On 07/16/04 19:31, Ray Saintonge wrote: Before we get a committee, we need a plan. Then, instead of a committee, we can have a commando action group ;-) What do we have so far? * Jimbo's statement that he doesn't want a fork from the current content, except at the very last stage before preparing for print. * Various plans for rating articles or versions of articles. (For edit war hot spots, expect vote spamming.) * Various lists of what *should* be in a single-volume encyclopedia. Completing these lists would be a fine program for volunteer recruitment, by the way. * A lot of articles with images that are fair-use, permission-granted, non-profit or of other non-free status to be cleared and replaced where at all feasible. * An interested publisher, one who actually gets it, waiting in the wings. (Jimbo, you said their name in London - is it still under wraps?) We need to know what they require from us, so we know what to aim for. Anything important I've missed? Add it and we'll have the broad form of our action plan. Then it's a Simple Matter Of Volunteer Motivation. And we have a lot of experience at that. - d.

Magnus Manske wrote: That makes me a little nervous - we already have a problem with people who agglomerate more and more text into longer and longer "articles" instead of using hyperlinks to make things more readable. Marking an article as one of the "chosen" will just incentivize to do even more of that. I think you'd need some kind of cutoff mark in articles (which has been discussed previously), plus some kind of daily query that budgets by words rather than article count. If for instance someone add a sentence to [[tuna]] and thereby exceeds the 100Kword limit for science topics, whip out the list of longest science articles and start fighting about what to cut. :-) It also occurs to me that these would be categories that you would not want displayed by default... Stan

I just wanted to point out that when users were asked what they think is the most important thing programmers should be working on, only 4 out of 36, or 11% said formal review and distribution. The results in detail were: Quality: 17 Screening for vandalism, with better watchlists, more configurable contributions pages and RC, etc. Features for organised patrol, marking edits as checked. Performance: 12 Full text search, regularly updated special pages, response time, avoiding error messages in peak times, scalability. Working on performance keeps hardware costs down. Syntax and rendering: 2 Templates with parameters that actually work, new kinds of data e.g. chemical structural formulas, chess, music, etc., browser compatibility, WAP access. Distribution: 4 Formal review, CDs, DVDs, print, static HTML dumps. User rights: 1 Partial bans on users, e.g. from namespaces or given sets of articles, or number of edits per day. Alternative methods for sysopping and desysopping. Dangerous actions by quorum or consensus. Partial page protection, using file replacement or similar. Automated sock puppet checks. Trust metrics. Note that the results were likely skewed towards quality, since the poll was advertised in a village pump discussion on quality features. -- Tim Starling

Please remember that we '''do not need developer effort''' to move towards Wikipedia 1.0. I think that improving the quality of major articles (a big part of moving towards 1.0) is the most important task for our editing community. Yet I also agree with the majority of those poll responders that vandalism screening and features for organised patrol are the most-needed development items (and these /do/ have some relevance to validation and quality control). On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 12:25:34 +1000, Tim Starling <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

Tim Starling wrote: I'm on it, I'm on it! :-) Magnus

David Gerard wrote: My implementation can use scales, for yes/no decisions, a scale of 1/2 will do :-) Different "types" can have different scales, so we could have a "Spelling" 1-5, and a "Use in 1.0" yes/no at the same time. Currently, I am using yet another special page, and while that will stay for statistics etc., I'd like to have the "pure" rating page as another tab in the current skin, like "edit" and "history". Any help in coding is welcome :-) Magnus

At 12:31 PM 7/16/2004 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: Users who approve a version of an article would likely watchlist it, so it doesn't seem like a major imposition to require them to review newer edits and give approval to newer versions if need be. Perhaps even have the software create a sort of parallel specialized watchlist that shows articles you've approved in the past that have had edits performed on them since then, both to make sure one doesn't forget to watchlist them and to make sure one's regular watchlist doesn't become cluttered. Users should only have the yes/no option, IMO, since including or excluding an article is an all-or-nothing proposition. Combining multiple users' ratings into a more fine-grained number could be handy, though, showing whether the approval is controversial at a glance. The details of this rating system will no doubt be the subject of endless bickering, which I look forward to seeing the end result of. :)

On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 01:48:09PM +0100, Neil Harris wrote: 1. There are serious problems with having more than 2 options, but on the other hand 2 options are not enough to express all opinions. What is the meaning of each number ? Everyone knows when to give worst and best available rating, but what kind of article deserves 4 or 7 ? It works quite well on IMDB, where people select ratings thinking "this movie was about as good as movie X, which got 7.8, so i'll rate it 8". Will the ratings of the articles get coherent enough to provide such guildlines ? Or are we going to attach descriptions to each rating, in which case we get to another problem ... 2. How to produce a single number from all the ratings. There's no natural linearity in ratings, and if we were to assign descriptions to each rating, what's the "average" of "bad", "bad", "great" and "needs minor improvements" ? Median is conceptually better than mean, as it only requires ratings to be comparable ("bad" < "needs minor improvements" < "good" < "great" etc.), but it's quite dissatisfying that it completely ignores the difference between possible ratings below the median (ratings "horrible" and "needs minor improvements" are equivalent if the average is "needs minor improvements" or better), and above it ("great" == "needs minor improvements", if median is "needs minor improvements" or worse). 3. If we were to implement rating scheme, I think it would be the best option to have different each user's rating options and summary ratings. The summary ratings could be based on median, variance of ratings, and the number of votes. For example: Available rating options: {horrible, needs major improvements, needs minor improvements, good, outstanding} Possible summary ratings: { not rated (no votes, or few votes and high variance), controversial (many votes, too high variance) extremely controversial (many votes, ratings dominated by horrible and outstanding) horrible (many votes, median 'horrible', small variance), probably horrible (median 'horrible', few votes or moderate variance), needs major improvements, probably needs major improvement, ... }

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 15:13:18 +0100, Neil Harris &lt;usenet(a)tonal.clara.co.uk&gt; wrote: If you get down to that level, you could adjust for individual user's voting prefrences. Normalize them somehow. ;)

Wow, lots of talk about an important subject. Wonderful. What TomK has said about this -- that it requires no technical support, but instead requires defining specific reachable subprojects, drumming up community interest in them, and providing regular updates and 'prereleases' with the status of the whole project -- is absolutely right for the short-term. Those of you who are eager to work on this, let us pick a suitable subject -- I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of the currently-underway English Readers -- and start defining the scope of our first validation effort. Feel free to write me privately with other suggestions, if you don't want to spam the list... For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language" flags as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation. See the metada section of the validation article: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Validation_via_extra_meta… Magnus writes: I'm not sure what you mean by 'one approval', but I agree with your first and third points -- approvals need not be on the same version (think of them as 'edits' to the article, which have to be actively removed by another editor before they are no longer part of it), and that there should be no rating scale. Either you think it should be validated or you have a specific (hopefully fixable) set of objections. I'm not eager to create a spectrum of article-quality; certainly not along a single linear scale of Quality; it is unnatural, and as a result invites disappointment and disagreement from users, each of whom will be able to find a pair of articles that s/he considers grossly misordered. On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 23:07:43 +0800, Mark Ryan &lt;ultrablue(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: gmail users everywhere agree... the review process should be very simple. (that said, I think we should prompt reviewers to evaluate an article in certain lights, according to the different qualities we would like in validated articles As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the 'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where each objection should be responded to by some future editor (and where the articles steadily improve) is a good way to think about it. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Validation_via_extra_meta…

We would need the spell checker to be reactivated and modified so that articles can be checked on their own (rather than giving a huge list of all pages with particular errors in them). I don't fancy copying entire articles into MS Word to check for errors (and people checking articles for correct spelling would be likely to miss many errors). I know the spell checker was a huge resource drain on Wikipedia, but if it is restricted to those permitted to validate articles, it shouldn't be so bad. ~Mark Ryan

On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:01:50 +0200, Yann Forget &lt;yann(a)forget-me.net&gt; wrote: I know automatic spell checking is just a tool. But we still have spelling errors being found now, years after they were first inserted into articles. Humans are prone to errors. I know I can proofread an essay of my own over ten times and not notice the most obvious spelling errors. An automatic spell checker would just draw our attention to possibly overlooked errors. How many spelling errors would you find on Britannica?

Mark Ryan wrote: Spell checkers didn't exist when the first edition of Britannica came out. It's always more difficult to find these spelling errors on your own work, but those same errors tend to stand out when you check another person's work. Maybe you should be letting someone else spell check your work. Ec

Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote: Since this is a general text editing need, it's the job of the browser's text editor widget. In Safari, go to the 'Edit' menu and look under 'Spelling'; for others, see your browser's documentation. If your browser doesn't include spell checking, see about fixing that. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

--- Mark Ryan &lt;ultrablue(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Section 0 of every article should ideally have a lead section in it that acts as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead sections should then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects). Selection of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed, of course. Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia. -- mav __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Vote for the stars of Yahoo!'s next ad campaign! http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo/votelifeengine/

On 07/20/04 00:22, David Gerard wrote: I've been reading a huge pile of stuff on Wikipedia 1.0 from the past year. There have been several mentions of the idea, much support and little objection. So I've boldly edited [[Wikipedia:News style]] and [[Wikipedia:Summary style]] to call it a consensus recommendation, because it does seem to be one. - d.

David Gerard wrote: Although there is much merit to having the initial section of an article give a general overview of the topic. I don't think that the application of "news style should extend any further than that. Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Being able to drop paragraphs at the end of an article to fit the available space is fine for newspapers who have short daily deadlines to meet. The weeklies have more freedom on this and monthlies and quarterlies even more. A biographical article needs to present the person's life in a chronological structure. Many famous people had some of their most significant events at the end of their lives. What would a biography of Lincoln or Kennedy be like if we had to cut the story of their assassination as a means of making those articles shorter?. I can see that the desire to have a large number of articles is driving the move the have severable opening stubs. The important question comes down to is it better to have a large number of short articles, or a much smaller number of comprehensive, well-written and thoughtful articles. When it is finally published, the hype will have preceded the event, and created high expectations. Which would be a better review? 1. The new paper Wikipedia is a collection of short articles. The material appears very accurate, but any person who browses the net could have found all this very easily. Why did they bother? or 2. The new paper Wikipedia is a series of interesting and very informative article. Interspersed are a number of shorter articles with a promise that these subjects will receive more thorough treatment in the future. We look forward to those future editions. Ec

--- Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: That is exactly why I support Summary Style instead of News Style. The "dropability" part does not apply to what we are doing and strictly speaking News Style only provides for lead sentences, not lead sections. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style Summary Style is somewhat similar in spirit to News Style, except it tries to apply the concept to Wikipedia, which is most certainly not a newspaper. It aims to not overwhelm readers with too much info up front and tries to offer summaries under prominent "Main article"-type links in sections. That way we serve several different types of users; *those that want a quick summary of what the topic is about (lead section), *those that want a basic summary (a set of several paragraph long sections - subsectioning can increase the number of paras), *and those that want to go into more detail ('Main article' links to articles which cover a sub-topic summarized in a section). But articles *should not* start out like this. Summary Style is more of a set of guidelines on how to split long articles (>40-50KB) into a set of daughters. Each of those daughters could eventually become large enough to bud out articles of its own. And so on - not unlike cellular division. Also, most good lead sections should be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in their own right. Some more expansive topics, such as major wars, will also need to have overviews, however. Overviews should have important info not contained in or barely mentioned in the lead section. Together these lead sections and overviews could be used almost directly in a desk reference concise version of Wikipedia. This division of content also makes it possible to create many different kinds of topic-based encyclopedias for print/DVD/CD; A general one would only have survey articles while a specific topic encyclopedia would have all the survey and daughter articles in its topic area. Creating a meta tagging system would help facilitate this by automating what goes where (this is a bit beyond the purpose of categories, IMO, but they *could* be used for this if needed). In terms of content, not really articles, we can and should have both. This can be done by splitting long articles and leaving a good-sized summary of that article in a section of a survey article on the topic. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

Mark Ryan wrote: We would need to feel confident that the spell checker respected national variations such as labor/labour while maintaing consistent usage within an individual article. Spell checkers also create false security. They would never catch the wrong use of there/their for example. Human checking will still be essential. Ec

Sj wrote: Interesting that you should raise this. I had already asked myself how could I go about choosing articles for 1.0, and the first thing that came to mind was the topic overview articles. Anything else would follow from there. If any group of articles should be priorized for being brought up to editorial standards it is these. They would be the lead articles for each section of a paper product. Nothing binds us to the strict alphabetical order of many traditional encyclopedias. Having these ratings kept loose is essential if we don't want a whole bureaucracy built up around them. (I do find a 10-pont rating scale more visually menaingful.) Security against a person casting multiple votes needs to be kept to a minimum. We certainly don't need to keep track of every vote that a person has cast. I would even go so far as to say that a person may cast a new vote after *every* edit, but I would attach more weight to votes cast since the last edit. An algorithm can certainly be devised to calculate a rating based on the available votes. When surveyed on many topics people do have a tendency to rate things higher than average. That can be normalized by looking at votes across all topics, and taking the raw average to be equivalent to 5.0 on a ten point scale. The idea that validation is done to elicit improvement of articles is important. Many educators to-day are questioning the role of tests and examinations in schools. For them we should be "testing for learning" rather than "testing of learning"; this conforms well with this idea of article validation.

On 07/21/04 21:34, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: Please wait a few days! I've been thinking of little else for the past few days and want to discuss ideas more here first. One important point that has been I think missed here - when we talk about 1.0 here, we're talking about the paper version, yes? I note that your page talks about a CD release as well. But the present push is because we have an actual paper publisher in the wings? I ask because I've been thinking in terms of a single-volume paper concise Wikipedia, not a CD-ROM, which could probably have all Adequate Prose on it. Indeed ... - d.