So many typos, sorry. ack.
On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 2:09 PM, jytdog <jytdog(a)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(a)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-fashion…
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?
Phil
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