Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal -- some proposed details ...
The problem with the approach that we can let the welcoming and friendliness be an emergent behaviour, is that we're already many years into this and it's simply... not. However the admin bit is an officially sanctioned method of enforcing rules. This is a lop-sided approach. To counter-balance the officially sanctioned rule enforcement, we need an *equally weighted* officially sanctioned welcoming committee type role that operates *on the level* of the editors exactly as an admin operates. A person well-suited to be an admin, is not necessarily and sometimes diametrically opposed to a person well-suited to be a welcomer. Whatever happened to the push to encourage editors to come back? W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal -- some proposed details ...
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 2:39 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: The problem with the approach that we can let the welcoming and friendliness be an emergent behaviour, is that we're already many years into this and it's simply... not. However the admin bit is an officially sanctioned method of enforcing rules. This is a lop-sided approach. To counter-balance the officially sanctioned rule enforcement, we need an *equally weighted* officially sanctioned welcoming committee type role that operates *on the level* of the editors exactly as an admin operates. A person well-suited to be an admin, is not necessarily and sometimes diametrically opposed to a person well-suited to be a welcomer. See the Wiki Guides project for an attempt to do something like what you're describing.[1] 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Guides ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal -- some proposed details and a diagram
The actual work of helping new editors and monitoring quality does not require an admin, and most of the people doing it are not admins. The main thing I use admin tools for is to delete hopelessly unacceptable articles, but almost everything I delete has been spotted by a non-admin. However, most of what I do is not the use of admin tools, but explaining to the authors of these who have come in good faith what was wrong and how they can do better, encouraging the potentially good ones to stay. Anyone who has sufficient learned or innate politeness understanding can do that. And anyone with politeness and understanding can pass rfa, if they care to, if they are willing to tolerate some stupid remarks. The ability to patiently tolerate stupidity is and ought to remain one of the requirements for being an admin. On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Neil Harris n...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: Here are some more details to flesh out my proposal for new admin creation. Proposed rate of automatic new admin creation: 5% a month, until back to early-Wikipedia proportions of admin number relative to edit rate. Although this sounds a lot, it's only about 3 new admins a day. - State transitions: IP user | | Creates an account, passes captcha test V User | | Time passes V Autoconfirmed user | | Time passes. User gets chosen at random from pool of all editors, followed by machine checking for good participation. The daily rate of random selection is tuned to generate the correct rate of new admins over the long term. V Proposed new admin | | Gets message. Sends a request message to a list. Any old admin checks for human-like edits, then performs one-click action to issue admin bit. If they don't respond within (say) two weeks, the invitation is withdrawn, and they have to wait to be be drawn again at random. V New admin, with limited powers | | One year passes without being de-adminned V Old admin, with full powers -- Some possible machine-detectable criteria for good participation, based on edits: * Account age: Has been a Wikipedia contributor for at least two years. * Recent activity: Has made at least one edit in at least X days in the last three months. * Recent blocks: has not been blocked at all in the last year * Responsiveness: Has edited a user page of an editor who has edited their user page, at least Y times in the last three months. * Edit comments: Has added a non-trivial edit comment to at least Z% of their edits * Namespaces: Has edited some balanced mix of articles, talk pages, user talk pages, and project talk pages, within the last three months Note that this is a satisficing activity -- the aim is not to find the best editors, or to be fair, but just to select active Wikipedia participants who know their way around, and are not misbehaving, and then select some of them by lot. The final test, for humanness, necessarily needs to be performed by a human being, to avoid the threat of bots gaming the system, but, if as suggested above, there are only about three or four candidates proposed each day. Note also that almost this process can be implemented in a bot, independently of the actual wikipedia software itself. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal -- some proposed details and a diagram
on 2/26/11 3:52 PM, David Goodman at dgge...@gmail.com wrote: The actual work of helping new editors and monitoring quality does not require an admin, and most of the people doing it are not admins. The main thing I use admin tools for is to delete hopelessly unacceptable articles, but almost everything I delete has been spotted by a non-admin. However, most of what I do is not the use of admin tools, but explaining to the authors of these who have come in good faith what was wrong and how they can do better, encouraging the potentially good ones to stay. Anyone who has sufficient learned or innate politeness understanding can do that. Yes! And anyone with politeness and understanding can pass rfa, if they care to, if they are willing to tolerate some stupid remarks. The ability to patiently tolerate stupidity is and ought to remain one of the requirements for being an admin. As it is with clinicians :-). I've been called things I had to look up!:-) Yes, David, this is what I meant when I have said that a culture cannot be mandated or legislated. It must happen one person at a time, each time we communicate with another person. And the ability to interact with another person in a civil manner should be a requirement for everyone working on the Project. It then becomes the hallmark, the distinguishing feature of a Wikipedian. Marc Riddell On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Neil Harris n...@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote: Here are some more details to flesh out my proposal for new admin creation. Proposed rate of automatic new admin creation: 5% a month, until back to early-Wikipedia proportions of admin number relative to edit rate. Although this sounds a lot, it's only about 3 new admins a day. - State transitions: IP user | | Creates an account, passes captcha test V User | | Time passes V Autoconfirmed user | | Time passes. User gets chosen at random from pool of all editors, followed by machine checking for good participation. The daily rate of random selection is tuned to generate the correct rate of new admins over the long term. V Proposed new admin | | Gets message. Sends a request message to a list. Any old admin checks for human-like edits, then performs one-click action to issue admin bit. If they don't respond within (say) two weeks, the invitation is withdrawn, and they have to wait to be be drawn again at random. V New admin, with limited powers | | One year passes without being de-adminned V Old admin, with full powers -- Some possible machine-detectable criteria for good participation, based on edits: * Account age: Has been a Wikipedia contributor for at least two years. * Recent activity: Has made at least one edit in at least X days in the last three months. * Recent blocks: has not been blocked at all in the last year * Responsiveness: Has edited a user page of an editor who has edited their user page, at least Y times in the last three months. * Edit comments: Has added a non-trivial edit comment to at least Z% of their edits * Namespaces: Has edited some balanced mix of articles, talk pages, user talk pages, and project talk pages, within the last three months Note that this is a satisficing activity -- the aim is not to find the best editors, or to be fair, but just to select active Wikipedia participants who know their way around, and are not misbehaving, and then select some of them by lot. The final test, for humanness, necessarily needs to be performed by a human being, to avoid the threat of bots gaming the system, but, if as suggested above, there are only about three or four candidates proposed each day. Note also that almost this process can be implemented in a bot, independently of the actual wikipedia software itself. -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
Thesis: The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically. So why not just do it? Argument and proposal: Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response. This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good faith. I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was no big deal, and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office. If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process. Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken out into a base new admin role, and a set of specific extra old admin powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough. All existing admins would be grandfathered in as old admins in this scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be granted the full old admin powers automatically after one year, unless they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin bit completely. None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there should only be new admins, and old admins with the only distinction being the length they have been wielding their powers -- admin ageism should be a specifically taboo activity. Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a pre-qualified list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages, interacted with other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then from time to time send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that they can now ask any old admin to turn on their admin bit, with this request expected not to be unreasonably withheld, provided their edits are recognizably human in nature. (The reason why new admins should not be able to create other admins is to prevent the creation of armies of sockpuppet sleeper admin accounts riding on top of this process -- a year of competent adminning should suffice as a Turing test.) So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this? -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:43 PM, Neil Harris n...@tonal.clara.co.ukwrote: Thesis: The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically. So why not just do it? Argument and proposal: Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response. This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good faith. I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was no big deal, and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office. If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process. Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken out into a base new admin role, and a set of specific extra old admin powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough. All existing admins would be grandfathered in as old admins in this scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be granted the full old admin powers automatically after one year, unless they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin bit completely. None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there should only be new admins, and old admins with the only distinction being the length they have been wielding their powers -- admin ageism should be a specifically taboo activity. Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a pre-qualified list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages, interacted with other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then from time to time send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that they can now ask any old admin to turn on their admin bit, with this request expected not to be unreasonably withheld, provided their edits are recognizably human in nature. (The reason why new admins should not be able to create other admins is to prevent the creation of armies of sockpuppet sleeper admin accounts riding on top of this process -- a year of competent adminning should suffice as a Turing test.) So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this? -- Neil ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I think those are two separate issues. I don't think having a large number of admins would have an effect on apparent friendliness to beginners, if I had to guess I would say having more admins would probably increase the degree of alienation. Admins do a lot of janitorial tasks, having more would prob. increase the administrative activity. This is in addition to having new admins who wouldn't have been properly vetted by the community, which would bring in new and unknown admins into the equation. There is an another school of thought, who believe that some admins might be the problem. Beginners might not be able to separate or understand that an admins actions is isolated and doesn't represent the larger community, they're probably unaware of possible recourse available to them after an administrative action. The second problem is the current RfA process, which I agree has been getting really restrictive for genuine candidates. I saw people oppose deserving candidates for the most trivial of reasons, from a single userbox to not being descriptive enough in edit summaries. I agree that we need to reconsider the current RfA process, the number of new admins has been falling steadily. I would support going back to the old days when
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
Greetings all. I have been monitoring exchanges regularly, but never felt the urge to respond to any topic, here is my first. As a beginner, I found Wikipedia, in addition to unfriendly, very abstract and complex. Wikipedia Spanish has a problem with editors, and I can see in the text below some of the things I have experienced, where is why: I am a big archaeology fan and decided to undertake a personal project, enhancing the quality of archaeology articles, mainly because I noticed that many articles did not exist in Spanish or in English. What was worst was that many articles exist in English and not in Spanish, naively I set out to fix some of it, by investigating, researching and adding bilingual articles, in some cases simply translating from English and a few from German, Italian, etc. So I guess I found the reason why there are far too few Spanish articles. At a point in time, I encountered empowered and authoritarian Spanish text editors that vandalized my contributions, deleted articles, made Wikipedia rules on the go, etc., and offered no explanations. The last resort measure I had was to stop creating Spanish articles. In English, however it has been a pleasure, I have found people very proactive, friendly, helpful, etc. For details about my contributions and comments, see my user page, under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gumr51. I have a lot of time to research on my personal project, however very little time or interest in arguing or engaging in sterile debates with Text Editors, that I have no clue who they are, what is their knowledge, or actual interest are, since the environment is very impersonal, few even provide their real name. Since this is voluntary work, I would have liked or expected for the text editors to advise or comment on problems they encountered, I spent a few weeks last year asking for help and advice, I did get support in English, but not in Spanish. I believe that in addition to quality text editors and their power levels, somebody may require to qualify the editors expertise in the content of articles, beyond the Wikipedia rules. I will continue adding English archaeological articles. Regards from a frustrated Mexican bilingual Wikipedian, Raul Gutierrez -Original Message- From: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Neil Harris Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal Thesis: The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically. So why not just do it? Argument and proposal: Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response. This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good faith. I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was no big deal, and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office. If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process. Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken out into a base new admin role, and a set of specific extra old admin powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough. All existing admins would be grandfathered in as old admins in this scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be granted the full old admin powers automatically after one year, unless they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin bit completely. None of this should be presented as a rank
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
Only people who are fluent in Spanish have a prayer of solving problems on the Spanish Wikipedia. Somebody's got to grasp the nettle, maybe not you, but somebody, actually a determined group of somebodies. Faith... Fred Greetings all. I have been monitoring exchanges regularly, but never felt the urge to respond to any topic, here is my first. As a beginner, I found Wikipedia, in addition to unfriendly, very abstract and complex. Wikipedia Spanish has a problem with editors, and I can see in the text below some of the things I have experienced, where is why: I am a big archaeology fan and decided to undertake a personal project, enhancing the quality of archaeology articles, mainly because I noticed that many articles did not exist in Spanish or in English. What was worst was that many articles exist in English and not in Spanish, naively I set out to fix some of it, by investigating, researching and adding bilingual articles, in some cases simply translating from English and a few from German, Italian, etc. So I guess I found the reason why there are far too few Spanish articles. At a point in time, I encountered empowered and authoritarian Spanish text editors that vandalized my contributions, deleted articles, made Wikipedia rules on the go, etc., and offered no explanations. The last resort measure I had was to stop creating Spanish articles. In English, however it has been a pleasure, I have found people very proactive, friendly, helpful, etc. For details about my contributions and comments, see my user page, under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gumr51. I have a lot of time to research on my personal project, however very little time or interest in arguing or engaging in sterile debates with Text Editors, that I have no clue who they are, what is their knowledge, or actual interest are, since the environment is very impersonal, few even provide their real name. Since this is voluntary work, I would have liked or expected for the text editors to advise or comment on problems they encountered, I spent a few weeks last year asking for help and advice, I did get support in English, but not in Spanish. I believe that in addition to quality text editors and their power levels, somebody may require to qualify the editors expertise in the content of articles, beyond the Wikipedia rules. I will continue adding English archaeological articles. Regards from a frustrated Mexican bilingual Wikipedian, Raul Gutierrez -Original Message- From: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Neil Harris Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal Thesis: The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically. So why not just do it? Argument and proposal: Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response. This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good faith. I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was no big deal, and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office. If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process. Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken out into a base new admin role, and a set of specific extra old admin powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough. All existing
