http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_Wikipedia_Week
This is happening.
A perennial press story is "I was bitten as a n00b on Wikipedia" - every random interaction with a random en:wp editor is taken as representative and officially sanctioned.
So we need people to be on extra special good behaviour.
(For those about to point out to Mr Pot that he is of similar blackness to Messrs Kettle, Jimbo emailed me directly asking me to please be much nicer on wikien-l in particular. And I can't say it wasn't deserved. *cough*)
Main sticking point I can see is notoriously prickly individuals who are also notoriously good encyclopedia writers. I won't go so far as to name any of those who spring to my mind, but I'm sure you have your own list. If they can be convinced this is a good idea then they should provide a suitably shocking example of niceness.
Also, have to hit the village pump, the admin boards etc. Those who do lots of janitorial work cleaning out the sewers of en:wp (vandal-chasing, newpages patrolling, RC patrolling, etc) and basically see the bad side of people all the time need to be brought on board as well. This is somewhere n00bs can really be bitten.
Ideas please? I suspect not doing this is not an option.
- d.
On Nov 6, 2007 6:07 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_Wikipedia_Week This is happening.
A perennial press story is "I was bitten as a n00b on Wikipedia" - every random interaction with a random en:wp editor is taken as representative and officially sanctioned.
It would be really really really helpful to see some links to incidents. Many times these complaints come without citation. I don't disbelieve them, but there are many types and causes of these results and they have vastly different cures.
It's not enough to simply say "be nicer!". Some times we need to say different things like "New users haven't learned our customs, that doesn't mean they are all jerks!"
On Nov 6, 2007, at 8:56 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It would be really really really helpful to see some links to incidents. Many times these complaints come without citation. I don't disbelieve them, but there are many types and causes of these results and they have vastly different cures.
It's not enough to simply say "be nicer!". Some times we need to say different things like "New users haven't learned our customs, that doesn't mean they are all jerks!"
Another component of this is a failure to remember the difference between a useful contribution and an ideal one. In addition to telling people to bite the newbies less hard (an important lesson), we have to think seriously about what cases it is and is not helpful to wield any of the multitude of sticks we have developed to whack people in the head with.
We should remember that we became a top ten website as a website littered with inaccuracies for which we were frequently criticized, full to the brim of crufty articles on silly topics, and peppered with vandalism. That is not to say that we should not attempt to correct these things, but we should recognize that people seem to be aware and accepting of what we are right now, and, in some cases, even desiring what we are right now.
This is, perhaps, not something that is easily shifted in preparation for an "edit Wikipedia week," but it is something we have to remember - {{fact}} is in many cases preferable to reversion, notes on talk pages are in many cases preferable to speedy deletion tags, vandalism should be dealt with as we see it, and even watched for, but should not be an obsession.
-Phil
On 06/11/2007, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
This is, perhaps, not something that is easily shifted in preparation for an "edit Wikipedia week," but it is something we have to remember
- {{fact}} is in many cases preferable to reversion, notes on talk
pages are in many cases preferable to speedy deletion tags, vandalism should be dealt with as we see it, and even watched for, but should not be an obsession.
I think perhaps a better statement of that last sentence is "...should not be an assumption."
A lot of problems - certainly back when I was still regularly dealing with OTRS earlier in the year - came from patrollers assuming that an imperfect or confusing contribution was vandalism, was spam, was malicious. They acted accordingly - reverted or deleted and warned - which just confused and upset the subject.
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
On Nov 6, 2007 12:39 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
When you are a hammer all bumps are nails. We need examples!
Andrew Gray wrote:
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
And even when it is clearly vandalism, I think it's often worth not it treating as vandalism.
A while back somebody brought up the example of somebody replacing the Earth article with "mostly harmless". I think most would call that clear vandalism, but that doesn't stop it from being a well-meant joke. The person posting that clearly didn't think things through, but it's not clear to me that a virtual yelling-at would improve their thinking skills any.
Most of the obviously worthless contributions I see are people just playing around. The problem isn't that they are playing. It's that they're playing at too low a level, like some enthusiastic kindergarteners running onto the field of a major-league game. We don't want them to stop playing, just to play better, and to avoid ruining things for the audience in the meantime.
William
On 11/6/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
[[Wikipedia:Avoid the word "vandal"]]?
Andrew Gray wrote:
A lot of problems - certainly back when I was still regularly dealing with OTRS earlier in the year - came from patrollers assuming that an imperfect or confusing contribution was vandalism, was spam, was malicious. They acted accordingly - reverted or deleted and warned - which just confused and upset the subject.
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
In my own patrolling (admittedly infrequent these days since I find writing new articles less annoying), I've gone back to my circa-2003 way of dealing with the problem, before user-warning templates existed: just post a short note on the user's talk page telling them that you undid their edit and why.
For example, if someone removes an entire section with no edit comment, I'll write something like, "Please don't remove sections of articles without discussing on the talk page or at least providing a reason in the edit summary. I've added it back for now. Thanks!". (Credit goes to Brianna Laugher at Wikimania '07 for suggesting that approach.)
I do find a pretty large percentage of things that aren't *obvious* vandalism are good-faith errors, and some of the people who made them even respond with apologies after being "warned". Some amount of judgment is needed of course---if the edit is from an IP address that's been tagged as belong to a library or school computer, I usually don't bother to spend time doing that.
A totally different and somewhat circular problem I've noticed lately is newbies biting other newbies (or even non-newbie editors) by taking on new-pages patrolling duties before they really know what's going on. That requires basically a nice way of saying, "look, you should really stick around a bit more before you start going on new-page patrol and tagging articles with cleanup/delete/unreferenced/etc. tags". Heck, I had one of my articles tagged as "unreferenced" by a new-ish editor because it "only" referenced a book---as he explained, it didn't count as verifiable if there were no links he could click on to verify it. =]
-Mark
On Nov 6, 2007 8:35 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
A lot of problems - certainly back when I was still regularly dealing with OTRS earlier in the year - came from patrollers assuming that an imperfect or confusing contribution was vandalism, was spam, was malicious. They acted accordingly - reverted or deleted and warned - which just confused and upset the subject.
"If it isn't clearly vandalism, don't treat it as vandalism" might be an interesting approach.
In my own patrolling (admittedly infrequent these days since I find writing new articles less annoying), I've gone back to my circa-2003 way of dealing with the problem, before user-warning templates existed: just post a short note on the user's talk page telling them that you undid their edit and why.
For example, if someone removes an entire section with no edit comment, I'll write something like, "Please don't remove sections of articles without discussing on the talk page or at least providing a reason in the edit summary. I've added it back for now. Thanks!". (Credit goes to Brianna Laugher at Wikimania '07 for suggesting that approach.)
I do find a pretty large percentage of things that aren't *obvious* vandalism are good-faith errors, and some of the people who made them even respond with apologies after being "warned". Some amount of judgment is needed of course---if the edit is from an IP address that's been tagged as belong to a library or school computer, I usually don't bother to spend time doing that.
I believe another Mark (User:Fuddlemark?) was an advocate of this brief but untemplated approach for quite some time before he left/went on permanent wikibreak. I usually switch between it and the templates depending on my mood; I've also created my own version of the welcome template with an argument allowing me to add some personal comment (e.g. "Btw, great edits to [[article X]] - keep it up!"). IMO, like all things, templates rely on judicious use by a thinking human. Mechanical reliance on either approach is a recipe for some sort of disaster.
Johnleemk
RC-patrol seems to have the most biting as far as I can tell. I'd suggest possibly altering the RC top to make a note for the 24 hours or so prior to the week starting asking people not to bite.
Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_Wikipedia_Week
This is happening.
A perennial press story is "I was bitten as a n00b on Wikipedia" - every random interaction with a random en:wp editor is taken as representative and officially sanctioned.
So we need people to be on extra special good behaviour.
(For those about to point out to Mr Pot that he is of similar blackness to Messrs Kettle, Jimbo emailed me directly asking me to please be much nicer on wikien-l in particular. And I can't say it wasn't deserved. *cough*)
Main sticking point I can see is notoriously prickly individuals who are also notoriously good encyclopedia writers. I won't go so far as to name any of those who spring to my mind, but I'm sure you have your own list. If they can be convinced this is a good idea then they should provide a suitably shocking example of niceness.
Also, have to hit the village pump, the admin boards etc. Those who do lots of janitorial work cleaning out the sewers of en:wp (vandal-chasing, newpages patrolling, RC patrolling, etc) and basically see the bad side of people all the time need to be brought on board as well. This is somewhere n00bs can really be bitten.
Ideas please? I suspect not doing this is not an option.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Don't forget Newpages. There's a fair share of people creating nonsense pages, of course, but if a good-faith editor trying to create an article doesn't include a slew of references within the first thirty seconds, it's got just as good a chance of being deleted.
On 11/6/07, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
RC-patrol seems to have the most biting as far as I can tell. I'd suggest possibly altering the RC top to make a note for the 24 hours or so prior to the week starting asking people not to bite.
Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_Wikipedia_Week
This is happening.
A perennial press story is "I was bitten as a n00b on Wikipedia" - every random interaction with a random en:wp editor is taken as representative and officially sanctioned.
So we need people to be on extra special good behaviour.
(For those about to point out to Mr Pot that he is of similar blackness to Messrs Kettle, Jimbo emailed me directly asking me to please be much nicer on wikien-l in particular. And I can't say it wasn't deserved. *cough*)
Main sticking point I can see is notoriously prickly individuals who are also notoriously good encyclopedia writers. I won't go so far as to name any of those who spring to my mind, but I'm sure you have your own list. If they can be convinced this is a good idea then they should provide a suitably shocking example of niceness.
Also, have to hit the village pump, the admin boards etc. Those who do lots of janitorial work cleaning out the sewers of en:wp (vandal-chasing, newpages patrolling, RC patrolling, etc) and basically see the bad side of people all the time need to be brought on board as well. This is somewhere n00bs can really be bitten.
Ideas please? I suspect not doing this is not an option.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Nov 6, 2007 9:57 AM, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
RC-patrol seems to have the most biting as far as I can tell. I'd suggest possibly altering the RC top to make a note for the 24 hours or so prior to the week starting asking people not to bite.
Examples please?
Simply saying "don't bite" is going to have approximately zero effect. If people realized what they were doing was inappropriate they would, for the most part, not be doing it.
Instead we probably need so say things like "Don't assume that people have any clue what they are doing wrong. New users are often lost and confused. Our policy pages amount to megabytes of text. Taking a moment to be kind and helpful will pay off over time. Vandalism can wait a moment." ... and being able to provide *good* example of what to do and what not to do would be very helpful.
Quoting Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
Instead we probably need so say things like "Don't assume that people have any clue what they are doing wrong. New users are often lost and confused. Our policy pages amount to megabytes of text. Taking a moment to be kind and helpful will pay off over time. Vandalism can wait a moment." ... and being able to provide *good* example of what to do and what not to do would be very helpful.
Agreed. One thing to do (and I don't have an example off the top of my head) is to to mark for speedy deletion things without leaving a note on the talk page of the person explaining why it has been marked for speedy deletion. This comes across as very impersonal. Additioally, if the person is a new user, they should first use a welcome template and then mention the speedy deletion. It might make sense to make some welcome-speedy templates for this purpose since the standard welcome template combined with a standard speedy template is very obvious a pair of form letters which can come across as biting by its impersonal nature.
On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Vandalism can wait a moment.
Good heavens, man, do you /want/ to be taken out and shot? :-)
Seriously, a lot of what some term "newbie-biting" comes from the concept held dear by many that our old creed of eventualism is dead, and that expedient removal of vandalism trumps all other concerns, including having a project worth defending.
But yes, exactly as you said - don't expect users, even if they're moderately 'old' (a few dozen - two hundred edits or so) to understand policy. Don't say "You did X, in clear violation of Y. Do it again and you will get blocked."; say "I saw that you did X, but you may not be aware that one of our guiding principles is Z which has led to the concept of Y, which suggests doing things differently. In this case, what if you did...?". Of course, this isn't easily replicated in a bot or human-driven script (which amounts to much the same thing), so sysops' editcountitis habit can't be fed.
Yours,
Quoting James Forrester jdforrester@gmail.com:
On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Vandalism can wait a moment.
Good heavens, man, do you /want/ to be taken out and shot? :-)
Seriously, a lot of what some term "newbie-biting" comes from the concept held dear by many that our old creed of eventualism is dead, and that expedient removal of vandalism trumps all other concerns, including having a project worth defending.
But yes, exactly as you said - don't expect users, even if they're moderately 'old' (a few dozen - two hundred edits or so) to understand policy. Don't say "You did X, in clear violation of Y. Do it again and you will get blocked."; say "I saw that you did X, but you may not be aware that one of our guiding principles is Z which has led to the concept of Y, which suggests doing things differently. In this case, what if you did...?". Of course, this isn't easily replicated in a bot or human-driven script (which amounts to much the same thing), so sysops' editcountitis habit can't be fed.
Yours,
James D. Forrester jdforrester@wikimedia.org | jdforrester@gmail.com [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
We have a general guideline about not templating the regulars. I'd suggest that that might be a good rule in many cases where the people aren't regulars. Templates can come across as very impersonal abd BITEy.
On 06/11/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
We have a general guideline about not templating the regulars. I'd suggest that that might be a good rule in many cases where the people aren't regulars. Templates can come across as very impersonal abd BITEy.
We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away."
(The usual response to pointing this out is "but I can't possibly keep up with the flood of responses otherwise." To which the response is "so don't.")
- d.
On Nov 6, 2007 10:52 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away."
(The usual response to pointing this out is "but I can't possibly keep up with the flood of responses otherwise." To which the response is "so don't.")
English Wikipedia is already serving more than _a million_ 'damaged' page views per-day*. I'm personally a bit tired of browsing Wikipedia being shock image roulette.
The urgency and lack of eventualism clearly causes harm, but it's not entirely unjustified. What is your answer to this?
* http://www.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf
On Nov 6, 2007, at 11:24 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
English Wikipedia is already serving more than _a million_ 'damaged' page views per-day*. I'm personally a bit tired of browsing Wikipedia being shock image roulette.
The urgency and lack of eventualism clearly causes harm, but it's not entirely unjustified. What is your answer to this?
Mine, at least, is to point out that we seem to be having no problems skyrocketing in the Alexa rankings and in popularity despite this. That does not mean we should not fight vandalism. But it does mean that our userbase seems relatively accepting of the fact that sometimes you'll load an article on Earl Grey tea and get a picture of a man's distended anus. Yes, we get a few upset e-mails from people who are not accepting of this every day at OTRS. But it doesn't seem to be having a crippling effect on our perceived usability at present.
-Phil
On Nov 6, 2007 11:31 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Mine, at least, is to point out that we seem to be having no problems skyrocketing in the Alexa rankings and in popularity despite this. That does not mean we should not fight vandalism. But it does mean that our userbase seems relatively accepting of the fact that sometimes you'll load an article on Earl Grey tea and get a picture of a man's distended anus. Yes, we get a few upset e-mails from people who are not accepting of this every day at OTRS. But it doesn't seem to be having a crippling effect on our perceived usability at present.
The trivial counter to your argument is that there have been plenty of products that caused harm slowly enough or at a infrequently enough rate that LOTS of people still purchased/used them.
It's not that people who smoke think "I don't mind cancer", it's that they don't experience the negative effects often enough to encourage them to make another decision.
Along that line of thinking, on Wikipedia it's not "I don't mind the fact that looking up a connector on Wikipedia might instead bring up some child porn that could get me fired from work and investigated by the police" ... it's either complete unawareness or "it won't happen to me".
Or maybe I'm just old fashioned in thinking that there are way to define success or correctness which don't consider popularity. ;)
On 11/6/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Or maybe I'm just old fashioned in thinking that there are way to define success or correctness which don't consider popularity. ;)
Well...I think we all agree on the end/goal/aim "Wikipedia as accurate / correct / vandalism-free as possible" [choose what you like best from these terms]. However, if I understand this discussion correctly, it's rather about the means we use to get there. I.e., is there a way in which we fix vandalism (or: remedy subobtimal edits[ without at the same time driving away many new users who are potentially valuable contributors. I'm not saying that I have the solution up my sleeve but I guess mass-flooding new users with templates which are only barely appropriate to their personal situation ("Your edit was reverted, please use the sandbox for testing" triggers often something like "eh, I didn't want to test, I wanted to improve this specific article") can't be a very good approach either.
Michael
On 07/11/2007, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/6/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Or maybe I'm just old fashioned in thinking that there are way to define success or correctness which don't consider popularity. ;)
Well...I think we all agree on the end/goal/aim "Wikipedia as accurate / correct / vandalism-free as possible" [choose what you like best from these terms]. However, if I understand this discussion correctly, it's rather about the means we use to get there. I.e., is there a way in which we fix vandalism (or: remedy subobtimal edits[ without at the same time driving away many new users who are potentially valuable contributors. I'm not saying that I have the solution up my sleeve but I guess mass-flooding new users with templates which are only barely appropriate to their personal situation ("Your edit was reverted, please use the sandbox for testing" triggers often something like "eh, I didn't want to test, I wanted to improve this specific article") can't be a very good approach either.
Michael
I always liked the stable version concept. Where new editors must wait a few minutes to get their edits verified by editors with a longer history, and hence a better understanding of the policies hopefully. I have no idea whether it is in place already.... It would also make a typical RC patroller who only cares about the encyclopedia more inclined to think about the users too as they are not directly damaging their wikipedia anymore.
Peter
On Nov 6, 2007 4:41 PM, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com wrote:
I always liked the stable version concept. Where new editors must wait a few minutes to get their edits verified by editors with a longer history, and hence a better understanding of the policies hopefully. I have no idea whether it is in place already.... It would also make a typical RC patroller who only cares about the encyclopedia more inclined to think about the users too as they are not directly damaging their wikipedia anymore.
I too have been a fan of this stable versions concept for three related reasons: * Removing urgency * Protecting readers who we can't expect to understand the operation of Wikipedia * Reducing the incentive for people to make intentionally malicious edits
Wikimedia has instead decided to go the 'flagged version' route.
The flagged versions software, which is not quite complete, can be used in a way similar to what you have described, and I believe the German Wikipedia plans to use it this way. But the software is more flexible and can be used in many other ways.
One of the other ways is purely advisory way, where a record of good versions is kept in the history but users still see whatever is most recent.
Recent commentary from Florence, Erik, and Sue Gardiner have indicated to me that they hope and expect English Wikipedia will only implement flagging, and only make the stable version the default for pages which are currently protected.
I'm concerned that this weak form of stable versions has little advantage over the old 'mark as patrolled' feature, and that because setting the flag will not accomplish anything people will not change their vandal fighting efforts to flagging efforts. The failure of the system would then be self-fulfilling.
I'm also concerned that whatever decisions are made, be they by consensus or fiat, will be made based only on speculation on the impact of the changes, and not based on any concrete evidence of measurement.
You can learn more about the English Wikipedia's community discussion of this subject at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions/Sighted_versio...
If this subject interests you, please take the time to look through the look through the archives there.
On Nov 6, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Nov 6, 2007 11:31 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Mine, at least, is to point out that we seem to be having no problems skyrocketing in the Alexa rankings and in popularity despite this. That does not mean we should not fight vandalism. But it does mean that our userbase seems relatively accepting of the fact that sometimes you'll load an article on Earl Grey tea and get a picture of a man's distended anus. Yes, we get a few upset e-mails from people who are not accepting of this every day at OTRS. But it doesn't seem to be having a crippling effect on our perceived usability at present.
The trivial counter to your argument is that there have been plenty of products that caused harm slowly enough or at a infrequently enough rate that LOTS of people still purchased/used them.
It's not that people who smoke think "I don't mind cancer", it's that they don't experience the negative effects often enough to encourage them to make another decision.
Along that line of thinking, on Wikipedia it's not "I don't mind the fact that looking up a connector on Wikipedia might instead bring up some child porn that could get me fired from work and investigated by the police" ... it's either complete unawareness or "it won't happen to me".
This seems to me a hysterical response, though. Or, at least, I would expect that if this had happened in practice, we'd have a news story about a guy who was fired from work and investigated by the police because the [[SCSI]] article had child porn.
Or maybe I'm just old fashioned in thinking that there are way to define success or correctness which don't consider popularity. ;)
Sure. We should try to make the encyclopedia better. But we have to remember that for our project better doesn't *just* mean serving up accurate and well-written articles. It also means meeting a standard of usability.
The issue I have here is that I have an easier time finding concrete damage caused by overzealous vandal-fighters than I have finding concrete damage caused by vandalism. (Note that I am defining damage here as a negative effect beyond the initial bad thing - obviously each instance of a bad page being served up and each instance of a mis- applied warning is bad in and of itself. But the warning seems to cause more negative effects after it takes place, whereas the bad page being served up seems to wrap itself up somewhat neatly.)
-Phil
On Nov 6, 2007 1:54 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Along that line of thinking, on Wikipedia it's not "I don't mind the fact that looking up a connector on Wikipedia might instead bring up some child porn that could get me fired from work and investigated by the police" ... it's either complete unawareness or "it won't happen to me".
This seems to me a hysterical response, though. Or, at least, I would expect that if this had happened in practice, we'd have a news story about a guy who was fired from work and investigated by the police because the [[SCSI]] article had child porn.
It's an overstatement. But you're kidding yourself if you don't think it will happen eventually.
We've had childporn vandalism. We've had people claim to get in trouble at work because of WP vandalism. And, of course, people have been fired in relation to their statements.
The issue I have here is that I have an easier time finding concrete damage caused by overzealous vandal-fighters than I have finding concrete damage caused by vandalism. (Note that I am defining damage here as a negative effect beyond the initial bad thing - obviously each instance of a bad page being served up and each instance of a mis- applied warning is bad in and of itself. But the warning seems to cause more negative effects after it takes place, whereas the bad page being served up seems to wrap itself up somewhat neatly.)
Like I said at the start of this thread... concrete examples would be really really helpful. I think we need to educate through examples.
I've been looking at the use of the boilerplate warnings, and I'm finding a lot of cases where I'm wondering why we warned rather than blocking. (For an example, Look at the talk page of the author of the vandalism diff I used earlier in the thread)
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
The trivial counter to your argument is that there have been plenty of products that caused harm slowly enough or at a infrequently enough rate that LOTS of people still purchased/used them.
It's not that people who smoke think "I don't mind cancer", it's that they don't experience the negative effects often enough to encourage them to make another decision.
Are mistakes in Wikipedia really harmful? My very first edit was to fix a minor mistake. That seems to be a common origin story. One of my favorite tricks for getting people to engage with intranet wikis is to leave obvious mistakes or omissions. And in a wiki-based startup I'm involved in, we are concerned that staff building the site too much can reduce community involvement.
I don't think many people take up smoking for the cancer. But judging by the number of anonymous little fixes, a lot of people edit Wikipedia because of damaged articles.
William
William Pietri wrote:
Are mistakes in Wikipedia really harmful?
Sorry, that's obviously idiotic now that I re-read it. I mean something more like "purely harmful"; I still think getting rid of errors and cruft is good. My point is that problems are indeed problems, but in that they serve as a call to involvement and an easy way to get started, we derive some benefit from them, too.
William
On 06/11/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 6, 2007 10:52 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away."
(The usual response to pointing this out is "but I can't possibly keep up with the flood of responses otherwise." To which the response is "so don't.")
English Wikipedia is already serving more than _a million_ 'damaged' page views per-day*. I'm personally a bit tired of browsing Wikipedia being shock image roulette.
Not even browsing, sometimes.
An aside...
Sometime in late December last year, we served up something on the order of 30,000 full-page images of a mutilated penis, on the - protected - front page. (You can even see the momentary blip in the traffic stats - I have a screenshot somewhere) We responded to that one about as quickly as reasonable - under a few minutes - but we still no doubt caused a good deal of discomfort to unsuspecting readers... frankly, I'm amazed we didn't get more flak over it.
David Gerard wrote:
On 06/11/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
We have a general guideline about not templating the regulars. I'd suggest that that might be a good rule in many cases where the people aren't regulars. Templates can come across as very impersonal abd BITEy.
We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away."
(The usual response to pointing this out is "but I can't possibly keep up with the flood of responses otherwise." To which the response is "so don't.")
- d.
The primary role of the welcome is, I think, informing the newcomers of the community expectations.
When I look at the current template, I think it is rather good, but I find interesting that the most important expectations we are mentionning on the talk page of the newcomers are about "naming conventions" or "manual of style".
Other expectations, such as code of conduct or consensus building, are only mentionned on a second page, where the newcomer will have to go. Note that I like the five pillars page very much. It is bright, concise, to the point.
ant
Florence Devouard wrote:
The primary role of the welcome is, I think, informing the newcomers of the community expectations.
When I look at the current template, I think it is rather good, but I find interesting that the most important expectations we are mentionning on the talk page of the newcomers are about "naming conventions" or "manual of style".
Other expectations, such as code of conduct or consensus building, are only mentionned on a second page, where the newcomer will have to go. Note that I like the five pillars page very much. It is bright, concise, to the point.
Hmm, that's a good point. IMO we should emphasize to newcomers that the things they really need to know up front in order to contribute are: 1) write neutral content; and 2) cite reliable sources so that what you write can be verified by someone else. It's useful to link to some pages explaining what those things mean (WP:NPOV, WP:RS, and WP:V). It's probably also useful to give a few general background links, like the five-principles ones. Most of the rest can be safely be left for later IMO---if a newcomer is writing neutral, well referenced articles, it's not a big problem if they name their article [[Prince Foo of Bar]] instead of [[Foo, Prince of Bar]]---that's easy to fix.
One thing that *is* something of a bottleneck IMO is the technical business of citing sources. A newbie looking for guidance on how to do that goes to WP:CITE, which quickly degenerates into a morass of multiple systems, template help pages, and who knows what else. Maybe we should have something prominently posted along the lines of: "If you find this confusing, feel free to cite your sources however you want! Someone will fix up the formatting later as long as you provide a complete citation to the sources you used."
-Mark
I think that should be the general idea of all of our welcoming. "To succeed here, write [[WP:NPOV|neutral]], [[WP:V|verifiable]], [[WP:RS|well-referenced]] material on [[WP:N|appropriate subjects]]. Remember to take special care with a [[WP:BLP|biography of a living person]]. Remember that [[WP:OWN|others can and will edit your writing]]. Don't worry so much about stylistic consideratons, someone can always clean up your syntax, style, or formatting later, and don't worry-if need be, someone will! However, for help with such issues, visit our [[WP:MOS|manual of style]]." I honestly don't see why the welcome template can't say something like that, perhaps with a -link- to a full policy set rather than the whole intimidating lot right there. I don't honestly care if someone never learns the manual of style so long as they don't write crap that's not worth fixing anyway, it's easy to clean up for MOS issues and the like.
On 11/6/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Florence Devouard wrote:
The primary role of the welcome is, I think, informing the newcomers of the community expectations.
When I look at the current template, I think it is rather good, but I find interesting that the most important expectations we are mentionning on the talk page of the newcomers are about "naming conventions" or "manual of style".
Other expectations, such as code of conduct or consensus building, are only mentionned on a second page, where the newcomer will have to go. Note that I like the five pillars page very much. It is bright, concise, to the point.
Hmm, that's a good point. IMO we should emphasize to newcomers that the things they really need to know up front in order to contribute are: 1) write neutral content; and 2) cite reliable sources so that what you write can be verified by someone else. It's useful to link to some pages explaining what those things mean (WP:NPOV, WP:RS, and WP:V). It's probably also useful to give a few general background links, like the five-principles ones. Most of the rest can be safely be left for later IMO---if a newcomer is writing neutral, well referenced articles, it's not a big problem if they name their article [[Prince Foo of Bar]] instead of [[Foo, Prince of Bar]]---that's easy to fix.
One thing that *is* something of a bottleneck IMO is the technical business of citing sources. A newbie looking for guidance on how to do that goes to WP:CITE, which quickly degenerates into a morass of multiple systems, template help pages, and who knows what else. Maybe we should have something prominently posted along the lines of: "If you find this confusing, feel free to cite your sources however you want! Someone will fix up the formatting later as long as you provide a complete citation to the sources you used."
-Mark
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Quoting Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
Florence Devouard wrote:
The primary role of the welcome is, I think, informing the newcomers of the community expectations.
When I look at the current template, I think it is rather good, but I find interesting that the most important expectations we are mentionning on the talk page of the newcomers are about "naming conventions" or "manual of style".
Other expectations, such as code of conduct or consensus building, are only mentionned on a second page, where the newcomer will have to go. Note that I like the five pillars page very much. It is bright, concise, to the point.
Hmm, that's a good point. IMO we should emphasize to newcomers that the things they really need to know up front in order to contribute are: 1) write neutral content; and 2) cite reliable sources so that what you write can be verified by someone else. It's useful to link to some pages explaining what those things mean (WP:NPOV, WP:RS, and WP:V). It's probably also useful to give a few general background links, like the five-principles ones. Most of the rest can be safely be left for later IMO---if a newcomer is writing neutral, well referenced articles, it's not a big problem if they name their article [[Prince Foo of Bar]] instead of [[Foo, Prince of Bar]]---that's easy to fix.
One thing that *is* something of a bottleneck IMO is the technical business of citing sources. A newbie looking for guidance on how to do that goes to WP:CITE, which quickly degenerates into a morass of multiple systems, template help pages, and who knows what else. Maybe we should have something prominently posted along the lines of: "If you find this confusing, feel free to cite your sources however you want! Someone will fix up the formatting later as long as you provide a complete citation to the sources you used."
-Mark
That's an excellent idea. I've just brought it up at WT:CITE
On Nov 7, 2007, at 12:31 AM, Delirium wrote:
Hmm, that's a good point. IMO we should emphasize to newcomers that the
things they really need to know up front in order to contribute are:
write neutral content; and 2) cite reliable sources so that what you write can be verified by someone else.
We need to be careful here - [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]] are important pages (and the latter is finally well-written! Or, at least, not horribly wrong), but citing sources is not a primary policy so much as one we have trouble getting the level of compliance with that we want.
The truth of the matter is that we don't want every statement in every article sourced. This is not a standard we put up for any article. The actual standard is much closer to "we want any statement that anybody has ever raised an eyebrow about to be sourced, and we want our articles to point readers to places where they can learn more and get more reliable sources than us."
This is a very vital distinction, because the former - cite everything - is a standard that most contributors, and especially idle "Hey, I found a mistake" contributors cannot possibly meet. It is further a standard that destructively pushes online sources - because if a contributor really only wants to spend 5 minutes on the edit they don't have the ability to look anywhere Google doesn't send them.
We must remember the difference between "unsourced material may be removed" and "unsourced material should not be added." There's a very big difference, and the {{fact}} tag exists as a way of navigating that gulf.
It is more accurate to say that sourcing, like wikifying, copyediting, and other such things, is a step that articles should go through as they advance towards the good and featured levels. It is an important step. We need more people who are willing to work with sources. But sourcing is not a basic concern, except inasmuch as people need to be *ready* to provide sources.
The better standard to push after NPOV is verifiability, with a reminder that sometimes, if people are skeptical of information, they will be expected to actually verify their information.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
It is more accurate to say that sourcing, like wikifying, copyediting, and other such things, is a step that articles should go through as they advance towards the good and featured levels. It is an important step. We need more people who are willing to work with sources. But sourcing is not a basic concern, except inasmuch as people need to be *ready* to provide sources.
Well, as simply a descriptive statement about how the encyclopedia works, a new article that has *no* sources stands a good chance of being deleted---and we warn contributors of this up front on the edit page. Basically the "standard" way of creating a new article is to write at least a decent stub with at least one reliable source, and helping new users to understand that will reduce the amount of angst from people unexpectedly getting their articles deleted.
-Mark
On Nov 7, 2007, at 8:30 PM, Delirium wrote:
Well, as simply a descriptive statement about how the encyclopedia
works, a new article that has *no* sources stands a good chance of being deleted---and we warn contributors of this up front on the edit page. Basically the "standard" way of creating a new article is to write at least a decent stub with at least one reliable source, and helping new users to understand that will reduce the amount of angst from people unexpectedly getting their articles deleted.
One thing we should look at once new article creation by anons and new accounts gets re-activated is how many days, on average, it takes a new user to create a new article. This gives a useful sense of how much we need to weight our advice one way or the other.
Of course, I also tend to think that deletion is not the first choice for a new unsourced article - one should ask the creator for a source first.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
One thing we should look at once new article creation by anons and new accounts gets re-activated is how many days, on average, it takes a new user to create a new article. This gives a useful sense of how much we need to weight our advice one way or the other.
Of course, I also tend to think that deletion is not the first choice for a new unsourced article - one should ask the creator for a source first.
This may be partly a tool-induced behavior issue. I don't really patrol new pages, but when I'm patrolling recent changes, I have this big feeling that if I don't catch and fix a bit of vandalism right now, it'll just get lost in the gigabytes of content we have.
I don't see how to do it with the current tools, but some way of knowing to what extent a new article has been reviewed could help that feeling. Especially with new pages, I'd much rather review them three days later, and then only if somebody else hasn't.
William
On 06/11/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away."
Close generally it means "at the present time I don't believe non template communication would be sufficiently beneficial to the project to be worth doing"
(The usual response to pointing this out is "but I can't possibly keep up with the flood of responses otherwise." To which the response is "so don't.")
You can keep up but it doesn't help. I can type "hi did you take this pic?" nearly as fast as {{subst:nsd}} then copy ({{subst:di-no source-notice|1=Prithvi s.jpg}} ~~~~ onto the talk page. If you are faced with needing to convey the same information repeatedly you are going to standardise. "hi did you take this pic?" scores higher on the higher I'm a human treating you like a human treat me like one scale (welcome templates score rather low) than copyvio templates but it isn't massively polite.
On 11/6/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/11/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
We have a general guideline about not templating the regulars. I'd suggest that that might be a good rule in many cases where the people aren't regulars. Templates can come across as very impersonal abd BITEy.
We shouldn't be templating ANYONE. It's a bureaucratic "go away."
I don't suppose you've got a natural-language processor I can use to give OrphanBot the ability to customize messages and respond to talkpage comments?
(and even without that, I suspect that OrphanBot is far more friendly to newcomers than most newpages patrollers)
On 11/6/07, James Forrester jdforrester@gmail.com wrote:
Seriously, a lot of what some term "newbie-biting" comes from the concept held dear by many that our old creed of eventualism is dead, and that expedient removal of vandalism trumps all other concerns, including having a project worth defending.
My idea for making vandalism much more catchable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Omegatron/Most_needed_software_features#Diff_summaries
On 11/6/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Anyone who uses the internet knows there is a chance of getting inappropriate content. We have one of the best protection mechanisms for it available, because of the very large number of users.
"One of the best available"? Really?
On 11/6/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I think it's worth realising that we're a work in progress.
I think it's more important that the general Google-linked public realize this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Tagline#.22that_anyone_can_edit.22
Sigh.
On 11/6/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
My point is that problems are indeed problems, but in that they serve as a call to involvement and an easy way to get started, we derive some benefit from them, too.
I also sometimes wonder if allowing kids to write crappy articles about their high schools might not actually be so harmful in the long run. Let them learn about neutrality and collaborative editing on pages that no one outside their microcosm is going to read anyway.
On 06/11/2007, Omegatron omegatron+wikienl@gmail.com wrote:
I also sometimes wonder if allowing kids to write crappy articles about their high schools might not actually be so harmful in the long run. Let them learn about neutrality and collaborative editing on pages that no one outside their microcosm is going to read anyway.
That's the kind of attitude that will result in the BLP mob making your life tricky.
Speaking of n00b, I can't believe the w00t article was deleted.
ObSheesh: Sheesh.
On Nov 6, 2007 6:07 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_Wikipedia_Week
This is happening.
A perennial press story is "I was bitten as a n00b on Wikipedia" - every random interaction with a random en:wp editor is taken as representative and officially sanctioned.
So we need people to be on extra special good behaviour.
(For those about to point out to Mr Pot that he is of similar blackness to Messrs Kettle, Jimbo emailed me directly asking me to please be much nicer on wikien-l in particular. And I can't say it wasn't deserved. *cough*)
Main sticking point I can see is notoriously prickly individuals who are also notoriously good encyclopedia writers. I won't go so far as to name any of those who spring to my mind, but I'm sure you have your own list. If they can be convinced this is a good idea then they should provide a suitably shocking example of niceness.
Also, have to hit the village pump, the admin boards etc. Those who do lots of janitorial work cleaning out the sewers of en:wp (vandal-chasing, newpages patrolling, RC patrolling, etc) and basically see the bad side of people all the time need to be brought on board as well. This is somewhere n00bs can really be bitten.
Ideas please? I suspect not doing this is not an option.
- d.
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