http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
I don't think anyone has been disputing that fact in at least 5 years. And the foundation is working on it. It's a hard problem.
Steve
There's sort of two components to this problem. There's the human behavior component, which is a super tough nut to crack. And then there is the institutional component; among the most common complaints about Wikipedia are its bureaucracy and the complexity of contributing. Solving the institutional, systems issue is complex... but a lot easier than getting people to act nicer. Take a look at the newest dispute noticeboard WP:DRN, or even arbitration enforcement, or SPI, etc. These are unimaginably complex for people new to Wikipedia, and only the starkest examples of a problem that also afflicts articles and article talkpages.
On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
on 12/3/11 11:27 PM, Steve Bennett at stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think anyone has been disputing that fact in at least 5 years. And the foundation is working on it. It's a hard problem.
What is the Foundation doing to solve, or at least alleviate, the problem?
Marc Riddell
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
"RTFM & If You Dont Know What That Means RTFM"
Yes, I'm engaged in a deletion debate right now, and feel quite helpless. But this is not new.
There is always a nasty mess in the corner and the mop is too awkward.
Fred
On 4 December 2011 03:56, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment.
Well covered in The Signpost, in fact. But I came away thinking that there is a misconception behind the "complaint". Put it this way: who is the customer? That turns out to be a rhetorical question: the customer is the reader. If the customer was the writer, or the person who feels he/she should have a Wikipedia page about them, the tone of the complaint would be more justified.
It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Considering that Wikipedia is the "killer app" for wikis, the comment seems a bit off-beam. What we have done is to stress-test the wiki concept by making a wiki at least two orders of magnitude larger than would have been been thought reasonable in the year 2000.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
AGF is good, but the issue here is just as much whether the problems with
the "learning curve" are correctly described in the article. My first thought in finding Deletion Review on enWP is to type
site:en.wikipedia.org "deletion review"
into Google. So the top hit is the talk page of [[WP:DRV]]. If I omit the quotes I get the same thing. Not all related searches are so helpful but if you put in
site:en.wikipedia.org deletion
then (today for me) hit number three is [[WP:AFD]] and the template to the right has a link to the deletion review page.
OK, I happen to know that the way to search enWP is a Google custom search, not futz around navigating on the site. That's a generic procedure that is presumably quite accessible to technical people everywhere.
I get frustrating experiences regularly, in searching the websites of financial institutions for the quite opposite reason: I expect to get almost instant results from using Google to search the site for keywords, and the design seems to think the world wants menu-driven plodding navigation from an overcrowded front page full of irrelevant stuff, images and things in tiny print. Maybe if the WMF paid enough it could get Wikipedia to look the same.
Charles
On 4 December 2011 16:58, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 4 December 2011 03:56, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment.
Well covered in The Signpost, in fact.
Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That's very good coverage.
But I came away thinking that there is a misconception behind the "complaint". Put it this way: who is the customer? That turns out to be a rhetorical question: the customer is the reader. If the customer was the writer, or the person who feels he/she should have a Wikipedia page about them, the tone of the complaint would be more justified.
The wiki model of content production makes no distinction between reader and editor.
It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Considering that Wikipedia is the "killer app" for wikis, the comment seems a bit off-beam. What we have done is to stress-test the wiki concept by making a wiki at least two orders of magnitude larger than would have been been thought reasonable in the year 2000.
I think you're missing my point that the processes we're running on the wiki--not the content--are what the tool is unsuitable for.
On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
In this case, Sullivan wasn't a reader. He was a would-be editor trying to maintain an article about a barely notable SEO expert.
I've noticed that a lot of critics of Wikipedia began by trying to promote some non-notable cause only to be rebuffed.
On 12/04/11 1:10 PM, Will Beback wrote:
On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Tony Sidawaytonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
In this case, Sullivan wasn't a reader. He was a would-be editor trying to maintain an article about a barely notable SEO expert.
I've noticed that a lot of critics of Wikipedia began by trying to promote some non-notable cause only to be rebuffed.
Do we get anywhere when we approach a problem with such an attitude of defensiveness?
Instead of trying to figure out why this happens so often, this response merely seeks to justify the status quo. Whether somebody is notable depends entirely on one's Point of View, yet the entire premise of the argument is the subject's notability. How is the subject any less notable than [[Cy Vorhees]]?
Ec
On 5 December 2011 09:52, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
On 12/04/11 1:10 PM, Will Beback wrote:
<snip>
I've noticed that a lot of critics of Wikipedia began by trying to
promote
some non-notable cause only to be rebuffed.
Do we get anywhere when we approach a problem with such an attitude of defensiveness?
I don't know. Will's comment seems to be empirically accurate. It's an ad hominem argument (as yours is); and ad hominem is sometimes a fallacy. We do tend to hear in the blogosphere about the cases where someone is vested in some way in having Wikipedia cover something; we tend to hear on this list about the principle of the thing. Either way, I prefer analyses that start from premises that are the mission's own.
Instead of trying to figure out why this happens so often, this response merely seeks to justify the status quo. Whether somebody is notable depends entirely on one's Point of View, yet the entire premise of the argument is the subject's notability. How is the subject any less notable than [[Cy Vorhees]]?
AfD can get it wrong: I suppose that is common ground. "Notability" as a concept is broken, always has been, always will be (my view, not necessarily the majority view given the status given to the GNG by some). In some cases it is really not a big deal whether a topic is included or not: there obviously is a level at which quite a number of reasonable people are pretty much indifferent to the outcome. The same people would not, presumably, be indifferent to the decision not being by "due process". There is an appeal against AfD's process aspect. Anyone can navigate there.
I think we first need to analyse whether this is a "manual page" problem or a "complaint procedure" problem. (Actually I'm going to put in a plug for "How Wikipedia Works" at this point: look in the index under "deletion", "deletion review" is on p. 226 and the page tells you what to do. If the guy really wanted to impress his colleague he could have done that.) If he'd mailed OTRS and got an unhelpful answer, I really would worry.
Look, the whole point of HWW or any other serious explanation about how we got this far that people are so bothered about our content is that you have to admit that: (a) the system does work, and is fit for the main purpose for which it was set up (contra Tony's view); and (b) it's complicated. There are no doubt people out there, in millions, who don't realise that you probably can't have (a) without (b). You surely could have (a) if you had enough paid staff, a skyscraper full of them (well, maybe 5000 graduates); and if you paid yet more you could give an impression that (b) didn't apply. The service would not be free at the point of use unless a large charitable foundation was picking up the bill. The complication in (b) is to do with decentralisation: multiple processes running in different places, as the only solution that is known to scale.
I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia "Byzantine", which is the basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind that more and better written "manual pages" would only work better if people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context of complex systems they don't understand.
Charles
I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia "Byzantine", which is the basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind that more and better written "manual pages" would only work better if people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context of complex systems they don't understand.
Charles
On IRC last night I was trying to explain to someone how to put sources into their own words, quite impossible; we do things that are hard and that cannot be expressed in simple understandable rules. Tying to determine notability is one of those things.
In this particular case the person is notable within a small but highly significant community which makes determination difficult.
The complaint that Wikipedia is "closed and unfriendly" is false. Many people responded to the blog posting and we do have procedures to deal with the questions raised. Not that the blogger will get their way; nobody gets that consistently.
Fred
On 6/12/2011 4:02 a.m., Fred Bauder wrote:
I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia "Byzantine", which is the basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind that more and better written "manual pages" would only work better if people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context of complex systems they don't understand.
Charles
On IRC last night I was trying to explain to someone how to put sources into their own words, quite impossible; we do things that are hard and that cannot be expressed in simple understandable rules. Tying to determine notability is one of those things.
In this particular case the person is notable within a small but highly significant community which makes determination difficult.
The complaint that Wikipedia is "closed and unfriendly" is false. Many people responded to the blog posting and we do have procedures to deal with the questions raised. Not that the blogger will get their way; nobody gets that consistently.
Fred
WP may on occasion be an unfriendly experience but it is far from closed. The ease of being able to make edits is well known, which is why we are continually getting rid of spam, vandalism, non-notable info, and trying to maintain balance within articles. But on the other hand, as Fred points out, it is hard editing WP since it has become a complex, bureaucratic behemoth. That is not a criticism - in order to develop and improve the project we need all manner of policy, guidelines, MOS, etc and we have to interact with other editors (of varying expertise about wikis and about the subject material).
Alan
On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
AfD can get it wrong: I suppose that is common ground. "Notability" as a concept is broken, always has been, always will be (my view, not necessarily the majority view given the status given to the GNG by some). In some cases it is really not a big deal whether a topic is included or not: there obviously is a level at which quite a number of reasonable people are pretty much indifferent to the outcome. The same people would not, presumably, be indifferent to the decision not being by "due process". There is an appeal against AfD's process aspect. Anyone can navigate there.
I think we first need to analyse whether this is a "manual page" problem or a "complaint procedure" problem. (Actually I'm going to put in a plug for "How Wikipedia Works" at this point: look in the index under "deletion", "deletion review" is on p. 226 and the page tells you what to do. If the guy really wanted to impress his colleague he could have done that.) If he'd mailed OTRS and got an unhelpful answer, I really would worry.
Look, the whole point of HWW or any other serious explanation about how we got this far that people are so bothered about our content is that you have to admit that: (a) the system does work, and is fit for the main purpose for which it was set up (contra Tony's view); and (b) it's complicated. There are no doubt people out there, in millions, who don't realise that you probably can't have (a) without (b). You surely could have (a) if you had enough paid staff, a skyscraper full of them (well, maybe 5000 graduates); and if you paid yet more you could give an impression that (b) didn't apply. The service would not be free at the point of use unless a large charitable foundation was picking up the bill. The complication in (b) is to do with decentralisation: multiple processes running in different places, as the only solution that is known to scale.
I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia "Byzantine", which is the basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind that more and better written "manual pages" would only work better if people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context of complex systems they don't understand.
Charles
You're making the argument that some complex systems (bureaucracy) are necessary and intrinsic to the success of the project. I think most people would agree. People are not challenging the existence of any bureaucracy; they're saying there is too much, that it's too difficult for the average person, and that we hallow bureaucracy and its mastery above more important considerations.
Nathan
Its also the case that even our complex systems are not easy to navigate and that the wiki system can be very confusing for new users beyond just the complexity of our bureaucracy. In the example that sparked this conversation, the new editor struggled to understand the difference between deletion review and requests for undulation. There are good reasons for both these pages - but even their staunchest defenders would have to concede that these pages are hardly a model of clarity and design. We could probably help the situation a lot by putting in some effort to improve the user experience of our bureaucracy and thinking about how each "wikipedia" page appears to new editors and attempting to make them simpler to grasp - without changing any of our underlying policies.
On 5 December 2011 22:08, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
<snip> > > I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia "Byzantine", which is the > basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse > the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to > me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind > that more and better written "manual pages" would only work better if > people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context > of complex systems they don't understand. > > Charles
You're making the argument that some complex systems (bureaucracy) are necessary and intrinsic to the success of the project. I think most people would agree. People are not challenging the existence of any bureaucracy; they're saying there is too much, that it's too difficult for the average person, and that we hallow bureaucracy and its mastery above more important considerations.
"Bureaucracy" may have a neutral meaning, but most people take it as a pejorative for "complex system of administration". They assume the literary models that spring to mind (the Circumlocution Office in "Little Dorrit", Kafka, Catch-22). They assume also analogies with complaints procedures or form-filling applications that we all meet from time to time.
The fairest comparison in the case in hand is the Circumlocution Office. I'm saying it's not too fair: there is a dedicated forum for "deletion review", and it isn't impossibly hard to navigate to it. Compared to being able to ask the deleting admin to think again, it is bureaucratic, and possibly process-bound. But it is also more likely to get to the real point of such requests, I think: outcomes that are better documented. We could tweak this or any other aspect of the system as a whole, but as of right now I don't see any proposals to fold separate pages into a more centralised place.
Charles
Our own internal discussions have long reflected on the unfriendliness and undue bureaucracy of Wikipedia. Generally we're good at the trade-off but if we start claiming with a straight face that it's benign rather than a necessary evil we'll have lost something important.
While the complainant here might not have prevailed on the merits, his complaints about the spikiness of the interface were legitimate and should not have been met with defensive comments that sought to reflect the criticism back onto him.
On 11 December 2011 14:13, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Our own internal discussions have long reflected on the unfriendliness and undue bureaucracy of Wikipedia. Generally we're good at the trade-off but if we start claiming with a straight face that it's benign rather than a necessary evil we'll have lost something important.
While the complainant here might not have prevailed on the merits, his complaints about the spikiness of the interface were legitimate and should not have been met with defensive comments that sought to reflect the criticism back onto him.
I would agree that it is well worth pondering the nature of the interface
between the administrative pages (in the Wikipedia: namespace) and the "general public" who may wish to access them. I don't know any single onsite explanation of "processes" and "noticeboards" which would be a good starting point. Then I haven't looked for such a thing. A "main page" explaining the whole namespace looks like an inherently good idea (whether or not those who need it would find it).
That said, I deprecate getting "design" issues mixed up with others. The use of emotive terms such as cold and unfriendly implies things about intention and fault that aren't exactly helpful. I don't know whether arguing that WP is "sui generis" is defensive or not. I can think of several issues where it allows a reply like "you'd have more of a case if WP were ...", to fill in to taste with "staffed by paid workers"/"for profit"/"offering a different service"/"run on a billion dollar budget"/"Facebook", etc. These answers seem to me to offer analytical insight.
Charles
On 12/03/11 7:56 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to help us to make it better.
+1
Ec