[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Charles Matthews]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 05:25 AM 3/6/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
>> Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>> > Wikipedia painted itself into this corner.
>> >
>> Indeed, said corner being #5 website in the world according to recent
>> Comscore figures. The onus is still on those who think the system is
>> broken.
>
> Onus? No, I'm seeing masses of highly experienced editors leaving the 
> project, with those replacing them being relatively clueless, as to 
> the original vision, which was itself brilliant but incomplete. The 
> biggest problem with the system is massive inefficiency, with huge 
> amounts of editor labor necessary to make decisions and maintain them, 
> long-term. A secondary problem is that the process does not reliably 
> seek consensus, which is an essential element in the estimation of the 
> degree of neutrality obtained. And the massive inefficiency compounds 
> this problem. You can sail on, believing that it's working just fine. 
> And, I suppose, you can believe that all the admins who have left, or 
> who maintain comments that it's broken, are just, what? Sour grapes?
>
> There is a lot of criticism out there that is obviously ignorant. But 
> that's not all there is.
Yes, there is also stuff that is plainly directed against the project, 
from some of WR to the WSJ's reiteration of the discredited Ortega 
statistics (see the most recent Signpost). It doesn't take too much to 
distinguish legitimate beefs from troll-talk.

Some of us who have been around for a while might think that a smaller, 
better-trained workforce could possibly get on faster with constructive 
work. It seems well-established that the big influx of 2006-7 has now 
sorted itself out into those who have learned the system and are 
supporting it substantially, and those who have moved on (fnding tweets 
more to their attention span, whatever). People do come and go anyway on 
a big site. But we were talking about notability.
>
>>  ("Notability" has always been a broken concept, but the real
>> question is whether the system as a whole is broken, rather than whether
>> individual subjective judgements always agree with the result of
>> deletion processes.)
>
> The system is broken. It's obvious. But almost all of those who 
> recognize this also believe that it's impossible to fix, and so they 
> either leave in despair or they struggle on for a while. I'm unusual. 
> I know it's broken, and I know why, and I know how to fix it. And what 
> I'd suggest would take almost no effort. And it's been opposed at 
> every turn, attempts were made to delete and salt a small piece of the 
> proposal, years ago, a very modest experiment that would have changed 
> no policy or guideline.
I agree with "unusual" - the jury seems still to be out on the rest.
>
> What I'd propose is very simple, but it happens that it's also very 
> difficult to understand without background; I happen to have the 
> background. Few Wikipedia editors do. I could be wrong, but what I've 
> seen is that the *very idea* arouses very strong reactions. Based on 
> ... what? I could say, but it's really not up to me. I can do nothing 
> by myself except set up structures that people can use or not.
>
>>  >I proposed a change to the guideline, a
>> > special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member
>> > society of a notable international society would be notable. If you
>> > know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections.
>> > "Notability is not inherited."
>> Indeed, it isn't.
>
> Not normally. DGG has already addressed the substance. What's 
> happening is that guidelines are being interpreted as fixed rules, 
> instead of as ways of documenting how the community operates. If 
> documentation of actual decision-making is pursued, then 
> inconsistencies can be directly addressed, and can produce more 
> refined -- and more accurate -- guidelines. This build-up of 
> experience, documented, is what's normal with structures like that of 
> Wikipedia, if they are to remain sustainable. That this is actively 
> blocked, that attempts to document actual practice are strongly 
> resisted, is part of the problem. "Instruction creep." But that 
> assumes that the guidelines are fixed rules, not simply documentation 
> that can be read to understand how the community is likely to decide 
> on an issue.
>
>>  Some of the more high-profile associated topics of
>> notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't
>> mean they are all worth a separate article.
>
> Where does the decision get made? There is notable topic, amateur 
> radio. There is an international organization which reocognizes 
> national societies, one per nation. It's the IARU, in the situation 
> being discussed. It intrinsically creates 200 possible subtopics, 
> organized by nation, by the nature of the situation. Each one of these 
> *probably* has reliable sources that would justify a separate article, 
> given a deep enough search, but suppose there were a couple of 
> exceptions. If we start valuing editor time, a major oversight in the 
> development of project structure, we might say that if, in almost all 
> cases, with adequate work, we could find reliable sources for 190 
> articles, we mighg as well treat all these subtopics identically. Is 
> there any harm to the project from this?
>
> But where does the decision get made? Is it possible to make a global 
> decision as I'm suggesting? I.e., in *this* situation, we will give 
> each national member society an article, as a stub, based on "national 
> scope" and "IARU recognition," with the IARU web site as the source. 
> Is it reliable for the purpose of determining that the national member 
> society is notable? What I see here is that those who argue guidelines 
> as an abstraction are saying "No," and they give reasons that are 
> abstract. But those who know the field, uniformly, are saying, "Yes," 
> and they seem to be bringing neutral editors along with them, and 
> closing admins who have nothing to do with the topic. Does, in fact, 
> actual community practice trump the guidelines? What I'm seeing from 
> Mr. Matthews is an argument, that, no, the guidelines should prevail, 
> and we should not change the guidelines to reflect actual practice.
I'm certainly not saying that, and it doesn't represent my view. I 
didn't understand what you were saying so well, at first. Proposals to 
create nearly 200 stubs in an area on the assurance that they are 
probably verifiable somehow falls under a different general heading, the 
creation of a "walled garden" of material where ordinary editors are 
basically told to keep out. Walled gardens are no good when "editors 
assumed to know" are in charge of the content. Some better approach 
needs to be negotiated, allowing at least some informal guidelines to 
emerge. (Example: which scholastic philosophers to include? We tend to 
go by the contents of academic works of reference as at least a sensible 
approach.)

Charles