[WikiEN-l] Interview

[Durova]

Your survey is well constructed for a general readership.  Over here at this
list most of us live in the belly of the beast.  So to get to the heart of
the matter, one of the best things Wikipedia could do right now is to adopt
a plagiarism policy, or at least a plagiarism guideline.  What we have now
in that area is at proposal stage, and needs work.  This is doable; it just
needs to be prioritized.

Beyond that, there are several longstanding trouble spots.  Broadly
speaking, these deal with topics that are the subject of ongoing real world
disputes.  Ethnic/nationlist debates form a large part of that, with various
religious, political, and (pseudo)science topics rounding out most of the
rest.  Those areas would be harder to remedy because of the number of
editors involved and the entrenched nature of the disputes.

My own proposal in that area is multifaceted, and would probably be disputed
or rejected by many fellow Wikipedians.  Presenting the analysis in summary
form.

1. In Internet communities generally, 5% of the participants will violate
the rules no matter what they are.  5% will abide by the rules no matter
poorly enforced they are.  The other 90% would prefer to abide by the rules
if the rules are generally enforced, but will also ignore rules if the rules
become meaningless.  The key to managing a community is to sway that 90%.

2. Wikipedia's rules are generally enforced, but pockets of activity need
more than the usual share of administrative attention.  Because these are
long term trouble spots and neither the community at large nor the sysop
community rewards work there, these areas actually get less than their share
of attention.  Administrators who intervene are generally disdained:
perceived on all sides not as 'trying to help' but as 'engaging in drama'.

3. My proposed solution is to assemble task forces of 12 to 20 neutral
administrators, depending on the size of each given dispute, to share the
work of patrolling a problem area.  By engaging in dialog at talk pages,
edit protecting articles as needed, and occasionally handing out short
blocks, a sufficiently large group of uninvolved administrators could
normalize a problem area by convincing the 90% of editors in the middle that
site policies do have meaning and will be enforced.

4. Currently, we do not have enough administrators to implement this
solution.  English Wikipedia has the lowest ratio of administrators to
registered accounts among all Wikipedia's language editions, and that ratio
has been dropping steadily for years.

5. English Wikipedia also has no formal system for training potential
administrators.  We have no 'best practices' guideline for admin coaching,
and training is generally deprecated.  Because the limited coaching that
does occur is often done poorly (geared more toward passing admin candidacy
than toward the actual skills and duties of adminship), coaching itself is
generally not encouraged or respected within the community.  In my view this
is nonsensical: English Wikipedia is the only organization of its size that
actively deprecates training for positions of responsibility.  Our
self-selected body of administrators is composed of people who succeeded in
training themselves.  This demographic skews our consensus discussions on
the subject.

6. At some point (which I hope will be quite soon), it will become apparent
to more of the community that self-training is not sufficient to meet the
site's administrative needs.  At that point, serious training will become a
community priority.  IMO, Wikipedia ought to have about three times as many
administrators as it currently does.  Because we are understaffed, some of
our best volunteers are burning out and quitting.  The key is to achieve
broader awareness and turn this around.  It will take several
months--perhaps a year--for the effects of a good recruitment and training
program to have an impact on the overall size and stress level of the
administrative volunteer pool.

7. As soon as feasible, I would like to run a pilot project with an
administrative task force at a long term problem area.  The key is to
recruit a critical mass of administrator volunteers.  At minimum, this means
twelve people.  Preferably fifteen.  Interested administrators are welcome
to contact me.

-Durova

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:47 PM, dhruv bhalla <dhruvbhalla at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm sorry for causing such a stir. Let me reiterate: The reason for
> conducting the interview is because I would like the opinion of any
> regular contributor/reader, on what he or she feels are the major
> issues ( those on the lines of reliability etc.) facing Wikipedia
> today. As this piece work requires me to address these issues and
> propose logical solutions ( to the best of my ability) I choose to use
> this forum to gain a knowledgeable perspective on how to combat these
> issues. The 'trivial' questions in the interview were only to help me
> establish trends in my analysis.
> As before any help would be appreciated
> Thanks
>
> 2009/3/11 philippe <philippe.wiki at gmail.com>:
> >
> >
> > On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:30 PM, KillerChihuahua wrote:
> >
> >> Unlikely. If he's not English as a primary language, why would he
> >> email
> >> the EN mailing list?
> >
> > 'cuz it's got the most readers?  I'm just guessin' on that....
> >
> >
> > ___________________
> > philippe
> > philippe.wiki at gmail.com
> >
> > [[en:User:Philippe]]
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
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