At 07:31 PM 3/6/2010, David Gerard wrote:
>On 7 March 2010 00:00, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd(a)lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
>
> > Onus? No, I'm seeing masses of highly experienced editors leaving the
> > project, with those replacing them being relatively clueless, as to
> > the original vision, which was itself brilliant but incomplete.
>
>
>You aren't allowing for the typical length of intense participation in
>*any* online environment typically being 18-24 months (MMORPGs, etc),
>and that the stated reason may not be the reason.
Indeed. Or it might be the reason, or be related to the reason.
>(Protip: someone who gets blocked as much as you do should consider
>the possibility there are things they fundamentally don't understand
>about the environment.)
Well, certainly that's a possiblity. The reverse is also a
possibility, and Wikipedia process, basically, can't figure out the
difference. It's not like I've never seen this before. Time will tell.
At 01:10 PM 3/6/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>I agree that something driven by reader choice would be good, but
>still with editorial guidance.
With a print encyclopedia, there is a publisher who is in charge.
However, the publisher is dependent upon the buyers of encyclopedias,
who are generally either readers or involved with readers and serving
readers more directly.
The publisher then manages the editors, according to the standards it
develops, either to please the readers, or to please the founders and
investors (who may have independent motives, for better or for worse.)
The editors review and edit contributions by writers, to make them
conform to the criteria set by the publisher. Good editors encourage
writers and, at the same time, contain what they do within
established boundaries. Sometimes, I believe, writers are called
"editors," particularly if it's a writer coordinating any
synthesizing content from a number of writers, but I'm sure DGG can
contribute more and better detail. Then, if this is the case, what
I'm calling editors may be called "managing editors."
Wikipedia mashed it all together, resulting in the predictable:
massive confusion of roles, and the classic cats-and-dogs struggle
between writers and editors, in the worst form. Classic publishing
structure was designed to moderate and mediate this, for efficiency.
Good writers are hard to find! So too, really good editors.
The Wikipedia model was innovative, in a way, but did not adequately
consider efficiency. That seemed to be fine when new editors were
arriving in droves. In the long run, the lack of efficient process
will kill the project, if something doesn't change.
At 11:39 AM 3/6/2010, David Goodman wrote:
>We will never solve the problem of structuring--different
>encyclopedias at various times have done it quite opposite.
That's a non sequitur. The solved the problem. Differently.
> (Some
>French encyclopedias have even consisted of 5 or 6 very long volume
>length articles, divided in an elaborate scheme to a number of
>subsections. Recall that the print Brittanica for many years was
>divided into two separate parts, one with long articles, one with
>short ones--and with many subjects having a different article in each
>section.
I have that encyclopedia, it was brilliant. The next step was
hypertext. Wikipedia didn't adopt a layered hypetext model, but a
flat model, which then does not allow a notability hierarchy, only an
all-or-nothing decision, more or less. Either a separate article or
inclusion as a section in an article (or item in a list) or no
inclusion at all.
Part of this was a decision not to allow subpages. Using a subpage
structure would allow a top-level page on a topic that would require
high notability and stable and broad consensus, with the notability
level being enough to justify the attention that it takes to gain
high consensus when there is controversy, in particular. Then the
top-level page would refer to subpages on details and related topic
as best classified. If we began to understand notability as not
absolute, but relative, and use such a page structure, notability
decisions would be *classifications,* not absolute, as such. If it's
determined that there is a certain minimum standard for an article to
exist at all, (basically, WP:V), then the argument becomes, not
Keep/Delete for anything that can satisfy the policy, but what level
of notability and classification is best *for the reader*.
The present Wikipedia structure, to this reader, is a mess. Sometimes
I go to an article and it's just right, but more often there is
either too little detail or too much. Various revert wars, in topics
where there is either controversy or some faction or other wants the
project to be A Certain WAy, have removed much of what used to be of
high utility in topics I know. I read Robert Cleese the other way. I
love Mr. Cleese. And the article made me want to throw up. It's not
something specific, it is the indiscriminate mixture of truly notable
information wtih boring *verifiable* detail, assuming it's verifiable.
With a subpage structure, there would be a top level article on Mr.
Cleese. (Actually, it might not be fully top, there might be a
Comedians article above it, or something like that, or maybe
Biographies/Comedians.... etc. The Comedians page might be a general
history of Comedians, types of comedians, etc, based on sources, etc.
On the Cleese page would be an overview of his life and the most
notable aspects of it, like you'd find in an ordinary biographical
encyclopedia. And then there would be, as appropriate, subpages to
cover the "boring detail," which may, in fact, be of interest to someone.
>In an electronic encyclopedia using structured information, and
>sufficiently elaborate metadata and frameworks, to provide the
>different frameworks, the reader would be able to convert back and
>forth between separated and combined formats, just like an electronic
>map can display one or more layers .
Yeah, and subpages actually make this easy with any browser. I'm not
sure that "combined formats" are needed, but that's a software issue.
Collapse boxes are another approach that can be used instead of
subpages. And, suppose that this or some idea is a good one. How in
the world would a decision be made? I see that the simplest decisions
can take such horrifically complicated process that people have
mostly given up.
>The problem is not structure.
DGG has not understood my references to structure. It's about
decision-making process, which others have called "governance." But
how the project is presented is a *kind* of structure, a different
kind than what I'm talking about, and there is an inter-relation.
> The problem is that people take having a
>separate article as an indicator of importance, and will continue to
>do so. Readers have expectations, and we write for them, not
>ourselves, so we need to conform to what they expect of an
>encyclopedia format.
The expectation was inappropriate, setting that up was an error, that
predictably created high inefficiency, as the boundary is constantly
debated. We have piles of articles that do not match reader's
expectations of "importance," and missing articles that do, largely
because readers vary and have different needs and expectations. "The
sum of human knowledge" creates expectations that are seriously at
variance with actual practice.
>But another problem is content: in an open edited encyclopedia with no
>enforceable editorial guidelines, experience shows that the content of
>individual items in long articles will tend to shorten, and combining
>into large articles loses information. When there are short articles,
>people tend to want to make them longer, and they look for and add
>information--information sometimes in unencyclopedic detail.
Right. Give them a place to put "unencyclopedic detail." Don't
prohibit it, harness it. There are good reasons for sticking to WP:V,
and allowing linking to external sites that present speculation,
controversy, etc., etc., in some cases from the lowest permitted
layer on Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia should be the "sum" as in
"summary," i.e., precis, but for it to be neutral, it must be quite
complete, and it can resolve the contributions by linking to what it
cannot contain. To a student researching a topic, this would return
Wikipedia articles to what they used to often be -- in controversial
topics: links to the primary sources or "sides" of a controversy.
Often this would not be appropriate for an "encyclopedia article," in
itself. The top layer. But "summary" should include links to Further
Reading, particularly to a set of such links that would allow a
relatively complete understanding of the topic, in whatever detail is
desired by the reader. The project should facilitate the acquisition
of knowledge, as fully as possible, but much of this would be
indirect, by pointing to outside sources where the information
doesn't meet WP:V with sufficient strength.
>We are spending far too much time debating over structure of
>individual articles--it would be much better to have fixed conventions
>for different types of articles, and everyone write to them.
Bingo. And if people don't like the convention, there would be a
place to debate that. If there is a disconnet with a higher-level
decision and a lower-level one (I.e., at an article), then this
should be *resolved*. With whatever level of involvement of the
community as is necessary to actually resolve it instead of simply
deciding that one side is right and the other side is wrong and if
the other side keeps arguing, ban 'em. Without ever going through the
process of finding consensus, which isn't necessarily easy. But it's
necessary, or the project gradually becomes warped away from neutrality.
>Deliberately taking a field I do not work in, we could for example
>decide that all the athletic teams of a college will be grouped in one
>article separate from the college, regardless of importance and
>regardless of how how long or short the resulting article is.
That's right. Make class decisions, document them. Then if there are
exceptions, *document them.* Allow "instruction creep!" But without
turning the "instructions" into fixed rules, rather they should be
documentation of consensus, and consensus can change. And make the
change possible. And how to do that *efficiently* is my major focus
and concern, and has been for almost thirty years.
>Or we
>could decide that for some sports, such as football, we would always
>make a separate article if there were a varsity team.
The separate article would have a section in the overall one,
covering the football team in summary style. Standard.
> Either way,
>people would know where to write the material. (I am not advocating
>for doing either one of them, except to say that either one would be
>simpler to deal with than a mixture, and after their first experience
>with the encyclopedia, people would know where to look.
Sure. The guideline pages would themselves be hypertext; that can be
done in WP space. The only space where subpages don't work is
mainspace, which results in some weird stuff. For example, Talk:OS/2
thinks that it's a subpage of Talk:OS. It would have been better to
allow subpages in mainspace, for defined use, and use a special
character or escape character for a page name with a slash in it.
There is a MediaWiki option to allow subpages in mainspace, but I
don't know that there is a fix for the slash problem.
>according to reader choice.
Readers? Since when do they have a say? If you are a SPA (which
usually means some kind of expert on the topic, even if "only"
amateur), you are definitely second class. Being only a reader, who
will listen to you?
There would be a way to actually empower readers, but don't hold your
breath for the "community" to approve of it. The "community" means
the community of registered editors, and especially of
administrators, in practice, and, being invested in their own
contributions and positions on content, this community doesn't
necessarily have the same goals or values as readers. (In some cases,
the active editors understand the issues better than the ordinary
readers, but that's not always so reliable that it produces better
content, in terms of fundamental policy, it depends!)
On 7 March 2010 00:00, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd(a)lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> Onus? No, I'm seeing masses of highly experienced editors leaving the
> project, with those replacing them being relatively clueless, as to
> the original vision, which was itself brilliant but incomplete.
You aren't allowing for the typical length of intense participation in
*any* online environment typically being 18-24 months (MMORPGs, etc),
and that the stated reason may not be the reason.
(Protip: someone who gets blocked as much as you do should consider
the possibility there are things they fundamentally don't understand
about the environment.)
- d.
At 09:04 AM 3/6/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>Structuring of content is an interesting question. Sometimes small
>stubs are better than a list, as it is easier to link to separate
>articles than to items in a list, especially if there is no real
>unifying structure for the list. Sometimes it takes a while to work
>out what list, or summary article, something should be part of, but if
>done well, that can work well.
As a process junkie, my concern is how the decision gets made. When
there is an article covering the *class* of articles, and national
society members of a notable international society provides such an
example, then a list can be used either within that article or
separately. Then the question arises as whether available sourced
detail about each society should go in the list or in stubs (with
stubs becoming more extensive articles where justified by the
existence of sources.) That's a decision on which no general
guideline could be set, I believe, at least not at this point. One of
the ways of creating "guidelines" is to link to examples of
decisions, which can then point out inconsistencies, and sometimes
these inconsistencies represent truly different cases (i.e., they
aren't really inconsistent, because the conditions are different) or
represent a need for attention to one or the other examples. Creating
better guidelines like this could actually result in cleaner content.
But not by making guidelines controlling, simply by making them
reflect actual practice, which might, transiently, actually cite
contradictory practices.
When actual practice conflicts with a guideline, if the actual
practice is cited in the guideline as an exception, it then can
attract wider review. Is this good? I think so! Maybe the actual
practice is what's defective and what will fix it is changing the
actual decisions, not demanding that the guideline reflect the ideal.
>But sometimes separate articles is the way to go. Even if the
>individual articles are unlikely to be much more than a GA-level
>article at best, the separate articles approach has several
>advantages, even if some content gets duplicated across several
>articles.
Yes. The radio amateur stubs all say more or less the same thing in
the lede, boilerplate. But that's short. They have the logo of the
society in a template. The articles are mostly brief and attractive.
There are two lists, the list of national members of the IARU, in the
IARU article, and a List of amateur radio organizations. The latter
is a far more problematic case, and attention will turn to it and the
articles listed there. The "deletionist" -- no aspersions intended --
focused on the national organizations, where the strongest case can
be made. If this editor had succeeded there, there then would have
been a pile of AfDs very likely to be successful. I have not
expressed an opinion on the pile of local clubs shown in the overall
list, but I'm guessing that consensus there will be to merge most of
the individual articles back to the list, once the national
organization issue is out of the way, which it largely is. There will
be, I expect, if I'm not banned in short order, a DRV on the single
deleted national organization, and I expect it's likely to be
successful at undeletion. Or not. *Wikipedia process is unreliable.*
Sure, ultimately a consensus can be found, but it can be horrific
getting there.
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Wikipedia painted itself into this corner.
>
Indeed, said corner being #5 website in the world according to recent
Comscore figures. The onus is still on those who think the system is
broken. ("Notability" has always been a broken concept, but the real
question is whether the system as a whole is broken, rather than whether
individual subjective judgements always agree with the result of
deletion processes.)
<snip>
>I proposed a change to the guideline, a
> special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member
> society of a notable international society would be notable. If you
> know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections.
> "Notability is not inherited."
Indeed, it isn't. Some of the more high-profile associated topics of
notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't
mean they are all worth a separate article. Such decisions should go
case-by-case, but in general terms they are about structuring of
content, rather than permissible content. [[Mary Ball Washington]],
mother of George Washington, gets an article (not very substantial); her
mother doesn't. I don't see that "recognized national" is a very
different attribute from "notable", but certain office-holders might be
considered worth an article "ex officio" (general notability doesn't
recognise anything ex officio, I think, but arguably more special
guidelines could.)
<snip>
Charles
Excellent!
Glad to be in the company of other quality snobs!
~ Eli
------Original Message------
From: David Gerard
Sender: wikien-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To: English Wikipedia
ReplyTo: English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Steven Walling: Why Wikipedians Are Weird
Sent: Mar 6, 2010 17:57
This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI
(I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of
Wikipedians didn't enter because "it wouldn't be fair.")
- d.
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Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Hi,
I need to download wikipeida 2007 dump as the current dump is quite large.
So, I wander if it's still available for download as I could only find 2009
and 2010 dumps on the download page!
--
Ahmed Elgohary