>
> Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:33:36 +0100
> From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher
> Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> Matt Jacobs wrote:
> >> Anyway, the point is not that external links are systematically
> >> persecuted (they may be patchily persecuted); but that they now have few
> >> actual rights.
> >>
> >> Charles
> >>
> >>
> >
> > And why should links have any particular "rights"? External links should
> be
> > justified in the same way as any addition to the article. They may not
> > require the same verifiability standards, but they should be judged to be
> a
> > recommended place for further reading. In some way or another, they
> should
> > add content the editors judge to be useful, and not simply be about the
> > subject. Considering that for every good link I've seen inserted, I've
> also
> > seen one that was useless or even misleading or libelous, why would they
> > need any special protection?
> >
> The point would be no different from (say) unreferenced content: there
> the distinction between "may be removed" and "must be removed" is quite
> important. And there is the "right", not of the link but the editor
> adding it, to have "good faith assumed": other things being equal,
> assume that the link was added to help develop the encyclopedia. The
> onus is not always on the editor adding to an article to "justify"
> additions: that is a very unwiki-like attitude, if I may say so.
> > I see no reason why we need additional policy and bureaucracy
> specifically
> > for links.
> >
> >
> For one thing, the page WP:EL is very bureaucratic as it stands; the
> good part of it is the "maintenance and review" section, where templates
> for tagging links regarded as potential problems are mentioned.
>
> Also, this discussion thread reveals fairly clearly that there are
> differing views on the matter.
>
> Charles
>
I see nothing unwiki-like in suggesting that a person should defend their
additions to an article when disputes arise. That's a pretty standard
expectation in any collaborative environment. There's no lack of assumption
of good faith involved in an editor removing an addition if they have reason
to believe it is not beneficial to the article.
Sxeptomaniac
I just received an odd email suggesting I hand over my admin account to
the "Wikipedia Freedom Fighters". I see that they did something similar
back in May. Whether this is an actual effort or just a way to stir up
trouble, I dunno -- the content was ridiculous enough that I figure it's
probably trolling -- but I figured I'd mention it.
My email came from user WikiFFyta <wikifreedomfighter(a)googlemail.com>.
William
At 03:24 PM 3/28/2010, Fred Bauder wrote:
>That is why I despise the war on external links and further reading some
>editors seem to think is appropriate.
I don't think that some editors realize the extent to which the
blacklist, originally intended to control spam, is used to control
content. A web site that is inappropriate as a reference can
sometimes be the most important site for an external link. Yet if a
lot of people have linked to that site, and especially if a handful
of editors, interested in the topic -- or even they are COI -- have
added a lot of links, the site is nominated for blacklisting. In the
nomination and in decisions to blacklist by administrators, a
supporting reason, besides reports on numbers of links existing, is
often "Site is not RS." Sometimes, even, this is a controversial
statement, but if it's not clearly RS, the argument can prevail.
The specific appropriateness of the links in the articles where
placed *is not considered*, and, indeed, that consideration would be
impractical.
Sometimes sites are blacklisted without massive spam, but only a
little, and I have found, on occasion, that all the links that
resulted in blacklisting were actually legitimate, and that was
sustained by later stable replacement. Editors who were adding links
in good faith, links that were actual improvements, have been blocked
and banned for "spamming." Even when they stopped when warned.
I appreciate the need for spam control, but it can go too far.
ArbComm decided that content control ("not RS") was not a legitimate
reason for blacklisting, but it's complicated by the need to balance
true spam control with damage to editorial freedom, so we can't say
that content arguments are utterly irrelevant, either. If there is
gross spamming, but a site is RS, we would properly be more reluctant
to blacklist. If a site is utterly and unremediably usable, it might
be blacklisted easily if there is spamming. Most blacklistings do
fall into this category.
What I've seen, though, in raising the argument that a site would
make a good external link, is the "Wikipedia is not a repository of
links" argument, which is making a decision, like the not-RS
argument, in the wrong place, blacklist administrators should have no
special authority, as admins, over article content. It should be
realized that this is truly a small number of admins, as little as
two or three, that regularly make decisions, and, as is typical, they
are overworked.
But, then, there is still the possibility of whitelisting individual
links. I had thought that I'd come to some agreement with Beetstra
over this, and I started to try to assist by reviewing whitelisting
requests. These had been sitting for, some of them, for over two
months without response. Whitelisting is only a practical alternative
if it is quick, in general, and there is no anti-spam reason to deny
a reasonable whitelisting request, it would be impossible to spam
through whitelist requests if support is routinely required from at
least one registered editor, not associated with the site or an SPA
around the issue, looks at it and decides it's a reasonable request.
That still does not make the decision at the article for actual use.
But this is one of the charges made against me in the lastest
Arbitration Enforcement action, that I somehow was violating my ban
by reviewing unanswered whitelist requests and giving an opinion, an
opinion that really shouldn't have been contentious, and there was no
dispute on that page.
I also commented on one request on the blacklist page, where a
request for blacklist had been made, there was a neutral comment from
Beetstra, and I then contradicted information in the blacklist
request, because I concluded that the site was, in fact, RS. Just my
opinion! But evidenced. So, as far as dispute on that page was
concerned, I was originating the dispute, which was supposedly
allowed. It did not spin out and become a massive discussion, I was
careful to be brief. I wasn't intervening in a dispute between
editors. It could be said that there was a dispute between an IP
editor and an anti-spam volunteer who had warned him or her, on the
IP talk page, but I did not intervene in that. I was commenting on
the blacklisting proposal, not on the possible editorial dispute
(which apparently didn't continue, but I don't know. To my knowledge,
the IP was not blocked, which would certainly have occurred if
"spamming" had continued.)
Based on Beetstra's later comments, I sadly concluded that help with
whitelisting was seen as an outside interference, it was not welcome,
even when done carefully in such a way as to thoroughly respect the
legitimate needs of blacklisting. So the ArbComm decision on the
blacklist is basically a dead letter, for lack of anyone
knowledgeable to make it happen.
Links will be provided on request. This is not an attempt to canvass
support for some position on any web site.
>>
>> Anecdotally, I see a lot of people decline the opportunity because the
>> RFA gauntlet is so obnoxious.
>>
>>
> Looking around, reform of RfA seems to have been thought of seriously in
> 2006, but perhaps not since. [[Wikipedia:Admin coaching]] has offered
> one solution: is this not being productive? One thing that occurs to me
> is that a self-test page could be useful.
>
> Charles
>
>
There's a self test that was developed in 2008, I found it useful but
I think it is rarely used and might be out of date.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Filll/AGF_Challenge_2_Multiple_Choice
Admin coaching is pretty much dead after coachees started being
opposed for going through admin coaching.
There have been no end of attempts to reform RFA mooted at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship
Even if the crats started to ignore incivil !votes, opposes that are
not supported by difs and opposes for supporting particular policiess,
we still have a problem that expectations in terms of tenure and
editcountitis have put adminship out of reach for most editors.
Personally I favour the on the job training option - increase the
amount of training modules and expect admins to complete relevant
modules before using an unfamiliar subset of the tools.
Another option is to agree a minimum number of active admins needed,
and hold a monthly election to restore numbers to that level. This
isn't ideal but it would have the advantage of negating the arbitrary
inflation of RFA standards.
But the page has long become deadlocked and it seems to be difficult
to get a consensus that we have a phenomena, let alone that RFA is
broken and needs change.
I agree that a "lot of people decline the opportunity because the RFA
gauntlet is so obnoxious". I think part of the recent downturn is the
chill effect of some recent very unpleasant RFAs. But the escalation
of standards and arbitrary nature of the process are also deterring or
delaying candidates. I have two potential candidates who I have been
speaking to, one has said he may run after he has done 10,000 edits
and the other is concerned that his huggling might be counted against
him (his >10,000 non huggle edits on their own would very probably get
him through).
I think that the projects would be a good hunting ground for potential
admins, as would be looking at currently active editors who have both
Rollback and Autoreviewer. Lots of editors started editing in the last
30 months, it would be nice to get a few more of them as admins, and
even with current RFA standards I'm sure we can find more than 2
candidates a month who can pass RFA. But if we want adminship to be
the norm for all longterm clueful, civil contributors we will need a
new method to appoint admins.
--
WereSpielChequers
Is this an appropriate forum for opening a discussion on project best practices? The articles and discussions I've found on Wikipedia so far are really weak and general. I'd like to share my own learnings and also discuss best practices in:
1. Components of a good project page
2. Good tools for virtual meetings
3. Team member roles
4. How best to orient team members who are new to Wikipedia
5. Reporting progress
6. Finding contributors with certain skills
7. Possible correlation between number of edits and % "done"
8. Maximizing granularity of assignments
9. Repurposing edit stalkers before they discourage new contributors
10. The value of using formal management processes (like Scrum)
11. Avoiding continual redesign of many like articles to avoid design analysis paralysis and maximize content generation
12. ...and others
If this is not the right place to discuss these things, have you any suggestions as to where to do it? Even outside WP I see no good discussions going on regarding best practices of community writing projects. There's nothing on LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, forums, or even blogs, as far as I've been able to find. If I have to build such a forum I will, but I was hoping to start one related specifically to WP so we could pull knowledge people who are relatively more experienced than many outside WP -- people who perhaps are so busy organizing and contributing to projects that they are not sharing their best practices yet. I know the knowledge is out there; I just want to get people sharing it.
Michael
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> Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:50:53 +0000
> From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> On 25 March 2010 20:45, Kwan Ting Chan <ktc(a)ktchan.info> wrote:
>
> > Well, they're not dwindling since admin rights don't get
> taken away on
> > inactivity. ;-) But to the general question, because the
> standard expected
> > of a candidate for RfA has gone up over the years?
>
>
> And because going through a continuously ratcheted-up gauntlet is
> rather too demeaning for people to consider worth the effort?
>
>
> - d.
As one of the newest admins on enwiki, I must say that I was lucky in that I
didn't have a contentious RfA, however, I think that over the last few
months, I am the exception rather than the rule.
Despite the oft-quoted "It's no big deal", obviously many of the editors
commenting at RfA *do* consider it to be a big deal. I'm not sure why this
should be - although I notice that it's more likely-than-not to be
non-admins who are the most vehement opposers.
OK, I may be a newbie admin, but I agree that it's not that big a deal - my
admin actions have been to delete obvious CSDs, close xfDs according to the
census - plus a very few protections/blocks/rights changes... Nothing that's
a big deal - very much maintenance, as it is meant to be.
As for the number of active admins - well, people move on from things
online. I remember when I started online, lots of my friends would be in
Messenger, or in the chat rooms - now hardly any of them are. This is mainly
because they have more family commitments than they did (mumbles) years ago.
The same is true for admins - family commitments crop up, work commitments -
or they get bored of the abuse they get (I've been lucky so far, I've not
received abuse for my actions so far - that's not asking anyone here to
abuse me, by the way!)
Has anyone compared the activity rate of admins over time to that of
non-admins? For example, what %age of admins whose accounts were created in
2006 are active, compared to the %age of non-admins whose accounts were
created in 2006?
Is this an admin-only problem, or is it an editors-in-general problem?
Phantomsteve
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>
> Message: 9
> Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:45:20 -0700
> From: George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <38a7bf7c1003251345o244feebbreafd2cc705e1cd15(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 1:24 PM, WereSpielChequers
> <werespielchequers(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
>> The number of admins on the English Wikipedia may possibly have
>> peaked, and the number of active admins is 20% down on its peak of a
>> couple of years ago.
>>
>> Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and February 2010 had only 19 successful RFAs
>> between them, with December and January both equalling the previous
>> all time low of 6. March 2010 is not yet over, but with less than 7
>> days left and no-one running, it looks like 2 is a new record monthly
>> low for RFA, and 15 a new record low for a quarter.
>>
>> Those who are becoming admins are mostly the tale end of the classes
>> of 2006/7, as we currently have only 34 admins who started editing in
>> 2008, and only 4 from the class of 2009.
>>
>> Are other projects experiencing a similar phenomena?
>>
>> What are the likely results of a dwindling number of admins, and a
>> growing wikigeneration gap between admins and other editors?
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> WereSpielChequers
>
> Thanks for bringing the data up here. I hadn't noticed the trend this year yet.
>
> Fundamental question 1 - Do we have enough admins? Fewer may not be a
> problem, or it may be a huge problem.
>
> Fundamental question 2 - How long are admins from each set elected
> staying active? We've had a total of 1841 promotions, of which 870
> are still active. I'd almost like to go through each admin's history,
> from account creation to adminship to end of active adminship (even
> better, month by month edit and admin activities) to see how long
> we're keeping people.
>
> This isn't hard statistics, but I don't know where all the source data
> is to try and do the data reduction on it... Ideas, or info sources?
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert(a)gmail.com
>
870 was the number of active admins as of the end of 2009, it has
since dropped to 842 today.
I think the total number of admins active and inactive peaked at 1720
and is now 1718, but March 2010 could turn out to be a blip, I don't
feel this is statistically significant. April would only need to
return to Jan/Feb levels to have more successful RFAs than admins
resigning or being desysopped. But there is a clear longterm
downwards trend in our number of active admins, and in terms of
community health and actually getting admin stuff done the number of
active admins is more relevant (the number of admins who actively use
the tools might be even more relevant but I don't have that data).
I agree that it would be interesting to work out whether there is a
standard wiki career with most users moving on in say their third or
fourth years or whether after the first two or three years people
settle down and we only lose a certain percentage a year. If the
latter we may be able to keep the site running for many moons. If the
former we may be closer to the rocks than we think.
Month by month edit and admin activities should be extractable from
the toolserver.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADMINSTATS has some stats on
admin activity - I think the discussions would be more meaningful if
we were measuring how many active and how many very active admins we
had.
WereSpielChequers
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
This week we've seen a lot of helpful testing from at least 15 people,
and we'd love to see more before launch.
To participate, start here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_upd…
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and
Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
There will likely be more work than that before launch as user feedback
comes in; we just added a number of items based on tester feedback. But
if this week's feedback is any guide, we don't appear to have much major
work remaining.
We expect to release again next week, and each week thereafter until
this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William