Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Jack Park]

In my view, "undue weight" might be as likely to stifle a minority view
which will later win a Nobel Prize as it would stifle a "flat earth"
argument. Again, in my view, all views deserve the light of day.  In the
context of current events, i think it can be argued that "majority views"
might actually be the wrong views worth emphasizing.

Consider the "benefits" of Google's miracle -- page rank -- which, for
those of us who started using Google before it was a verb, really was a
miracle. Right up until we discovered that we had to dive into maybe a
dozen or more pages of hits before we discovered the novel idea we were
after in the first place. Popularity contests mask novelty.

Consider current affairs centered on Ebola. Many Americans read The Hot
Zone many years ago, and are already conditioned with one "point of view",
and are finding it really difficult to deal with "science" which is telling
them a story much different from what they read about many years ago. How,
really, does one decide what is "majority" and what is not majority? Which
drone does MediaWiki unleash on the universe to make such decisions?

It may actually be the case that deciding the way forward for Wikipedia is
as wicked as are the problematic topics and entailed organizational issues
which started this conversation.

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 9:41 AM, Pierre-Carl Langlais <
pierrecarl.langl...@gmail.com> wrote:

>  I do not think we have too much of an issue here, thanks to Undue Weight
> :
> an encyclopedic article has to show the respective weight of every
> viewpoint. Of course, whenever the coverage topic is frenquently changing
> (typically, a current event) or quite small, you're likely to report "all
> points of view". I don't know how often Undue Weight is quoted on the
> English Wikipedia, but the French adaptation I've drafted, Wp:PROPORTION
> ,
> has proven quite useful to solve this regular encyclopedic challenge…
>
> As an aside, a good idea to ease the verification of Wikipedia sources
> would be to exploit the current expansion of open access sources and
> develop a side-to-side checking feature: you would get the wikipedia
> article on one side and the original source text on the other (with perhaps
> even some markup on the likely parts covered by the reference, thanks to
> some text mining magic). Wikisource has already a similar feature (with the
> pdf on one side and the translated text on the other) to ease
> retranscription. That's typically the kind of suggestions that would rather
> appear within the community (and here we get back to my suggestion of a
> wishlist).
>
> PCL
>
> Le 28/10/14 17:20, Jack Park a écrit :
>
>   Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through
> which to view the present situation.
>
>  Let me preface a question with this:
>
>  NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text
> book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily
> submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the
> issues in play.
>
>  My question is this:
>
>  Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in
> the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible
> justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation?
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien <
> nicolas.jull...@telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by
>> Marwell and Oliver
>> "The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
>>
>> http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y
>>
>> which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and
>> need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood
>> (which is, sometime, boring)
>>
>> Nicolas
>>
>> Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :
>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
>>> *"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
>>> even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have certainly
>>> allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
>>> so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
>>> still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
>>> active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
>>> far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
>>> have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
>>> like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
>>> 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
>>> sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per ca

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Pierre-Carl Langlais]

I do not think we have too much of an issue here, thanks to Undue Weight 
: 
an encyclopedic article has to show the respective weight of every 
viewpoint. Of course, whenever the coverage topic is frenquently 
changing (typically, a current event) or quite small, you're likely to 
report "all points of view". I don't know how often Undue Weight is 
quoted on the English Wikipedia, but the French adaptation I've drafted, 
Wp:PROPORTION 
, 
has proven quite useful to solve this regular encyclopedic challenge…


As an aside, a good idea to ease the verification of Wikipedia sources 
would be to exploit the current expansion of open access sources and 
develop a side-to-side checking feature: you would get the wikipedia 
article on one side and the original source text on the other (with 
perhaps even some markup on the likely parts covered by the reference, 
thanks to some text mining magic). Wikisource has already a similar 
feature (with the pdf on one side and the translated text on the other) 
to ease retranscription. That's typically the kind of suggestions that 
would rather appear within the community (and here we get back to my 
suggestion of a wishlist).


PCL

Le 28/10/14 17:20, Jack Park a écrit :
Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through 
which to view the present situation.


Let me preface a question with this:

NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text 
book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not 
easily submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins 
for the issues in play.


My question is this:

Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly 
in the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, 
as-well-as-possible justified points of view, are crucial to 
understanding the situation?



On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien 
> wrote:


Hello,

to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work
by Marwell and Oliver
"The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)

http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y

which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature"
and need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered
in adulthood (which is, sometime, boring)

Nicolas

Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :

Hi everyone,

I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
*"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not
result in
even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have
certainly
allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules.
Yet, I'm not
so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's
probably
still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
active contributors during the past month, the English
Wikipedia is by
far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience
(I do not
have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller
communities
like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of
bureaucracy
sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly.
If you
want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess
you would
have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
*"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive
flexibility". I
would rather point a lack of communication between the
community and the
WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
 on
Wikipedia
politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the
high level
of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of
important
features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do
not have
any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to
reestablish this
link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
*Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all
communities
tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and
stagnate.
The growth of

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Sydney Poore]

I wish it was true that we have reached a level of maturity and need fewer
people, But unfortunately, even the the largest language Wikipedia,
Wikipedia English, still needs much improvement.

For example,  the readership base of our health related articles is much
larger that the number of editors working on them. We don't have enough
people to improve the health related articles to make them useful, then
keep them up to date, and watch them for the inclusion of errors or poor
quality edits. Much of this work needs to be done by real people not bots
or gadgets.

We do our best to watch the articles with the highest readership, like the
Ebola. A great article highlighting one success
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/business/media/wikipedia-is-emerging-as-trusted-internet-source-for-information-on-ebola-.html


But there are many other important medical articles that are read thousands
of times a day and are start class articles or have outdated content. .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages

We are out recruiting new editors to help.. We are hopeful that connecting
with health organizations with a common interest in disseminating health
information will draw in enough  people to make a noticeable change.

It would be helpful to avoid giving a mixed message and not tell the world
that we are mature and need less people. :-)

Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence
at Cochrane Collaboration

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien <
nicolas.jull...@telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by
> Marwell and Oliver
> "The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
> http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_
> Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y
>
> which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and
> need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood
> (which is, sometime, boring)
>
> Nicolas
>
> Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
>> *"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
>> even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have certainly
>> allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
>> so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
>> still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
>> active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
>> far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
>> have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
>> like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
>> 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
>> sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
>> basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
>> necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you
>> want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would
>> have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
>> current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
>> *"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I
>> would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the
>> WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
>>  on Wikipedia
>> politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level
>> of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important
>> features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have
>> any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this
>> link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
>> *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities
>> tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
>> The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
>>  after 2012. This is not because these
>> communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is
>> way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in
>> addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a
>> rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these
>> current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within
>> the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly
>> not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for
>> women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
>> patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of
>> home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on
>> enhanci

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Jack Park]

Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through which to
view the present situation.

Let me preface a question with this:

NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text
book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not easily
submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins for the
issues in play.

My question is this:

Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly in
the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is, as-well-as-possible
justified points of view, are crucial to understanding the situation?


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien <
nicolas.jull...@telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by
> Marwell and Oliver
> "The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
> http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_
> Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y
>
> which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and
> need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood
> (which is, sometime, boring)
>
> Nicolas
>
> Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
>> *"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
>> even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have certainly
>> allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
>> so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
>> still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
>> active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
>> far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
>> have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
>> like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
>> 2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
>> sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
>> basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
>> necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you
>> want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would
>> have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
>> current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
>> *"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I
>> would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the
>> WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
>>  on Wikipedia
>> politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level
>> of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important
>> features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have
>> any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this
>> link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
>> *Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities
>> tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
>> The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
>>  after 2012. This is not because these
>> communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is
>> way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in
>> addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a
>> rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these
>> current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within
>> the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly
>> not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for
>> women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
>> patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of
>> home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on
>> enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project
>>  to greet
>> newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an
>> inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to
>> enhance participation would be to make some global change on society
>> (reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time,
>> creating a basic income, you name it…).
>>
>> That's all, folks
>>
>> PCL
>>
>> Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :
>>
>>> Hey folks,
>>>
>>> I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really
>>> relevant to the thread it appeared in.
>>>
>>> Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia.  I'm studying the nature of
>>> socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case
>>> study. Wikidata might 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Nicolas Jullien]

Hello,

to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by 
Marwell and Oliver

"The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y

which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and 
need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in 
adulthood (which is, sometime, boring)


Nicolas

Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :

Hi everyone,

I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
*"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have certainly
allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you
want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would
have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
*"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I
would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the
WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
 on Wikipedia
politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level
of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important
features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have
any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this
link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
*Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities
tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
 after 2012. This is not because these
communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is
way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in
addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a
rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these
current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within
the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly
not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for
women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of
home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on
enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project
 to greet
newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an
inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to
enhance participation would be to make some global change on society
(reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time,
creating a basic income, you name it…).

That's all, folks

PCL

Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :

Hey folks,

I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really
relevant to the thread it appeared in.

Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia.  I'm studying the nature of
socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case
study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but
personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems
work & break down.  When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata
will benefit from what I have learned.

-Aaron


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen
mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Hoi,
I  agree when it is the only thing I said.

Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them
and several times) and I always hear "good idea, should be easy,
we ill look into it and we get back to you". But as I said, your
reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not.
Thanks,
 GerardM

On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker mailto:aaron.halfa...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Gerard.  Did you file the feature request?  If not, you are
ranting at the wrong mailing list.

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Pierre-Carl Langlais]

Hi everyone,

I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
*"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in 
even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have certainly 
allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not 
so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably 
still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000 
active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by 
far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not 
have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities 
like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around 
2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy 
sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case 
basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become 
necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you 
want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would 
have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the 
current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
*"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I 
would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the 
WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper 
 on Wikipedia 
politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level 
of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important 
features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have 
any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this 
link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
*Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities 
tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate. 
The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down 
 after 2012. This is not because these 
communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is 
way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in 
addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a 
rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these 
current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within 
the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly 
not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for 
women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up 
patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of 
home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on 
enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project 
 to greet 
newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an 
inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to 
enhance participation would be to make some global change on society 
(reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time, 
creating a basic income, you name it…).


That's all, folks

PCL

Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :

Hey folks,

I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really 
relevant to the thread it appeared in.


Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia.  I'm studying the nature of 
socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case 
study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but 
personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems 
work & break down.  When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata 
will benefit from what I have learned.


-Aaron


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen 
mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>> wrote:


Hoi,
I  agree when it is the only thing I said.

Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them
and several times) and I always hear "good idea, should be easy,
we ill look into it and we get back to you". But as I said, your
reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not.
Thanks,
 GerardM

On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker mailto:aaron.halfa...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Gerard.  Did you file the feature request?  If not, you are
ranting at the wrong mailing list.

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen
mailto:gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>>
wrote:

Hoi,
Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that
despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I
despair about what the Research list has become and, I
will explain why.

What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of
Wikipedia related noise. Noise becau

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia focus of research (was Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia)

[Aaron Halfaker]

Hey folks,

I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really relevant
to the thread it appeared in.

Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia.  I'm studying the nature of
socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case study.
Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but personally,
I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems work & break down.
When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata will benefit from what I
have learned.

-Aaron


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen 
wrote:

> Hoi,
> I  agree when it is the only thing I said.
>
> Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and
> several times) and I always hear "good idea, should be easy, we ill look
> into it and we get back to you". But as I said, your reply is relevant when
> it is the only thing I said and it is not.
> Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
> On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker  wrote:
>
>> Gerard.  Did you file the feature request?  If not, you are ranting at
>> the wrong mailing list.
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
>> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an
>>> attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research
>>> list has become and, I will explain why.
>>>
>>> What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of Wikipedia related
>>> noise. Noise because it feels to me like the same subjects are covered in
>>> endless similar ways. I despair because when something new happens OUTSIDE
>>> of this, the English Wikipedia it is completely ignored.
>>>
>>> Much of what I hear feels like noise because it lacks practical
>>> relevance. Research, statistics could show "What are people looking for
>>> most in Wikipedia but cannot find". We do not have that because of no
>>> reason I can think of and, it has been promised often enough for years now.
>>> The Swedish Wikipedia finds that their bot generated articles has
>>> rejuvenated their Wikipedia but the research community is quiet about it..
>>> Ignores it ? Wikidata has statistics [1] its data has a real meaning about
>>> Wikipedia, about Wikidata and about the sum of all information AVAILABLE to
>>> us.
>>>
>>> The consequence of all this self promotion is that there is no attention
>>> for anything else.. Yes, we know there is a gender disparity but what about
>>> people with a mental health problem.. We have way more people editing who
>>> are "enriched" with a diagnosis than is average. What do our projects mean
>>> for them, does it help them with their self awareness, does it help them
>>> recover, is our community aware of it and how does it cope or fail to cope.
>>> What practical steps can we take to make these valuable contributors more
>>> secure, less anxious?
>>>
>>> Researching the same things over and over does not help us understand
>>> WIkipedia, our "other projects", our communities. It does not help us
>>> achieve our aim; it is "share in the sum of all knowledge", we do not even
>>> share all the knowledge that is available to us. Why not? How can we do
>>> this?
>>>
>>> Jane knows the tool that provides a selection of Wikipedias with search
>>> results from Wikidata. It works, Ori looked at it from a performance point
>>> of view. NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO IMPLEMENT IT. It does not happen. A
>>> research question would be "Why".
>>>
>>> The statistics for Wikidata are not up to date because the dumps are
>>> faulty. It is not clear, obvious that it is of real concern to the people
>>> responisble. However this data IS used to run specific bots based on what
>>> the numbers show. The numbers matter, the statistics matter they have a
>>> real demonstrable impact.
>>>
>>> What I am looking for is relevance and I find only research for more
>>> fine grained explanations not for solutions. It is why I despair, it is
>>> because it feels so much like a colossal waste of time when you consider
>>> that researching subjects with a different objective would help us forward
>>> so much.
>>>
>>> Maybe my expectations are unrealistic and people doing research are just
>>> another incrowd doing their own thing.
>>> Thanks,
>>>GerardM
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> [1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php?reverse
>>>
>>> On 28 October 2014 00:15, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
>>>
 If it's that trivial to implement, implement it.

 That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to
 disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you "despair"? It, by
 inference, made you conclude he doesn't accept new things? You find the
 absence of a feature actively irrational?

 It's okay for Pine's vision to be different from yours, or mine, or
 Aaron's, or anyone else's. Wikimedia's ethos is not built on any one
 person's vision: it is built on the sum of all of our hopes (in an ideal
 universe). It's not a o