James, it received a single "support" vote. It was not included in any final strategy documents. I think it could more accurately be described as "something not worthy of the attention of the Wikimedia community".
While I have no doubt that the WMF and the Wikimedia community care about the accuracy of articles, there's no basis to believe that this project would have any effect on said accuracy, or that it will actually identify inaccuracies in the text; it looks for "old" edits that haven't been revised using keywords that may or may not have any relevance to the accuracy of the information. It would require tens of thousands of person-hours (if not more) to analyse the data, and not a single article would be improved. Your proposal requires massive time commitment from reviewers of the data obtained in order to assess whether or not an update should be requested; it doesn't even fix out-of-date information. There is no indication at all that there is any interest on the part of Wikipedians to review data identified in the manner you propose.
Risker/Anne
On 13 February 2015 at 12:58, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Risker wrote:
... relying on suggestions from a six-year-old strategy document when we're about to start a new strategic session, isn't the best course of action.
A strategy proposal which never garnered criticism after so many opportunities would seem to qualify as at least an emergent strategy within the meaning of the slide and narrative at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4Kvj5vCaW0&t=19m30s
Furthermore, the initial limited subtask would be much more difficult to evaluate as a strategy without a working prototype, including by the Bot Approvals Group which demands working code before making a final decision on implementation. Trying to second guess the BAG is presumptuous.
Is it possible that supporting updates to out of date articles would not be part of any successful strategy for the Foundation? I have posted multiple series of statistics to wiki-research-l in the past several months proving that quality issues are transitioning from creating new content to maintaining old content, and will be happy to recapitulate them should anyone suggest that they think it could be.
what exactly is the plan for doing something with this information.
It will be made available to volunteers as a backlog list which community members may or may not choose to work on. The Foundation can't prescribe mandatory content improvement work without putting the safe harbor provisions in jeopardy. Volunteers will be attracted to working on such updates in proportion to the extent they see them as being a worthy use of their editing time.
I have additional detailed plans for testing which I will be happy to discuss with interested co-mentors, because depending on available resources there could be a way to eliminate substantial duplication of effort.
I have updated the synopses at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89416
Best regards, James Salsman
I invite review of this preliminary proposal for a Google Summer of Code project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
If you would like to co-mentor this project, please sign up. I've been a GSoC mentor every year since 2010, and successfully mentored two students in 2012 resulting in work which has become academically relevant, including in languages which I can not read, i.e., http://talknicer.com/turkish-tablet.pdf .) I am most interested in co-mentors at the WMF or Wiki Education Foundation involved with engineering, design, or education.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l