On Tuesday 15 February 2005 02:08, Mark Williamson wrote: You could fix it very easily if: - You make Wikipedia more attractive for experts, academics, scientists - You make sure no article gets forgotten by encouraging people to concentrate on their own articles, instead of editing here and there in the whole wiki - You allow these people to put their names and biographies in the articles they write - You help these people collect some donations from their readership. Wikimedia Foundation collects some donations for the servers, but it could also give some of it to the editors, too. - You make the articles to have versions, and have a "frozen" (protected) article in the mainspace, so that new contributions (which may be vandalism or whatever) go to an "under construction" version. In our projects, such as http://www.nerdypc.org and http://www.adapedia.org (now being migrated to better software), we are trying to find ways to implement these ideas. You can read some preliminary analysis for our IT wiki at http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Help:Editing_process -- NSK http://portal.wikinerds.org

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:55:55 +0800, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote: Which is a pity, because it means we willfully go against the GNU/FDL. Andre Engels

On Tuesday 15 February 2005 13:33, John Lee wrote: No, it's not. Have you ever wondered why I rarely edit at Wikipedia? it's because I know that nobody will know that an article or paragraph was written by me. On our projects, such as http://www.nerdypc.org , we give credit for every contributed paragraph or section. We even allow our authors to choose what licence they like (but contributing to an existing article means using the same licences). For example, see at http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Zsync : "[...] requests from the server on a second round-trip transmission. This paragraph contributed by Antaeus Feldspar." "[...] but the .zsync attribute file need not be on the same server as the actual file. This paragraph contributed by ssd." (this text is GFDL1.2 and CC-By-SA-2) -- NSK http://portal.wikinerds.org

On Feb 15, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote: In my course of recruiting for wikipedia, this is a statement made by several academics. The nature of wikipedia as a "people's encyclopedia" stops them. Now this is a serious question - people will work for free but not for nothing - and part of what will help wikipedia grow is finding ways of giving people the ability to get "something" for their work, particularly in the writing community, that is the body of editors who make large contributions. Right now we hand out the ability to POV push - which is why we are codependent on poves. Another ability which we are about to hand out is the ability to google bomb by pushing your favorite sites in links. Fights over these issues are among the most personal and stress inducing in wikipedia. It would be better if we could "pay" people in some other form, to induce more contributors of the kind who write good NPOV articles. We have a currency for people who can negotiate compromise - administrator status - but not for people who can create articles. Where I disagree with NSK is that the required inducement is handing out "ownership", simply because the experience of wikibooks - namely that it isn't growing quickly - shows that "credit" is only worth something when it is attached to something else, like money. Handing out ownership stops other editors from working on something, which means that the economics moves back to "what a single editor can produce". At which point he might as well produce for money. Article ownership is the wrong currency to hand out. However, "credit" of other kinds could given, one which did not attach "ownership" to a particular article. Wikipedia should look into ways to recognize its creative contributors, without attaching personal credit or ownership over articles.

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 01:26:55 +1100, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: Less clear than it might be. On a minor page you have to check about 10 edits to see that there are 1 or 2 people who wrote almost everything. On pages with much traffic it's more like checking 50 to find 5 of them. Andre Engels

It would be wonderful and appropriate to list contributors at the bottom of each page. Wikitravel seems to have a nice patch for this, which also lists the latest contributor; I wonder if it would be easy to backport to the trunk of mediawiki. (wondering also if Evan is reading this :) +sj+ On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 15:29:26 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote: --

I strongly agree. -- NSK http://portal.wikinerds.org/canada-flag On Wednesday 16 February 2005 23:40, Mark Williamson wrote: wrote:

Why would John Lott vandalise his own article? Isn't that kind of the opposite of what most celebrities do to their own articles? Anyhow, I think most academics that are somehow repelled by Wikipedia other than because of the basic concept (many of them complain about how chaotic it is) is because they don't want their work to be mixed and mashed with that of others. The way it works in academia in general is John Smith writes "An Introduction To Introductions", with all his expertise and theses and opinions and all the basic information organised /his/ way, and then year or two later Jack Doe decides he could do it better (at least in his POV) and writes "Introductions: An Introductory Reader". They will both have their ups and downs but what John Smith likes best about it is that he has one book that he wrote all by himself that he can brag about and Jack Doe has his own book too and can brag about it unceasingly. If an article is edited by all the top experts in the field, unless there is some other purpose behind it (ie, a more generalised work where each expert contributes from their more specific area of interest and/or expertise), they will not get as much pleasure out of it, and there is a much smaller chance that they will write it. This stems from the basic desire of everybody to be famous, at least a little bit in some way shape or form. There is no Wiki solution to this problem. Rather than us getting over their problems for them, we should stay exactly as we are and wait for them to change, which they probably will at some point (if we paid a couple of well-known academians in every field a little bit to tell everybody how great Wikipedia is and to contribute some, it would go a long way) Mark On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:46:29 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway <minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com> wrote:

On Tuesday 15 February 2005 16:26, David Gerard wrote: This will be possible in the software I will finish later this year, but I won't give details now. As I implement it I will include more info at http://maatworks.wikinerds.org/index.php/NGWP -- NSK http://portal.wikinerds.org

And I thought /I/ was arrogant and self-centered....

On Feb 15, 2005, at 3:49 PM, the Epopt of Boskone wrote: What is is all about is that the dispute resolution process on wikipedia is often unpleasant, particulary when dealing with organized groups of poves. One of the reasons that many people want article ownership is that it is very stressful dealing with cranks and others who have severely misguided views of the world. If people need an example, see CSTAR's trials on Bell's Theorum or Xtar's having to deal with a pove on the Australian Liberal Party. A large part of the problem is that often a knowledgeable person must, at length, explain basic concepts to people who are unwilling to listen - it moves the activity from "editing for lots of people", which is to say a high leverage of a writer's time - to "dealing with nasty ignorant people retail", which is to say a low leverage of a writer's time. A large part of the problem is that the general equation that someone is unpleasant when they are wrong is not a sound assertion from an epistemological stand point, and that numerical superiority of organized groups generates a great deal of hostility very quickly, simply because those with numerical superiority have much less incentive to engage in discussion, but, on the contrary, have every incentive to try and engage in time wasting behavior. I feel that NSK is wrong on article ownership, but I do think he has a point, because it is one made to me by several other people who have considered editing wikipedia, and who use it as a resource, but are not willing to deal with some of the problems that it has currently. There are many pages which are "owned" now by small cabals of editors, because they can revert away anyone who disagrees with them. In the spirit of "no formalized page ownership" this should be addressed. My proposal is tighten the revert rule to be content based, that is three reverts of particular content in a day is the limit, in each direction, and that after that people making further reverts are blocked. Then create categories for RFC and reverting, requiring that someone reverting an article place the article in one of the categories based on the reason for the revert. This isn't that much more work, and will automatically create a tracking system which is better than searching edit summaries and better than relying on RFC. The RFC process as is would remain in place as a way of giving a more detailed explanation of the source of the dispute. I feel the more "automatic" we make the process of "raising a red flag" on an article, the more it will be done rather than edit warring it out. Commitment to an open process of consensus means, I think, that we examine where that process is not yet acceptable to people who are able, energetic and knowledgeable, and who we want as contributors.

On Feb 16, 2005, at 3:31 PM, Delirium wrote: That list is, in fact, part of the problem.

On Feb 16, 2005, at 7:46 PM, Rich Holton wrote: I don't have a large enough sample size, but my experience - which is anecdotal - doesn't seem to confirm this. Very often "active" editing pages are ones that are going very well - because contributors are working with each others edits. Since the person reverting knows both what they are reverting and why, it seems reasonable to ask them to spend a few seconds to put in something like [[Category:Revert Test/Graphitti]] or [[Category:Revert Content Conflict]] as part of doing the reversion, particularly one for [[Category:3RR Limit Reached]]. We already have categories for NPOV disputes and so on, so all this proposal amounts to is: 1. Tightening the number of reverts to reversion by content, not by user/article-day, to three in each direction. 2. Creating categories for reversion. 3. Mandating their use. 4. Publicizing them so that editors interested in helping an article reach consensus and avoid an edit war have a place to look. This removes the incentive to mobocracy, makes the notification system simpler, and halts revert wars in their tracks relatively quickly. Its intent is to reduce the amount of sturm and drang associated with such conflicts.

On Feb 16, 2005, at 7:20 PM, Andre Engels wrote: More people not tied to the original dispute does two things. First, it takes personality conflicts off the table, which are a regrettable part of most edit wars. Second, it reduces the ability of groups to harden into place by getting closer to a statistical sampling of opinion. 2 people self selected to edit an article probably have views which are unusual, that's why they chose to edit the article. Ten or more is much more likely to reflect the broad range. Importantly, this would help to reduce the incentive for each side to bring in friends and continue the revert war. If a larger group of wikipedians can't come to a consensus, then it clearly is time for a more formal RFC to be written. But again, the more people not party to the original dispute, the more likely that RFC is to focus on the actual issues. As it is both the process of escalating an edit conflict, and the rules of editing conflicts, do not promote good resolution without a good deal of "drama processing". It is this drama processing that causes a disproportionate share of "wikistress", and creates a disincentive for knowledgeable people to contribute. I can easily see other proposals designed to meet the same problems, but I do feel this issue needs to be addressed and current procedures refined in light of the experience so far.