This month: April 2007
Current First Monday
cooperation
Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia
Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia
has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits,
contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by
5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order,
the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million
articles in the English–language Wikipedia follow certain patterns.
This paper demonstrates the accretion of edits to an article is
described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail
of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. There is a
crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which
validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.
Also this month!
wikipedia globe
Visualizing the Overlap between the 100 Most Visited Pages on
Wikipedia for September 2006 to January 2007
This paper compares the monthly lists of the 100 most visited
Wikipedia pages for the period of September 2006 to January 2007.
searchCrystal is used to visualize the overlap between the five
monthly Top 100 lists to show which pages are highly visited in all
five months; which pages in four of the five months and so on. It is
shown that almost 40 percent of a month's top 100 pages are visited in
all five months, whereas 25 percent are highly visited only in a
single month.
--
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Konkani Wikipedia (under incubation) needs your help!
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/kok
The change has to be cultural. If there is a fact about a prime minister of
Senegal, it obviously came from somewhere, unless the author made it up. Where
is that somewhere? People have to learn to cite their sources, and not just
add information.
Perhaps it would be good to start off with a policy that all new information
about BLPs should be sourced. Then we can begin looking things up to find
where the unsourced materials come from.
As for high importance and low participation, yes--this is hard work. Let's
face it, most of the low-hanging fruit is gone. Now is the time to roll up our
sleeves and get to work on making this the most reliable source on the net,
not just the biggest.
Danny
In a message dated 4/29/2007 11:46:03 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com writes:
On 4/27/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Now, yes, we obviously can find sources for articles on all the prime
> ministers of Senegal. That's not the issue. The issue is that there
> are very few editors working in this area - often not enough to
> handle a wave of PRODs on their articles. It's an area of high
> importance to the project and low participation. To add a rule that
> allows for deletion in this area makes it far too easy to overwhelm
> these vital areas with deletions and gut our coverage with no
> attention to whether or not the articles are actually erroneous.
I share concerns with Phil here, a form of systemic bias I think. If (an
estimated 16,000?) articles are marked for deletion at the same time, yes we
we will probably end up with a several hundred impeccably referenced
articles about Foo-Idol contestants, state senators, professional sports
people, porn stars, even webcartoonists... all of whose biographies would
otherwise be in poorer shape.
That's all groovy, but not at the price of total loss of biographical
coverage outside the English-speaking world, even for a few weeks.
Realistically it will probably be much longer than that, with a limited
number of people who would have the time and energy help facilitate the
reconstruction.
And a limited number of admins willing to act as a liaison between the
deleted content and the editors who care to improve it.
And a limited number of people who know where to find Senegal on a map or
care what goes on there.
And a limited amount of time before these people quit the project in
disgust.
> BLPs and sourcing are a problem, but they need a far more subtle
> solution than this.
Userfy? Perhaps move to a designated area of project space specifically not
indexed by Google? I've got some more ideas if this doesn't sound too
outlandish yet.
Charlotte
************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
At 06:01 AM 4/29/2007, David Gerard wrote:
>'''Adolf Hitler''' is the Chancellor of Germany[1]. He is noted[2] for
>his work on the moral fibre of German society[3] and stimulating the
>economy[4], notably through the Autobahn construction programme[5].
>Some have criticised aspects of his work[removed due to BLP policy].
And on the talk page, there is an endless
discussion on whether he should be properly
styled "Chancellor of Germany" or "Chancellor of
the German Empire" or "The Führer of the German Empire" or what.
Chris
At 04:07 AM 4/29/2007, Todd Allen wrote:
>I don't generally see such things as worth arguing over. If someone
>-really- wants a citation for that, or that the Earth's atmosphere is
>mainly nitrogen and oxygen, or that Einstein was a physicist, you can
>find one in thirty seconds. If something is really as obvious as you
>think it is, citation is trivially easy.
The problem is that you can find a citation for the opposite in 30
seconds, too.
The goal should not be to have lots of citations, but good ones.
Chris
On 29 Apr 2007 at 22:24, "John Lee" <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> If the article is about a white supremacist organisation, it seems pretty
> dumb not to link to their website. [[WP:NPOV]] should take precedence,
> because we aren't supposed to endorse any particular point of view. Of
> course, [[WP:IAR]] may apply (IIRC we don't make proper links to very NSFW
> sites like Goatse or the Al-Qaeda beheading videos, but provide the URLs for
> people to copy and paste if they really want to see them), but it's all on a
> case-by-case basis. Slapping a one-size-fits-all policy on this to cover all
> cases is retarded.
Actually, our article on [[Goatse.cx]] does link to the site -- not
at its original address (which is no longer functional), but at a
mirror site that contains the same content.
It seems that quite often, in the course of debates like this, when
somebody cites some example of a site that Wikipedia chooses not to
directly link to, it turns out that they are mistaken and we do in
fact link to it at some place where it makes sense to do so. This
only underscores the point that flat bans on any sort of links do not
reflect actual consensus of the editors.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Andrew Gray wrote:
> I'm not claiming I know Brion's mind, but it is worth emphasising that
> the situation as it stands does not require any deliberate favouritism
> to Wikia... just a common-sense decision to solve a problem now
> without a long and picky process of patching the code and then
> manually deciding which interwikis were good and which were bad.
The interwiki table in MediaWiki already includes an "iw_local" field
that indicates whether an interwiki link should be considered "local"
or "not local." It is therefore easy to modify the code so that "not
local" interwiki links get nofollow. No "long and picky process" is
needed. This is a simple policy decision, not a situation where
"changing this would be lots of work."
Peter Jacobi wrote:
> Actually, the InterWiki map is pile of trash links:
That's probably the result of the ad hoc way in which the map was
compiled over time, combined with the relative difficulty of taking
out interwiki entries once they're in. If you remove an entry from
the interwiki map, all of the pages which use it will then have
broken links that look like bad links to nonexistent namespaces. For
this reason, the path of least resistance is to retain interwiki
entries even if they're not very important. However, this shouldn't
be a problem as long as editors don't use those entries to create a
bunch of actual links. Applying a nofollow to non-local interwiki
links would make it even less of a problem.
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On 29 Apr 2007 at 13:42:38 +0100, Guy Chapman aka JzG
<guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
> There are some editors who have been so viciously attacked that any
> link to these sites, however innocuous the individual page, feels like
> a mortal insult. What's on these sites that justifies that pain?
That sounds like a similar mindset to the one that has produced
politically-correct speech codes on university campuses; it's the
idea that avoiding hurting the feelings of the most sensitive people
is more important than allowing the vigorous exercise of free speech.
One thing I've always prided myself about Wikipedia was that it was
unafraid to confront its critics head-on [Apply directly to the
forehead...]. Rather than cower in fear of anybody who's attacking
us, or cultishly try to shield the eyes of the faithful from anything
that might disrupt the Wikipedian Worldview (even the Ayn Rand cult
is known for trying to suppress heretical views, as when they urged
their adherents not to read anything by Nathaniel and Barbara Branden
once they were excommunicated), we've normally taken a position that
there is much to be gained and little to be lost by being aware of
everything being said about us -- from intelligent, thoughtful
criticism to intemperate, ridiculous attacks, and everything in
between. We can learn from the constructive criticism, rebut the
misguided critics, choose to ignore the utterly ridiculous, but in
any case, it's a bad idea to try to forcibly suppress any of them; it
just makes it seem like we've got something to hide or fear.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
I was being "unnecessarily inflammatory" according to Steve Bennett
for saying that some people have a problem with people linking to
sites they don't like. A couple of others have already referred to
the big WP:BADSITES debate, including the edit warring, threats,
accusations of WP:POINT, and so on that attended the addition and
removal of links to sites used to illustrate why sometimes linking to
such sites makes sense. Now, yet another conflict has broken out
along those lines.
This week, Wikipedia Signpost has an article about the latest
developments in the Daniel Brandt flap:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-04-
23/Brandt_unblock
The original version, by Michael Snow, included a link to Brandt's
Wikipedia Watch site, which was relevant to the article because it
was in fact being discussed there.
Michaelas10 then removed the link, using "Attack site" as his edit
summary.
Then, SqueakBox reinstated it, saying that [[WP:BADSITES]] is not
policy.
Musical Linguist then reverted that, and there was one more round of
edit warring by these last two users, before it settled to its
current state of not having the link.
Musical Linguist also left a warning message threatening to block
SqueakBox, which he deleted from his talk page.
Some of the commentary referred to "enforcing the MONGO ArbCom
decision", and it's a perfect example of why I consider that
decision, at least the part of it that imposed a ban on linking to
"attack sites", was a bad idea.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/