[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the Third World

[Andrew Gray]

[sorry for earlier blank]

On 07/01/07, Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall.org> wrote:
> Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent
> times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher
> than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution,
> it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in
> this space.
>
> Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in
> cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not
> prominent or noteworthy? See as one example:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against
> censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the
> participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.

Bah. Untagged - no way an organisation of 250 professionals which runs
a six-day film festival is "db-bio", even if all the internal links
are red.

I notice it was marked "using NPWatcher" - has anyone experience of
using this program? I've noticed it a bit recently, and it seems to be
very heavily used for fast automation of tagging, deletion, etc. Which
is fair enough, so long as only one person involved is doing it -
because the speedy deletion process on enwp has two pairs of eyes
involved, there'll in theory be a second person along to read it over
before deletion and decide if the tag is in order or not.

But when both are using this sort of thing... well, I saw one user who
was running a speedy deletion, on average, *every twenty seconds for
an hour* using it. People can't really be giving what they're looking
at any attention at that speed, and wrongful tagging will just carry
over into wrongful (and wasteful) deletion.

Thoughts on how usefully to solve this? Automation to cope with a task
is well and good, but we can't automate out human review where it's
there for a reason.


-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk