On 3/30/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
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?)
I think bureaucracy is the wrong word. The idea is to impose a radically different, prescriptive structure onto Wikipedia to ensure that all articles are managed and brought to a particular standard. Where bureaucracy suggests evolutionary build up of layers of redundancy, this system would, ideally, be technical and streamlined. This technicality would eliminate the need for bureaucratic layers.
No, it'd merely make sure that the bureaucratic layers are planned in advance. ;-)
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll simply refuse. This proposal, basically, assumes that there's a supply of editors somewhere willing to do work (which happens to be "not fun" in a major way) according to some central bureaucracy's dictates; in my experience, there simply isn't such a supply available.
- 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.)
This hasn't occurred under the organic system where a lot of pressure is on to verify with references, why would it occur under this system?
Um, right now, there isn't *any* pressure for anything that's not a BLP or a controversial topic. We have enormous numbers of unreferenced articles on more obscure topics that few people visit; the vast majority of them will never see anyone trying to remove them based on being unreferenced, which this proposal would do.
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.
I don't think introducing a new system is equivalent to "rounding up WikiProjects and telling them they're doomed unless they source the articles". WikiProjects will be identified as existing SWGs and the contributors will be asked to join the SWG.
And then what? The key element of this proposal seems to be that these SWGs (let us call them "WikiProjects") would somehow magically start sourcing everything with nary a complaint. The fundamental underpinning theory here is that (a) occasional editors can be forced to join project en masse and (b) project members can be forced to do sourcing work en masse; in my experience, neither of those reflects reality. The more likely reaction is that many of the active projects will simply move somewhere else, and the rest will fail to actually accomplish anything substantial.
Kirill