[Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

[Yann Forget]

Hi,

Le Monday 13 September 2004 01:24, Erik Moeller a écrit :
> John-
>
> > simple vision: a free encyclopedia where anyone could edit anything.
> > Now, sysops, developers etc are getting more power,
>
> That happened when?
>
> Sysops have no irreversible powers and are accountable to their own peers
> as well as the entire community. On the English Wikipedia, there is a
> ridiculously complex procedure for dealing with obvious problem users,
> which in most cases never amounts to anything. Trolls and morons violate
> policies with impunity on a regular basis. Just check the history of any
> controversial article on Wikipedia.
>
> Developer "powers" were actually recently reduced by creating a new class
> of privileged users trusted by the community, stewards. Developers have
> no privileges when it comes to policy decisions over normal users.
>
> Important policy decisions have been increasingly *democratized* in the
> last few months, and a board was elected in order to replace the previous
> benevolent dictator model. Before that, there even was a time when
> Wikipedia had an Editor in Chief who quite aggressively pursued a singular
> vision of building the project.
>
> So, given that the trend is the exact opposite of what you claim it is, I
> can either deduce that you know nothing about Wikimedia's history, or that
> you are living in a parallel universe superimposed over own where time
> runs in the opposite direction. Which is it?
>
> > anons less trusted,
>
> Anons were *never* trusted, and for good reason. Trust is based on
> experience, and you cannot build experiences with someone you don't know.
> Even so, using technological improvements like templates, people send
> polite messages to even vandals and spammers before they are blocked:
>
>      Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has
>      now been removed. Please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for any other tests
>      you want to do, since testing material in articles will normally
>      be removed quickly. Please see the welcome page if you would like
>      to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.
>
> We have an almost masochistic relationship to abusers, we tolerate them
> until it starts to bleed. For every deletion, there is a debate, and when
> the debate becomes long, that usually means the content isn't deleted (no
> consensus!). We tolerate the crappiest articles you can imagine about the
> most insignificant fictional character in a minor video game franchise. If
> you suggested publicly that as a project with 1,000,000 articles we no
> longer need to allow people to edit who are not even willing to go through
> a 15-second-registration-process, the resulting outcry in the wikisphere
> would cause major floods and earthquakes.

I agree with Erik here.
We have the same problems in the French Wikipedia.
We needed four months to throw out a vandal who never really produced a single 
good and NPOV article. During the summer, we had several bad users who 
managed to create a suspicious atmosphere by insults, allegations, religious 
attacks, etc. And for the last year and half, we have had a troll who, 
althrough he created some good articles, attacked and insulted collectively 
other contributors, especially sysops when they tried to correct the 
situation. He was banned already twice temporarly, including once with a 
direct permission from Jimbo after the community failed to deal with the 
problem. He also used suck-puppets to generate support for him.
He apparently left last month after being blocked again for a day.

> > and there is talk of paying developers.
>
> Yes, we are actually thinking about running a trial to get certain
> features *which users ask for* or *which the Wikimedia Foundation and its
> democratically elected Board of Trustees deem useful* implemented. We
> might use money donated for that purpose to promote the development of
> open source software. We might give people who cannot directly contribute
> to software development the *choice* to contribute to the progress of the
> software by other means - the horror!

Yes, let the trial go, then we can see if it's beneficial or not.

Technically, I feel the system is still not as reliable as it should, although 
the situation improved quite a lot. So maybe that an area where we want to 
put some money.

> Of all the online projects I've ever been involved in, Wikimedia is the
> most paranoid about power and money. I prefer facts to paranoia, and
> progress to stagnancy.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Regards,
Yann
-- 
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux