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(a)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(a)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.

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.

* 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.

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.

* 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 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(a)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(a)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