Why do my emails to this list keep being randomly rejected? Is it a hint of
some kind?
Kerry
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To: kerry.raym...@gmail.com
Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia
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I'm 100% with you both on this matter of having tried the obvious easy
solutions. If I hear one more person to propose outreach as the solution to
the gender gap or new editor retention, I think I will insert threat of
choice here. I do a lot of outreach here in Australia and, yes,
hand-holding works as long as you in the room with them but stops working
once they are at the mercy of the community (who will attack even during
the outreach). And also that kind of handholding is not scalable. We don't
just need 10 new active editors; we need 10K or even 100K new active
editors. It is indeed time to tackle the hard problem and that is changing
the crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere. The solution
does not lie in training people to conform to that regime. Even if people
are taught how to engage with it, if people don't enjoy the experience, of
course they will walk away. Those of us still here are all probably as
stubborn as mules and with the hides of rhinoceroses (or just enjoy being a
bully safely hidden behind a pseudonym).
Although academic standards of publication appears to held up as the ideal
behind some of the Wikipedia quality guidelines, I must say they are higher
standards than I've seen enforced at most journals or in most conferences.
And certainly I've never seen the rigid enforcement of the nit-picking rules
in the Manual of Style. I do think we are operating our own version of the
Stanford Prison Experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
only the difference is that they cancelled their experiment in about a week.
Ours has been running for years ..
The Wikipedia article above says .
The results of the experiment have been argued to demonstrate the
impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing
ideology and social and institutional support.
Quality control is Wikipedia's legitimising ideology and our processes
provide it with the social and institutional support. When did you ever see
someone in an Article for Deletion discussion or similar say let's look at
the big picture here, the WMF have a strategic priority to reverse editor
attrition or close the gender gap, let's consider our decision here with
that in mind. No, it's always we must decide this according to our rules,
raising any other point is discouraged (you get slapped down for it). Of
course, I question why WMF allows the community to make and enforce rules
when the outcome appears to be working against their stated priorities.
That's not strong governance, that's weakness. I don't think WMF needs to
control everything top-down (and indeed it would not be scalable if they
did) but they do need to set boundaries in some places in relation to the
community's control over policy and process to ensure the success of the WMF
strategic plan. For example, I would say that if a new editor creates a new
article which isn't obviously spam/vandalism, does it really matter to let
that article survive because it isn't notable enough according to the
guidelines for that category of article. At the very least could we defer
the discussion of deletion for a few months in the hope it is further
developed to a better standard by then? Perhaps a two stage process, first
communicate with the contributor(s) with *precise* concerns about how it
needs to be improved and they have a month to do it, and that help is
available (at the TeaHouse or wherever). (Feedback is often too vague,
saying not notable is not helpful and saying WP:ANYTHING is not helpful
either as it looks like a string of gibberish written like that and even if
the link is clicked, the resulting page is full of jargon and often
meaningless to the newbie).
Maybe we should introduce a karma system (like Slashdot). You can only do
certain actions if you have high karma. So positive emotional actions like
thanking, wikilove, writing nice sentiment messages, making uncontested
contributions to articles, etc earn you karma and only high karma people can
take negative emotional actions (undoing - other than vandalism),
proposing for deletion, voting to delete, because they reduce your karma
etc. This might at least slow down the out-and-out bullies who engage in
lots of emotionally negative behaviours .
Kerry
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