On 17/06/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/17/06, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:

...

Folks,

The New York Times has an article on Wikipedia called " Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=1&_r...

Regards

Keith Old

since when have admins had "authority to exercise editorial control"?

Well, they have the same latitude for editorial discretion and common sense we give everybody who isn't banned or being an idiot, and as admins are - at least in part - selected for a bare minimum of intelligence, tact, and common sense, then you'd expect them to be better with the whole "editorial discretion" thing.

It isn't control, but it usually gets a stable solution, so it looks like it.

On 6/17/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

Since they could block for 3RR.

That isn't editorial control.That is just the nutralisation of our more incompetant edit warriours.

* Kat Walsh wrote:

On 6/17/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

...

since when have admins had "authority to exercise editorial control"?

I'm particularly disappointed by that statement, considering I spent a fair bit of effort in the interview explaining how and why they don't.

In my opinion this is slowly becoming little more than a fiction we tell ourselves. Recently an admin labeled a user changing his wording of, "Some conspiracy theorists disagree..." to "Some disagree..." as "vandalism" and placed a 48 hour block after edit warring with the user (and others) over this phrase.

To me that looks like the >admin< was violating NPOV by trying to write the article from the 'most popular point of view' rather than the NEUTRAL point of view... but in any case it certainly wasn't "vandalism" and admins aren't supposed to block over content disputes. Particularly content disputes they are involved in.

So what do you suppose came of it?

When the user put the 'unblock' template on their page it was denied by another admin who was involved in the same edit war and then the user's talk page was protected by yet another admin to prevent them from requesting unblock again. And when his objection was raised at AN/I? Yet more admins lined up to say that the action was entirely proper. All this against a user who has been on Wikipedia for nine months (~350 edits) and never been blocked or cited as a 'troublemaker' before.

We SAY that admins do not have authority to exercise editorial control, but, given the fact that we don't enforce it, the reality is quite different.

I think the blocking admin's message to the user illustrates how far lost the 'no editorial control' concept has become;

"If unblocked and you revert me one more time, I'm going to block you for a week."

Those are words that NO admin would ever be able to utter if the principle you cite above had ANY meaning. But the fact is that a dozen other admins looked on and said that it was just fine.

Hi,

With the caveat that I haven't looked carefully at either the AN discussion, the RFC, nor the article in question...

Quoting Conrad Dunkerson conrad.dunkerson@worldnet.att.net:

To me that looks like the >admin< was violating NPOV by trying to write the article from the 'most popular point of view' rather than the NEUTRAL point of view...

...it would be easy to (mis?)read the above as a statement that we are attempting to find some sort of absolute neutrality between points of view. It isn't a violation of [[WP:NPOV]] to write a synthesis of mainstream thinking and identify fringe views as fringe views. Our actual policy goes into some detail about this, and takes a much less naive view of neutrality than is often attributed to it.

Jkelly

"Captured"(???) and "Correct"(!!!)? Those aren't good alternatives to "Neutral".

The closest synonyms I can find to "neutral" which really get the same meaning are "evenhanded", "impartial", and "disinterested". Even these are a bit too close to "objective" which is not the same thing as "neutral" at all (you can be objective without being neutral).

Neutral is a great word. Instead of worrying about people misunderstanding the acronym, which should take more time to explain it to them, and try to avoid using acronyms alltogether if possible (they are in-community practices which are opaque and potentially misleading to those who are not used to them -- WP:FU is a great example!).

FF

On 6/24/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:

Yeah, POV is nearly always good NPOV unless it's OR.

We should really change the name NPOV. It's too confusing. The policy is spot on but nobody knows what the acronym NPOV means.

I would prefer, say, CPOV. Captured POV or Correct POV. NPOV suggests *Not* POV; whereas POV is absolutely fine.

*Seriously*.

Page move anyone?

On 25/06/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:

...

Hi,

With the caveat that I haven't looked carefully at either the AN discussion, the RFC, nor the article in question...

Quoting Conrad Dunkerson conrad.dunkerson@worldnet.att.net:

...

To me that looks like the >admin< was violating NPOV by trying to write the article from the 'most popular point of view' rather than the NEUTRAL point of view...

...it would be easy to (mis?)read the above as a statement that we are attempting to find some sort of absolute neutrality between points of view. It isn't a violation of [[WP:NPOV]] to write a synthesis of mainstream thinking and identify fringe views as fringe views. Our actual policy goes into some detail about this, and takes a much less naive view of neutrality than is often attributed to it.

Jkelly

---

WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- -Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created." _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I never thought I'd say this, but I agree with Phil Welch.

- Nathan (nathanrdotcom)

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Philip Welch wrote:

I think we should replace "neutral point of view" (which is abbreviated to the misunderstood acronym NPOV) to "neutrality" (which, like "verifiability", is easier to understand).

Wait, NPOV doesn't mean No Point of View?

=D

On 6/25/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

On Jun 25, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Nathan wrote:

...

I never thought I'd say this, but I agree with Phil Welch.

• Nathan (nathanrdotcom)

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Philip Welch wrote:

...

I think we should replace "neutral point of view" (which is abbreviated to the misunderstood acronym NPOV) to "neutrality" (which, like "verifiability", is easier to understand).

We already have trouble with editors who try to use neutral washed out language rather than allowing opposing points of view to be fully expressed.

Fred _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

G'day Conrad,

• Kat Walsh wrote:

...

On 6/17/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

...

since when have admins had "authority to exercise editorial control"?

I'm particularly disappointed by that statement, considering I spent a fair bit of effort in the interview explaining how and why they don't.

In my opinion this is slowly becoming little more than a fiction we tell ourselves. Recently an admin labeled a user changing his wording of, "Some conspiracy theorists disagree..." to "Some disagree..." as "vandalism" and placed a 48 hour block after edit warring with the user (and others) over this phrase.

Admins *don't* have the authority to exercise editorial control (with the caveat that we won't call preventing someone from replacing the text with "poop", "exercising editorial control"), or at least, to exercise more control than any other editor. The admin you cite was, on the face of it, exceeding his authority.

Of course, we don't know the full story. It could be the editor was an obnoxious so-and-so who'd been cutting a swathe through Wikipedia, vandalising and POV-pushing, and when he seemed to be about to re-write our article on New World Order to make all those loony right-wing Americans seem less loony, the camel gave one hell of a scream as it felt its long-suffering back finally break. Or perhaps not.

It seems to me we have two equally obnoxious sides to the "bad admin" question. One takes the view that admins can do no wrong, and resists any push --- within the admin community or without --- to help those of us who need to clean up our acts to do so. This is obviously Harmful, with a capital 'H', no less. This side never refers to admins by name, doesn't want to embarrass anyone. Doesn't try to improve the conduct of individual admins, because then the trolls will win.

The other side sits on the sidelines and laughs at us. This side never refers to admins by name, either: if those few admins who misbehaved were encouraged to improve (or even de-sysopped), then this side would no longer have anything to criticise. This side enjoys criticising the status quo so much that it would never *dream* of actually doing anything likely to make things better for Wikipedia, or the community that supports it.

Now, it's obvious to anyone that refusing to accept criticism, refusing to change in the face of clear evidence that we're wrong, etc., is a terrible way to conduct our affairs. It's not quite so obvious that pointing to unspecified inappropriate behaviour and the unnamed admins who encourage it and saying "tut, tut" without making any effort to do anything about the problem is also pretty terrible.

<snip />

So what do you suppose came of it?

When the user put the 'unblock' template on their page it was denied by another admin who was involved in the same edit war and then the user's talk page was protected by yet another admin to prevent them from requesting unblock again. And when his objection was raised at AN/I? Yet more admins lined up to say that the action was entirely proper. All this against a user who has been on Wikipedia for nine months (~350 edits) and never been blocked or cited as a 'troublemaker' before.

I see. Do you have a link?

We SAY that admins do not have authority to exercise editorial control, but, given the fact that we don't enforce it, the reality is quite different.

I think the blocking admin's message to the user illustrates how far lost the 'no editorial control' concept has become;

"If unblocked and you revert me one more time, I'm going to block you for a week."

Those are words that NO admin would ever be able to utter if the principle you cite above had ANY meaning. But the fact is that a dozen other admins looked on and said that it was just fine.

And what did you do about it? Did you say "no, this is not appropriate. This was plain-jane edit warring, and should be treated as such. Admins should never use their admin powers in an edit war, nor should they call non-vandalism edits 'vandalism' to justify a block." Did you say anything at all? If you piped up at all, was it to make a comment like my suggested one, or did you make one more of the sort you've become famous for --- like the one in your email to the list?

We have damn near a thousand admins now. Some of them are becoming admins without even knowing what adminship is all about. Others have become too caught up in the tougher admin jobs, and become jaded. A couple (and this one irritates me) feel they have the support of ArbCom regardless of what they do (whether ArbCom agrees or not is a different story), and feel they have no reason not to do as they please. Overall, considering the sheer number of admins involved, I think we can be pleased that very, very few of them are bad admins. But when we come across an example of an admin misbehaving, we should be either trying to improve their behaviour, or stripping them of adminship until we can trust them with the extra tools and the inevitable (but unfortunate) increase in status. Clucking that everything's broken isn't going to improve the lot of Wikipedia's admins, nor that of the Wikipedians who are forced to put up with them.

G'day Conrad,

• Mark Gallagher wrote:

...

G'day Conrad,

Hello Mark.

...

Of course, we don't know the full story. It could be the editor was an obnoxious so-and-so who'd been cutting a swathe through Wikipedia, vandalising and POV-pushing, and when he seemed to be about to re-write our article on New World Order to make all those loony right-wing Americans seem less loony, the camel gave one hell of a scream as it felt its long-suffering back finally break. Or perhaps not.

As I said, the user had never been blocked or 'in trouble' before. Nearly all of those defending the admin action actually cited bad behaviour by OTHER people as 'justification' for blocking. 'They are all disruptive POV pushers so we should block them indefinitely' sort of thing - with NO evidence of this being true of the person actually blocked being presented... or apparently needed in the eyes of far too many.

Well, that's not good.

...

Now, it's obvious to anyone that refusing to accept criticism, refusing to change in the face of clear evidence that we're wrong, etc., is a terrible way to conduct our affairs. It's not quite so obvious that pointing to unspecified inappropriate behaviour and the unnamed admins who encourage it and saying "tut, tut" without making any effort to do anything about the problem is also pretty terrible.

Perhaps it could be noted that there are OTHER (less 'terrible') reasons for describing issues without 'naming names'... such as focusing on a general problem rather than specific individuals, attempting not to bias ongoing discussion by leaving the individual name out of it, and/or presenting a scenario without names to get an evaluation based on the scenario itself without any preconceptions based on the names attached.

You're focusing on the idea of "naming names". That's not what I meant the focus to be. Sorry if I was unclear.

What I meant was, this handwavey "oh, oh, there's a problem, a terrible problem," without giving more details or (seemingly) doing anything to help fix it is Not Good. It's like that old joke --- you can't trust the Church to fight evil, because if the Devil were vanquished and all men led sinless and happy lives, they'd be out of a job. If all admins behaved blamelessly, then some of our critics would be out of a job ...

And... weren't you the one who, when I DID specifically object to the actions of someone by name, told me that such public confrontations are counterproductive and it would be better to keep the matter private? It seems almost as if objections are ALWAYS wrong, no matter how presented.

No-o ... not exactly. I pointed out that, instead of damning all sysops to the end of time on the basis of the behaviour of one admin, you could instead take the matter up with the lady in question, and stand at least a decent change of fixing the problem ...

Oh, there was another interaction: when you stated publicly on AN/I that anyone who closed an xfD on some basis other than a strict numerical count must be acting in bad faith. But there, my objection was not to the public naming and shaming of the "bad faith" admin concerned, but to the sheer cluelessness of the statement. Since I trust you're no longer making statements like *that* (certainly I've not seen any, particularly on this list), we can assume that particular problem won't crop up again.

Lookit, I can accept that you're doing what you think is the Right Thing to improve the behaviour on admins on Wikipedia (I didn't believe that, earlier, hence at least part of my aggression here). But I think your approach is doomed to fail. If there's a problem admin who can be dealt with privately, deal with them privately. If the problem's so big --- or it's a group thing --- that they need to be dealt with publicly, deal with them publicly. Denunciations from the sideline aren't much use. It's the equivalent to people on the list muttering to each other about how terrible AfD or RfA or whatever is, without ever trying to educate the specific people causing problems.

...

I see. Do you have a link?

As you insist;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/MONGO

...

And what did you do about it? Did you say "no, this is not appropriate. This was plain-jane edit warring, and should be treated as such. Admins should never use their admin powers in an edit war, nor should they call non-vandalism edits 'vandalism' to justify a block."

Um... yes?

Did you seriously think there was any question of that? If so, I think you need to consider the possibility that you do not understand me at all;

I did, and I think you may be right about that. My apologies.

<snip links and suchlike/>

In response to your analysis I would propose at least two more 'groups' - those who challenge the admin community as a whole to confront the perceived double-standards, and those who respond with some rather nasty comments and assumptions instead of considering that they might have a point.

Or perhaps those aren't "groups" so much as individuals. :]

I'll cop to the "assumptions" bit. I have made certain assumptions about you --- and some of them are wrong. But I *have* considered that you may have a point --- and said so, during the last exchange we had on the list (though I didn't say so when you were posting silly things to AN/I, because the point you had there was actually the wrong end of the stick).

You *do* have a point ... sometimes. I think, however, that viewing yourself as one who "challenge[s] the admin community as a whole to confront the perceived double-standards" is what we generally refer to as "looking through rose-coloured glasses". If your comments are, in fact, meant to challenge the admin community to do anything at all, they need to be quite a bit clearer. The impression you're giving in your denunciations is not the (much better) impression you give in this email.

Cheers,

On 6/17/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/17/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:

...

For the record, the Einstein article was only protected recently because a stubborn editor was insisting on changing the formatting to meet his own personal requirements and was revert warring. However after a week of this he finally agreed to stop after he was instructed as to how to modify his own monobook.css to make it display for him how he wanted to. It is currently unprotected.

Why was an article protected to stop a *single editor* from modifying it? Wouldn't banning him from the article (and blocking him from Wikipedia if he failed to respect the ban) have been more effective?

Probably. But as you know, there are many ways these things play out, and in the end the article was successfully unprotected after seven days without any difficulties in this respect. IMO the "right answer" is usually any solution which ends up resolving the immediate problem and doesn't create new long-term problems, so in this case I think it worked out fine.

In any case, it was not protected as a result of any of the reasons the reporter discussed in the NYT article, and is not under long-term semi-protection at all. Its inclusion in the article is somewhat gratuitous—the reporter clearly did not investigate the details of its protection status and just grabbed its title from a list somewhere (a small crime in comparison with the more fundamental misrepresentations in the article, of course).

FF

On Sat, 17 Jun 2006 20:36:07 -0400 "The Cunctator" cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

Jimmy Wales may argue that the NYT got the situation exactly backwards, but the reality is that this is a semantic game and in this case the contrarian position the NYT is arguing is, if not ultimately correct, an important one to have. Wikipedia benefits by having outsiders challenging Wikipedia to be and remain open and free. Institutions by their nature are conservative and self-protecting, and their commitment to their claimed ideals must face constant challenge for them to remain true to said ideals.

I would say that neither Wales for the NYT is really right-- I would argue that Wikipedia, as it grows in size and prominence, is evolving rapidly and in ways that no one person could possibly understand fully. That Wikipedia will always be straddling the uncomfortable divide between reliability and editability, just as it embodies conflicts between universality and topicality, brevity and completeness, accessibility and accuracy, etc. It is neither the golden perfect lovely machine that Wales seems so insistent on portraying nor the decadent failure its critics decry.*

I would be happier if we lived in a world where the New York Times was writing articles promoting the promise of Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales was its biggest critic, finding fault where others see none, but I don't get to choose the world I live in.

That said, I found it quite interesting how Larry Sanger is now lost from the official narrative of the creation of Wikipedia. History belongs to the victors, I suppose. Although I became one of his most active critics during his tenure, he does not deserve to become a footnote, or worse, forgotten.

--tc

{{signed}} ~~~~

On 6/17/06, Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com wrote:

Admins do excercise editorial control, mostly in their selection of articles for deletion (and especially speedy deletion). I've read a few irate bloggers talking about how the articles they added got deleted immediately -- and while of course it's possible to argue that those articles didn't belong in wikipedia, it's silly to say that making *and then enforcing* this argument isn't excercising editorial control.

But it's not an administrative decision to say what should get deleted. Presumably the articles were deleted according to deletion guidelines -- made up by the community, not just admins -- and anyone could have marked it for deletion; an admin simply avoided the middle step of tagging. (A large smelly trout and minus 500 points to anyone who hijacks the thread and makes it about rouge admins not following deletion policy. Does [[WP:BEANS]] apply to the mailing list?) It's not their status as admins that allows editors to decide what stays and what goes.

Even non-admins excercise editorial control, often /en mass/. It's just a more participatory form of control, and a more open one.

Right. Admins exercise editorial control as normal editors, not as admins. (Though sometimes they are empowered to enforce decisions.) The power belongs in the hands of the community -- which presumably admins are an active part of, maybe even the bulk of policy-related edits (this would be an interesting thing to get data on).

-Kat

On 6/20/06, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/17/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

That Wikipedia will always be straddling the uncomfortable divide between reliability and editability,

This is the same false dilemma that reporters just can't seem to grasp. There is no such divide.

I think Wikipedia's and Britannica's collective reactions to the Nature article proved that.

Steve

On 6/20/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

[snip] It's difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest critical analyses of the effects of his policies.

[snip]

This is a complicated matter and neither the NYT, nor Jimmy, nor BoingBoing is helping matters by oversimplifying the debate.

Well, to be fair to Jimmy, it really isn't _his_ policy. By framing the debate with this in mind, I think you too are oversimplifying. ;-) It was a policy decided by community consensus.

But I would agree with you on some points. As someone who doesn't really care for WP:SEMI, I think it does place some restrictions on *how* people can edit, rather than *who*.

Just keep in mind that basically every policy is generated by the community, and basically every policy places a limit on what we should do. But I think it can be argued that these fall under the "restrictions to make us freer" heading. --LV

Lord Voldemort wrote:

On 6/20/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

[snip] It's difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest critical analyses of the effects of his policies.

[snip]

...

This is a complicated matter and neither the NYT, nor Jimmy, nor BoingBoing is helping matters by oversimplifying the debate.

Well, to be fair to Jimmy, it really isn't _his_ policy. By framing the debate with this in mind, I think you too are oversimplifying. ;-) It was a policy decided by community consensus.

And, I should add to this. I never ever heard of semi-protection until the community consensus was overwhelming to have it implemented. Someone pointed me to the discussion and page about it, and I thought: wow, this is brilliant, I fully support it.

But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for semi-protection. It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more open than before, when we only had the tool of protection. But it is not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.

On 6/20/06, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for semi-protection. It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more open than before, when we only had the tool of protection. But it is not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.

A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean by "more open" here? What's the metric?

He means that disputed articles that would have had to have been fully protected, can now be semiprotected. That way more people (not just admins) can edit the article, while potentially culling the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong. --LV

On 6/20/06, Lord Voldemort lordbishopvoldemort@gmail.com wrote:

He means that disputed articles that would have had to have been fully protected, can now be semiprotected. That way more people (not just admins) can edit the article, while potentially culling the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong. --LV

I'm being somewhat Socratic here, but how do we decide when an article "has to" be protected? Who decides? Does giving admins yet another power increase the divide between admins and everyone else? To what degree is that a problem? Does giving admins more tools give them more responsibility for policing, making the average user less responsible? Etc. There are actually some complicated questions here.

An imperfect analogy can be seen in 9/11 -- all the glorious powers and authority of the military and uniformed security people and official communications methods did nothing, but the unarmed passengers with cellphones and friends and family found out what happened and acted collectively to try to stop Flight 93. In some situations an elite police force is less optimal than expecting everybody to pull their weight.

The Cunctator wrote:

...

But, yes, it is absolutely not possible for me to claim credit for semi-protection. It is a brilliant innovation that allows us to be more open than before, when we only had the tool of protection. But it is not my innovation, and I do not know who first thought of it.

A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean by "more open" here? What's the metric?

Under full protection, no one was able to edit, except for admins, and by social custom, admins were not to edit except for in certain very minor ways. In effect, even for articles where there was major breaking news, the articles had to be kept closed.

Under semi-protection, we have been able to relax this. Anonymous ip numbers and accounts less than 4 days old can not edit, but anyone else can. This has proven to be remarkably effective in preserving both the ability of people of good will of diverse viewpoints to join the dialogue, and the exclusion of random driveby vandalism.

I think that semi-protection could be improved. We recently had a good conversation here about how to change the user interface around it to make it less off-putting and more inviting for people to participate.

If random people writing "George Bush is a poopy head" are excluded from an article, but people of various legitimate (though often wrong, say, or different from mine, or whatever) opinions can participate, where before, BOTH groups were excluded, then I think that is a net win for openness.

I would be happy to see full protection go away completely. It still exists at the moment, and it does serve some purpose, namely as a "cooling off period" type of thing, which is often softer and more open than dragging people before an ArbCom proceeding to ban them.

I think there should be no articles which are full-protected for more than a day or two (with of course reasonable exceptions for unusual circumstances), and I think that there are probably many articles which should be semi-protected for a fairly longish period of time. (Where we have repeated driveby trolling for example.)

I also think that a "stable version" approach is much better than protection, in the sense that if done well, then we can leave a lot of things unprotected, knowing that the random vandalism will never hit the "public page" anyway.

--Jimbo

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

The Cunctator wrote:

...

Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the

lovely

...

heading "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has added restrictions".

Gee, that is hardly what I have said. We used to fully protect in cases that we now semi-protect. That's a net gain for openness.

I hope you'll get Boing Boing to correct their title.

It's

...

difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing

honest

...

critical analyses of the effects of his policies.

Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing studies of how semi-protection is used.

Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh -- I think you're essentially the best man for the job, and as I admitted elsewhere in the thread, I'm prone to hyperbole.

As an admin, I've also turned

...

on/off semi-protection in various cases. I just wish people (aka Jimmy) would be will to admit that there are shades of gray instead of shouting that it's black and white.

Excuse me? I have spent the last several days writing dozens of journalists and bloggers explaining precisely this: that there are shades of gray and that the matter is much more complex than "Wikipedia is locking down" or "Wikipedia is total fucking chaos".

But when you go and write something like "The New York Times gets it exactly backwards" that doesn't sound like someone explaining shades of gray. It sounds like someone getting pulled into a black vs white fight (which is easy enough to do--just look at how heated my rhetoric has been in response to what you wrote in response to what they wrote).

The truth is: Wikipedia is incredibly open,

Yes, yes, and yes.

and it is my intention that

we look at the places where we have been unable to be open in the past, and find clever ways to slice those so that we are more open. Like, for example, semi-protection instead of full protection.

I'm not sure we have identical definitions of openness. Sometimes not letting anyone edit an article is more open than letting particular subsets of people edit.

I think your motives are exactly right. I think sometimes your methods for coming to decisions aren't always the best, and your understanding of the nature of Wikipedia is imperfect. That's true of anybody, but you're a special case, so you get criticism from the likes of me.

There's more, but rest assured that I do think about history.

On 6/20/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator" cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment,

we

...

will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

It worked, though.

What specifically were the effects?

On 6/20/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:10:54 -0400, "The Cunctator" cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

[re no anonymous creation]

...

What specifically were the effects?

A massive reduction in "things made up in school one day", and consequently the speedy deletion queue. Or so it seems to me - I no longer do newpage patrol though (appeared to be much less to do after that change). But you know how it is, if there were a strong community consensus in favour of going back I bet it would happen.

Didn't speedy deletion get implemented around the same time or even after the change?

I guess my point is that Wikipedia is too complicated and big to draw firm conclusions from any one's anecdotal experience, and attempts at rigorous analysis should be encouraged.

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:29:32 -0400, "The Cunctator" cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

Didn't speedy deletion get implemented around the same time or even after the change?

Speedy had certainly been around for a while beforehand.

I guess my point is that Wikipedia is too complicated and big to draw firm conclusions from any one's anecdotal experience, and attempts at rigorous analysis should be encouraged.

For sure. On the other hand, when something is widely believed to be doing more good than harm why not leave it place while we do the analysis? An analysis based on the first month would have been misleading anyway since people have started creating accounts to document things made up in school one day (but it seems to me to be much easier to deal with this kind of silliness now).

Guy (JzG)

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator" cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

It worked, though.

It is not clear to me that it did. I would love for us to have some serious analysis of that.

My sense is that the number of articles created by unknown people is about the same, but that they now sign up for an account first. This is not helpful, because whereas before we had the rough indicator of "ip number equals newbie" (imperfect), we now have less of an indicator.

There is also the question of whether the net production of new articles by ip numbers was sufficiently worthwhile to mean that preventing those cost more than it was worth.

I do not think we have very firm answers to these questions.

What I would prefer to see, in the long run, is a replacement of locking and controls by flagging and visibility. This is core to what I think works: not gatekeeping, but accountability.

The issue we have, but so far only in English Wikipedia, and to a lesser degree elsewhere, I think, is that the sheer volume of crap that the new pages patrollers have to deal with means that every day we are making major mistakes that could be dealt with better through openness than through controls. (Openness in this case meaning: visibility and accountability.)

--Jimbo

On 6/21/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable. Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly editable, continuing the path we have already taken.

Erik

Problem is that kills one of wikipedia's main attractions.

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

geni wrote:

...

Problem is that kills one of wikipedia's main attractions.

Not if done carefully, I think. It may kill the main attraction to vandals and POV pushers, but that'd be a good thing. :)

Try thinking away from high profile articles. Lets consider say [[Biaxial nematic]] which other than the problem that it doesn't appear to be writen in english is a fairly middle of the road low profile article.

It is also the top result on google for Biaxial nematic. At the moment we have rather a nice motivator for people to add stuff to it. Add stuff and it will be the top hit on google. People will see it. If you instead say add stuff and people may see it if and when a reviewer gets round to looking at it (which will be a while since the number of people we have who understand the subject is probably somewhat limited) you have lost that motivation.

Jimmy Wales schrieb:

geni wrote:

...

Problem is that kills one of wikipedia's main attractions.

Not if done carefully, I think. It may kill the main attraction to vandals and POV pushers, but that'd be a good thing. :)

Well, it might as well attract POV pushers to become reviewers (censors?), so they can enforce their kind of "quality protection".

On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

In addition, a pseudonym is more anonymous than an IP address.

It's also less anonymous though; wherever a pseudonym is used, we know it's the *same* people, where an anonymous IP address is used it could be anyone behind a NAT'd gateway.

Before, it was possible to tell that user X came from school network Y. Now you have to do a CheckUser to get the user's IP. The Seigenthaler vandal was identified because he was an unregistered user.

Right. IP addresses are very useful.

GerardM also has some great ideas how we can build better authentication into our software, so that, for instance, we know that certain IP addresses are untrusted, and instead of blocking them entirely, we allow users who are authenticated _within_ a school or university to use that authentication in Wikipedia.

Yes, it doesn't make sense right now that a logged in user on a anonymous IP address can't edit the wikipedia. Recently there was a weird internet routing problem and I found that there was no direct route to the wikipedia, but I could log in fine via a proxy server, but couldn't edit. Given that the wikipedia knew it was me, that behaviour is *broken*.

Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable. Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly editable, continuing the path we have already taken.

I definitely agree, but I think the nupedia experiment tells us that formal reviews are bad for the wikipedia though.

The problem is they never time out; you could be waiting for a formal review forever- there's nothing forcing it through. There's no pressure on the reviewers. I mean, if the wikipedia tells us anything it's that if most edits to something improve an article, then the article will improve over time; so the first version doesn't have to be particularly good, because it will converge to excellence.

So we need to put pressure on the reviewers- how's this as an idea for the most lightweight scheme for reviewing?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Timed_article_change_stabilisation_me...

(summary: the idea is that newbie edits don't go live for a day or so, to allow more experienced editors to check it over.)

But beyond that, we need to come up with simple mechanisms to divide trust between well established users; for example how can new users get disadvantaged when creating a new article, but in a way that still allows them to create articles?

If a new user (with say, less than 100 edits) creates an article, should it go live immediately or should there be a cooling off period of say, a week, to give the established editors a chance to check it over? Just adding a delay discourages lots of bad guys I think; no immediate gratification.

Erik

On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

For instance, a basic copyright check might require only a time delay, while stating the accuracy of an article might require one or two other editors to confirm the claim PLUS a time delay.

It already sounds way too complicated to me. The more complicated you make it, the more unintended consequences there are likely to be, the more failure modes there are and the more unwieldy it gets to edit the Wikipedia.

We *want* people to contribute to the Wikipedia, it got where it is today by being incredibly quick and easy to edit.

Adding some review process to the wikipedia, which may never, ever finish?? Why?

It's not like the Wikipedia is employing people to edit it. They don't ever have to sign anything off. And once you realise that, you realise that there has to be a timeout somewhere, because they can always go away, and then you start wondering why you need more complication than just delaying stuff a bit on a timeout, and informing editors of edits and letting them deal with it.

At the end of the day, it's the editors that make the wikipedia what it is, all we can do is empower them to improve it. Process can guide, but it won't do it.

Erik

On 21/06/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:

I think that there would be user value in having available a human-reviewed WP derivative of some sort.

I see the logical process as being a separate project. It could be a WP project, or another outside project. Not a fork, but a grooming process for articles. All contributions made at WP, versions found to be stable and useful then "promoted" to live on otherPedia.

With a million items in the wikipedia, there would be a strong tendency for the groomed version to get way behind, and if that happens most users won't use it, why would anyone assist in the grooming?

There may be a reason why they would, but a big advantage of timeouts is that that can't really happen.

-- -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com / george.herbert@gmail.com

On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:

The more complicated you make it, the more unintended consequences there are likely to be, the more failure modes there are and the more unwieldy it gets to edit the Wikipedia.

*cough* parametrized templates mathematical expressions embedded LaTeX advanced image thumbnail syntax magic words EasyTimeline wiki table syntax commons integration watchlists categories localization (to the point of pluralization algorithms for particular languages) ...

MediaWiki is a far cry from being a simple wiki engine like the little Perl script that Wikipedia used to run on in 2001. Over the years, we have added capabilities to give users more and more power, and to let machines take over routine tasks. Some of the above solutions are mature, others have a lot of room for optimization and simplification.

But do not confuse a simple user experience with a simple implementation. Making things nice and smooth for the user is often a lot of work for the developer.

I distinguish the problem of quality review from the problem of patrolling and anti-vandalism measures. I agree with you that patrolling and anti-vandalism tools (of which some delayed page protection mechanism may be one) need not be particularly complex to work well. The goal of quality review, for me, is to say that a revision of an article - has been thoroughly fact-checked - is deemed to be neutral by the community - has been checked for copyright violations or other legal issues - meets stylistic and other formal criteria - etc.

In essence, I am talking about _positive_ assertions about the article's quality, rather than the _negative_ assertions for which we use tagging. While individual tagging works well to make a negative assertion (if you are wrong, it doesn't do much harm), for a positive assertion, you need to have community verification and consensus. Vandalism patrolling, meanwhile, is not about _assertions_ at all -- it is about intervention. It's a different class of problem altogether.

WP:FAC is a good process in the quality review category, if I may say so myself, but its scalability is very poor. This is in part because it expects every editor to know everything. It does not accommodate me going into a nomination and saying, for instance: "I've done a copyright check on this article." "This article meets the MoS criteria." There is no reward in doing so -- the article may still fail the full review. The process of discussion is lengthy, the procedure complex, and the standards of quality are very high.

WP:FAC also does not do changeset-specific review. It reviews on the basis of the whole article only. This works well for the initial nomination, but by the time the article has passed, it has often changed significantly already. In other words, the quality of the assertions we make about articles is dubious, and our ability to cope with the rapid rate of changes limited.

I am interested in giving users power tools to enable them to review articles rapidly and bring their skills to the fore. Furthermore, I would like us to provide machine-readable metadata that allows external re-users of our content, as well as scripts we use to develop distributable versions thereof, to make use of the assertions that have been made through these tools.

This is, I repeat, a complex problem. However, the solution needs not interfere at all with the regular editing process. We can experiment with different models alongside normal editing -- those users who do not click the relevant buttons will never be bothered by any review-related functionality (except, perhaps, for some visible metadata on the article itself). I do not believe in models where anonymous users are only shown reviewed content, for instance. The content that is shown when you visit a particular URL should always be the same for all users.

You are right that, if we succeed, the solution will be very neat and simple from a user's point of view. But it will be the result of a very long process of debating, thinking, and experimenting, and the implementation itself may well be very complex.

Erik

On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:

On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

...

In addition, a pseudonym is more anonymous than an IP address.

It's also less anonymous though; wherever a pseudonym is used, we know it's the *same* people, where an anonymous IP address is used it could be anyone behind a NAT'd gateway.

True for some situations, but not for others. In the case of a throwaway account used to create one article (or edit once), that's about as close to anonymous as you can get.

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

...

It worked, though.

It is not clear to me that it did. I would love for us to have some serious analysis of that.

I don't mean to be contentious on this issue, but whenever it comes up it kind of bugs me that no serious analysis was apparently even _planned_. One can't really call something an "experiment" if one doesn't intend to analyze at the results.

It seems to me that there should be some relatively straightforward facts and figures that could be dug out of the edit history database on this. Perhaps a graph of the average age of deleted articles would do for a start; a drop in speedy deletion compared to other forms of deletion should result in an increase in the average age of articles upon deletion.

My sense is that the number of articles created by unknown people is about the same, but that they now sign up for an account first. This is not helpful, because whereas before we had the rough indicator of "ip number equals newbie" (imperfect), we now have less of an indicator.

In this case we'd see a significant increase in the number of new accounts that make just a few edits after creation and then are abandoned.

There is also the question of whether the net production of new articles by ip numbers was sufficiently worthwhile to mean that preventing those cost more than it was worth.

A bit harder to judge numerically since it involves "worth" judgements, but how about looking at the rate of creation of articles that aren't deleted within a week of their creation? That gives articles time to go through the full AfD gauntlet, which (perhaps debatably :) acts as worth-based filter. All ideas are just off the top of my head, of course.

Fortunately thanks to Wikipedia's retention of full edit and deletion histories one can still do detailed analysis after the fact. But IMO this should have already been prepared for before the switch was thrown.

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

As I said before, the experiment did cut down on a lot of crap, because some newbies simply don't want to register and instead post to AFC where we can nip an article's creation at the core.

But what are the numbers? There's all this raw data sitting there in the database from which it should be relatively straightforward to determine actual statistical measures of what effect the change in policy had, but since the analysis hasn't been done we're reduced to relying on subjective impressions and assertions pulled seemingly out of nowhere. How can I _verify_ that the experiment did or didn't cut down on a lot of crap? I don't personally do any of the various sorts of "patrolling" this change was likely to have an impact on (recent changes, new articles, etc) so I don't even have subjective impressions of my own to go on.

On 6/21/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:

Have you ever looked at a regular day of submissions at AFC? Each and every one of them is one more than hasn't been created by an ignorant newbie and avoided overworking admins with the need to delete it.

It appears to me that at least a large minority of them aren't written by an "ignorant newbie" but by a "smart newbie." Each and every one of them is one more problem that some wikipedian has to deal with. Seems to me like the whole AFC thing has just managed to move the problem to another place. AFC = AFD in reverse.

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:58:31 +0200, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article out of the deal.

Plus, the interaction with the newbies at AfC can act as a better introduction to policy and guidelines than slapping "unsourced" tags on their newly created article.

Guy (JzG)

On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

Isn't AfC part of Wikipedia?

Nope, it's in Wikipedia: space.

(as contradictory as that sounds)

Steve

On 6/22/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

So if new articles by users that weren't logged in had "Wikipedia:" in front of their title then you wouldn't have a problem with keeping the crap?

It's more that content created by users that's sitting on a page called "Wikipedia:Articles for creation" is much less of a problem than that same content sitting on its own page called "Jerry the gay wanker". To whatever extent having crap articles is a problem for us.

Steve

On 6/22/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

What if the page is called "Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Jerry the gay wanker"?

Definitely better than it being in article space.

...

I'm simply arguing that AfC is less work for us, the established Wikipedia community, than is putting crap new articles through AfD. It's definitely less convenient for the newcomer.

There's no reason that crap new articles have to go through AfD.

By which you mean that we can either leave them alone, or devise some alternative process for getting rid of them.

Steve

On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/22/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

...

What if the page is called "Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Jerry the gay wanker"?

Definitely better than it being in article space.

If it's a bad article, it's better being out of the article space. If it's a good article, it's better being *in* the article space. Some articles created by "anons" are bad, some are good. So putting these articles in another namespace would have both positives and negatives. The positives probably outweigh the negatives, because having libellous content (for instance) in the main namespace is much worse than not having even ten times the amount of good content in it.

...

...

I'm simply arguing that AfC is less work for us, the established Wikipedia community, than is putting crap new articles through AfD. It's definitely less convenient for the newcomer.

There's no reason that crap new articles have to go through AfD.

By which you mean that we can either leave them alone, or devise some alternative process for getting rid of them.

Steve

I was referring to the fact that it's certainly *possible* to delete crap without putting it through AfD, and is probably within policy to do so. If it isn't within policy to delete crap started by anons which no registered user would have bothered to fix and move to article space, then the policy is flawed, not the software.

Of course, part of my second idea above was that we not only make it explicitly within policy to speedily delete crap started by an anon, but that we make it possible for the vast majority of established users to do so.

Anthony

On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

...

I was referring to the fact that it's certainly *possible* to delete crap without putting it through AfD, and is probably within policy to do so. If it isn't within policy to delete crap started by anons which no registered user would have bothered to fix and move to article space, then the policy is flawed, not the software.

WP:AFC handles that quite nicely. But I'm not sure where we're going with all this.

Where we're going is that AFC *doesn't* handle things nicely. It's a terrible hack. If you think AFC works well, you apparently don't use it very much.

...

Of course, part of my second idea above was that we not only make it explicitly within policy to speedily delete crap started by an anon, but that we make it possible for the vast majority of established users to do so.

It's possible for anyone to nominate the article for speedy deletion. I suppose giving "deletion for anonymous articles" rights to people is possible, but fraught. Is an article that has been edited by a registered user still a candidate for mega-speedy deletion?

Until someone approves it, yes.

Anyway, yes, it's possible for anyone to nominate an article for speedy deletion. This is why I think your argument that "AfC is less work for us, the established Wikipedia community, than is putting crap new articles through AfD" is a strawman.

Anthony

On 6/21/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article out of the deal.

Here's something that would be even less work for everyone.

When a non-logged in user creates a new article stick "warning, this isn't really part of Wikipedia" on the top of it. Then, when a logged in user edits it, take the warning off. If no logged in user edits it within X days, delete it.

Anthony

On 21/06/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

Until an article is approved, it can be deleted by *any* registered user, there's no need to bother an admin to delete it. Additionally, if the article is not approved within X days, it is automatically deleted.

You would only want well established users to be able to delete articles for some notion of 'well esablished'. Otherwise people will register just for the joy of deleting other people's articles. If well established users delete articles inappropriately, then the admins can lock them out, and they can't do it anymore; so any problem is self limiting.

Anthony

On 6/22/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

...

Until an article is approved, it can be deleted by *any* registered user, there's no need to bother an admin to delete it. Additionally, if the article is not approved within X days, it is automatically deleted.

All good, IMO, except for the assumption of bad faith right at the end there. I don't see why the default has to be "delete". At that point the article's been hanging around for X days with a bomb strapped to its chest and not a single editor has seen fit to pull the trigger on it, suggesting that it probably isn't total trash. It may simply be a little questionable, which is something Wikipedia can work with.

---

WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

If we adopted such a system, it should work so that a user can nominate an

article and an admin can make a decision according to our policy on deletion. There should also be consideration of the categories of article that would be liable for speedy deletion and those that would go through a lengthier process such as Articles for deletion.

As Bryan Derksen argues, we should look at which articles we should work on and which have no potential at all.

Regards

*Keith Old*

On 6/21/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

...

Until an article is approved, it can be deleted by *any* registered user, there's no need to bother an admin to delete it. Additionally, if the article is not approved within X days, it is automatically deleted.

All good, IMO, except for the assumption of bad faith right at the end there. I don't see why the default has to be "delete". At that point the article's been hanging around for X days with a bomb strapped to its chest and not a single editor has seen fit to pull the trigger on it, suggesting that it probably isn't total trash. It may simply be a little questionable, which is something Wikipedia can work with.

I suppose it'd be enough to simply provide a list of articles which sat in that limbo state for X days (or just a list ordered by oldest first). In that case I think it's pretty clear you're right - total trash wouldn't stand a chance, unless it happened to get approved by a registered editor (which could happen under an AfC type system as well).

On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

...

When a non-logged in user creates a new article stick "warning, this isn't really part of Wikipedia" on the top of it. Then, when a logged in user edits it, take the warning off. If no logged in user edits it within X days, delete it.

I would strongly urge us *not* to make the mistake of assuming that "edited by a logged-in user" equals "approved by a logged-in user". We should *not* be forcing people to take responsibility for whole articles if they simply fix a typo, add a category, or tweak an interwiki link. Bad, bad idea.

You could always add a checkbox for this (though I would think adding a category or tweaking an interwiki link would suggest that one does not think an article is suitable for deletion).

...

It appears to me that at least a large minority of them aren't written by an "ignorant newbie" but by a "smart newbie." Each and every one of them is one more problem that some wikipedian has to deal with. Seems to me like the whole AFC thing has just managed to move the problem to another place. AFC = AFD in reverse.

No, the great thing about AfC is no one has to deal with it at all. If we stopped working on AfC, then Wikipedia would simply lose a little bit of growth. By contrast, if we stopped working on AfD, then Wikipedia would fairly dramatically fill up with total crud.

By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article out of the deal.

I think you are suffering from the My Perspective is the Only One that Counts syndrome. Try submitting a few articles to AFC as an anon user and then tell us how nice it is.

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that effect is undone by the amount of logged in newbies. Was there a spike in AFD entries at the time? - ~~~~

This is exactly my point. It should be entirely possible to dig up the actual numbers and make a pretty graph to show objectively whether the policy change had effects like this, but nobody has. So _nobody knows_. Or if they do, they haven't published their results anywhere publicly - in the email that sparked me off on this thread Jimbo himself says he hasn't seen any analysis.

On 6/21/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

I have seen a graph of number-of-articles-on-AFD over time, but damned if I can find it. Does anyone else remember it?

I've seen graphs demonstrating that proposed deletion greatly reduced the load on AfD, but I haven't seen anything from when anon article creation was disabled.

This sounds like a great first project for some of the stats groups getting started (Erik Garrison, call your office...)

My personal guess, based on some hasty stats months ago, is that the rate of good-new-article creation dropped, the rate of bad-new-article creation dropped by a bit less, and the rate of worrisome-vandalism (not the obvious kind) didn't drop at all. I would like to see a serious stats breakdown, from before, during, and after the change to know better what's going on.

Interesting statistics: rate of reverts, rate of speedy-deleted articles, rate of AfD entries, rate of new user creation, rate of new users created who never edit, rate of creation of articles that never get more than one major edit, rate of good additions to AFC, rate of good additions to AFC that never get turned into an article...

SJ

On 6/21/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

...

As I said before, the experiment did cut down on a lot of crap, because some newbies simply don't want to register and instead post to AFC where we can nip an article's creation at the core.

But what are the numbers? There's all this raw data sitting there in the database from which it should be relatively straightforward to determine actual statistical measures of what effect the change in policy had, but since the analysis hasn't been done we're reduced to relying on subjective impressions and assertions pulled seemingly out of nowhere. How can I _verify_ that the experiment did or didn't cut down on a lot of crap? I don't personally do any of the various sorts of "patrolling" this change was likely to have an impact on (recent changes, new articles, etc) so I don't even have subjective impressions of my own to go on.

The Cunctator wrote:

I hope you'll get Boing Boing to correct their title.

Their title is correct. The New York Times report was false. Semi-protection is not an "added" restriction, it is a softening of a very old restriction. It is my intention that we work to creatively soften even more restrictions.

The key to this is to realize that our current control mechanism are both too broad and too narrow. Yes, there is no perfect answer, but yes, there are better answers than what we have now, answers which will both better control for sheer vandalism while at the same time leaving articles more open for genuine input.

Semi-protection is a step in the right direction... it is a removal of a restriction that we used to have.

Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

No, it was an experiment, and I have been saying lately that I do not think it was successful. I expect that we will turn it off soon.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh -- I think you're essentially the best man for the job, and as I admitted elsewhere in the thread, I'm prone to hyperbole.

That's ok, so am I. :)

I'm not sure we have identical definitions of openness. Sometimes not letting anyone edit an article is more open than letting particular subsets of people edit.

Sometimes. For example, if the restriction is "you have to be an admin who has been elected by a group of people of remarkable similar opinions about the world" then it is less open to let that subset edit than to let no one edit. If the restriction is "Well, you have to prove you are a human by solving a captcha" then it is probably more open to allow editing than not, to that group.

I think your motives are exactly right. I think sometimes your methods for coming to decisions aren't always the best, and your understanding of the nature of Wikipedia is imperfect. That's true of anybody, but you're a special case, so you get criticism from the likes of me.

There's more, but rest assured that I do think about history.

Fair enough. :)

--Jimbo

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:44:48 +0200, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

It is my intention that we work to creatively soften even more restrictions.

How about semi-blocking, letting semi-blocked editors comment on Talk but not in article space?

Ideally, blocking would be even more fine-tuned:

* Block users from individual namespaces * Block users from individual articles * Fix Bug 550 *and implement the fix*

On 6/22/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:

We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps' bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.

It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.

While this sounds like a good idea in theory, I think the model of having a class of users *less* empowered than the default class is unworkable. They would obviously simply create new accounts when they had these priveleges taken away from them. The only way to do it would be to provide these privileges after some number of edits/days with the project, and revoke them as needed. I suppose it *could* work with editors who have invested a lot in their username...

Steve

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:32:40 +1000, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:

It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.

Yes, absolutely. It could be a way of stopping things from escalating, as they so often do when a full block is implemented.

Guy (JzG)

Mark Gallagher wrote:

We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps' bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.

It is unclear to me that there really are that many cases of people who are extremely annoying in some areas, but whose help would be so valuable in other areas.

It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.

Perhaps. But "being an idiot" is not normally a tendency which is confined to easily identifiable areas of activity.

I am not totally opposed to the concept, but we have to think carefully. Every change to the tools gives rise to changes in the equilibria. Will we have to sit through watching some troll be successively banned from one action after another as people cry "Why prevent him from editing articles about Chemotherapy? All he was doing was uploding goatse to articles on homosexuality? He might be a good user."

--Jimbo

Steve Bennett wrote:

On 6/22/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

I am not totally opposed to the concept, but we have to think carefully. Every change to the tools gives rise to changes in the equilibria. Will we have to sit through watching some troll be successively banned from one action after another as people cry "Why prevent him from editing articles about Chemotherapy? All he was doing was uploding goatse to articles on homosexuality? He might be a good user."

In the case of a recidivist copyviolater, simply banning image uploading seems like a sensible move, though. However, that would imply banning it for all anons too - almost certainly a good thing.

I didn't think that uploads had *ever* been enabled for IP users, at least not under Mediawiki...

On 6/22/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Will we have to sit through watching some troll be successively banned from one action after another as people cry "Why prevent him from editing articles about Chemotherapy? All he was doing was uploding goatse to articles on homosexuality? He might be a good user."

--Jimbo

No. At the moment when I run into someone who just ignores image copyright my only option is to try and educate them and if that fails try and figure out some way under the rules to block them. I don't have a button to deal with people who can't upload images responsibly.

On 6/22/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

On Jun 22, 2006, at 8:16 AM, geni wrote:

...

At the moment when I run into someone who just ignores image copyright my only option is to try and educate them and if that fails try and figure out some way under the rules to block them. I don't have a button to deal with people who can't upload images responsibly.

-- geni

Does it make sense to have one? a button, that is.

Fred

yes

Fred Bauder wrote:

On Jun 22, 2006, at 8:12 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

Will we have to sit through watching some troll be successively banned from one action after another as people cry "Why prevent him from editing articles about Chemotherapy? All he was doing was uploding goatse to articles on homosexuality? He might be a good user."

You exaggerate.

Fair enough. I was making an extravagant example. But really, I find it fairly rare that a person who uploads repeated copyvios after being warned would also somehow miraculously be of value to us in other ways.

We are no longer a struggling tiny project which needs to go out of our way to get every possible beneficial scrap of work from anyone. We seek to have diverse participation from a wide range of people with different viewpoints, but we should also remember, always, how many good users we use when we are too "co-dependent" with our trolls.

--Jimbo

G'day Steve,

Maybe others see things differently, but I do not feel a massive influx in people contributing raw, valuable text to our encyclopaedia, which is something we're quite short of. We have lots of people joining us to help delete, categorise, clean, or write about their own pet topic - but do we really have so many helping to expand on our existing topics?

I agree. Heck, in some cases I see the same *name* (singular) editing an area of the encyclopaedia with me.

There's also the issue that an editor's "own pet topic" tends also to be the "own pet topic" of thousands of other people. There's very few people who are fascinated by the mating habits of gibbons and *also* want to spend hours working on Wikipedia, but there's an imperial truckload (that's more than a metric truckload, for those wondering) of people who want to talk about trains. Not all pet topics are equal.

Cheers,

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:12:20 +0200, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

It is unclear to me that there really are that many cases of people who are extremely annoying in some areas, but whose help would be so valuable in other areas.

My original thought was to allow edits to Talk (and user and project) space but not article space - like protection in reverse. It would reduce the number of protected articles, because where there is an edit war we just confine the warriors to Talk for a while until they've hammered out their differences.

Guy (JzG)

On 6/22/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Mark Gallagher wrote:

...

We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps' bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.

It is unclear to me that there really are that many cases of people who are extremely annoying in some areas, but whose help would be so valuable in other areas.

A great many users, including some of our most prolific editors, have no clue about image copyright law or policy. The ability to block them from uploading images would be quite useful.

What would be even more useful would be for image uploading to be a privilege, not a right: you don't get the ability to upload images simply by registering an account.

On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/22/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:

...

A great many users, including some of our most prolific editors, have no clue about image copyright law or policy. The ability to block them from uploading images would be quite useful.

What would be even more useful would be for image uploading to be a privilege, not a right: you don't get the ability to upload images simply by registering an account.

A proper experiment on this would be a good thing. Measure the number of "good", "bad" and "borderline" images before and after the implementation of such a privilege system.

Well, the "before" results certainly aren't encouraging: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-March/041534.html Roughly 50% of all uploads have incorrect license tags. Roughly 35% of all fair-use claims are immediately obvious as invalid, and I expect at least another 25% to be found invalid on further inspection.

Preliminary results on who's doing the uploading indicate that about 35% of all uploads are by users with fewer than 50 edits; 15% are by users with fewer than ten. Less than a quarter are by users with a thousand or more edits. I don't have precise statistics, but in general, the bad images I've seen go by tend to have been uploaded by users with redlinked userpages.

In the past six months, OrphanBot has handed out 37,000 notices to 24,000 users. 200 users have received ten or more notices, with one user receiving 53 notices. For the majority of these users, the only things on the user's talk page are a welcome notice and notifications from OrphanBot.

How would you work out who to give initial priveleges to? Is there enough history to determine which editors have uploaded more problem images than good ones?

I'd start by letting anyone with at least five hundred edits upload images. They may not be any better at uploading good images, but at least they've got enough invested in Wikipedia that they'll stick around to learn about the image use policy.

On 6/23/06, Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com wrote:

Five hundred! It took me years to get there, and I spend far too much time on Wikipedia. What about 75?

At the arcom elections the minium was 150 edits. From that experence i would suggest a limit of 100.

G'day Jimmy,

Mark Gallagher wrote:

...

We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps' bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.

It is unclear to me that there really are that many cases of people who are extremely annoying in some areas, but whose help would be so valuable in other areas.

Images is the obvious case. There are *many* editors on Wikipedia who have no clue about copyright ("it was on the web, therefore it's public domain"; "the picture looks fair [i.e. pretty], therefore it comes under Fair Use"; etc.), but are otherwise extremely good editors. Some of them might get blocked for being idiots, and we lose their valuable efforts. For the most part, though, people look and say "do we *really* want to do send away this excellent editor?" We shouldn't have to make that choice.

There's other editors who are incredibly good at, say, numismatics, or trams (AmE: "shopping baskets"), but who *also* have a deep and abiding love for Joseph McCarthy and tend to rant about left-wing conspiracies in the space where our neutral article on the man is supposed to go. I'm not convinced that banning them from highly emotive areas of Wikipedia only isn't worth it, if we get to keep their calm and rational work on the mating habits of an obscure species of ape, say.

...

It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.

Perhaps. But "being an idiot" is not normally a tendency which is confined to easily identifiable areas of activity.

We have admins with such qualities.

(Come to that, it might be nice to prevent certain admins from blocking, deleting, protecting, or saying "I'm an admin, I know these things" ;-))

I am not totally opposed to the concept, but we have to think carefully. Every change to the tools gives rise to changes in the equilibria. Will we have to sit through watching some troll be successively banned from one action after another as people cry "Why prevent him from editing articles about Chemotherapy? All he was doing was uploding goatse to articles on homosexuality? He might be a good user."

A fair point, and while it's one I'd be keen to argue ... erm ... well, I see the way that A7 is being used to argue for borderline deletions. And I see the way that semi-protection requested needlessly. And I see the way that people on AfD complain when someone removes {{prod}} from an article. And I see the way that Good Articles has become a stepping-stone to Featured Article status, rather than a recognition of good articles in their own right. And ... let's face it, whenever someone comes up with a good idea (not that I'm saying this is a good idea; just that I thought of it ;-)), someone else will come along with a way to bollocks it up completely.

The question is: is it worth it?

On 6/23/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:

I noticed this the other day, when I saw someone removing the tag from an article because "it hadn't passed through the Good Articles process properly". And here I was thinking that the point of the thing was that it was to be a largely process-free way of tagging articles that seemed reasonably good.

It was. Then, astonishingly, it turned into an exact mirror of the FA process. In fact, there's very little difference between an FA and a GA as far as I can tell, except that a short article can be a GA but not an FA.

Generally because certain people can never see a good idea that they don't think could be improved with more process, formality, forms and bureaucracy.

There is that. Also, is there a Wikipedia law yet that says "whenever a process is introduced that rates anything according to some criteria, its standards will rise faster than the standards of the things being rated"?

Seems to be true for RfA, FPC, FAC, GAC...

Steve

On 6/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:

...

It was. Then, astonishingly, it turned into an exact mirror of the FA process. In fact, there's very little difference between an FA and a GA as far as I can tell, except that a short article can be a GA but not an FA.

That's insane. Soon you'll need to go through five days of discussion and achieve a majority poll before you can edit an article...

More likely, we'll have a new level "OK articles" which will then go through the same process, so we'll introduce "Not-too-bad articles"...

I need to go and take my anti-cynicism pills now.

Steve

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

The Cunctator wrote:

...

Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the lovely heading "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has added restrictions".

Gee, that is hardly what I have said. We used to fully protect in cases that we now semi-protect. That's a net gain for openness.

If there are actually cases where articles that were previously protected are now semi-protected. Except that article weren't really ever permanently protected in the first place.

One of the previous rules about protected articles was that *no one* was supposed to edit them, including the admins who were technically able to edit them. I'm sure you could slant that as another gain for openness, though. Is allowing only admins to edit more or less open than allowing no one to edit?

...

It's difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest critical analyses of the effects of his policies.

Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing studies of how semi-protection is used.

Then you probably gathered these statistics: What was the average time of page protection before semi-protection was implemented? Now what is the average time of page protection and the average time of semi-protection?

Steve Bennett wrote:

These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of semi-protected articles, then: P(now) << P(a year ago) That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that: P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago) That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has not increased.

I think that the first is true, and if not we should seriously look at why not. I think that there is no reason for the second to be true.

I also think that a serious analysis should not look at the raw number of articles (the site is a lot bigger than a year ago, so there should be a lot more of everything) but both percentages of articles, and also percentages of articles weighted by pageviews and/or edit frequency.

On 6/21/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

I think that the first is true, and if not we should seriously look at why not. I think that there is no reason for the second to be true.

There is. Long term semi protection really only hits a very small number of subjects. The number of subjects that enough people feel strong about to cause a problem is unlikely to increase.

I don't know that I agree with that last sentence. What subjects are there, which are contentious in real life, which don't already have WP pages, and are encyclopedic? What subjects we have WP articles on which are contentious in real life aren't contentious in WP, and why? What would change over time about those?

You might be right, but it doesn't strike me as obviously so. I think a lot of the problems which are likely to hit, have already hit. Many may stay poorly resolved for a while, but they're already here, I think.

On 6/21/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:

Empirically I find it to be true. It's amazing how many people will fight tooth and nail to get their POV into [[X]], while being oblivious to [[History of X]], [[X and Y]], [[X-Z effect]], [[list of Xes]], etc, all of which will have extensive material inconsistent with the wanted POV. (My unkind belief is that POV pushers are simply not smart enough to figure out that the encyclopedia has more than one article.)

Or they are smart enough to get as far as figureing out that most people only look at the high profile articles.

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of semi-protected articles, then: P(now) << P(a year ago) That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that: P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago) That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has not increased.

I think that the first is true, and if not we should seriously look at why not. I think that there is no reason for the second to be true.

First: Anyone notice the NYT correction?

Anyway, the more I consider the facts, the less convinced I am. The problem is in the interpretation of "anyone can edit". Does it mean "anyone who wants to edit, can", or does it mean "anyone at all can edit". Normally this wouldn't matter, but it's critical if we're attempting to measure "anyone-can-edit-ness" (ACEN).

By the first interpretation, we should take into account the fact that most edits are made by confirmed users (I think?) If there is a shift from total protection to semi-protection, then ACEN has gone up. The measure P(now) < P (then) is the critical one, but P(now) + S(now) <= P (then) should probably not totally be forgotten.

By the second interpretation, the vast hordes of potential visitors to the site massively overwhelm the small number who actually carry out the edits.Shifting towards semi-protection makes no difference at best (either way they're blocked), so the critical comparison is P(now) + S(now) <= P (then). The problem is that semi-protection lasts longer than full protection, as a rule, so that in general this comparison is far from true.

Semi-protection may indeed have been intended to improve openness and ACEN, but based on my quick perusal of the protected articles list, ACEN has gone down. Semi-protection is not the only cause of that (if a cause at all) - but I think we should be honest about where we stand now, compared to some arbitrary time in the past. I'm far from convinced that NYT "got it exactly backwards" - it's a fairly subtle question of interpretation of what ACE and "open" mean.

I also think that a serious analysis should not look at the raw number of articles (the site is a lot bigger than a year ago, so there should be a lot more of everything) but both percentages of articles, and also percentages of articles weighted by pageviews and/or edit frequency.

Pageview figures would indeed be nice, for all kinds of statistics. No one seems to have given a reason why pageview stats could not be turned on for a day, just to give us some data to play with.

Steve

On 6/22/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

To me it means "To the maximal extent consistent with keeping vandalism down to a dull roar, we try to let as many people edit as many things as we can with as little barrier as possible. When we are forced to enact some barrier, we try to keep it as narrowly focussed as possible, and as short term as possible."

It does not mean, and has never meant, "Come one, come all, even if you are a jerk or complete idiot there is a home for you here."

Uh...I agree, but that's a separate interpretation all together. Even good authors are prevented from editing semi-protected pages if they don't have an account.

It seems to me, with my fairly imprecise data, that anonymous editors are barred from editing a greater portion of articles than they could a year ago. It's not a significant portion, but it's growing.

I don't want to flog this dead horse too much longer, but that conclusion seems to be fairly much in line with what the NYT was saying.

Steve

Since no one else has pointed it out, here's their "correction":

They changed the headline, too.

Steve Bennett wrote:

On 6/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

...

The missing piece of data is: what proportion of anonymous editors are good contributors? If it's very small, then it's a non-issue.

I have a theory that for any change made by an anon editor:

• if it's a deletion, it's probably vandalism
• if it's the addition of more than a sentence, it will probably be

unsourced and get reverted

• if it's only a net change of plus or minus 5 characters, it's

probably a useful copy-edit

Sceptre's second law: If only five bytes have been added to an article in a diff by an IP, it will almost always be the word "gay".

On 23/06/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

"gay" takes only 5 bytes now? What an ingenious unicode storage format we must have :)

Most anons are not so grammar illiterate as to not use spaces, correctly, though. See point above about most useful anon contributions being copyedits - they are obviously all grammar pedants and would not stoop so low as to add unparsable vandalism to articles!

--Sam

On 6/24/06, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:

I do like semi-protection as a defense against the hordes of drive-by vandals who come by in bursts for some reason or another. But I think we should keep it to a minimum, and be careful not to use protection -- full or semi -- where it has not been shown to be needed.

Probably better tools (preferably trigger-based, rather than poll-based) to automatically and accurately detect vandalism would be good. Then allowing open access to articles would not be such a burden, as only a few edits would have to be checked by hand.

Steve

On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

[...] Even good authors are prevented from editing semi-protected pages if they don't have an account.

This is a pretty trivial barrier to entry...

On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

Anyway, the more I consider the facts, the less convinced I am. The problem is in the interpretation of "anyone can edit". Does it mean "anyone who wants to edit, can", or does it mean "anyone at all can edit". Normally this wouldn't matter, but it's critical if we're attempting to measure "anyone-can-edit-ness" (ACEN).

Anyone can drive on the public roads. Of course you need a licence and need to know the rules of the road. It's just common sense, we don't need to fine-tune it.

The problem is that semi-protection lasts longer

than full protection, as a rule, so that in general this comparison is far from true.

What, they can't wait 4 days to edit an article that's a huge source of vandalism - yet they can still edit the other 99.999% of articles? Boohoo.

mboverload

Yes, I feel so bad for the people who don't want to spend one minute registering to edit. Semiprotection is used on so few articles I fail to see how it could have any impact.

mboverload

On 6/26/06, Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com wrote:

Even if the restrictions are minor, any level of separation between anons and regular users does have social consequences: it's a barrier, if a permeable one, and it will effect how many people join wikipedia (and what types of people), how users treat outsiders, etc. Semiprotection is necessary, but we shouldn't pretend it's inconsequential. (Hey, maybe those consequences are /good/, like encouraging people to create accounts and become invested in the project. And maybe they're not.)

On 6/25/06, mboverload mboverload@gmail.com wrote:

...

On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

...

Anyway, the more I consider the facts, the less convinced I am. The problem is in the interpretation of "anyone can edit". Does it mean "anyone who wants to edit, can", or does it mean "anyone at all can edit". Normally this wouldn't matter, but it's critical if we're attempting to measure "anyone-can-edit-ness" (ACEN).

Anyone can drive on the public roads. Of course you need a licence and

need

...

to know the rules of the road. It's just common sense, we don't need to fine-tune it.

The problem is that semi-protection lasts longer

...

than full protection, as a rule, so that in general this comparison is far from true.

What, they can't wait 4 days to edit an article that's a huge source of vandalism - yet they can still edit the other 99.999% of articles?

Boohoo.

...

mboverload _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Oh yes, true. You got me there, I'll admit.

mboverload

On 6/26/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

On 6/26/06, mboverload mboverload@gmail.com wrote:

...

Yes, I feel so bad for the people who don't want to spend one minute registering to edit. Semiprotection is used on so few articles I fail to

see

...

how it could have any impact.

Remember, semiprotection blocks new users, not just unregistered users.

Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On 6/27/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:

Somebody please put it back. Its like instruction creep for global tabs.

Hear hear. That is ugly as. Anything would be better than that.

Steve

Whoa, that's cool. lol, I don't know why I thought that the configuration of the interface couldn't be in the wiki too =D

mboverload

On 6/26/06, xaosflux xaosflux@gmail.com wrote:

This has been fixed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki%3AViewsource&diff=60...

----- Original Message ----- From: "stevertigo" vertigosteve@yahoo.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 7:02 PM Subject: [WikiEN-l] Ugly == "edit this page (read only)"

...

Somebody please put it back. Its like instruction creep for global tabs.

Svertigo

---

Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---

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On 6/17/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:

...

"Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy"

Anyone can use the public library. But if you're too disruptive, you'll be asked to leave.