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.
Take a look at [[OTRS]] if you aren't familiar with how this system could work. I think the demonstration that such formalised, technical collaboration models work is demonstrated by [[Distributed Proofreaders]]. Contributors are given small, finite tasks to perform (eg. proofreading is broken down into a series of tasks - each task being to proof read a single page. Contributors, are asked to compare a page of text which has been processed by OCR to the original scan. There are three layers of proofreading, so each page is proofread three times by different users. Users are free to contribute as much or as little as they like. Compare this to hypothetical WikiProofread where users are presented with large pages of text and are expected to proofread this text in no formalised fashion. Since the task is not broken down and fed to contributors, it seems insurmountable and very little work gets done.
The SWG would not see a list of articles which need to be fixed up in a number of ways as they currently do (making the task seem insurmountable and the achievements seem minimal). What needs to be done would be broken down into easily-manageable discrete tasks which will effectively be ticked off as each is fulfilled. This system would ensure an observable progress and give the contributors a sense of achievement. The SWG would therefore have a series of discrete tasks to perform.
- 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.
Bots and scripts could associate particular users with SWGs based on their recent edit history and send them a request to join.
- 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?
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.