1. None of the offending ip numbers was blocked, ever. 2. RyRy5, not really intentionally as far as I can tell, restored the worst version after an anon had cleaned it up! 3. East718 did the right thing and semi-protected... but only on April 26th, many days after the vandalism spree had died down
The article has never, even once, contained any useful information about the victim. It has always been a stub. A quick look around the web suggests that it will never be more than a stub.
(Of the top 10 hits in google, more are about his wikipedia entry than anything else!)
All of the following is still in the article history, where it might be read by Mr. Kinnear's children, his mother, future employers, etc.
I propose that policies still need a lot of work to get us to where we need to be on BLP.
Please read all of the following, and ask whether it reflects the values we all hold for our project.
===============
08:35, 6 September 2006 - ''Bob Kinnear''' is a douchebag in [[Toronto]], [[Ontario]], [[Canada]]. He is the leader of the [[Amalgamated Transit Union]], Local 113.
11:51, 27 March 2008 - In September 2007, a report released to the public stated that Kinnear is developmentally delayed. He is an active supporter and volunteer of the guns for toys program in Toronto.
11:51, 27 March 2008 - In September 2007, a report released to the public stated that Kinnear is developmentally delayed. He is an active supporter and volunteer of the Guns for Toys program in Toronto.
13:32, 10 April 2008 - Heavy marijuana user.
16:11, 10 April 2008 - He is a heavy marijuana smoker
16:16, 10 April 2008 - nickname = Iron Mike<br/>Baddest Man on the Planet<br/>Kid Dynamite
11:17, 17 April 2008 - '''Bob Kinnear''' is a douchebag.
12:32, 17 April 2008 - Mr. Kinnear believes that striking and screwing over the City is the best possible way to line his workers pockets with more money. In a recent study, over 25% of TTC riders believe that Bob Kinnear is a supreme douchebag.
15:21, 17 April 2008 - He (here on referred to as "a giant piece of shit") has made a scapegoat of himself by directing the workers of the [[Toronto Transit Commission]] to strike on [[April 21]]st, 2008 at 4:00 a.m., leaving at least one million commuters who rely on the TTC to fend for themselves.
15:22, 17 April 2008 - BOB KINNEAR IS A FUCKING RETARD.
15:23, 17 April 2008 - BOB KINNEAR EATS SHIT.
16:51, 17 April 2008 - '''Bob Kinnear''' is a labour leader and pirate in [[Toronto]], [[Ontario]], [[Canada]]. He is the leader of the [[Amalgamated Transit Union]], Local 113.
20:34, 17 April 2008 - Bob Kinnear is a Class A cock-smoker with a terrible set of plugs. Born in a trailer park, the bastard son of a dirty Carney and his retarded cousin, Bob grew up to be the colossal piece of shit that likes to shut the city down every two years so he can whine. Whine about how his $25+ dollar an hour plus benefit bus/streetcar drivers, some of the RUDEST, surliest people on earth, don't get paid enough. + + Whine about how when every once in a while, one of these pricks lips off to the wrong person and gets slapped around for it. Yeah it's the city and there are SOME crazy/shitty /violent people, and unprovoked incidents DO happen. Welcome to the big city genius. Bob should spent a day incogneto on the system and find out EXACTLY how these people treat riders. It ain't pretty. I'm sure they're all sunshine and lollypops when they know the Boss or the Media is watching. Bob's in for a rude shock when the Union's forced back to work by Monday night then deemed an essential service by the Province. + + Toronto is FED UP. The public is NOT behind you in any way, shape or form. We all knew that you would not be giving 48 hours notice of a strike because you knew it would be like shoving drivers through a meat grinder for 48 hours. I mean really, Bob. Did you REALLY think we'd believe that you would put the employees out the with the pissed off public that you're fucking over? Coward. Typical Union. Now we get to wake Monday morning before we know for sure. Congrats Bob, you're in for a rude shock when the Union's forced back to work by Monday night then deemed an essential service by the Province probably not long thereafter. (Hint: expect it to be an election issue, which means you are fucked.) Maybe if you end up getting a few days off, you could go fix that hair of yours. Is that what all this is about Bob? Money to get the rest of the plugs done? You're a dickhead Bob. You sound like a whiny jerk who just loves to have his little media moments. Kind of like that Craig Brommel idiot from the police union. The TTC WILL end up an essential service after this stunt sport, and when it is you and all those lazy, rude, jackasses you call employees can go pound sand up your collective asses if you don't like what you're offered or don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. + + Remember dummy, the public isn't going to be real inclined to be kind to TTC employees after spending a few days rotting in traffic or walking for miles/hours every day. Don't whine when there's a backlash. You unions are masters of cutting your own throats when it comes to public support. It boggles the mind. + Worth a Million? More like WORTHLESS.
20:40, 17 April 2008 - ''Bob Kinnear''' eats babies in [[Toronto]], [[Ontario]], [[Canada]]. He is deathly afraid of Chuck Norris and is in charge of reach-arounds at the [[Amalgamated Transit Union]], Local 113.
02:40, 20 April 2008 - '''Bob Kinnear''' is a self serving jack-off in [[Toronto]], [[Ontario]], [[Canada]]. He is the leader of the [[Amalgamated Asshole's Union]], Local 113.
02:44, 20 April 2008 - '''Bob Kinnear''' is a self serving jack-off in [[Toronto]], [[Ontario]], [[Canada]]. He is the leader of the [[Amalgamated Asshole's Union]], Local 113.
17:06, 20 April 2008 - Kinnear's attempt at organizing a system-wide TTC strike in April 2008, which would affect some 1.5 million daily commuters, was averted nearly two hours past the self-imposed deadline of 4 p.m. on April 20. I guess a whole bunch of fat, lazy, overpaid, underworked, unionized bastards will have to be cancelling their vacation plans.
Hmm. Ok, deleted and recreated with the good version to remove the history. Semi-protection and move-full-protection of infinite duration. Did I miss anything?
It may be better to merge his article in with that of the union he's head of. There don't appear to be all that many sources out there we could use to help us build a better article, but I don't pretend to have looked to closely. He is head of a decent-sized (?) union, after all. We'll see.
Oh, and Jimbo, I hope you've noticed you might be appointing a new arbitrator pretty soon. How much of our time has that poisonous piece of slime, Daniel Brandt, wasted? God damn him.
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:36:40 -0400 From: jwales@wikia.com To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography
- None of the offending ip numbers was blocked, ever.
- RyRy5, not really intentionally as far as I can tell, restored the
worst version after an anon had cleaned it up! 3. East718 did the right thing and semi-protected... but only on April 26th, many days after the vandalism spree had died down
The article has never, even once, contained any useful information about the victim. It has always been a stub. A quick look around the web suggests that it will never be more than a stub.
(Of the top 10 hits in google, more are about his wikipedia entry than anything else!)
All of the following is still in the article history, where it might be read by Mr. Kinnear's children, his mother, future employers, etc.
I propose that policies still need a lot of work to get us to where we need to be on BLP.
Please read all of the following, and ask whether it reflects the values we all hold for our project.
_________________________________________________________________ 100’s of prizes to be won at BigSnapSearch.com http://www.bigsnapsearch.com
Moreschi has done the right thing by recreating it (losing all the muckraking old history) as a permanently semi-protected stub, noting that it's likely to be a magnet for BLP violations.
A question just occurred to me: given that we know it's a magnet, do we really want to say "You can help Wikipedia by expanding it", with an extra, handy link to the edit button? Seems to me we'd really rather that many of these BLP stubs *stay* stubs.
Not really. If an article's always going to be a stub, there's no point having it all. Then it's a case for redirection and merging. Really, if we can't write an FA on a certain subject, the article is dubious: if we can't manage to write an article of DYK-acceptable length it's really dodgy. One of my notability tests, anyway :)
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
From: scs@eskimo.com Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:55:20 -0400 To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography
Moreschi has done the right thing by recreating it (losing all the muckraking old history) as a permanently semi-protected stub, noting that it's likely to be a magnet for BLP violations.
A question just occurred to me: given that we know it's a magnet, do we really want to say "You can help Wikipedia by expanding it", with an extra, handy link to the edit button? Seems to me we'd really rather that many of these BLP stubs *stay* stubs.
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2008/4/29 Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk:
Not really. If an article's always going to be a stub, there's no point having it all.
I disagree that a BLP is ever "always" going to be a stub - in this specific case, many union leaders go into politics; at the least, he may turn into another [[Bob Crow]].
Our inability to predict the future extends to other categories of article, too. For instance, before 1st August 2007, many might have said that [[I-35W Mississippi River bridge]] was "always going to be a stub". Having it existing as a stub probably helped editors build it up when it became somewhat more notable than it previously had been.
2008/4/29 James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com:
2008/4/29 Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk:
Not really. If an article's always going to be a stub, there's no point having it all.
I disagree that a BLP is ever "always" going to be a stub - in this specific case, many union leaders go into politics; at the least, he may turn into another [[Bob Crow]].
Bob Crow was the example I was about to mention too ;-)
- d.
Ah, fair point. I hadn't thought of that one. Apply an opt-out policy to said stubs, in which case (but not to other BLPs)?
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:24:10 +0100 From: james.farrar@gmail.com To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography
2008/4/29 Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk:
Not really. If an article's always going to be a stub, there's no point having it all.
I disagree that a BLP is ever "always" going to be a stub - in this specific case, many union leaders go into politics; at the least, he may turn into another [[Bob Crow]].
Our inability to predict the future extends to other categories of article, too. For instance, before 1st August 2007, many might have said that [[I-35W Mississippi River bridge]] was "always going to be a stub". Having it existing as a stub probably helped editors build it up when it became somewhat more notable than it previously had been.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
_________________________________________________________________ Play the Andrex Hello Softie Game & win great prizes http://www.thehellosoftiegame.co.uk
James Farrar wrote:
2008/4/29 Christiano Moreschi moreschiwikiman@hotmail.co.uk:
Not really. If an article's always going to be a stub, there's no point having it all.
I disagree that a BLP is ever "always" going to be a stub - in this specific case, many union leaders go into politics; at the least, he may turn into another [[Bob Crow]].
Our inability to predict the future extends to other categories of article, too. For instance, before 1st August 2007, many might have said that [[I-35W Mississippi River bridge]] was "always going to be a stub". Having it existing as a stub probably helped editors build it up when it became somewhat more notable than it previously had been.
I doubt very much that a stub helps very much with building things up when they do become notable. At any rate, we have no empirical evidence of that, and no examples that I know of where new developments did not lead to an appropriate creation of an article that had previously not existed or been deleted appropriately.
We do have empirical evidence of people using Wikipedia to hurt others, in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with our encyclopedic mission.
--Jimbo
That's not a bad biography, it's childish vandalism that happened to be missed. Stable versions should help with that in the not too distant future. I don't really see how such articles harm the subject - they're obviously vandalised and any reasonable reader will disregard them (perhaps we should try and cater to unreasonable readers, but I'm not sure we realistically can).
On 29/04/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
That's not a bad biography, it's childish vandalism that happened to be missed. Stable versions should help with that in the not too distant future. I don't really see how such articles harm the subject
- they're obviously vandalised and any reasonable reader will
disregard them (perhaps we should try and cater to unreasonable readers, but I'm not sure we realistically can).
No, it's a bad biography. It's exactly the type of biography we don't need. This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only thing that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news right now because his local is in labour negotiations. This time next month, nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people who have been trashing him thus far.
These biographies of people with very marginal notability are magnets for vandalism. It's a waste of good editor time to expect people to monitor them and clean up vandalism in them; yet, failing to actively monitor them (or messing up when we actually do look at them) leads to the article Jimmy mentions at the beginning.
Risker
Risker wrote:
No, it's a bad biography. It's exactly the type of biography we don't need. This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only thing that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news right now because his local is in labour negotiations. This time next month, nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people who have been trashing him thus far.
These biographies of people with very marginal notability are magnets for vandalism. It's a waste of good editor time to expect people to monitor them and clean up vandalism in them; yet, failing to actively monitor them (or messing up when we actually do look at them) leads to the article Jimmy mentions at the beginning.
Precisely.
The key here is not a single anomalous biography, but a question about systemic matters. Wiki is not paper, so we do not have the constraints of disk space. But this does not leave us without constraints.
One of the constraints is precisely the one you point out: maintenance of biographies over time takes time and attention, and it is "a waste of good editor time to expect people to monitor them" when they are so marginal in the first place. And yet, failing to monitor, leads to use being abused in the service of someone else's cause.
--Jimbo
Risker wrote:
On 29/04/2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
That's not a bad biography, it's childish vandalism that happened to be missed. Stable versions should help with that in the not too distant future. I don't really see how such articles harm the subject
- they're obviously vandalised and any reasonable reader will
disregard them (perhaps we should try and cater to unreasonable readers, but I'm not sure we realistically can).
No, it's a bad biography. It's exactly the type of biography we don't need. This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only thing that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news right now because his local is in labour negotiations. This time next month, nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people who have been trashing him thus far.
To say that the president of a large local union is only marginally notable is a wilfully deceptive POV. It's exactly the kind of behaviour that creates such a high degree of anxiety around deletion processes. Bad biography because of childish vandalism, and bad biography because a personal POV that would suppress biographies of certain classes of people such as union leaders are two entirely different criteria.
These biographies of people with very marginal notability are magnets for vandalism. It's a waste of good editor time to expect people to monitor them and clean up vandalism in them; yet, failing to actively monitor them (or messing up when we actually do look at them) leads to the article Jimmy mentions at the beginning.
Being a vandal magnet is an extremely weak criterion for deleting an article. It punishes someone's efforts, not on the basis of what is done, but on a totally speculative basis of what others might do.
Ec
Risker wrote:
It's exactly the type of biography we don't need. This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only thing that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news right now because his local is in labour negotiations. This time next month, nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people who have been trashing him thus far.
He's been the president of that union, which represents all transport workers in Toronto and is frequently in the news, since 2005, and he's been in the news multiple times every year since then. The article in question was created /in 2006/, so he hardly just became notable with the current incident.
-Mark
2008/4/30 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
Risker wrote:
It's exactly the type of biography we don't need. This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only
thing
that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news
right
now because his local is in labour negotiations. This time next month, nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people
who
have been trashing him thus far.
He's been the president of that union, which represents all transport workers in Toronto and is frequently in the news, since 2005, and he's been in the news multiple times every year since then. The article in question was created /in 2006/, so he hardly just became notable with the current incident.
-Mark
See now...that's what happens when you read the newspapers. He's the president of a union local that represents approximately 9,000 of the 40,000 transport workers in Toronto, and is in the news during contract negotiations, and when there is a big safety issue. He's in the news less frequently than many other labour leaders (e.g., presidents of teacher unions), which I am sure disappoints the union's PR people a great deal. The president of my company is on the news at least as often as this guy, and even our president would not consider himself noteworthy. Union local presidents are not particularly noteworthy without extraordinary circumstances. Just being in the newspaper isn't one of them; that would suggest that the head of Public Relations for any major corporation is as notable (or even more so) than its president or chair of the board.
None of that is relevant to the fact that this subject's article was thoroughly and repeatedly vandalised, and it remained available to the general viewing public in this clearly inappropriate condition at the very time that the article was having the heavier than normal page views associated with his apparent notability. This harmed the reputation of the union leader, and it harmed our reputation too. If we can't look after these articles, we shouldn't have them.
Risker
Risker
Jimmy Wales wrote:
The article has never, even once, contained any useful information about the victim. It has always been a stub. A quick look around the web suggests that it will never be more than a stub.
I'm not sure what you intend to prove with this straw-man. You found one article that has been on Wikipedia for nine days, that should have been deleted, but hasn't been. Nobody's even objected to its deletion! Considering we have over 2 million articles, this is unsurprising.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
The article has never, even once, contained any useful information about the victim. It has always been a stub. A quick look around the web suggests that it will never be more than a stub.
I'm not sure what you intend to prove with this straw-man. You found one article that has been on Wikipedia for nine days, that should have been deleted, but hasn't been. Nobody's even objected to its deletion! Considering we have over 2 million articles, this is unsurprising.
It is not a straw man. It is routine. And it hurts real people.
To you, it is one of 2 million articles. To the victim, it is a top google hit on his own name.
But in any event, I am not trying to prove anything. I am proposing that we have a long way to go before we can feel happy about the situation with respect to real people being victimized by vandals. People are using Wikipedia to carry out vendettas against people. I make no apologies for saying that we should think hard about how to stop that from happening.
--Jimbo
2008/4/29 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com:
It is not a straw man. It is routine.
Not that common. Not like this. Requires a large group without many wikipedians in to get pissed off at someone.
And it hurts real people.
I doubt it. Mr Kinnear is already dislike by the majority of those who know about him I doubt the article had much of an impact one way or another.
To you, it is one of 2 million articles. To the victim, it is a top google hit on his own name.
To a city it is an easy way to vent their frustration. If google results are Mr Kinnear's biggest concern right now I think his union's members will be added to the list of people who don't like him.
But in any event, I am not trying to prove anything. I am proposing that we have a long way to go before we can feel happy about the situation with respect to real people being victimized by vandals. People are using Wikipedia to carry out vendettas against people.
A vendetta would be a protracted campaign. In this case more a large number of random individuals.
I make no apologies for saying that we should think hard about how to stop that from happening.
We have. So far the only results have been an experiment that fails to meet even a low level of scientific rigour and and a bunch of power tripping BLPers. As long as you continue to look for top down solutions expect much the same result.
geni wrote:
I doubt it. Mr Kinnear is already dislike by the majority of those who know about him I doubt the article had much of an impact one way or another.
Well you certainly get that impression from the wikipedia entry and the blogosphere, but the fact is, we have no idea if this is true or not. None. Zero.
There are simply no reliable sources of any kind that would lead us to think that. Reading between the lines here, I think he sounds like he is probably not the least bit unlikable as a person. He's a union leader. He called for an unpopular strike. There is no evidence in the media or anywhere else that he is "disliked by the majority of those who know about him".
To a city it is an easy way to vent their frustration. If google results are Mr Kinnear's biggest concern right now I think his union's members will be added to the list of people who don't like him.
Why would you speculate on such a thing? Hasn't this guy had enough abuse already? To be clear: I am not acting on any complaint from him. I found this situation randomly.
We have. So far the only results have been an experiment that fails to meet even a low level of scientific rigour and and a bunch of power tripping BLPers. As long as you continue to look for top down solutions expect much the same result.
I am not looking for top down solutions. I am looking for thoughtful people within the community to stop blaming the victim and start looking for sustainable solutions that will work.
--Jimbo
2008/4/29 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com:
geni wrote:
I doubt it. Mr Kinnear is already dislike by the majority of those who know about him I doubt the article had much of an impact one way or another.
Well you certainly get that impression from the wikipedia entry and the blogosphere, but the fact is, we have no idea if this is true or not. None. Zero.
There are simply no reliable sources of any kind that would lead us to think that. Reading between the lines here, I think he sounds like he is probably not the least bit unlikable as a person. He's a union leader. He called for an unpopular strike. There is no evidence in the media or anywhere else that he is "disliked by the majority of those who know about him".
Know about him in this case would be know the name or would have some reason for looking for it.
I am not looking for top down solutions. I am looking for thoughtful people within the community to stop blaming the victim and start looking for sustainable solutions that will work.
Well the good news is the community has never gone in for victim blaming.
"Start looking for sustainable solutions that will work" First problem. You haven't defined the problem properly. At the moment you are doing the equiverlent of saying that "copyright wise we should have articles that look like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait". This may be true but isn't very useful.
Your past statements are no more helpful being either over specific or outright dangerous (do you really want to give a wikipedian a weapon as dangerous as do no harm? and "We must get the article right" sounds great until you realise what that actually means. An article stating mid 80s that Edwina Currie was having an affair would have been right but would have been highly inadvisable to write such a thing.
So we have a number of options:
1)Aim to keep wikipedia content non libelous within the US. This has the advantage of being fairly easy to define but problematical with regards to public figures.
2)Aim to keep wikipedia content non libelous within the US while latitude allowed for public figures is ignored. In adition aim to remove insult. This has the advantage of being fairly easy to define but technically results in wikipedia being in contempt of the english courts (of course it already is but separate issue).
3)Aim to make sure that all negative statements about living people are sourced. Define negative and sourced. For example is "Ian Hislop has become the most sued man in Britain." a negative statement. The usual fights over what counts as a source tend to get worse.
4)Aim to make sure that all negative statements about living people are fair and sourced. Fight over "fair" would be eventful and probably visible from earth orbit
5)Do no harm. I assume biron knows where the off switch is.
I prefer option 2 since it is fairly fixed and less based on an individuals judgment and thus we can be fairly sure everyone at least should be working towards the same objective.
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
The article has never, even once, contained any useful information about the victim. It has always been a stub. A quick look around the web suggests that it will never be more than a stub.
I'm not sure what you intend to prove with this straw-man. You found one article that has been on Wikipedia for nine days, that should have been deleted, but hasn't been. Nobody's even objected to its deletion!
The article spent the vast majority of its short first life as something which any experienced editor would have blanked or speedy deleted on sight had they actually been read.
So I'll take this moment to remind people of the new page patrol feature that Enwiki has had for a number of months now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages If you're logged in "unpatroled" pages will be yellow. You can click "Hide patrolled edits" to hide pages that other people have patrolled.
If you click on the page you'll have an opportunity to mark the page as patrolled through a link in the lower right corner or the article. Anyone autoconfirmed or better can patrol as the site is currently configured.
A persistent log of every patrolling action is kept, and you can determine who patrolled a particular page by looking at the page logs from the page history.
This mechanism allows Wikipedia to gain positive evidence that a wikipedia user has seen every new page, and it accomplishes this efficiently. ... but only if people use it!
Considering we have over 2 million articles, this is unsurprising.
Sheer quantity might make failure harder to avoid, even unsurprising, but it never excuses it.
On Apr 29, 2008, at 11:36 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Please read all of the following, and ask whether it reflects the values we all hold for our project.
With all due respect, no, of course it doesn't. You know that. You also know that in a project of this size things like this are going to happen - the article was a frequent target for vandalism. It was reverted frequently, generally, it looks like, by non-admins. On the 17th it became the target of vandalism for a spree that lasted three days. The vandalism was frequently reverted.
So what, exactly, do you see as the problem? That it often took a few hours for the vandalism to get noticed? That one of two million articles fell through the cracks such that it wasn't instantly noticed on people's watchlists? What, exactly, do you see as the egregious problem here?
And furthermore, you know better than to argue via anecdotal evidence like this. An article was the subject of a vandalism attack and was fixed a bit more slowly than we might like. And? What's the systemic problem you see? Where's your evidence that the problem is actually systemic?
What do you think we should be doing differently? It's unfair and insulting to the community to pop up and take us all to task for failing to deal with one case. What do you want changed? What's your actual idea here? Because otherwise this feels a lot like a bit of random scolding with no actual content or thought.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
It's unfair and insulting to the community to pop up and take us all to task for failing to deal with one case.
I did not take anyone to task. Quite the opposite. I have said many times in this thread that there seems to be no particular person to blame.
What do you want changed? What's your actual idea here?
One of my actual ideas is that "So what, we have 2 million articles" strikes me as not a very helpful approach to improvement. We don't look at the problem of heart disease by pointing out that almost everyone makes it through the day without dying of a heart attack.
The problem is systematic, widespread, and worth puzzling over in good faith without recriminations... particularly not for people who are merely pointing out that there is a problem and we need to take it seriously.
--Jimbo
On Apr 29, 2008, at 10:51 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One of my actual ideas is that "So what, we have 2 million articles" strikes me as not a very helpful approach to improvement. We don't look at the problem of heart disease by pointing out that almost everyone makes it through the day without dying of a heart attack.
I think the response is better summarized as "it is impossible to reduce the error rate to 0 with a population of this size." Accordingly, anecdotal evidence does not seem to me to be significant, which is why I find the particular problem you raised here so frustrating - because I don't think a lone article where our vandalism reversion is going slower than is optimal is evidence of anything. Hence it feels rather like scolding.
I'm open to the possibility that vandalism reversion is something that there is still room for improvement about. I have numerous thoughts on the subject. But that doesn't seem to me the conversation you started. A high-level, programmatic look at our treatment of vandalism would be useful. But I do take offense when an isolated instance of something that can be minimized, not prevented, is taken as an occasion to reflect on whether we are reflecting "the values we all hold for our project." It feels condescending.
In an effort to separate this issue from what I take to have been the discussion you were trying to start, I'll make a separate reply with some thoughts on the issues you're trying to raise. But I urge you to avoid the sort of parenting "let's all reflect on this" approach. The project is too big to get anywhere that way - some amount of actual politics-playing in which specific proposals and approaches are advanced is going to have to happen, and you're going to have to play an active part in it. The community, in its current configuration, is not capable of high-level and programmatic action. And if you want such action to happen, you are going to have to engage with it on a level of practical "I would like some input on a plan that will actually be put into place."
-Phil
On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I think the response is better summarized as "it is impossible to reduce the error rate to 0 with a population of this size." Accordingly, anecdotal evidence does not seem to me to be significant,
[snip]
There are two classes of errors that can show up in a production process, random and systemic. It is important to understand how each class contributes to the overall error rate because the methods used to address them are different.
Systemic errors can be eliminated. It doesn't matter if you are making 10 or 10 million things, the systemic part is equally eliminatble, and the more things you make the greater the payoff of eliminating the systemic error.
The random contribution can not be (except in so far as whatever isn't yet done to reduce random errors can be regarded as a systemic error).
I realize the above definition is somewhat circular. But its important distinction between systemic and random errors has nothing to do with their frequency, but everything to do with whether they can be controlled or not.
Once the systemic errors are gone there are only two efficient and effective ways of handing the remaining random error. You can ignore it and suffer the consequences, or you can decide that it is acceptable and test every single thing produced for it, fixing it when you find it. Sampled testing is never an effective solution to random errors because if there is no systemic error your sample tells you absolutely nothing about the rest of the set.
English Wikipedia is rife with errors of systemic class, things which we could control/reduce, and I think you will agree with this even if you and I do not agree on all of what those errors are or how to resolve them.
These ought to be fixed, and the fact that fixing the things we can control doesn't solve the things we can't is not a valid excuse not to try.
Philip Sandifer wrote:
I think the response is better summarized as "it is impossible to reduce the error rate to 0 with a population of this size."
I agree. I still think the error rate is far too high, and that we can improve upon it if we think together about what some of the common causes are and how they might be fixed.
In an effort to separate this issue from what I take to have been the discussion you were trying to start, I'll make a separate reply with some thoughts on the issues you're trying to raise. But I urge you to avoid the sort of parenting "let's all reflect on this" approach.
I don't think it is "parenting" at all to say "let's all reflect on this".
--Jimbo
2008/4/30 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com:
Philip Sandifer wrote:
I think the response is better summarized as "it is impossible to reduce the error rate to 0 with a population of this size."
I agree. I still think the error rate is far too high, and that we can improve upon it if we think together about what some of the common causes are and how they might be fixed.
So why the initial case? That a bunch of Canadian commuters decicded that someone had annoyed them isn't a common cause.