Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 05:25 AM 3/6/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Wikipedia painted itself into this corner.
Indeed, said corner being #5 website in the world according to recent
Comscore figures. The onus is still on those who think the system is
broken.
Onus? No, I'm seeing masses of highly experienced editors leaving the
project, with those replacing them being relatively clueless, as to
the original vision, which was itself brilliant but incomplete. The
biggest problem with the system is massive inefficiency, with huge
amounts of editor labor necessary to make decisions and maintain them,
long-term. A secondary problem is that the process does not reliably
seek consensus, which is an essential element in the estimation of the
degree of neutrality obtained. And the massive inefficiency compounds
this problem. You can sail on, believing that it's working just fine.
And, I suppose, you can believe that all the admins who have left, or
who maintain comments that it's broken, are just, what? Sour grapes?
There is a lot of criticism out there that is obviously ignorant. But
that's not all there is.
Yes, there is also stuff that is plainly directed
against the project,
from some of WR to the WSJ's reiteration of the discredited Ortega
statistics (see the most recent Signpost). It doesn't take too much to
distinguish legitimate beefs from troll-talk.
Some of us who have been around for a while might think that a smaller,
better-trained workforce could possibly get on faster with constructive
work. It seems well-established that the big influx of 2006-7 has now
sorted itself out into those who have learned the system and are
supporting it substantially, and those who have moved on (fnding tweets
more to their attention span, whatever). People do come and go anyway on
a big site. But we were talking about notability.
("Notability" has always been a broken
concept, but the real
question is whether the system as a whole is broken, rather than whether
individual subjective judgements always agree with the result of
deletion processes.)
The system is broken. It's obvious. But almost all of those who
recognize this also believe that it's impossible to fix, and so they
either leave in despair or they struggle on for a while. I'm unusual.
I know it's broken, and I know why, and I know how to fix it. And what
I'd suggest would take almost no effort. And it's been opposed at
every turn, attempts were made to delete and salt a small piece of the
proposal, years ago, a very modest experiment that would have changed
no policy or guideline.
I agree with "unusual" - the jury seems still to
be out on the rest.
What I'd propose is very simple, but it happens that it's also very
difficult to understand without background; I happen to have the
background. Few Wikipedia editors do. I could be wrong, but what I've
seen is that the *very idea* arouses very strong reactions. Based on
... what? I could say, but it's really not up to me. I can do nothing
by myself except set up structures that people can use or not.
I proposed
a change to the guideline, a
special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member
society of a notable international society would be notable. If you
know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections.
"Notability is not inherited."
Indeed, it isn't.
Not normally. DGG has already addressed the substance. What's
happening is that guidelines are being interpreted as fixed rules,
instead of as ways of documenting how the community operates. If
documentation of actual decision-making is pursued, then
inconsistencies can be directly addressed, and can produce more
refined -- and more accurate -- guidelines. This build-up of
experience, documented, is what's normal with structures like that of
Wikipedia, if they are to remain sustainable. That this is actively
blocked, that attempts to document actual practice are strongly
resisted, is part of the problem. "Instruction creep." But that
assumes that the guidelines are fixed rules, not simply documentation
that can be read to understand how the community is likely to decide
on an issue.
Some of the more high-profile associated topics
of
notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't
mean they are all worth a separate article.
Where does the decision get made? There is notable topic, amateur
radio. There is an international organization which reocognizes
national societies, one per nation. It's the IARU, in the situation
being discussed. It intrinsically creates 200 possible subtopics,
organized by nation, by the nature of the situation. Each one of these
*probably* has reliable sources that would justify a separate article,
given a deep enough search, but suppose there were a couple of
exceptions. If we start valuing editor time, a major oversight in the
development of project structure, we might say that if, in almost all
cases, with adequate work, we could find reliable sources for 190
articles, we mighg as well treat all these subtopics identically. Is
there any harm to the project from this?
But where does the decision get made? Is it possible to make a global
decision as I'm suggesting? I.e., in *this* situation, we will give
each national member society an article, as a stub, based on "national
scope" and "IARU recognition," with the IARU web site as the source.
Is it reliable for the purpose of determining that the national member
society is notable? What I see here is that those who argue guidelines
as an abstraction are saying "No," and they give reasons that are
abstract. But those who know the field, uniformly, are saying, "Yes,"
and they seem to be bringing neutral editors along with them, and
closing admins who have nothing to do with the topic. Does, in fact,
actual community practice trump the guidelines? What I'm seeing from
Mr. Matthews is an argument, that, no, the guidelines should prevail,
and we should not change the guidelines to reflect actual practice.
I'm
certainly not saying that, and it doesn't represent my view. I
didn't understand what you were saying so well, at first. Proposals to
create nearly 200 stubs in an area on the assurance that they are
probably verifiable somehow falls under a different general heading, the
creation of a "walled garden" of material where ordinary editors are
basically told to keep out. Walled gardens are no good when "editors
assumed to know" are in charge of the content. Some better approach
needs to be negotiated, allowing at least some informal guidelines to
emerge. (Example: which scholastic philosophers to include? We tend to
go by the contents of academic works of reference as at least a sensible
approach.)
Charles