If we're going to improve the quality of new articles, we'll going to need an actual quality check, not just a block on anonymous editors' ability to start articles. Most of new articles don't meet basic quality standards. A significant number are so bad that they need to be speedily deleted, or put on AFD.
I suggest that we tackle this by putting all new articles into an approval queue - they shouldn't appear on Wikipedia unless they meet basic quality standards. If a reviewing editor judges that the article meets an objective set of criteria, it should be "published". If not, the submitted new article should either be deleted or sorted into a "needs improvement" category outside the main namespace.
Here's some background data on the problem. I checked 50 new articles tonight, all created between 22:46 and 23:03. I graded them into five categories as follows:
* Speedy deletion fodder (falling into the categories set out in [[WP:CSD]]): - 10 articles (20% of the total)
* Sufficiently poor to warrant a deletion vote ([[WP:AFD]]): - 2 articles; 1 of them a copyvio, 1 a probable spamvertisement (2% of the total)
* Serious content problems (no wikilinking or references, badly written, non-English; generally these were just plain blocks of text dumped into Wikipedia): - 7 articles (14% of the total)
* No obvious problems with content, but problems with the formatting, spelling or layout: - 12 articles (24% of the total)
* No obvious problems - 19 articles (38% of the total)
Note that I didn't check whether the content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards. As these figures indicate, the majority of new articles created during this period failed the quality check. Nearly a quarter failed so badly that they were worth deleting. This certainly accords with my previous experiences in monitoring [[Special:Newpages]].
We already have a huge amount of crap in the database, as we all know. Unfortunately the problem is getting bigger all the time. No amount of work to fix existing articles is going to help if we don't also fix the problem of poor-quality new articles being published. We're effectively trying to bail out a leaky boat while the water is still entering.
Note also that quite a few of the speedy deletions were things like personal attacks, patent nonsense, tests etc (e.g. "wow, hey carly, i cant believe i can put this on a site! :O its so cool!"). I strongly suspect that people wouldn't submit this sort of thing if they knew that they wouldn't see it appearing instantly on a Wikipedia page.
So how could we deal with this? Three measures, I think:
1) New articles should go somewhere outside the main namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
2) We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly formatted? Includes references? etc etc...
3) Reviewing editors should assess newly created articles against these criteria. If the article passes, the article should be cleared to enter the main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a "needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling corrections", then finally moved to the main namespace.
Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be people with a bit of experience of editing, I would limit the ability to review and approve new articles to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+. However, any editor should be able to work on improving a queued article.
Any thoughts on this idea?
- ChrisO
___________________________________________________________ NEW Yahoo! Cars - sell your car and browse thousands of new and used cars online! http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/
Hello,
Note that I didn't check whether the content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards. As these figures indicate, the majority of new articles created during this period failed the quality check. Nearly a quarter failed so badly that they were worth deleting. This certainly accords with my previous experiences in monitoring [[Special:Newpages]].
Nice (original) research! I considered doing something similar with AfC. There, the vast majority of pages fail on the grounds of "already exists under another name", "not noteworthy", "not a dictionary", "silly" etc. Let's face it - newbies should be not be making new pages. They just don't have the concept of what belongs in Wikipedia and what doesn't.
- New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
Why stop at new articles? Why not do the same with newbie edits, or edits detected by the system to be possible vandalism. (Massive reductions of text, swear words, etc.)
- We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria
for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly formatted? Includes references? etc etc...
Passes the grade to be published? Add "contains sufficient definition and context". Wikilinking maybe less important?
- Reviewing editors should assess newly created
articles against these criteria. If the article passes, the article should be cleared to enter the main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a "needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling corrections", then finally moved to the main namespace.
Are you proposing "reviewing editors" as being a particular class of editor, akin to a "moderator"?
Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be people with a bit of experience of editing, I would limit the ability to review and approve new articles to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+.
Woot, I qualify.
However, any editor should be able to work on improving a queued article.
Wholly concur. I amigane a situation where some article is up to version 1593, and its *published version* is 1589. You edit the article, see version 1593, save your changes, it becomes 1594. Eventually a reviewer reviews it and publishes it - now the two versions are in sync at #1594, and can be distributed to mirrors etc.
Libel considerations aside, it might be worthwhile making "unpublished" versions available to the general public underneath massive spammy WARNING UNVERIFIED banners.
Steve
Hi,
Big yellow and black stripes!
Yes, preferably with "under construction" signs. No, seriously - if a user goes out of their way to view text which is "not fit for public viewing", they deserve any spammy banners they see. Of course, one problem is what is then implied by the absence of such spammy banners on 'published' pages, as has been discussed.
Steve
On 12/15/05, Chris Owen ronthewarhero@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
- New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
I never understood the purpose of having a queue. It takes just as much time to delete something from the queue as it does to delete an article. Move the articles with problems (that aren't speedy deletes) *into* the queue(s). Keep the ones that don't have problems right where they are.
Anthony
On 12/16/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/15/05, Chris Owen ronthewarhero@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
- New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
I never understood the purpose of having a queue. It takes just as much time to delete something from the queue as it does to delete an article. Move the articles with problems (that aren't speedy deletes) *into* the queue(s). Keep the ones that don't have problems right where they are.
Anthony
Yes, it won't necessarily lower the workload, but it would certainly improve the quality of our articles.
Mgm
On 12/16/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/16/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/15/05, Chris Owen ronthewarhero@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
- New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
I never understood the purpose of having a queue. It takes just as much time to delete something from the queue as it does to delete an article. Move the articles with problems (that aren't speedy deletes) *into* the queue(s). Keep the ones that don't have problems right where they are.
Anthony
Yes, it won't necessarily lower the workload, but it would certainly improve the quality of our articles.
Mgm
How? The quality of the articles is exactly equal if someone puts them into a queue and you delete it or someone creates it and you delete it.
The question is whether or not to keep substandard articles. The meat of the proposal is to keep unreferenced, unlinked, and/or unformatted articles out of the article namespace. I agree with that. What I don't agree with is the crappy implementation of it.
Instead of building queues and restricting editing and moving good articles out of the queues, just move the bad articles into the queues. Start [[Wikipedia:Articles without references]], and move new articles without references to a subpage. Start [[Wikipedia:Articles without formatting]], and move new articles without formatting to a subpage. Start [[Wikipedia:Articles without wikilinks]], and move new articles without wikilinks to a subpage. You accomplish all the same things without forcing the good articles to go through a queue.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Yes, it won't necessarily lower the workload, but it would certainly improve the quality of our articles.
Mgm
How? The quality of the articles is exactly equal if someone puts them into a queue and you delete it or someone creates it and you delete it.
Without making any comment on the merits of the specific proposal at hand (it sounds great to me, but then again I haven't thought it through enough yet), I can answer this question...
The question is what happens in the case of an overlooked article? What happens when the New Pages Patrollers get behind or there is a gap in coverage?
The default failure mode of the patrolling process today says "Anything we don't look at, we assume is good enough to go on the site" -> Seigenthaler. The proposed failure mode of the patrolling process says "Anything we don't look at, we leave it in the queue until someone gets around to it." If the queue of new articles by newbies is time-stamp sorted, then we will often be only a few minutes behind, sometimes maybe an hour.
Now, this need not necessarily be done with a queue or a gateway model. Another idea in the same general area is the long-desired 'check off' model for collaborative RC/new pages patrolling.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Yes, it won't necessarily lower the workload, but it would certainly improve the quality of our articles.
Mgm
How? The quality of the articles is exactly equal if someone puts them into a queue and you delete it or someone creates it and you delete it.
Without making any comment on the merits of the specific proposal at hand (it sounds great to me, but then again I haven't thought it through enough yet), I can answer this question...
The question is what happens in the case of an overlooked article? What happens when the New Pages Patrollers get behind or there is a gap in coverage?
The default failure mode of the patrolling process today says "Anything we don't look at, we assume is good enough to go on the site" -> Seigenthaler. The proposed failure mode of the patrolling process says "Anything we don't look at, we leave it in the queue until someone gets around to it." If the queue of new articles by newbies is time-stamp sorted, then we will often be only a few minutes behind, sometimes maybe an hour.
Now, this need not necessarily be done with a queue or a gateway model. Another idea in the same general area is the long-desired 'check off' model for collaborative RC/new pages patrolling.
As I already offered somewhere else, I could modify my "Tasks" extension to * automatically flag every new article with a "checkme" task * automatically flag edits that delete a huge amount of text with a "check for vandalism" task These are just examples, I could add lots more here (low "[[" to bytes ratio = unwikified :-)
If I add this, some assurance that the extension would be used some day would be nice, though. I'll probably end up rewriting the validation feature, and the stable version feature seems to be obsolete due to parallel development. Please, not again.
Magnus
On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Yes, it won't necessarily lower the workload, but it would certainly improve the quality of our articles.
Mgm
How? The quality of the articles is exactly equal if someone puts them into a queue and you delete it or someone creates it and you delete it.
Without making any comment on the merits of the specific proposal at hand (it sounds great to me, but then again I haven't thought it through enough yet), I can answer this question...
The question is what happens in the case of an overlooked article? What happens when the New Pages Patrollers get behind or there is a gap in coverage?
The default failure mode of the patrolling process today says "Anything we don't look at, we assume is good enough to go on the site" -> Seigenthaler. The proposed failure mode of the patrolling process says "Anything we don't look at, we leave it in the queue until someone gets around to it." If the queue of new articles by newbies is time-stamp sorted, then we will often be only a few minutes behind, sometimes maybe an hour.
Now, this need not necessarily be done with a queue or a gateway model. Another idea in the same general area is the long-desired 'check off' model for collaborative RC/new pages patrolling.
--Jimbo
You're right in theory, but in practice I don't think new articles are coming in fast enough that there are some that no one looks at at all. Someone *did* look at the Seigenthaler article, it's just that the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious. I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact. If you're going to require *extensive* fact checking before releasing something from the queue, then I could see the purpose. But this proposal was about "basic quality standards", standards which the Seigenthaler article apparently met (I haven't actually seen it, I'm going by the statements of you, Seigenthaler, and others, here).
A "check off" model might help a little, but it would be rather easy to search the database for articles which were created and not edited by some subset of "trusted users" within a certain timeframe. This would accomplish pretty much the same thing as a check off model, and it'd allow for different people to have different definitions of who is trusted.
Say you defined "trusted user" as a user who has at least 500 edits. It would be no problem to present a list of articles that haven't been edited by such a "trusted user".
Anyway, I guess a properly implemented queue wouldn't be a bad thing. For instance if "publishing" and "unpublishing" were a simple toggle switch. But I see it as rather unnecessary.
As an aside, would the user who clicks the "publish" button find herself legally liable for the content of that article? I certainly could see an argument for that being the case. Whether or not that'd be a good thing or a bad thing is another unanswered question.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
You're right in theory, but in practice I don't think new articles are coming in fast enough that there are some that no one looks at at all. Someone *did* look at the Seigenthaler article, it's just that the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious.
I think the mistakes were blatantly obvious and if the person who wikied the article had had enough time, the article would have been: -tagged as a stub -placed into a category -edited down to uncontroversial claims
Any good editor _with enough time_ who looks at an article about a living person which makes claims as transparently outlandish as these will know to remove those claims and insist on a source. It would have taken 15 seconds of googling to see that the claims were in no way supported by any obvious source.
I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious."
This would not have been a news story around the world if the mistakes were subtle. Subtle mistakes are possible in every medium. The problem here, and no one should be complacent about this in any way, shape or form, is that this article was spectacularly jaw-droppingly wrong, and sat on the site for 4 months without us noticing it.
But this proposal was about "basic quality standards", standards which the Seigenthaler article apparently met (I haven't actually seen it, I'm going by the statements of you, Seigenthaler, and others, here).
The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic quality standards.
--Jimbo
On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious."
If the mistakes were obvious, the edit patroller who edited the article would have caught them.
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious. Now maybe there were others which were more glaring and Seigenthaler just decided not to mention them. But I doubt it.
But this proposal was about "basic quality standards", standards which the Seigenthaler article apparently met (I haven't actually seen it, I'm going by the statements of you, Seigenthaler, and others, here).
The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic quality standards.
--Jimbo
The original post said this: "Note that I didn't check whether the content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards."
The proposal was specifically *not* about accuracy.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious."
If the mistakes were obvious, the edit patroller who edited the article would have caught them.
That's a spectacularly bad bit of reasoning. The mistakes *were* obvious, and the edit patroller *did not* catch them. Those are the simple facts of the case. The question we must ask ourselves is: why?
Simply pre-defining "obvious mistakes" as "anything an edit patroller catches" in a tautological fashion is absurd and in my opinion mere trolling.
Imagine this conversation:
Q: "How does wikipedia police new articles?" A: "We have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors." Q: "What happened with Seigenthaler?" A: "The errors weren't obvious." Q: "?!?!! What makes you say that." A: "If they were obvious, we would have caught them, since we have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors."
*cough*
This line of thought completely ignores ALL the important questions like: are human errors possible? Are our systems well-designed to minimize human error? How did this error happen?
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
--Jimbo
On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious."
If the mistakes were obvious, the edit patroller who edited the article would have caught them.
That's a spectacularly bad bit of reasoning. The mistakes *were* obvious, and the edit patroller *did not* catch them. Those are the simple facts of the case. The question we must ask ourselves is: why?
Simply pre-defining "obvious mistakes" as "anything an edit patroller catches" in a tautological fashion is absurd and in my opinion mere trolling.
I'm defining "obvious mistakes" roughly as "a mistake that anyone looking at something would notice". If something is obvious, then someone looking at it would notice it. I guess I'm presuming that the edit patroller actually looked at the article.
I really think you need to take a step back here and consider that the definition of obvious that I was using is quite reasonable. It might not be exactly the right definition, and it might not be how you thought I was using the word. But it wasn't trolling.
Imagine this conversation:
Q: "How does wikipedia police new articles?" A: "We have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors." Q: "What happened with Seigenthaler?" A: "The errors weren't obvious." Q: "?!?!! What makes you say that." A: "If they were obvious, we would have caught them, since we have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors."
*cough*
This line of thought completely ignores ALL the important questions like: are human errors possible? Are our systems well-designed to minimize human error? How did this error happen?
I don't think Wikipedia should settle for only catching obvious errors.
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
--Jimbo
In order to determine whether or not those statements are true, one would need to do research. Do you dispute this? Do you think if I asked an average person on the street whether or not it was true that John Seigenthaler was thought, for a brief time, to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations, that they'd say "no, of course that isn't true"? Personally I think they'd say "John who?"
You seem to like conversations:
Person 1: John Seigenthaler didn't move to the Soviet Union in 1971. Person 2: Obviously.
Do you think that's a reasonable conversation?
Anthony
"Jimmy Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote in message news:43A2D09C.4080301@wikia.com...
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
[snip]
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter." None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
Well, colour me with the same brush, then.
If I was already familiar with the life-history of "John Seigenthaler Sr." I might well be able to tell that those particular statements were in error. If I was an expert on the Kennedy Assassination, I might have a similar chance. Even if I was American, I might have a better chance than I do :-)
However, coming to it cold, I would have no way of knowing which, if any, of the various points of information in that article might have been false. If there were external links in the article, I would have to follow each and every one to check. If not, I would have to Google extensively.
However, and most importantly, I would have to know that I **needed to check**.
What was the "glaring red light" that might have prompted a chance visitor to that article to think "maybe I ought to check whether everything in this article is completely true?"? Were there no other suspects than Oswald and [whoever killed Bobby Kennedy], ever? Did JS never live anywhere other than where he lives now, and is he famous for never moving home? Did he not actually start up "one of the country's largest public relations firms"? or did he, but not at that time?
Hindsight is 20/20. I clearly am not.
HTH HAND
Hi,
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
Are you perhaps discussing different meanings of "obvious"? I, like most people, had never heard of Seigenthaler before this issue arose. For starters, I'm not American. Nothing in the style of writing or the facts being claimed leaps out at me as being "this could not possibly be true for any living journalist", although the phrase "nothing was ever proven" is...unusual. It's perfectly conceivable (to me) that a journalist could have been suspected of being involved in an assassination, but not be tried or convicted.
However, had I known anything *whatsoever* about Seigenthaler, it's quite likely that those errors would have been "obvious". Similarly, anyone reasonably familiar with the Kennedy family would spot the error. I don't even know if Bobby Kennedy is dead, and if so, whether he was murdered etc.
So is the problem here that no one should correct/verify any new article unless they're fairly familiar with the subject?
Steve
On 12/16/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
Are you perhaps discussing different meanings of "obvious"?
I think so. It's now obvious to me and pretty much anyone following this discussion that the article was false. I mean, the person who wrote it even admitted it. I don't think it was obvious to the average edit patroller at the time. That's all I was saying. Poor phrasing, I suppose, but not trolling.
Anthony
Are you perhaps discussing different meanings of "obvious"?
I think so. It's now obvious to me and pretty much anyone following this discussion that the article was false. I mean, the person who wrote it even admitted it. I don't think it was obvious to the average edit patroller at the time. That's all I was saying. Poor phrasing, I suppose, but not trolling.
Anthony _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list
And I agree for whatever it's worth, as someone who does RC patrol a lot, that edit would not have set off any alarm bells. I would have looked at it and tried to make a decision whether it's worth chasing it down and letting a page or two of CDFV screens roll by....we see lot's of stuff added to articles, vandal fighting would grind to a halt if we started fact checking everything. I assume that a subject matter expert catches that stuff on the flip side. Obviously not all the time...
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
I have to admit I probably wouldn't have flagged these as out of the ordinary either. There are hundreds of JFK conspiracy theories, many involving unlikely-seeming people, and there are many USians who have lived in the Soviet Union for long periods, people working at the embassy for example. WP has a long tradition of "strange but true" material, as witness [[crushing by elephant]] and the whole exploding animals series, so strangeness alone does not trigger many alarms.
RC patrol sometimes seems a little like a checkpoint in Iraq; the volume of oncoming traffic is such that you only get a few seconds to assess each edit as "plausible" or "bogus", and either pull the trigger or let it pass. Just the other day somebody reverted as vandalism an anon's mention of a proposal for a maglev train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. But I remembered reading about it in the paper, and a moment of Googling turned up all the details. I only noticed this deletion because the article happened to be on my watchlist because I had added a picture to it once.
If you really want to keep the vandals and pranksters from getting through, you either need more volunteers on patrol (Shinseki says 300,000 at least :-) ), or use them more efficiently, or cut down on the inflow somehow.
Stan
Stan Shebs wrote:
If you really want to keep the vandals and pranksters from getting through, you either need more volunteers on patrol (Shinseki says 300,000 at least :-) ), or use them more efficiently, or cut down on the inflow somehow.
I think a few more levels of catchers will do the job fine.
e.g. [[Wikipedia:Speedy deletion patrol]] appears to be a workable idea - rather than hassle the Newpages patrollers to be perfect, we just let some admins check the deletion logs and restore articles clearly deleted in error - which will be a much smaller subset. Both the deleters and the restorers are admins, and if you pass RFA you can be assumed not to have completely whacked-out judgement, so the people doing each function can assume basic sanity on the part of the others, and the deletions and restorations can proceed with assumption of good faith and without a zillion layers of red tape. Which is ideal, really.
e.g. the mooted biography patrol - presumably checking the surviving new articles for anything resembling a person's name.
e.g. whatever else.
This should help the screening in manageable doses without setting up a structure or bureaucracy that will be a pain in the backside or cause rancor.
- d.
Stan Shebs wrote:
If you really want to keep the vandals and pranksters from getting through, you either need more volunteers on patrol (Shinseki says 300,000 at least :-) ), or use them more efficiently, or cut down on the inflow somehow.
I think a few more levels of catchers will do the job fine.
e.g. [[Wikipedia:Speedy deletion patrol]] appears to be a workable idea - rather than hassle the Newpages patrollers to be perfect, we just let some admins check the deletion logs and restore articles clearly deleted in error - which will be a much smaller subset. - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list
[[Wikipedia:Speedy deletion patrol]]
That's a great idea, I'd personally like to see an undeletion accompanied by a little cleanup. There's plenty of out-of-process speedy deletion but a lot of them were in pretty sad shape (which is probably partly what got them speedied in the first place). I know some admins don't like when someone restores something they speedied but if it was also cleaned up a bit I doubt if anyone would object...
I'd still like to see tag and bag though.....
Brian wrote:
That's a great idea, I'd personally like to see an undeletion accompanied by a little cleanup. There's plenty of out-of-process speedy deletion but a lot of them were in pretty sad shape (which is probably partly what got them speedied in the first place). I know some admins don't like when someone restores something they speedied but if it was also cleaned up a bit I doubt if anyone would object...
Well, that's the point - we're all admins there, so basic judgemental skills can be assumed. The idea is to *reduce* hassle for the newpages patrollers - that they're not expected to be perfect.
And to reduce the ridiculous bureaucracy and resulting rancor surrounding the whole deletion process on en:.
It doesn't cut through the [[Gordian Knot]] of en: deletion bureaucracy, but I think it will help pick a few threads out of it.
I'd still like to see tag and bag though.....
No reason not to do that too.
(I need to do some SPD myself, for that matter ...)
- d.
Brian wrote:
[[Wikipedia:Speedy deletion patrol]]
That's a great idea, I'd personally like to see an undeletion accompanied by a little cleanup. There's plenty of out-of-process speedy deletion but a lot of them were in pretty sad shape (which is probably partly what got them speedied in the first place). I know some admins don't like when someone restores something they speedied but if it was also cleaned up a bit I doubt if anyone would object...
I've undeleted a few things in recent days (though I doubt I'll be adding my name to the patroller list, looks too much like "work" :), and in pretty much every case I immediately did an edit of some sort to the article so that I could at least explain why I undeleted it in the edit summary. Most had obvious cleanup to do, but even those that don't probably still have a speedy deletion template on them that'll need removing.
Perhaps a future edition of the MediaWiki software might add an "insert reason here"-type field for undeletions, like it has for deletions?
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
This was not (except in retrospect) obvious to me either, because I am not an expert in the Kennedy assassination. I have a vague recollection that it took a long time to come up with the official determination of what happened, so for all I know there may have been hundreds of suspects in the earlier stages of the investigation, and I do not know offhand all their names, or whether Mr. Seigenthaler was one of them.
Quite frankly, if you have nothing better to do than insult Wikipedians and tell us we are not fit to participate in your project, I should think we need new leadership.
-Mark
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
Me too, then. When the mood hits me (as it often does) I spend a lot of time clicking "random page" and tidying up any articles I come across that look in need of tidying. Before this controversy I've never heard of Siegenthaler before, so if I'd hit this page and tidied it up I would have left all of those errors in place because they are _not_ obvious. All of those things could well have been true for all I know, and it's not like I'm giving my personal stamp of approval to every word in any article I click the "save" button on so I shouldn't have to fact-check every one of them whenever I throw in category tag or succession box.
If it had said Siegenthaler had been suspected of being involved in Nixon's assassination, or had lived on Mars for a period of time, then _that_ would have been a blindingly obvious error. And even then I'd forgive an editor who just skimmed over the line without noticing it while doing other things, since it still fits well enough into the flow of the article that one might suffer a momentary lapse of attention.
On 16/12/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
I have to jump in here as well, I confess.
Errors that are "blindingly obvious" are ones which are, at a glance, clearly untrue or impossible to anyone with only a passing knowledge of the subject.
eg/ "Seigenthaler shot John F. Kennedy" or "X was implicated in the assassination of Elizabeth II". We all know who shot JFK, we all know HM is not dead (at least, not as of the time of writing).
Moved to the USSR and returned to the US is plausible though unusual; it didn't happen often, but there were isolated cases AIUI. Starting a large PR firm - well, he'd have had to do something notable, and it sounds believable enough. So those two down...
Saying "...was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassination" is not _obviously_ impossible; we all know the Kennedy assassination is a very long-debated thing, was a subject of much speculation at the time, and so forth. So, "was implicated" is not on the face of it spectacularly wrong.
Then there's Bobby Kennedy. I know who Bobby Kennedy was, and I know who shot him, I have a vague inkling of why, and if I tried I might be able to give you a decent half-page summary of RFK's career. I know that it would seem pretty odd for someone to be implicated in both assassinations; they're pretty unconnected, so that would seem a pretty silly thing to me if I noticed it.
But, I suspect, I am somewhat unusual for a twentysomething Briton* in knowing that - heck, if I gave my brother that sentence, he'd probably think for a bit and guess that "uh, Bobby Kennedy was the guy sitting in the car next to JFK?". And a lot of our good editors are a) young and b) not American; something that is blindingly obvious to you, or to anyone with a passing knowledge of American history, is somewhat less likely to be obviously wrong to someone never particularly taught it, with a vague memory of a name and an event...
(This is less stupid than it sounds - remember, most people only remember "current events" starting from about ten or fifteen, and - at least in my experience - tend to not be taught any "history" more recent than perhaps the War... so I know the politics of the Douglas-Home government about as well as I know the politics of the Grey government...)
*I heard a young lady, I believe in her second year at Oxford, repeatedly assert the other day that the Berlin Wall fell circa 1995. I was trying very, very hard not to get up and start correcting her in the middle of the pub... but it's probably indicative.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Jimmy Wales wrote:
(re: [[John Seigenthaler Sr.]])
I think the mistakes were blatantly obvious and if the person who wikied the article had had enough time, the article would have been: -tagged as a stub -placed into a category -edited down to uncontroversial claims
See, they wouldn't have been "blatantly obvious" to me either.
Any good editor _with enough time_ who looks at an article about a living person which makes claims as transparently outlandish as these will know to remove those claims and insist on a source. It would have taken 15 seconds of googling to see that the claims were in no way supported by any obvious source.
Newpages patrol typically doesn't take or have the time to do that. It's a firehose of slush-pile quality information. It's about a first cull.
The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic quality standards.
It passed *basic* ones, which is how it survived Newpages patrol. Basic quality standards for Newpages means more or less that's it's shaped enough like something that might be a Wikipedia article not to shoot on sight.
What it would need is something like what someone else mooted, a biography patrol. Which is a damn fine idea, I think.
- d.
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
As an aside, would the user who clicks the "publish" button find herself legally liable for the content of that article? I certainly could see an argument for that being the case. Whether or not that'd be a good thing or a bad thing is another unanswered question.
Anthony
This problem could probably be avoided by _not_ providing a "publish" button at all, but instead only a "deprecate/delete" voting button, and automatically moving articles from the new-article queue to the main article space after, say, an hour after creation if they are not shot down first. An hour is probably plenty of time, given a queue system to ensure that articles do not fall through the cracks, and the current number of people doing RC patrol.
I like the idea that new articles could be made visible to logged-on users only, until they are moved to the main article space -- the introduction of logged-on-user-only article creation now removes any need to make the article visible to IP-only users creating their own articles. Not making queued articles visible to IP-only readers would also have the effect of making them invisible to web crawlers and real-time proxy-leeching sites, and hence less likely to appear in Wikipedia mirrors.
Similarly, it would be a good idea to avoid backing up new articles on the queue to article database dumps, which would further reduce the possibility of their being picked up by syndicators.
An RSS feed of the new article queue would be useful, too.
-- Neil
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
You're right in theory, but in practice I don't think new articles are coming in fast enough that there are some that no one looks at at all. Someone *did* look at the Seigenthaler article, it's just that the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious. I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
Saying that the allegations were dropped shortly after they were made could leave the impression that the issue was not as serious as would first appear.
Say you defined "trusted user" as a user who has at least 500 edits. It would be no problem to present a list of articles that haven't been edited by such a "trusted user".
Having a trusted users among the editors may not be enough His edit may be as a part of a search and destroy mission for a particular common spelling mistake. He would make just that change without bothering to read the rest of the article.. Another possibility is that he may be making link fixes that arose from edits he was making elsewhere.
Ec
I never understood the purpose of having a queue. It takes just as much time to delete something from the queue as it does to delete an article. Move the articles with problems (that aren't speedy deletes) *into* the queue(s). Keep the ones that don't have problems right where they are.
The difference is that the article will never appear in public, hence reducing the payoff for vandals, spammers, self aggrandizers etc.
Steve
Here's some background data on the problem. I checked 50 new articles tonight, all created between 22:46 and 23:03. I graded them into five categories as follows:
- No obvious problems
- 19 articles (38% of the total)
Wow! In 17 minutes there are 19 articles without obvious problems. That is more than 1 per minute. If this doesn't proof the wiki model really *is* working, I don't know what does.
Gerrit.
Chris Owen wrote:
I suggest that we tackle this by putting all new articles into an approval queue - they shouldn't appear on Wikipedia unless they meet basic quality standards. If a reviewing editor judges that the article meets an objective set of criteria, it should be "published". If not, the submitted new article should either be deleted or sorted into a "needs improvement" category outside the main namespace.
Probably the simplest way to do this would to tag the article with an appropriate template that contains a category.
Mind you, cleanup is already so big and growing so fast I can't see us getting through it in a reasonable time ...
We're effectively trying to bail out a leaky boat while the water is still entering.
Yes.
Note also that quite a few of the speedy deletions were things like personal attacks, patent nonsense, tests etc (e.g. "wow, hey carly, i cant believe i can put this on a site! :O its so cool!"). I strongly suspect that people wouldn't submit this sort of thing if they knew that they wouldn't see it appearing instantly on a Wikipedia page.
Remember that this stuff shouldn't be assumed to be vandalism, i.e. malicious - a lot of it is just sandboxing. "'Edit this page'? What on earth? That's unbelievable ..." (hits "submit") "... Oh. Er. HELP!"
- New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not* immediately enter the main namespace.
Possibly. Seems like work.
- We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria
for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly formatted? Includes references? etc etc...
Let me once more strongly suggest my new article prefill idea:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/034414.html
This clearly shows the expectations for a new article. I'm sure we'll get some really amusing and creative new BJAODN, but the new editor who's heard of this "Wikipedia" thing will see what we're after.
- Reviewing editors should assess newly created
articles against these criteria. If the article passes, the article should be cleared to enter the main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a "needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling corrections", then finally moved to the main namespace.
This might actually be almost workable without instruction-creeping into Nupedia. Looking through a slush pile with an editorial eye and tagging something with its defects is a *lot* easier, more scaleable and less painful than actually trying to fix some horrible crappy prose right then and there.
Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be people with a bit of experience of editing, I would limit the ability to review and approve new articles to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+. However, any editor should be able to work on improving a queued article. Any thoughts on this idea?
It's new process, so therefore should be assumed to be instruction creep until absolutely proven not to be ;-) But parts of it might be workable and would help all by themselves.
I really would like anon page creation switched back on, but article prefill would IMO help a *lot*. And prefill would work with an assumption of good faith on the part of the new editors, and that assumption's what's got us this far.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Chris Owen wrote:
I suggest that we tackle this by putting all new articles into an approval queue - they shouldn't appear on Wikipedia unless they meet basic quality standards. If a reviewing editor judges that the article meets an objective set of criteria, it should be "published". If not, the submitted new article should either be deleted or sorted into a "needs improvement" category outside the main namespace.
Probably the simplest way to do this would to tag the article with an appropriate template that contains a category.
Mind you, cleanup is already so big and growing so fast I can't see us getting through it in a reasonable time ...
I still think that adding the unsourced tag is the only practical first step. Then we need to recruit people who are willing to be fact checkers and documenters. This can't be done at the same time as vandal patrol, because it's detailed painstaking work which could take a long time. Most things should be fact-checked, including those that already have references.
I would love to see synchronized side-by-side edit boxes which could be used for this, as well as other uses.
Ec