On 3/30/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
And *why* exactly would we need this all-pervading bureaucracy? Who cares which group is "primarily" responsible for the article? You're confusing the idea of the SWG as a place to ask for help with the article with that of the SWG as a place to excercise control over it; unless the primary group is to be given some unique function relative to the non-primary ones, knowing which one it happens to be is useless.
(You do realize that virtually every article will be in such an intersected scope, if only because subject-oriented groups are orthogonal to country-oriented ones, yes?)
- Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
Who would be doing the asking, and what would they do if the editors refuse? Keep in mind that they *are* volunteers.
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
So, basically, mass deletions of hundreds of thousands of articles. (The groups will not, in general, have either the manpower or the motivation to really fix any substantial portion of what's unsourced. The only result you're likely to see is that editors will start pasting in references -- *any* references -- in an attempt to avoid having the articles deleted.)
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
And how, precisely, are you intending to do that? Rounding up the WikiProjects and telling them that they're doomed unless they source all their articles is going to be extremely counterproductive; faced with a negative motivational strategy, the volunteer editors will simply leave.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
And now we swing the other way: not only do unsuccessful projects get penalized, but so do successful ones. Recruiting editors to a project becomes harmful; recruit too many, and the bureaucracy will come in and Balkanize your project.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
It is, at the least, entirely unrealistic, and belies a significant lack of understanding about how collaborative editorial groups on Wikipedia actually work (or don't work, as the case may be) *in practice*.
Kirill