[WikiEN-l] Proposal: improving quality on enwiki

[Oldak Quill]

On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a message I wrote in another mailing list.  I'm forwarding it
> to enwiki-l at Jimbo's suggestion.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com>
> Date: Mar 30, 2007 11:15 AM
> Subject: Re: [Otrs-en-l] [SPAM] info-en vs info-fr
> To: English OTRS discussion list <otrs-en-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> (Comments from another contributor redacted; the discussion was
> related to how inclusionist tendencies tend to lead to large numbers
> of unmaintained articles.)
>
> This was the gist of my recent blogpost on maintainability as the
> proper criterion for inclusion.  I freely admit to being an
> inclusionist -- I would love to see proper articles on all rysorts of
> random topics of even marginal interest -- but I temper that with the
> understanding that having unmaintainable articles harms the
> encyclopedia as a whole, and the recognition that the Wikipedia
> community is not currently capable of maintaining even the articles it
> has, let alone all the articles it could possibly have.
>
> My attitude on such people is that the content should be sequestered
> in a nonpublic place and reviewed upon notice that the individual in
> question has died.  If we never receive notice, then that's probably
> because the person was not interesting enough in life to justify an
> article anyway.  Yes, we might sequester an article for decades under
> this policy, but I'm an eventualist as well.
>
> However, don't mistake my eventualism for being support for the idea
> that we should leave crap articles sitting out there in public view
> (which is a point of view commonly attributed to eventualists).  I am
> firmly opposed to leaving low-quality articles on the public wiki when
> doing so will bring disrepute onto the subjects of those articles or
> bring harm to Wikipedia as a project.  I am therefore very much in
> favor of deletion of any article for which there is no established,
> committed process for maintenance.
>
> The problem with this is that there is no established, committed
> process for maintaining ANY article on Wikipedia.  All article
> maintenance on Wikipedia, and in fact virtually all process on
> Wikipedia, is haphazard.  We are just starting to get comprehensive
> vandalism management using centralized tools, or so I am told.  We
> still have no mechanisms for coordinating even so much as article
> categorization or article sourcing, both of which are crucial aspects
> of article maintenance.
>
> The infrastructure to maintain over a million and a half articles has
> never existed on Wikipedia.  Until it does, every new article is
> another paper cut, bleeding us a bit more each day.
>
> As I see it, the following absolutely must be done:
>
> * All articles must be categorized.  A bot can be used to generate
> lists of uncategorized articles, and the articles found in this way
> presented to volunteer categorizers using a workflow approach.
> Articles not categorized within a reasonable time (say, seven days for
> new articles, and three months for existing articles) will be deleted.
>  My understanding is that there are bots that are capable of making
> "good guesses" at categorization, so this may be less painful than it
> seems.
>
> * A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
> established.  Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the
> maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories
> assigned to that SWG.  (If an article is within the scope of multiple
> SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative
> components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for
> it.)
>
> * Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
> a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or
> formalize an existing informal one).
>
> * SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
> their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
>
> * Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
> A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of
> the article and the need to source it.
>
> This is all entirely orthogonal to vandalism management.
>
> There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of
> organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such.  However, both the
> automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently
> present, and needs to be cultivated.  We need these people to feel
> personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their
> SWG.
>
> This is a response to the scaling problem.  The English Wikipedia's
> community has grown too large to function organically the way it used
> to three years ago.  It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple
> subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem:
> the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more
> likely to remain collegial and productive with one another.  A SWG
> that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this
> provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a
> one-time fix.
>
> Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
>
> Kelly

Regardless if discussion goes any further on this. Would it be a good
idea to set up an project management or OTRS system and trial it with
a couple of active WikiProjects? See if Wikipedians work well with
small broken-down tasking?

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)