Darin Brown wrote:
It is clear by looking at the histories of several AfD's for just a few hours that many people who were not experts on the topic, and hardly cared or were even interested in the topic, expended so much time and energy in telling people who *were* experts and interested people how they should police themselves.
Yep. AFD is one place where Larry Sanger's claim of blatant anti-expert bias is provably correct.
So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
- d.
On 11/15/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yep. AFD is one place where Larry Sanger's claim of blatant anti-expert bias is provably correct.
So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
Snowspinner, who does actually know a thing or two about webcomics, has been practising some interventionism in webcomic article deletion debates. This kind of thing isn't for the faint of heart, because usually it involved convincingly facing down a bunch of ignoramuses, but he's had some success.
I have come around to the suggestion that I formerly felt rather wary of: closing AfD at least for an experimental period, because of its function in lending leverage to attempts to exclude whole subjects from Wikipedia. The current activities organised around AfD not good for the long term health of the project, in my opinion.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 11/15/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yep. AFD is one place where Larry Sanger's claim of blatant anti-expert bias is provably correct.
So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
Snowspinner, who does actually know a thing or two about webcomics, has been practising some interventionism in webcomic article deletion debates. This kind of thing isn't for the faint of heart, because usually it involved convincingly facing down a bunch of ignoramuses, but he's had some success.
I have come around to the suggestion that I formerly felt rather wary of: closing AfD at least for an experimental period, because of its function in lending leverage to attempts to exclude whole subjects from Wikipedia. The current activities organised around AfD not good for the long term health of the project, in my opinion.
In addition, undelete everything closed by AFD in the last year. If stuff needs deleting, CSD and copyvio provisions should be able to handle it.
G'day David, [AfD]
So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
It depends on the expert. On the one hand, an unbiased view on AfD is a very welcome thing. Imagine if SPUI were the sole authority on what roadcruft we should keep, and what we should delete! And yet, he's undeniably an amateur expert on transportation in the USA --- should his opinion count for more than the metric truckload of people who don't think an unnoteworthy back street encyclopaedic?
On the other hand, anti-expert bias is inherently a Bad Thing. Wikipedia is too populist. We take experts and say to them "well, I'm an ignorant moron from Power Cable, Nebraska, and my views count just as much as yours do. So tell me, if you can, why Lyndon LaRouche isn't our Lord and Saviour?"
The question is not whether we should be blanket pro- or anti-expert. It's how far to either extreme we should lean.
Cheers,
On 11/15/05, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
It depends on the expert. On the one hand, an unbiased view on AfD is a very welcome thing. Imagine if SPUI were the sole authority on what roadcruft we should keep, and what we should delete! And yet, he's undeniably an amateur expert on transportation in the USA --- should his opinion count for more than the metric truckload of people who don't think an unnoteworthy back street encyclopaedic?
Actually from what I've seen SPUI does a convincing job on this subject and I'd trust his judgement because of it. Roads and the like are pretty heavy duty things involving pretty massive amounts of work, usually publicly organised, so it's a bit odd to see people nominating articles on these massive slabs of tarmacadam for deletion in the first place. If the roads aren't particularly interesting in themselves, then we should organise the information using our existing redirect and merge features.
Mark Gallagher wrote:
G'day David, [AfD]
So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
It depends on the expert. On the one hand, an unbiased view on AfD is a very welcome thing. Imagine if SPUI were the sole authority on what roadcruft we should keep, and what we should delete! And yet, he's undeniably an amateur expert on transportation in the USA --- should his opinion count for more than the metric truckload of people who don't think an unnoteworthy back street encyclopaedic?
On the other hand, anti-expert bias is inherently a Bad Thing. Wikipedia is too populist. We take experts and say to them "well, I'm an ignorant moron from Power Cable, Nebraska, and my views count just as much as yours do. So tell me, if you can, why Lyndon LaRouche isn't our Lord and Saviour?"
The question is not whether we should be blanket pro- or anti-expert. It's how far to either extreme we should lean.
Additionally, it's not like we don't have experts who want to help us; we've had a few "your article on (blah) sucks, I'm an expert on (blah), what should I do?", to which all I can do is write out {{sofixit}} longhand. (If you've ever bothered to read the template, instead of just referencing it by name, you'll realise that it's actually pretty useful...)
What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d, nn. cruft".
"David Gerard" wrote
If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
AfD remains the classic raw wiki experience.
AfD is not
- filtered - mediated - sorted by topic - categorised by policy invoked
or indeed really massaged in any way: it's just a daily list. People nominate, they add directly to the page. They want "instant action". Never mind the long list of clean-ups stretching back into the past, they want something _off the site_, or their patience will snap, and they want attention _now_.
We are told, fairly convincing, that AfD has scaled badly. Why would it scale well? Essentially nothing has been tried.
Filtering: make a 24 hour wait before nominations go public at AfD, so that admins can do speedy deletes and keeps.
Mediated: sort noms with admin sponsors to delete from those which are not speedied but have no support either way.
Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility. Make sorted noms a crisper process.
Categorise: why this nomination?
All this is without Sangerising and having people arguing that other people don't know what they're talking about.
Charles
On 11/15/05, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility. Make sorted noms a crisper process.
Great so as well as remebering how to list something in the first place I know have to remeber every single wikipedia wiki project. Congrats on makeing RC patrol even more complex.
geni
On 11/15/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/15/05, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility. Make sorted noms a crisper process.
Great so as well as remebering how to list something in the first place I know have to remeber every single wikipedia wiki project. Congrats on makeing RC patrol even more complex.
It's a newpages patrol job, not a rc patrol job.
Be that as it may, there's no reason it can't be a two-stage process where the person nominating for deletion simply tags the article, and other people then work on that tagged category and work out what should be done.
-Matt
On 11/15/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/15/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/15/05, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility. Make sorted noms a crisper process.
Great so as well as remebering how to list something in the first place I know have to remeber every single wikipedia wiki project. Congrats on makeing RC patrol even more complex.
It's a newpages patrol job, not a rc patrol job.
Be that as it may, there's no reason it can't be a two-stage process where the person nominating for deletion simply tags the article, and other people then work on that tagged category and work out what should be done.
-Matt
Wikiproject AFD? That soulds like a recipy for conflict that would worry even me.
-- geni