If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly great web projects and its success cannot be questioned. However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its limits and for some things it doesn't work. One of the things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on controversial topics.
I'm writing as someone who recently decided to stop editting Wikipedia after making about 3000 edits over a year or so. The area I most worked in was the Middle East, about which I have substantial expertise. The hope I had when I started was that despite some ups and downs articles would gradually get better; that is, the average quality would slowly improve over time so that the long-term benefit of one's labors would be clear. Alas, it is not so. Sometimes a serious effort from a few contributors with NPOV at heart can create a major improvement in an article, but it only lasts as long as they man the trenches to fend off the barbarians. A moment of lapsed attention and the article is back to where it was before.
The dynamic process is like a cup of water with some sand in it. You can get the sand closer on average to the top by energetic stirring, but any success in getting it closer to the top than that average is fleeting. Stop stirring and all your prior work is gone in an instant.
I frankly don't think this problem can be solved by making small changes. Tweaking the rules won't help very much. Yes, people should have to write NPOV rather than merely accept it in principle, but who is going to enforce that rule and who is going to stop the enforcers from becoming a sort of star chamber which in practice is a source of POV? Having a "latest stable edition" won't work either, because any sort of mechanism for changing the stable edition based on consensus will never gain that consensus. (If you doubt this, review the history of attempts to delete truly awful MidEast articles via VfD; it is nearly impossible.)
Of course I wish the best of luck to those willing to devote more of their time to trying to fix the unfixable, but I have personally had enough. I hope to return later on to edit in an area (mathematics) where Wikipedia works pretty well.
Zero.
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zero-
If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly great web projects and its success cannot be questioned. However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its limits and for some things it doesn't work. One of the things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on controversial topics.
We definitely have problems in this area. My current thinking, briefly summarized:
1) Be very inclusive. NPOV can only work if everyone gets a fair chance to have their point of view included in an article (even if not the main article).
2) Center discussions around issues rather than people. Conduct systematic peer review in different categories for every article. Highlight unsourced/unattributed claims in the article.
3) Facilitate forking. It should be easy to create and maintain forks of controversial articles written from a specific group's point of views - not necessarily within the Wikimedia framework, but outside of it. Others can then take Wikipedia, Wikinews or Wikibooks entries and develop them according to their respective belief systems.
4) Eliminate edit wars. The most obvious solution seems to be a "Ban to talk page" feature that does not protect the whole page, but only forces the users involved in an edit war to discuss the issue.
5) Faster response when people violate the rules, by randomly selected trusted user committees or something similar. Milder, but quicker punishments. Less talk, more action.
2)-5) require changes to the software. Have patience, they will come. Some related proposals and documents are on Meta, particularly LiquidThreads and Wikiflow.
In the meantime, my advice is to either keep stirring, or to bookmark the last revision of the page which you find acceptable and wait for things to improve.
Regards,
Erik
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
- Facilitate forking. It should be easy to create and maintain forks of
controversial articles written from a specific group's point of views - not necessarily within the Wikimedia framework, but outside of it. Others can then take Wikipedia, Wikinews or Wikibooks entries and develop them according to their respective belief systems.
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions (with each edit warrior would want to orphan his opponent's version).
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer a écrit:
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
- Facilitate forking. It should be easy to create and maintain forks of
controversial articles written from a specific group's point of views - not necessarily within the Wikimedia framework, but outside of it. Others can then take Wikipedia, Wikinews or Wikibooks entries and develop them according to their respective belief systems.
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions (with each edit warrior would want to orphan his opponent's version).
-- mav
Jee, I was just ready to jump on Erik for the same reason. I second you Mav. Ant
At 01:05 PM 10/11/2004 +0200, Anthere wrote:
Daniel Mayer a écrit:
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions (with each edit warrior would want to orphan his opponent's version). -- mav
Jee, I was just ready to jump on Erik for the same reason. I second you Mav. Ant
And I. I think the other ideas were good, though.
Daniel-
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions
In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive).
So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by the Institute for Creationism.
This mangifies the potential influence of Wikimedia content even further and it is something that other news and information sources cannot easily compete with because they are not open content (ironically, it's also the reason for the success of agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP - they allow their stories to be modified for the purposes of individual users). The edit war problem is negligible in this context, as each group can define its own rules of exclusion.
However, whether it is desirable to have such functionality within Wiki[mp]edia is open to debate. I have contemplated a separate "Wikiviews" project, or simply making it as easy as possible for third parties to manage forks of Wikimedia content in their MediaWiki installs. Temporary and fixable problems like "edit wars" are certainly not a strong argument in favor of a very conservative approach, though.
NPOV is great, but it does not allow me to make use of my existing "reputation information": I cannot easily get from the current article on creationism to an article that includes the points of view only of the people I trust on this particular topic. On controversial topics, I will have to wade through many pages of text to get to the meat of the matter. Therefore, many people will prefer specialized information sources like EvoWiki and talkorigins.org on such subjects, because they know that their information space is not "polluted".
This in itself carries a much greater risk of duplication of effort than us providing the tools to do it properly (easy merging between changing revisions). We should not close our eyes to this problem and explore ways in which we can make Wikimedia content more useful to specific interest groups while maintaining NPOV as the central ideology of the Wikimedia projects. Open content is not just about vertical growth: from 100 articles to 10,000. It is also about horizontal growth: from 1 article about a topic to 10 or 100. Only if we embrace both types of growth we will become the catalyst of the media revolution .
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Daniel-
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions
In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive). So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by the Institute for Creationism.
I believe you have just described Wikinfo, Fred Bauder's fork of Wikipedia. That is, it's already been done.
- d.
David-
I believe you have just described Wikinfo, Fred Bauder's fork of Wikipedia. That is, it's already been done.
Wikinfo is an example, yes, although they do the keeping-in-sync part manually. I actually wrote a little script that makes the merging of Wikinfo and Wikipedia articles easier a while ago, not sure if anyone uses it. In the long term, I want multiple such forks with specific purposes (views) and I want to facilitate the cooperation between these different variants of our content. Mav's concerns about doing this within Wikimedia are understandable, but false. I will prove this when the time comes.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
David-
I believe you have just described Wikinfo, Fred Bauder's fork of Wikipedia. That is, it's already been done.
Wikinfo is an example, yes, although they do the keeping-in-sync part manually. I actually wrote a little script that makes the merging of Wikinfo and Wikipedia articles easier a while ago, not sure if anyone uses it. In the long term, I want multiple such forks with specific purposes (views) and I want to facilitate the cooperation between these different variants of our content. Mav's concerns about doing this within Wikimedia are understandable, but false. I will prove this when the time comes.
What I don't understand is why you require that this be done within Wikipedia. What I'm saying is there's a fork with the policy you want - why do you require that Wikipedia's policy change?
- d.
I'd like to see this idea tried out with more people involved.
Fred
From: erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: 11 Oct 2004 21:17:00 +0200 To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Article forks (was Re: Loosing more of our best contributors)
David-
I believe you have just described Wikinfo, Fred Bauder's fork of Wikipedia. That is, it's already been done.
Wikinfo is an example, yes, although they do the keeping-in-sync part manually. I actually wrote a little script that makes the merging of Wikinfo and Wikipedia articles easier a while ago, not sure if anyone uses it. In the long term, I want multiple such forks with specific purposes (views) and I want to facilitate the cooperation between these different variants of our content. Mav's concerns about doing this within Wikimedia are understandable, but false. I will prove this when the time comes.
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive).
That is moving away from NPOV and creates POV editor groups; both are dangerous to the project. I don't expect you will get any traction in that direction, so I won't waste much time on this topic.
But having NPOV articles that described in detail the views of particular groups of people are fine; they just need to be correctly titled and qualified. This is just a more focused form of NPOV where less relevant material gets an appropriate amount of coverage. It is a fallacy to assume that NPOV means we can only have very general articles (not that I'm saying you ascribe to that fallacy).
If people want to have a biased instead of an NPOV encyclopedia, then they can start one any time they wish, but it will not be part of Wikimedia.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
But having NPOV articles that described in detail the views of particular groups of people are fine; they just need to be correctly titled and qualified. This is just a more focused form of NPOV where less relevant material gets an appropriate amount of coverage. It is a fallacy to assume that NPOV means we can only have very general articles (not that I'm saying you ascribe to that fallacy). If people want to have a biased instead of an NPOV encyclopedia, then they can start one any time they wish, but it will not be part of Wikimedia.
Wikinfo has the Sympathetic Point Of View policy with parallel articles. I would not claim that Wikipedia getting all the hits and publicity is necessarily evidence their approach is worse - first-mover advantage and network effect counts for a *lot* - but I do feel that, whereas SPOV will make strident editors feel better, it doesn't really create better articles for the *reader*.
(Much as I enjoy wasting time (and it is wasting time) on IRC, and attending the occasional meet, I'm on Wikipedia for the buzz of creating an end result, not for the social club.)
- d.
Erik Moeller a écrit:
Daniel-
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions
In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive).
So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by the Institute for Creationism.
We will have to disagree with you on this.
Erik Moeller wrote:
Daniel-
Absolutely not within Wikimedia! That flies directly in the face of NPOV, leads to needless duplication in what we are doing, and transfers edit wars to all articles that link to the forked versions
In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive).
So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by the Institute for Creationism.
Well, you get articles like "Christian views of women" which is entirely POV. When I found it I could have renamed it to "Atheist views of Christian views of women". I don't know if this would work too well.
My take is that splitting articles can be a good thing. Sometimes the best way of dealing with a larger and more complicated issue is to place it in its own page and summarise that page in the main page's section. Hey, we do it for articles with lots of content, why not for contentious issues? We don't have to agree with the views, just characterise them.
TBSDY
This mangifies the potential influence of Wikimedia content even further and it is something that other news and information sources cannot easily compete with because they are not open content (ironically, it's also the reason for the success of agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP - they allow their stories to be modified for the purposes of individual users). The edit war problem is negligible in this context, as each group can define its own rules of exclusion.
However, whether it is desirable to have such functionality within Wiki[mp]edia is open to debate. I have contemplated a separate "Wikiviews" project, or simply making it as easy as possible for third parties to manage forks of Wikimedia content in their MediaWiki installs. Temporary and fixable problems like "edit wars" are certainly not a strong argument in favor of a very conservative approach, though.
NPOV is great, but it does not allow me to make use of my existing "reputation information": I cannot easily get from the current article on creationism to an article that includes the points of view only of the people I trust on this particular topic. On controversial topics, I will have to wade through many pages of text to get to the meat of the matter. Therefore, many people will prefer specialized information sources like EvoWiki and talkorigins.org on such subjects, because they know that their information space is not "polluted".
This in itself carries a much greater risk of duplication of effort than us providing the tools to do it properly (easy merging between changing revisions). We should not close our eyes to this problem and explore ways in which we can make Wikimedia content more useful to specific interest groups while maintaining NPOV as the central ideology of the Wikimedia projects. Open content is not just about vertical growth: from 100 articles to 10,000. It is also about horizontal growth: from 1 article about a topic to 10 or 100. Only if we embrace both types of growth we will become the catalyst of the media revolution .
Regards,
Erik
On 10/11/04 2:07 AM, "Erik Moeller" erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
- Be very inclusive. NPOV can only work if everyone gets a fair chance to
have their point of view included in an article (even if not the main article).
- Center discussions around issues rather than people. Conduct systematic
peer review in different categories for every article. Highlight unsourced/unattributed claims in the article.
- Facilitate forking. It should be easy to create and maintain forks of
controversial articles written from a specific group's point of views - not necessarily within the Wikimedia framework, but outside of it. Others can then take Wikipedia, Wikinews or Wikibooks entries and develop them according to their respective belief systems.
- Eliminate edit wars. The most obvious solution seems to be a "Ban to
talk page" feature that does not protect the whole page, but only forces the users involved in an edit war to discuss the issue.
- Faster response when people violate the rules, by randomly selected
trusted user committees or something similar. Milder, but quicker punishments. Less talk, more action.
2)-5) require changes to the software. Have patience, they will come. Some related proposals and documents are on Meta, particularly LiquidThreads and Wikiflow.
The number one thing that would help this is to support atomization. The more clearly defined the scope of the entry, the easier it is to find consensus and to discard chaff. As entries get larger, their scope broadens, and conflict, dispute, and confusion ensue.
Hi Zero,
Just saw your message posted via the list. Sorry to hear that you have given up, but I fully understand; I've also gotten burnt out. I may edit non-controversial articles again in the future or I may not.
All the best!
V.
zero 0000 wrote:
If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly great web projects and its success cannot be questioned. However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its limits and for some things it doesn't work. One of the things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on controversial topics.
[snip]
The dynamic process is like a cup of water with some sand in it. You can get the sand closer on average to the top by energetic stirring, but any success in getting it closer to the top than that average is fleeting. Stop stirring and all your prior work is gone in an instant.
I frankly don't think this problem can be solved by making small changes. Tweaking the rules won't help very much. Yes, people should have to write NPOV rather than merely accept it in principle, but who is going to enforce that rule and who is going to stop the enforcers from becoming a sort of star chamber which in practice is a source of POV? Having a "latest stable edition" won't work either, because any sort of mechanism for changing the stable edition based on consensus will never gain that consensus. (If you doubt this, review the history of attempts to delete truly awful MidEast articles via VfD; it is nearly impossible.)
Of course I wish the best of luck to those willing to devote more of their time to trying to fix the unfixable, but I have personally had enough. I hope to return later on to edit in an area (mathematics) where Wikipedia works pretty well.
Zero.
It occurs to me that the problem is not with NPOV. The problem is that there are some subjects which people feel very strongly about and have been warring over for centuries. 2-3 years of Wikipedia editting will not fix these issues. Only diligence will and perhaps diplomacy.
TBSDY