconds googling and fill in something. Metadata, such as
{{Persondata}}, has the same problem.
Readers may like infoboxes - perhaps a sample size of one-ish is a bit
small to be sure - but the info they contain may not always be a fair
representation of what the article actually says. Infoboxes are poor
at complicated subjects like "where and when was Charlemagne born?",
"when did Saint Patrick die?", but they get used for it all the same.
Even something like "when was William Shakespeare born?" gets mangled
when the nice, neat, square peg of knowing his baptismal date is
battered into the round hole of adding his birth date to a template.
Infoboxes are designed with the assumption that there's a True answer.
But often there's no simple answer to questions like "born when?" and
"died when?". When combined with the seemingly endless stream of
editors who'd sooner add a date than read what the article says, this
can get tedious, although nobody's yet added St Pat's birth date in
2008. Even wikimarkup has the same problem of failing to handle
imprecise dates correctly based on user preferences unless they are
spelled out in full: "... born between [[23 April]] [[1141]] and [[24
May]] [[1141]]....". But who considers the data that fields might hold
when designing templates? And why would dates ever be imprecise?
You know, I don't think I like infoboxes very much.
Angus
On 1/21/08, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd(a)lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> I tried to file a 3RR report, and I hadn't yet figured out the proper way
> to do diffs. So I posted Contribs for the IP, which essentially pointed
> to the edits *more* efficiently than diffs. The admin who looked at it
> rejected the complaint because I hadn't followed proper process.
While I do agree that it is a travesty to reject a straightforward
complaint on such dubious grounds, and that it would (as far as I'm
concerned) reflect poorly on the competence of the admin in question,
and while poorly judged admin actions can eventually result in loss of
privileges, I am unaware of any case where an admin has been
desysopped (or otherwise sanctioned) for refusing to act. This is
probably a good thing, if you consider all possible scenarios, most of
which are less clear-cut.
> I asked how to do it. I wasn't told. I was basically told, "Assume good
> faith." Good advice, inappropriate for the situation. There was
> enough information in my complaint that any admin paying attention
> would realize that some action was needed.
Obviously we need more admins paying attention in that venue, if for
no other reason than to keep the current ones sane.
> Many users would simply have gone away. I didn't. I had come to
> understand that any user has the same rights as any administrator,
> but without the buttons. So I did, effectively, what an administrator
> would have done, only less efficiently. I reverted sock edits --
> unless they were useful -- and I didn't consider myself limited by
> 3RR, since blocking is *effectively* more than 3RR, even more
> damaging potentially.
You probably would have done better to drop an informal note on a
random admin's talk page.
> A chair will often rephrase an improper motion from a member to make
> it proper. An abusive chair will say, "You are out of order," and if the
> member protests, will order the member removed from the meeting.
Robert's Rules of Order thankfully do not apply on Wikipedia.
> A little while later, an experienced user, who had originally written
> on my Talk page to warn me about what he thought was contentious
> editing, actually read my response and turned around: he started an
> RfA for me, and asked me to accept. I did not want to be an
> administrator, but I accepted, simply wanting to acknowledge his
> kindness and consideration. It was, of course, snowed out, but what
> was interesting to me was how parochial the process was. The
> administrator who had been so unhelpful in 3RR was a prominent
> objector, "he didn't even know how to present a diff."
Yes, you'll learn most people are assholes.
> Wikipedia is going to need many more administrators as the scale
> increases. It is also going to need additional structure to make
> administrative support more efficient, while preserving the open
> community process that makes Wikipedia so special.
Actually, it's the vast range of articles, and the freely re-usable
nature of (most of) their content which makes Wikipedia so special.
The nitty-gritty specifics of how things actually get done behind the
scenes have been arbitrarily chosen over time and are, in the big
picture, fairly trivial.
My advice to you is not to let the internal parlor games (or anything
else) prevent you from enjoying the project as a whole.
—C.W.
A suggestion from a reader, emailed to me:
> I'm not press, but this seemed the only access to the Wikipedes. (Mind you,
> I am a former newspaper columnist.)
> As a lexicographer, I admire Wikipedia, and offer one suggestion. Ask your
> contributors to indicate pronunciation where needed.
> For instance, I had to look up an actress with the first name of "Cote." Is
> it [COAT]? [ko-TAY]? [KO-tay]?
Quite a few of our articles on people include the pronunciation, but
it's far from universal. Would anyone be interested in a drive to fill
out pronunciations? (What groups of Wikipedians are fans of this
stuff?) Adding a field in the infoboxes might help too.
- d.
At 02:56 AM 12/29/2007, David Goodman wrote:
> If anything, 1% implies that we should be looking for more to
>investigate. i cannot believe that just that small number is the total
>size of the problem. No group of diverse voluntarily gathered people
>can do quite that well.
While this may be true, I'd really hate seeing a witch-hunt
atmosphere. Rather, there should be a better complaint process. I'll
report one incident from my own experience. I had started editing
Wikipedia fairly intensively, my interest aroused by an article on a
political topic. I discovered that an article was being maintained by
sock puppets and an IP editor. The IP editor was making extensive
reverts with a summary like "editor is a critic." I tried to file a
3RR report, and I hadn't yet figured out the proper way to do diffs.
So I posted Contribs for the IP, which essentially pointed to the
edits *more* efficiently than diffs. The admin who looked at it
rejected the complaint because I hadn't followed proper process. I
asked how to do it. I wasn't told. I was basically told, "Assume good
faith." Good advice, inappropriate for the situation. There was
enough information in my complaint that any admin paying attention
would realize that some action was needed.
Many users would simply have gone away. I didn't. I had come to
understand that any user has the same rights as any administrator,
but without the buttons. So I did, effectively, what an administrator
would have done, only less efficiently. I reverted sock edits --
unless they were useful -- and I didn't consider myself limited by
3RR, since blocking is *effectively* more than 3RR, even more
damaging potentially.
Naturally, the sock knew process quite well. But also didn't want to
call attention to himself. So he created a new sock which, as its
first action, placed a 3RR warning on my Talk page, then filed the
complaint. Since I saw it coming, I simply posted, underneath the
warning, very briefly -- I *can* write briefly if I take the time,
it's harder than writing as it comes -- what was going on.
The admin took one look at my Talk page -- as he had to, to verify
the warning -- and blocked just about everyone in sight. One innocent
user got blocked, and one meat puppet. I was temporarily IP blocked,
immediately lifted. The article was semi-protected. All this could
have happened much quicker if the admin watching 3RR had considered
himself a servant of the community, instead of expecting the
community to serve him by putting everything in proper form and
*dismissing* the complaint when it was not.
I've been a chair for large meetings. If a member rises and says
something that is out of order, and it is at all possible, it is the
duty of the chair to assist the member to do what the member wants to
do. A chair will often rephrase an improper motion from a member to
make it proper. An abusive chair will say, "You are out of order,"
and if the member protests, will order the member removed from the meeting.
A helpful chair, if the member objects to the action of the chair,
will inform the member about appeal process. Wikipedia has some good
practices in this regard, explaining to blocked users how to appeal the block.
A little while later, an experienced user, who had originally written
on my Talk page to warn me about what he thought was contentious
editing, actually read my response and turned around: he started an
RfA for me, and asked me to accept. I did not want to be an
administrator, but I accepted, simply wanting to acknowledge his
kindness and consideration. It was, of course, snowed out, but what
was interesting to me was how parochial the process was. The
administrator who had been so unhelpful in 3RR was a prominent
objector, "he didn't even know how to present a diff."
Of course, he had been right, and I understand why admins want proper
diffs in complaints, but.... he didn't know how to assist a user.
Other objections were simply to the number of edits, which was still
in the several hundred range. However, I've in the past taken on
major responsibilities where I was technically not qualified, but
.... I knew what to do when the situation was outside of what I was
familiar with, who to ask. I've done this with life-and-death
situations, and nobody died. The key question with administrators
should be their personal trustworthiness, their willingness to serve
the community consensus, their sensitivity to the needs of Wikipedia,
their understanding of when to recuse themselves. Not knowing
technical process is a remediable defect, not understanding how to
serve the community is commonly much more difficult to fix.
The standard applied to me was almost purely number of edits. I
forget, but I think that there may have been some objection as well,
to contentious edits. (The blocking admin in the case above, though,
clearly ratified my actions as protecting Wikipedia against sock
puppets.) However, I had addressed this in the RfA, that I'd
scrupulously avoid exercising administrative powers where I had a
specific POV involved in the issue. The fact is that having admin
powers would be a *hindrance* when I get involved in a difficult
article. It would not have helped me with the article in question,
I'd not have blocked the editors involved. The only reason I'd want
those powers would be to more generally serve the community. And, in
fact, I'm not particularly available for that, I couldn't do much of
the routine mop work, and there is a lot of it.
Wikipedia is going to need many more administrators as the scale
increases. It is also going to need additional structure to make
administrative support more efficient, while preserving the open
community process that makes Wikipedia so special.
At 08:14 AM 1/12/2008, Anthony wrote:
>Wikipedia has needed a constitution for a long time now. Top-down or
>bottom-up, that's the only way to stop "this" from happening again.
>The board seems to have rejected the top-down approach, as has the arb
>com. But then, the community seems to have rejected the bottom-up
>one.
There are two classic approaches to the structural problem: Anthony
has named them top-down and bottom-up. Nearly all coherent
organizations of any significant size are bottom-down, such that most
of us think "organization" means top-down, and we know what problems
top-down organizations have, so we reject "organization" entirely. Or
others, quite correctly as well, see organization as necessary, but,
again, from long habit, think it must come top-down, hence the call
for "leadership."
This problem was actually solved over sixty years ago; a peer
association was created that was, in its functions, bottom-up. There
is no top-down organization, formally, though outsiders might think
there is, out of the habit I mention above. The organization is
Alcoholics Anonymous, and it was structured by Bill Wilson -- as the
"leader" -- to avoid what had made prior attempts at temperance
organizations fail. AA functions at the local meeting and personal
level, the national organization has no control over local
organizations ("intergroups"), and intergroup has no control over
individual meetings, and individual meetings may have "leaders," but
the AA Tradition is "Our leaders are but trusted servants, they do
not govern." Also from the Traditions: "For our group purpose there
is but one ultimate authority-a loving God as He may express Himself
in our group conscience. " While many will immediately object to the
"religious" aspect of this, consider when it was written and the
context, it's actually irrelevant: notice how the AA group knows what
"God" wants: its group conscience. Not some scripture, not some
dogma, not what the leaders say. In AA, group conscience means
consensus. Meetings will go a long way out of their way to satisfy
*every* member with a decision. In the end, of course, they *might*
decide to simply vote, but it is considered undesirable, damaging to
group unity, only to be done when necessary.
At the national level, there is a General Service Conference
consisting of delegates elected by -- if they follow Wilson's advice
-- supermajority (2/3) from regions. If no supermajority can be
obtained after repeated attempts, the delegate is chosen by lot from
among the top two. The thinking is that this increases diversity.
This, of course, is a very simple system, what Wilson thought of more
than sixty years ago -- and I may be ascribing to Wilson what was
actually the product of wide discussion in the fellowship --, and
there are other possible ways to create a democratic and
representative national structure. But the national structure doesn't
control the local *at all*. Rather, it advises the nonprofit
corporation, AA World Services, Inc., the most significant function
of which is to publish literature and to handle a few other national
and international coordinating functions. AA World Services, Inc., is
a traditional nonprofit, with a self-elected board, legally. However,
the Conference essentially nominates candidates for the board, and
the board traditionally accepts them. What has been set up is a legal
structure where the corporation is legally responsible for its own
actions, and is free to follow its own opinion, but it has strong
motivation to follow Conference recommendations.
Why? Well, there is another Tradition: AA "organizations," from
meetings on up, don't accumulate assets beyond what is called a
"prudent reserve," which is basically enough to shut down gracefully
if the flow of donations stop. These service organizations within AA
are continuously dependent upon the ongoing support of their members,
and their members *do* have options. Don't like a meeting? Start
another, and starting another meeting is trivial. AA grew in this
way, actually. It's part of why it rapidly became almost the only
show in town, competition to AA is tiny; and the strongest reason is
that there is practically no reason for it. Tradition 3: "Our
membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we
may refuse none who wish to recover. Nor ought A.A. membership ever
depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered
together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. Group, provided
that, as a group, they have no other affiliation." (Other affiliation
means some defining characteristic that would exclude some
alcoholics. Exceptions have been made, such as women's meetings, but
even those have been hotly debated.) What this means that, in theory
at least, there is no top-down dogma imposed on meetings. In
practice, I'm sure, AA members are human and there may be places
where some meeting which was promoting "controlled drinking" might
have trouble getting listed. But I don't know what actually happens
if that is tried.
My point is that AA is *highly* structured, but the structure is
bottom-up. And AA has been phenomenally successful. I'm not an
alcoholic, but study of AA led me to develop the concept of "Free
Association," which is a peer association that essentially follows
the AA traditions, organized for any purpose. There are actually
countless such, for the Free Association concepts are pretty much the
default for small peer associations. It's only when they grow beyond
a certain point, or when they formally organize, that they become
something different. So the problem reduces to the well-known problem
of scale in democracy.
Attempts to maintain direct democracy as an organization grows run
into the well-known problem on Wikipedia. The problem is not voting,
in itself. The problem is deliberation. If everyone can participate
in deliberation, and without structure to organize deliberation, the
traffic becomes overwhelming as the organizational size grows. This
discourages participation, and, for a time, there is some homeostasis
due to participation bias. Only those who care participate; however,
this, then warps the deliberation away from the general community.
Town Meeting governments often make decisions in Town Meeting that
are then, when they must be by law submitted for ratification by the
electorate, rejected. Somehow the direct democracy of Town Meeting
did not actually represent the town. It's participation bias, plus,
as well, poor communication between Town Meeting and the general citizenry.
I have a solution. I invented it something like twenty years ago, but
did not publish it. However, it's been independently invented in
various places around the world, I've encountered at least five
independent inventions. On Wikipedia, it's called [[Liquid
democracy]], but liquid democracy was a narrow concept dealing with
elections and choice, whereas my own concept, delegable proxy --
which is structurally the same thing, at least in some version -- has
been replicated by others, and there are a few small organizations
using or planning to use it. In a Free Association context, DP would
not make binding decision, it is an *advisory* network, and the
advice flows in both directions, so the proxy network that DP creates
essentially becomes a full "nervous system" for the organization,
with afferent and efferent "nerves," and every "synapse" being an
intelligent filter for information traffic. I'm not going to detail
how it would specifically apply to Wikipedia, but I can see fairly
clearly how it could solve the problem of participation bias, how it
would create ad-hoc assemblies that directly or indirectly represent
everyone, yet which can deliberate issues and make recommendations
and measure consensus through the active participation of a
relatively small group.
Contrary to what one might think at first, this creates no
bureaucracy. It requires no action on the part of WikiMedia
Foundation. It requires no general consensus. It would be, in fact
users doing what they already have the right to do: communicate with
each other, choosing whom they communicate with.
As there is little or no cost associated with it, and it is, in fact,
designed to make communication efficient, and participation is fully
voluntary, what's the problem? What is stopping this from happening?
Two things. One is inertia. Few see the benefit, few will follow the
analysis of the problem sufficiently to understand what this would do
and why it would be desirable. Another aspect of inertia is a general
despair over there being any solution at all to the problem of scale.
The other obstacle is that if the proxy networds actually start to
form, they will destabilize the existing power structure -- or, more
accurately, those with excess power in that structure will fear this
-- and action will be taken to stop it. I was shocked to discover
how, on Wikipedia, voluntary associations of Wikipedia members that
did not require anyone else to do anything, that were aimed at
helping people with Wikipedia process, were deleted and salted. (I'm
talking about Esperanza and the arbitration advocates, whatever they
were called.) There was no significant allegation in the deletion
reviews that they were harming anyone. Indeed, the deletion arguments
were that they were inefficient; surely that would be a matter for
the members, since all the cost of the inefficiency was born
voluntarily by the members, and if no members carried it, nobody else
was harmed. The lesson I took from this: if there are to be developed
proxy structures for Wikipedia members, they must be independent of
Wikipedia, not vulnerable to interdiction by deletion of the
organizing mechanism. And, again, this would be taking an example
from the AA experience. Members communicate directly with each other,
they do not need any support or structure or permission from AA World
Services, Inc., from Intergroup, from their local meeting. All those
simply facilitated their meeting and do not control, in any way, the
direct communication.
If anyone is interested in pursuing this topic, write to me directly,
and I will organize a mailing list to help develop it. As far as
possible general applications -- some of you who have come this far
might easily recognize that Wikipedia would be a relatively minor
application compared to some other possibilities -- again, I welcome
communication. I'm not about to exhaust myself trying to "get" the
Wikipedia community to adopt these concepts, it will or it won't, and
if nobody is interested -- hey, the motion failed for lack of a
second. I just think Wikipedia will be a *lot* more successful, in
the long run, if some of us look at this, and it only takes a few.
The problem of scale will get worse, unless the community develops a
coherent means of addressing it, or, alternatively, the Foundation
steps in and exerts control. Watch.
Wikipedia Anonymous First Step: We admitted we were powerless over
Wikipedia. :-)
(This means individually, *not* collectively.)