I don't know if there is an sense to reply to this mail, because is only a copy of the same boring discussion we had several times. And which can be broken down to the sarcastic sentence. "I the developer know what is good for the world, and everybody has to follow my will''. If he wants to overrule his own community, or there is a consensus there to have these hard coded rules, in a configurable system he can set the flags accordingly. If an other community has more confidence in their community and don't want the hard rules, set the flags to the according values and everybody (or all except one) will be happy.

And you can be shure that there is a broad consensus by the real active people to get the ip's editing allowed. And the second point he always forgets to mention, is  that he make us a lot of work to transfer older projects to this extension. He is not willing to give the right to set pages which have been validated before to the validated state by transferring it to his extension. Even Admins are excluded from doing that. 

Sorry for beeing a little bit sarcastic,but I think i've (we) had this discussion with ThomasV  now 4 or 5 times. And I don't find a way to get a good solution, together with him.  


Greetings



2010/7/1 ThomasV <thomasV1@gmx.de>
Here is my answer to the statements made recently.

* For those who are not familiar with the issue, I am the main
 developer of ProofreadPage, a Mediawiki software extension
 that allows Wikisource users to proofread a page of text by
 comparing it to its scanned source. This extension also manages
 book metadata and citation information, and it imposes a very basic
 processing workflow, where a page must have been checked by two
 different users in order to reach its final state.
 [see here : http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:Page_Status]

* This extension has been introduced four years ago. Since then, more
 than 350000 pages have been proofread with it, and more than 120000
 pages have been double-checked. By now, between 500 and 1000 pages
 are being proofread every day at Wikisource. These figures are
 growing rapidly, and we can reasonably expect that Wikisource will
 become more active than Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders
 in the coming years.

* A few de.ws admins have requested that the ProofreadPage extension
 be modified, in order to allow anonymous users to mark pages as
 "proofread". It is very important to understand that they do not
 request only that : They want any user, anonymous not, to be able to
 set any page to "validated" (quality level 4), no matter if it has
 passed through the "proofread" stage (quality level 3). And this is
 indeed what would happen if IPs were allowed to mark a page as
 "proofread". This would break the "two proofreaders" rule.

* As a matter of fact, these de.ws admins are not opposed to the
 "two proofreaders" rule. However, they want this rule to be
 enforced by themselves, not by software. Indeed, before the
 introduction of ProofreadPage, the "two proofreaders" rule was
 enforced at de.ws by the community, and this rule did not exist at
 other wikisources.

* The "two proofreaders" rule that is built into the software is
 not meant to be robust ; it is very easy to circumvent by using
 sockpuppets. And its goal is not to prevent vandalism, as is
 sometimes stated. No, the goal of this software restriction is to
 ensure that various users, who do not necessarily read the rules,
 or who do not interpret them in the same way, share a common
 interpretation of the quality levels. Its goal is to make their meaning
 unambiguous.

* I do not think that the "two proofreaders" rule can be enforced
 in the long run by a wiki community, without software. This rule
 has been enforced at de.ws for some time, because it was a small
 community, where most users knew themselves, and where rules were
 very strictly observed (my goal is not to spread stereotypes about
 the Germans; they are very proud about their superior quality
 standards). However, such a level of organization and rule
 enforcement cannot be achieved at other wikis, because they are much
 more lax and larger communities, with less rules, with users who do
 not take time to read the rules, with users who sometimes disagree
 with rules, and where most users do not like to play the police. In
 the long run, enforcing that rule will become impossible at de.ws
 too.

* In a lax community, where users do not always read the rules before
 participating, if a rule is not clear or ambiguous, then users start
 to develop their own interpretations of it. In this context, if any
 user is allowed to set any page to quality level 4, no matter if
 that page has been proofread before, then users will start to have
 diverging interpretations of the meaning of q3 and q4. For example,
 some of them will decide to use q3 for proofreading, and q4 for
 formatting. This is not a thought experiment: It already happened at
 fr.ws, with our previous proofreading system based on icons. And you
 cannot blame users for that : it is very intuitive to think that q3
 means "unfinished", when there is another level called "q4".

* In contrast, if software does not let you reach q4 but only q3, no
 matter how well you proofread and format a page, then it does not
 make sense to believe that you are supposed to leave some part of
 the formatting work for later, for the person who will be doing
 q4. The only interpretation that makes sense is that you should do
 as much proofreading and formatting work as you can. And if you
 use a sockpuppet in order to reach q4, then you _know_ that you're
 doing something you're not supposed to do.

* Thus, removing the "two proofreaders" rule from
 ProofreadPage would spell the end of the current proofreading
 workflow. Again, this is not a thought experiment, but something
 that already happened at fr.ws with our previous system. Once a wiki
 decides to enable such an option, we will see users making diverging
 interpretations of the quality levels, and the pages that were
 previously validated by two users will be in the same category as pages
 validated by a single user. This would be a complete lack of respect for
 the validation work that has been accomplished so far.

* For this reason, I will never allow such a change to be made to
 ProofreadPage. I do design and maintain this extension by listening
 to the requests of users, and I do implement most of the features
 they request, or add patches submitted by other users. However, when
 a request is so blatantly contradicting the purpose of the tool, I
 believe that I have the right to refuse it.

* Please note that I am not opposed to IPs, and my goal is not to
 discriminate them. And I would certainly allow IPs to mark pages as
 "proofread", if we could find a way to do this in a way that does
 not hurt the "two proofreaders" rule. I even proposed to allow pages
 status to be modified by a whitelist of static IPs, but my proposal was
 ignored.

* As a matter of fact, there are various other things that anonymous
 users are not allowed to do at the Foundation. One restriction that
 is particularly relevant for Wikisource is the fact that IPs are not
 allowed to upload scans. This implies that they are not allowed to
 start a new proofreading project. Strangely, this intolerable
 discrimination does not seem to hurt anyone at de.ws. If their fight
 is really about the rights of IPs, why don't they complain about
 that?

* More generally, I do not feel comfortable when someone pretends to
 speak for a category of people who do not express themselves. When a
 minority is silent, you can put any words in their mouth. According
 to Michael Joergens, these anonymous users are scared of getting
 registered and of giving away their email addresses, and he is mandated
 to speak for them. But how can we check their existence, how can we
 check how many they are, if they refuse to be identified ?


Finally, several statements have been made in the previous messages,
that are wrong or misleading :

* Firstly, it was written that de.ws _must_ use the ProofreadPage
 extension. This is not true. There are other similar proofreading
 tools that have been developed at de.ws, and these tools are still
 used today. You are free to use or to develop whatever you want.

* Secondly, it is false to claim that there is a consensus at de.ws, in
 favor of allowing IPs to mark pages as "Proofread". The statement
 made in this mailing list, about the existence of such a consensus,
 has been questioned shortly after in the de.wikisource Scriptorium.
 So, if Klaus Graf wants to speak in the name of the de.ws community,
 he should ask them first. Eight months ago I suggested that a vote
 be organized at de.ws, on that question; instead of that, the same
 group of admins held a vote in order to have me desysoped (and they
lost it).

* Thirdly, if the de.wikisource community decides, by vote or by
 consensus, that they want IPs to be allowed to change the quality
 status of pages, they can do this without destroying
 ProofreadPage. They just need to step out of the ProofreadPage
 quality system, and restore their previous system in place of it.
 I am willing to explain how to do this to any technically skilled
 person. Note that I already made the same proposal in bugzilla
 8 months ago.


I apologize for the length of my answer. I wish to thank those who
have had the patience to read this entire post.

Thomas

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