Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of late have seemed to take as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I, personally, disagree. I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It needs work, but it's good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since we went public with it. Sensible users can use it well.
But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I can take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to take it)...
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Anything that's absolutely vital that comes into being in those months will still be possible to write about in a few months, so there's no real rush. And a lot of the crap that we create by reflex will not get created and be pleasantly forgotten about. (Brian Peppers, anyone?) And we could easily make the red page text read something like "On XX/XX/XXXX suspended new article creation until XX/ XX/XXXX in order to better work on existing articles. If this is an important topic that has developed since we made this decision, you can probably find information on it by looking at existing articles on related topics."
We've suggested doing it for a day here and there. The heck with that. Let's do it for a long period of time so that the culture of fixing what we have becomes entrenched.
Or, I mean, we could decide that everything we've worked on this far is actually crap and create drastic proposals for how we could start over.
-Phil
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of late have seemed to take as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I, personally, disagree. I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It needs work, but it's good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since we went public with it. Sensible users can use it well.
But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I can take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to take it)...
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Anything that's absolutely vital that comes into being in those months will still be possible to write about in a few months, so there's no real rush. And a lot of the crap that we create by reflex will not get created and be pleasantly forgotten about. (Brian Peppers, anyone?) And we could easily make the red page text read something like "On XX/XX/XXXX suspended new article creation until XX/ XX/XXXX in order to better work on existing articles. If this is an important topic that has developed since we made this decision, you can probably find information on it by looking at existing articles on related topics."
We've suggested doing it for a day here and there. The heck with that. Let's do it for a long period of time so that the culture of fixing what we have becomes entrenched.
Or, I mean, we could decide that everything we've worked on this far is actually crap and create drastic proposals for how we could start over.
-Phil
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events. How do you think we should handle that?
On 31/03/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events. How do you think we should handle that?
Oh, we can invent a process. Give the "article creation right" flag to admins or bureaucrats or [some arbitrary respected group of people], have a process where new articles can be created in a short period if it's utterly essential, leave them to it with the understanding it really shouldn't be used much.
It's certainly nothing we can't solve just by fiddling the rules a little bit, and as we ourselves *make* the rules...
On 4/1/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of late have seemed to take as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I, personally, disagree. I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It needs work, but it's good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since we went public with it. Sensible users can use it well.
But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I can take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to take it)...
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
<snip/>
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events. How do you think we should handle that?
Oh, we can invent a process. Give the "article creation right" flag to admins or bureaucrats or [some arbitrary respected group of people], have a process where new articles can be created in a short period if it's utterly essential, leave them to it with the understanding it really shouldn't be used much.
It's certainly nothing we can't solve just by fiddling the rules a little bit, and as we ourselves *make* the rules...
Locking down new article creation while we do a cleanup is sensible; Afd would be less like a sewerage drain and we could then judge the status of the cleanup by the, hopefully diminishing, number of Afds being raised. This suggestion meshes very well with the other current activities like V 1.0 and stable revisions.
During this time, creation of new articles could be restricted to admins, and non-admins could use WP:AFC. It would be more tedious, but it would further encourage a culture of writing articles that fit within our policies and guidelines. Regular contributors can write userspace articles and submit them to WP:AFC in order to request that they are moved into the main namespace by an admin.
-- John
On 3/31/07, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Locking down new article creation while we do a cleanup is sensible; Afd would be less like a sewerage drain and we could then judge the status of the cleanup by the, hopefully diminishing, number of Afds being raised.
Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation is shut off.
During this time, creation of new articles could be restricted to admins, and non-admins could use WP:AFC.
They could use it as a temporary storage place, but if you're going to let people submit new articles through WP:AFC and then have admins create new articles based on those submissions, it seems you're just redirecting efforts from one type of creation to another, and adding more work in the process.
It would be more tedious, but it would further encourage a culture of writing articles that fit within our policies and guidelines. Regular contributors can write userspace articles and submit them to WP:AFC in order to request that they are moved into the main namespace by an admin.
I don't see the point of that. If you're going to stop article creation, stop it. Admins can still create or move articles if they feel there are special extenuating circumstances, but giving them the task of reviewing and approving ordinary article creations defeats the whole purpose, which is supposed to be to free people up to fix what's already there.
Anthony
On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation is shut off.
I think this would be a mistake. With the greater focus on already existing articles, it will actually increase the chance that people will find articles that should be deleted but have never really had enough attention payed to them to discover that.
Dycedarg wrote:
On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation is shut off.
I think this would be a mistake. With the greater focus on already existing articles, it will actually increase the chance that people will find articles that should be deleted but have never really had enough attention payed to them to discover that.
What's the rush? The really urgent stuff like copyvios will be deleted whether AfD is running or not. Flag the rest and come back to AfD them when the three months are over.
On 4/1/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 3/31/07, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Locking down new article creation while we do a cleanup is sensible; Afd would be less like a sewerage drain and we could then judge the status of the cleanup by the, hopefully diminishing, number of Afds being raised.
Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation is shut off.
We have enough crap already to keep Afd going for quite a while. My preference is too keep Afd running because I'm concerned that in its absence a lot of articles will be deleted using CSD. Even when justified, a prod type approach to deletion only notifies the existing editors. If the contributors who care are not regulars, the article will slip down the drain. WP:AFD has a sharp edge and related WikiProject mechanisms such as delsorting are an effective way to involve contributors that would not otherwise have been aware the article existed. It is that type of article that a cleanup effort needs to cater for.
I don't see the point of creating another suitable system of doing what AFD is intended to do: gathering consensus for deletion. Turning off the firehose will make AFD a happy place where we can take our time and focus on researching odd articles, cleaning up unsourced statements, and removing the articles that have no place on Wikipedia.
During this time, creation of new articles could be restricted to admins, and non-admins could use WP:AFC.
They could use it as a temporary storage place, but if you're going to let people submit new articles through WP:AFC and then have admins create new articles based on those submissions, it seems you're just redirecting efforts from one type of creation to another, and adding more work in the process.
In the event of a lock down, AFC could be restricted to a community defined criteria for new articles that are considered necessary during this period, e.g. current events. The rest can be rejected out of hand by ordinary editors before an admin needs to see it.
AFC would see more traffic, but it would be a pragmatic way to turn the hose down to a well defined trickle that can be adjusted as required to deal with new situations as they arise.
-- John
On 4/1/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 3/31/07, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Locking down new article creation while we do a cleanup is sensible; Afd would be less like a sewerage drain and we could then judge the status of the cleanup by the, hopefully diminishing, number of Afds being raised.
Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation is shut off.
During this time, creation of new articles could be restricted to admins, and non-admins could use WP:AFC.
They could use it as a temporary storage place, but if you're going to let people submit new articles through WP:AFC and then have admins create new articles based on those submissions, it seems you're just redirecting efforts from one type of creation to another, and adding more work in the process.
It would be more tedious, but it would further encourage a culture of writing articles that fit within our policies and guidelines. Regular contributors can write userspace articles and submit them to WP:AFC in order to request that they are moved into the main namespace by an admin.
I don't see the point of that. If you're going to stop article creation, stop it. Admins can still create or move articles if they feel there are special extenuating circumstances, but giving them the task of reviewing and approving ordinary article creations defeats the whole purpose, which is supposed to be to free people up to fix what's already there.
Anthony
I raised the point that during the time article creation is shut down, new topics (often current events) will arise that require articles. To not be 3 months behind after creation gets turned on again, we need some effort to keep up to date and to have admins do it is the most sensible choice.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events. How do you think we should handle that?
Admins can still create new articles as needed.
I called for a one-month moratorium on new articles in my blog recently (http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/03/notability-maintainability-and-quality.html). I found Kurt's comment there interesting: the German Wikipedia is apparently discussing a proposal to disable new article creation one week out of each month; this proposal is not faring well.
I suppose it is more fun to create than it is to maintain. Open source software has the same problem -- which is why there are hundreds of half-written IRC clients out there. The only way we got GIMP to 1.0 was to declare a "feature freeze" and to spend a couple of months doing nothing but killing bugs. Wikipedia needs to do essentially the same thing: stop adding new stuff until they get the old stuff organized, at least a bit more. Until they do, the bleeding will not stop.
Kelly
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
I'm not completely convinced, but don't forget images, if by some miracle this gets adopted. :)
Judson [[:en:User:Cohesion]]
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
I have a question concerning this: Is it possible in the software to lock down only article creation in the mainspace and nowhere else? After all, IP's can't create pages, and they can't create any normal (as opposed to talk) pages at all. If this wasn't the case, you'd either have to get the developers to program something, or deal with the hundreds of angry people who are used to randomly making new subpages in their userspace all the time, the new users who wouldn't have user pages at all, and project pages requiring new archives. I see nothing in any of the MediaWiki documentation about being able to restrict page creation by namespace, except for a distinction between normal pages and talk pages.
If this was technically possible or made possible, I'd definitely be in full support of it. It is completely and utterly impossible to increase the ratio of good articles to bad articles at the current exponential rate of article creation. The percentage of articles that qualify as good articles is dropping; from what I understand fairly rapidly too. Sure, creating crappy articles is more fun than fixing crappy articles, but which is better for the encyclopedia in the long run?
Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of late have seemed to
take
as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I, personally,
disagree.
I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It needs work, but
it's
good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since we went
public
with it. Sensible users can use it well.
But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I
can
take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to take it)...
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace
entirely
for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Anything that's absolutely vital that comes into being in those months will still be possible to write about in a few months, so there's no real rush. And a lot of the crap that we create by
reflex
will not get created and be pleasantly forgotten about. (Brian Peppers, anyone?) And we could easily make the red page text
read
something like "On XX/XX/XXXX suspended new article creation
until XX/
XX/XXXX in order to better work on existing articles. If this is
an
important topic that has developed since we made this decision,
you
can probably find information on it by looking at existing
articles
on related topics."
We've suggested doing it for a day here and there. The heck with that. Let's do it for a long period of time so that the culture
of
fixing what we have becomes entrenched.
Or, I mean, we could decide that everything we've worked on this
far
is actually crap and create drastic proposals for how we could
start
over.
-Phil
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's not a success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors, deeply frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.
And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except admins? Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have to manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only what, 1100 admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are already kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of processes which are already too often backlogged (and related stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose any new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a day onto their collective laps.
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation?
I agree. Volunteer effort is not transformable in that way. There is absolutely no proof WHATSOEVER that shutting down article creation will help our project at all. It's yet another manifestation of the belief that if you stop people doing what they want, they'll instead go off and do what YOU want.
This doesn't happen. If people can't do what they want, in a project MOSTLY CREATED BY OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTORS, they'll simply leave.
The only people steerable in such a way are regular contributors. We do need to find ways to encourage those deeply committed to the project to waste less time dealing with crap that doesn't matter. Encourage, not force.
-Matt
Matthew Brown wrote:
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation?
I agree. Volunteer effort is not transformable in that way. There is absolutely no proof WHATSOEVER that shutting down article creation will help our project at all. It's yet another manifestation of the belief that if you stop people doing what they want, they'll instead go off and do what YOU want.
This doesn't happen. If people can't do what they want, in a project MOSTLY CREATED BY OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTORS, they'll simply leave.
The only people steerable in such a way are regular contributors. We do need to find ways to encourage those deeply committed to the project to waste less time dealing with crap that doesn't matter. Encourage, not force.
-Matt
It's possible I missed something...but I thought the proposal was to shut off article creation *for a while* while launching a major clean-up effort. Of course, some people who like to create articles will not turn instead to cleanup. But some of those who are currently doing cleanup, including newly created articles, would be able to focus on other things.
I'm not sure it's a good idea. But it's not a suggestion for an indefinite change, but for a temporary pause in new articles. Something quite different.
-Rich
Rich Holton wrote:
I'm not sure it's a good idea. But it's not a suggestion for an indefinite change, but for a temporary pause in new articles. Something quite different.
Disabling article creation for anonymous users was supposed to be "just an experiment" too and it's still in place over a year later despite no analysis ever being done. I can understand people being concerned about this experiment winding up the same way.
On 3/31/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Disabling article creation for anonymous users was supposed to be "just an experiment" too and it's still in place over a year later despite no analysis ever being done. I can understand people being concerned about this experiment winding up the same way.
I'm concerned it will be done simply because people want to try SOMETHING, without really thinking through the actual effects and without doing any real testing to make sure it helps. Meanwhile, every time I think that some content would work better in a new article I can't do it. Every time someone finds a crucial hole in our coverage they won't be able to add it. Many of those people won't come back.
I have a great deal of caution about the urge to 'do something'. Things done just to 'do something' tend to be poorly thought out and lacking in results and lacking in research to see if they actually did any good.
-Matt
Anon page creation was shut down with no specific re-enable date mentioned. That's quite different from this proposal.
Mgm
On 4/1/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Rich Holton wrote:
I'm not sure it's a good idea. But it's not a suggestion for an indefinite change, but for a temporary pause in new articles. Something quite different.
Disabling article creation for anonymous users was supposed to be "just an experiment" too and it's still in place over a year later despite no analysis ever being done. I can understand people being concerned about this experiment winding up the same way.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's not a success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors, deeply frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.
And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except admins? Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have to manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only what, 1100 admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are already kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of processes which are already too often backlogged (and related stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose any new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a day onto their collective laps.
This is pretty much a complete misinterpretation of the proposal. Let me outline it for you: A. This would be a very temporary change. This would last for a few months in an attempt to rejuvenate clean-up efforts, and then go away forever. B. This would not be an attempt to filter all new pages through the admins using some uber-beefed up AfC. There would be no new articles whatsoever. Zero. Zip. Nada. The only very few and far between exceptions would be those necessary to maintain our coverage of recent events, such as hurricanes, floods, wars, and other natural/not so natural disasters. Admins would only make new pages if it was patently obvious that we need such an article immediately. Any request for an article that is not necessary for such coverage would be ignored and deleted on sight.
I would agree that the overall number of edits would drop as people who typically only create new pages took a wikibreak. But I believe that enough would remain that the concentration of their efforts on the remaining articles could be of a large amount of benefit. In fact: Even if the amount of edits improving current articles remained constant, and no work was redirected at all, the fact that all the work that usually goes into stubbifying, prodding, CSDing, AfDing, wikifying, and all the rest of what is necessary to make the brand new articles serviceable could now instead be devoted to making the rest of the encyclopedia better, means that in my opinion the over-all result would be positive. If anyone simply can't wait another second before starting work on a new article, than they can make it in their userspace and work on it until they can put it in mainspace again. The draft will no doubt be all the better for it anyway.
Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com writes:
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from
locking
down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's
not a
success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors,
deeply
frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.
And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except admins? Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have
to
manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only what, 1100 admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are
already
kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of processes which are already too often backlogged (and related stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose
any
new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a
day
onto their collective laps.
This is pretty much a complete misinterpretation of the
proposal.
Let me outline it for you: A. This would be a very temporary change. This would last for a
few months
in an attempt to rejuvenate clean-up efforts, and then go away
forever.
B. This would not be an attempt to filter all new pages through
the admins
using some uber-beefed up AfC. There would be no new articles
whatsoever.
Zero. Zip. Nada. The only very few and far between exceptions
would be those
necessary to maintain our coverage of recent events, such as
hurricanes,
floods, wars, and other natural/not so natural disasters. Admins
would only
make new pages if it was patently obvious that we need such an
article
immediately. Any request for an article that is not necessary
for such
coverage would be ignored and deleted on sight.
I would agree that the overall number of edits would drop as
people who
typically only create new pages took a wikibreak. But I believe
that enough
would remain that the concentration of their efforts on the
remaining
articles could be of a large amount of benefit. In fact: Even if
the amount
of edits improving current articles remained constant, and no
work was
redirected at all, the fact that all the work that usually goes
into
stubbifying, prodding, CSDing, AfDing, wikifying, and all the
rest of what
is necessary to make the brand new articles serviceable could
now instead be
devoted to making the rest of the encyclopedia better, means
that in my
opinion the over-all result would be positive. If anyone simply
can't wait
another second before starting work on a new article, than they
can make it
in their userspace and work on it until they can put it in
mainspace again.
The draft will no doubt be all the better for it anyway.
--
Dycedarg
As another editor has pointed out, temporary things which affect the entire wiki have a way of becoming permanent.
Even if it truly turns out to be temporary, we already have good reason to believe that it would not do any good at all
As for the drop: it is obvious to foresee, but do you really think that the shift of effort will be somehow so astronomically valuable as to compensate for the certain loss of thousands of man-hours, both temporarily/for the duration of the lockdown and long-term as people leave to never return and other people simply avoid ever joining? This is either extraordinarily optimistic or extraordinarily paranoid.
There are many considerations here: legal, cultural, PR (there is no way to spin this positively), and so on. All of them militate against this proposal, and only fluffy hopes that it really would be a net benefit are offered in return.
If this was to be implemented it would be for a limited amount of time and applied for creation of a specific set of articles. It is not to give admins more powers, it is to focus the attention of editors on fixing existing articles instead of creating new articles. It is easier to fix what we have if there isn't a constant influx of new material that doesn't get the eyes it needs.
Mgm
On 4/1/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
Many of the proposals to "fix" Wikipedia of late have seemed to
take
as a premise that what we've done is wrong. I, personally,
disagree.
I think we've got a pretty good encyclopedia. It needs work, but
it's
good enough to go public with, which, thank God, since we went
public
with it. Sensible users can use it well.
But if we really do want to speed up its improvement (which I
can
take or leave, but everyone else seems desperate to take it)...
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace
entirely
for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Anything that's absolutely vital that comes into being in those months will still be possible to write about in a few months, so there's no real rush. And a lot of the crap that we create by
reflex
will not get created and be pleasantly forgotten about. (Brian Peppers, anyone?) And we could easily make the red page text
read
something like "On XX/XX/XXXX suspended new article creation
until XX/
XX/XXXX in order to better work on existing articles. If this is
an
important topic that has developed since we made this decision,
you
can probably find information on it by looking at existing
articles
on related topics."
We've suggested doing it for a day here and there. The heck with that. Let's do it for a long period of time so that the culture
of
fixing what we have becomes entrenched.
Or, I mean, we could decide that everything we've worked on this
far
is actually crap and create drastic proposals for how we could
start
over.
-Phil
This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation? It's not a success by any standards - it's led to burnt out editors, deeply frustrated and well-meaning outsiders, and an arcane submission process that is slow, glitchy, and doesn't scale! There is no evidence whatsoever that AfC has helped Wikipedia: no evidence that it has encouraged people to focus on articles.
And now you want to disable page creation for everyone except admins? Besides the obvious aspect of adding yet another thing only admins and other higher ups can do, with ramifications for the culture and legally (if this goes through, and admins have to manually approve each article, will Wikipedia pass from being a host capable of claiming DMCA safe harbor to a publisher exercising editorial control and discretion over posting of new articles?), this simply won't scale. There are only what, 1100 admins, and how many of them are active? 900? Admins are already kind of busy with deletions and page moves and other sort of processes which are already too often backlogged (and related stuff like OTRS). We should be very very reluctant to propose any new process which could dump literally thousands of entries a day onto their collective laps.
-- Gwern Inquiring minds want to know.
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MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
If this was to be implemented it would be for a limited amount of time and applied for creation of a specific set of articles. It is not to give admins more powers, it is to focus the attention of editors on fixing existing articles instead of creating new articles. It is easier to fix what we have if there isn't a constant influx of new material that doesn't get the eyes it needs.
Adding new limits to everyone except admins is IMO no different in practical terms from giving admins more powers.
On 4/1/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
If this was to be implemented it would be for a limited amount of time
and
applied for creation of a specific set of articles. It is not to give
admins
more powers, it is to focus the attention of editors on fixing existing articles instead of creating new articles. It is easier to fix what we
have
if there isn't a constant influx of new material that doesn't get the
eyes
it needs.
Adding new limits to everyone except admins is IMO no different in practical terms from giving admins more powers.
Assuming this does get implemented, how do you suggest we handle current event articles if not in the way I suggested?
Mgm
On 01/04/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/1/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Adding new limits to everyone except admins is IMO no different in practical terms from giving admins more powers.
Assuming this does get implemented, how do you suggest we handle current event articles if not in the way I suggested?
I would answer: don't bother, because it will be such an utter clusterfuck and PR disaster (relevant since it's basically a PR-driven initiative) that the fine details really don't matter.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
I would answer: don't bother, because it will be such an utter clusterfuck and PR disaster (relevant since it's basically a PR-driven initiative) that the fine details really don't matter.
I hadn't thought about it in that light, but you're completely right.
It would be a major tech news story, and a lot of them wouldn't be positive. It could be easily written as a "Wikipedia admits Wikipedia model a failure" story. Even friendly ones would ask why, and the headline could well end up as "Wikipedia bans new articles after 'ruining lives'".
That's not to say it isn't the right thing to do if the model really is a failure. But I'm not there yet.
William
On 4/1/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
I would answer: don't bother, because it will be such an utter clusterfuck and PR disaster (relevant since it's basically a PR-driven initiative) that the fine details really don't matter.
I hadn't thought about it in that light, but you're completely right.
It would be a major tech news story, and a lot of them wouldn't be positive. It could be easily written as a "Wikipedia admits Wikipedia model a failure" story. Even friendly ones would ask why, and the headline could well end up as "Wikipedia bans new articles after 'ruining lives'".
That's not to say it isn't the right thing to do if the model really is a failure. But I'm not there yet.
William
I disagree entirely, it could quite easily be spun positively. "Wikipedia changes focus to fixing errors." That's already what Jimbo's been saying, so it's not much of a change. Yes, perhaps we'd lose some people, but what about the thousands of people who've heard about how unreliable Wikipedia is because of all the news stories about how we fucked up somewhere? We need a better reputation, and the only way to get that is to fix our problems. No, we might not get a shift of contributions from new article creation to cleaning up, and many of those people might stop contributing altogether until the lock is lifted, but it still gives the cleaning crews time to catch up. Right now, thousands upon thousands of articles need fixing, and that grows every day. If we can get that down to a reasonable level, we might be able to keep up with the new articles later, instead of sticking them in a category for a year before they're first looked at.
I find the emphasis on PR troubling. Wikipedia is a work in progress and is emphatically not finished. We won't be able to fake this convincingly anyway, so why are we thinking of trying?
-Matt
Yes, it's a work in progress, but to actually be "in progress" you need to make progress and articles being stuck in a category for more than a year or even 2 isn't progress.
On 4/2/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I find the emphasis on PR troubling. Wikipedia is a work in progress and is emphatically not finished. We won't be able to fake this convincingly anyway, so why are we thinking of trying?
-Matt
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On 4/2/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I find the emphasis on PR troubling. Wikipedia is a work in progress and is emphatically not finished. We won't be able to fake this convincingly anyway, so why are we thinking of trying?
Because after 6 years, we have reached the End of History.
On 4/2/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/2/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I find the emphasis on PR troubling. Wikipedia is a work in progress and is emphatically not finished. We won't be able to fake this convincingly anyway, so why are we thinking of trying?
Because after 6 years, we have reached the End of History.
Heh.
I think some don't realise (because they don't work in the right areas) just how incomplete Wikipedia is in many topic areas, and thus how damaging shutting down article creation would be. In their view, Wikipedia already contains pretty much all the articles it needs and thus article creation is something only harmful (because all new articles are unencyclopedic cruft anyway).
-Matt
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
On 4/1/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Adding new limits to everyone except admins is IMO no different in practical terms from giving admins more powers.
Assuming this does get implemented, how do you suggest we handle current event articles if not in the way I suggested?
I can't think of another way offhand. What I'm saying is that if we go ahead with this, this is how I think it'll be perceived. So, I guess I'm coming down pretty firmly now in the "this is not a good idea" camp.
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Because things happen every day that deserve to be documented, and there are always people who want to do so. Don't force them to try to do what you want.
There are much softer solutions to get people's attention. For example:
A simple notice:
"We have 1,715,464 articles in English. Why not bring an existing one up to [[featured article status]]?"
on the new article creation page.
A contest announced through the site notice for registered users.
A "how to make Wikipedia better today" newsletter
Making an "Improvement of the month" part of the Main Page for readers, which would also raise awareness of what Wikipedia represents.
Organizing face-to-face meetups with a focus on actual research & work -- perhaps by making them focused on topics, or WikiProjects.
E-mail newsletters of the "how you can help Wikipedia today" type. Real-time collaborations with Gobby. Topic-oriented mailing lists and IRC channels.
Be creative. Locking article creation is not.
On 4/1/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Be creative. Locking article creation is not.
Peace & Love, Erik
I don't know. I'd certainly call it creative, but as with anything it has its negative sides. The ideas you presented are good too, but don't address the fact that with the constant stream of articles coming in, cleanup efforts aren't scaling. It takes a LOT more time to properly reference an article than to write an unsourced new one and if nothing is done to address the difference, cleanup efforts won't ever have a chance of catching up.
Of course, reaching that point is a pipe dream, but with several thousands of articles being unsourced or containing dubious statements tagged (probably a fraction of the real number) and that number going up all the time, efforts need to be made that help cleanup efforts catch up with creation efforts.
Mgm
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Because things happen every day that deserve to be documented, and there are always people who want to do so. Don't force them to try to do what you want.
There are much softer solutions to get people's attention. For example:
A simple notice:
"We have 1,715,464 articles in English. Why not bring an existing one up to [[featured article status]]?"
on the new article creation page.
A contest announced through the site notice for registered users.
A "how to make Wikipedia better today" newsletter
Making an "Improvement of the month" part of the Main Page for readers, which would also raise awareness of what Wikipedia represents.
Organizing face-to-face meetups with a focus on actual research & work -- perhaps by making them focused on topics, or WikiProjects.
E-mail newsletters of the "how you can help Wikipedia today" type. Real-time collaborations with Gobby. Topic-oriented mailing lists and IRC channels.
Be creative. Locking article creation is not.
Trying to "be creative":
How about locking article creation for everyone one day a week? Or one day in 5? or 10?
Keeping up with current events becomes much less of an issue. It resembles the sort of routine that many people are familiar with (where, for example, they do not work on weekends). And it would allow for some time to "catch up".
Of course, it would not have the immediate degree of impact that locking page creation for 3 months would have--but that includes both desirable and undesirable impact.
-Rich
On 01/04/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Trying to "be creative":
How about locking article creation for everyone one day a week? Or one day in 5? or 10?
Oooh. "Maintenance Saturdays". A rather interesting idea.
On 4/1/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Because things happen every day that deserve to be documented, and there are always people who want to do so. Don't force them to try to do what you want.
There are much softer solutions to get people's attention. For example:
A simple notice:
"We have 1,715,464 articles in English. Why not bring an existing one up to [[featured article status]]?"
on the new article creation page.
A contest announced through the site notice for registered users.
A "how to make Wikipedia better today" newsletter
Making an "Improvement of the month" part of the Main Page for readers, which would also raise awareness of what Wikipedia represents.
Organizing face-to-face meetups with a focus on actual research & work -- perhaps by making them focused on topics, or WikiProjects.
E-mail newsletters of the "how you can help Wikipedia today" type. Real-time collaborations with Gobby. Topic-oriented mailing lists and IRC channels.
Be creative. Locking article creation is not.
Trying to "be creative":
How about locking article creation for everyone one day a week? Or one day in 5? or 10?
Keeping up with current events becomes much less of an issue. It resembles the sort of routine that many people are familiar with (where, for example, they do not work on weekends). And it would allow for some time to "catch up".
Of course, it would not have the immediate degree of impact that locking page creation for 3 months would have--but that includes both desirable and undesirable impact.
-Rich
Even an addicted Wikipedian can simply not edit for one day of the week if they only want to create new pages. It may help administrators with cleaning backlogs, but when a lockdown isn't long enough it won't help people catch up.
Say for example we use Sunday as the off-day and let's assume for a moment that I spend 8 hours here. If I want to do some serious research to reference an article it may take anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour. In the best of cases that would mean I can source 32 articles if I go at it for an entire day.
It would be a drop on a hot plate.
Last time I read about the stats for this, there were 55000 articles with citation needed templates alone (that's not counting entirely unsourced articles which are at least another 50000). To get rid of both, we'd need 100000/32 = 3125 Wikipedians who know where to find the relevant sources working a whole day to get rid of the existing backlog. The WikiProject for factchecking doesn't have enough members and I doubt everyone is willing to make an effort to do this for a full working day.
In the other six days in which creation wouldn't be locked down we'd have at least 2500 new pages created a day (those are the ones that survive) many of which need sources added (that is 6x2500=15000 new entries that need vetting every week) A oneday creation block simply wouldn't be enough to get rid of the backlog or even lighten it in any sort of meaningful manner with the amount of material coming in during the days where the wikipedians doing the checking are busy with other stuff.
Mgm
A less drastic solution would be to disable new user accounts. This would limit the number of new articles, and especially the ones that are the greatest maintenance burden, especially unsourced articles, and would not significantly impair our ability to cover current events or inhibit people who are quite capable of creating sound articles. Even if the limit were only a week, this would still be time for the person to get familiar with how to edit Wikipedia; we should stress the idea that Wikipedia is not a dumping ground, that if you are creating an article it should not be crap, that it should at least have the rudiments of what is necessary for someone else to improve it, and most importantly that you should not leave something undone if it would take you 5 minutes to do it but it would take someone unfamiliar with the topic and the article 20 minutes.
On 4/1/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Any proposal based on an assumption like "people spend X hours a week working on Wikipedia, and if only we could stop them wasting those X hours working on something silly" is flawed. If you stopped me creating new articles, I'd probably just get pissed off and leave.
Steve
On 4/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/1/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Any proposal based on an assumption like "people spend X hours a week working on Wikipedia, and if only we could stop them wasting those X hours working on something silly" is flawed. If you stopped me creating new articles, I'd probably just get pissed off and leave.
If I was stopped from creating new articles, I probably wouldn't be that pissed off (okay, who am I kidding, I would) but no matter what I'd stop creating new articles.
If you don't get it, my point is that would be A Bad Thing. How many redlinks are there in Wikipedia?
Hmmmmmmmm?
On 4/3/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
If you don't get it, my point is that would be A Bad Thing. How many redlinks are there in Wikipedia?
Hmmmmmmmm?
Few than you'd think. Most problem new articles are orphans. Indeed preventing the creation of orphans would be a potential option.
On 4/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/1/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Any proposal based on an assumption like "people spend X hours a week working on Wikipedia, and if only we could stop them wasting those X hours working on something silly" is flawed.
I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that the people who spend X hours a week *cleaning up* new articles, would be perfectly content cleaning up existing articles instead.
But that leads me to an idea. What if new article creation was still allowed, but only logged in users could see those new articles? This might be enough to put those new articles into a lower-priority bin while still allowing those who *want* to work on them the freedom to do so.
One problem is this really doesn't lend itself to a "three months only" solution. Another problem is who would be allowed move articles into the full public view, and under what rules? If the solution winds up creating more work than the problem, then it's not really a solution. The final problem is, it requires code, albeit probably not that much.
I don't know if I support this idea or not. I'm presenting it as a brainstorming activity, not as a proposal.
Anthony
These seem like good ideas for someone to try on a fork of Wikipedia. Kind of like John Galt leading the few good Objectivists into the mountains to get away from the dreck of common human civilization.
I'm not even being sarcastic; I think forks off of Wikipedia trying radically different models for content creation and management are healthy.
On 4/4/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 4/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/1/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing articles.
Any proposal based on an assumption like "people spend X hours a week working on Wikipedia, and if only we could stop them wasting those X hours working on something silly" is flawed.
I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that the people who spend X hours a week *cleaning up* new articles, would be perfectly content cleaning up existing articles instead.
But that leads me to an idea. What if new article creation was still allowed, but only logged in users could see those new articles? This might be enough to put those new articles into a lower-priority bin while still allowing those who *want* to work on them the freedom to do so.
One problem is this really doesn't lend itself to a "three months only" solution. Another problem is who would be allowed move articles into the full public view, and under what rules? If the solution winds up creating more work than the problem, then it's not really a solution. The final problem is, it requires code, albeit probably not that much.
I don't know if I support this idea or not. I'm presenting it as a brainstorming activity, not as a proposal.
Anthony
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