Is anyone else experiencing an extremely long response time when trying to
edit the English Wikipedia? When trying to "Save Page" on my last two edits,
both resulted in time outs and wouldn't, or couldn't, complete the edit. In
both cases I finally gave up. Any suggestions?
Marc
We already have several rivals, including the Chinese,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike and the largest online
encyclopaedia Hudong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong At some
point in the near future translation software will improve to the
point that they can compete against us in languages other than
Chinese. Also I suspect we are already losing ground to more
inclusionist projects such as IMDB.
We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and
among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are
unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having
their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the
small print that says their words now belong to the website they've
written them on.
Willingness to adapt to the desires of National Governments and even
cultural prejudices also creates niches in much if not most of the
world. I've no idea how good Chinese to Arabic translation software
is, but the combination of an adequate translation and a filter agreed
with relevant governments or religions would probably beat us in the
Arab world. I don't like the idea of political censorship, but I do
like the idea of enabling people to make their own choices as to what
they see. If our user preferences included two stick figures and a
sliding bar that enabled every option from burka to thongless then my
personal choice need not concern others any more than theirs mattered
to me.
Other interesting niches would be for a "child safe", unscientific or
mono-dialect encyclopaedias. I'm not convinced that the young earth
creationists with their American English at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia or the Australian English
equivalent at http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are
sufficiently mainstream to do this, let alone the absolutist flat
earthers at http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page But I
suspect that a mainstream trusted brand could find a niche here,
perhaps even with a bowdlerised mirror of Wikipedia.
I've seen many newbies get an early warning by starting their wiki
career "correcting" articles to the version of English that they are
comfortable with, and I'd like to see us resolve this by making
display dialect a user preference
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:More_multi_dialect_wikis I
think this would have a secondary benefit that identifying and
appropriately marking ambiguous words such as bonnet, hood and fender
would make it easier to translate those articles into other languages.
Other options would be for a site that ended the
inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
pigs.
WereSpielChequers
Larry Sanger started Citizendium with a detailed plan for precisely
how it would work, which he detailed in a Slashdot article in 2005 and
kept firmly to. This produced the weird phenomenon where he treated
user suggestions like they were *threats*. I just read a Paul Graham
article which contains a line summing up the problem here:
If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here it
is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone
is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter
what.
Knowino (and Argopedia, and the survivors of Citizendium, and everyone
in fact) needs to look at this and see what they can do. Is there room
in the encyclopedia game? I sure hope so. How do you beat Wikipedia?
Work like a startup. Wikipedia now changes at dinosaur pace and seems
utterly unable to solve the problems it knows it has, let alone the
ones it doesn't. If room to zip around it exists, something small
enough to be nimble can find it.
- d.
There is a difference between hosting a site and running a site.
Jimmy's company wikia hosts a number of sites including Liberapedia -
http://liberapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page None of the various
conservative sites seem to use wikia, unless that is Wikia allows
sites to use their own domain name? Wikkii is definitely a rival to
Wikia. They all seem to use wiki technology. I wonder if they are
deliberately avoiding the indirect connection to Wikipedia by doing
business with our founder?
Interestingly only Liberapedia and one of the conservative sites,
http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are actually open for
editing. Conservapedia http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
currently comes up as a 404 and
http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page allows you to create an
account, but not to edit, not even to edit your own talkpage....
Has anyone done a study of these various sites to see if any have had
a measure of success without allowing IP editing?
As EN Wiki looks like rising the drawbridge to the extent of only
allowing autoconfimred accounts to create new articles, it would be
interesting to know if any successful sites are that restrictive.
WereSpielChequers
On 9 April 2011 00:08, Sarah <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 15:57, Bob the Wikipedian
> <bobthewikipedian(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Already been done, Conservapedia. The most disgusting mockery of
>> conservatives I've ever seen. Then again, isn't this one of the sites
>> Jimbo runs?
>>
> Definitely not.
>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ting Chen <tchen(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 8 April 2011 20:35
Subject: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear community,
on the IRC board meeting at April 8th 2011 the board approved
unanimously the following resolution:
We, the Wikimedia Foundation Board, believe that the continued health of
our project communities is crucial to fulfilling our mission. The
Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness,
participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great
repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and
supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends
show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors.
As laid out in our five-year Strategic Plan, and emphasized by these
findings, Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse
editors, and to retain our experienced editors. A stable editing
community is critical to the long-term sustainability and quality of
both our current Projects and our movement.
We consider meeting this challenge our top priority. We ask all
contributors to think about these issues in your daily work on the
Projects.
We support the Executive Director in making this the top staff priority,
and recommend she increase the allocation of Foundation resources
towards addressing this problem, through community outreach,
amplification of community efforts, and technical improvements.
And we support the developers, editors, wikiprojects and Chapters that
are working to make the projects more accessible, welcoming, and
supportive.
The Board resolves to help move these efforts forward, and invites
specific requests for Foundation assistance to do so. We welcome and
encourage new ideas to help reach our goals of
[[strategy:Openness|openness and broader participation]].
We urge the Wikimedia community to promote openness and collaboration, by:
* Treating new editors with patience, kindness, and respect; being aware
of the challenges facing new editors, and reaching out to them; and
encouraging others to do the same;
* Improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and
instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier
policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion;
* Supporting the development and rollout of features and tools that
improve usability and accessibility;
* Increasing community awareness of these issues and supporting outreach
efforts of individuals, groups and Chapters;
* Working with colleagues to reduce contention and promote a friendlier,
more collaborative culture, including more thanking and affirmation; and
encouraging best practices and community leaders; and
* Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive
and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers.
;Resources
:
[[strategy:Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary|Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary]]
: [[strategy:Editor_Trends_Study|2011 Editor Trends Study]]
([[strategy:March_2011_Update|Executive Director's summary]],
[[strategy:Openness|ideas]])
--
Ting Chen
Member of the Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
E-Mail: tchen(a)wikimedia.org
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Tom,
The maintanabilty test strikes me as an interesting one, but I'm not
sure it scales. On Citizendium you had essentially one language and a
relatively small community, on Wikipedia you have:
*
* a much larger multilingual community so exponentially more difficult
to know if someone is sufficiently interested to update it when the
subject dies.
* a large proportion of editors who edit as anonymous IPs, so you have
no easy way to discover in advance whether an article would be updated
if the subject died.
* tools such as http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table
so you don't need someone on the Lain Wikipedia to be keeping an eye
on whether someone is alive, there could be someone on the French,
Russian or Tamil wikipedias and it then gets circulated as a death
anomaly.
* the critical mass that means that when someone notable dies a bunch
of newbie and IP editors often turn up at their Wikipedia article
As for the obscure English grocer, at present he wouldn't have an
article unless he was notable for something else - not every
sportsperson stays in sport till their retirement. I think you could
expand notability a long way without including every shopkeeper, but
as I said I think this is easier for IMDB and similar specialist
pedias than for us.
One area where I do think we could make a difference is to change our
policy to accept the concept of transient fame. For example anyone
signed as a player of a major football club is of interest to a
certain section of our readers, if they are dropped from the squad
without ever playing then they cease to be of interest. Currently our
policy requires them to have made a first team appearance, but
"currently in the squad or having in the past made a first team
appearance" would be more rational.
WereSpielChequers
On 8 April 2011 11:30, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers
> <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Other options would be for a site that ended the
>> inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
>> concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
>> seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
>> specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
>> one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
>> somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
>> pigs.
>>
>
> One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast
> notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on
> Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not
> explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism,
> propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current
> community of editors.
>
> It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for
> inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A
> rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article
> and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would
> the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep
> over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one
> would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But
> what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in
> England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability
> policy gets you.
>
> The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles
> don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton
> is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor
> and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable
> presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has
> an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the
> evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to
> be too drastic.
>
> --
> Tom Morris
> <http://tommorris.org/>
>
On Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:26:41 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I confess that when my wife and I are sitting in front of the TV, and a
> question arises from whatever we are watching, Wikipedia's relevant
> articles become a first source of information on our laptops while we're
> watching. When we do that we seldom feel the need to follow the sources.
One time I can recall that such a situation came up was during the
Super Bowl halftime a couple of years ago; somebody I was watching it
with started wondering how old Bruce Springsteen (the feature
performer there) was, so I grabbed my iPhone and looked it up through
a Wikipedia app. Unfortunately, the page had just been vandalized to
alter his birthdate to be 10 years earlier than it really was, so I
got a wrong answer.
--
== 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/
This sort of thing is happening a bit lately. It strikes me as
possibly a somewhat more manageable form of expert participation than
throwing individual well-meaning experts into a wiki cagefight with
individual persistent idiots. How's the community tending to treat
such groups?
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Martin Poulter <M.L.Poulter(a)bristol.ac.uk>
Date: 4 April 2011 11:38
Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] Media coverage of Cancer Research UK workshop
To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
BBC News (linked from front page and 4th most popular item currently!)
Cancer charity to tidy up Wikipedia
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12887075
The Times
Cancer Research UK to edit information on Wikipedia
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article2971655.ece
(NB behind a paywall)
--
Dr Martin L Poulter ICT Manager, The Economics Network
Based at the ILRT, University of Bristol: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
The full experience: http://infobomb.org/
Wikipedia contributor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter
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