Today I decided to analyze in more detail to what extent articles across
Wikipedias remain protected for long periods of time. The report is at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005
(To developers: The script I used is 'logprot.pl' in my home directory.
It may be desirable to make this available as a special page, if someone
can figure out a way to make the query scale.)
It shows all pages in all language Wikipedias that have been protected
for more than 14 days. Note that, by the time you look at it, some of
the pages in it may have been unprotected already.
The Wikipedias with the most such protected pages are (article rank in
parentheses):
German - 253 (2)
Japanese - 165 (4)
English - 138 (1)
Italian - 19 (5)
French - 15 (3)
Spanish - 13 (10)
This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used
excessively on the German Wikipedia. It is quite striking that many,
many controversial articles have been protected for months. For example,
articles about veganism, sex, democracy, abortion, astrology, Karlheinz
Deschner (famous atheist writer), Silvio Gesell (controversial
economist) and his Freiwirtschaft theory, Gorleben (controversial
nuclear waste disposal site), and Egon Krenz (East German politician)
have been protected since July. Articles about child sexual abuse and
pedophilia have been protected since April 2005 and March 2005,
respectively. Notably, in the child sexual abuse case, the article was
also cut down from 54,000 characters to 2,000 before being protected,
making it effectively useless -- a rather drastic measure to deal with
ongoing controversies.
The longest protected articles appear to be related to German student
corporations. The record holder is [[de:Schmiss]], which has been
protected since January after a neutrality dispute.
Perhaps ironically, even the article about Wikipedia itself has been
protected since August 25.
Note that the local policy on protection, at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seitensperrung and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administratoren , is not unusal
and recommends only short protections except for very high exposure
pages like the Main Page, or unimportant pages like redirects which are
frequently vandalized. This raises the question why no bold admin has
unprotected these articles yet.
I cannot say anything about the protection patterns on the Japanese
Wikipedia, which is the only one which stands out besides English and
German. The long term protections on the English Wikipedia appear to be
mostly accidental. When someone notices that a page has been protected
for very long, it is generally quickly unprotected.
Across languages, possibly with the exception of Japanese, the German
Wikipedia is alone in the pattern of locking down controversial articles
for months. Protected articles also seem to not be tagged as such, so
that visitors do not see a reason for the protection on the page (a
visible marker might also encourage sysops to unprotect the page).
One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
beyond the articles concerned.
I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing
complexity:
* limit protections by policy
* add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in
the article namespace
* add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with.
Best,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Today I decided to analyze in more detail to what extent articles across
> Wikipedias remain protected for long periods of time. The report is at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Longest_page_protections%2C_September_2005
>
> (To developers: The script I used is 'logprot.pl' in my home directory.
> It may be desirable to make this available as a special page, if someone
> can figure out a way to make the query scale.)
>
> It shows all pages in all language Wikipedias that have been protected
> for more than 14 days. Note that, by the time you look at it, some of
> the pages in it may have been unprotected already.
>
> The Wikipedias with the most such protected pages are (article rank in
> parentheses):
>
> German - 253 (2)
> Japanese - 165 (4)
> English - 138 (1)
> Italian - 19 (5)
> French - 15 (3)
> Spanish - 13 (10)
>
> This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used
> excessively on the German Wikipedia. It is quite striking that many,
> many controversial articles have been protected for months. For example,
> articles about veganism, sex, democracy, abortion, astrology, Karlheinz
> Deschner (famous atheist writer), Silvio Gesell (controversial
> economist) and his Freiwirtschaft theory, Gorleben (controversial
> nuclear waste disposal site), and Egon Krenz (East German politician)
> have been protected since July. Articles about child sexual abuse and
> pedophilia have been protected since April 2005 and March 2005,
> respectively. Notably, in the child sexual abuse case, the article was
> also cut down from 54,000 characters to 2,000 before being protected,
> making it effectively useless -- a rather drastic measure to deal with
> ongoing controversies.
>
> The longest protected articles appear to be related to German student
> corporations. The record holder is [[de:Schmiss]], which has been
> protected since January after a neutrality dispute.
>
> Perhaps ironically, even the article about Wikipedia itself has been
> protected since August 25.
>
> Note that the local policy on protection, at
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Seitensperrung and
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administratoren , is not unusal
> and recommends only short protections except for very high exposure
> pages like the Main Page, or unimportant pages like redirects which are
> frequently vandalized. This raises the question why no bold admin has
> unprotected these articles yet.
>
> I cannot say anything about the protection patterns on the Japanese
> Wikipedia, which is the only one which stands out besides English and
> German. The long term protections on the English Wikipedia appear to be
> mostly accidental. When someone notices that a page has been protected
> for very long, it is generally quickly unprotected.
>
> Across languages, possibly with the exception of Japanese, the German
> Wikipedia is alone in the pattern of locking down controversial articles
> for months. Protected articles also seem to not be tagged as such, so
> that visitors do not see a reason for the protection on the page (a
> visible marker might also encourage sysops to unprotect the page).
>
> One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
> relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
> information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
> they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
> beyond the articles concerned.
>
> I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing
> complexity:
>
> * limit protections by policy
> * add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in
> the article namespace
> * add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
>
> I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with.
>
> Best,
>
> Erik
Interesting...
One point which does not seem factual to me in your report, but possibly
only an interpretation is
"> One immediate effect, besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more
> relevant in the power structure, as they are the only ones who can add
> information to articles after protection. Instead of being janitors,
> they become editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions
> beyond the articles concerned."
This is only true if there is no social norm forbidding a sysop to edit
a protected page. At least, on the english and french wikipedia, I do
think the rule of no-edit on a protected page exist. Maybe not on all
projects ? Can you from your data gather such an information ? I mean,
are there situations when a long-protected article actually grow and
evolve during the protection ?
Ant
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:53:56 +0200
> From: Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia page protection report
>
>[...]
>
> This is only true if there is no social norm forbidding a sysop to edit
> a protected page. At least, on the english and french wikipedia, I do
> think the rule of no-edit on a protected page exist.
As an example of a minor edit that was allowed, during the recent
brouhaha over Pat Robertson's suggestion that Hugo Chávez be
assassinated, the English "Pat Robertson" article was protected, but a
sysop there implemented my request that a link to the corresponding
Esperanto article be added to the set of interwikis.
Haruo
Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> This confirms my intuition that long term page protection is used
> excessively on the German Wikipedia. [...] One immediate effect,
> besides stagnation, is that sysops become far more relevant in the
> power structure, as they are the only ones who can add information to
> articles after protection. Instead of being janitors, they become
> editors. This, I believe, must have social repercussions beyond the
> articles concerned.
Given these concerns, which certainly could be taken as a criticism of
the German Wikipedia's methodology, I'm surprised you didn't post this
to wikide-l.
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I can see three immediate ways to address the issue, by increasing
> complexity:
>
> * limit protections by policy
> * add an automated or template-based visible marker to protections in
> the article namespace
> * add an "expiry" feature for page protection similar to blocks
>
> I am merely reporting this issue and will leave it to others to deal with.
Perhaps using Salvatore Ingala's validation feature would help. After
all, he did design it with the aim of reducing page protection.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-July/030898.html
-- Tim Starling
Here are some facts you should know about American Sign Language to help
with the discussion. It is a signed language (a great deal of research has
been done to determine this) and does not have a commonly used writing
system
Approximate number of speakers: 500,00
o Location(s) spoken: American Sign Language is the dominant sign
language in the United States, English-speaking Canada and parts of Mexico.
It is also used in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Côte d'Ivoire,
Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, Democratic Republic
of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar,
Zimbabwe.
o Closely related languages, if any: French Sign Language
o External links to organizations that promote the language:
National Association of the Deaf www.nad.org ,
Canadian Association of the Deaf, http://www.cad.ca
American Society for Deaf Children www.deafchildren.org
Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf http://www.ccsdeaf.com/
American Sign Language Teachers of America
www.rit.edu/~asltawww ,
Center for Accessible Technology in Sign, www.aasdweb.com/CATS
.
You should also know:
The average deaf adult reads at about the 4th grade level
http://gri.gallaudet.edu/Literacy/#reading . Thus much of the
internet and encyclopedias in general are inaccessible to these
users due to the level of reading required. A survey of the
readability of internet sites showed popular sites such a the NY
Times and Nickelodeon were above 4th grade level (
www.readability.info). The article on cats from Wikipedia receives
the following scores
Readability report for The cat in wikipedia.doc
readability grades:
Kincaid: 11.0
ARI: 12.2
Coleman-Liau: 13.4
Flesch Index: 52.5
Fog Index: 14.4
Lix: 49.1 = school year 9
SMOG-Grading: 12.8
As you can see these are all well above the 4th grade level.
Although simple.wikipedia.org strives to provide a version of English that
is easier to read it does not totally meet the needs of deaf users. The
readability of the “cat” article in simple wikipedia hovers at or slightly
above the 4th grade level on 2 measures of readability and is above 7th
grade on 3 measures of readability.
Readability report for A cat in simple wikipedia.doc
readability grades:
Kincaid: 4.6
ARI: 3.9
Coleman-Liau: 7.7
Flesch Index: 85.4
Fog Index: 7.4
Lix: 27.0 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 7.7
To make information accessible to all deaf users sign language video is
necessary that accompanies the English text. An ASL-English bilingual
Wikipedia would provide deaf users with a tool for not only acquiring
general world knowledge via an accessible medium (sign language video) but
also a powerful educational tool for enhancing literacy by being able to
compare the ASL video and English text.
An ASL-English Wikipedia will also provide deaf students with a national
project that all students can contribute to while producing their everyday
reports for their classes in Social Studies, Science, etc… It will be a
great motivator for students to produce a product that is actually of use
to others and a great lesson for them to learn that their labor can help
others. It will be a source of pride in the deaf community. A deaf fly
fisherman in Montana may produce a signed article/video on trout and it
will be in a medium (sign language video) that is comprehensible by the
500,000 users of American Sign Language.
I am writing to request the establishment of an American Sign
Language-English bilingual Wikipedia. This will contain the written word
versions of articles (Englsih) and American Sign Language versions via
video. We have a dozen users ready to start building this powerful resource
for deaf users and will be recruiting more.
Harley Hamilton
>Hi Ffarr,
>It's nice to see you've subscribed to Wikipedia-l.
>Although it's a little bit off-topic, I'd like to ask you what you
>think of the Traditional-Simplified conversion system in its current
>form.
>Obviously, it's not perfect, but do you find it satisfactory? Or do
>you think it has a long way to go still before it can be accepted?
>Mark
hello Mark:
Although Traditional-Simplified conversion system is not perfect and we often have to try to solve some problems, I think it satisfacory and will gradually become better and better. I think it is because that although Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapore etc. are different in some vocabularies and writing system, they are all the same language and people using them can communicate easily with each other. （I have heard Someone suggesting Mandarin -Cantonese conversion, I think it is too hard for two different languages with a lot of vocabulary and even some grammer differences .)
ffaarr
On 9/12/05, Pawe? Dembowski <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> > Well, we still wouldn't split the two, because it's still lunacy to split.
>
> Why don't we just have a Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia then instead of
> separate ones for each dialect?
Oh, but we do have that! We have BOTH a Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia (sh:)
AND separate Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ones. Which I think is a
HIGHLY undesirable situation.
For this reason I have locked the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia half a year
ago, but the pressure to unlock it got too strong, so I unlocked it
again. But only under protest. I think we should either have sh: or
sr+bs+hr:, but not both.
By the way, there is an issue with the Chinese languages there too -
if we get a separate Kantonese Wikipedia, we should not keep a Chinese
one alongside. Rather, we should make that into a Mandarin Wikipedia,
or even better, move each article to whatever language it has been
written in.
Andre Engels
-----
The two situations are different at all. The ZH Wikipedia is now in fact Mandarin Wikipedia. No articles in Kantonese, Minnan, Hakka , Wuu etc. are written there. If someone wrote in zh wikipedia an article by the language of Test-zh-yue, it will soon be deleted or translated into Chinese to make users of zh wikipedia understand it.
ffaarr