[Note: The post that I'm replying to didn't appear on <wikipedia-l>. Thus I copy it all, except for the technical aspects.]
Erik Moeller wrote:
One key problem with a wiki encyclopaedia is that there's no quality control whatsoever. An article may have been vandalized 5 seconds ago, or be grossly non-NPOV etc. As we get more and more articles, this problem becomes more urgent.
Fortunately, the solution is rather simple. Articles can be certified by contributors to be high quality. But who is allowed to certify articles? The system works by allowing groups of people to form certification teams. Anyone can submit a new team to be created, and anyone can apply to join an existing team and certify articles in its name. Users can then decide to view only article revisions certified by members of selected teams.
So I could decide in my user preferences: Certification: Approved Teams Team Nupedia Team Wiki-Fiction Team Wiki-Maths
Then there would have to be a way to display certified article revisions. This could be accomplished by having a "Certified Mode", showing *only* articles that have received certs, with the most recently certified revision shown. Somewhat weaker, where an article has been certified, a link "There is a version of this article certified by Team X" could be placed above the article, showing the certified revision when clicked (or a text "This article has been certified by .." if the current revision is the certified one). This could be the default view, making users aware of the cert system.
Each team could have its own quality standards, policies, and subject preferences. I suggest that the creation of new teams would have to be approved by the Wikipedia cabal to avoid "Team Trolls". New team members would either be voted on or approved by team members that have a certain status flag ("can_approve_newcomers"). Teams could get their own namespace as well.
You seem to be using the word "cabal" here in a sense that is neither derogatory nor ironic. I find that highly disturbing.
A decision would have to be made as to which teams to include in the default view, i.e. the one that anonymous and newly registered users get. In the short term such decisions may be made by the cabal, in the long term I would prefer voting.
If newcomers see only what is approved by a list of certification teams, then Wikipedia will no longer be a wiki. There will be a wiki underneath, which you can get to by registering and then setting your preferences, but that wiki would be dead without an influx of newcomers.
[technical aspects cut]
Results:
If this works as intended, it should solve the quality problem and allow users to browse Wikipedia as a high quality content only encyclopaedia. The more teams you would admit to your personal filter, the more content you would see, but quality standards of individual teams might not be up to par. By distributing the job of quality approval on several team leaders, we can get competition of quality standards and social methods, which is probably a good thing and reduces social problems.
Potential problems:
If too many people use highly customized views, caching will get harder. I don't see this as too big a problem as a) most people typically don't customize views, b) article retrieval is already very fast with or without caching.
Too many teams may have undesired effects, such as teams deliberately inserting POV articles to certify them. This is not a problem with the team principle per se but with the way teams are approved and moderated. Generally, teams should have a clear NPOV commitment and respect Wikipedia policy, otherwise they should be deleted.
Comments on this would be appreciated. This is something I probably won't have time to implement fully, but I will gladly help with any/all efforts. I consider it very necessary for Wikipedia in the long term.
-- Toby
You seem to be using the word "cabal" here in a sense that is neither derogatory nor ironic. I find that highly disturbing.
You may find it disturbing, but the truth is that there are people like Jimbo who can make high level decisions, and there are sysops that have more power than ordinary users. Many of these decisions already happen in places that most people don't know about (e.g. the mailing list). Glossing over the truth doesn't make it go away: there is a Wikipedia cabal.
I have already suggested a voting scheme that would democratize the decision processes by the inevitable administration. Aside from extreme opinions like "voting doesn't work", I see few arguments against that. We need to talk openly about this kind of stuff, or what you find disturbing will turn into a nightmare eventually.
A decision would have to be made as to which teams to include in the default view, i.e. the one that anonymous and newly registered users get. In the short term such decisions may be made by the cabal, in the long term I would prefer voting.
If newcomers see only what is approved by a list of certification teams, then Wikipedia will no longer be a wiki. There will be a wiki underneath, which you can get to by registering and then setting your preferences, but that wiki would be dead without an influx of newcomers.
You misunderstand me. I am absolutely in favor of creating and keeping a site that is immediately accessible to the newcomer, where the newbie quickly notices that WP is editable and joins the process. I love wikis! My idea centers around the facts that - there will always be many people who just read and who will never be contributors, - even for contributors, it is sometimes desirable to quickly find trustworthy information, - some contributors would like there to be some distinction between the work they have invested much time in and the vandalism of a bored Internet hooligan.
So what I am suggesting is an alternative viewing mode that would *never* be the default but optional. It would allow me to browse a Wikipedia where the article about Mozart *can* not just have been replaced by an image from goatse.cx. Instead, I would view the last certified version of that article, which hopefully would be brilliant prose.
Instead of just telling people to use Britannica if they want trustworthy information, we should substitute this part of Britannica -- quality control -- as well. That doesn't mean we have to give up any part of the massively collaborative project that WP is becoming. As a matter of fact, it would hopefully attract all those skeptics that are afraid that something like the above happens to their sacro-sanct articles -- it could still happen, but they could find peace of mind in the fact that the vandalized version would never be certified.
Last but not least, we should not forget that WP is intended to be a useful tool, not just for those who like to write, but for those who like to read, too. Be it interested adults or curious children, rich or poor, we want Wikipedia to be accessible. We may want to distribute it on CD- ROMs and on paper. Then how on Earth are the schoolchildren in India going to wade through megabytes of Middle Earth mythology and stubs, if not if we supply them with at least the option to filter articles according to criteria developed collaboratively by various teams, working together to find the sparkling gems among the ocean we are creating?
"Being a wiki" doesn't mean that we shouldn't extend the original wiki functionality. Had we stayed with that, Wikipedia would have never become that big. We would still be using CamelCase.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
You seem to be using the word "cabal" here in a sense that is neither derogatory nor ironic. I find that highly disturbing.
You may find it disturbing, but the truth is that there are people like Jimbo who can make high level decisions, and there are sysops that have more power than ordinary users. Many of these decisions already happen in places that most people don't know about (e.g. the mailing list). Glossing over the truth doesn't make it go away: there is a Wikipedia cabal.
If you're going to take this realist position towards the cabal, then you should use the word in a derogatory way (assuming that you don't want to disturb me, that is, I presume that in reality you don't care if you disturb me). For example: Jimbo can make high level decisions, so in order to avoid a cabal we should create a nonprofit foundation with an elected board of directors that Jimbo could sit on. Or: Sysops have more power than ordinary users, so to avoid a cabal we should turn ordinary users into sysops automatically after they've made several edits over several months. In this case: To avoid a cabal, we should allow anybody to create a certification team; you just shouldn't expect me to pay any attention to the certifications of Team Troll, only to Team Cabal (an ironically named team ^_^).
I have already suggested a voting scheme that would democratize the decision processes by the inevitable administration. Aside from extreme opinions like "voting doesn't work", I see few arguments against that. We need to talk openly about this kind of stuff, or what you find disturbing will turn into a nightmare eventually.
"voting doesn't work" is hardly an extreme position; it's been the opinion of the vast majority of humankind throughout the vast majority of human history. That's really not much of an argument one way or another. (You also seem to be conflating voting with democracy, which is wrong.) My own position on democratic decision making matters is that we rarely need to make any official decision, but that we should vote when decisions *must* be made (if there isn't a clear consensus that obviates that need). For example: We shouldn't need to officially certify certification teams. OTOH: We will have to vote (if we can't come to a consensus) on the issue of whether to have certification teams in the first place, since your proposal asks for software changes that recognise them, and the software must be decided on.
A decision would have to be made as to which teams to include in the default view, i.e. the one that anonymous and newly registered users get.
If newcomers see only what is approved by a list of certification teams, then Wikipedia will no longer be a wiki.
You misunderstand me.
[...]
So what I am suggesting is an alternative viewing mode that would *never* be the default but optional.
Then I did misunderstand you. In the paragraph that I was responding to, you seemed to be saying that the default view might be restricted to certified articles. *That* would ruin the wiki nature. If the default view is to always show the most recent edit, then I have no objection to this matter; it's still a wiki.
In summary, I don't see why you think this is *necessary*, but it'd be nice to be able to refer to certified versions if I want to get a specific trusted group's opinion on something. I can't imagine every surfing Wikipedia with a restricted view, but I can certainly imagine checking out the certified versions. I just hope that participating in this is always *optional*, never *default* (at the main Wikipedia site).
-- Toby
Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu writes:
In summary, I don't see why you think this is *necessary*, but it'd be nice to be able to refer to certified versions if I want to get a specific trusted group's opinion on something. I can't imagine every surfing Wikipedia with a restricted view, but I can certainly imagine checking out the certified versions. I just hope that participating in this is always *optional*, never *default* (at the main Wikipedia site).
I was also thinking about ways of establishing a sort of quality control for the future. Random article, an overfull recentchanges, pages needing attention and search for short articles may not ever suffice for quality control.
Why not put a little rating system (which could be turned on or off in user settings) below each article? four checkboxes: - major improvements needed (pure stub or really bad article...) - minor improvents needed (some information missing, bad spelling or style...) - fine article - excellent article
People looking for articles to work on could consult a function which lists articles with bad ratings People looking for excellent articles could call a opposite function.
This would serve as a future, easier to handle equivalent of "pages needing attention" and "excellent articles" (without necessarily giving these pages up)
If we do rating, let's do it the wiki way ;-)
greetings, elian
I wrote in last part:
In summary, I don't see why you think this is *necessary*, but it'd be nice to be able to refer to certified versions if I want to get a specific trusted group's opinion on something. I can't imagine every surfing Wikipedia with a restricted view, but I can certainly imagine checking out the certified versions. I just hope that participating in this is always *optional*, never *default* (at the main Wikipedia site).
The middle line should begin "I can't imagine ever surfing Wikipedia". That's "ever", not "every".
-- Toby
On 30 Oct 2002 erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
You seem to be using the word "cabal" here in a sense that is neither derogatory nor ironic. I find that highly disturbing.
You may find it disturbing, but the truth is that there are people like Jimbo who can make high level decisions, and there are sysops that have more power than ordinary users. Many of these decisions already happen in places that most people don't know about (e.g. the mailing list). Glossing over the truth doesn't make it go away: there is a Wikipedia cabal.
TINC.
Cabal implies secrecy, what we have here is a benevolent dictatorship.
Imran
On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 16:33, erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
You seem to be using the word "cabal" here in a sense that is neither derogatory nor ironic. I find that highly disturbing.
You may find it disturbing, but the truth is that there are people like Jimbo who can make high level decisions, and there are sysops that have more power than ordinary users. Many of these decisions already happen in places that most people don't know about (e.g. the mailing list). Glossing over the truth doesn't make it go away: there is a Wikipedia cabal.
*clunk clunk clunk* [1]
-tc
[1] (sound of head banging against wall; do I really need to unearth "How to Destroy Wikipedia"?)
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