*sigh* it only sent it to mgm.
On 9/20/05, Phroziac phroziac@gmail.com wrote:
..if you look at the test, you will see that it's not blank, but has a nice template explaining what the deal is, and has a link to both versions on it. That's not very hard to find the content..
On 9/20/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Right all a disgrunted POV warrior needs to do is cause a fuzz and we need to click through different versions to see which is the one we're looking for. Have you thought about how a blank page looks to the public. If they've got problems reading headers on the Help desk, I don't expect them to look any further when the page is blanked. We'd get daily complaints that things are missing.
--Mgm
On 9/20/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/20/05, Phroziac phroziac@gmail.com wrote:
I have written a proposal which basically suggests blanking protected pages, and leaving a template on them that kinda combines {{protected}} and {{twoversions}}. You can see it at [[WP:NVP]], or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_version_protection
Please keep discussion of this on the relevant talk page, to avoid fragmentation.
I support this proposal only if we link to both versions of the article in question, thereby giving all parties in the dispute the perfect opportunity to go fork themselves.
OK, that wasn't serious at all. No discussion here, I'll save it for the project page.
-- Michael Turley User:Unfocused _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
It might be nicely linked but it's just another two links too many visitors have to go through. People, especially newbies are notoriously bad at finding stuff even if it's staring them in the face (aka Help desk instructions). Such a thing as this is only going to cause more problems than it's solving.
Protection one version over the other (without paying too much attention what version it's protected on encourages at least one of the parties to discuss.
--Mgm
For those looking for your daily dose of VfD (Because, really, why pretend changing V to A changed anything) abuse, I submit for your amusement http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/
Which is deleted at 60%, with one of the delete votes being very weak. When someone sensibly objected to deleting at 60%, which is considerably below the MINIMAL and highly disputed 2/3 threshold, and undeleted...
A delete/undelete war started.
Yes, there was a fairly conclusive VfU that said keep deleted. But as has been noted, VfU is exceedingly deferent to VfD, such that bad calls on VfD have no real recourse.
Adding to the problem is the fact that we're apparently adding a condition of extreme deference to the closing admin, which means that the final fate of articles is more or less being single-handedly decided by whether or not the closing admin happens to be of the 2/3 flavor, the 60% flavor, the 75% flavor, the "I just delete what I feel like" flavor, or what.
If nothing else, we should accept that deletion will be handled like blocking, with objections to deletion being taken very seriously, and with admins being given a wide latitude to undelete what they see as bad closings.
To summarize, there are two key problems that NEED to be addressed, and that exist outside of whether one is an inclusionist, a deletionist, or a big blue frog.
1) AfD is simply too busy for the statement "Any good article that is nominated for AfD will be noticed by someone within five days" to be plausible, leading to a high probability that the generally deletionist tendencies on AfD will delete articles that, by most reasonable standards of the Wikipedia community at large, would be kept.
2) The closing procedures for AfD and subsequent appeals processes are heavily biased towards deletion, meaning that the only time that noticing and objecting to a good article being nominated is useful is in the first five days.
-Snowspinner
Snow spinner stated for the record:
For those looking for your daily dose of VfD (Because, really, why pretend changing V to A changed anything) abuse, I submit for your amusement http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/
A Slate article was deleted? What does an article on pr0n have to do with Wikipedia?
I'm so confused....
Whoops. Wrong thing on my clipboard, apparently.
Here's the actual thing I'm bitching about: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_gags_in_Airplane%21
-Snowspinner
On Sep 20, 2005, at 12:02 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:
Snow spinner stated for the record:
For those looking for your daily dose of VfD (Because, really, why pretend changing V to A changed anything) abuse, I submit for your amusement http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/
A Slate article was deleted? What does an article on pr0n have to do with Wikipedia?
I'm so confused....
On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Whoops. Wrong thing on my clipboard, apparently.
Here's the actual thing I'm bitching about: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_gags_in_Airplane%21
-Snowspinner
On the other hand the VFU appears to be a pretty strong consensus.
A couple of days ago I was on the verge of taking this matter very seriously.
Then I looked at the net growth rate of the Wikipedia page count. Around 1500 new pages per day remaining undeleted after seven days. I compared it to the sclerotic maximum capacity of Articles for Deletion (AfD) (average of 112 listings per day early June to early September) and the fact that AfD participants complain bitterly about their inability to keep up with AfD at present.
Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable articles, and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will decrease in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible extension of speedy deletion.
Perhaps requiring editors to sit a short examination on deletion policy would help to keep inappropriate nominations down and increase the overall capacity of AfD, but this would not address the problem of scale.
We should speedily delete obvious rubbish, and we do. In time this manual mechanism may be augmented by cooperative RC (recent changes) monitoring tools, which would improve our efficiency.
But AfD is already swamped by growth and this will only get worse. Correcting its strong exclusionist bias and restoring its connection with the deletion policy would not solve its fundamental brokenness.
On Sep 20, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
But AfD is already swamped by growth and this will only get worse. Correcting its strong exclusionist bias and restoring its connection with the deletion policy would not solve its fundamental brokenness.
I agree wholeheartedly. Among other things, I think deletion policy is always going to have to be adaptive, because, like the blocking policy, stupid will always find new and previously unimagined ways to exist. Ultimately, the deletion policy, like the blocking policy, amounts to endless iterations of "Stop things that hurt Wikipedia without preventing anything beneficial to Wikipedia." Which is to say, we cannot sensibly connect the deletion policy to anything as a set of rigid rules, because all that will obtain is a system designed to be gamed.
AfD has two deeply seated problems.
1) It is unmanageably big, and will only get bigger. 2) The case for deletion can usually be made with a cursory look at the article. The case for inclusion often requires mildly substantive research using non-Wikipedia sources. Thus deletion is always going to be a fundamentally easier case to argue.
Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less than the inclusionists.
-Snowspinner
On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less than the inclusionists.
Actually my conclusion is the opposite, from more or less the same set of observations.
Firstly, as Wikipedia grows larger at an accelerating rate, the likelihood of a given article ever being listed for deletion diminishes. AfD is not growing in size, it seems to have stabilized, while I presume that the article growth rate rises.
Secondly, while it is true that it's harder to make the case against deletion, a consensus is not required to avoid deletion.
Thirdly, an article that is salvageable can be improved with a small amount of effort during the discussion, and this has an immense effect on the result of the debate.
Exclusionism may become more popular, because it appeals as a quick fix to feelings that the project is growing beyond control.
However the same accelerating growth ensures that exclusionism confined to AfD can only have a diminishing influence on the overall end product, as a smaller proportion of both incoming new articles and of existing, established articles, falls within the limited reach of AfD.
On Sep 20, 2005, at 1:56 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Thus it will always be the case that AfD becomes unmanageable, and that the unmanageability affects the exclusionists noticably less than the inclusionists.
Actually my conclusion is the opposite, from more or less the same set of observations.
The problem is that this leads to an inclusionist position with a substantial and non-trivial exclusionist force that goes and mucks things up. The result is, I think, bad, and bad in a way that is still exclusionist. The result is that, instead of a consistent exclusionism, we have an inconsistent one - some number of articles will get deleted, those articles will stay deleted regardless of the arguments to the contrary, and those articles will be selected more or less at random.
-Snowspinner
On 9/20/05, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is that this leads to an inclusionist position with a substantial and non-trivial exclusionist force that goes and mucks things up. The result is, I think, bad, and bad in a way that is still exclusionist. The result is that, instead of a consistent exclusionism, we have an inconsistent one - some number of articles will get deleted, those articles will stay deleted regardless of the arguments to the contrary, and those articles will be selected more or less at random.
Well there is a substantial exclusionist faction on Wikipedia. While they obviously don't enjoy consensus support (viz: Deletion policy, history of organised attempts to exclude articles about schools, pikachu, cartoons, etc) they're entitled to express their views.
Wikipedia isn't supposed to have a consistent policy. It's just supposed to make decisions we can live with, even if we need to grit out teeth.
I suspect that the more exclusionist a position one takes about wikipedia content, the more likely one is to have resource to gritting one's teeth. Wikipedia is filling up with articles about animators, books, radio DJs, episodes of old TV shows, drinking games, jokes, and all manner of subjects that would probably not make it into a paper encyclopedia.
This process is inexorable. In the absence of widespread uproar at this massive influx of articles on obscure subjects, the exclusionist position is unsalvageable. By default, we have created an aggressively inclusionist encyclopedia.
There are no effective policy tools by which this situation could be reversed.
On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
A couple of days ago I was on the verge of taking this matter very seriously.
Then I looked at the net growth rate of the Wikipedia page count. Around 1500 new pages per day remaining undeleted after seven days. I compared it to the sclerotic maximum capacity of Articles for Deletion (AfD) (average of 112 listings per day early June to early September) and the fact that AfD participants complain bitterly about their inability to keep up with AfD at present.
Tony's observation reminds me of a question I've pondered off & on over the last couple of months, which I'm adding to the mail list on the off chance someone may want to study it.
Simply put: is there a point in Wikipedia's size where it's current growth will taper off or stop? I don't mean to repeat the old chestnut that knowledge is somehow finite: put in different words, is there a certain point where contributors will find it far easier to work on existing articles than to contribute new ones?
(This is a problem that I doubt we'll encounter until Wikipedia reaches somewhere between 5 & 10 million articles, but I think it is a potential problem.)
Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable articles, and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will decrease in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible extension of speedy deletion.
If there is such a tipping point, we may find that AfD (in whatever form it has at the time) not only will be able to keep up with the flow, but may actually reduce the size of Wikipedia!
Nevertheless, I admit Tony addresses a problem that will likely be seen far sooner than mine.
Geoff
On 9/20/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
is there a certain point where contributors will find it far easier to work on existing articles than to contribute new ones? (This is a problem that I doubt we'll encounter until Wikipedia reaches somewhere between 5 & 10 million articles, but I think it is a potential problem.) If there is such a tipping point, we may find that AfD (in whatever form it has at the time) not only will be able to keep up with the flow, but may actually reduce the size of Wikipedia!
If this should ever become a serious problem, the GFDL ensures that the information removed can be copied and retained indefinitely.
Folks,
There is no potential tipping point that I can see for information being added to the system other than the capacity of the system to organise and retrieve information.
The reason I say this is that we see:
- at least one national, provincial or even municipal election held a week on average with new people being elected; - albums, movies and books being released each week; - musicians, actors, directors and authors becoming notable as a result of above regularly; - launch of notable new companies and businesses through IPOs and other processes; - a steady flow of scientific discoveries ; - notable national disasters occurring regularly (we have had two very significant ones occur within twelve months in the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina); and - regular launch of notable new products.
The only potential limit is the capacity of the system to organise and retrieve such information.
Keith aka Capitalistroadster
On 9/21/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
A couple of days ago I was on the verge of taking this matter very seriously.
Then I looked at the net growth rate of the Wikipedia page count. Around 1500 new pages per day remaining undeleted after seven days. I compared
it
to the sclerotic maximum capacity of Articles for Deletion (AfD)
(average of
112 listings per day early June to early September) and the fact that
AfD
participants complain bitterly about their inability to keep up with AfD
at
present.
Tony's observation reminds me of a question I've pondered off & on over the last couple of months, which I'm adding to the mail list on the off chance someone may want to study it.
Simply put: is there a point in Wikipedia's size where it's current growth will taper off or stop? I don't mean to repeat the old chestnut that knowledge is somehow finite: put in different words, is there a certain point where contributors will find it far easier to work on existing articles than to contribute new ones?
(This is a problem that I doubt we'll encounter until Wikipedia reaches somewhere between 5 & 10 million articles, but I think it is a potential problem.)
Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable
articles,
and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will
decrease
in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible extension of speedy deletion.
If there is such a tipping point, we may find that AfD (in whatever form it has at the time) not only will be able to keep up with the flow, but may actually reduce the size of Wikipedia!
Nevertheless, I admit Tony addresses a problem that will likely be seen far sooner than mine.
Geoff
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On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
We should speedily delete obvious rubbish, and we do.
No, we don't. A ton of obvious rubbish must be sent to AfD because it's not covered by the CSD. Band vanity is the most obvious example, but there are many others, such as: neologisms, corporate vanity, personal essays/rants. No one can give any good reason why these should be deliberated upon, but they are, all in the name of making sure we never, ever delete a good article by accident; even if that means making editors who could be using their time to write articles deliberate on the merits of garbage.
- Ryan
On 9/20/05, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:
No, we don't. A ton of obvious rubbish must be sent to AfD because it's not covered by the CSD. Band vanity is the most obvious example, but there are many others, such as: neologisms, corporate vanity, personal essays/rants.
A lot of that rubbish is being deleted speedily anyway, regardless of what the CSD policy says. WP:IAR gets used a lot by new page patrollers, at least those with deletion rights. If all the admins who speedily delete non-CSD rubbish stopped, AFD would be groaning that much more.
Kelly
On 9/20/05, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
We should speedily delete obvious rubbish, and we do.
No, we don't. A ton of obvious rubbish must be sent to AfD because it's not covered by the CSD. Band vanity is the most obvious example, but there are many others, such as: neologisms, corporate vanity, personal essays/rants. No one can give any good reason why these should be deliberated upon, but they are, all in the name of making sure we never, ever delete a good article by accident; even if that means making editors who could be using their time to write articles deliberate on the merits of garbage.
- Ryan
Yes, of course you're right, though I agree with Kelly that RC patrol is
the most frequent user of IAR.
Afd does fulfil a need by letting us delete vanity and rants with a clean conscience, you're quite right. What I'm saying, and I'm sorry I have to repeat this, is that whatever it is that AfD does, it doesn't scale.
By the way, impressions can be deceptive. I just looked at AfD for September 1, chosen at random. I could have sworn that the delete rate in AfD must be around 90% if not higher, but I'll be buggered if I can find over 73 deletes, speedies, transwikis and whatnot out of 102 nominations. 71%.
So I randomly chose September 5. 88 out of 138. 63%.
So maybe this is a recent thing? August 20. 75 out of 102. 73%.
Further back? April 12. 41 out of 68. 60%.
Definitely not what I expected.
On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
Bottom line: AfD doesn't scale. Whatever problems may exist with AfD's tendency to randomly delete a selection of perfectly reasonable articles, and VFU's growing unwillingness to rectify this, the problem will decrease in significance in the long term as page creation rates accelerate inexorably beyond the reach of AfD, and possibly even any defensible extension of speedy deletion.
Perhaps requiring editors to sit a short examination on deletion policy would help to keep inappropriate nominations down and increase the overall capacity of AfD, but this would not address the problem of scale.
AFD only doesn't scale for people who want to vote on all listed articles. Only vote for articles that need the votes and to ones where you can add something to the discussion. Based on a stable amount of around 100 listed articles on a given day, it should take a voter over an hour-and-half to go through all the nominations which is just not possible.(This assumes they spend at least 1 minute checking the article and formulating their vote).
If anyone can get through AFD and vote on all nominations under an hour (as someone previously stated in some AFD discussion on this list), either they're only checking speedy deletable articles, or they're not giving the article due attention.
Has any editor yet complained that an administrator has unprotected The Wrong Version?
On 9/20/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Has any editor yet complained that an administrator has unprotected The Wrong Version?
no in so many words they will normaly phrase it as the disspute not ever being over.