Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On 11/02/11 3:38 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: I'm thinking that the problem here is inline references. An inline reference is one where you plonk the reference in the middle of the text reflots of stuff/ref. The problem with those is that they break up the flow of the text, making it very hard to maintain. Inline references are a problem even for newbies wanting to make a simple correction. In a reference rich article the error may be easily visible in article space, but becomes difficult to find in edit space when one needs to wade through a lot of references. Ray ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:07 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it would be hard to get really wrong. What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion. What else?) Responding more to the opinion piece published in the Signpost, than what you are saying, my experience of looking through such backlogs is large amounts of mis-labelling, or outdated labelling. Is it very discouraging to think you are working on a backlog to find that the article either never had the alleged problem, or that it was fixed but no-one bothered to remove the tag identifying the problem. So I think those numbers quoted in that opinion piece are worthless (i.e. over-inflated through poor tagging practices). Random sampling, tailored to specific areas, would give a better idea of the extent of any problems, IMO. What I think often happens is that someone tagging stuff thinks: there is a problem with this article, but rather than use the right tag, or look at the problem in any detail, I'll put a tag on to be safe and then move on. And then someone else, later, might fix the article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no, really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you should come back and assess whether it is still needed). And this in general put me off tags. I've hardly ever tagged articles (preferring to fix them myself or point them out to someone who can fix them), and I tend to ignore tags on articles, preferring to form my own judgement over whether an article is reliable or not (i.e. why should I trust the judgement of a random Wikipedian over whether the article has problems, when all articles should be read with jaundiced eye towards potential problems?). Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)
On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: safe and then move on. And then someone else, later, might fix the article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no, really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you should come back and assess whether it is still needed). There's also a widespread belief that I shouldn't/can't remove them. I regularly see emails in OTRS saying I've fixed X page, but the tags are still there, can you check it out; I've seen it occasionally on talkpages as well, though it's less common. This may be because people believe - a) the tags are official, need third party review before they can be removed (to confirm the problem's gone); or b) tags are automatically generated, and that since they're still there after they've made changes, the articles obviously not fixed enough yet. Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the zeroth section of the article. If you don't see the template when you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed. - and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to get to it, you're stuck! Working on the assumption that there are people who want to remove templates but are having problems doing so, one solution here might be to build on the (excellent) work that's been done with HotCat, and implement a remove this tag link on the template itself. Click this, you get a little line saying are the problems still here?, click yes, and it loads-and-saves the change in the same way that a HotCat category change works. Thoughts? This would be one way to get our readers to do the triage and cleanup for us... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: safe and then move on. And then someone else, later, might fix the article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no, really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you should come back and assess whether it is still needed). There's also a widespread belief that I shouldn't/can't remove them. I regularly see emails in OTRS saying I've fixed X page, but the tags are still there, can you check it out; I've seen it occasionally on talkpages as well, though it's less common. Thank-you for confirming from your OTRS experience that this is an actual problem. snip Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the zeroth section of the article. If you don't see the template when you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed. - and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to get to it, you're stuck! Interesting. Hadn't thought of that. Working on the assumption that there are people who want to remove templates but are having problems doing so, one solution here might be to build on the (excellent) work that's been done with HotCat, and implement a remove this tag link on the template itself. Click this, you get a little line saying are the problems still here?, click yes, and it loads-and-saves the change in the same way that a HotCat category change works. Thoughts? This would be one way to get our readers to do the triage and cleanup for us... +1 In fact, +100. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:07 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php
Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it
would be hard to get really wrong.
What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the
use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting
edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion.
What else?)
Responding more to the opinion piece published in the Signpost, than
what you are saying, my experience of looking through such backlogs is
large amounts of mis-labelling, or outdated labelling. Is it very
discouraging to think you are working on a backlog to find that the
article either never had the alleged problem, or that it was fixed but
no-one bothered to remove the tag identifying the problem. So I think
those numbers quoted in that opinion piece are worthless (i.e.
over-inflated through poor tagging practices). Random sampling,
tailored to specific areas, would give a better idea of the extent of
any problems, IMO.
My reaction was somewhat different. I went into the list of categories or
{{unreferenced}} tagging (by month) just to have a look. Well, it's pretty
miscellaneous. I did a few, including some of my own articles
(embarrassing, but except for one there was nothing that was really out of
hand).
The normal reaction is to slice and dice. Doing it by oldest goes back five
years, which is certainly not excellent; but the old ones didn't seem more
worrying than others, really. How many are also tagged as orphans? This
seems more likely to be where really mucky stuff might lurk. Articles of
the type [[1853 in Canada]] are basically lists, and unreferenced lists are
really another issue. Priorities seem clearer when you get involved. Small
town in Slovakia: easy to check it exists.
The thing is that with a better classified backlog you'd get some easier
progress. If you Google the topic of these older articles, you tend to get
mirror material back, so I don't know that it is fair to ask newbies to sue
their own unsupported initiative.
Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)
For some of them why not go one step further and replace the template with an automatically generated hidden category? Dead end, uncategorised, undercategorised and orphan could all be replaced with fully automated hidden categories; no need for the adding or subtraction of templates. Though we'd need a template or hidden cat for unsuccessful deorphaning attempts. WereSpielChequers On 3 November 2011 13:00, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: safe and then move on. And then someone else, later, might fix the article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no, really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you should come back and assess whether it is still needed). There's also a widespread belief that I shouldn't/can't remove them. I regularly see emails in OTRS saying I've fixed X page, but the tags are still there, can you check it out; I've seen it occasionally on talkpages as well, though it's less common. Thank-you for confirming from your OTRS experience that this is an actual problem. snip Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the zeroth section of the article. If you don't see the template when you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed. - and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to get to it, you're stuck! Interesting. Hadn't thought of that. Working on the assumption that there are people who want to remove templates but are having problems doing so, one solution here might be to build on the (excellent) work that's been done with HotCat, and implement a remove this tag link on the template itself. Click this, you get a little line saying are the problems still here?, click yes, and it loads-and-saves the change in the same way that a HotCat category change works. Thoughts? This would be one way to get our readers to do the triage and cleanup for us... +1 In fact, +100. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: The thing is that with a better classified backlog you'd get some easier progress. If you Google the topic of these older articles, you tend to get mirror material back, so I don't know that it is fair to ask newbies to sue their own unsupported initiative. Sue? Was that meant to be use? I agree, some backlogs are better dealt with by more experienced editors. How can such slicing and dicing be done? And if there were manageable chunks, I'd do bits as well. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)
That's a good idea as well, though some might see it as trampling on the stuff swept under the rug (making it less visible). But you are right that some backlogs don't really need to be visible to readers. Carcharoth On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:22 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: For some of them why not go one step further and replace the template with an automatically generated hidden category? Dead end, uncategorised, undercategorised and orphan could all be replaced with fully automated hidden categories; no need for the adding or subtraction of templates. Though we'd need a template or hidden cat for unsuccessful deorphaning attempts. WereSpielChequers On 3 November 2011 13:00, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: safe and then move on. And then someone else, later, might fix the article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no, really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you should come back and assess whether it is still needed). There's also a widespread belief that I shouldn't/can't remove them. I regularly see emails in OTRS saying I've fixed X page, but the tags are still there, can you check it out; I've seen it occasionally on talkpages as well, though it's less common. Thank-you for confirming from your OTRS experience that this is an actual problem. snip Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the zeroth section of the article. If you don't see the template when you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed. - and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to get to it, you're stuck! Interesting. Hadn't thought of that. Working on the assumption that there are people who want to remove templates but are having problems doing so, one solution here might be to build on the (excellent) work that's been done with HotCat, and implement a remove this tag link on the template itself. Click this, you get a little line saying are the problems still here?, click yes, and it loads-and-saves the change in the same way that a HotCat category change works. Thoughts? This would be one way to get our readers to do the triage and cleanup for us... +1 In fact, +100. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
On 3/11/2011 10:45 p.m., Ray Saintonge wrote: On 11/02/11 3:38 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: I'm thinking that the problem here is inline references. An inline reference is one where you plonk the reference in the middle of the text reflots of stuff/ref. The problem with those is that they break up the flow of the text, making it very hard to maintain. Inline references are a problem even for newbies wanting to make a simple correction. In a reference rich article the error may be easily visible in article space, but becomes difficult to find in edit space when one needs to wade through a lot of references. WikEd has syntax highlighting to make editing easier. Alan ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)
I've hinted for a while that for {{orphan}}ed and {{dead end}}ed
articles, you could replace the manual method of using templates and
categories with automated database reports that are much more accurate.
But those could also be considered sweeping under the rug, as many
database reports tend to get neglected also.
-MuZemike
On 11/3/2011 12:58 PM, Carcharoth wrote:
That's a good idea as well, though some might see it as trampling on
the stuff swept under the rug (making it less visible). But you are
right that some backlogs don't really need to be visible to readers.
Carcharoth
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:22 PM, WereSpielChequers
werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote:
For some of them why not go one step further and replace the template with
an automatically generated hidden category?
Dead end, uncategorised, undercategorised and orphan could all be replaced
with fully automated hidden categories; no need for the adding or
subtraction of templates. Though we'd need a template or hidden cat for
unsuccessful deorphaning attempts.
WereSpielChequers
On 3 November 2011 13:00, Carcharothcarcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 12:31 PM, Andrew Grayandrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk
wrote:
On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharothcarcharot...@googlemail.com
wrote:
safe and then move on. And then someone else, later, might fix the
article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and
not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no,
really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others
to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you
should come back and assess whether it is still needed).
There's also a widespread belief that I shouldn't/can't remove them.
I regularly see emails in OTRS saying I've fixed X page, but the tags
are still there, can you check it out; I've seen it occasionally on
talkpages as well, though it's less common.
Thank-you for confirming from your OTRS experience that this is an
actual problem.
snip
Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly
don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit
links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the
zeroth section of the article. If you don't see the template when
you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed.
- and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to
get to it, you're stuck!
Interesting. Hadn't thought of that.
Working on the assumption that there are people who want to remove
templates but are having problems doing so, one solution here might be
to build on the (excellent) work that's been done with HotCat, and
implement a remove this tag link on the template itself. Click this,
you get a little line saying are the problems still here?, click
yes, and it loads-and-saves the change in the same way that a HotCat
category change works.
Thoughts? This would be one way to get our readers to do the triage
and cleanup for us...
+1
In fact, +100.
Carcharoth
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