[sorry for earlier blank]
On 07/01/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
Bah. Untagged - no way an organisation of 250 professionals which runs a six-day film festival is "db-bio", even if all the internal links are red.
I notice it was marked "using NPWatcher" - has anyone experience of using this program? I've noticed it a bit recently, and it seems to be very heavily used for fast automation of tagging, deletion, etc. Which is fair enough, so long as only one person involved is doing it - because the speedy deletion process on enwp has two pairs of eyes involved, there'll in theory be a second person along to read it over before deletion and decide if the tag is in order or not.
But when both are using this sort of thing... well, I saw one user who was running a speedy deletion, on average, *every twenty seconds for an hour* using it. People can't really be giving what they're looking at any attention at that speed, and wrongful tagging will just carry over into wrongful (and wasteful) deletion.
Thoughts on how usefully to solve this? Automation to cope with a task is well and good, but we can't automate out human review where it's there for a reason.
the speedy deletion process on enwp has two pairs of eyes involved
Unless I'm mistaken, if the first pair of eyes is an admin, they can delete it straight away. The db tags are just for non-admins (or admins that want a 2nd opinion) to notify admins.
On 07/01/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
the speedy deletion process on enwp has two pairs of eyes involved
Unless I'm mistaken, if the first pair of eyes is an admin, they can delete it straight away. The db tags are just for non-admins (or admins that want a 2nd opinion) to notify admins.
My understanding was that even admins should tag, if there's anything there that's at all subjective (anything much above page-blanked-by-author, random text, whatever). It certainly seems more sensible that way.
(I usually try to, but...)
My understanding was that even admins should tag, if there's anything there that's at all subjective (anything much above page-blanked-by-author, random text, whatever). It certainly seems more sensible that way.
(I usually try to, but...)
[[WP:CSD]]:
"The "Speedy deletion" policy governs limited cases where Wikipedia administrators may delete Wikipedia pages or media "on sight" without further debate. Non-admins can request deletion of such a page by adding an appropriate template (see below). The word "speedy" in this context refers to the simple decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created."
I interpret that as admins being able to delete without tagging. The whole point of CSD is that it's for uncontroversial deletions. If there is anything significantly subjective about it, it should go through PROD or AfD.
On 1/7/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
My understanding was that even admins should tag, if there's anything there that's at all subjective (anything much above page-blanked-by-author, random text, whatever). It certainly seems more sensible that way.
(I usually try to, but...)
[[WP:CSD]]:
"The "Speedy deletion" policy governs limited cases where Wikipedia administrators may delete Wikipedia pages or media "on sight" without further debate. Non-admins can request deletion of such a page by adding an appropriate template (see below). The word "speedy" in this context refers to the simple decision-making process, not the length of time since the article was created."
I interpret that as admins being able to delete without tagging. The whole point of CSD is that it's for uncontroversial deletions. If there is anything significantly subjective about it, it should go through PROD or AfD.
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Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30 seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also, the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not as helpful as it should be.
Mgm
On 1/7/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30 seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also, the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not as helpful as it should be.
the article is new so there is not history and most are maybe two lines. Yes it could be done.
geni wrote:
On 1/7/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30 seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also, the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not as helpful as it should be.
the article is new so there is not history and most are maybe two lines. Yes it could be done.
Observations:
The tag went up on this article less than one-half hour after the article was begun. It's also remarkable that no-one involved has seen fit to comment on the admin's talk page to question his excessive zeal.
Ec
Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30 seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also, the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not as helpful as it should be.
2-3 articles a minute might be a little too fast, but 1-2 articles a minute is probably fine. Once you learn what to look for you can tell which articles need a closer look and which can be deleted instantly.
Well, yes they can. But Andrew's point still stands. How can one make a well-balanced decision when you're tagging or deleting stuff every 20-30 seconds? It usually takes me at least 2 minutes to read the entry, watch the history and do other related stuff and that's just on a short article. Also, the reasons given in the reason field by some administrators is totally not as helpful as it should be.
Mgm
20 seconds is actually quite a bit of time if you take into account some types of speedies (broken redirects, redirects to user pages, talk pages without articles, some completely NN band articles, total nonsense, etc.) An average of one delete every 20-30 seconds, over the course of an hour and working from the usually-backlogged CSD page, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Erica en:User:Fang Aili
I notice it was marked "using NPWatcher" - has anyone experience of using this program? I've noticed it a bit recently, and it seems to be very heavily used for fast automation of tagging, deletion, etc. Which is fair enough, so long as only one person involved is doing it - because the speedy deletion process on enwp has two pairs of eyes involved, there'll in theory be a second person along to read it over before deletion and decide if the tag is in order or not.
NPWatcher is a newer VP-like program designed by User:Martinp23 to aid in new page patrolling. It's for .NET again, so it leaves us non-windows people out again, but from what I've seen it can be used to tag a new page with a CSD tag (like {{db-nonsense}}) and leave a warning on the persons talk page not to make silly articles like that. It can also be used by admins to help clear backlogs, such as CAT:CSD by deleting pages (believe me, it really helps). As an admin, I know that I check pages that are marked for speedy deletion before deleting them, with some being more obvious than others. It's almost always backlogged though, so it would be appreciated it editors would make sure they are sure when tagging articles, and don't make it any more bureaucratic. Sometimes you just need to let us do our jobs.
-User:Royalguard11
On 07/01/07, Royalguard11 royalguard11@gmail.com wrote:
NPWatcher is a newer VP-like program designed by User:Martinp23 to aid in new page patrolling. It's for .NET again, so it leaves us non-windows people out again, but from what I've seen it can be used to tag a new page with a CSD tag (like {{db-nonsense}}) and leave a warning on the persons talk page not to make silly articles like that. It can also be used by admins to help clear backlogs, such as CAT:CSD by deleting pages (believe me, it really helps). As an admin, I know that I check pages that are marked for speedy deletion before deleting them, with some being more obvious than others. It's almost always backlogged though, so it would be appreciated it editors would make sure they are sure when tagging articles, and don't make it any more bureaucratic. Sometimes you just need to let us do our jobs.
Perhaps I should provide some context to my original mutterings.
The case that drew my attention a little while back did so because it had been tagged as {{db-empty}}, and then deleted despite containing a {{hangon}} note, three external links, and 160 words of actual honest-to-god coherent content. It was a little patchy, clearly written by someone for whom English was not a first language and wiki-syntax was not a second, but obviously a survivable stub on something and certainly not an empty article. And the guy who wrote it complained it had been deleted, so I looked into it.
Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using NPWatcher)"
It's an automatically generated edit summary (parsing the db tag?), and I find it hard to credit anyone actually looked at that page as it was being deleted. In that one-hour run of 182 semiautomated deletions, the admin in question removed a grand total of four deletion tags. 2% is somewhere very far south of our usual falsely-labelled rate, by my reckoning; certainly whenever I look at CSD more than one in fifty is a dodgy or spurious deletion request.
There are cases of clear-cut deletion, sure. And there are many more that aren't. This sort of robotic script-assisted deletion is mindless; the reason we don't have it performed by a robot is to have human judgement in the loop. There are malicious requests; there are mistaken requests; there are confused requests; there are all sorts of cruft sneak in there, and we can't just glance at it, see there is indeed a tag, and hope the tagger got it right.
If we didn't need that human judgement, we'd have coded a ten-line script and given it admin rights.
I'm not naming names; I'm not pointing fingers; I'm trying to make this as general a cry as possible. But I've done my time on the coalface as well as you have, and I know what these routine tasks entail. And there are clearly cases where the availability of easy automation is making people lose track of their common sense and their goals. We give people adminship because they are sane, because they are trusted to be able to think and to do the sensible rational thing when a problem arises. We don't give them it because they can fulfil a Stakhanovite quota of meaningless routine tasks faster and better than anyone else.
I am not demanding extra bureaucracy in a process; I am not demanding extra process. I am not pretending I know better than "the admins"; I am one. But it's a wiki. The cases where we need to ACT NOW ACT FAST are few and far between; if there's a backlog, well, there's a backlog; it'll clear. We can always take more time over something; we set the pace of this project ourselves.
We should not be pressurising ourselves into running ahead of our own common sense. It's an encyclopedia, not a race.
The case that drew my attention a little while back did so because it had been tagged as {{db-empty}}, and then deleted despite containing a {{hangon}} note, three external links, and 160 words of actual honest-to-god coherent content. It was a little patchy, clearly written by someone for whom English was not a first language and wiki-syntax was not a second, but obviously a survivable stub on something and certainly not an empty article. And the guy who wrote it complained it had been deleted, so I looked into it.
Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using NPWatcher)"
a) Which article? b) Have you taken it to DRV?
Thomas Dalton wrote:
The case that drew my attention a little while back did so because it had been tagged as {{db-empty}}, and then deleted despite containing a {{hangon}} note, three external links, and 160 words of actual honest-to-god coherent content. It was a little patchy, clearly written by someone for whom English was not a first language and wiki-syntax was not a second, but obviously a survivable stub on something and certainly not an empty article. And the guy who wrote it complained it had been deleted, so I looked into it.
Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using NPWatcher)"
a) Which article? b) Have you taken it to DRV?
If the case is as it is described, there should be no need for DRV. Just undelete it. The tag was clearly incorrect.
On Sun, 7 Jan 2007 19:51:19 +0000, "Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Deletion summary was "(Deleting page - reason was: "Empty page" using NPWatcher)"
Bad. I don't use automated tools to do Actual Deletions. Of course the occasional valid subject gets swept up among the detritus, but hopefully not *too* much. Unfortunately, the ones who bitch and moan most are the ones who have just created the article on episode 17 of American Fancruft, the title of which has yet to be finalised but its airing date is rumoured to be some time in October 2008.
Guy (JzG)