I will copy what I wrote to David here...
That's right!
I want to ask for your opinion here. I was feeling brave this morning and decided to see if I could make a dent in Category:Wikipedia backloghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog. After looking at about 25 articles with the wikification tag attached to them, and being so disgusted with the lot as to be unable to make a *single* change, something major hit me.
We need to, as one might say, flush the crap down the toilet. Allow me to explain.
A LOT of the articles in Category:Articles that need to be wikifiedhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_that_need_to_be_wikifiedare so poorly written and so obscure that they have *no possible use, worth or value to anyone!* Jimbo himself made it clear in that interview that although Wikipedia does have some gems of articles (ie our Featured Articles), there is a rather poor signal to noise ratio. We all know that backlogs need to be cleared out, but no one is going to be able to do it without a.) time that reaches beyond time itself, b.) unlimited patience and c.) endless knowledge. In other words, to clear out the backlogs would be akin to an act of God.
I know you know what I'm thinking, David. I want to nuke a ton of articles in the backlog. Things like thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_the_Agedmay have a place on Wikipedia, but *not* in their current form. If these things are important enough, they can be tagged as such and someone can be given it to work with. But I want to delete a lot of articles.
I know I'm going to get a lot of flak from other users concerning this. They will kneejerk to "OMG ABUSIVE ADMIN LALALALLA" and "DELETIONIST! OMG DELETIONIST!". But, we *need* to do something about the absolutely wretched backlogs.
Get back to me on this. Thanks. Alex Schenckhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Linuxbeak(that's Linuxbeak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Linuxbeak to you) 16:40, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
--Linuxbeak
Alex Schenck wrote:
I will copy what I wrote to David here... I want to ask for your opinion here. I was feeling brave this morning and decided to see if I could make a dent in Category:Wikipedia backloghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog. After looking at about 25 articles with the wikification tag attached to them, and being so disgusted with the lot as to be unable to make a *single* change, something major hit me. We need to, as one might say, flush the crap down the toilet. Allow me to explain.
I replied on [[User talk:David Gerard]] as well. I suspect flooding AFD with this stuff will just piss people off. OTOH, it's probably not speedyable.
Most of these articles are on topics that *do clearly deserve an article* and would probably survive AFD because of that. The actual articles are horrible.
All the people on this list who have complained we need a higher drive for quality. Go to [[Category:Wikipedia backlog]] and fix a pile of articles. Get together a WikiProject to Fix Crappy Prose.
Any takers?
(note me not waving my own hand)
- d.
On 12/1/05, Alex Schenck linuxbeak@gmail.com wrote:
Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
--Linuxbeak
Well as a deltionist admin even I feel you are going a little far. While I seem to recall that uncyclopedia did have a few weeks in which they cleared out at lot of rubish by allowing the admins to delete anything they felt was not up to par I don't think this would work on wikipedia.
My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.
-- geni
Alex Schenck wrote:
I will copy what I wrote to David here... I want to ask for your opinion here. I was feeling brave this morning and decided to see if I could make a dent in Category:Wikipedia backloghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog. After looking at about 25 articles with the wikification tag attached to them, and being so disgusted with the lot as to be unable to make a
*single*
change, something major hit me. We need to, as one might say, flush the crap down the toilet. Allow me to explain.
On his userpage, George argues this better than me, but basically the argument is that sometimes, nothing is better than something. I'm sure that many of the articles in that backlog actually do more damage than good to the project, because someone who finds them is going to judge the quality of wikipedia as a whole based on those articles. Not finding anything, on the other hand, will probably not result in as great a negative reaction.
That said, I'm not sure what should be done about it. Deletion is tempting, but shouldn't be applied haphazardly. I wouldn't be opposed to the creation of an AfD criterion (not CSD) that allowed for the deletion of truly unorganized and difficult to use text. This is different from patent nonsense, and CSD shouldn't be extended, which is made clear because Alex's example, [[Help the Aged]], was just reverted to a previous version by Angela and now it looks fine. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_the_Aged&diff=30111977&am...). Deleting it would have been a bad idea.
Just my two cents.
Nathaniel / Spangineer
Nathaniel Sheetz wrote:
On his userpage, George argues this better than me, but basically the
argument is that sometimes, nothing is better than something. I'm sure that many of the articles in that backlog actually do more damage than good to the project, because someone who finds them is going to judge the quality of wikipedia as a whole based on those articles. Not finding anything, on the other hand, will probably not result in as great a negative reaction.
This is pure speculation
That said, I'm not sure what should be done about it. Deletion is tempting, but shouldn't be applied haphazardly. I wouldn't be opposed to the creation of an AfD criterion (not CSD) that allowed for the deletion of truly unorganized and difficult to use text.
The implication is that sufficient information is already there, but it's badly written. It sounds like the article is a candidate for rewriting and reorganization rather than deleting.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Nathaniel Sheetz wrote:
On his userpage, George argues this better than me, but basically the argument is that sometimes, nothing is better than something. I'm sure that many of the articles in that backlog actually do more damage than good to the project, because someone who finds them is going to judge the quality of wikipedia as a whole based on those articles. Not finding anything, on the other hand, will probably not result in as great a negative reaction.
This is pure speculation
Indeed. Evidence of this is sorely lacking.
That said, I'm not sure what should be done about it. Deletion is tempting, but shouldn't be applied haphazardly. I wouldn't be opposed to the creation of an AfD criterion (not CSD) that allowed for the deletion of truly unorganized and difficult to use text.
The implication is that sufficient information is already there, but it's badly written. It sounds like the article is a candidate for rewriting and reorganization rather than deleting.
Yep. Using deletion as an editorial tool is abuse of the deletion system. Try writing something instead. Yes, I know it resembles "effort".
- d.
geni wrote:
On 12/1/05, Alex Schenck linuxbeak@gmail.com wrote:
Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
--Linuxbeak
Well as a deltionist admin even I feel you are going a little far. While I seem to recall that uncyclopedia did have a few weeks in which they cleared out at lot of rubish by allowing the admins to delete anything they felt was not up to par I don't think this would work on wikipedia.
My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.
We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were created.
I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are probably more motivated in that case.
-- Tim Starling
On 12/5/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were created.
Technicaly It is pretty simple (just makeing some alterations to the text in the mediawiki namespace would be enough to stop most cases). The problem is the few cases where there may be a legit reason to create orphans.
I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are probably more motivated in that case.
-- Tim Starling
No so much. The idea is to limit the creation of articles no one cared about. If an article is not an orphan then hopefully it means that at least one other person though wikipedia should have the article.
-- geni
On 12/5/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/5/05, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are probably more motivated in that case.
-- Tim Starling
No so much. The idea is to limit the creation of articles no one cared about. If an article is not an orphan then hopefully it means that at least one other person though wikipedia should have the article.
-- geni
I think it'd be a good feature to have, though I don't think it'd solve many of the problems this thread is talking about. There really isn't any point in having an orphaned article. If you can't find *somewhere* to create a link from (at least a list or something), then why have an article in the first place? Making contributors more motivated - that's *usually* a good thing, right?
One caveat, though. This would probably be best implemented only in the article namespace. Orphaned user pages, for instance, make a lot more sense.
Anthony
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
I think it'd be a good feature to have, though I don't think it'd solve many of the problems this thread is talking about. There really isn't any point in having an orphaned article. If you can't find *somewhere* to create a link from (at least a list or something), then why have an article in the first place? Making contributors more motivated - that's *usually* a good thing, right?
One caveat, though. This would probably be best implemented only in the article namespace. Orphaned user pages, for instance, make a lot more sense.
Anthony
Due to the way history works it would be quite hard to create a truely orphaned user page.
-- geni
On 12/5/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
I think it'd be a good feature to have, though I don't think it'd solve many of the problems this thread is talking about. There really isn't any point in having an orphaned article. If you can't find *somewhere* to create a link from (at least a list or something), then why have an article in the first place? Making contributors more motivated - that's *usually* a good thing, right?
One caveat, though. This would probably be best implemented only in the article namespace. Orphaned user pages, for instance, make a lot more sense.
Anthony
Due to the way history works it would be quite hard to create a truely orphaned user page.
-- geni
Due to the way the mediawiki database is set up, it'd be extremely difficult to check whether or not there were links from the history, though. The only practical definition of orphaned I can think of would be "containing no links in the 'what links here' section".
Anthony
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Due to the way the mediawiki database is set up, it'd be extremely difficult to check whether or not there were links from the history, though. The only practical definition of orphaned I can think of would be "containing no links in the 'what links here' section".
Anthony
You forget there is a way to do this that doesn't involve any database quires. Simply change [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]]. Makes it pretty much imposible to create an orphan without messing with the address.
-- geni
On 12/5/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Due to the way the mediawiki database is set up, it'd be extremely difficult to check whether or not there were links from the history, though. The only practical definition of orphaned I can think of would be "containing no links in the 'what links here' section".
Anthony
You forget there is a way to do this that doesn't involve any database quires. Simply change [[MediaWiki:Nogomatch]]. Makes it pretty much imposible to create an orphan without messing with the address.
-- geni
I didn't forget about it. This is actually the way it's set up on jnanabase, which is one of the wikis I use regularly. I've found that I usually just type in the address manually to start a new article there, though. It's easier to "mess with the address" than it is to add a link to the article from somewhere else.
It'd probably be useful to put something in the software to actually force people to make the link, first. Of course, then people will just put it in the sandbox or on their user page or something. Maybe a force to put a link *from article space* when creating a page in article space. I can't think of any example where you wouldn't want to have such a link. This would slightly increase the difficulty of creating a new page, but that could be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
Anthony
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
It'd probably be useful to put something in the software to actually force people to make the link, first. Of course, then people will just put it in the sandbox or on their user page or something. Maybe a force to put a link *from article space* when creating a page in article space. I can't think of any example where you wouldn't want to have such a link. This would slightly increase the difficulty of creating a new page, but that could be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
Anthony
There are bound to be legit reasons for doing so that I have failed to think of.
-- geni
On 12/5/05, ABCD en.abcd@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/5/05, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I can't think of any example where you wouldn't want to have such a link.
What about creating a new redirect from a misspelling?
ABCD
Good point. If this were going to be implemented, you'd have to make an exception for redirects... And that would significantly complicate things.
Anthony
Tim Starling wrote:
We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were created.
I would say that whether or not the experiment beginning today on preventing anons from creating *any* articles works, we might try this one as well (after a couple of weeks, say) as a "softer" solution.
I guess this would prohibit the creation of articles that are created casually, a few sentences about something the author cares about. But I think the effect would be smaller for larger junk -- text copied from homework essays or personal webpages for example. The contributors are probably more motivated in that case.
Yes.
--Jimbo
On 12/5/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
We can tell fairly easily whether a page will be an orphan before it is created, it's an indexed query. So we could, say, prevent creation of orphans by anons. I'm not sure what the effect would be. I can tell you that currently, 205 of the 1498 articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] are orphans, I don't know how many were orphans when they were created.
I would say that whether or not the experiment beginning today on preventing anons from creating *any* articles works, we might try this one as well (after a couple of weeks, say) as a "softer" solution.
I'd say the proper "soft" solution is simply to be less forgiving with anonymous contributions that aren't properly references. If an anonymous contributor puts facts into the encyclopedia without sourcing them, then any user should feel free to remove those facts. I really don't see this as taking a significant amount of time for people working on the new page patrol.
With logged in users, especially ones with well established reputations of editing, you have to be more forgiving than this, of course.
But as this is all being done as an experiment I don't mind waiting a few weeks to see if it really does work miracles.
Anthony
Edit screens also tell people to use reliable sources. I would equally unforgiving with someone who adds unsourced edits as someone who starts unsourced articles.
If anyone can verify it. Go ahead. But if it can't be verified, we shouldn't be leaving it in Wikipedia. It breaks basic policy.
Mgm
On 12/5/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Edit screens also tell people to use reliable sources. I would equally unforgiving with someone who adds unsourced edits as someone who starts unsourced articles.
Absolutely. There are some differences though. Article deletion is much harder to revert. That's probably the biggest one. Also, people often revert changes to an article which changes it from a massive unreferenced one to a short factual stub. I used to do that a lot with articles on VFD, I'd change long articles on people with absolutely no sources to "Blah Whoever might be a person." and I'd find that some long time editor would revert me. Maybe that's just a VFD thing, though. Then there are the other issues, like the fact that New Page Patrol is possible whereas New Edit Patrol isn't (at least not without some technical resources). Watchlists are effective for edits but not as effective for new pages. It's the same principles, but it's a different beast.
It really depends on how you look at eventualism. The way I see it, it's fine to remove information as long as its still in the edit history. If some logged in user wants to actually go through the trouble of looking up the information and adding it back, that's great. If not, well, it's still there for someone to find eventually. But if an article is reduced to a single verifiable sentence (which would be easy for a new page patroller to do), is it going to get speedy deleted, and the information lost forever?
If anyone can verify it. Go ahead. But if it can't be verified, we shouldn't be leaving it in Wikipedia. It breaks basic policy.
Mgm
Well, there's also the talk page. It's OK to leave most unverified information there. But that's another difference with new pages. For some reason most admins insist on deleting the talk page when they delete an article. I think it's even a speedy criterion.
Anthony
On 12/4/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.
-- geni
We could have a group of people dedicated to going through every single new article which is created and then they could either destroy that information or nominate it for destruction. We could call these people "firemen", and we could call the process "new page patrol".
Anthony
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Anthony DiPierro stated for the record:
On 12/4/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.
-- geni
We could have a group of people dedicated to going through every single new article which is created and then they could either destroy that information or nominate it for destruction. We could call these people "firemen", and we could call the process "new page patrol".
Anthony
Award yourselves a bonus point if you get the /Fahrenheit 451/ reference....
- -- Sean Barrett | Johnny's in the basement sean@epoptic.org | Mixin' up the medicine. | I'm on the pavement | Thinking 'bout the government.
On 12/5/05, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Anthony DiPierro stated for the record:
On 12/4/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
My personal answer is that we should make it harder to create new articles in the first place. Probably by restricting the creating of orphans. Don't ask me how to do that though.
-- geni
We could have a group of people dedicated to going through every single new article which is created and then they could either destroy that information or nominate it for destruction. We could call these people "firemen", and we could call the process "new page patrol".
Anthony
Award yourselves a bonus point if you get the /Fahrenheit 451/ reference....
To be fair, most of the work done by the new page patrol is productive.
On 12/1/05, Alex Schenck linuxbeak@gmail.com wrote:
I will copy what I wrote to David here...
That's right!
I want to ask for your opinion here. I was feeling brave this morning and decided to see if I could make a dent in Category:Wikipedia backloghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog. After looking at about 25 articles with the wikification tag attached to them, and being so disgusted with the lot as to be unable to make a *single* change, something major hit me.
We need to, as one might say, flush the crap down the toilet. Allow me to explain.
A LOT of the articles in Category:Articles that need to be wikifiedhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_that_need_to_be_wikifiedare so poorly written and so obscure that they have *no possible use, worth or value to anyone!* Jimbo himself made it clear in that interview that although Wikipedia does have some gems of articles (ie our Featured Articles), there is a rather poor signal to noise ratio. We all know that backlogs need to be cleared out, but no one is going to be able to do it without a.) time that reaches beyond time itself, b.) unlimited patience and c.) endless knowledge. In other words, to clear out the backlogs would be akin to an act of God.
I know you know what I'm thinking, David. I want to nuke a ton of articles in the backlog. Things like thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_the_Agedmay have a place on Wikipedia, but *not* in their current form. If these things are important enough, they can be tagged as such and someone can be given it to work with. But I want to delete a lot of articles.
I know I'm going to get a lot of flak from other users concerning this. They will kneejerk to "OMG ABUSIVE ADMIN LALALALLA" and "DELETIONIST! OMG DELETIONIST!". But, we *need* to do something about the absolutely wretched backlogs.
Get back to me on this. Thanks. Alex Schenckhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Linuxbeak(that's Linuxbeak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Linuxbeak to you) 16:40, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
Now, with that said, I need feedback. Please provide.
--Linuxbeak
I think these articles are perfect for the pure wiki deletion process. They're somewhat useful as starting points for articles, but a lot of work still needs to be done. It'd be nice if there were a place to keep them until they get more fleshed out, but not bless them as an actual article worthy of Wikipedia. PWD allows for that.
Of course, moving all the crap to the talk page and replacing the mess with a really short stub would work too. That solution probably wouldn't stick, though. For one thing, ripping out lots of information is often reverted, and for another lots of people like to turn short stubs into redirects (which tend to create circular links and not be expanded due to this and other technical issues).
OMG ABUSIVE DELETIONIST ADMIN!
LOL
Sorry, couldn't control myself. I think we need some sort of quality control at check in. This way we won't be stuck with articles that are in no way up to par. Unfortunately, I have no idea on how to accomplish that without messing up some basic wiki principles.
Mgm