Your survey is well constructed for a general readership. Over here at this list most of us live in the belly of the beast. So to get to the heart of the matter, one of the best things Wikipedia could do right now is to adopt a plagiarism policy, or at least a plagiarism guideline. What we have now in that area is at proposal stage, and needs work. This is doable; it just needs to be prioritized.
Beyond that, there are several longstanding trouble spots. Broadly speaking, these deal with topics that are the subject of ongoing real world disputes. Ethnic/nationlist debates form a large part of that, with various religious, political, and (pseudo)science topics rounding out most of the rest. Those areas would be harder to remedy because of the number of editors involved and the entrenched nature of the disputes.
My own proposal in that area is multifaceted, and would probably be disputed or rejected by many fellow Wikipedians. Presenting the analysis in summary form.
1. In Internet communities generally, 5% of the participants will violate the rules no matter what they are. 5% will abide by the rules no matter poorly enforced they are. The other 90% would prefer to abide by the rules if the rules are generally enforced, but will also ignore rules if the rules become meaningless. The key to managing a community is to sway that 90%.
2. Wikipedia's rules are generally enforced, but pockets of activity need more than the usual share of administrative attention. Because these are long term trouble spots and neither the community at large nor the sysop community rewards work there, these areas actually get less than their share of attention. Administrators who intervene are generally disdained: perceived on all sides not as 'trying to help' but as 'engaging in drama'.
3. My proposed solution is to assemble task forces of 12 to 20 neutral administrators, depending on the size of each given dispute, to share the work of patrolling a problem area. By engaging in dialog at talk pages, edit protecting articles as needed, and occasionally handing out short blocks, a sufficiently large group of uninvolved administrators could normalize a problem area by convincing the 90% of editors in the middle that site policies do have meaning and will be enforced.
4. Currently, we do not have enough administrators to implement this solution. English Wikipedia has the lowest ratio of administrators to registered accounts among all Wikipedia's language editions, and that ratio has been dropping steadily for years.
5. English Wikipedia also has no formal system for training potential administrators. We have no 'best practices' guideline for admin coaching, and training is generally deprecated. Because the limited coaching that does occur is often done poorly (geared more toward passing admin candidacy than toward the actual skills and duties of adminship), coaching itself is generally not encouraged or respected within the community. In my view this is nonsensical: English Wikipedia is the only organization of its size that actively deprecates training for positions of responsibility. Our self-selected body of administrators is composed of people who succeeded in training themselves. This demographic skews our consensus discussions on the subject.
6. At some point (which I hope will be quite soon), it will become apparent to more of the community that self-training is not sufficient to meet the site's administrative needs. At that point, serious training will become a community priority. IMO, Wikipedia ought to have about three times as many administrators as it currently does. Because we are understaffed, some of our best volunteers are burning out and quitting. The key is to achieve broader awareness and turn this around. It will take several months--perhaps a year--for the effects of a good recruitment and training program to have an impact on the overall size and stress level of the administrative volunteer pool.
7. As soon as feasible, I would like to run a pilot project with an administrative task force at a long term problem area. The key is to recruit a critical mass of administrator volunteers. At minimum, this means twelve people. Preferably fifteen. Interested administrators are welcome to contact me.
-Durova
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:47 PM, dhruv bhalla dhruvbhalla@gmail.comwrote:
I'm sorry for causing such a stir. Let me reiterate: The reason for conducting the interview is because I would like the opinion of any regular contributor/reader, on what he or she feels are the major issues ( those on the lines of reliability etc.) facing Wikipedia today. As this piece work requires me to address these issues and propose logical solutions ( to the best of my ability) I choose to use this forum to gain a knowledgeable perspective on how to combat these issues. The 'trivial' questions in the interview were only to help me establish trends in my analysis. As before any help would be appreciated Thanks
2009/3/11 philippe philippe.wiki@gmail.com:
On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:30 PM, KillerChihuahua wrote:
Unlikely. If he's not English as a primary language, why would he email the EN mailing list?
'cuz it's got the most readers? I'm just guessin' on that....
philippe philippe.wiki@gmail.com
[[en:User:Philippe]]
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l