Perhaps I'm the only one who finds this a little concerning in my part, but lately I've been feeling that too many users are trying to watch too much of Wikipedia at one time.
Let me elaborate a little. It isn't uncommon for the normally active user to have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages on their watchlist. Then, when somebody makes an edit that a certain user doesn't agree with, it gets changed or outright reverted. It's like, at the least, a form of a bunch of "Big Brothers" looking over an article and, at the worst, an outright form of page ownership.
I've been on the low end on watchlisting pages myself, but a couple of months ago I decided to "unload" my watchlist, removing most articles that I have extensively worked on since I came onboard -- going from about 50 pages watched to about fewer than 10 pages watched, only keeping those I'm monitoring in the short-term.
Personally, I found unloading my watchlist liberating, and I would hope that more would do the same. There's always that steady stream of vandal-fighters to stomp out any clear vandalism that pops up. It's hard to explain, but I think it's a good exercise in assuming good faith that others will make constructive edits in efforts to improve pages.
-MuZemike
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 2009/12/10
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Update on single-revision deletion
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Just a note to say that I didn't go ahead with my
planned implementation of revision suppression
for all administrators, because Aaron said that he
would rather that I wait until bug 20928. Once that
is fixed, I will again look into deploying single-revision
deletion for administrators.
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20928>
--
Andrew Garrett
agarrett(a)wikimedia.org
http://werdn.us/
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
My watchlist recently went over the 5,000 mark, but a handful of busy
talkpages and noticeboards dominate the recent edits on it. I've set
mine to ignore bot edits, and on the articles I'm interested in I
don't bother to check the edits by users I recognise.
I think flagged revisions would help as there are several vandal
magnets like [[Beaver]] that I would take off my watchlist if they
were protected by flagged revisions. At present on the rare occasion
when someone actually improves that article there are probably dozens
of editors who check that edit.
But the change I'd like to see to watchlists is an option to ignore
rolled back edits. If A has edited an article, b has then vandalised
it and C has reverted to the version edited by A then I'd really only
like to see A's edit on my watchlist.
werespielchequers
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 16:30:17 -0800 (PST)
> From: Mike Pruden <mikepruden(a)yahoo.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Do we try to watch(list) the encyclopedia too
> much?
> To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <76300.90794.qm(a)web32603.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Perhaps I'm the only one who finds this a little concerning in my part, but lately I've been feeling that too many users are trying to watch too much of Wikipedia at one time.
>
> Let me elaborate a little. It isn't uncommon for the normally active user to have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages on their watchlist. Then, when somebody makes an edit that a certain user doesn't agree with, it gets changed or outright reverted. It's like, at the least, a form of a bunch of "Big Brothers" looking over an article and, at the worst, an outright form of page ownership.
>
> I've been on the low end on watchlisting pages myself, but a couple of months ago I decided to "unload" my watchlist, removing most articles that I have extensively worked on since I came onboard -- going from about 50 pages watched to about fewer than 10 pages watched, only keeping those I'm monitoring in the short-term.
>
> Personally, I found unloading my watchlist liberating, and I would hope that more would do the same. There's always that steady stream of vandal-fighters to stomp out any clear vandalism that pops up. It's hard to explain, but I think it's a good exercise in assuming good faith that others will make constructive edits in efforts to improve pages.
>
> -MuZemike
>
>
>
>
A note that this week marks the 250th issue of the English Wikipedia Signpost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost
The weekly newsletter has been going strong for five years now, only
rarely missing an issue -- a testament to the dedication of the three
editors the Signpost has had, and the dozens and dozens of writers who
have contributed.
And a note that we are always looking for more writers and reports
(especially reports from special events, other projects, onwiki
contests...); post writeups or story suggestions here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom/Suggesti…
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
...in 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into
World War II. Not that you'd know that from the "On this day" section
of the main page. I guess there is an iron rule that nothing mentioned
in any other part of the main page makes it into the "On This Day"
section (a Today's Featured Picture is an image of lifeboats rescuing
sailors from a ship damaged in the attack), but that seems like a
strange rule to me.
Nathan
It's happening again :)
Wikimedia Strategy Project office hours on IRC (#wikimedia-strategy at
freenode) are Wednesday from 04:00-05:00 UTC, which is:
Tuesday, 8-9pm PST
Tuesday, 11pm-12am EST
You can access the chat by going to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and
filling in a username and the channel name (#wikimedia-strategy). You
may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
Another option is http://chat.wikizine.org.
For more information about IRC clients, go to the Wikipedia entry on
IRC or the Meta page on Wikimedia IRC.
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Facilitator, Strategy Project
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
mobile: 918 200-WIKI (9454)
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
I'd like to work out some way of advocating the "missing article"
lists to potential new contributors. On en:wp:
http://enwp.org/WP:WANTEDhttp://enwp.org/WP:MISSING
I've been writing new stub articles just from those in the past couple
of days. It reminds me of how and why I got hooked on writing an
encyclopedia.
What would be a good way of advocating these to n00bs? "See this list?
Write a coupla paragraphs with a coupla good references and it'll go
in."
Suppose I should help process the "new articles from unconfirmed
users" queue ... where is that these days?
- d.
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Here's another: when someone searches for an article (let's say "norwegian
> antarctic expedition") that doesn't exist, let's encourage them to add it -
> we have successfully located someone interested in a topic that we don't
> have an article about. This is a good start.
However, there are a lot of "gotchas" to the process of observing
what appears to be a missing article and proceeding to attempt to
create it, and it takes a good deal of experience in Wikipedianism to
successfully navigate them.
Even apart from all the political tripwires a newbie could stumble
into when the topic concerns something controversial either in the
"real world" or in the bizarre confines of Wikipolitics, there's the
matter of there possibly being an article on a topic already, just
under a slightly different spelling. On Wikipedia, capitalization
and punctuation matter, and newbies can't be expected to know all the
nitpicky conventions used to decide what the "proper" title of an
article is. Maybe they'll end up creating an article under
"Norwegian Antarctic Expedition" when the slightly differently
capitalized "Norwegian antarctic expedition" already exists but they
didn't manage to find it. Or maybe the existing article is under
"Antarctic expeditions of Norway" or "Antarctic expeditions
(Norwegian)". Sometimes there are redirects from other obvious
titles, but not always. Or the newbie might misspell "Norwegian".
It's happened to me a few times, that I've created a new article
where I thought there was a gap, then later found there to be one
already under a slightly different name.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
>
> I personally think we are at the stage where we should be spending time
> improving what we have, rather than creating more work. We aren't low on
> articles.
>
> --Majorly
>
I find this view strange, and if it is a common opinion among experienced
Wikipedians, then that makes me very worried about the state of the
community.
First about the idea of "creating work": If our goal is to write a
comprehensive encyclopedia, then the work of writing those articles was
always there. Creating stubs just makes it visible.
Second, Wikipedia is nowhere near finished in terms of number of articles.
Take a look at this image and tell me if geographical locations are well
covered throughout the world:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imageworld-artphp3.png
There is also a huge number of historical people with no articles. Whole
academic subjects such as philosophy are barely covered and not very well
written. Events before 2001 that aren't frequently referenced today is not
nearly as well covered as recent events.
Sure, the subjects the average Wikipedia writer is likely to look up are
well covered. My favorite subject areas were actually quite well covered
already in 2004. There is an article on pretty much every American town,
film, band, athlete etc, but as soon as you go outside North America,
Europe, Japan and Australia it gets a lot more sparse.
I cannot find the link right now, but I have seen estimates that the total
number of notable subjects is at least 10 million, probably closer to 100
million.
Now if this was just your personal opinion it wouldn't be a problem, but the
meme that Wikipedia has enough articles affects processes and community
standards. When I complain that it has become too difficult for a newbie to
create a new article, I am met with replies along the lines of "It helps
keep the crap out, and we don't need more articles anyway". If people who
start new articles are considered as troublemakers, then all those millions
of missing topics will never be covered.
