On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> 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. 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-) -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 03/01/13 17:38, Tim Starling wrote: 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(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: 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(a)googlemail.com> wrote: 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 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. Can we make use of big microdata for future projects?

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: 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... -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 4 January 2013 00:01, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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: 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: 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

On 21 January 2013 01:23, Kim Bruning <kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote: 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(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

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(a)eunet.rs> wrote: 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: 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: 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 &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; 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. . -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Martijn Hoekstra &lt;martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 1/4/13 5:51 PM, George Herbert wrote: 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: 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: 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: 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" &lt;kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl&gt; wrote: provide proven 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.

On 4 January 2013 15:29, Nathan &lt;nawrich(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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: 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 &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: 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) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: "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. -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

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_tab… On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

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. [Improving editor clipped] [clipped for now > More disruptive technical solutions could include:] 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 &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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.

On 4 January 2013 13:39, Fred Bauder &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; wrote: 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

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

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Peter Coombe &lt;thewub.wiki(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: 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 &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; wrote: 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: -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&contri… shows newbie edits of all sorts -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard which shows the positive, negative, and just plain confused comments by new editors who have at least clicked the edit button once. This one in particular needs attention from thoughtful, experienced contributors. Steven

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Martijn Hoekstra &lt;martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com 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: 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. 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: 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: It's not that it's painful, it's that I don't want various organizations to know my phone number. 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: 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

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: 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 &lt;kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl&gt; wrote: 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) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt; 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? - d.

On 09/01/13 10:03, Kim Bruning wrote: 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 &lt;jayen466(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

* Andreas Kolbe wrote: 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. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: 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: 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: 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: 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) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: 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: 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. "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 &lt;kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl&gt; wrote: 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/Incide… http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Legolas2186&diff=53… 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 &lt;tstarling(a)wikimedia.org&gt;rg>:

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: