I am with you 100% on the principle that if we don't change how we do things,
nothing will change in terms of our outcomes. But I guess what we are debating
is what the change should be.
Our problem is indeed one of ideology as we have three statements of ideology
underpinning Wikipedia. We have the vision:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
We have the 5 Pillars which I assume we all know so I won't elaborate here
and we have the main page that says "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free
encyclopaedia that anyone can edit."
Frankly these various ideologies don't combine terribly well and I think that
"anyone can edit" is something that we do have to re-think. At the end of the
day we are building and (increasingly) maintaining an encyclopaedia. We do need
adequately educated people to do this. The ability to research and write is not
innate, most people have to learn it through a formal education process. Now I
am not suggesting a formal education barrier to participation but really, if
you can't cite, you can't write for Wikipedia. Maybe you can fill other roles
in Wikipedia but not as a content writer.
We absolutely do need new contributors. We know we have a contributor gap and a
content gap and there is research that shows these are related. But I am not
convinced that the vandals and self-promoters are part of our contributor gap.
I suspect our bad faith editors are predominantly white male and 1st-world, and
we have plenty of good faith contributors from that group already. Do we have
any evidence that vandals turn into productive contributors? Have we surveyed
our existing editor community on how many of them started out as a vandal?
Maybe we could turn CoI and bias around to be a motivator? A lot of the
self-promoters seem to be quite well educated. Let's have some new namespaces
e.g. "CV" (for CVs), "Essay" (for opinions). Maybe you get to the right to one
of these for every N productive edits you do in mainspace. Obviously they get
displayed to the reader in a way that makes clear these are "personal views" or
whatever words are appropriate so there is no misrepresentation of what they
are. And of course they should be subject to our normal rules about puffery,
hate speech etc. And they can choose to have or not have an associated talk
page. But I would put one caveat on these new namespaces, verified identity. If
you want to advertise yourself and your views, you need to stand up and be
honest about who you are (but it doesn't have to be linked to your normal user
name or IP editing for those who edit on "sensitive" topics). After enough good
mainspace edits, you get a token that you can "cash in" for one of these
personal statement pages. This works well for the paid editors. They can write
good edits on mainspace topics to earn tokens to write CVs and personal
statements for their clients (as long as their clients are happy to verify
their real world identity). And as the easiest way to get a good edit is to
revert vandalism, maybe we can solve our vandalism problem that way.
Maintenance is a problem. 2016 we had a census in Australia. We still have
loads of town/suburb articles with 2011 census date, and I stumble over 2006
data too. (Note this is not easy to automate as the internal identifiers used
for the places are not stable from one census to the next -- if it was, we
would have automated this). Let's set this kind of stuff up into a pipeline
like Mechanical Turk as another way to get "good edits". Indeed let's consider
whether the price of paying folks in the third world to do this kind of
maintenance might be worth it. They are pretty cheap and they need the money.
We need to nurture the good faith new contributors. Could we have something
that isn't "un-do: but say "re-do" which acts some kind of referral to a more
caring part of Wikipedia than your average editor to help them learn how to do
it beter? E.g. Teahouse type people.
But back to the contributer gap. We do need to do something about oral
knowledge, such as we have in Australian Indigenous communities. At the moment,
this is a verification problem. But Indigenous people don't have a verification
problem. They know who their elders are and they know who they trust to hear
their lore fromMaybe we need a family of templates, e.g. {{Oral Quandamooka}}
that tells the reader that what's inside this box (or however we present it) is
oral knowledge provided by" SoAndSo, Elder Of the Quandamooka People", and
within such templates, normal verification does not apply but there is some
culturally appropriate real world verification that is used to authorised
certain user names to use that template. It might not be the respected elder
themselves as they may not be technologically savvy but it might be someone
they designate to assist them with the task. And of course,
