Snowspinner wrote:
The heart of the problem with AfD, DRV, and the rest of the deletion suite of pages is this: It is increasingly a pile of rules. Rules encourage playing to win.
This is one effect of the problem with deletion, yes. At its root, however, the problem with deletion is merely a manifestation of more fundamental issues. In fact, it has a lot in common with the other major problem that has been so prominently in the news for the past couple weeks.
The real heart of the problem is that people are laboring under the misapprehension that they're looking at or working on something like a final version of the encyclopedia. So they get themselves in a lather/snit/tizzy (pick your idiom) over a transient state of affairs, or they try to force permanence where consensus for it is lacking. Disputed deletions are in the latter category.
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
Stable versions that feed into development versions, with the latter clearly identified as such (in David Gerard's words, 1995-style yellow and black "Under Construction" GIFs), would do quite a bit to defuse these problems, I think. In particular, I don't think the urge to delete would be nearly as strong, and the concern about harm to Wikipedia's image from be minimized. The time to provide stable versions has come.
--Michael Snow
Michael Snow wrote:
<snip> The real heart of the problem is that people are laboring under the misapprehension that they're looking at or working on something like a final version of the encyclopedia. So they get themselves in a lather/snit/tizzy (pick your idiom) over a transient state of affairs, or they try to force permanence where consensus for it is lacking. Disputed deletions are in the latter category.
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
Stable versions that feed into development versions, with the latter clearly identified as such (in David Gerard's words, 1995-style yellow and black "Under Construction" GIFs), would do quite a bit to defuse these problems, I think. In particular, I don't think the urge to delete would be nearly as strong, and the concern about harm to Wikipedia's image from be minimized. The time to provide stable versions has come.
--Michael Snow
Strong agreement here.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
Michael Snow wrote:
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as backwards. I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is in fact stable. If an article must first be judged stable what would be the mechanism for making that decision?
The lack of an agreed mechanism for doing that has been a major factor in not getting the 1.0 project off the ground.
Ec
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as backwards. I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is in fact stable. If an article must first be judged stable what would be the mechanism for making that decision?
You seem to be confusing "good" and "stable". It's easy to see if an article is in fact stable. Just look at when the last time is that it's been edited. I suppose you could get even more detailed, and look at the types of edits that have been performed (minor fixes indicated stability or major changes and new content indicated lack of stability), but even that isn't what ratings are about. Ratings are about whether or not a version is good, not whether or not it's stable.
And in order for ratings to be useful, you have to have a lot of ratings on the same version. That's why you need stability before ratings can be effective.
The lack of an agreed mechanism for doing that has been a major factor in not getting the 1.0 project off the ground.
Ec
I agree. That's why I haven't really opposed adding ratings in. Agreeing on something is better than nothing here. Worst case scenario ratings come out and everyone realizes why they weren't such a good idea, and then new ideas can come forward.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as backwards. I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is in fact stable. If an article must first be judged stable what would be the mechanism for making that decision?
You seem to be confusing "good" and "stable". It's easy to see if an article is in fact stable. Just look at when the last time is that it's been edited. I suppose you could get even more detailed, and look at the types of edits that have been performed (minor fixes indicated stability or major changes and new content indicated lack of stability), but even that isn't what ratings are about. Ratings are about whether or not a version is good, not whether or not it's stable.
And in order for ratings to be useful, you have to have a lot of ratings on the same version. That's why you need stability before ratings can be effective.
The two go hand in hand, or become part of a feedback loop. A "poor" rating will have the effect of destabilizing an article. This is perhaps a chicken-or-egg kind of problem. One would need an easily applied criterion to measure stability. We all know that the edits on [[George W. Bush]] can be chaotic. For comparison I looked at the recent edit history of [[Martin Van Buren]] and it had 26 edits in the last month. I didn't look at the details, but it would still take time for someone else to do that if it were being considered for rating. To be effective a rating system should be able to automatically adjust its results for stability.
The lack of an agreed mechanism for doing that has been a major factor in not getting the 1.0 project off the ground.
Ec
I agree. That's why I haven't really opposed adding ratings in. Agreeing on something is better than nothing here. Worst case scenario ratings come out and everyone realizes why they weren't such a good idea, and then new ideas can come forward.
Yes. Ratings like any other tool will have bugs.
Ec
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as backwards. I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is in fact stable. If an article must first be judged stable what would be the mechanism for making that decision?
You seem to be confusing "good" and "stable". It's easy to see if an article is in fact stable. Just look at when the last time is that it's been edited. I suppose you could get even more detailed, and look at the types of edits that have been performed (minor fixes indicated stability or major changes and new content indicated lack of stability), but even that isn't what ratings are about. Ratings are about whether or not a version is good, not whether or not it's stable.
And in order for ratings to be useful, you have to have a lot of ratings on the same version. That's why you need stability before ratings can be effective.
The two go hand in hand, or become part of a feedback loop. A "poor" rating will have the effect of destabilizing an article.
I don't see how. I don't even understand how this is supposed to be applied. When you see a bad article, do you rate the version before or after you fix it? Or do you rate both? Or do you go through the history and start rating all the versions?
Is there a project with an example of ratings running? I've seen article validation in practice, and already that's way too much. Ratings seem to only be worse.
This is perhaps a chicken-or-egg kind of problem. One would need an easily applied criterion to measure stability.
Number of characters changed in the past two weeks?
We all know that the edits on [[George W. Bush]] can be chaotic.For comparison I looked at the recent edit history of [[Martin Van Buren]] and it had 26 edits in the last month. I didn't look at the details, but it would still take time for someone else to do that if it were being considered for rating. To be effective a rating system should be able to automatically adjust its results for stability.
In what way do you think a rating system should be adjusted to account for stability? I can think of a lot of different arguments, all of which would be applicable to different situations. I'm just not sure you can boil this stuff down to a number.
The lack of an agreed mechanism for doing that has been a major factor in not getting the 1.0 project off the ground.
Ec
I agree. That's why I haven't really opposed adding ratings in. Agreeing on something is better than nothing here. Worst case scenario ratings come out and everyone realizes why they weren't such a good idea, and then new ideas can come forward.
Yes. Ratings like any other tool will have bugs.
Ec
I'm not talking about bugs. I've seen article validation in action, and I think it's fairly useless. It works, but it's not useful. I think article ratings will be even more useless, because the data will be even more spread out.
Maybe I'm wrong. If so, then I'll be happy to jump on the article rating bandwagon. There's only one way to find out for sure, and that's to try it.
Anthony
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
And it's very easy to give people the wrong idea when we don't have a final or even a stable version of anything. Considering that Wikipedia has been going for five years, I think we're ready to start. Stable versions, even more than article ratings, are a feature we need. In fact, I think setting up article ratings before stable versions is completely backwards, because it's the stable versions we should be asking people to rate.
I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as backwards. I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is in fact stable. If an article must first be judged stable what would be the mechanism for making that decision?
I mostly agree with this view, but I see them as somewhat interrelated. If we have some good ratings on at least a few recent versions, it'll be easier to figure out how stable it is. For example, if I know version [x] is good, and someone makes a minor edit that just fixes a typo, then I know that version [x+1] is also good. What we really want are versions that are both stable *and* relatively good, with some indication to the end-user of how good it is (perhaps on a range)---making versions stable in the trivial sense is easy by just protecting the page.
-Mark