On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:

On 02/01/13 09:33, ENWP Pine wrote:

...

...

Hi Pine,

It might be because of the alcohol I've ingested these last days, but

• what are you proposing exactly?

Hapy new year, strainu

I wasn't proposing any specific action. I was thinking, "Big Data is a cool topic, it's a big topic in its own right, it's relevant to several aspects of Wikimedia, and other people might be interested in reading about it or thinking about it in relation to work that they're doing or priorities that they have".

Maybe Wikimedia should have some sort of Buzzword Compliance Officer to manage this sort of thing. You know, scalable P2P in the cloud, mining big data on a NoSQL platform etc. etc.

-- Tim Starling

Laugh all you want, but the best man at my wedding's scalable P2P in the cloud company was acquired by Adobe, then he was poached by Skype who were poached by Microsoft, and now he's a Very Senior Architect spending most of his time flying around the world to far-flung offices, architecting and implementing scalable P2P in the cloud.

And a recent company coworker was hired to mine big data on a NoSQL platform as part of the data analysis team of Obama's reelection campaign.

That is not to say we aren't all getting a good laugh at the current round of fully-buzzword-compliant press articles with the new year, or have fun watching trunk friends stagger around yelling "Fully virtualized big data SAAS in the cloud!".

8-)

On 03/01/13 17:38, Tim Starling wrote:

The number of active (>5 edits/mo) contributors has declined from 13000 in January 2007 to 5900 in October 2012.

Correction: that was the number of new editors per month. The number of active editors has actually declined from 49,000 to 33,000 over that period.

-- Tim Starling

2013/1/3 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:

On 03/01/13 16:09, George Herbert wrote:

...

Laugh all you want, but the best man at my wedding's scalable P2P in the cloud company was acquired by Adobe, then he was poached by Skype who were poached by Microsoft, and now he's a Very Senior Architect spending most of his time flying around the world to far-flung offices, architecting and implementing scalable P2P in the cloud.

Flying sucks. Time spent flying should be a measure of failure, not success.

Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to deny the existence of petabyte-sized data sets, or to deny that some organisations derive value from being able to pass them through CPUs in a reasonable amount of time. I merely question the value of a mailing list post that says "hey, big data, we should do that".

Which is not, as far as I understood, what Pine said. I read "Hey, big data, cool topic, interesting articles for who may be interested follow. No action needed." So what's the point of all this sarcasm? (note: rhetoric question, you should not need to answer this).

We all know that our problems lie elsewhere, and as far as I am concerned I think that the topic of "Wikimedia and Big Data" is only a great opportunity for anyone who is interested.

That said, Pine, thank you for the interesting reading.

Cristian

On Jan 3, 2013 11:01 AM, "Thomas Morton" morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:

On 3 January 2013 06:38, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

You don't need "big data" to see what needs to be done.

It might help; often it is surprising how statistical analysis can help narrow the focus of such efforts.

For example; it is taken as a given that incivility drives away new users, but do we have hard statistical evidence to back that up?

We don't even have a proper working definition of civilty, stats of how many times and how early in their editing life someone has been uncivil to would be hard to come by.

And if that is a

true situation, can we identify specifically what uncivil things are driving the most editors away (rudeness, templating, etc.).

Editor retention programmes have some data there. Check wp:wer on en.wiki. how the data for the other projects match up I don't know.

Although please lets do it without words like "big data", which makes me squirm :P

Can we make use of big microdata for future projects?

Tom _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:

On 03/01/13 22:46, Martijn Hoekstra wrote:

...

Editor retention programmes have some data there. Check wp:wer on en.wiki. how the data for the other projects match up I don't know.

Yes, that page describes the problem in detail. But the suggestions they offer under "how you can help" are along the same lines as policies that have been in place on Wikipedia since 2002 or earlier. It's been tried, it didn't work.

The problem is, some people want to feel powerful more than they want Wikipedia to grow. Or even if they want Wikipedia to grow on a cerebral level, exercising power over another user is immediately pleasurable, and they don't have sufficient impulse control to stop themselves from doing it.

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

There is risk, because the editor population will probably be reduced in the short term, and it's hard to know if it will ever recover. I don't know if there is anyone with the power to save Wikipedia who also has the required courage.

-- Tim Starling

I took a moderately long break from ENWP for most of this year, precipitated by work / firewall issues but just taking some time mostly away helped clear my mind.

In the interim, arbcom case filings and acceptances dropped like a stone, and it seems like several major conflict areas have been "baked in" as insoluble.

If you believe that the problem is the conflict over a perceived problem, this is a good development.

If you believe that the problem is the underlying problem at issue, then this is a horrific development.

I don't currently know...

On 4 January 2013 00:01, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling@wikimedia.org

...

wrote:

...

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

Right! Because we all know the solution to social problems is oligarchy.

Ironically, Steven, there is a lot to be said in favour of oligarchy; it's how most organized groups survive, provided they ensure the "few" who have authority remain rooted in the larger group.

Tim raises many interesting points.

It's a difficult problem that has its roots much further back than most us can imagine - remember that early English Wikipedians were largely drawn from either the Usenet, the academic, or the open source/free speech communities, and none of them are particularly noted for their deep-rooted commitment to civil discourse. Newer users learned their "wiki-manners" from the old hands; certainly many of those who were in positions of authority when I joined in 2005 were not exactly paragons of civility. Back then, though, these behaviours were considered "quirky" or "off-beat", and the individuals considered to have "character" and "guts". To give many of them their due, they managed to get this crazy enterprise off the ground and keep it flying despite the many obstacles that existed.

At the same time, many of the processes that were established early on depended on genuine good faith and a touching degree of idealism. Requests for comment were intended to draw in users for additional considered opinions, who had little or no history with the topic (or person) involved. For some time, that worked; however, today's requests for comment almost always wind up with the editors whose opinions had already been expressed repeating the same arguments, few additional uninvolved voices, and often as not the same divergence that existed beforehand.

We have been, to some extent, the victims of our own success. We grew exponentially and not organically, and given the roots of our community, the usual group structural forms were eschewed. There was also practically no money for anything for a very long time (our fundraisers now raise as much in a day as they did in the entire year when I first joined up), and very few employees who kept the operation together with shoestrings and sealing wax, while everything else was left to the editorial communities (and the volunteer developer communities) to keep things going. This "flattened hierarchy" of leadership worked reasonably well with a smaller editorial community that had barely scratched the surface of content creation, but quickly showed itself to be impractical when editors joined in droves - many of them focusing on hand-to-hand combat with vandals. Those who loathed wasting their time cleaning up after vandals were glad to have this newer cadre join them; however, there was a palpable difference in their reason for becoming part of the community, and when the number of highly active contributors more than doubled over a short period of time, it was impossible to provide an effective process to help them learn the technical, policy, and cultural expectations. Efforts to try to remedy some of these issues have been largely unsuccessful, with an overwhelming proliferation of often-conflicting policies that are nearly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, an overabundance of badly written and poorly descriptive templates, and a dependence on automated tools for social interaction.

And Tim is right about interpersonal interactions being one of the largest problems on English Wikipedia, although I think it's important to remember that the vast majority poor editorial behaviour never comes to the attention of the broader community. Only a microscopic portion of it ever manages to get as far as a noticeboard, and if it gets there it will almost always be because an experienced user is filing the complaint (most of the time about another experienced user). No, the problems are on user talk pages, and article talk pages - or they're not even discussed, they're just edits that are reverted with snippy edit summaries or no edit summary at all. New editors don't know what BRD means (Bold, Revert, Discuss).

I'm not sure Tim's proposal would be the best solution, but I'm very doubtful that the English Wikipedia community is able to pull itself together enough to establish some of the important structures that it needs to continue its growth. We probably *do* need a group with the authority to settle longterm content disputes, another with the authority to harmonize and simplify the policies, and another to improve the enculturation of new Wikipedians. I do think the community knows that it needs these things.

Risker

On Sun, 6 Jan 2013 03:11:03 +0000, Andreas Kolbe wrote:

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:48 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:

The lack of flagged revisions is a key contributor to this state of affairs. The English Wikipedia is ridiculously vulnerable to vandalism. Is it surprising that that vulnerability attracts large numbers of vandals and vandal fighters?

Andreas _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Not really. Russian Wikipedia has flagged revisions for almost five years now, and the situation with conflict resolution there is dramatically worse than in English Wikipedia, with assuming bad faith basically being the only means to move forward.

Cheers Yaroslav

On 04/01/13 16:01, Steven Walling wrote:

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.orgwrote:

...

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

Right! Because we all know the solution to social problems is oligarchy.

The solution for social problems is to have rules and a means to punish people who break them. This is well-established by experimental psychology, see for example:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2599936/

Oligarchy is not the only way to achieve this, but it is the model typically used in these game theory experiments. So it is hard for me to understand why you think it is ridiculous.

Oligarchy is a popular model for the governance of organisations. WMF itself is governed by a Board of Trustees. Nobody seems to think that is ridiculous.

I'm not saying that good behaviour on Wikipedia can be enforced by the direct efforts of a governing committee. I am saying that a governing committee could have sufficient resources under its control (case officers, etc.) to effect significant change.

-- Tim Starling

Socialization is usually best achieved through rewards rather than through punishments. The principle reward is a sense of achievement when good editing is done or good administrative work done. In the case of editing the reward, absent trouble, is instantaneous as your work is published.

Fred

Yes, of course - why didn't we think of that? Actually the lack of rules and lack of punishments means (meant) it was bloody hard to game the system. Now we have a calcified set of rules and an oligarchy, passive-aggressives have a field day. Rules-lawyers abound, polite requests to the oligarchy are met with insults about "mind-set" and other newspeak comments. Meanwhile the 99% of editors that just want to edit and the 95% of admins that just want to help the project are stymied at every turn, scared to get involved in the processes. A number of years ago the oligarchy destroyed hope (Esperanza) - now the Wikiquette noticeboard has gone. Power is increasingly in fewer and fewer hands, a significant number of whom have, over the years, and indeed recently, abused that power.

The solution for social problems is socialisation. We have some great exponents of that art in Dennis Brown, Worm That Turned and several others. For those that won't be socialised, the solution is ostracism - or blocking as it is known. Provided this is used with caution on community members, and with no longer duration than necessary it is a good solution.

On 04/01/2013 06:27, Tim Starling wrote:

...

The solution for social problems is to have rules and a means to punish people who break them.

---

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On 21 January 2013 01:23, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 09:53:46AM +0000, Richard Farmbrough wrote:

...

number of years ago the oligarchy destroyed hope (Esperanza) - now the

Well, Esperanza ended up ossified faster than the rest of wikipedia, so it had to be taken down.

Esperanza was killed because it became problematic.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza

Perhaps bits of the idea may be useful, but it was a bad implementation and is generally not missed.

- d.

Here's a question, Steve: what social problems have been solved by anarchy? If we toss out "oligarchy", decide "voting is evil", and only allow most decisions to proceed on some ill-defined notion of consensus, that's what is left.

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 12:01 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling@wikimedia.org

...

wrote:

...

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

Right! Because we all know the solution to social problems is oligarchy.

Steven _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Tim and Erik's views aren't at all incompatible or mutually exclusive; they're just looking at opposite ends of the same problem, which stated fully is that experienced editors leave and the pace of new editors turning into experienced editors is too low to maintain a steady community size. Erik's list of possible solutions, and Tim's suggestion, are both quite reasonable methods for solving the complete problem. No large scale effort to improve editor retention should ignore half the problem, though, so the true bottom line goal ought to be both encouraging new people and making life easier for the folks that are already here.

Meanwhile, the project needs to adjust to its new realities. Even if some suite of solutions manages to improve the retention problem, it won't go away - fundamentally, the success of the project and its longevity are likely just as important factors as the editing environment. It doesn't come up a lot on this list, but Wikipedia's enormous success in accumulating content means that a much smaller potential group of people might be both willing and able to add more. Most topics that are popular or significant to large groups of English-writing people are already well covered, narrowing the opportunities for those folks (who, let's recall, generally don't have advanced expertise of the type amenable to Wikipedia articles) to contribute.

For years this higher bar for the able and interested was offset by the influx of people dedicated to preserving what was already there, but technological improvements (AbuseFilter, anti-vandal bots, bots with admin buttons, human-driven but highly efficient tools like Huggle) has reduced opportunities in that arena as well. Which is all to say, it's totally expected that the population of both content contributors and vandal whackers will decline over time.

So any complete statement of the problem, which ought to be the starting point for any efforts to solve it, should account for the awkward new editor experience, the difficulties facing long-term contributors, *and* the natural and inevitably growing attrition rate that we should reasonably expect to see.

On 4 January 2013 15:41, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.rs wrote:

Editing an article was easy. All I needed to know was simple and intuitive syntax for headings, bold, italic and links. It was easy to see article text through this syntax.

I spent idle time in the holiday week working on [[:en:OpenOffice]]. Wikitext is just awful these days, particularly in an article like that where every assertion needs and has a cite. Anyone who thinks wikitext is just fine for the job, I urge you to click "edit" and contemplate fixing the guacamole you see before you. Sure hope the visual editor makes managing references on an article like that easier.

- d.

On 15/01/13 00:21, Richard Farmbrough wrote:

Of course any effort to make article source more readable meets with opposition - in the case of references in particular. And not only from those who cite CITEVAR legitimately, but from at least one admin who will block for putting references in numerical order. These are the sorts of things which would not have lasted long in (admittedly slightly mythical) Good Old Days

Unfortunately, even this admin has some justification for what he's doing: he probably encountered someone who was using reordering to introduce subtle vandalism (since it can't be checked in diff).

Again I see that part of the problem is that there are too few people guarding too much content, but I don't see what to do to change this.

On 1/4/13 9:57 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:

On Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:41:06 +0100, Nikola Smolenski wrote:

...

I guess I could write much more. But at the end, I have no solution. I could imagine some partial solutions for some of the problems, but nothing that could really bring Wikipedia to days of old.

Certainly, it will not. For the very same reason you mention: less not covered topics, more complexity, higher editing standards.

Yes, this is the main problem I've run into trying to recruit new Wikipedia editors: less low-hanging fruit, at least on en.wiki (things are different on smaller wikis). Fewer topics of widespread general interest are completely article-less compared to a few years ago, so there's less scope to e.g. write a 1-paragraph stub about [[Mahmoud Abbas]] and feel you've contributed significantly. *And* you can no longer do so just by jotting down a few things you remember off the top of your head, since the standards for verifiability have gone up considerably.

So the first problem I run into is that many people feel Wikipedia is "done", or at least done enough that the remaining work is too advanced for a casual layperson to do. And the second problem is that not many people want to go to a library, look up books, and do proper research with cited sources, if it isn't a school assignment or part of their job. I suspect that part hasn't even really changed—we have fewer editors now than in 2005, but I would guess if you look at the number of *souce-citing* editors in 2005 versus today, there hasn't been much of a decline (I could be wrong on that!).

The most successful approach I've found to getting new people interested and non-frustrated is to suggest they follow an approach roughly like this:

---

1. Start with a source, not a topic. Pick a high-quality book that covers subjects that could have Wikipedia articles. For example, I recently picked up a book on archaeology of northern Greece. Browse in a library for inspiration!

1a. Do *not* pick a source that you have a particularly close personal or emotional connection to: it is not good to start with your own research, your supervisor's or colleague's research, a project of yours or that you're involved with, a nationalist/political/religious subject you feel strongly about, the history of your own family, etc.

2. Scan through the book for topics that could be discrete Wikipedia articles. For example, the book may describe specific historical figures, or archaeological sites. Identify some that have enough material on them in the book to put together at least a short article. See if a Wikipedia article already exists (try several name variations, and search for mentions in other articles).

3. Add information from the book to an existing article, or start a new one. After each paragraph (or occasionally after specific important sentences) add a citation to where you got the information, by adding a citation tag: <ref>A. Author (1999). Book, pp. 22-23</ref> . You can format the citation with whatever style you want, as long as it's sufficient to identify the source. (Wikipedia does have official citation templates, but there's need to trouble yourself with them when starting out... a bot or person will re-format your citations later if necessary).

4. If it's a new article, add at the end of the article a reference section: ==References== {{reflist}}

This will automatically generate a bibliography of everything you put in <ref></ref> tags.

5. Optionally, add categories to the article, by adding something like this at the end of the article text, after the references:

[[Category:Castles in Greece]] [[Category:13th-century architecture]]

---

I haven't had much success convincing people to do that, though. Not lack of success as in people try and then fail: run into deletionism or incivility, or just aren't able to figure it out. But lack of success in convincing people to go to the library, find a book, and write a cited article based on it. Most people, ime so far at least, just aren't interested in doing that. Not sure how to change that, short of paying editors.

-Mark

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:05 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

On 4 January 2013 17:56, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:

...

1a. Do *not* pick a source that you have a particularly close personal or emotional connection to: it is not good to start with your own research, your supervisor's or colleague's research, a project of yours or that you're involved with, a nationalist/political/religious subject you feel strongly about, the history of your own family, etc.

This can be a problem in that people will become interested first in fixing something they think is wrong because they know about it. I do realise all the steps from that to here, and that a list of instructions pretty much won't be read.

Along the lines of noneuclidian geometry...

What if we experiment (at least conceptually) with inverting that instruction? Encourage people to write on subjects they know...

Normal people won't be so much of an expert that using their own professional or academic work as a reference is even applicable.

Actual experts, we can include a "Please cite your sources, rather than your own work, thanks!" and leave it at that.

Actual experts who fail to heed that are a problem, but a much smaller and easier to communicate with and explain problem than the no-newbies one. .

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:

On Jan 5, 2013 12:51 AM, "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:05 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

On 4 January 2013 17:56, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:

...

1a. Do *not* pick a source that you have a particularly close personal

or

...

...

...

emotional connection to: it is not good to start with your own

research,

...

...

...

your supervisor's or colleague's research, a project of yours or that

you're

...

...

...

involved with, a nationalist/political/religious subject you feel

strongly

...

...

...

about, the history of your own family, etc.

This can be a problem in that people will become interested first in fixing something they think is wrong because they know about it. I do realise all the steps from that to here, and that a list of instructions pretty much won't be read.

Along the lines of noneuclidian geometry...

What if we experiment (at least conceptually) with inverting that instruction? Encourage people to write on subjects they know...

Normal people won't be so much of an expert that using their own professional or academic work as a reference is even applicable.

Actual experts, we can include a "Please cite your sources, rather than your own work, thanks!" and leave it at that.

Actual experts who fail to heed that are a problem, but a much smaller and easier to communicate with and explain problem than the no-newbies one. .

Please resubmit this suggestion after three hours of AfC work

You think I haven't done hours (days, weeks, at one point a month) worth of AfC work?

I thought AfC was a great place to ramp up my WP skills when I was getting in sync. Pick something I knew about but not enough to write an article, go research it, zap.

On 1/4/13 5:51 PM, George Herbert wrote:

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:05 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

On 4 January 2013 17:56, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:

...

1a. Do *not* pick a source that you have a particularly close personal or emotional connection to: it is not good to start with your own research, your supervisor's or colleague's research, a project of yours or that you're involved with, a nationalist/political/religious subject you feel strongly about, the history of your own family, etc.

This can be a problem in that people will become interested first in fixing something they think is wrong because they know about it. I do realise all the steps from that to here, and that a list of instructions pretty much won't be read.

Along the lines of noneuclidian geometry...

What if we experiment (at least conceptually) with inverting that instruction? Encourage people to write on subjects they know...

Hmm, I should've worded that more narrowly. I don't disagree with people writing on subjects they know (quite the opposite!). I have more in mind to avoid things that people have an unusually close personal/emotional connection to, which makes it more likely their editing will result in POV-pushing.

For example, I'm Greek, and know a bit about Greek culture, history, etc., and these are fine areas for someone to start editing in. On the other hand, a Greek choosing [[Macedonia naming dispute]] or [[Cyprus dispute]] as the first article one edits (e.g. to "correct misinformation") is less advisable, imo. It's certainly possible to edit reasonably in those areas, but I think it's a poor starting point, and requires some more experience with how to write neutral articles in contentious areas, and how to reach a consensus over what that even means.

Same in my area of expertise: editing AI articles is a great place for an AI researcher to start editing, but editing an article on one's own research lab, self, department, algorithm, etc. is not a great place. Unfortunately I often find academics primarily interested in the latter: the would-be-editor question I most often get is along the lines of, "how do I create a Wikipedia article on [my own thing]"? I do try to redirect this into suggesting they edit more generally in their area of expertise but not *specifically* their approach/self/lab they're trying to promote, e.g. think about what exists in a good textbook or survey article that's not yet covered well in Wikipedia, and work there. But I'd say that's usually not successful.

-Mark

On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 04:48:57PM -0800, George Herbert wrote:

I almost wonder if having a "warning flag" for highly sensitive or contentious article, encouraging editors without some threshold of edits (500? ... some number) to ask about contributions on the article talk page first, rather than going directly to editing the actual article...

Note: Adds a threshold, thus negatively influences editor retention.

sincerely, Kim Bruning

<scratches head> Maybe we need some sort of course/book "wiki-process design for dummies".

On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 04:13:20PM -0800, George Herbert wrote:

...

Note: Adds a threshold, thus negatively influences editor retention.

...

But we need to understand what's wrong with the current way of doing things as part of the discussion.

Consider a famous example in Japan: Several Japanese onsens had problems with Russian Sailors, so in the end they instituded a "no foreigners allowed" policy. This solved the probnlem nicely.

I've also heard a story about a lan party in texas, where they had had repeated issues with people hurling slurs at girl gamers etc. so in the end they simply banned all female participants.

The correct solution to newbies being chased off is not "ban them upfront". The correct solution is to deal with those chasing off the newbies ;-)

sincerely, Kim

On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 04:50:39PM -0800, George Herbert wrote:

...

The correct solution to newbies being chased off is not "ban them upfront". The correct solution is to deal with those chasing off the newbies ;-)

There is a tremendous difference between a clickthrough warning that one might be wading into a dangerous topic, and a ban of a type or class of users from articles or topic areas.

Ah, I see what you're getting at now!

As a temp measure, it's better than nothing, I suppose, though the underlying problem should also be dealt with, possibly by use of DRN or similar.

sincerely, Kim Bruning

On Jan 9, 2013 1:07 AM, "Kim Bruning" kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 03:51:42PM -0800, George Herbert wrote:

...

Along the lines of noneuclidian geometry...

What if we experiment (at least conceptually) with inverting that instruction? Encourage people to write on subjects they know...

Normal people won't be so much of an expert that using their own professional or academic work as a reference is even applicable.

Actual experts, we can include a "Please cite your sources, rather than your own work, thanks!" and leave it at that.

Actual experts who fail to heed that are a problem, but a much smaller and easier to communicate with and explain problem than the no-newbies one.

You know, this is starting to sound like we're the 2001 wikipedia to

provide

input to the nascent Nupedia? ;-)

My proposal would be to replace AFC with an "unstable branch wikipedia". (And cherry-pick from there). This proposal has the upside that it uses

proven

technology and processes ;-)

sincerely, Kim bruning

So, how bold are you? Also: where is the sign up page? I think I'd feel very much at home on a wiki that is a wiki.

---

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On 4 January 2013 15:29, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:

Most topics that are popular or significant to large groups of English-writing people are already well covered, narrowing the opportunities for those folks (who, let's recall, generally don't have advanced expertise of the type amenable to Wikipedia articles) to contribute.

So I hear this may not be at all the case, and that editors writing about Indian topics complain of excessive trouble getting past US editors' notability detectors. This is of course anecdote not numbers, but I would suggest not ignoring it.

- d.

On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 09:02:18AM -0500, Nathan wrote:

Here's a question, Steve: what social problems have been solved by anarchy? If we toss out "oligarchy", decide "voting is evil", and only allow most decisions to proceed on some ill-defined notion of consensus, that's what is left.

Consensus != Anarchy. And we've actually had [[WP:CONSENSUS]] nailed down pretty hard, with process diagrams and everything. People keep disbelieving the hard definitions and watering things down though.

sincerely, Kim Bruning

(IMO anyway. I've always been a hardcore IAR/BOLD person... and for good procedural reasons. And no, that is also not a recipe for "anarchy" or anomie.)

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 11:02 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

I do agree that better mechanisms for dispute resolution, dealing with topic warring, article ownership, and plain old incivility are needed. But I don't believe that those issues are at the heart of the "editor retention problem" as you seem to suggest, but rather, that they tend to occur later in the editor lifecycle, among a subset of editors which in fact already has survived many of the primary factors that deter new editors and are therefore relatively likely to retain. The new editor experience is characterized more by templating and assembly line style enforcement of existing policies than it is by incivility, topic warring, article ownership and incivility.

I'm wondering whether the key findings in Halfaker's recent "rise and decline" paper resonate with you: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

Existing data like the above supports strongly the notion that well-intentioned, good faith contributors are much more heavily discouraged in 2012 than they were in 2004 or 2005, but this can be explained in significant part with the influx of bad faith contributors that have necessitated increasingly heavy handed ways to control against bad edits (Huggle, Twinkle, AbuseFilter, etc.) -- which catch good faith editors in the crossfire -- as well as increasing expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality edit / page creation.

In an environment where most folks who show up want to help, it's easy to be welcoming and supportive of new contributors. As Wikipedia had to deal with more and more spammers, crackpots and assholes, while simultaneously being more and more scrutinized in terms of quality and reliability, new users have increasingly been seen as "guilty until proven innocent" and are dealt not so much in a deliberately uncivil, but more in an assembly line robotic fashion that's highly discouraging. Templating with standard messages, no matter how friendly, is much more common than explicit incivility toward a new user and lack of any form of personal encouragement or gratitude.

If that is correct, then the answer -- at least for very new users -- isn't first and foremost a more "disciplined" enforcement of existing policies. Rather, new editors are simply treated in a manner that's discouraging more than it is encouraging, without that treatment being in violation of any policy -- indeed, with various policies in fact calling for precisely such discouraging actions to be taken in order to preserve quality, to enforce notability and sourcing policies, etc.

The answer, then, is to find ways to make the new user experience more encouraging and pleasurable, such as:

• simplifying the interface so that we can at least get rid of

technical reasons that lead to early edits being unsuccessful and reverted (Visual Editor, talk page replacement, notifications, etc.);

• making it easy to find things to do that are relatively low-risk

(something the E3 team is experimenting with right now) so that new editors can have a more ladder-like experience of becoming good contributors;

• guiding the new user in a clear and instructive manner, and pointing

them to places where they can get help from another human being (cf. Teahouse)

More disruptive technical solutions could include:

• safer alternative work/collaboration spaces that don't suffer from

the contention issues of the main article space (sandboxes on steroids)

• easier ways for new users to re-do an edit that has been reverted

(cf. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Improve_your_edit )

• real-time mechanisms for coaching, collaboration (chat, real-time

collaborative editing) and mentor matchmaking

More disruptive policy-level changes would include rethinking some of the more problematic quality-related policies, especially notability.

That's not to say that we should ignore the deeper social issues that arise in maintaining a universal encyclopedia in a radically open manner (and indeed, the community has learned, evolved and continually improved its ways of dealing with those issues). But most new users give up well before encountering those issues. When new editors complain about Wikipedia being mean, they complain more often about reverts, templating, deletion nominations, etc. -- none of which are in fact inherently "uncivil" according to Wikipedia's own policies, but rather part of its overzealous immune system. In other words, rudeness is in the eye of the beholder.

All best, Erik

I am very much in agreement with Erik's description of the issue and potential solutions.

Like he said, E3 is running an experiment where we ask people who just registered on English Wikipedia to try their hand at copyediting some articles, if they don't have an activity in mind already. We're still doing analysis of the first phase, so the rest of the team will shoot me if I trot out any specific data, but suffice it to say that we've got a decent chunk of new editors to try this out so far. When you inspect the edits of users who did this, you see some patterns which match the conclusions of the paper Erik cites above:

Vandals or those making mistakes are getting reverted and warned. Those who actually made constructive edits like asked are either ignored, or given a welcome template with a laundry list of policies and other documentation. A very small number of the latter group figure out how to find more to do, and keep doing it. In short, we are focusing on the negative as a community, and leaving potentially helpful new community members to try and figure everything out on their own.

In any case, sorry for the earlier snark. Suffice it to say that it peeved me to hear anyone try and chalk up an extremely complex problem like Wikipedia editor retention to some kind of basic flaw in human nature, which causes grumpy oldbies to hoard power. I can save my debate with Tim and Risker concerning their disturbing ideas about oligarchy for later, since I don't want anyone really cares to hear me expound on that.

Steven

On 4 January 2013 08:18, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:

Erik Moeller, 04/01/2013 08:02:

I'm wondering whether the key findings in Halfaker's recent "rise and

...

decline" paper resonate with you: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~**halfak/publications/The_Rise_** and_Decline/http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

Existing data like the above supports strongly the notion that well-intentioned, good faith contributors are much more heavily discouraged in 2012 than they were in 2004 or 2005, but this can be explained in significant part with the influx of bad faith contributors that have necessitated increasingly heavy handed ways to control against bad edits (Huggle, Twinkle, AbuseFilter, etc.) -- which catch good faith editors in the crossfire -- as well as increasing expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality edit / page creation.

The paper does contain good news though:

To explore Hypothesis: Norm formalization & calcification, we first looked for changes in the rate of new policy creation following the introduction of a structured proposal process in 2005. Figure 8 shows that growth of policies and guidelines began to slow in 2006, just as Forte (2009) reports. The results from our analysis of new policy/guideline proposals show that the number of new policy proposals accepted via this process peaked in 2005 at 27 out of 217 (12% acceptance). 2006 saw an even higher number of proposed policies, but lower acceptance with 24 out of 348 proposals accepted (7% acceptance). From 2007 forward, the rate at which policies are proposed decreases monotonically down to a mere 16 in 2011 while the acceptance rate stays steady at about 7.5%.

---

In other words, it would seem that en.wiki, contrary to popular belief, has developed a good immune system against bureaucracy norms expansion. :-)

The paper is actually of little use in this part IMHO, because:

1. we already know that users who joined in 2005/2006 are still

disproportionately active in most community processes like deletion discussions and so on, 2) everybody knows that to influence how the wiki is run it's more effective to change a single word in an important policy than to establish ten new policies.

As for (1), I doubt the Wikipedia thought police is keeping newcomers out of discussions, but one can make them look so hard that newbies won't participate. However, it.wiki recently switched from the established vote-system for deletion to a discussion system as en.wiki's, and a year of data for the "new" system seems to prove that it increased the words spent and drove away old/unexperienced editors (with 3+ years or 51-5000 edits), while newcomers resisted, presumably to defend their own articles. https://toolserver.org/~**mauro742/liste/pdc_stats.csvhttps://toolserver.org/~mauro742/liste/pdc_stats.csv <https://it.wikipedia.org/**wiki/Wikipedia:Elenchi_** generati_offline/Richieste/**Archivio/2011#Lavoro_per_le_**PdChttps://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Elenchi_generati_offline/Richieste/Archivio/2011#Lavoro_per_le_PdC

...

Nemo

Well, I'd argue "we knew" is not the same as "we can prove"* ;*p. I

"know" lots of things - that's distinct from being able to prove them to academia. In my mind, anything which academically substantiates an internally-held assumption is A Good Thing: maybe not directly for us, but indirectly, in the sense that it communicates to intelligent people who get quantitative data the need to help out and work with us.

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This thread may have started weird, but it seems to be going in a very good direction: we're all very concerned about editor retention, we all see problem areas we agree on, and we are all grasping at new ideas that seem more or less like straws. This is bad news, but it has to remain on the agenda, and we have to keep thinking about it or the project runs the risk of actually failing - the very thing we all laughed away for a long time seeing wikipedia's success.

When I look back on my wiki time, I see a transition much as Erik described. I joined in 2005 with the great influx that was going on, or just coming to an end at the time. The editors who were there, who learned me the ropes, still very strongly believed in WP:IAR, and the 'it's just a guideline' principle. What I believe happened is that a new generation of editors - roughly new editors since the time I joined - who didn't create the rules had more distance from the rules, and in some ways more respect for them. These are the vandalism fighters and the new page patrollers Risker mentions were - and are - very needed. If they are not here, we might well collapse under the load of bad faith edits. Everyone obviously believes that their view of what wikipedia is is right, but I believe they don't grok wikipedia. They don't grok the meaning of a wiki, and neither do they grok IAR. And yet we need them desperately. As a community we started revering the rules over the project, and that's very very wrong.

I'm going to go ahead and postulate that the greatest problem with editor retention is that it is really really hard to do something good for wikipedia - too hard for many people - and far harder still to grok wikipedia. This is a two sided problem. The first side is the problem for new editors: We have set up rules to justify fixing the good faith errors they have made which are enforced quite strictly. To grok wikipedia you need experience. As a rule of thumb, I would say about 1000 edits which are not anti-vandalism edits, and you could grok it. I am willing to go further, and say that none or very few of those 1000 edits will actually be very good. But we don't have the manpower in experience to guide all those 1000 edits, kindly explain what's wrong with them, and that it's absolutely fine that the edits aren't very good. Before that moment has arrived, we will have had a good meaning good faith vandal fighter strongly discouraging this user. It's a miracle people even make it this far.

So what can we do? Well, first off, we could stop bothering new editors about the rules. There are far too many anyway, and while they are a fun mental exercise for the experienced wikipedian, a new wikipedian only needs to know a few things: Don't act like a dick, be bold, content should be verifiable, and you are here for the project - not personal gain. An editor writes the most horrific sucky article ever, but passes those above rules? Cool! Thanks! Carry on! Feedback can come later, he already took the hurdle of writing something that passes the basic rules. (note this is not how [[WP:AfC]] works). An editor breaks one of the above rules? Take ownership and responsibility for the rule. If you agree to the rule, you don't need the blue link to tell him what they did wrong. "Hey, you wrote this and that article, and you didn't name your sources. Without them our readers will rightfully question the truthfullness - to them, it's just some guy on the internet who wrote that. Could you fix that?" No need to bother them with the finer points of [[WP:V]] and [[WP:RS]]. They're just policy pages - a pretty nifty summary of consensus.

Now that might be a little awkward and getting used to for our editing community, but there is another painful truth out there. The people who have the ability to properly understand wikipedia are spread far to thin to give this personal attention to newcomers, attention they very much need to come to be grown up wikipedians, and still be productive in their own right. We need a cure for that. We tried the cure of dedicated vandal fighters, and it didn't work, it landed us in the situation where we are now. We need something else, and whatever that something else will be, it will be very very painful, and will go against everything our wikispirit stands for, and we will hate it, but it will be needed. Possibly flagged revisions on all pages. Possibly a far simpler blocking policy (I for one strongly support abolishing any form of time-expiring block which are punitive almost by definition. You are blocked indefinitely, and you are unblocked if you ask for it, and give a good reason why the problematic behaviour won't be recurring. There is never a reason to unblock because three days have passed) If some administrator has the strong feeling that they are not here to build an encyclopedia, begone. Is that fair? No. There is a large factor of arbitarity there, mistakes will be made, and it requires far more responsibility from our admins than we should ask of them. But we need it to protect the time of our more experienced members to grow more experienced members. We will need to make things worse now to make them better later, or they will be far worse in the future - one of the greatest projects of our time dead in the water, with no hope of expanding it, just draconic measures to protect it.

Now people like Tim, who have their wiki heart in the right place (thanks for kicking this up Tim!), and seem to grok the project, can work on technical means that alleviate the pain for the technical editing experience. People like Leslie who recently became the focus of a hypothetical discussion on the medical expenses policy of the WMF (wtf?) can do her work to provide the infrastucture our platform needs. This will never be enough if we don't change as a community.

We all know the 'oh fuck' graph of editor retention. For you viewing pleasure, the equivalent in admin retention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_administrators/stat_tabl...

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:

Erik Moeller, 04/01/2013 08:02:

I'm wondering whether the key findings in Halfaker's recent "rise and

...

decline" paper resonate with you: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~**halfak/publications/The_Rise_** and_Decline/http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

Existing data like the above supports strongly the notion that well-intentioned, good faith contributors are much more heavily discouraged in 2012 than they were in 2004 or 2005, but this can be explained in significant part with the influx of bad faith contributors that have necessitated increasingly heavy handed ways to control against bad edits (Huggle, Twinkle, AbuseFilter, etc.) -- which catch good faith editors in the crossfire -- as well as increasing expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality edit / page creation.

The paper does contain good news though:

To explore Hypothesis: Norm formalization & calcification, we first looked for changes in the rate of new policy creation following the introduction of a structured proposal process in 2005. Figure 8 shows that growth of policies and guidelines began to slow in 2006, just as Forte (2009) reports. The results from our analysis of new policy/guideline proposals show that the number of new policy proposals accepted via this process peaked in 2005 at 27 out of 217 (12% acceptance). 2006 saw an even higher number of proposed policies, but lower acceptance with 24 out of 348 proposals accepted (7% acceptance). From 2007 forward, the rate at which policies are proposed decreases monotonically down to a mere 16 in 2011 while the acceptance rate stays steady at about 7.5%.

---

In other words, it would seem that en.wiki, contrary to popular belief, has developed a good immune system against bureaucracy norms expansion. :-)

The paper is actually of little use in this part IMHO, because:

1. we already know that users who joined in 2005/2006 are still

disproportionately active in most community processes like deletion discussions and so on, 2) everybody knows that to influence how the wiki is run it's more effective to change a single word in an important policy than to establish ten new policies.

As for (1), I doubt the Wikipedia thought police is keeping newcomers out of discussions, but one can make them look so hard that newbies won't participate. However, it.wiki recently switched from the established vote-system for deletion to a discussion system as en.wiki's, and a year of data for the "new" system seems to prove that it increased the words spent and drove away old/unexperienced editors (with 3+ years or 51-5000 edits), while newcomers resisted, presumably to defend their own articles. https://toolserver.org/~**mauro742/liste/pdc_stats.csvhttps://toolserver.org/~mauro742/liste/pdc_stats.csv <https://it.wikipedia.org/**wiki/Wikipedia:Elenchi_** generati_offline/Richieste/**Archivio/2011#Lavoro_per_le_**PdChttps://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Elenchi_generati_offline/Richieste/Archivio/2011#Lavoro_per_le_PdC

...

Nemo

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On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

I do agree that better mechanisms for dispute resolution, dealing with topic warring, article ownership, and plain old incivility are needed. But I don't believe that those issues are at the heart of the "editor retention problem" as you seem to suggest, but rather, that they tend to occur later in the editor lifecycle, among a subset of editors which in fact already has survived many of the primary factors that deter new editors and are therefore relatively likely to retain.

Correct. Nasty editorial disputes and use of incivility to enforce point of view comes later, as does finding out that sometimes nothing can or will be done about it.

The answer, then, is to find ways to make the new user experience more encouraging and pleasurable, such as:

[Improving editor clipped]

• making it easy to find things to do that are relatively low-risk

(something the E3 team is experimenting with right now) so that new editors can have a more ladder-like experience of becoming good contributors;

• guiding the new user in a clear and instructive manner, and pointing

them to places where they can get help from another human being (cf. Teahouse)

[clipped for now > More disruptive technical solutions could include:]

All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

I've been playing on a MUD lately, http://www.alteraeon.com/ that has put considerable effort into getting new users started. MUDs, at least text-based ones, also suffer from failure to attract and engage new users.

The first thing about a MUD that is simply not on a wiki is channels. On a MUD there will be a Newbie channel that experienced users monitor. Experienced users are expected to be helpful, offering encouragement and practical help to new users. A channel on a MUD is more or less an IRC channel incorporated into the software. It's real time. Another thing is that a user is logged on, and presumably engaged in the game. There is no need for that on a wiki. Anyway, a post on the newbie channel is seen by all others who are logged in and have activated that channel. This happens on a telnet terminal with a command line for input or a functional equivalent, called a client, a mud client. So something like an in-wiki IRC channel that new users would automatically be logged into along with experienced users might be helpful.

The MUD I reference has both a MUD school where a presumably new user goes through the basic game moves and is instructed in them and, much more interesting and engaging, a complex Newbie zone where the new player faces an increasing complex series of challenges which successfully accomplish learning by doing. The coding on the particular MUD generously rewards every "right" move with "experience", "money", and other goodies. This is all very nanny and I doubt the average highly educated user who is a university professor or professional could accept being put to school in this manner in a compulsory way before being allowed to edit, but it could be available as an option. We could even have a "practice" wiki which was set up in this way as an option. Probably no one would use it though, I suppose, so whatever is done would probably have to be on the main site. It would be a sandbox, but a more active and monitored one, actually a set of practice articles in sandboxes.

With respect to welcoming and assisting new users on the English Wikipedia where there is a bewildering volume of varied activity by new and experienced users it might be helpful if we had a recent changes options that showed only edit by new editors with less than say 100 edits that could be monitored. Newbie helpers could then welcome, comment, compliment, or otherwise assist the new user. Obviously access to such a recent changes option by those looking for trouble could also be used in ways that would discourage the new user. Perhaps access could be limited to only flagged newbie helpers.

Fred Bauder

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 2:10 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

On 4 January 2013 13:03, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

...

With respect to welcoming and assisting new users on the English Wikipedia where there is a bewildering volume of varied activity by new and experienced users it might be helpful if we had a recent changes options that showed only edit by new editors with less than say 100 edits that could be monitored. Newbie helpers could then welcome, comment, compliment, or otherwise assist the new user. Obviously access to such a recent changes option by those looking for trouble could also be used in ways that would discourage the new user. Perhaps access could be limited to only flagged newbie helpers.

How would we stop Twinkle/Huggle users from using such a feed as a shooting gallery?

By blocking the hell out of anyone who thinks that is a good idea. We as editors are not idiots. The trench mentality which is understandable but inexcusable has been condoned for too long. Anyone who - in good faith, understandably by the mind-numbing idiocy poured out in our recent changes by various forms of bad faith and incompetence - fucks up by scaring off our good faith new editors that need help rather than templating (which is not help in any recognisable form) needs to stop doing what they are doing. If our vandalism fighters can't be held to those standards, they shouldn't do it.

• d.

---

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On 4 January 2013 13:39, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

I'm afraid the shooting gallery is already coded into Twinkle/Huggle. It is the use of that coding that is at issue. It could be used to encourage, reward and advise as well as to enforce.

This is currently implemented by templating, which is how human editors can fail the Turing test.

Unfortunately, just banning Twinkle/Huggle/similar first-person-shooter games is unlikely to fly.

- d.

On 4 January 2013 13:39, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

...

I'm afraid the shooting gallery is already coded into Twinkle/Huggle. It is the use of that coding that is at issue. It could be used to encourage, reward and advise as well as to enforce.

This is currently implemented by templating, which is how human editors can fail the Turing test.

Unfortunately, just banning Twinkle/Huggle/similar first-person-shooter games is unlikely to fly.

• d.

Such applications are useful, even vital. The problem is sorting out good-faith new users for attention. Perhaps they could flag themselves as a "new user needing help getting started".

Fred

David Gerard, 04/01/2013 14:10:

...

On 4 January 2013 13:03, Fred Bauderfredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

...

With respect to welcoming and assisting new users on the English Wikipedia where there is a bewildering volume of varied activity by new and experienced users it might be helpful if we had a recent changes options that showed only edit by new editors with less than say 100 edits that could be monitored. Newbie helpers could then welcome, comment, compliment, or otherwise assist the new user. Obviously access to such a recent changes option by those looking for trouble could also be used in ways that would discourage the new user. Perhaps access could be limited to only flagged newbie helpers.

How would we stop Twinkle/Huggle users from using such a feed as a shooting gallery?

[[special:contributions/newbies]] has existed for a while now. Of course it's just newbies in the very technical sense of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Newly_registered_user , which by default (but not en.wiki) is only a temporary condition almost nobody is in, for the sake of throttling vandals.

Nemo

Following up two edits at random resulted in a link to spam posted on de in 2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Istandil and an attempt to promote a product used by women to pee standing up https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Female_urination_device&diff=...

This is not easy; lot of these edits are not good or to be encouraged. It's hard to avoid taking the role of first person shooter.

The coding could be improved though, or an additional option added including edits by users with less than say 100 edits.

Fred

It would probably be easier to code and use "Wikipedia the Game" which had ingame commands such as view, edit, upload, discuss, search, etc which called http pages on Wikipedia than to add game features to wiki software. One could start with any mud coding with an appropriate license.

Fred

I've been playing on a MUD lately, http://www.alteraeon.com/ that has put considerable effort into getting new users started. MUDs, at least text-based ones, also suffer from failure to attract and engage new users.

The first thing about a MUD that is simply not on a wiki is channels. On a MUD there will be a Newbie channel that experienced users monitor. Experienced users are expected to be helpful, offering encouragement and practical help to new users. A channel on a MUD is more or less an IRC channel incorporated into the software. It's real time. Another thing is that a user is logged on, and presumably engaged in the game. There is no need for that on a wiki. Anyway, a post on the newbie channel is seen by all others who are logged in and have activated that channel. This happens on a telnet terminal with a command line for input or a functional equivalent, called a client, a mud client. So something like an in-wiki IRC channel that new users would automatically be logged into along with experienced users might be helpful.

The MUD I reference has both a MUD school where a presumably new user goes through the basic game moves and is instructed in them and, much more interesting and engaging, a complex Newbie zone where the new player faces an increasing complex series of challenges which successfully accomplish learning by doing. The coding on the particular MUD generously rewards every "right" move with "experience", "money", and other goodies. This is all very nanny and I doubt the average highly educated user who is a university professor or professional could accept being put to school in this manner in a compulsory way before being allowed to edit, but it could be available as an option. We could even have a "practice" wiki which was set up in this way as an option. Probably no one would use it though, I suppose, so whatever is done would probably have to be on the main site. It would be a sandbox, but a more active and monitored one, actually a set of practice articles in sandboxes.

With respect to welcoming and assisting new users on the English Wikipedia where there is a bewildering volume of varied activity by new and experienced users it might be helpful if we had a recent changes options that showed only edit by new editors with less than say 100 edits that could be monitored. Newbie helpers could then welcome, comment, compliment, or otherwise assist the new user. Obviously access to such a recent changes option by those looking for trouble could also be used in ways that would discourage the new user. Perhaps access could be limited to only flagged newbie helpers.

Fred Bauder

---

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On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Peter Coombe thewub.wiki@googlemail.com wrote:

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Adventure which is a project very much along these lines. I'm not sure what the current status of that is, but it definitely seems like a good approach for at least some groups of newbies.

There is some neat tech that the E3 team has plans to use, which would also be a good framework for this kind of interactive training: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours

On a less interactive level, we've also got some trainings tailored to different groups of people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Training

We've never really tried systematically pointing newbies to a structured orientation (as opposed to giving them 10 or 20 links to explore without guidance).

-Sage

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:03 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:

With respect to welcoming and assisting new users on the English Wikipedia where there is a bewildering volume of varied activity by new and experienced users it might be helpful if we had a recent changes options that showed only edit by new editors with less than say 100 edits that could be monitored. Newbie helpers could then welcome, comment, compliment, or otherwise assist the new user. Obviously access to such a recent changes option by those looking for trouble could also be used in ways that would discourage the new user. Perhaps access could be limited to only flagged newbie helpers.

These aren't power tools like what vandalfighters have in Huggle or Twinkle, but I would check out the two following feeds of new editor activity, if you want to give this kind of task a try:

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@gmail.com

wrote:

This is pretty cool cool. How hard would it be to hack together something like the curation tool for which I have much love, but for recent changes by newbies instead?

Not radically more difficult than Special:NewPagesFeed, would be my guess. I would think you could actually adapt the Curation Toolbar it uses for this purpose as well.

If anyone's interested in working on it, I'm happy to help; a specialized welcoming interface is something in the E3 backlog of ideas, but which we haven't focused on yet.

On 04/01/13 18:02, Erik Moeller wrote:

I do agree that better mechanisms for dispute resolution, dealing with topic warring, article ownership, and plain old incivility are needed. But I don't believe that those issues are at the heart of the "editor retention problem" as you seem to suggest, but rather, that they tend to occur later in the editor lifecycle, among a subset of editors which in fact already has survived many of the primary factors that deter new editors and are therefore relatively likely to retain. The new editor experience is characterized more by templating and assembly line style enforcement of existing policies than it is by incivility, topic warring, article ownership and incivility.

I'm wondering whether the key findings in Halfaker's recent "rise and decline" paper resonate with you: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

Yes, they do resonate with me. The paper says that established users who use Huggle and similar tools do not follow best practices when they revert the edits of new users. This leads to poor editor retention. I am saying that an expanded arbcom and its delegated officers should reprimand those Huggle users.

I am not saying that the editor retention problem is the kind of thing that the arbcom currently deals with. I think the arbcom is limited in the kinds of problems it can deal with because its mandate and resources are limited.

Existing data like the above supports strongly the notion that well-intentioned, good faith contributors are much more heavily discouraged in 2012 than they were in 2004 or 2005, but this can be explained in significant part with the influx of bad faith contributors that have necessitated increasingly heavy handed ways to control against bad edits (Huggle, Twinkle, AbuseFilter, etc.) -- which catch good faith editors in the crossfire -- as well as increasing expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality edit / page creation.

We need ways to deal with bad faith edits that don't require destruction of the project to achieve their purpose.

For example, requiring phone number verification for new users from developed countries would be less damaging.

When a Huggle user drives away a new good faith user, that new user might not return for decades. You can't reverse it no matter what new policies you introduce, you just have to wait for another person to be born and grow up. It would be less damaging to tell them "sorry, we can't accept any new users from Comcast this year, try again next year!"

Note that the total edit rate has declined from 4.5M in January 2007 to 3.5M per month in October 2012. As a metric of the workload that places on very active users, consider that figure divided by the number of users with more than 100 edits per month: it works out to 950 per very active user per month in January 2007, up to 1078 per very active user per month in October 2012.

So it is hard for me to believe that the total review workload has increased over that period to such an extent that our only option is now to revert both good and bad edits on sight, with no discussion. Presumably the proportion of bad edits has increased, but it should be quicker to deal with simple vandalism than to review a good faith edit and engage with the editor.

But we can always do new user phone number verification if enforcing the revert policy turns out to be too hard, right?

-- Tim Starling

Nikola Smolenski, 08/01/2013 10:30:

On 05/01/13 04:47, Tim Starling wrote:

...

For example, requiring phone number verification for new users from developed countries would be less damaging.

I don't see how is this supposed to help (and I don't think most new users would want to do this; I certainly wouldn't).

Not to say that it would be a good idea, but Google does it already and phone verification is probably less painful than our CAPTCHAs are to non-English users (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5309 ). In general, as far as we know captchas are currently not stopping spammers at all, while effectively stopping many legitimate (less motivated and experienced) users.

Nemo

On 08/01/13 11:35, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

Nikola Smolenski, 08/01/2013 10:30:

...

On 05/01/13 04:47, Tim Starling wrote:

...

For example, requiring phone number verification for new users from developed countries would be less damaging.

I don't see how is this supposed to help (and I don't think most new users would want to do this; I certainly wouldn't).

Not to say that it would be a good idea, but Google does it already and phone verification is probably less painful than our CAPTCHAs are to non-English users (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5309 ).

It's not that it's painful, it's that I don't want various organizations to know my phone number.

In general, as far as we know captchas are currently not stopping spammers at all, while effectively stopping many legitimate (less

Care to elaborate? Do we know how are spammers avoiding captchas (by software or by humans)? How come other websites don't have this problem?

Nikola Smolenski, 08/01/2013 13:10:

...

In general, as far as we know captchas are currently not stopping spammers at all, while effectively stopping many legitimate (less

Care to elaborate? Do we know how are spammers avoiding captchas (by software or by humans)? How come other websites don't have this problem?

Are you kidding? All MediaWiki websites suffer from the uselessness of its captchas. For additional information please refer to the discussions linked from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/CAPTCHA and others on wikitech-l.

Nemo

It's the worst kept secret in the world that you can hire people to decode your captchas -- http://decaptcha.biz/ for example. Better captchas don't work because you are competing against people and if people can't solve the captcha ...

Middle name of Jimmy Wales has worked well for me.

And middle name of Larry Sanger, and nickname of Jimmy Wales.

Fred

On 08/01/13 20:30, Nikola Smolenski wrote:

On 05/01/13 04:47, Tim Starling wrote:

...

For example, requiring phone number verification for new users from developed countries would be less damaging.

I don't see how is this supposed to help (and I don't think most new users would want to do this; I certainly wouldn't).

Phone number verification would dramatically reduce the rate of new user creation. It would especially discourage casual vandalism and casual good-faith contributions (typo fixes, etc.). Combined with disabling anonymous edits, and allowing phone number ranges to be blocked, it should reduce the vandalism rate by at least an order of magnitude.

The case for restricting the use of semi-automated anti-vandal tools would then be much stronger. Since the rate of new user creation would slow from a flood to a trickle, constructive and friendly engagement with new users would seem both more feasible and more essential.

So editor retention would be improved, at the expense of editor recruitment.

I don't know whether the net effect on the editor population would be positive or negative. But my theory is that the people who are discouraged by phone number verification would be less likely to hold a grudge against Wikipedia than the people who have their contributions reverted and nasty messages placed on their talk pages. Thus, editor numbers will rebound after phone number verification is disabled.

The editor retention problem is best solved by enforcing policies which are aimed at ensuring new users feel welcomed. But if enforcement is impossible, then a weaker alternative would be to implement technical measures which will make those policies seem attractive.

-- Tim Starling

On 8 January 2013 23:27, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

I think that the requirements for a wiki (open, welcoming, anyone can edit, eventualism) are always going to be at tension vs the requirements for an encyclopedia (reliable, good sourcing, etc). Right now, en.wikipedia rules are more complex and potentially more strict than nupedia ever was, and we're running on inertia.

I understand the decline is similar in other wikis - that this is not at all just an en:wp problem.

How are the numbers for the other Wikipedias? How are the numbers for the non-Wikipedias?

- .

On 9 January 2013 06:41, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:

David Gerard, 09/01/2013 00:32:

...

I understand the decline is similar in other wikis - that this is not at all just an en:wp problem. How are the numbers for the other Wikipedias? How are the numbers for the non-Wikipedias?

The main pattern, ie a turning point in 2007, is the same in all projects, and almost in all language versions of them: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikiquote/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm (in order of project size/pageviews; graphs don't include recent data, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42318 ) Typically the pattern is the same across all projects in the same language. (Almost?) all Russian projects, for instance, are an exception to decline. This has often made people wonder if the causes are external (Facebook? Facebook is also almost non-existing in Russia, right?).

Right. So anyone in this thread going into detail about en:wp policies is actually not addressing this, and the problem is on a higher level?

- d.

On 09/01/13 10:03, Kim Bruning wrote:

On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 07:45:41AM +0000, David Gerard wrote:

...

Right. So anyone in this thread going into detail about en:wp policies is actually not addressing this, and the problem is on a higher level?

:-/ Back to the drawing board. That actually makes the problem a lot harder!

(does mean we know where to start looking though)

I am not sure that Facebook is the problem. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=wikipedia,facebook does show that Facebook overtook Wikipedia sometime in 2007, but that happened relatively slowly.

Having said that, there have been suggestions to introduce social networking features in Wikipedia. WikiLove is a step in that direction. So, what could be the next step? Befriend users and see their edits and new articles? Like edits and articles?

On 09/01/13 10:03, Kim Bruning wrote:

...

On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 07:45:41AM +0000, David Gerard wrote:

...

Right. So anyone in this thread going into detail about en:wp policies is actually not addressing this, and the problem is on a higher level?

:-/ Back to the drawing board. That actually makes the problem a lot harder!

(does mean we know where to start looking though)

I am not sure that Facebook is the problem. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=wikipedia,facebook does show that Facebook overtook Wikipedia sometime in 2007, but that happened relatively slowly.

Having said that, there have been suggestions to introduce social networking features in Wikipedia. WikiLove is a step in that direction. So, what could be the next step? Befriend users and see their edits and new articles? Like edits and articles?

We could have lists of friends. Although some would actually be enemies lists. 172 continues to edit under several names. If I wanted to spend all my time reversing his point of view edits a friends list with his socks on it would be useful. This nicely illustrates the problem that making the editing atmosphere better for some requires making it punishing for others.

Fred

Hi Andreas/Nemo

Which column are you looking at to give you the growth numbers on those projects?

Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992

Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).

*Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*

On 10 January 2013 16:24, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com

...

wrote:

...

David Gerard, 09/01/2013 00:32:

On 8 January 2013 23:27, Kim Bruningkim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

...

I think that the requirements for a wiki (open, welcoming, anyone can

...

edit, eventualism) are always going to be at tension vs the requirements for

an

...

...

...

encyclopedia (reliable, good sourcing, etc). Right now, en.wikipedia rules are more complex and potentially more strict than nupedia ever was, and we're running on inertia.

I understand the decline is similar in other wikis - that this is not at all just an en:wp problem.

How are the numbers for the other Wikipedias? How are the numbers for the non-Wikipedias?

The main pattern, ie a turning point in 2007, is the same in all

projects,

...

and almost in all language versions of them: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.**htm<

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm%3E

...

http://stats.wikimedia.org/**wiktionary/EN/**PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.*

...

*htm<

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm%3E

...

http://stats.wikimedia.org/**wikiquote/EN/**PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.**

...

htm<

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikiquote/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm%3E

...

http://stats.wikimedia.org/**wikisource/EN/**PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.*

...

*htm<

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm%3E

...

(in order of project size/pageviews; graphs don't include recent data, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.**org/42318<

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42318%3E)

...

Typically the pattern is the same across all projects in the same language. (Almost?) all Russian projects, for instance, are an exception

to

...

decline. This has often made people wonder if the causes are external (Facebook? Facebook is also almost non-existing in Russia, right?).

Nemo

Actually, Nemo, I don't think that is right at all. If you look at the German, Spanish or French Wikipedia, for example, the German and Spanish are totally stable, with no decline at all discernible around 2007, while editor numbers for the French Wikipedia are actually growing:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm

Summaries and charts for all projects are available here:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

These three projects are of a similar age to the English Wikipedia, and they are definitely not following the same editor retention pattern at all.

I don't know the French and Spanish Wikipedias well, but the German Wikipedia also generally seems more scholarly than the English one.

Andreas _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

* Andreas Kolbe wrote:

I am mostly looking at the column for editors making more than 100 edits a month, as that is where the decline in the English Wikipedia has been most pronounced, from 4804 in March 2007 to 3137 in November 2012. It's when core editors leave in droves that you start to worry.

You would have to analyse those edits qualitatively though in order to tell whether this decline is something to worry about. For example, if authors no longer have to fix certain problems because bots are taking care of them now, then fewer edits are nothing to worry about.

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:

Andreas Kolbe, 10/01/2013 17:24:

...

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

The main pattern, ie a turning point in 2007, is the same in all

...

projects, and almost in all language versions of them: [...]

Actually, Nemo, I don't think that is right at all. If you look at the German, Spanish or French Wikipedia, for example, the German and Spanish are totally stable, with no decline at all discernible around 2007, while editor numbers for the French Wikipedia are actually growing:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**TablesWikipediaFR.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**TablesWikipediaDE.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**TablesWikipediaES.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm

I said "a turning point", i.e. a singularity; mainly, from positive to non-positive derivative, whether negative or not. Of course, it's easier to see in a graph than in a table. I don't see French growing: except an outlier in November 2012 for active editors, which is not reflected in the very active editors count, in the last few months it's at the same level as in January-March 2008, 4800-5000 active editors. It's the same in Italian, growth till January-March 2008 and then oscillation/stagnation: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/** TablesWikipediaIT.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaIT.htm Anecdotally in WMIT, we've been repeating "it.wiki has 500 very active editors" for a while, and we've stopped updating this figure a long time ago. :-)

Of course I'm only playing the stats dilettante here.

Here are the French charts: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm Here are the English ones: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm

Compare the third and fourth charts (for editors making more than 5 and more than 100 edits per month respectively). The height of the bars in the French charts is still rising. It's a continuous upward trend. In the English charts, it has been falling since 2007.

Andreas

Andreas Kolbe, 10/01/2013 18:09:

Here are the French charts: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm Here are the English ones: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm

Compare the third and fourth charts (for editors making more than 5 and more than 100 edits per month respectively). The height of the bars in the French charts is still rising. It's a continuous upward trend.

Sorry, I've no idea what you're looking at: I don't see any continuous upward trend, as I said in the previous message. Sure, if you compare the last month of each wiki with the month of en.wiki's highest peak you can prove whatever you want.

Yaroslav M. Blanter, 10/01/2013 18:11:

On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:24:12 +0000, Andreas Kolbe wrote:

...

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:

...

David Gerard, 09/01/2013 00:32:

This has often made people wonder if the causes are external (Facebook? Facebook is also almost non-existing in Russia, right?).

Nemo

No, incorrect. Facebook exists in Russia and is somehow popular, though it is not the most popular social medium.

Thanks for the information! The en.wiki articles are not super-clear about it. Are its competitors less able to (allegedly) convert the web population in a mass of dumbs, or of otherwise draining all their mental energies? :p

Nemo

On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:59:28 +0100, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

Yaroslav M. Blanter, 10/01/2013 18:11:

...

On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:24:12 +0000, Andreas Kolbe wrote:

...

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:

No, incorrect. Facebook exists in Russia and is somehow popular, though it is not the most popular social medium.

Thanks for the information! The en.wiki articles are not super-clear about it. Are its competitors less able to (allegedly) convert the web population in a mass of dumbs, or of otherwise draining all their mental energies? :p

Nemo

In my view, the main competitor, Vkontakte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkontakte) is even better in conversion of their audience into a mass of dumbs. I do not have an account there though, (not that I use my facebook too much).

Cheers Yaroslav

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:

Andreas Kolbe, 10/01/2013 19:21:

...

Open these two pages:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**ChartsWikipediaFR.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**ChartsWikipediaEN.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm

Each has four bar charts with yellow bars. Ignore the top two charts.

Focus

...

on the third and fourth charts with yellow bars.

Random fluctuations aside, the ones for French show a consistent upward trend.

They don't.

Are you willing to concede that they look *markedly* different from the English ones, and don't show a clear downward trend starting in 2007, as the English ones do? :))

Andreas

On 11/01/13 03:58, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

Andreas Kolbe, 10/01/2013 17:24:

...

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

...

The main pattern, ie a turning point in 2007, is the same in all projects, and almost in all language versions of them: [...]

Actually, Nemo, I don't think that is right at all. If you look at the German, Spanish or French Wikipedia, for example, the German and Spanish are totally stable, with no decline at all discernible around 2007, while editor numbers for the French Wikipedia are actually growing:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm

I said "a turning point", i.e. a singularity; mainly, from positive to non-positive derivative, whether negative or not. Of course, it's easier to see in a graph than in a table.

IIRC, there was a large reduction in traffic growth rate in approximatly 2007, presumably due to market saturation. You'd expect a similar market saturation effect in editor population. A decline can't be explained away in that way.

It's the same in Italian, growth till January-March 2008 and then oscillation/stagnation: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaIT.htm

"Stagnation" is another way to say "stability", except that it also implies rot. I don't think we can take it for granted that a wiki will rot if it has a stable editor population.

If the English Wikipedia could achieve a stable editor population, I would be very happy.

-- Tim Starling

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 11:27 PM, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:

I think that the requirements for a wiki (open, welcoming, anyone can edit, eventualism) are always going to be at tension vs the requirements for an encyclopedia (reliable, good sourcing, etc).

Right now, en.wikipedia rules are more complex and potentially more strict than nupedia ever was, and we're running on inertia.

Rules may be strict, but in the things that matter they are ineffective. For the past few days, the media have reported on the Bicholim Conflict hoax – a "Good Article" on a war that never happened, and could never have happened (one of the parties to it, the Maratha Empire, did not even exist at the time).*

That hoax remained listed as a Good Article for more than five years. The Good Article reviewing guideline says,

*Ideally, a reviewer will have access to all of the source material, and sufficient expertise to verify that the article reflects the content of the sources; this ideal is not often attained.* * * In the wake of the Bicholim conflict story, another contributor was blocked the other day by George William Herbert, "upon review of outstanding claims of fabrication of sources and quotes. Damaging the integrity of Wikipedia is not acceptable behavior."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Inciden...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Legolas2186&diff=531...

That editor has written or co-written 95 Good Articles, and 7 Featured Articles, mostly on entertainers like Madonna and Lady Gaga. That included a Featured Article on Madonna, which was then demoted, with lots of material removed, after sourcing concerns were raised about the editor's work. Editors who looked into the concerns say the chap made up sources and put words into Madonna's mouth, making her say things in Wikipedia which she had never said, and still getting his articles approved for GA and FA.

The English Wikipedia needs a wake-up call. It offers a playground to vandals and petty officials, has people arguing interminably about civility and waffling about the need to assume good faith, while encyclopedic core skills are lacking, even in what is supposed to be Wikipedia's best work.

Andreas

*For a write-up and links, see http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/01/09/wikipedias-new-year-begins-with-a-hoax/

Hello,

I agree totally with Tim's assessments of the situation, and it is quite the same on the French WP, and that's why I stopped editing there. Some people like power more than anything else (well, that's not surprising, because it is quite the same IRL), including the growth of the project.

Happy New Year to all,

Yann

2013/1/4 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:

On 03/01/13 22:46, Martijn Hoekstra wrote:

...

Editor retention programmes have some data there. Check wp:wer on en.wiki. how the data for the other projects match up I don't know.

Yes, that page describes the problem in detail. But the suggestions they offer under "how you can help" are along the same lines as policies that have been in place on Wikipedia since 2002 or earlier. It's been tried, it didn't work.

The problem is, some people want to feel powerful more than they want Wikipedia to grow. Or even if they want Wikipedia to grow on a cerebral level, exercising power over another user is immediately pleasurable, and they don't have sufficient impulse control to stop themselves from doing it.

It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake.

There is risk, because the editor population will probably be reduced in the short term, and it's hard to know if it will ever recover. I don't know if there is anyone with the power to save Wikipedia who also has the required courage.

-- Tim Starling

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

Yes there is some data on templating in a research paper somewhere, and some more on a/b template runs. But the solution is not trivial. I have stuck up for a few editors who appear to be children, suggesting that we treat them a little more gently, only to be told that they are in fact trolls, pretending to be children, pretending to create obvious socks...

When I joined Wikipedia I was constantly being surprised (and delighted) by the unwillingness to block, the willingness to unblock, the IAR ethos when something did something obviously good that broke a rule. I get the feeling that many admins still have the same /attitude/ they are just to weary to AGF. UNblock is pretty much always "standard offer or nothing" - even people who say "I see what I did was wrong but.." end up with their talk page access removed, or giving up. This is not about the vandalism only accounts, this is people who do something stupid, and something in good faith, or make a mistake. They may well not be ready to edit for a few years, but we are building up a resentment about Wikipedia that is visible in every comments section of every article about Wikipedia "I tired to edit once and it got reverted". Of course there will always be some who won't engage with discussion, but fundamentally we should be able to engage these people, rather than alienate them.

On 03/01/2013 10:01, Thomas Morton wrote:

It might help; often it is surprising how statistical analysis can help narrow the focus of such efforts. For example; it is taken as a given that incivility drives away new users, but do we have hard statistical evidence to back that up? And if that is a true situation, can we identify specifically what uncivil things are driving the most editors away (rudeness, templating, etc.). Although please lets do it without words like "big data", which makes me squirm :P Tom