This is a message I wrote in another mailing list. I'm forwarding it to enwiki-l at Jimbo's suggestion.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com Date: Mar 30, 2007 11:15 AM Subject: Re: [Otrs-en-l] [SPAM] info-en vs info-fr To: English OTRS discussion list otrs-en-l@lists.wikimedia.org
(Comments from another contributor redacted; the discussion was related to how inclusionist tendencies tend to lead to large numbers of unmaintained articles.)
This was the gist of my recent blogpost on maintainability as the proper criterion for inclusion. I freely admit to being an inclusionist -- I would love to see proper articles on all rysorts of random topics of even marginal interest -- but I temper that with the understanding that having unmaintainable articles harms the encyclopedia as a whole, and the recognition that the Wikipedia community is not currently capable of maintaining even the articles it has, let alone all the articles it could possibly have.
My attitude on such people is that the content should be sequestered in a nonpublic place and reviewed upon notice that the individual in question has died. If we never receive notice, then that's probably because the person was not interesting enough in life to justify an article anyway. Yes, we might sequester an article for decades under this policy, but I'm an eventualist as well.
However, don't mistake my eventualism for being support for the idea that we should leave crap articles sitting out there in public view (which is a point of view commonly attributed to eventualists). I am firmly opposed to leaving low-quality articles on the public wiki when doing so will bring disrepute onto the subjects of those articles or bring harm to Wikipedia as a project. I am therefore very much in favor of deletion of any article for which there is no established, committed process for maintenance.
The problem with this is that there is no established, committed process for maintaining ANY article on Wikipedia. All article maintenance on Wikipedia, and in fact virtually all process on Wikipedia, is haphazard. We are just starting to get comprehensive vandalism management using centralized tools, or so I am told. We still have no mechanisms for coordinating even so much as article categorization or article sourcing, both of which are crucial aspects of article maintenance.
The infrastructure to maintain over a million and a half articles has never existed on Wikipedia. Until it does, every new article is another paper cut, bleeding us a bit more each day.
As I see it, the following absolutely must be done:
* All articles must be categorized. A bot can be used to generate lists of uncategorized articles, and the articles found in this way presented to volunteer categorizers using a workflow approach. Articles not categorized within a reasonable time (say, seven days for new articles, and three months for existing articles) will be deleted. My understanding is that there are bots that are capable of making "good guesses" at categorization, so this may be less painful than it seems.
* A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
* Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
* SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
* Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted. A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
This is all entirely orthogonal to vandalism management.
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
Kelly
Kelly,
There's a lot of really interesting thinking here.
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
There's a conversation on the Administrator's Noticeboard right now that touches on this. The argument has been put forward that "it was mentioned on television" should be taken as verifiable, reliable source for material in biographies of living wrestlers. Other editors are saying something that you did in another paragraph of this email; that articles about wrestlers are, in fact, apparantly not maintainable, but draw many votes to be kept without anyone taking responsibility to clean them up.
Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted. A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
The creation of a "drop-dead" date alone would help a great deal.
Jkelly
On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
This is a message I wrote in another mailing list. I'm forwarding it to enwiki-l at Jimbo's suggestion.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com Date: Mar 30, 2007 11:15 AM Subject: Re: [Otrs-en-l] [SPAM] info-en vs info-fr To: English OTRS discussion list otrs-en-l@lists.wikimedia.org
(Comments from another contributor redacted; the discussion was related to how inclusionist tendencies tend to lead to large numbers of unmaintained articles.)
This was the gist of my recent blogpost on maintainability as the proper criterion for inclusion. I freely admit to being an inclusionist -- I would love to see proper articles on all rysorts of random topics of even marginal interest -- but I temper that with the understanding that having unmaintainable articles harms the encyclopedia as a whole, and the recognition that the Wikipedia community is not currently capable of maintaining even the articles it has, let alone all the articles it could possibly have.
My attitude on such people is that the content should be sequestered in a nonpublic place and reviewed upon notice that the individual in question has died. If we never receive notice, then that's probably because the person was not interesting enough in life to justify an article anyway. Yes, we might sequester an article for decades under this policy, but I'm an eventualist as well.
However, don't mistake my eventualism for being support for the idea that we should leave crap articles sitting out there in public view (which is a point of view commonly attributed to eventualists). I am firmly opposed to leaving low-quality articles on the public wiki when doing so will bring disrepute onto the subjects of those articles or bring harm to Wikipedia as a project. I am therefore very much in favor of deletion of any article for which there is no established, committed process for maintenance.
The problem with this is that there is no established, committed process for maintaining ANY article on Wikipedia. All article maintenance on Wikipedia, and in fact virtually all process on Wikipedia, is haphazard. We are just starting to get comprehensive vandalism management using centralized tools, or so I am told. We still have no mechanisms for coordinating even so much as article categorization or article sourcing, both of which are crucial aspects of article maintenance.
The infrastructure to maintain over a million and a half articles has never existed on Wikipedia. Until it does, every new article is another paper cut, bleeding us a bit more each day.
As I see it, the following absolutely must be done:
- All articles must be categorized. A bot can be used to generate
lists of uncategorized articles, and the articles found in this way presented to volunteer categorizers using a workflow approach. Articles not categorized within a reasonable time (say, seven days for new articles, and three months for existing articles) will be deleted. My understanding is that there are bots that are capable of making "good guesses" at categorization, so this may be less painful than it seems.
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
- Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
This is all entirely orthogonal to vandalism management.
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
Certainly grandiose thinking that could revolutionise Wikipedia. Your outline seems, to me, to be, on the surface of it, workable.
1) Do you have any suggestions as to how we implement this? 2)a Is existing software adequate to achieving this? b Is the development effort to implementing this realistic? 3) How much of the process would be automated (identification of SWGs and those who should be in them) and would an infrastructure be offered so that selected users could quickly and easily assume these roles? 4) Are you suggesting the articles which don't meet the deadlines at each stage be deleted in existing Wikipedia fashion or simply made unviewable to readers? 5) How would non-essential editing (eg. expansion, adding of media) gel with this system?
On 3/30/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
- Do you have any suggestions as to how we implement this?
Not entirely. The software aspects are not all that daunting; getting community acceptance will be considerably harder. Although, actually, I suspect that much of this can be done without actually changing the way editors collaborate all that much, Kirill's protestations notwithstanding.
2)a Is existing software adequate to achieving this?
Not by itself.
b Is the development effort to implementing this realistic?
I think so. Most of it can be implemented with bots, with a few web interfaces, perhaps at the toolserver.
- How much of the process would be automated (identification of SWGs
and those who should be in them) and would an infrastructure be offered so that selected users could quickly and easily assume these roles?
I think that particular process can be largely automated. It is relatively easy to obtain a list of all articles a user has edited, gather the categories of those articles, and identify likely SWGs that a user might be interested in; this can be automated once a category to SWG map exists. Someone (possibly Greg Maxwell) mentioned to me that there is already a bot that can autocategorize articles reasonably well, so it's possible that this could be almost nearly automated.
- Are you suggesting the articles which don't meet the deadlines at
each stage be deleted in existing Wikipedia fashion or simply made unviewable to readers?
Technically, deleting them is basically the same as making them unavailable to readers. :)
- How would non-essential editing (eg. expansion, adding of media)
gel with this system?
I would assume that people interested in a topic will continue to expand articles, add media, and so forth, whether or not they participate in an SWG. I suppose people who take the SWG principle seriously might spend less time doing "nonessential" editing.
Kelly
On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
6) Do you think the system itself create this sense of personal responsibility in the mind of the editor? If not, how do you suggest this could be done?
On 3/30/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
- Do you think the system itself create this sense of personal
responsibility in the mind of the editor? If not, how do you suggest this could be done?
That's the hardest part, isn't it? If our editors haven't learned personal responsibility by the time they come to Wikipedia, we're not going to inspire it in them.
Kelly
On 3/30/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
And *why* exactly would we need this all-pervading bureaucracy? Who cares which group is "primarily" responsible for the article? You're confusing the idea of the SWG as a place to ask for help with the article with that of the SWG as a place to excercise control over it; unless the primary group is to be given some unique function relative to the non-primary ones, knowing which one it happens to be is useless.
(You do realize that virtually every article will be in such an intersected scope, if only because subject-oriented groups are orthogonal to country-oriented ones, yes?)
- Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
Who would be doing the asking, and what would they do if the editors refuse? Keep in mind that they *are* volunteers.
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
So, basically, mass deletions of hundreds of thousands of articles. (The groups will not, in general, have either the manpower or the motivation to really fix any substantial portion of what's unsourced. The only result you're likely to see is that editors will start pasting in references -- *any* references -- in an attempt to avoid having the articles deleted.)
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
And how, precisely, are you intending to do that? Rounding up the WikiProjects and telling them that they're doomed unless they source all their articles is going to be extremely counterproductive; faced with a negative motivational strategy, the volunteer editors will simply leave.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
And now we swing the other way: not only do unsuccessful projects get penalized, but so do successful ones. Recruiting editors to a project becomes harmful; recruit too many, and the bureaucracy will come in and Balkanize your project.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
It is, at the least, entirely unrealistic, and belies a significant lack of understanding about how collaborative editorial groups on Wikipedia actually work (or don't work, as the case may be) *in practice*.
Kirill
On 31/03/07, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
And *why* exactly would we need this all-pervading bureaucracy? Who cares which group is "primarily" responsible for the article? You're confusing the idea of the SWG as a place to ask for help with the article with that of the SWG as a place to excercise control over it; unless the primary group is to be given some unique function relative to the non-primary ones, knowing which one it happens to be is useless.
(You do realize that virtually every article will be in such an intersected scope, if only because subject-oriented groups are orthogonal to country-oriented ones, yes?)
I think bureaucracy is the wrong word. The idea is to impose a radically different, prescriptive structure onto Wikipedia to ensure that all articles are managed and brought to a particular standard. Where bureaucracy suggests evolutionary build up of layers of redundancy, this system would, ideally, be technical and streamlined. This technicality would eliminate the need for bureaucratic layers.
Take a look at [[OTRS]] if you aren't familiar with how this system could work. I think the demonstration that such formalised, technical collaboration models work is demonstrated by [[Distributed Proofreaders]]. Contributors are given small, finite tasks to perform (eg. proofreading is broken down into a series of tasks - each task being to proof read a single page. Contributors, are asked to compare a page of text which has been processed by OCR to the original scan. There are three layers of proofreading, so each page is proofread three times by different users. Users are free to contribute as much or as little as they like. Compare this to hypothetical WikiProofread where users are presented with large pages of text and are expected to proofread this text in no formalised fashion. Since the task is not broken down and fed to contributors, it seems insurmountable and very little work gets done.
The SWG would not see a list of articles which need to be fixed up in a number of ways as they currently do (making the task seem insurmountable and the achievements seem minimal). What needs to be done would be broken down into easily-manageable discrete tasks which will effectively be ticked off as each is fulfilled. This system would ensure an observable progress and give the contributors a sense of achievement. The SWG would therefore have a series of discrete tasks to perform.
- Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
Who would be doing the asking, and what would they do if the editors refuse? Keep in mind that they *are* volunteers.
Bots and scripts could associate particular users with SWGs based on their recent edit history and send them a request to join.
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
So, basically, mass deletions of hundreds of thousands of articles. (The groups will not, in general, have either the manpower or the motivation to really fix any substantial portion of what's unsourced. The only result you're likely to see is that editors will start pasting in references -- *any* references -- in an attempt to avoid having the articles deleted.)
This hasn't occurred under the organic system where a lot of pressure is on to verify with references, why would it occur under this system?
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
And how, precisely, are you intending to do that? Rounding up the WikiProjects and telling them that they're doomed unless they source all their articles is going to be extremely counterproductive; faced with a negative motivational strategy, the volunteer editors will simply leave.
I don't think introducing a new system is equivalent to "rounding up WikiProjects and telling them they're doomed unless they source the articles". WikiProjects will be identified as existing SWGs and the contributors will be asked to join the SWG.
On 3/30/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
And *why* exactly would we need this all-pervading bureaucracy? Who cares which group is "primarily" responsible for the article? You're confusing the idea of the SWG as a place to ask for help with the article with that of the SWG as a place to excercise control over it; unless the primary group is to be given some unique function relative to the non-primary ones, knowing which one it happens to be is useless.
(You do realize that virtually every article will be in such an intersected scope, if only because subject-oriented groups are orthogonal to country-oriented ones, yes?)
I think bureaucracy is the wrong word. The idea is to impose a radically different, prescriptive structure onto Wikipedia to ensure that all articles are managed and brought to a particular standard. Where bureaucracy suggests evolutionary build up of layers of redundancy, this system would, ideally, be technical and streamlined. This technicality would eliminate the need for bureaucratic layers.
No, it'd merely make sure that the bureaucratic layers are planned in advance. ;-)
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll simply refuse. This proposal, basically, assumes that there's a supply of editors somewhere willing to do work (which happens to be "not fun" in a major way) according to some central bureaucracy's dictates; in my experience, there simply isn't such a supply available.
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
So, basically, mass deletions of hundreds of thousands of articles. (The groups will not, in general, have either the manpower or the motivation to really fix any substantial portion of what's unsourced. The only result you're likely to see is that editors will start pasting in references -- *any* references -- in an attempt to avoid having the articles deleted.)
This hasn't occurred under the organic system where a lot of pressure is on to verify with references, why would it occur under this system?
Um, right now, there isn't *any* pressure for anything that's not a BLP or a controversial topic. We have enormous numbers of unreferenced articles on more obscure topics that few people visit; the vast majority of them will never see anyone trying to remove them based on being unreferenced, which this proposal would do.
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
And how, precisely, are you intending to do that? Rounding up the WikiProjects and telling them that they're doomed unless they source all their articles is going to be extremely counterproductive; faced with a negative motivational strategy, the volunteer editors will simply leave.
I don't think introducing a new system is equivalent to "rounding up WikiProjects and telling them they're doomed unless they source the articles". WikiProjects will be identified as existing SWGs and the contributors will be asked to join the SWG.
And then what? The key element of this proposal seems to be that these SWGs (let us call them "WikiProjects") would somehow magically start sourcing everything with nary a complaint. The fundamental underpinning theory here is that (a) occasional editors can be forced to join project en masse and (b) project members can be forced to do sourcing work en masse; in my experience, neither of those reflects reality. The more likely reaction is that many of the active projects will simply move somewhere else, and the rest will fail to actually accomplish anything substantial.
Kirill
On Mar 30, 2007, at 10:14 PM, Kirill Lokshin wrote:
And then what? The key element of this proposal seems to be that these SWGs (let us call them "WikiProjects") would somehow magically start sourcing everything with nary a complaint. The fundamental underpinning theory here is that (a) occasional editors can be forced to join project en masse and (b) project members can be forced to do sourcing work en masse; in my experience, neither of those reflects reality. The more likely reaction is that many of the active projects will simply move somewhere else, and the rest will fail to actually accomplish anything substantial.
I agree... What I find peculiar about this proposal is that it seems disassociated from the reality of day-to-day editing and the current culture in en.wiki. One thing has become clear to me: as Wikipedia becomes bigger and bigger, the ability to make any major changes will be greatly diminished, in particular in issues related to the social structure of the project.
-- Jossi
On 3/31/07, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
I agree... What I find peculiar about this proposal is that it seems disassociated from the reality of day-to-day editing and the current culture in en.wiki. One thing has become clear to me: as Wikipedia becomes bigger and bigger, the ability to make any major changes will be greatly diminished, in particular in issues related to the social structure of the project.
What's interesting about your statement is that I developed the idea out of suggestions from people who are involved in day-to-day editing in Wikipedia.
I do admit that it is not well associated with the current culture in enwiki, but that's because the current culture in enwiki is defective and problematic and needs to be changed.
Kelly
On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:16 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:
I do admit that it is not well associated with the current culture in enwiki, but that's because the current culture in enwiki is defective and problematic and needs to be changed.
And how will you *change* culture? You can't. I will evolve as it sees fit, if unencumbered by bureaucracy.
-- Jissi
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll simply refuse.
Yep, important to remember. The "incentive" could be simply deletion; if someone says "adopt this article or it goes away", then I can look at the article and decide if I want to take it on. If I don't care about it, and nobody else does either, then why would we want to keep it anyway? It's just going to accumulate bad edits and mislead anybody who happens to read it.
Requiring adoption by a project is just a way to make sure the interest outlives the whims of any particular editor.
It *is* a different mind set. Four years ago the attitude was "every sentence is sacred" :-) and we would jump through all kinds of hoops to save every scrap of verbiage. Now the underlying theme of many discussions is what it looks like to be finished with a topic; we want the geologist's accomplishments, but not the charges and countercharges in the divorce, or we want one paragraph on a TV episode, not a minute-by-minute transcript. Deleting unmaintained articles is a further step on that road, maybe going too far, but certainly worth pondering.
Stan
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll simply refuse. This proposal, basically, assumes that there's a supply of editors somewhere willing to do work (which happens to be "not fun" in a major way) according to some central bureaucracy's dictates; in my experience, there simply isn't such a supply available.
Prescriptive collaboration is an oxymoron.
Ec
On 04/04/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors make content contributions on topics of their choice; if they're told that they *must* work on article X, they'll simply refuse. This proposal, basically, assumes that there's a supply of editors somewhere willing to do work (which happens to be "not fun" in a major way) according to some central bureaucracy's dictates; in my experience, there simply isn't such a supply available.
Prescriptive collaboration is an oxymoron.
It depends on the level of prescription. This proposal never required that an individual editor *must* work on any article or any groups of articles. It attempted to match editors to areas of Wikipedia needing work and contribute their time by fulfilling ticket requests.
This is not in any conflict with collaboration.
On 4/5/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
But the key issue, I think, is simply this: prescriptive collaboration models do not, as a general rule, work on Wikipedia. The vast
Prescriptive collaboration is an oxymoron.
This is a total load of bollocks. There is nothing remotely wrong with prescribing guidelines for collaboration, with setting up frameworks for colloboration or with specifying what the priorities for collaborations are.
A WikiProject is a "prescriptive collaboration". A "collaboration of the week" is by definition a prescripitive collaboration. Even a backlog of maintenance tasks is effectively the same thing.
What's with all this baseless negativity towards a very workable, useful suggestion?
Steve
Inherent in this whole thing is the belief that Wikipedia is getting worse. Is it? Really? I have my doubts. Wikipedia is getting bigger, and thus the absolute NUMBER of problems increases, but I am yet to be convinced that the project as a whole is any more problematic than it ever was.
What IS a problem is that the project is simply so big that it is hard for everyone to work together as one community. Thus, I do like the suggestion that we encourage more of a sense of community and responsibility in smaller, more manageable areas - sensibly, organized around subject areas of common interest.
This may also help with the issue that many new contributors feel lost, alone and confused on Wikipedia, because the project as a whole is hard to feel at home in.
I'm not so sure we need /process/ in the sense of bureaucracy- Wikipedia is if anything way too good at growing confusing bureaucracy already - as much as /support/ for specialised groups to form and work together at improving Wikipedia's quality. Automation and frameworks for doing things more efficiently might indeed help, though.
I also agree that all articles should be categorized - though that's not enough, unless we have some idea where it fits into the project, the right people will not find it and fix it.
More thoughts as they come.
-Matt
On 31/03/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Inherent in this whole thing is the belief that Wikipedia is getting worse. Is it? Really? I have my doubts. Wikipedia is getting bigger, and thus the absolute NUMBER of problems increases, but I am yet to be convinced that the project as a whole is any more problematic than it ever was.
In my opinion, Wikipedia is *better* now than it ever has been and Wikipedia tends towards self-improvement. Under the organic system, our quality and control mechanisms have increased and the number of articles which meet these higher standards have increased. If we retain the current system, this will continue to happen.
The problem is that the rate of improval of Wikipedia currently doesn't match the rate at which we need to improve. Our growth in popularity, usability and use, accountability (legal and ethical).. all demand quality and control standards that exceed the ones currently in place. As these factors continue to grow--as our moral and legal accountability continues to grow--we will fall farther and farther behind (despite our general trend towards self-improvement). In the long term we risk becoming bankrupt in more than one sense.
As Slim Virgin commented on a thread entitled "Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun" at [WikiEN-l] (I hope she doesn't mind me quoting her): "All I'm arguing is that it's irresponsible to continue year after year on the same course knowing that these are real possibilities [legal harm to us and personal harm to others] and relying only on luck to see us through." The current organic system results in us relying on luck. This proposed system effectively eliminates it.
I also agree that all articles should be categorized - though that's not enough, unless we have some idea where it fits into the project, the right people will not find it and fix it.
Perhaps we should have a call to effort in categorising uncategorised articles. Often I'm stuck on Wikipedia deciding what the most important thing for the project I could be spending my time doing. If I knew that categorisation was the most important task I could be doing (an easy, though tiring task), I would happily engage in it. Such a call to effort would alert many users to the need for categorisation.
This is something practical we could be implementing right now (while we continue to discuss theoretical possibilities here and slowly get them implemented). Such a project would benefit Wikipedia whether we stay as we are or whether we determine to change.
Matthew Brown wrote:
What IS a problem is that the project is simply so big that it is hard for everyone to work together as one community. Thus, I do like the suggestion that we encourage more of a sense of community and responsibility in smaller, more manageable areas - sensibly, organized around subject areas of common interest.
This actually fits well with how wikiprojects have evolved, from loose groups with shared interests to well-organized collaborations - so in a sense it's just blessing what so many people are doing already. I like the idea that *every* article should be associated with one or more projects. As always, we can't *make* anybody do anything, but project people usually want to know about new articles in their areas, and right now the discovery process is haphazard - always disconcerting to find a duplicate article created several months earlier. So process to put articles into appropriate buckets would be helpful.
I wonder if there are worthwhile articles that simply defy classification, requiring an "Oddballs" category...
Stan
On 3/31/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
This actually fits well with how wikiprojects have evolved, from loose groups with shared interests to well-organized collaborations - so in a sense it's just blessing what so many people are doing already.
Yes. The idea came about from talking to people who mainly edit content, oddly enough. Something which the people who play at running Wikipedia do not do enough of, I am afraid.
I like the idea that *every* article should be associated with one or more projects. As always, we can't *make* anybody do anything, but project people usually want to know about new articles in their areas, and right now the discovery process is haphazard - always disconcerting to find a duplicate article created several months earlier.
The haphazardness is the problem that I really think needs to be dealt with more than anything else. It's always the article that we've overlooked (e.g. [[John Siegenthaler]]) that rises up to bite us.
Kelly
There's a bot that runs through the newpages log to search for articles that are potentially suitable for DYK and there's also a bot that suggests users articles to edit based on their other edits (assuming those edits display the editor's interests. There's no reason why we can't have a bot running that categorizes new articles (either automatically or semi-automatically) and lists them on the relevant project pages.
The question is if we can find programmers to write such a bot and find people to run it 24/7
Mgm
On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
This actually fits well with how wikiprojects have evolved, from loose groups with shared interests to well-organized collaborations - so in a sense it's just blessing what so many people are doing already.
Yes. The idea came about from talking to people who mainly edit content, oddly enough. Something which the people who play at running Wikipedia do not do enough of, I am afraid.
I like the idea that *every* article should be associated with one or more projects. As always, we can't *make* anybody do anything, but project people usually want to know about new articles in their areas, and right now the discovery process is haphazard - always disconcerting to find a duplicate article created several months earlier.
The haphazardness is the problem that I really think needs to be dealt with more than anything else. It's always the article that we've overlooked (e.g. [[John Siegenthaler]]) that rises up to bite us.
Kelly
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 Mar 30, 2007, at 7:27 PM, Kelly Martin wrote:
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
This is already happening where is needed. Trying to impose this on the whole of en.wiki would be a mistake. Let it grow organically. If there are people that want to get together and form an SWG, nothing is stopping them. Should we encourage them to form one of they do not feel like, of course not. If there is something we need less is bureaucracy. Personal responsibility cannot be neither policed nor encouraged by rules.
-- Jossi
People work on Wikipedia because they enjoy it. As soon as you start forcing responsibilities the fun factor is gone. We definitely need to put in place some sort of referencing effort that's bigger than the existing WikiProject, but if large existing unsourced articles that are otherwise not creating any problems are getting deleted if someone can't find the references in a specified time period, you're making Wikipedia worse, not better.
A lack of sources is only a real problem when the facts are dubious or questionable.
Lack of categorization is the worst reason to delete something I've seen. There is already a large organized effort to do this and someone can do it easily often without knowledge of the subject. Categories should be the easiest to add.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
People work on Wikipedia because they enjoy it. As soon as you start forcing responsibilities the fun factor is gone.
Yes. Absolutely, it is totally unreasonable to expect our volunteers to do anything at all.
This is the core, underlying attitude that dooms Wikipedia to mediocrity. Thousands of volunteer projects exist worldwide that places often quite strenuous obligations on their volunteers. (Think Habitat for Humanity.) And yet these projects survive, even thrive. Wikipedia already has a good core of volunteers who are willing to do as requested. We need to stop pandering to the self-centered lazy "volunteers" who will "only do what is fun" and instead target the committed volunteer who is willing to do the hard stuff that needs to be done.
Kelly
On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
This is the core, underlying attitude that dooms Wikipedia to mediocrity. Thousands of volunteer projects exist worldwide that places often quite strenuous obligations on their volunteers. (Think Habitat for Humanity.) And yet these projects survive, even thrive. Wikipedia already has a good core of volunteers who are willing to do as requested. We need to stop pandering to the self-centered lazy "volunteers" who will "only do what is fun" and instead target the committed volunteer who is willing to do the hard stuff that needs to be done.
I'm fine with extra responsibilities and obligations on those that choose to take them on. Look how many people are willing to jump through the stupid hoops for RFA; now if only that energy was expended more usefully.
We also have the expectations required to be even minimally involved with Wikipedia. Those can also be raised, but less strenuously.
-Matt
Kelly Martin wrote:
This is the core, underlying attitude that dooms Wikipedia to mediocrity. Thousands of volunteer projects exist worldwide that places often quite strenuous obligations on their volunteers. (Think Habitat for Humanity.) And yet these projects survive, even thrive. Wikipedia already has a good core of volunteers who are willing to do as requested. We need to stop pandering to the self-centered lazy "volunteers" who will "only do what is fun" and instead target the committed volunteer who is willing to do the hard stuff that needs to be done.
By happy chance, and through Project Gutenberg's good graces, I've just been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer again. After the fence gets painted, Twain ends the chapter with:
If [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is / obliged / to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
I think the only thing that has changed in 150 years is that treadmills are no longer work, but play.
William
On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
Essentially, what you're describing isn't Wikipedia as it works but a different project starting from the same database.
(Put this new project at en.wikipedia.org and put the old one at en-dev.wikipedia.org?)
- d.
On 31/03/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
Essentially, what you're describing isn't Wikipedia as it works but a different project starting from the same database.
(Put this new project at en.wikipedia.org and put the old one at en-dev.wikipedia.org?)
Or http://en-x-old.wikipedia.org/ :)
On 3/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
Essentially, what you're describing isn't Wikipedia as it works but a different project starting from the same database.
What? No. We currently categorise most articles and many fall under wikiprojects. Kelly proposes categorising *all*, placing them *all* under wikiprojects, and expanding the role of wikiprojects to encompass governance and maintenance.
If we have slumped into a "anything that we don't do already is not in the spirit of Wikipedia", then we're already dead. And the terrorists have already won.
Steve
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Kelly Martin wrote:
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
The problem with this is the same as always. While sourcing everything is an ideal, articles generally don't get created fully sourced, let alone with every sentence sourced, and Wikipedia is very much a work in progress and will remain so. Removing all unsourced articles will remove a vast amount of useful information, most of which is accurate, and when it is inaccurate is generally no more so than a typical non-Wikipedia reference anyway.
On 3/31/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
Removing all unsourced articles will remove a vast amount of useful information, most of which is accurate, and when it is inaccurate is generally no more so than a typical non-Wikipedia reference anyway.
Furthermore, most of the inaccuracy in Wikipedia, I suspect, was not cut from whole cloth by the contributor writing the article - but rather, it comes from an outside source. After all, people get their facts from somewhere. Sourcing articles doesn't magically make them accurate. It does perform the useful task of helping someone track down the source of inaccurate info, however.
Sourcing also makes people actually re-check the place they got the facts from, sometimes encouraging further reading of it.
-Matt
On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
This is a message I wrote in another mailing list. I'm forwarding it to enwiki-l at Jimbo's suggestion.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com Date: Mar 30, 2007 11:15 AM Subject: Re: [Otrs-en-l] [SPAM] info-en vs info-fr To: English OTRS discussion list otrs-en-l@lists.wikimedia.org
(Comments from another contributor redacted; the discussion was related to how inclusionist tendencies tend to lead to large numbers of unmaintained articles.)
This was the gist of my recent blogpost on maintainability as the proper criterion for inclusion. I freely admit to being an inclusionist -- I would love to see proper articles on all rysorts of random topics of even marginal interest -- but I temper that with the understanding that having unmaintainable articles harms the encyclopedia as a whole, and the recognition that the Wikipedia community is not currently capable of maintaining even the articles it has, let alone all the articles it could possibly have.
My attitude on such people is that the content should be sequestered in a nonpublic place and reviewed upon notice that the individual in question has died. If we never receive notice, then that's probably because the person was not interesting enough in life to justify an article anyway. Yes, we might sequester an article for decades under this policy, but I'm an eventualist as well.
However, don't mistake my eventualism for being support for the idea that we should leave crap articles sitting out there in public view (which is a point of view commonly attributed to eventualists). I am firmly opposed to leaving low-quality articles on the public wiki when doing so will bring disrepute onto the subjects of those articles or bring harm to Wikipedia as a project. I am therefore very much in favor of deletion of any article for which there is no established, committed process for maintenance.
The problem with this is that there is no established, committed process for maintaining ANY article on Wikipedia. All article maintenance on Wikipedia, and in fact virtually all process on Wikipedia, is haphazard. We are just starting to get comprehensive vandalism management using centralized tools, or so I am told. We still have no mechanisms for coordinating even so much as article categorization or article sourcing, both of which are crucial aspects of article maintenance.
The infrastructure to maintain over a million and a half articles has never existed on Wikipedia. Until it does, every new article is another paper cut, bleeding us a bit more each day.
As I see it, the following absolutely must be done:
- All articles must be categorized. A bot can be used to generate
lists of uncategorized articles, and the articles found in this way presented to volunteer categorizers using a workflow approach. Articles not categorized within a reasonable time (say, seven days for new articles, and three months for existing articles) will be deleted. My understanding is that there are bots that are capable of making "good guesses" at categorization, so this may be less painful than it seems.
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
- Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
This is all entirely orthogonal to vandalism management.
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their SWG.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's community has grown too large to function organically the way it used to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem: the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a one-time fix.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
Kelly
Regardless if discussion goes any further on this. Would it be a good idea to set up an project management or OTRS system and trial it with a couple of active WikiProjects? See if Wikipedians work well with small broken-down tasking?
On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
- All articles must be categorized. A bot can be used to generate
lists of uncategorized articles, and the articles found in this way
To be precise, all articles must be categorised within the main hierarchy of categories.
- A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories
Yes.
assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for it.)
No. It's not important who is "primarily responsible" for it.
- Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or formalize an existing informal one).
Yes. This already kind of happens with WikiProjects. It's sort of flattering to be asked to join a WikiProject. :)
- SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
Yes. We should not be scared of using the word "responsibility". Obviously we don't punish people if they fail. But we define the group who is ultimately responsible.
- Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of the article and the need to source it.
Oh, this is interesting. Implicit in this is that the SWG can decide whether they want the article or not.
This is all entirely orthogonal to vandalism management.
Is it? I hoped one advantage would be fewer dusty, never visited corners of Wikipedia. With the supervised category approach, we could guarantee to patrol every page.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
I really, really like this idea. It's the next logical step forward. Implementation details please.
Steve