[Wikisource-l] [Wikitech-l] Wikisource bugs

Thu Jul 1 22:08:45 UTC 2010

I don't know if there is an sense to reply to this mail, because is only a
copy of the same boring discussion we had several times. And which can be
broken down to the sarcastic sentence. "I the developer know what is good
for the world, and everybody has to follow my will''. If he wants to
overrule his own community, or there is a consensus there to have these hard
coded rules, in a configurable system he can set the flags accordingly. If
an other community has more confidence in their community and don't want the
hard rules, set the flags to the according values and everybody (or all
except one) will be happy.

And you can be shure that there is a broad consensus by the real active
people to get the ip's editing allowed. And the second point he always
forgets to mention, is  that he make us a lot of work to transfer older
projects to this extension. He is not willing to give the right to set pages
which have been validated before to the validated state by transferring it
to his extension. Even Admins are excluded from doing that.

Sorry for beeing a little bit sarcastic,but I think i've (we) had this
discussion with ThomasV  now 4 or 5 times. And I don't find a way to get a
good solution, together with him.

Greetings

2010/7/1 ThomasV <thomasV1 at gmx.de>

> Here is my answer to the statements made recently.
>
> * For those who are not familiar with the issue, I am the main
>  developer of ProofreadPage, a Mediawiki software extension
>  that allows Wikisource users to proofread a page of text by
>  comparing it to its scanned source. This extension also manages
>  book metadata and citation information, and it imposes a very basic
>  processing workflow, where a page must have been checked by two
>  different users in order to reach its final state.
>  [see here : http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:Page_Status]
>
> * This extension has been introduced four years ago. Since then, more
>  than 350000 pages have been proofread with it, and more than 120000
>  pages have been double-checked. By now, between 500 and 1000 pages
>  are being proofread every day at Wikisource. These figures are
>  growing rapidly, and we can reasonably expect that Wikisource will
>  become more active than Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders
>  in the coming years.
>
> * A few de.ws admins have requested that the ProofreadPage extension
>  be modified, in order to allow anonymous users to mark pages as
>  "proofread". It is very important to understand that they do not
>  request only that : They want any user, anonymous not, to be able to
>  set any page to "validated" (quality level 4), no matter if it has
>  passed through the "proofread" stage (quality level 3). And this is
>  indeed what would happen if IPs were allowed to mark a page as
>  "proofread". This would break the "two proofreaders" rule.
>
> * As a matter of fact, these de.ws admins are not opposed to the
>  "two proofreaders" rule. However, they want this rule to be
>  enforced by themselves, not by software. Indeed, before the
>  introduction of ProofreadPage, the "two proofreaders" rule was
>  enforced at de.ws by the community, and this rule did not exist at
>  other wikisources.
>
> * The "two proofreaders" rule that is built into the software is
>  not meant to be robust ; it is very easy to circumvent by using
>  sockpuppets. And its goal is not to prevent vandalism, as is
>  sometimes stated. No, the goal of this software restriction is to
>  ensure that various users, who do not necessarily read the rules,
>  or who do not interpret them in the same way, share a common
>  interpretation of the quality levels. Its goal is to make their meaning
>  unambiguous.
>
> * I do not think that the "two proofreaders" rule can be enforced
>  in the long run by a wiki community, without software. This rule
>  has been enforced at de.ws for some time, because it was a small
>  community, where most users knew themselves, and where rules were
>  very strictly observed (my goal is not to spread stereotypes about
>  the Germans; they are very proud about their superior quality
>  standards). However, such a level of organization and rule
>  enforcement cannot be achieved at other wikis, because they are much
>  more lax and larger communities, with less rules, with users who do
>  not take time to read the rules, with users who sometimes disagree
>  with rules, and where most users do not like to play the police. In
>  the long run, enforcing that rule will become impossible at de.ws
>  too.
>
> * In a lax community, where users do not always read the rules before
>  participating, if a rule is not clear or ambiguous, then users start
>  to develop their own interpretations of it. In this context, if any
>  user is allowed to set any page to quality level 4, no matter if
>  that page has been proofread before, then users will start to have
>  diverging interpretations of the meaning of q3 and q4. For example,
>  some of them will decide to use q3 for proofreading, and q4 for
>  formatting. This is not a thought experiment: It already happened at
>  fr.ws, with our previous proofreading system based on icons. And you
>  cannot blame users for that : it is very intuitive to think that q3
>  means "unfinished", when there is another level called "q4".
>
> * In contrast, if software does not let you reach q4 but only q3, no
>  matter how well you proofread and format a page, then it does not
>  make sense to believe that you are supposed to leave some part of
>  the formatting work for later, for the person who will be doing
>  q4. The only interpretation that makes sense is that you should do
>  as much proofreading and formatting work as you can. And if you
>  use a sockpuppet in order to reach q4, then you _know_ that you're
>  doing something you're not supposed to do.
>
> * Thus, removing the "two proofreaders" rule from
>  ProofreadPage would spell the end of the current proofreading
>  workflow. Again, this is not a thought experiment, but something
>  that already happened at fr.ws with our previous system. Once a wiki
>  decides to enable such an option, we will see users making diverging
>  interpretations of the quality levels, and the pages that were
>  previously validated by two users will be in the same category as pages
>  validated by a single user. This would be a complete lack of respect for
>  the validation work that has been accomplished so far.
>
> * For this reason, I will never allow such a change to be made to
>  ProofreadPage. I do design and maintain this extension by listening
>  to the requests of users, and I do implement most of the features
>  they request, or add patches submitted by other users. However, when
>  a request is so blatantly contradicting the purpose of the tool, I
>  believe that I have the right to refuse it.
>
> * Please note that I am not opposed to IPs, and my goal is not to
>  discriminate them. And I would certainly allow IPs to mark pages as
>  "proofread", if we could find a way to do this in a way that does
>  not hurt the "two proofreaders" rule. I even proposed to allow pages
>  status to be modified by a whitelist of static IPs, but my proposal was
>  ignored.
>
> * As a matter of fact, there are various other things that anonymous
>  users are not allowed to do at the Foundation. One restriction that
>  is particularly relevant for Wikisource is the fact that IPs are not
>  allowed to upload scans. This implies that they are not allowed to
>  start a new proofreading project. Strangely, this intolerable
>  discrimination does not seem to hurt anyone at de.ws. If their fight
>  is really about the rights of IPs, why don't they complain about
>  that?
>
> * More generally, I do not feel comfortable when someone pretends to
>  speak for a category of people who do not express themselves. When a
>  minority is silent, you can put any words in their mouth. According
>  to Michael Joergens, these anonymous users are scared of getting
>  registered and of giving away their email addresses, and he is mandated
>  to speak for them. But how can we check their existence, how can we
>  check how many they are, if they refuse to be identified ?
>
>
> Finally, several statements have been made in the previous messages,
> that are wrong or misleading :
>
> * Firstly, it was written that de.ws _must_ use the ProofreadPage
>  extension. This is not true. There are other similar proofreading
>  tools that have been developed at de.ws, and these tools are still
>  used today. You are free to use or to develop whatever you want.
>
> * Secondly, it is false to claim that there is a consensus at de.ws, in
>  favor of allowing IPs to mark pages as "Proofread". The statement
>  made in this mailing list, about the existence of such a consensus,
>  has been questioned shortly after in the de.wikisource Scriptorium.
>  So, if Klaus Graf wants to speak in the name of the de.ws community,
>  he should ask them first. Eight months ago I suggested that a vote
>  be organized at de.ws, on that question; instead of that, the same
>  group of admins held a vote in order to have me desysoped (and they
> lost it).
>
> * Thirdly, if the de.wikisource community decides, by vote or by
>  consensus, that they want IPs to be allowed to change the quality
>  status of pages, they can do this without destroying
>  ProofreadPage. They just need to step out of the ProofreadPage
>  quality system, and restore their previous system in place of it.
>  I am willing to explain how to do this to any technically skilled
>  person. Note that I already made the same proposal in bugzilla
>  8 months ago.
>
>
> I apologize for the length of my answer. I wish to thank those who
> have had the patience to read this entire post.
>
> Thomas
>
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