So many typos, sorry. ack.
On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 2:09 PM, jytdog jytdog@gmail.com wrote:
That piece is abysmally bad "science journalism" (I can't even write it without scare quotes, it is so bad). To hell with it. Ignore it.
The paper they are writing about ( http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/8/2/14/html) is published in an MDPI open access journal; MDPI is borderline "predatory publisher". So not the most 'reliable source" as we say. I don't have much to say about it, other than a) that the authors would find it "surprising" that Wikipedia would have norms after 15 years and having achieved what we have achieved on so many FAs, is more of a commentary on them, than on the project; b) other than that and some other boners, their analysis was pretty good and matches my experience.
Here is the thing I want to elevate from this: I think that the WMF doesn't take into account enough when it does outreach and planning. The en-wiki project is mature; it has strong norms that govern content and behavior. While there is a boatload of weak article and even bad ones, there are a lot of very good articles that are actually difficult to improve; in other words, edits made by passers-by often make the very good articles worse, not better.
When I work with new users, one of the first things I explain to them is exactly this -- Wikipedia is a mature project, that is not at all a "Mad Max" world but rather we have something very close to a "rule of law" and very strong norms and traditions, all grounded in CONSENSUS, including community-wide consensus reached in the past -- the policies and guidelines. If they are willing to learn, lots of people are willing to help. But the #1 determiner of whether people stick around or leave, if how open they are to learning the culture and norms. WP is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", but editing is privilege, not a right, and people who make no effort to learn how things work and cause a big ruckus, end up leaving angry or getting blocked. This makes sense to most everybody I interact with (except the ones who are on their way to leaving angry to getting kicked out)
On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 8:32 PM, Stephen Philbrick < stephen.w.philbrick@gmail.com> wrote:
I just scanned an article: "Wikipedia is basically just another giant bureaucracy",
http://www.sciencealert.com/wikipedia-is-basically-just-another-old-fashione...
and it is astonishing how bad it is.
I don't really quibble with the headline - it is a bureaucracy, but some of the content of the article is head-scratching.
For example, how many editors do you know who have achieved the rank of super-contributor?
Can one take an article seriously that blunders this badly?
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