[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in theroom

[Peter Southwood]

Remember that is always the other person who is wrong headed and obsessed...
Cheeers,
Peter
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2013 4:07 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in 
theroom


> Also, vandalism had always been a red herring, kind of like the terrorism
> that justifies the TSA security theater and NBA surveillance or the Red
> Scare. It's a wrong-headed obsession that weakens community.
> On Nov 22, 2013 2:06 PM, "Steven Walling" <steven.walling at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:37 AM, WereSpielChequers <
>> werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Typo correction and vandalism reversion are certainly both entries to
>> > editing, and it isn't just anti-vandalism where the opportunities have
>> > declined in recent years. Typos are getting harder to find, especially 
>> > in
>> > stable widely read articles. Yes you can find plenty of typos by 
>> > checking
>> > new pages and recent changes, but I doubt our  5 edits a month editors
>> are
>> > going to internal maintenance pages like that. I suspect they are 
>> > readers
>> > who fix things they come across. It would be interesting to survey a
>> sample
>> > of them I suspect we'd find many who are reading Wikipedia just as much
>> as
>> > they used to, but if they only edit when they spot a mistake then of
>> course
>> > they will now be editing less frequently. And of course none of that is
>> > actually bad, any more than is the loss of large numbers of vandals who
>> > used to get into the 5 edits a month band for at least the month in 
>> > which
>> > they did their spree and were blocked..
>> >
>> > The difficulty of getting precise measurements of "community health"
>> makes
>> > it a fascinating topic, and with many known factors altering edit 
>> > levels
>> in
>> > sometimes poorly understood ways we need to be wary of
>> oversimplifications.
>> > No-one really knows what would have happened if the many edit filters
>> > installed in the last four years had instead been coded as anti 
>> > vandalism
>> > bots, clearly our edit count would now be much higher, but whether it
>> would
>> > currently be higher or lower than in 2009 when the edit filters were
>> > introduced is unknown. Nor should we fret that we shifted so much of 
>> > our
>> > anti-vandalism work from very quick reversion to not accepting edits.
>> > However it isn't sensible to  benchmark community health against past
>> edit
>> > levels, we should really be comparing community activity against
>> readership
>> > levels. If we do that there is a disconnect between our readership 
>> > which
>> > for years has grown faster than the internet and our community which is
>> > broadly stable. To some extent this can be considered a success for
>> Vector
>> > and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one
>> > optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels 
>> > we
>> > always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead 
>> > of
>> > Vector. My suspicion is also that the rise of the mobile device,
>> especially
>> > amongst the young, is turning us from an interactive medium into more 
>> > of
>> a
>> > broadcast one. It is also likely to be contributing to the greying of 
>> > the
>> > pedia.
>> >
>> > I am trying to list the major known and probable causes of changes of 
>> > the
>> > fall in the raw editing levels in a page on
>> > wiki<
>> >
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F
>> > >,
>> > feedback welcome.
>> >
>>
>> Holy smokes this thread has gotten off topic, but I'll bite. ;)
>>
>> Making articles that need spelling and grammar fixes easily available to
>> new editors is precisely what we're doing with GettingStarted, our 
>> software
>> system for introducing newly-registered people to editing. (Docs at
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GettingStarted and
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians). We're
>> currently
>> getting thousands of new people to make their first typo fix a month on
>> English Wikipedia, and we're moving to other Wikipedias soon.
>>
>> In English Wikipedia it's quite easy for us to do so, since there's a 
>> large
>> category of articles needing copyediting. In other Wikipedias, it's not
>> easy, because there is no such category. If you want to help us help
>> newbies, the best thing you could do is create a copyediting category on
>> your Wikipedia and link it to the appropriate Wikidata item
>> (either Q8235695 or Q9137504).
>>
>> As a side point: when we examine first-time editors contributions, these
>> days it's rare to find someone start out by correcting vandalism, 
>> probably
>> because now bots and users of tools like Huggle or Twinkle catch it all 
>> so
>> fast. It's so small a number that when we examine samples of new
>> contributors in our qualitative research,[1][2] we just put it in the 
>> Other
>> category of edit types.
>>
>> Steven
>>
>> 1.
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/Qualitative_analysis
>> 2.
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/OB6/Contribution_quality_and_type
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