Samuel, As a Vandalism reverter on the English Wikipedia, let me inform you that, when a person posts nonsense, EVEN if it is useful, but has a problem, like lacking sources OR, grammatical nonsense. IT still gets reverted, the guy gets a warning, he comes back, revert plus warn again and ultimately, he gets the boot. It happens quite often. I've done it rarely, because the content was disputed, but there are others who do it on a daily basis. Check all automated edits made with Huggle. You'll find plenty of such edits. What Sundar says is more or less the same. My view is that if they refuse to adhere to policies and keep adding errors and DON'T listen to your suggestions, then do ahead with a Warn. If they persist despite a warn. might as well block them.. Regards, Srikanth
On 22 April 2010 20:10, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Sundar and Ravi,
On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 2:00 AM, Ravishankar ravidreams@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Achal and Samuel,
Thank you for your mails.
***What is the board's view on paid editing?***
The foundation doesn't pay people to edit, but some third party groups have staff who contribute to WP as part of their job (say, sharing information about archives or cultural collections), or contractors who help with translation, from time to time. Many more groups fund topic-specific projects which have as one of their outcomes the improvement of wikipedia (from class projects on a topic to academic-group decisions to revise a wikipedia category as part of their review of material in their field to authors or publishers publishing their material in part via wikibooks).
( and the line is not always clear -- the Foundation has accepted grants in the past to support specific topics -- one to support creation of Wikijunior, years ago; and one to set up an award/contest for great illustrations. Does this count as 'paid editing'? we generally take the view that finding ways to recognize great work, encourage new contributors to get involved, reduce barriers to entry, or bring people together for face-to-face meetings, are useful ways to support community growth. )
These sorts of content questions are generally left up to communities to address. There is no official foundation view about whether this is good or not. In my personal opinion, this type of effort has been successful at times and unsuccessful at others in contributing to the world's useful educational material. And again in my personal opinion, contributors should not be blacklisted just because they are contributing while 'at work' -- but they should be expected to follow the same style and conflict-of-interest guidelines as everyone else.
We were scratching our heads for almost 4,5 months before "discovering" that Google was doing this. This is not in anyway transparent.
That is surprising. So for 4.5 months you knew that some people were submitting strange translated articles while ignoring their talk pages, but didn't know why? links to related user pages/contributions would be helpful.
the community dynamics (Regular Wikipedians Vs Google Translators?
I think we set a good standard in the Swahili project for how translation can be useful: as a context that draws new people in to become long-term editors, by lowering the barrier to entry for starting a new article.
Why preferential treatment for Google translators?
There is none that I know of (unless you have a community policy about this).
Earlier, Sundar wrote:
The most important of the issues stem from the pillars of Wikipedia... For Wikipedia, the basic necessity is readable and meaningful content added through a process that doesn't subvert the Wiki way.
Sure. But you can speak to the translators from a position of strength -- if they are not contributing in a positive way, their contributions won't be kept in the project.
- The quality is abysmal. Too mechanical and ungrammatical more than 50%
of
the time. The process is hands-off, the translators don't even read the
page
that they've dumped.
Ok, so they need better translators working on the project. If a page is so ungrammatical as to be no better than a redlink, does it fall under one of your deletion policies?
- The pages are broken with infinite erroneous redlinks and missing
templates
due to an easy-to-fix bug in the kit.
You can always instruct them to suspend the project on Tamil until this is fixed. "we won't be able to accept new articles with the following problems. please fix this bug first."
You, Ravi, Mayooranathan, பரிதிமதி, Karthik, Nat, &c are the project admins -- you don't need any special 'permission' to revert the work of an unhelpful editor. But please bear in mind that these /could/ be productive contributors, and it may be worth mentoring them a bit more rather than asking them to leave.
- The basic premise of the team is 'something's better than nothing'.
It's not.
I am not a deletionist, but even inclusionists will agree that 'something' can be worse than nothing when it is incomprehensible.
- Their process requirement: you can pick subjects, give guidelines, but
we
can't guarantee anything. We don't carry any responsibility to improve
the
articles once dumped and we don't want you to mess with them.
They are in no position to ask you to 'not mess with' an article; why would this issue come up? They may have no responsibility to improve articles, but you likewise have no responsibility to keep them.
I also request the community here and the foundation folks to reflect on
the
policy issues: how can we let someone post articles of no acceptable
level which
they won't edit further? Tomorrow, if a vandal does the same, won't we
block
them?
Vandalism is blocked because the edits themselves are harmful. People who post unwikified nonsense are rarely blocked, but their work is often reverted or blanked.
On top of this, they casually mentioned some sort of agreement or
contract
with the foundation, but decline to give any information regarding that.
Either
they don't get what Wikipedia is or they don't care about it.
That sounds like a 'game of telephone' understanding of the discussions Google has had about how to improve GTT so that it is more useful to Wikipedians, and the successful community collaborations that have happened elsewhere (cf. Swahili Wikipedia). Having met the project manager for GTT, I can say: he *really* does want to make it useful to Wikipedia. That doesn't mean that the people running each subproject care in the same way.
Again: You have no obligation to accept articles that do not meet community standards.
On a positive note, we still have our channel open with them and we're
going to
propose that they approach universities or the Classical Tamil Institute
in
Chennai who undertake such projects employing retired Tamil professors
and
teachers.
This sounds like a great idea.
SJ
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