Lodewijk explained in a discussion on a private list how the 'revision patrolled' mechanism worked well on nl:wp. I remember that it rapidly fell into disuse on en:wp, so asked how it worked in practice. (Message forwarded here with permission - "consider it gfdl :-)".)
I think the idea of an RC patrol roster would be useful - not to find people to cover the time, as much as to discourage people from doing it to the point of burnout (and the consequent presumption of bad faith and newbie-biting).
Thoughts? (And what are the most useful venues on en:wp to put a link to or copy of this message on?)
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com
I think that this is not entirely true. MarkAsPatrolled is being used extensively in the Dutch language Wikipedia (already for years now i think), with good results. You just might have to work out the right procedures to make it work. I am not entirely sure on which wiki you are basing your conclusions, but you might want to consider to check out nlwiki :)
[someone else's response deleted - d.]
on nlwiki we have a control center for vandal fighting. You may find it on http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CV . Every day is chopped in several pieces, and people can sign up for a part to check it (afterwards). That way every single anonymous edit is manually checked. If the edit is checked, it will be marked as patrolled. A symilar list is set up for new articles, but this is not with mark-as-patrolled, but with only a checklist for day-parts.
Everybody with a confirmed account can mark as patrolled. Every m.a.p. is logged. So if someone falsely marks an edit as patrolled, he or she can be blocked for that. It is not official policy, but generally considered as inside-vandalism, so worse then normal vandalism.
I think the main trick is that the majority of the vandal fighters has to support the system. Furthermore, there has to be a certain social control. The most obvious problems have already been fixed (anonymous and new accounts can't mark. Marks are logged, so abuse can be tracked and stopped.
The largest advantage of map is that you can share the workload, that you can check the vandalism afterwards. Especially for wiki's with no 24/7 patrols this might be very usefull, or wiki's with a *lot* of edits, where live patrol becomes impossible. There is a clearly defined backlog, and 99% of the vandalism is found this way.
BR, Lodewijk
I see where you're coming from, and I think it's fantastic that it works on NL, but I doubt patrolled edits will ever become useful on enwiki. Last time they were in place, the system was largely ignored. Now, I cannot say how it's going this time around (I've been out of the loop on enwiki meta-issues it seems), but I fear it will do the same. The simple fact is that enwiki is /far/ too large to properly make use of any quality control system, be it patrolled edits or flaggedrevs.
If only we had 1,000,000 articles again. 2 million is too many, and I for one think we need to do some major pruning and sprucing up of our guidelines. Quality, not quantity, is what we need. I find it hard to believe we have 2 million articles on 2 million notable subjects. I for one would like to see the article count drop *below* 2 million again.
Chad H.
On Nov 21, 2007 3:40 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Lodewijk explained in a discussion on a private list how the 'revision patrolled' mechanism worked well on nl:wp. I remember that it rapidly fell into disuse on en:wp, so asked how it worked in practice. (Message forwarded here with permission - "consider it gfdl :-)".)
I think the idea of an RC patrol roster would be useful - not to find people to cover the time, as much as to discourage people from doing it to the point of burnout (and the consequent presumption of bad faith and newbie-biting).
Thoughts? (And what are the most useful venues on en:wp to put a link to or copy of this message on?)
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com
I think that this is not entirely true. MarkAsPatrolled is being used extensively in the Dutch language Wikipedia (already for years now i
think),
with good results. You just might have to work out the right
procedures to
make it work. I am not entirely sure on which wiki you are basing your conclusions, but you might want to consider to check out nlwiki :)
[someone else's response deleted - d.]
on nlwiki we have a control center for vandal fighting. You may find it on http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CV . Every day is chopped in several pieces, and people can sign up for a part to check it (afterwards). That way every single anonymous edit is manually checked. If the edit is checked, it will be marked as patrolled. A symilar list is set up for new articles, but this is not with mark-as-patrolled, but with only a checklist for day-parts.
Everybody with a confirmed account can mark as patrolled. Every m.a.p. is logged. So if someone falsely marks an edit as patrolled, he or she can be blocked for that. It is not official policy, but generally considered as inside-vandalism, so worse then normal vandalism.
I think the main trick is that the majority of the vandal fighters has to support the system. Furthermore, there has to be a certain social control. The most obvious problems have already been fixed (anonymous and new accounts can't mark. Marks are logged, so abuse can be tracked and stopped.
The largest advantage of map is that you can share the workload, that you can check the vandalism afterwards. Especially for wiki's with no 24/7 patrols this might be very usefull, or wiki's with a *lot* of edits, where live patrol becomes impossible. There is a clearly defined backlog, and 99% of the vandalism is found this way.
BR, Lodewijk
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On 21/11/2007, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
The simple fact is that enwiki is /far/ too large to properly make use of any quality control system, be it patrolled edits or flaggedrevs.
I think you're wrong. nl:wp is smaller, but it's not *that* much smaller.
If only we had 1,000,000 articles again. 2 million is too many, and I for one think we need to do some major pruning and sprucing up of our guidelines. Quality, not quantity, is what we need. I find it hard to believe we have 2 million articles on 2 million notable subjects. I for one would like to see the article count drop *below* 2 million again.
I strongly suggest you read [[WP:WIP]] and follow the red link lists at the bottom. en:wp is so far from finished it's ridiculous.
- d.
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
Perhaps I am wrong about the scalability of quality control to enwiki. I don't think so though. There is definitely a size difference between NL and EN. I'm not one to minimize 380k-ish articles, which is a very noble achievement; however, there is a noticeable difference between the sizes. A magnitude of about 5 1/4 times difference, give or take. That's 5 times as many articles. Does enwiki have a force of editors willing to read every single edit to every single article? Sustainable?
I think not, but that's just my jaded opinion.
Chad h.
On Nov 21, 2007 6:30 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/11/2007, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
The simple fact is that enwiki is /far/ too large to properly make use of any quality control system, be it patrolled edits or flaggedrevs.
I think you're wrong. nl:wp is smaller, but it's not *that* much smaller.
If only we had 1,000,000 articles again. 2 million is too many, and I
for
one think we need to do some major pruning and sprucing up of our guidelines. Quality, not quantity,
is
what we need. I find it hard to believe we have 2 million articles on 2 million notable subjects. I for
one
would like to see the article count drop *below* 2 million again.
I strongly suggest you read [[WP:WIP]] and follow the red link lists at the bottom. en:wp is so far from finished it's ridiculous.
- d.
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On 21/11/2007, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
Does enwiki have a force of editors willing to read every single edit to every single article? Sustainable? I think not, but that's just my jaded opinion.
I think a roster system would make it quite scaleable. Last stats we have (Oct 2006), there were 43,006 editors with >5 edits that month and 4,300 with >100. I doubt those numbers have gone down.
- d.
Chad schreef:
There is definitely a size difference between NL and EN. I'm not one to minimize 380k-ish articles, which is a very noble achievement; however, there is a noticeable difference between the sizes. A magnitude of about 5 1/4 times difference, give or take. That's 5 times as many articles. Does enwiki have a force of editors willing to read every single edit to every single article? Sustainable?
It's worse than that: the last 500 main space entries on Recent Changes cover about 4 minutes, while the last 500 main space entries on Recente wijzigingen date from the last 2 hours. That's a factor 30 difference in editing speed.
On the other hand, enwiki has about 1400 administrators, and nlwiki only 86. Since patrolling would not only be done by admins, I've also looked at the number of active users. Unfortunately, the most recent figures for enwiki are a year old, but we had about 4,300 editors with more than 100 edits per month, and nlwiki had only 267.
So we have 30 times the workload, against 16 times the workforce. So the difference per editor is not that much higher, and you cannot conclude from the numbers alone that it wouldn't work here.
Eugene
What is a frivolous article? I personally wouldn't mind if every article about a soap opera disappeared but that doesn't make them frivolous. And similar remarks apply to pretty much every niche subjects. If we have enough verifiable material on a subject then it isn't frivolous. If we don't, then we shouldn't have an article.
Quoting Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
Perhaps I am wrong about the scalability of quality control to enwiki. I don't think so though. There is definitely a size difference between NL and EN. I'm not one to minimize 380k-ish articles, which is a very noble achievement; however, there is a noticeable difference between the sizes. A magnitude of about 5 1/4 times difference, give or take. That's 5 times as many articles. Does enwiki have a force of editors willing to read every single edit to every single article? Sustainable?
I think not, but that's just my jaded opinion.
Chad h.
On Nov 21, 2007 6:30 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/11/2007, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
The simple fact is that enwiki is /far/ too large to properly make use of any quality control system, be it patrolled edits or flaggedrevs.
I think you're wrong. nl:wp is smaller, but it's not *that* much smaller.
If only we had 1,000,000 articles again. 2 million is too many, and I
for
one think we need to do some major pruning and sprucing up of our guidelines. Quality, not quantity,
is
what we need. I find it hard to believe we have 2 million articles on 2 million notable subjects. I for
one
would like to see the article count drop *below* 2 million again.
I strongly suggest you read [[WP:WIP]] and follow the red link lists at the bottom. en:wp is so far from finished it's ridiculous.
- d.
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Chad wrote:
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
What's "frivolous" is in the eye of the beholder. Take a look at our top 100 most heavily trafficked pages: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=11%2F2007&mode=view The non-pop-culture articles are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the list consists of articles about works of fiction, computer games, and entertainers. And also a bunch of articles about sex, of course, this being the internet. People _want_ to read about that stuff, they aren't winding up at those articles accidentally.
Wikipedia has a huge perceived signal-to-noise ratio because everybody has different ideas about what's "signal" and what's "noise." If everyone pruned out what they weren't interested in there'd be nothing at all left. Better to just ignore it.
It's not a simple matter of being in the eye of the beholder, or it being about a niche subject. Provided it's well sourced and those sources establish why the subject is notable, there should most certainly be an article about every soap opera that meets these standards.
What I'm referring to is the absolute proliferation about subjects that aren't necessarily notable in their own right, but are simply notable due to association. One cannot tell me that every episode of Lost or Family Guy is notable in and of itself. And yet (at least with Lost, I've never read Family Guy-related articles), we have an article on almost each and every episode, notable only by their connection to a notable show. Each episode doesn't necessarily have independent sources discussing the subjects.
Chosen at random from Lost, let's look at [[Exposé (Lost]]. I see two sources, one being an ABC-related site (and therefore not necessarily a reliable source, it's not a third party source), and IMDB, which is a great source of information, but hardly and establishment of notability, as they publish information on practically everything and everyone. Looking at the article itself, you have 6 sentences that are not directly related to describing the plot.
This model is repeated across every Lost episode, and countless other TV shows. However, this is not limited to only TV shows, but other subjects as well. It's *this* proliferation of absolute crap that I feel needs to be aggressively removed.
Chad H.
On Nov 21, 2007 7:57 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Chad wrote:
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
What's "frivolous" is in the eye of the beholder. Take a look at our top 100 most heavily trafficked pages: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=11%2F2007&mode=view The non-pop-culture articles are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the list consists of articles about works of fiction, computer games, and entertainers. And also a bunch of articles about sex, of course, this being the internet. People _want_ to read about that stuff, they aren't winding up at those articles accidentally.
Wikipedia has a huge perceived signal-to-noise ratio because everybody has different ideas about what's "signal" and what's "noise." If everyone pruned out what they weren't interested in there'd be nothing at all left. Better to just ignore it.
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Interesting, and here I was thinking we should be more lenient about inherited notability as long as we can source things. The way I see it, we allow some leeway about using primary sources to source things once a subjects notability has been established. Whether we then stick that all on the same page or not is really a formatting/editorial decision. In that regard, we're simply splitting off the separate episodes from the main article.
(and I suppose eventuallism is sufficiently deprecated that no one will be happy if I make an appeal to that?)
Quoting Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
It's not a simple matter of being in the eye of the beholder, or it being about a niche subject. Provided it's well sourced and those sources establish why the subject is notable, there should most certainly be an article about every soap opera that meets these standards.
What I'm referring to is the absolute proliferation about subjects that aren't necessarily notable in their own right, but are simply notable due to association. One cannot tell me that every episode of Lost or Family Guy is notable in and of itself. And yet (at least with Lost, I've never read Family Guy-related articles), we have an article on almost each and every episode, notable only by their connection to a notable show. Each episode doesn't necessarily have independent sources discussing the subjects.
Chosen at random from Lost, let's look at [[Exposé (Lost]]. I see two sources, one being an ABC-related site (and therefore not necessarily a reliable source, it's not a third party source), and IMDB, which is a great source of information, but hardly and establishment of notability, as they publish information on practically everything and everyone. Looking at the article itself, you have 6 sentences that are not directly related to describing the plot.
This model is repeated across every Lost episode, and countless other TV shows. However, this is not limited to only TV shows, but other subjects as well. It's *this* proliferation of absolute crap that I feel needs to be aggressively removed.
Chad H.
On Nov 21, 2007 7:57 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Chad wrote:
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
What's "frivolous" is in the eye of the beholder. Take a look at our top 100 most heavily trafficked pages: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=11%2F2007&mode=view The non-pop-culture articles are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the list consists of articles about works of fiction, computer games, and entertainers. And also a bunch of articles about sex, of course, this being the internet. People _want_ to read about that stuff, they aren't winding up at those articles accidentally.
Wikipedia has a huge perceived signal-to-noise ratio because everybody has different ideas about what's "signal" and what's "noise." If everyone pruned out what they weren't interested in there'd be nothing at all left. Better to just ignore it.
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On 22/11/2007, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
It's not a simple matter of being in the eye of the beholder, or it being about a niche subject. Provided it's well sourced and those sources establish why the subject is notable, there should most certainly be an article about every soap opera that meets these standards.
Provided those sources are classed as notable in the eye of the beholder, and they do indeed provide perceived notability statements, it is not in the eye of the beholder... Niche subjects never survive deletion because the typical AfD beholder doesn't have the expertise needed to perceive the subject properly. Amateur review can only go so far.
Peter
Chad wrote:
This model is repeated across every Lost episode, and countless other TV shows. However, this is not limited to only TV shows, but other subjects as well. It's *this* proliferation of absolute crap that I feel needs to be aggressively removed.
Even if I were to agree with your opinion on what's notable and what's "crap", I remain unconvinced that this would amount to anywhere _near_ a ten-to-one "noise" ratio.
On 22/11/2007, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Chad wrote:
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
What's "frivolous" is in the eye of the beholder. Take a look at our top 100 most heavily trafficked pages: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=11%2F2007&mode=view The non-pop-culture articles are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the list consists of articles about works of fiction, computer games, and entertainers. And also a bunch of articles about sex, of course, this being the internet. People _want_ to read about that stuff, they aren't winding up at those articles accidentally.
Wikipedia has a huge perceived signal-to-noise ratio because everybody has different ideas about what's "signal" and what's "noise." If everyone pruned out what they weren't interested in there'd be nothing at all left. Better to just ignore it.
But its not notable if I am not interested in it! (Why am I the one who always falls back of sarcastic, yet truthful statements to make their point).
Statement before about there not being 2 million perceived notable topics brought it on of course...
Peter