I'm in agreement with David here.
I do not want to be a policeman on behaviour, but I would certainly be
interested in, and already do, patrol content changes and pass or
remove spurious details. I think we all do that a bit. Being a
policeman is quite a different role.
So a flagged rev backlog will only be addressed if we allow all
established users to so address it, and deny the power to admins to
unseat a member of the group. It should probably be automatic at a
certain edit count or length of stay or something of that nature.
There is absolutely no need to create any additional powers for admins,
and we already have process in place to handle people who are truly
disruptive to the system even though long-term participants. We don't
need any more of that.
Will Johnson
-----Original Message-----
From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 5:56 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs
doc,
I think you underestimate the number of good editors who do not want
to be admins but would gladly take this on. Considering what an admin
does, I can understand not wanting the distinction, but having a real
role in making sure we have an acceptable content is another thing
entirely. But you are certainly right that it won;'t solve the
subtler problems--though I think experienced people develop a good e
ye
for what is likely to be NPOV violations.
Option 1 above makes little sense to me, and I think to you also,
because less watched does not = less notable. it just means less
popular. We'll lose most of the senators. We'll keep the wrestlers.
Option 2 will take a lot of tweaking. Since flagged revisions is
essentially certain to be approved for a trial, why don't we wait and
see how it works, as the first of the tweaks. If we change too many
variables at once, we'll end up with a lot of rules that won;t really
have been necessary.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 5:27 PM, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Flagged revisions is not going to solve much more than
obvious
vandalism. If we flag a good proportion of article, then we will need
lots of reviewers, and the level will be set at sysop of lower - the
job
will be tedious and done by the lazy with an eye on
edit count. The
problem is that subtle attempt to insert credible untruths,
half-truths,
or facts spun to create an imbalanced biased picture
of a person will
almost certainly walk through this.
Only what is obvious to the average lazy reviewer will be prevented -
but what is obvious to the reviewer is not harmful, because it is also
obvious to the reader. Hence, general flagging will not solve the BLP
problem, it will not really even he
lp.
We won't dent this until we start to take maintainability into
consideration as well as verifiability. Sure, any individual BLPs
/can/
be written in good way, but, taken together, our
wiki-structure /will
not/ maintain this level of BLPs without an unacceptable level of
harmful articles. Eventualism does not work here - because shitty
biased
BLPS in the meantime are not acceptable.
We have two choices:
1) delete a large proportion of our lower notability (=less watched
by
knowledgable people) BLPs. OR
2) tweek the structures so that those motivated to be doing the
quality
control (and that includes clued readers) are able to
maintain more
articles.
The second option means looking at:
1) Spot banning anyone pushing negative POVs on a BLP. We should not
waste resources arguing with such people.
2) Permanently semi-protecting any article where there's been a
previous
harmful BLP violation that's not been reverted
within a few hours.
These
are the articles that our open editing has failed once
- the subject
should not be open to it again.
3) *Insisting on sourcing*. Yes, the patroler /could/ google and check
the verifiability of the thing for himself. But we simply DO NOT have
enough clued patroler to do this. We must put the onus on the editor
giving the information to "show his working" - so that the partoler
(or
the casual
reader) will be quicker to see any
problems with the
sourcing.
Why should unsourced BLPs not be tolerated? Because we cannot maintain
any level of quality control as long as we keep making the checker do
all the work. You want it in? You source it - otherwise NO.