On 10/6/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php

I don't agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.

"It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better quality, period, free or non-free." Geez, watch what you say. Before I noticed who made the statement I took it to mean that you don't care if we're free or non-free.

Anthony

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Stan Shebs wrote:

2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors

from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies, randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.

I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki, and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that is not at all a pleasure to read.

- - Ryan

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Michael Turley wrote:

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I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki, and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that is not at all a pleasure to read.

If you're going to be that brusque, you should accompany your reversion with a comment on a talk page (article or editor) to tell them where you see the problem with their edits. "rv: not an improvement, see [[article:talk]]" is much better. This way, it's constructive rather than just blunt.

If you want to do that, you are welcome to. My intention was to give him an idea on how to deal with this problem, not to lecture him on manners.

- - Ryan

I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a

That's an incredibly hostile way of editing. What happens when someone thinks that your "rv. not an improvement" is "not an improvement"?

-- mvh Björn

On 10/7/05, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:

Maybe my way of responding to that is viewed as hostile because this isn't part of the common understanding, but I think it probably should be. Of course I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but if the article has to suffer because someone takes reverts personally, there isn't much I can do.

Actually, there IS much you can do. Start by leaving a talk page post explaining just what you think is wrong with the other person's edits each time you use your "rv: not an improvement" message. That's all it takes. You can do a lot with very little effort.

Your way is hostile not because it isn't part of the common understanding, it's hostile because it criticizes other editors and makes no attempt to be non-hostile. It also gives no impression of what you find wrong with someone else's good faith edit. I sincerely hope your current method NEVER becomes part of the common understanding.

-- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

Ryan Delaney wrote:

Stan Shebs wrote:

...

2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors

from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies, randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc.

I've actually had some luck with this. If someone makes an edit that doesn't hurt anything, but doesn't add anything either, I simply revert with the edit summary "rv: not an improvement". This seems to send a message to people that edits need to be constructive and have a plan behind them. Just moving stuff around isn't good for the Wiki, and a solitary edit like this could seem to have no effect, but in the aggregate they can make for a ridiculously disorganized article that is not at all a pleasure to read.

Heh, that's tougher than I've generally been willing to be. Seems all too easy to trigger edit wars and accusations of newbie-biting, but softening it by explaining the rationale takes time away from content improvement. Explanations are worth the trouble if the person is going to be a long-term contributor, but not if they're one of the "two-day wonders" that are active for only a short time.

Another one of my hesitations in reverting is that oftentimes a good edit, say a spelling fix, is intermixed with more ambitious tinkering, as the editor starts with the obvious fix and then is emboldened to do more. Then it gets time-consuming to undo only part of an edit.

This circles back to the back to the shortage of editors too; while it can be engaging to do stylistic fixup, vandalism patrol, etc, I find that it can easily suck up my entire available WP time, leaving no cycles for contributing in the areas where I have unique expertise. I see that happening with other editors too. WP being a volunteer organization, people will always work on what they want to work on, and many SMEs enjoy working outside their field, but if your goal is to build the best possible encyclopedia, you want your Nobel laureates to write about their research, not to feel like they have to mop floors or scrape gum off the undersides of desks because otherwise it won't get done.

Stan

Andrew Lih wrote:

On 10/7/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:

...

2. We need a way to discourage well-meaning but less-able editors

from crumbling good articles. On my watchlist I see a lot of editors (some logins, some anons) adding nonsequiturs or redundancies, randomly rearranging text, adding useless templates en masse, etc. They're not vandalism, but they're not improvements either, and most of them I just let slide by because they're stylistic rather than factual, and it's disheartening to argue with people about style over and over. A vicious circle though, because if I feel like an article is inexorably going downhill, I'm less and less motivated to try to halt the slide. Not quite the same as article rating, it seems more like we want articles to gradually get harder to edit as they gradually get better.

This is a great point by Stan, and something Wikipedia has to figure out. At least for English WP, it's no longer predominantly growth mode; it has entered an important maintenance-heavy mode.

I know this is lame, but I just want to say "me too". Stan's point is great.

We'd like to think that it's inevitable we'll asymptotically approach high quality, as Tony defended with [[Eventualism]]. But I think it's too simplistc. As Stan observed, many articles have been or are sliding backwards, and unfortunately the techniques to prevent the regression are generally frowned upon - abrupt rejections of changes from newbies, repeated reverts, protecting articles.

As we've moved from growth to maintaining the core set of articles that will be in "1.0", have we appropriately changed our expectations about community policies to get there?

I think that's exactly the right conversation for us to be having.

I'm a big fan of eventualism. But Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are not new articles, nor are they difficult or obscure subjects. Nor are the problems I'm _currently_ concerned about with these articles problems resulting from a lack of knowledge. They are stylistic problems which are pretty awful.

--jimbo

Tony Sidaway wrote:

On 10/7/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

I'm a big fan of eventualism. But Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are not new articles, nor are they difficult or obscure subjects. Nor are the problems I'm _currently_ concerned about with these articles problems resulting from a lack of knowledge. They are stylistic problems which are pretty awful.

I think you've put your finger on the problem there. The mechanisms by which Wikipedia articles improve and degrade are not fully understood, and there may well be some complex factors that we don't consider seriously enough.

But we can make a stab at guessing the main factor: entropy. An article that is edited frequently by many people will probably degrade quickly

I don't disagree with you, but it occurs to me that this is at least roughly a testable hypothesis.

One idea I suggested a while back, half jokingly, is that it should be possible to make a group decision to revert to an earlier version of an article. Articles do degrade and it may sometimes be a good idea to recognise that the overall effect of recent edits has been to destroy what was good about the article.

Of course, right now, there's no real need for a group decision to do this. It's perfectly acceptable (if a bit bold) to dig back six months into the past and resurrect an older version of an article before it went downhill. "Something went badly off track back there, so I resurrected the old article and seek help in incorporating any positive changes from intervening versions in a way that doesn't make the article read like chopped liver" sounds like a great thing to write on the talk page.

Today I summarily removed the Featured Article status from an article, [[Iraqi insurgency]], because it's now such an unholy mess, with two competing versions each pushing a point of view, and full of unreferenced statements and opinions represented as fact. And yet that article survived a move to remove its featured status as recently as June, 2005. Assuming that the earlier version really was better than the mess that exists today, perhaps it would be as well to revert to that version and to find ways to incorporate later work on this current event without degrading it.

I agree completely.

--Jimbo

Tony Sidaway wrote:

I think you've put your finger on the problem there. The mechanisms by which Wikipedia articles improve and degrade are not fully understood, and there may well be some complex factors that we don't consider seriously enough.

But we can make a stab at guessing the main factor: entropy. An article that is edited frequently by many people will probably degrade quickly. An article that doesn't start out with a firm structure will not improve until a single person or a tightly organized group imposes such a structure. An article that is part of a series of similar articles that are edited by the same group of people will tend to have a structure similar to the others in the series.

Another factor is the tension between information and style. On the one hand we want to have lots of accurate information, on the other hand we want to have well-written, readable articles, and those two things aren't easy to bring in agreement. If you add facts, you'll likely ruin the style, and if you improve the style, you'll likely remove information. In popular articles, people care more about information, so the style is going to suffer.

What can be done about that? Reorganizing the facts while being careful not to remove any. And this is really hard, because you need to be familiar with all of the facts before you can successfully reorganize them, or you'll distort them.

Chris [[User:Chl]]

Fastfission wrote:

If [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] were wonderful, featured articles then he could have picked any of the dozens upon dozens of other biographies of major figures who haven't had a full editing treatment from many knowledgeable editors. The "find crappy articles on Wikipedia" game is not one we can ever win -- the person looking for crap will find it.

Yes, but these are not exactly obscure people. If he went and found an article on an obscure 13th century poet which was crap, I would be not quite as bothered. But Jane Fonda? Bill Gates?

These entries could be contentious, heavily edited, prone to vandalism, occassionally biased, etc., and I would be happier than I am right now. What I'm unhappy about is *bad writing*.

When people do that -- okay, there might be a real cause for concern. But if they're looking at articles which just haven't had the benefit of a swirl of interested and informed attention -- well, that's always going to be the majority of the encyclopedia in the way things are done here. There's no point in which the numbers on that will ever really change. Wikipedia is not going to ever be valued for its "completeness" or its "coherency" -- it will be valued for its intellectual property model, its breadth, its concept, its speed, and, in the end, some aspect of its "usefulness", which is a moving target.

Well, I don't agree. It is my intention that we be valued for completeness and coherency and "brilliant prose" *as well as* for being freely licensed, with magnificent breadth and speed and usefulness, etc.

--Jimbo

Fastfission wrote:

But clearly "obscurity" is not the factor which determines a good or bad article. Plenty of articles on obscure people are very good and plenty articles on very simple things can be quite bad. But still, he did not, of course, give any rationale for these two articles except that they exemplify the fact that Wikipedia is edited by amateurs and sometimes has spotty content. So what?

It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards quality. "So what?" So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's what.

But nobody's making excuses here. I'm just saying that you will always be able to find sore spots if you want to. If you believe in the Wikipedia way, what you do is try to fix them or call them to the attention to others. If you don't, then you write pissy articles about them.

I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of complaint should be. I think our response should be: hey, you know what, he's right! These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they aren't. Why? What can we do to improve?

If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is nothing to be done about it, then fine. But we should not just accept the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for improvement.

We're not making software, here -- just because some parts of it are spotty doesn't mean the entire package won't work. In that way we're a lot less restrained than the open source software projects and can afford to have a philosophy of eventualism.

I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.

--Jimbo

Delirium wrote:

Well, in principle, *all* our articles should be pretty decent, but we have nearly a million of them in en: now, so that takes some time. Even if you take only all high-profile articles, there's at least a few thousand of them, so the fact that someone can find 2 of those thousands that aren't very good at one particular moment in time isn't particularly convincing.

*nod* Ok, I see your point. What I wonder is if we could identify a particular class of articles and discover that they tend to be bad in a particular way and then do something about it.

In the case in hand, we have "Bill Gates" and "Jane Fonda" -- they are similar in that they are both living famous Americans who are controversial. The problems with the articles are similar in that the problem isn't so much bias or lack of factual accuracy, as it is bad writing.

Are the biographies of other living famous Americans who are controversial similarly godawful?

Here's a test: Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Ann Coulter

I wonder how those are, and I'll be studying them on the plane home tomorrow....

/me goes to download and save.

--Jimbo

On Sunday, October 9, 2005, at 09:40 AM, Delirium wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

In the case in hand, we have "Bill Gates" and "Jane Fonda" -- they are similar in that they are both living famous Americans who are controversial. The problems with the articles are similar in that the problem isn't so much bias or lack of factual accuracy, as it is bad writing.

Are the biographies of other living famous Americans who are controversial similarly godawful?

That makes sense. One other thing I'd find interesting but sadly don't have the time to check right now is whether there are better versions in the history. That is, are such articles consistently bad, or are they just very unstable so at any given moment they're likely to be bad even though good versions exist?

They've always been bad I think, LOL :).

Thanks, Ryan

[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org

On 10/8/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards quality. "So what?" So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's what.

Well, I'm all for aspiration, but I think in practice we cannot honestly suspect that people will not be able to find spotty articles when they want to. Even in publications with professionally trained, full-time editors this is a major problem (I say this as someone who in a previous life worked in a number of publishing and fact-checking jobs). In a situation where one is relying upon the volunteer and usually amateur labor of thousands of editors... it seems unavoidable. But of course that is just my gut sense of it.

I don't mean this to sound pessimistic. I think Wikipedia will always have a great many articles of very high quality. But I also think it will also have a great many articles of poor quality. This in no means should sound either discouraging or discouraged. I just think it's a fact of how a project of this sort will work in practice and I think it will be a constant tension. But let's not forget that tensions can be productive! The reason many editors (myself being one of them) got hooked on Wikipedia in the first place was discovering a sub-par article on something they knew about and, instead of writing off the whole idea, said "I can fix this!" and just never stopped.

I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of complaint should be. I think our response should be: hey, you know what, he's right! These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they aren't. Why? What can we do to improve?

If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is nothing to be done about it, then fine. But we should not just accept the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for improvement.

Well, I admit to making two major assumptions: 1. that the reason there will be spotty places like this is because of the wiki model itself and 2. that the wiki model has many other benefits and I wouldn't want to change it very much. You might be right in questioning my assumptions in the first case -- that this isn't something inherent to the model. It may of course be that my version of "the wiki model" is different than yours but I suspect it is not that different.

I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.

Okay, I agree with that. My "so what?" was only to the fact that Wikipedia sometimes has spotty content. I do somewhat suspect this is going to be inherent to the project -- at any given moment, there might be things which need work. But I could be very wrong on that, of course, and hopefully I am!

I don't think there's a massive "quality" problem that isn't to be expected from a system of this sort. I think the fact that there is some very high-quality work is proof enough that this system doesn't *necessarily* lead to poor or spotty content, which is what most of these critics generally seem to be implying.

It would be interesting, as a fact-finding exercise, for someone to sit down with the histories of these two articles as well as the histories of two featured articles and look at what the patterns of editing were and see if any generalizable conclusions could be drawn. I'm not sure if it would give any actionable policy, but could at least reduce the armchair philosophizing (which I'm of course always happy to take part in, being somewhat of a pedant).

FF