Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-23 Thread Anthony
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Ben Kovitz  wrote:

> On Feb 16, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>
> > We could discuss why [CZ] failed but I think the real answer is
> > simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little
> > interest in a new project doing the same thing.
>
> I think you have pegged it exactly right.  In most large markets, the
> rule of thumb is that the #1 player holds 40% market share, the #2
> player holds 20% market share, the #3 player holds 10%, and then there
> are some little guys.  Most markets on the Internet, though, are
> "winner take all".  For example: eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia.  It's very
> hard for a newcomer to displace an established top player, *regardless
> of quality* (unless the quality difference is revolutionary).  So, we
> will likely never be able to test Larry Sanger's claim that giving
> experts ultimate say would produce a better encyclopedia.


Is Amazon really in a "winner takes all" market?  My intuition, as well an
incredibly quick search, suggests "no way" (
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/04/amazon-growth-fuels-onlines-bo.html says
"while Amazon is by far the most dominant player, they still represent less
than half of the total online book market").  If you've got stats that say
otherwise though, I'd gladly accept them over some random guy on the
Internet.

eBay I can understand, but I see no reason why Wikipedia will be a winner
takes all market.  All that's needed is a decent search engine for
educational content, which doesn't focus so much on popularity.  I can't
imagine that not happening one of these days.
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/21 David Gerard :
> 2009/2/21 Thomas Dalton :
>> 2009/2/21 James Farrar :
>>> 2009/2/21 Ben Kovitz :
>
 Disclaimer: I've read three or four books on marketing, so that, uh,
 makes me an expert. ;)
>
>>> Probably more of an expert than someone who's read ten or twenty books
>>> on marketing ;)
>
>> I've read the Wikipedia article on marketing, what more could I need?
>
>
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Marketing , obviously.

I would rather take my marketing advice from an encyclopaedia people read...

http://www.xkcd.com/125/ (see the tooltip text)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread David Gerard
2009/2/21 Thomas Dalton :
> 2009/2/21 James Farrar :
>> 2009/2/21 Ben Kovitz :

>>> Disclaimer: I've read three or four books on marketing, so that, uh,
>>> makes me an expert. ;)

>> Probably more of an expert than someone who's read ten or twenty books
>> on marketing ;)

> I've read the Wikipedia article on marketing, what more could I need?


http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Marketing , obviously.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/21 James Farrar :
> 2009/2/21 Ben Kovitz :
>
>> Disclaimer: I've read three or four books on marketing, so that, uh,
>> makes me an expert. ;)
>
> Probably more of an expert than someone who's read ten or twenty books
> on marketing ;)

I've read the Wikipedia article on marketing, what more could I need?

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread James Farrar
2009/2/21 Ben Kovitz :

> Disclaimer: I've read three or four books on marketing, so that, uh,
> makes me an expert. ;)

Probably more of an expert than someone who's read ten or twenty books
on marketing ;)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread Ben Kovitz
On Feb 16, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

> We could discuss why [CZ] failed but I think the real answer is
> simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little
> interest in a new project doing the same thing.

I think you have pegged it exactly right.  In most large markets, the 
rule of thumb is that the #1 player holds 40% market share, the #2 
player holds 20% market share, the #3 player holds 10%, and then there 
are some little guys.  Most markets on the Internet, though, are 
"winner take all".  For example: eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia.  It's very 
hard for a newcomer to displace an established top player, *regardless 
of quality* (unless the quality difference is revolutionary).  So, we 
will likely never be able to test Larry Sanger's claim that giving 
experts ultimate say would produce a better encyclopedia.

Disclaimer: I've read three or four books on marketing, so that, uh, 
makes me an expert. ;)

Ben


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread Ben Kovitz
On Feb 16, 2009, at 12:20 AM, Tim Starling wrote:

> "Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed
> predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the
> question of the proper role of experts."
>
> Strange, I thought it was because he stopped being paid for it.

That's right.  (As your next quotation showed.)

> He then forgot about Wikipedia completely for a few years, and 
> re-emerged
> a critic once the media started paying attention to it.

I think this does Larry Sanger an injustice, at least insofar as it 
suggests that he's some sort of media whore.  From the beginning, he 
wanted credentialed experts to compile the "real" encyclopedia, using 
the general-public wiki as a "feeder".  He has strenuously made this 
exact same objection--that letting just anyone edit the live 
encyclopedia would introduce bias in favor of "idiots" with hobby 
horses--from the very beginning, even before the project officially 
started.

Ben


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-21 Thread Charles Matthews
Gwern Branwen wrote:
> "User:MBisanz has charted the number of new accounts registered per
> month, which tells a very similar story: March 2007 recorded the
> largest number of new accounts, and the rate of new account creation
> has fallen significantly since then. Declines in activity have also
> been noted, and fretted about, at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship."
>
> My take on this is that all this tells a story of ever fewer people
> joining, and casual editors continuously winding down & leaving. This
> means that the small group of dead-ender hardcore editors will grow as
> a percentage, which may seem like a good thing ('yay, more editors are
> becoming obssessed!') until you consider the larger picture.
>
> (My cynical sarcastic take on this is to thank all the reference nazis
> & deletionists & vandal-fighters; we couldn't've done't without ye!)
>
>   
But note that most accounts don't edit _at all, ever_. Account creation 
may be the simplest statistic to get, but it is also the most simplistic.

The English Wikipedia is around 10,000 editors, basically.

Charles



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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-20 Thread Sage Ross
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Charles Matthews
 wrote:
> Mark Nilrad wrote:
>> I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the numbers of 
>> ACTIVE users slowed as well?

> If you're talking about the demographics of editors - I think it is now
> more three years since WP attracted a very large group of people,
> arriving over a few months only, who created a "boom" in article
> production (quantity not quality). Many of those will have left by now -
> others have become some of our most productive editors.  This can only
> happen once: WP became a Net phenomenon at some point in 2005, and that
> was because all of a sudden many people heard of it who hadn't before,
> or who had ignored it.  I would say the growth in editors was "over
> trend" at that point. We are seeing more like a sustainable rate now,
> and probably (who knows?) a higher proportion of "encyclopedist" types.

The short answer is yes, the number of active editors has declined.
See [[Wikipedia:Editing frequency]] and [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia
Signpost/2009-01-03/Editing stats]].  For the most part, I agree with
Charles Matthews's hopeful interpretation that Wikipedia is entering a
stable, sustainable phase, although others see more dire futures based
on the demographic trends.  I think a different sort of person may be
attracted to the project now.

Note, however, that although new users peaked in early 2007 (the same
time community size peaked, and about six months after creation rate
peaked), the rate of new accounts has actually been moderately stable,
varying only about 50% since about 2006.  Also, some published and
unpublished studies suggest that the the editor turnover rate is
considerably higher than MeatballWiki would have us believe, although
I'm not yet clear how much that applies to the very, very active core
of editors.

>> Obviously, as you can read in the Slashdot comments (and many other places), 
>> this is not Wikipedia's strength, at all.
>>
> One thing that is not at all obvious to me is that there is any really
> really credible reporting on this or other aspects of Wikipedia.  It's
> anecdotal at best - one or two incidents taken to stand for the site as
> a whole,  and its complexities. Plus people writing ignorant and
> inaccurate stuff, of course.
>

Indeed.  So much stuff goes on, and no one has really dared to dive in
deep enough in a systematic way to produce convincing stories about
the social dynamics of the project.

I was thinking about this, and it might be nice to do some experiments
to find out what kinds of experiences make new users become regular
editors.  Similar to what happened with the fundraiser banner
messages, as a start maybe we could design several different new users
greetings to replace standard template greetings, and randomly sort
which message is given to any particular new users.  Each message
would emphasize something different about Wikipedia, e.g., community,
needed new articles, citations and improving existing articles, having
fun, doing something good for the world, etc.  Then weeks, months, and
a year later we can find out whether the initial frame of the project
has a significant impact, and possibly tailor the way we treat newbies
to better pull them into the community.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-20 Thread Carcharoth
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Charles Matthews
 wrote:

[outside views of Wikipedia among general public]

> One thing that is not at all obvious to me is that there is any really
> really credible reporting on this or other aspects of Wikipedia.  It's
> anecdotal at best - one or two incidents taken to stand for the site as
> a whole,  and its complexities. Plus people writing ignorant and
> inaccurate stuff, of course.

I agree, but there is probably a lot more unreported anecdotal stuff
where people hear from others what Wikipedia is like and gain a false
(or true, YMMV) impression of what Wikipedia is like and what it is
about. There are certainly a lot of misunderstandings around,
including the one that Wikipedia is some homogenous whole, when in
fact it is a lot larger, mixed ad varied than people realise. Though
there are uniformities and constants as well. But the treatment a
first-time editor gets depends on who they encounter, what they edit
and how good they are at adapting to the standards they encounter.
What everyone can do is try and take the time to encourage new editors
and not treat people as if they should know what to do (or not do).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-20 Thread Gwern Branwen
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Mark Nilrad  wrote:
> In general, about article creation, this has obviously slowed quite a lot. 
> However, I think that is a good thing, as that means that article writers now 
> have a chance to catch up to all the new articles. That is why the precentage 
> of articles that are GAs, FAs, or FLs is rising, and will continue to rise.
>
> Currently, these 3 categories combined make up about 1 in 277 articles 
> (0.36%). It's better than before, but it obviously could go a lot further. 
> That's why I think the focus during Wikipedia's "adolescent" should be 
> article improvement, and not so much creation.
>
> On a related topic, really the only way to increase in this way is by getting 
> for users. I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the 
> numbers of ACTIVE users slowed as well? Because really, beyond just the 
> policies and long-winded arguments on ANI, there's the fact that you can't 
> watch over all the articles that Wikipedia has without getting more and more 
> editors. Another reason why being nice to newcomers and leaving a good first 
> impression is so crucial. Obviously, as you can read in the Slashdot comments 
> (and many other places), this is not Wikipedia's strength, at all.
>
> Mark Nilrad

Relevant to this discussion:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-01-03/Editing_stats

"The new data shows that the community continued to grow for about six
months after the peak in article growth rate, reaching a maximum of
18,126 registered user accounts (excluding bots) with at least 20
article namespace edits in the month of March 2007. By September 2008
(the last month covered by the new statistics) only 13,971 accounts
made 20 or more article edits. Anonymous edits and total non-bot edits
across all namespaces also peaked in March 2007."

"In 2005, users making at least one article edit in a given month were
about twice as likely to make over 100 edits that month than in 2007
and 2008. However, the proportion of active users making at least 2500
article edits per month has been rising since early 2007."

"User:MBisanz has charted the number of new accounts registered per
month, which tells a very similar story: March 2007 recorded the
largest number of new accounts, and the rate of new account creation
has fallen significantly since then. Declines in activity have also
been noted, and fretted about, at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship."

My take on this is that all this tells a story of ever fewer people
joining, and casual editors continuously winding down & leaving. This
means that the small group of dead-ender hardcore editors will grow as
a percentage, which may seem like a good thing ('yay, more editors are
becoming obssessed!') until you consider the larger picture.

(My cynical sarcastic take on this is to thank all the reference nazis
& deletionists & vandal-fighters; we couldn't've done't without ye!)

-- 
gwern

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-20 Thread Charles Matthews
Mark Nilrad wrote:
> I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the numbers of ACTIVE 
> users slowed as well?
If you're talking about the demographics of editors - I think it is now 
more three years since WP attracted a very large group of people, 
arriving over a few months only, who created a "boom" in article 
production (quantity not quality). Many of those will have left by now - 
others have become some of our most productive editors.  This can only 
happen once: WP became a Net phenomenon at some point in 2005, and that 
was because all of a sudden many people heard of it who hadn't before, 
or who had ignored it.  I would say the growth in editors was "over 
trend" at that point. We are seeing more like a sustainable rate now, 
and probably (who knows?) a higher proportion of "encyclopedist" types.
> Obviously, as you can read in the Slashdot comments (and many other places), 
> this is not Wikipedia's strength, at all.
>   
One thing that is not at all obvious to me is that there is any really 
really credible reporting on this or other aspects of Wikipedia.  It's 
anecdotal at best - one or two incidents taken to stand for the site as 
a whole,  and its complexities. Plus people writing ignorant and 
inaccurate stuff, of course. 

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-20 Thread Mark Nilrad
In general, about article creation, this has obviously slowed quite a lot. 
However, I think that is a good thing, as that means that article writers now 
have a chance to catch up to all the new articles. That is why the precentage 
of articles that are GAs, FAs, or FLs is rising, and will continue to rise.

Currently, these 3 categories combined make up about 1 in 277 articles (0.36%). 
It's better than before, but it obviously could go a lot further. That's why I 
think the focus during Wikipedia's "adolescent" should be article improvement, 
and not so much creation.

On a related topic, really the only way to increase in this way is by getting 
for users. I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the numbers 
of ACTIVE users slowed as well? Because really, beyond just the policies and 
long-winded arguments on ANI, there's the fact that you can't watch over all 
the articles that Wikipedia has without getting more and more editors. Another 
reason why being nice to newcomers and leaving a good first impression is so 
crucial. Obviously, as you can read in the Slashdot comments (and many other 
places), this is not Wikipedia's strength, at all.

Mark Nilrad



  
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-19 Thread Charlotte Webb
On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Carl Beckhorn  wrote:
> Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be
> worth reading even if the author were anonymous.

Only, he does not feel this way about the viewpoints of others who are
anonymous.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Carcharoth  wrote:
> So maybe I should have read that draft instead. It would be nice to
> know which versions were approved by the three editors above, and at
> what stage.

Ah, be patient, Carch. Since enwiki rejects FlaggedRevs as
antithetical to open editing, I predict Larry will pick up on it as it
affords Sangerpedia a cheap, trivial way to be Radically Different
from Jimbopedia.

Actually using the tool, to tighten up the status quo which he
considers Still Too Open (to dissent, for example), will just be a
pleasant side effect. The same can be said about knowing who approved
which edits, this helps those studying the editorial forensics of a
failing project but it is still secondary to creating a deep
philosophical contrast.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based
> on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
> curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around
> 2013-14.

"The end is near!"
"Which end?"

In breadth of coverage Wikipedia is still in its early adolescence.
Myself I learned a lesson about guessing numbers—don't bother, sweet
chariot, you'll always swing too low.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> I think a lot of people that like writing new articles don't like the fine 
> tuning
> that is required to get from Good to Featured

I don't know about all that. When I write a new article I don't like
the pedantic ref-bombing that is needed to prevent it from being
deleted 16.9 seconds later... but I still do it... to hell with the
other stuff.

—C.W.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-19 Thread Eugene van der Pijll
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen schreef:
> Would there be any workable way to create a big (huge?) "Missing
> Articles" project by somehow mass generating a list of the
> various non-English language articles still not translated
> to the English language wikipedia?

I did something like this, four years ago. Made a list of all German
articles with some interwiki links but no link to enwiki. I posted it at
the WikiProject Missing Articles, and there were several people who were
interested in working on it.

See [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/de]] and
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/fr]]. It may be
worth doing this again. (But I lack the resources of doing it at the
moment, as the database dumps have grown too much for me to handle
them.)

Eugene

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-19 Thread Charles Matthews

 >Does anyone know the answer to the opposite question? How many
> articles on the English Wikipedia lack interwiki links? It is possible
> (but less likely) that the articles exist in both places, but haven't
> been linked with an interwiki yet. I find examples of that fairly
> regularly, but am not sure how common it is.
>
> Carcharoth
>
>   
I was just doing a sample of 50 pages on enWP anyway to estimate the 
mean number of interwiki links - it's around three, but clearly skewed 
by hitting very common topics.  Anyway, it doesn't seem stupid to divide 
total articles in Wikipedias by 3 to get total unique topics: enWP 
probably has more unique topics than other languages. So, guess what, 
consistent with "one million to translate" as ballpark figure.

On the question posed by Carcharoth, it looks like around half of enWP's 
articles have no interwiki.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-19 Thread Carcharoth
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Charles Matthews
 wrote:
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>> Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
>> forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
>> (I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
>> know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
>>
>> Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
>> around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
>> non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
>> corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
>> even a rough estimate be made?
>>
>
> On the basis of clicking "Zufälliger Artikel" 50 times, it looks to me
> like around 50% of deWP articles do not have interwiki to enWP.  Only a
> small proportion of those without such interwiki look like they should
> have a corresponding article in enWP.  The proportion with interwiki but
> no English interwiki is not huge - say 25%?  This is not a very
> sophisticated technique from a statistical point of view, but it could
> be refined to get a better view by sampling of the overlapping of the
> Wikipedias.  It all suggests the answer to the question is "around one
> million" - not 50 (too low), not two million (maybe too high?).

Does anyone know the answer to the opposite question? How many
articles on the English Wikipedia lack interwiki links? It is possible
(but less likely) that the articles exist in both places, but haven't
been linked with an interwiki yet. I find examples of that fairly
regularly, but am not sure how common it is.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-19 Thread Charles Matthews
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
> forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
> (I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
> know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
>
> Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
> around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
> non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
> corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
> even a rough estimate be made?
>

On the basis of clicking "Zufälliger Artikel" 50 times, it looks to me 
like around 50% of deWP articles do not have interwiki to enWP.  Only a 
small proportion of those without such interwiki look like they should 
have a corresponding article in enWP.  The proportion with interwiki but 
no English interwiki is not huge - say 25%?  This is not a very 
sophisticated technique from a statistical point of view, but it could 
be refined to get a better view by sampling of the overlapping of the 
Wikipedias.  It all suggests the answer to the question is "around one 
million" - not 50 (too low), not two million (maybe too high?).

Charles



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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen :
> Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
> around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
> non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
> corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
> even a rough estimate be made?

It's difficult to say, since things are divided up differently in
different language versions. That's why getting interwiki links right
is so difficult in many cases.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Ian Woollard
Presumably whether something is worth doing in the wikipedia could be
defined to depend on whether anybody appreciates us doing it.

So I wonder if these location articles were translated whether they would
see much traffic? Do we have any evidence from any that have been translated
how much they were read, compared to how much they were read in the original
wiki?

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect
world would be much better.
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen :
> If I read that correctly the upshot seemed to be that just by
> translating articles from the non-English language wikipedias
> (presuming they would not be deleted immediately because of
> a lack of English language web-sources :-( that is) there would
> be fertile ground for an addition of around two million new
> articles to the English language wikipedia.

That was in summer 2006, the latest stats in the updates correspond to
4 million articles waiting for translation (although that's an over
estimate since it doesn't take into account articles that exist in
multiple languages, just not English). The test is very imprecise and
should only be used to give a rough idea - I think we can say there
are "millions" of articles waiting for translation, anything more than
that would be false precision.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>  wrote:
>   
>> Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
>> forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
>> (I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
>> know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
>>
>> Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
>> around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
>> non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
>> corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
>> even a rough estimate be made?
>>
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>> 
>
> [[User:Piotrus/Wikipedia interwiki and specialized knowledge test]]
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test
>
> Might be of interest.
>
>   

It is.

If I read that correctly the upshot seemed to be that just by
translating articles from the non-English language wikipedias
(presuming they would not be deleted immediately because of
a lack of English language web-sources :-( that is) there would
be fertile ground for an addition of around two million new
articles to the English language wikipedia.

Would there be any workable way to create a big (huge?) "Missing
Articles" project by somehow mass generating a list of the
various non-English language articles still not translated
to the English language wikipedia?

 At least the creation of such lists from those various
language projects wouldn't be problematic in terms of
database copyright. 


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Gwern Branwen
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
 wrote:
> Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
> forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
> (I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
> know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
>
> Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
> around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
> non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
> corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
> even a rough estimate be made?
>
>
> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

[[User:Piotrus/Wikipedia interwiki and specialized knowledge test]]
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialized_knowledge_test

Might be of interest.

-- 
gwern

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Matthew Brown
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 6:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
 wrote:
> But completely seriously, a subject that can be exhaustively
> covered briefly, is not a stub. Period.

Yes.  A stub is a place-holder for a real article.  I suspect that the
name is by analogy with a stub function in programming, since the
people who started Wikipedia included many programmers; a stub in that
context is a do-nothing or test-data implementation of a function,
created so the project as a whole can be compiled and the parts that
aren't the stub can be given some testing.

Thus, a stub on Wikipedia is something that's there INSTEAD of the
proper article that should be at that location.  People create them so
they can categorize them, link them in properly, put a few appropriate
'see also', 'external links' and sources, and a talk page, before they
have time or other resources to write a real encyclopedia article
there.

There are plenty of things in the world that everything that should be
said about them fits in a paragraph.  This doesn't make them not worth
an article.

-Matt

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen :
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 2009/2/17 Matthew Brown :
>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton  
>>> wrote:
>>>
 Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
 guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have.

>>> Stubs aren't bad things.
>>>
>>
>> Indeed, but there are far more topics that it is easy to write a stub
>> about than there are topics that it is easy to write a whole article
>> about.
>>
>>
>
> Erk... this is what we have the template {{notastub}} for.
>
> "A short article is not a stub." Repeat 10 times under your
> breath.
>
> 
> Otherwise, why would the 1975 Encyclopaedia Britannica
> Micropaedia article on "Monastery" consist of 12 words?
> 
>
> But completely seriously, a subject that can be exhaustively
> covered briefly, is not a stub. Period.

All true, but not at all relevant to what I was saying. I was talking
about how much you can *easily* write about a subject, not how much
there is to write about it.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/2/17 Matthew Brown :
>   
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton  
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
>>> guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have.
>>>   
>> Stubs aren't bad things.
>> 
>
> Indeed, but there are far more topics that it is easy to write a stub
> about than there are topics that it is easy to write a whole article
> about.
>
>   

Erk... this is what we have the template {{notastub}} for.

"A short article is not a stub." Repeat 10 times under your
breath.


Otherwise, why would the 1975 Encyclopaedia Britannica
Micropaedia article on "Monastery" consist of 12 words?


But completely seriously, a subject that can be exhaustively
covered briefly, is not a stub. Period.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Charles Matthews wrote:
>> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>   
>>> 2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
>>>   
>>> 
 I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
 potential as a comprehensive reference.  My main hope is that life
 around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.
 
   
>>> Indeed. Current predictions show growth in terms of article numbers
>>> pretty much ending in around 4 or 5 years time. We'll then need
>>> several more years to actually get all the articles up the scratch. A
>>> decade may even be optimistic.
>>>
>>>   
>>> 
>> Yeah, well, my reaction to the whole "fruit" discussion is that it is 
>> systemic-bias-lite.  I'll settle for five years to start most of the 
>> articles of interest to those with a fairly parochial view of what 
>> constitutes an interesting topic, and 25 years more to catch up with the 
>> rest of the planet. You're not telling me that we'll have articles 
>> correspording to all the other language versions - total interwiki 
>> converage - by 2014?
>>
>> 


Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
(I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
know I have often thought I should ask the question.)

Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
even a rough estimate be made?


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen





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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-18 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Charles Matthews wrote:
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>   
>> In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
>>
>> 1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
>> quality.
>>
>> 2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
>>
>> 3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
>>
>> 4. Aggressive people who won't permit quality will
>> follow an article.
>>
>> 5. Over the long term, the dynamics of wikipedias
>> practices will not prevent editors who will not
>> allow quality on wikipedia from dragging it down
>> to the level that they aggressively and persistently
>> insist on bringing it down to. There are no working
>> heuristics to allow it to transcend that attractor.
>>
>> *Understanding* the logical flaws of those 5 statements
>> is left to the student.
>>   
>> 
> It would be rash to say you couldn't find any examples where this is 
> true - there is a large selection of articles.  It might be a fair model 
> for the article about, for example, a controversial Governor of Alaska 
> who didn't get chosen as a candidate for Vice-President.  But you could 
> click Random Article for a little while before you came up with an 
> article to which this argument really would apply.
>   
I disagree that even Mrs. Palins article will fulfill the claim
of my 5th paraphrase.

Long term, (think 5 years down the line, or even say twice
the current age of wikipedia itself) those little problems
will be transcended.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Carcharoth
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> 2009/2/17 Sage Ross :
>> That would be interesting.  I wonder if this could be something that
>> could be integrated into the 1.0 rating scheme... another, parallel
>> rating for "scope" or "generality".  Naturally, any such
>> determinations will be subjective, but so are article ratings and yet
>> the semi-codified Stub-Start-C-B ratings tend to work out pretty well.
>>  It would be great to have the breakdown of general vs. specific
>> articles not just for FAs, but for everything.
>
> That might be good. It would also help when determining if an article
> being an orphan is a problem. Very specific articles probably won't be
> linked to much, more general articles will be. So, if a general
> article is an orphan, we have a problem, if a specific article is, we
> probably don't.

Rudimentary suggestions based on searches can probably generate
suggestions for links for practically any article. Humans could then
go through those lists working out if links are needed. If you are
just presented with an orphaned article, it can be a pain trying to
work out where it can be linked from.

To take an example, both of a low-hanging fruit and a relatively
orphaned article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lister_Medal

I was very surprised, back in October 2008, to discover that we didn't
have an article on this prestigious award made to surgeons. So I
created a list of those awarded the medal. Turns out the awarding
institute don't have a handy list on their website, so that was
probably the reason the article hadn't been created, but that's not
the point I'm making here. The point I'm making is that I failed to
link it from anywhere very much.

About 4 months later, it's still not linked from anywhere much:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Lister_Medal&hideredirs=1&namespace=0

* Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister (links)
* Manchester Mark 1 (links)
* Regius Professor of Surgery, Glasgow (links)

The first link, from Lister's article, was added by me in October 2008:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Lister,_1st_Baron_Lister&diff=247254203&oldid=246064425

The other two links were added as follows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Regius_Professor_of_Surgery,_Glasgow&oldid=260782369

That third link was added with the creation of that article in
December 2008 (on a side-note, that list of Regius Professors of
Surgery should be redlinks, not bare text, but the problem is that at
least four of them are blue links to the wrong articles - this is
where redlinks don't always work so well, unless the disambiguation
naming is obvious enough).

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Manchester_Mark_1&diff=269866878&oldid=269866509

The second link (diff above) was added in February 2009. It was piped,
though in fact a redirect from Lister Oration already existed.

But two links in four months seems pretty poor to me. Or is it?

What I should have done when I created the article, and what I will do
at some point (if no-one else does it first), is go through the
articles of the medallists linking back to the medal (and adding
sources), and do a search for the various terms (Lister Medal, Lister
Oration), and link them from various articles. In this case, there
isn't much mention of the medal in other articles, but for other
orphaned articles there can be.

And I should finish writing the article as well. It's still pretty stubby.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/17 Sage Ross :
> That would be interesting.  I wonder if this could be something that
> could be integrated into the 1.0 rating scheme... another, parallel
> rating for "scope" or "generality".  Naturally, any such
> determinations will be subjective, but so are article ratings and yet
> the semi-codified Stub-Start-C-B ratings tend to work out pretty well.
>  It would be great to have the breakdown of general vs. specific
> articles not just for FAs, but for everything.

That might be good. It would also help when determining if an article
being an orphan is a problem. Very specific articles probably won't be
linked to much, more general articles will be. So, if a general
article is an orphan, we have a problem, if a specific article is, we
probably don't.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Sage Ross
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Carcharoth
 wrote:

> I might try and do a personalised listing at some
> point, bringing out the areas I'm interested in and slicing up the FA
> cake in a different way. Such as identifying the more "general" ones
> and the more "niche" ones, and the "specific" items such as games,
> films, books, events, and paintings (as opposed to genres, histories
> and stuff like that), and biographies and suchlike. But with so many
> articles, it's difficult to do that.
>

That would be interesting.  I wonder if this could be something that
could be integrated into the 1.0 rating scheme... another, parallel
rating for "scope" or "generality".  Naturally, any such
determinations will be subjective, but so are article ratings and yet
the semi-codified Stub-Start-C-B ratings tend to work out pretty well.
 It would be great to have the breakdown of general vs. specific
articles not just for FAs, but for everything.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Carcharoth
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:39 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 2009/2/17 Carcharoth :
>
>> If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
>> but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
>> general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
>> experts tend to prefer to write more limited, specialised articles.
>> Sometimes the subsidiary articles need to be written to a good level
>> before the general article can be tackled. Sometimes it is the other
>> way round.
>
> I've noticed that featured articles are rarely general topics - they
> tend to be specialised articles brought to FA status by one person
> interested in that specialist subtopic.

I've looked briefly through the list at WP:FA (briefly because there
are 2,419 of them), and some that strike me as particularly general
(and nearly all are common terms) are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welding

Less general, but still very broad, are ones like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_cuisine

I stopped at "Food and drink" as we have quite a lot of featured articles.

One that I had in mind as an example is now a former featured article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion

Looking through the lists of former featured articles will probably
yield similar examples.

One thing I did discover is that reading through the list at WP:FA is
really quite difficult.

It is 29 sections, but each section is a wall of text and it is quite
hard to browse. I might try and do a personalised listing at some
point, bringing out the areas I'm interested in and slicing up the FA
cake in a different way. Such as identifying the more "general" ones
and the more "niche" ones, and the "specific" items such as games,
films, books, events, and paintings (as opposed to genres, histories
and stuff like that), and biographies and suchlike. But with so many
articles, it's difficult to do that.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Ian Woollard
On 17/02/2009, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> I love a good metaphor! You're absolutely right, writing articles
> about very general topics is very difficult. I think the problem comes
> in trying to balance breadth, depth and conciseness. There isn't an
> obvious solution - it just needs someone with the right talents to
> devote a significant amount of time and effort to it.

I believe that there's probably a class of general articles that will
never go FA. Some topics will not fit into the combination of
guidelines (particularly length), and to the extent that these
guidelines are rigidly enforced, then you have no chance.

The only way to get some articles (particularly general ones) past FA
is to remove stuff from them, and hope nobody in the FA review notices
;-)
-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread David Gerard
2009/2/17 Carcharoth :

> If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
> but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
> general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
> experts tend to prefer to write more limited, specialised articles.
> Sometimes the subsidiary articles need to be written to a good level
> before the general article can be tackled. Sometimes it is the other
> way round.


I've noticed that featured articles are rarely general topics - they
tend to be specialised articles brought to FA status by one person
interested in that specialist subtopic.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/17 Carcharoth :
> If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
> but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
> general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
> experts tend to prefer to write more limited, specialised articles.
> Sometimes the subsidiary articles need to be written to a good level
> before the general article can be tackled. Sometimes it is the other
> way round.

I love a good metaphor! You're absolutely right, writing articles
about very general topics is very difficult. I think the problem comes
in trying to balance breadth, depth and conciseness. There isn't an
obvious solution - it just needs someone with the right talents to
devote a significant amount of time and effort to it.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Carcharoth
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:



> Yes, but once you're using one source to find other sources and
> hunting for them, you're not really in the realms of low-hanging
> fruit.

Some of the so-called low-hanging fruit are articles that have never
been in that good condition, even now, or that still have great
potential for expansion or reorganisation (even if a lot of the detail
is in related articles, accessible via links). I'll try and find a few
examples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky

Compare that to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil

...which is quite good.

The surgery article is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgery

...but quite why there are 15 templates at the bottom of the article,
I don't know.

Something that looks OK at first glance, but less so when you look closer, is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass

Another article that is in a "hodge-podge" state is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging

If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
experts tend to prefer to write more limited, specialised articles.
Sometimes the subsidiary articles need to be written to a good level
before the general article can be tackled. Sometimes it is the other
way round.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/17 Matthew Brown :
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton  
> wrote:
>> Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
>> guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have.
>
> Stubs aren't bad things.

Indeed, but there are far more topics that it is easy to write a stub
about than there are topics that it is easy to write a whole article
about.

> Plus, the general guide can give you things to then look up in more
> depth elsewhere.

Yes, but once you're using one source to find other sources and
hunting for them, you're not really in the realms of low-hanging
fruit.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Matthew Brown
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
> guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have.

Stubs aren't bad things.

Plus, the general guide can give you things to then look up in more
depth elsewhere.

-Matt

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Guettarda :
> True, the stuff that you
> could add off the top of your head may be gone, but grab a good field guide
> to plants, or grab a historical dictionary, and you could add hundreds of
> articles.  To me it always seems like time is the major constraint, not
> stuff that needs to be written about...

Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have. (A general
"Field Guide to Plants" won't give you more than a couple of lines, a
"Field Guide to Orchids" might give you a paragraph or two, a "Field
Guide to Orchids of the British Isles" might give you most of an
article.)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Carcharoth
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:56 PM, George Herbert
 wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Thomas Dalton 
> wrote:
>
>> We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we
>> want to include.
>
> This is orthogonal to the main conversation here, but this is not nearly the
> case.
>
> We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it.  Things
> which haven't been dealt with include [...]



I wondered why this thread had exploded with activity. It's because it
turned into a "low hanging fruit" debate!

My approach to seeing how comprehensive Wikipedia's coverage is at the
moment is, while reading a book or watching a TV documentary, to
mentally make notes of things to look up on Wikipedia. I did that
yesterday while watching "The Victorians" (a BBC documentary presented
by Jeremy Paxman where he looked at the Victorians through their
paintings).

There was lots I could have looked up, including the program itself
(no article, understandably enough, as it wouldn't have met notability
guidelines), but the three things I made a mental note of were:

Gustave Dore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Dore

Manchester Town Hall:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Town_Hall

1888 International Exhibition in Glasgow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Festivals#Past_Festivals

The first two had articles, but the third one doesn't have its own
article. Turns out there are three big exhibitions that were held in
Glasgow, in 1888, 1901 and 1911 that we don't have articles on.

We do have one on the one in 1938:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Exhibition,_Scotland_1938

And the Garden Festival in 1988:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Garden_Festival

But it's the historical stuff that hasn't been written about yet (and
that's not even mentioning the art history - I should have noted the
titles of all the artworks and the artist's and seen which we had
articles on).

I was kind of hoping that an interesting set of murals in the
Manchester Town Hall hadn't had an article written on them yet, but it
has been fairly well covered already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchester_Murals

History is an almost boundless area for new articles.

Another way to assess how comprehensive Wikipedia is, is to take some
document (or even one of our unwikified articles) and wikify it in
some reasonably sensible way and see how many of the links are red.
This is a bit more exciting than wikifying some index or list of
entries in an old encyclopedia (though the latter is a more efficient
way to do this sort of thing).

One other thing that people sometimes forget to do is to check "what
links here" for said redlinks and see how popular they are. See how
many other people have been trying to link to it. Though you have to
remember to do a search as well and pick up the plain text examples of
the redlinked article that haven't been linked (some of which should
be, some shouldn't).

It's very satisfying to write a new article that has 10 or so incoming
links already! :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread David Goodman
I'm just starting adding a list of the members of the (US) National
Academy of Engineering. we have only about 1% of them covered by
articles.  there are dozens of fields like that where we haven't even
begun on the obvious. We have probably a similar coverage for pre 1990
US state legislators in almost all states.

Additionally, for creative work, for politics, for important products,
there will always be subjects for new articles. People are not going
to stop doing new things.

What we need is people. We will get them when we stop discouraging new
ones by our general hostile way of talking, and our focus on deletion
rather than improvement for new articles.  Anyone who comes to write
even  a facebook-type article on themselves is a potential recruit, if
talked to carefully.  If they're willing to go to the trouble of
writing, and brave enough to do so, they can be guided to find a
proper subject.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Guettarda
I wonder about how much of the fruit we've gathered.  The plant WikiProject
has about 30,000 articles, which include a mixture of articles about plant
species, plant morphology and anatomy, and plant biologists.  There are
close to 300,000 plant species in the world.  If we're only in the 5-10%
range when it comes to coverage, I could imagine that could easily triple
the number of articles without delving into the really hard to find
corners.  I can imagine that the Arthropods WikiProject (and its daughter
projects) have about 13,000 articles under their care.  Again, adding
100,000 arthropod articles shouldn't be difficult.  True, the stuff that you
could add off the top of your head may be gone, but grab a good field guide
to plants, or grab a historical dictionary, and you could add hundreds of
articles.  To me it always seems like time is the major constraint, not
stuff that needs to be written about...

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

>
> I think we passed to point where low-hanging fruit was a major factor
> some time ago (probably round about when we started to level out,
> although it obviously depends on your definitions). I think in a few
> years the vast majority of existing topics that we want to include
> will have at least stubs about them. There will be new topics being
> created all the time, so growth will never stop completely (there will
> always be a new series of Big Brother to write about!). We might
> expand our ideas of what kind of articles are acceptable (ie. relax
> our notability guidelines), but that's the only way we are going to
> maintain any significant level of article creation about pre-existing
> topics.
>
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Phil Nash :
> I think the downside might be exactly what is covered by [[WP:NOT]] at
> present, and especially [[WP:NOR]]; I've seen several articles that were
> extremely worthy as research projects, but offended against those policies,
> and [[WP:SYNTH]] in particular. I hated to nominate for deletion, but it had
> to be done, within existing policy. I hoped we would not lose those
> obviously committed and competent editors. The problem is that relaxing
> [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:SYNTH]], if not done with extreme care, opens the
> floodgates to all sorts of abuse, and that is why I don't think it should
> happen.

I think we can relax the notability guidelines without relaxing our
fundamental policies. We could change "multiple independent
non-trivial sources" to "one independent non-trivial source" (I'm not
sure that would allow for many additional articles, but you get the
idea).

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Phil Nash
Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 2009/2/16 Phil Nash :
>>> I think that this was bound to happen; any venture based on
>>> describing the known universe has an inherent limit in any case,
>>> and it seems obvious that once you've reached some level of
>>> coverage, what happens then is more determined by the pace of real
>>> life events. However, like software, it's arguable that an
>>> encyclopedia is never really finished. Good Articles may be good,
>>> and Featured Articles better, but something will always come along
>>> to require additions. As for relaxing notability guidelines, I
>>> think we very largely get it about right at present, and opening a
>>> can of worms does not commend itself to me as a policy.
>>
>> If we get to the point where virtually no new articles are being
>> created (beyond current events) and a very large proportion of the
>> existing articles are at least Good, then it might be worth relaxing
>> the guildlines - what would be the downside? I think a lot of people
>> that like writing new articles don't like the fine tuning that is
>> required to get from Good to Featured, so if we don't let them write
>> new stuff we'll just lose them. We might as well have them doing
>> something.

I think the downside might be exactly what is covered by [[WP:NOT]] at 
present, and especially [[WP:NOR]]; I've seen several articles that were 
extremely worthy as research projects, but offended against those policies, 
and [[WP:SYNTH]] in particular. I hated to nominate for deletion, but it had 
to be done, within existing policy. I hoped we would not lose those 
obviously committed and competent editors. The problem is that relaxing 
[[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:SYNTH]], if not done with extreme care, opens the 
floodgates to all sorts of abuse, and that is why I don't think it should 
happen.

As regards quality of articles that pass the intial [[WP:CSD]] and [[WP:N]] 
tests, it's very largely up to editors being interested enough to dedicate 
time and effort to take an article to its appropriate level. Take 
[[Tiddleywink]] as an example; it is notable, by definition, because it's a 
settlement. But without major research effort, it's extremely unlikely to 
ever achieve GA, let alone FA. Perhaps that is a problem with the 
requirements of GA & FA, and perhaps also those criteria are worth looking 
at.




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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16  :
> Another example is that the vast majority of our articles on US
> Counties have next to nothing about the county history.  That is, when
> was the county formed? What land was it formed out of? Did the
> boundaries change over time? What was the first city laid out?  Who
> were the first few documentation-attested inhabitants?
>
> Most of our county articles are just current demographics and
> geographical information.  So not only is there a lot of room for new
> articles, but there is a lot of room for expanding current articles.
>
> In addition a lot of biographical articles on say medieval people are
> just skeletons showing how they fit into a certain family, with next to
> nothing about their own life and accomplishments.

Oh, absolutely. 5 years is an estimate for when we'll be done creating
new articles, it will be a long time after that before we're done
enlarging existing articles.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread wjhonson
Another example is that the vast majority of our articles on US 
Counties have next to nothing about the county history.  That is, when 
was the county formed? What land was it formed out of? Did the 
boundaries change over time? What was the first city laid out?  Who 
were the first few documentation-attested inhabitants?

Most of our county articles are just current demographics and 
geographical information.  So not only is there a lot of room for new 
articles, but there is a lot of room for expanding current articles.

In addition a lot of biographical articles on say medieval people are 
just skeletons showing how they fit into a certain family, with next to 
nothing about their own life and accomplishments.

Will




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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Phil Nash :
> I think that this was bound to happen; any venture based on describing the
> known universe has an inherent limit in any case, and it seems obvious that
> once you've reached some level of coverage, what happens then is more
> determined by the pace of real life events. However, like software, it's
> arguable that an encyclopedia is never really finished. Good Articles may be
> good, and Featured Articles better, but something will always come along to
> require additions. As for relaxing notability guidelines, I think we very
> largely get it about right at present, and opening a can of worms does not
> commend itself to me as a policy.

If we get to the point where virtually no new articles are being
created (beyond current events) and a very large proportion of the
existing articles are at least Good, then it might be worth relaxing
the guildlines - what would be the downside? I think a lot of people
that like writing new articles don't like the fine tuning that is
required to get from Good to Featured, so if we don't let them write
new stuff we'll just lose them. We might as well have them doing
something.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Phil Nash
Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 2009/2/16 Sage Ross :
>>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton
>>>  wrote:
>>>
 I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements
 based on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a
 logistic curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in
 around 2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there
 by then.)

>>>
>>> So far, "low-hanging fruit" has dominated the growth pattern of
>>> Wikipedia.  Rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote, we're
>>> probably approaching a stable growth rate (i.e., an oblique
>>> asymptote), since it's obvious that the number of potential articles
>>> yet to be written is not the limiting factor.  Rather we're limited
>>> by
>>> a product of potential articles and users interested in those
>>> articles.
>>>
>>> But statistically it's probably impossible to know that just from
>>> the
>>> data, since low-hanging fruit swamps longer-term trends.
>>
>> I think we passed to point where low-hanging fruit was a major factor
>> some time ago (probably round about when we started to level out,
>> although it obviously depends on your definitions). I think in a few
>> years the vast majority of existing topics that we want to include
>> will have at least stubs about them. There will be new topics being
>> created all the time, so growth will never stop completely (there
>> will always be a new series of Big Brother to write about!). We might
>> expand our ideas of what kind of articles are acceptable (ie. relax
>> our notability guidelines), but that's the only way we are going to
>> maintain any significant level of article creation about pre-existing
>> topics.

I think that this was bound to happen; any venture based on describing the 
known universe has an inherent limit in any case, and it seems obvious that 
once you've reached some level of coverage, what happens then is more 
determined by the pace of real life events. However, like software, it's 
arguable that an encyclopedia is never really finished. Good Articles may be 
good, and Featured Articles better, but something will always come along to 
require additions. As for relaxing notability guidelines, I think we very 
largely get it about right at present, and opening a can of worms does not 
commend itself to me as a policy.



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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Sage Ross :
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton  
> wrote:
>
>> I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based
>> on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
>> curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around
>> 2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there by then.)
>>
>
> So far, "low-hanging fruit" has dominated the growth pattern of
> Wikipedia.  Rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote, we're
> probably approaching a stable growth rate (i.e., an oblique
> asymptote), since it's obvious that the number of potential articles
> yet to be written is not the limiting factor.  Rather we're limited by
> a product of potential articles and users interested in those
> articles.
>
> But statistically it's probably impossible to know that just from the
> data, since low-hanging fruit swamps longer-term trends.

I think we passed to point where low-hanging fruit was a major factor
some time ago (probably round about when we started to level out,
although it obviously depends on your definitions). I think in a few
years the vast majority of existing topics that we want to include
will have at least stubs about them. There will be new topics being
created all the time, so growth will never stop completely (there will
always be a new series of Big Brother to write about!). We might
expand our ideas of what kind of articles are acceptable (ie. relax
our notability guidelines), but that's the only way we are going to
maintain any significant level of article creation about pre-existing
topics.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread The Cunctator
This isn't actually accurate. Wikipedia may have reached the point where
most people find it includes most of the stuff *that has been traditionally
found in encylopedias* they carry around in their heads.

Wikipedia is not paper.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:50 PM, geni  wrote:

> 2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
> > Yeah, well, my reaction to the whole "fruit" discussion is that it is
> > systemic-bias-lite.
>
> Maybe but that doesn't address the problem. Wikipedia has already
> reached the point where most people find it includes most of the stuff
> they carry around in their heads. As a result the average person is
> facing far fewer opportunities to write new articles or expand
> existing ones than they used to. This makes both continuing expansion
> in size and editor numbers somewhat tricky.
>
>
>
> --
> geni
>
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Sage Ross
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based
> on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
> curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around
> 2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there by then.)
>

So far, "low-hanging fruit" has dominated the growth pattern of
Wikipedia.  Rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote, we're
probably approaching a stable growth rate (i.e., an oblique
asymptote), since it's obvious that the number of potential articles
yet to be written is not the limiting factor.  Rather we're limited by
a product of potential articles and users interested in those
articles.

But statistically it's probably impossible to know that just from the
data, since low-hanging fruit swamps longer-term trends.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread geni
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
> Yeah, well, my reaction to the whole "fruit" discussion is that it is
> systemic-bias-lite.

Maybe but that doesn't address the problem. Wikipedia has already
reached the point where most people find it includes most of the stuff
they carry around in their heads. As a result the average person is
facing far fewer opportunities to write new articles or expand
existing ones than they used to. This makes both continuing expansion
in size and editor numbers somewhat tricky.



-- 
geni

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
>>
>>> I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
>>> potential as a comprehensive reference.  My main hope is that life
>>> around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.
>>>
>>
>> Indeed. Current predictions show growth in terms of article numbers
>> pretty much ending in around 4 or 5 years time. We'll then need
>> several more years to actually get all the articles up the scratch. A
>> decade may even be optimistic.
>>
>>
> Yeah, well, my reaction to the whole "fruit" discussion is that it is
> systemic-bias-lite.  I'll settle for five years to start most of the
> articles of interest to those with a fairly parochial view of what
> constitutes an interesting topic, and 25 years more to catch up with the
> rest of the planet. You're not telling me that we'll have articles
> correspording to all the other language versions - total interwiki
> converage - by 2014?

I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based
on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around
2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there by then.)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Charles Matthews
Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
>   
>> I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
>> potential as a comprehensive reference.  My main hope is that life
>> around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.
>> 
>
> Indeed. Current predictions show growth in terms of article numbers
> pretty much ending in around 4 or 5 years time. We'll then need
> several more years to actually get all the articles up the scratch. A
> decade may even be optimistic.
>
>   
Yeah, well, my reaction to the whole "fruit" discussion is that it is 
systemic-bias-lite.  I'll settle for five years to start most of the 
articles of interest to those with a fairly parochial view of what 
constitutes an interesting topic, and 25 years more to catch up with the 
rest of the planet. You're not telling me that we'll have articles 
correspording to all the other language versions - total interwiki 
converage - by 2014?

Charles



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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread WJhonson
I would include biography as well.
We are heavily weighted toward moderns, who are also, not coincidentally,  
the easiest to research using Google.
That will change as more people get more familiar with using Google Books  
instead to research the biographies of people who have been more forgotten as  
time passes.  We probably have 50,000 biographies of people who lived in  the 
past 100 years, but only say 500 biographies of people who lived in the 18th  
century when we should, by population count, have perhaps ten times that number 
 if we're truly trying to represent the knowledge which actually exists in 
all  print sources.
 
Even just to take an example, some noble houses of Great Britain, like the  
Dukes of Portland, or the Earls of Dundonald, we don't have a complete set of  
articles, one on each one.  Even though such biographies do actually exist  in 
print.
 
 
 
In a message dated 2/16/2009 11:56:48 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
george.herb...@gmail.com writes:

There  are
whole fields of engineering and science that we have barely scratched  the
surface of at the  moment.


**Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. 
(http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusyelp0003)
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Charles Matthews
Sage Ross wrote:
>
> I don't disagree.  I'm just saying we should think of Citizendium as
> another (small) place for people to produce free content similar to
> the kind Wikipedia produces, as a potential collaborator with
> Wikipedia rather than a competitor (which isn't realistic, if it ever
> was).  That's a very real possibility once the license change happens.
>   
That's quite OK: someone who forks WP to make a site that is similar but 
has a different atmosphere doesn't have to prove a big philosophical 
difference, just to do it (which technically can't be so hard, these 
days).  In other words, it would be nice if all the free-culture people 
agreed that this is not a zero-sum game.  I don't read Sanger's comments 
in exactly that way, though.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread David Gerard
2009/2/16 Thomas Dalton :

> 30% by articles, maybe, but they were stubs weren't they, so it won't
> be 30% by words. (That may explain why their articles are longer on
> average.) Incidentally, I don't think Rambot articles were that
> significant - if you look at the graphs, rate of growth didn't
> increase when they were added as one would expect is rate of growth
> were simply proportional to size (which it what gives exponential
> growth) which suggests rate of growth was actually proportional to the
> number of non-Rambot articles.


I remember them being a PITA at the time (early 2004). 200k articles
with 30k Rambot articles meant [[Special:Random]] turned up Rambot
articles entirely too often for my liking. I'm glad that (a) they're
now vastly outnumbered (b) almost all have been significantly
rewritten.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
> I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
> potential as a comprehensive reference.  My main hope is that life
> around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.

Indeed. Current predictions show growth in terms of article numbers
pretty much ending in around 4 or 5 years time. We'll then need
several more years to actually get all the articles up the scratch. A
decade may even be optimistic.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Charles Matthews
George Herbert wrote:
>  There are
> whole fields of engineering and science that we have barely scratched the
> surface of at the moment.
>
>   
I think that's right.  Engineering is not one of Wikipedia's strong 
areas, I believe, though I hardly spend time on that.

I do spend time on history - looks like 2009 will be the year of the 
seventeenth century - and there is clearly a great deal of "placeholder 
text": stuff that will do until someone gets round to putting in an 
effort, but easy to add to in detail.  I'm working today on [[John 
Wilkins]], the really big single name in getting the Royal Society 
founded - and there was a huge amount to do just to make the article 
reasonably comprehensive.

I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its 
potential as a comprehensive reference.  My main hope is that life 
around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Eugene van der Pijll :
>> My calculations come out as about 1/10 the size by articles and 1/3
>> the size by words (so their articles must be longer on average).
>
> About 30% of the volume of WP at the time consisted of Rambot articles,
> which aren't too interesting as a measurement of growth (though they may
> have been a significant reason for our success).

30% by articles, maybe, but they were stubs weren't they, so it won't
be 30% by words. (That may explain why their articles are longer on
average.) Incidentally, I don't think Rambot articles were that
significant - if you look at the graphs, rate of growth didn't
increase when they were added as one would expect is rate of growth
were simply proportional to size (which it what gives exponential
growth) which suggests rate of growth was actually proportional to the
number of non-Rambot articles.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread David Gerard
2009/2/16 George Herbert :

> We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it.  Things


We've picked up all the fruit that's actually on the ground with neon
signs pointing to it. There's lots of low hanging fruit, e.g.:


> A month-ish ago, I spent a week putting together an article on one
> explosives engineering topic which was completely missing... leaving us with
> about 95% of that field still uncovered so far.
> Aerospace engineering is poorly covered.
> Automobile engineering is somewhat covered, but not with really good
> articles.  Rocketry needs a lot more.  Astrodynamics needs a lot more.
> Naval architecture and ship design topics are poorly covered now.
> Three of the last eight highly technical terms I went looking for
> information on weren't in Wikipedia in any significant way, across a bunch
> of fields.


Yep :-)


> This is just what's on my mind right now.  Every time I've looked at it I've
> found more gaps.


Here's to red links, the signposts to future growth!


> I could spend the rest of my life adding information to Wikipedia, at this
> rate, if I didn't have to have a day job and didn't want to go sit on a
> beach.  Hopefully we can over time add more new editors / contributors in
> these fields so I don't have to 8-P


Careful, you might get a life with that sort of attitude!


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread George Herbert
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

> We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we
> want to include.
>

This is orthogonal to the main conversation here, but this is not nearly the
case.

We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it.  Things
which haven't been dealt with include figuring out where a more liberal
livable line lies in the inclusionism question, and filling in a lot of semi
specialist topics which are currently woefully underrepresented.  There are
whole fields of engineering and science that we have barely scratched the
surface of at the moment.

A month-ish ago, I spent a week putting together an article on one
explosives engineering topic which was completely missing... leaving us with
about 95% of that field still uncovered so far.

Aerospace engineering is poorly covered.

Automobile engineering is somewhat covered, but not with really good
articles.  Rocketry needs a lot more.  Astrodynamics needs a lot more.

Naval architecture and ship design topics are poorly covered now.

Three of the last eight highly technical terms I went looking for
information on weren't in Wikipedia in any significant way, across a bunch
of fields.

This is just what's on my mind right now.  Every time I've looked at it I've
found more gaps.

I could spend the rest of my life adding information to Wikipedia, at this
rate, if I didn't have to have a day job and didn't want to go sit on a
beach.  Hopefully we can over time add more new editors / contributors in
these fields so I don't have to 8-P


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Sage Ross
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> They've been going for over two years, if they were going to have a
> big recruitment push wouldn't they have done so by now? But really,
> trying to recruit writers is the wrong way round, they need to recruit
> readers, that's where the writers come from for exponential growth
> (which they need if they are going to get anywhere). However, I can't
> see how they can recruit readers until they have enough articles to be
> useful - it's a catch-22 and that's why I don't think any similar
> project will ever rival Wikipedia, simply because we got there first.
>

I don't disagree.  I'm just saying we should think of Citizendium as
another (small) place for people to produce free content similar to
the kind Wikipedia produces, as a potential collaborator with
Wikipedia rather than a competitor (which isn't realistic, if it ever
was).  That's a very real possibility once the license change happens.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Eugene van der Pijll
Thomas Dalton schreef:
> I don't see a claim of exponential growth (which would be complete
> rubbish), just "good news". I don't think linear growth (even slightly
> below linear) is good news, personally.

I exaggerated somewhat. But he has spoken about ongoing exponential
growth before, so it annoyed me a bit to see him in denial again.

> My calculations come out as about 1/10 the size by articles and 1/3
> the size by words (so their articles must be longer on average).

About 30% of the volume of WP at the time consisted of Rambot articles,
which aren't too interesting as a measurement of growth (though they may
have been a significant reason for our success).

There are two kinds of CZ articles: copied from WP (mostly the best
articles; generally large), and original ones. The percentage original
articles has been rising steadily. Judging from clicking "random page" a
few times, they are not too different in length from the average WP
article, so the average length of the CZ article is falling.

Eugene

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Sage Ross :
> However, I don't think we should think of Citizendium as having
> failed.  Certainly, it has failed to realize Sanger's and a few
> others' hopes to be on its way to eclipsing Wikipedia.  But CZ has a
> fairly stable community; it's shrinking a little, but so is
> Wikipedia's community.

We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we
want to include. We're over the hill and rolling down the other side,
they never got up the hill and are rolling back down to the start.

>  It's a free content project that is producing
> some useful material, and some editors find it a nicer place to work
> than Wikipedia.  It's licensed CC-by-SA 3.0, which means it will be
> compatible with Wikipedia soon.  And a rather high proportion of
> content is stuff that isn't present on Wikipedia.  The anti-Wikipedia
> ethos of the project has also waned as they've begun to sort out their
> own identity beyond "Wikipedia with real names where experts have
> power".

Sanger's anti-Wikipedia attitude doesn't seem to have changed much. I
don't know about the rest of the community, I don't read their stuff
in much detail.

> Sanger keeps claiming that they aren't growing simply because they
> haven't yet gotten serious about recruitment.  I don't find that
> convincing, but it's not inconceivable that concerted efforts at
> recruitment could result in another wave of growth or two (though
> probably never exponential growth).

They've been going for over two years, if they were going to have a
big recruitment push wouldn't they have done so by now? But really,
trying to recruit writers is the wrong way round, they need to recruit
readers, that's where the writers come from for exponential growth
(which they need if they are going to get anywhere). However, I can't
see how they can recruit readers until they have enough articles to be
useful - it's a catch-22 and that's why I don't think any similar
project will ever rival Wikipedia, simply because we got there first.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Eugene van der Pijll :
> Thomas Dalton schreef:
>> I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get
>> the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking
>> (even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size
>> where anyone actually uses it.
>
> I've had a bit of an argument with him recently about the decline of CZ
> (http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/02/04/write-a-thon-is-on-independent-notices/)
> and he assured me that CZ has been growing exponentially, and will be
> growing explosively, and that [[CZ:Statistics]] proved that.

I don't see a claim of exponential growth (which would be complete
rubbish), just "good news". I don't think linear growth (even slightly
below linear) is good news, personally.

>> It's a fraction of the size of
>> Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and
>> growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that
>> time).
>
> CZ is actually only about half WP's size at the same age, I think. I've
> plotted the growth of both sites in number of words, and it is a
> surpising difference. CZ started much larger than WP because they
> imported a lot of WP articles[*], and then grew linearly. After a year,
> both encyclopedias were the same size, but because of WP's exponential
> growth, it is now outpacing CZ.
>
> CZ's growth in number of words has only just begun to fall; its lack of
> new authors has been a problem for a much larger time.

My calculations come out as about 1/10 the size by articles and 1/3
the size by words (so their articles must be longer on average). It
doesn't really matter, though, when you have exponential vs linear,
the exponential is always going to win regardless of precise numbers.
(Of course, we're not growing exponentially any more, so I guess it's
possible they could eventually catch up, but we're talking decades...)

>> We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is
>> simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little
>> interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be
>> anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous
>> assumptions).
>
> Could be. To succeed, a new encyclopedia will have to either have a very
> dedicated team of authors, or find a specialistic niche (scholarpedia?),
> or be useful from the start; perhaps by starting off with WP's entire
> content. And I don't think we have seen WP's successor yet.

A dedicated team of authors won't do it - Wikipedia grew exponentially
because as it got bigger more people read it and more readers became
writers. If all the writing is done by a set team the growth will only
even be linear. A specialist niche is another matter entirely - wikis
are good for all kinds of things, it's only the market for wiki
general encyclopaedias that is filled.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Eugene van der Pijll
Thomas Dalton schreef:
> I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get
> the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking
> (even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size
> where anyone actually uses it.

I've had a bit of an argument with him recently about the decline of CZ
(http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/02/04/write-a-thon-is-on-independent-notices/)
and he assured me that CZ has been growing exponentially, and will be
growing explosively, and that [[CZ:Statistics]] proved that.

> It's a fraction of the size of
> Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and
> growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that
> time).

CZ is actually only about half WP's size at the same age, I think. I've
plotted the growth of both sites in number of words, and it is a
surpising difference. CZ started much larger than WP because they
imported a lot of WP articles[*], and then grew linearly. After a year,
both encyclopedias were the same size, but because of WP's exponential
growth, it is now outpacing CZ.

CZ's growth in number of words has only just begun to fall; its lack of
new authors has been a problem for a much larger time.

> We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is
> simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little
> interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be
> anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous
> assumptions).

Could be. To succeed, a new encyclopedia will have to either have a very
dedicated team of authors, or find a specialistic niche (scholarpedia?),
or be useful from the start; perhaps by starting off with WP's entire
content. And I don't think we have seen WP's successor yet.

Eugene

[*] In fact, they imported all of Wikipedia. But I'm only counting the
articles they changed.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Sage Ross
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:

> I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get
> the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking
> (even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size
> where anyone actually uses it. It's a fraction of the size of
> Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and
> growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that
> time). We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is
> simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little
> interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be
> anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous
> assumptions).
>

I also have been following their stats page (as well as their forums),
and I agree with the fundamental issue: Wikipedia had the first mover
advantage, and has proved good enough for enough people to prevent any
serious competition.

However, I don't think we should think of Citizendium as having
failed.  Certainly, it has failed to realize Sanger's and a few
others' hopes to be on its way to eclipsing Wikipedia.  But CZ has a
fairly stable community; it's shrinking a little, but so is
Wikipedia's community.  It's a free content project that is producing
some useful material, and some editors find it a nicer place to work
than Wikipedia.  It's licensed CC-by-SA 3.0, which means it will be
compatible with Wikipedia soon.  And a rather high proportion of
content is stuff that isn't present on Wikipedia.  The anti-Wikipedia
ethos of the project has also waned as they've begun to sort out their
own identity beyond "Wikipedia with real names where experts have
power".

Sanger keeps claiming that they aren't growing simply because they
haven't yet gotten serious about recruitment.  I don't find that
convincing, but it's not inconceivable that concerted efforts at
recruitment could result in another wave of growth or two (though
probably never exponential growth).

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Eugene van der Pijll
Carcharoth schreef:
> Weirdly, most of the history is not there:
> 
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Homeopathy&action=history
> 
> But has been moved to a draft page:
> 
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Homeopathy/Draft&action=history

That's how they do that there. The approved page is a copy; the draft is
moved to /Draft, and is a living document.

> So maybe I should have read that draft instead. It would be nice to
> know which versions were approved by the three editors above, and at
> what stage.

The exact version that is now at [[Homeopathy]] was approved by the
three editors. (These are "editors" in the CZ sense: experts in the
article's workgroup, Health.)

It's a bit suprising to see one of the parties to the "edit war" as an
approving editor...

Eugene

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Eugene van der Pijll :
> Charles Matthews schreef:
>> Guess what - sometimes you have to put up with the pesky
>> business of people needing to argue the matter out on talk pages.
>
> I've been following CZ for some time, and one gets the feeling that
> Larry Sanger doesn't really like arguementsi, or open discussion.

I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get
the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking
(even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size
where anyone actually uses it. It's a fraction of the size of
Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and
growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that
time). We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is
simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little
interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be
anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous
assumptions).

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Eugene van der Pijll
Charles Matthews schreef:
> Guess what - sometimes you have to put up with the pesky 
> business of people needing to argue the matter out on talk pages.

I've been following CZ for some time, and one gets the feeling that
Larry Sanger doesn't really like arguementsi, or open discussion.

One of the rules at CZ is that you cannot complain about another editor
at all. This is to prevent long discussions on who is right, but
according to Adam Cuerden's blog post, it is one of the reasons why the
Homeopathy article is so bad.

The "anti-homeopathy" side started to make complaints about the other
side, and regardless of whether the complaints were justified, they were
templated with {{nocomplaints}}. (No [[WP:DTTR]] at CZ...) And then the
other side won.

The idea behind the nocomplaints policy seems a good one, perhaps, but 
in reality, it hampers discussion. After one of the latest intervention
by Larry Sanger, the reply was "I don't think you should have removed
that", which was promptly replaced by another {{nocomplaints}}...

I think there is a lesson in here for the other thread in this mailing
list at the moment: A zero-tolerance policy on incivility will be
interpreted loosely at times, which will hamper discussion, which leads
to bad articles if the number of editors is low (like on CZ or at
low-visibility WP articles).

Eugene

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Carcharoth
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
> Nathan wrote:
>> I say, let them congregate on Citizendium. We should have a template
>> {{trycitizendium}} that we can post on the pages of our more aggressive POV
>> pushers.
>
>
> The template need not limit itself to Citizendium, though the symbolism
> of having it in the template name has a certain value.  If the posted
> list contains several other such approved projects, with a one-line
> blurb about what they are, the aggressive person may more easily and
> quietly find one to his liking without actually stumbling upon
> WikipediaReview.

It can include sister WMF projects as well. Though care should be
taken to not push malcontents on unsuspecting people. It is best to
have a mentor or guide that can introduce you. It all depends whether
the reason for the breakdown in editing relations is due to the
person, the topic, or the environment. Sometimes it is all three.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Ray Saintonge
Nathan wrote:
> I say, let them congregate on Citizendium. We should have a template
> {{trycitizendium}} that we can post on the pages of our more aggressive POV
> pushers.


The template need not limit itself to Citizendium, though the symbolism 
of having it in the template name has a certain value.  If the posted 
list contains several other such approved projects, with a one-line 
blurb about what they are, the aggressive person may more easily and 
quietly find one to his liking without actually stumbling upon 
WikipediaReview.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Charles Matthews
David Gerard wrote:
> Which in practice will end up a bit like this:
> http://reinderdijkhuis.com/wordpress/2009/02/12/citizendium-the-encyclopedia-only-pro-homeopathy-editors-can-edit/
>
> Precis: experts are not a panacea.
>   
Mmmm, Larry of course does have a valid point in there, which is that 
edit warring correlates with a lower quality of article.  It looks like 
his solution is this: decide who should win the edit wars in advance. 
Bingo!  No serious edit wars.  Sadly, as this case apparently indicates, 
the syllogism that this will get you a higher quality of article isn't 
valid.  Guess what - sometimes you have to put up with the pesky 
business of people needing to argue the matter out on talk pages.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Nathan
What Citizendium's Homeopathy article shows more than anything is that a
wide base of editors, and therefore a wide audience, is essential for the
success of Wikipedia or any similar project. The article shows a distinct
lack of the cleansing effects of sunlight; few people read it, few people
contribute to it, and it's become the home of fringe POV editors who have
tried and failed to sling the same on Wikipedia. Citizendium might do better
if it made a more concerted attempt to discern between actual experts in
fact and self-described experts in name only, but they apparently have
chosen not to do that or don't have enough people from which to pick.

I say, let them congregate on Citizendium. We should have a template
{{trycitizendium}} that we can post on the pages of our more aggressive POV
pushers.

Nathan
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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Ian Woollard
On 16/02/2009, Charles Matthews  wrote:
> The good articles are good basically because smart people take the
> trouble to research them and write them to a decent standard. The
> article on topic X is good, when it is, not usually because A, an expert
> on X, has filled it with A's expert knowledge, but because B and C and
> maybe others have looked at some literature on the topic and done a
> decent job of constructing a precis for the general reader.

To be slightly more accurate, the wikipedia does indeed depend heavily
on experts and smart and knowledgeable people, but only after their
material has been published; and only then if the publisher is judged
to have good filtering processes in place to minimise the non
negligible chance that these people are wrong or unbalanced about what
they say.

Looked at like this, Sanger wants to take this a stage further- he
wants to actually *weaken* the fact checking by using unfiltered
experts saying more or less whatever they want. I would expect that
this can result in poorer articles than the wikipedias model, in
addition to the many obvious problems about how you find and validate
and keep these experts engaged.

> Charles

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/2/16 Carcharoth :
> One thing that strikes me is that both articles are difficult to read
> and poorly written. In other words, when something is controversial
> and has a high rate of editing, the readability quality invariably
> decreases in the ensuing chaos.

That doesn't just apply to controversial subjects. Any subject with a
high edit rate shows the same problem - current events, for example
(they generally end up being timelines in very poor disguise). What it
needs is for someone to periodically go through the whole thing
tidying it up - not a fun job, admittedly, but a necessary one. (This
does happen with some articles, and you can tell the difference.)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Carcharoth
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:29 PM, David Gerard  wrote:



> However, the Citizendium article on homeopathy is still an
> NPOV disaster.

I hadn't visited Citizendium for ages.

It is an interesting exercise to read through the Wikipedia article on
Homeopathy and the Citizendium one, and see the strengths and
weaknesses of both, and also the similarities and places where the
differences are very subtle (different order of sections) and less
subtle ("Professional homeopaths: who are they?"). But equally, the
Wikipedia article lacks a section on homeopaths, professional or
otherwise.

One thing that strikes me is that both articles are difficult to read
and poorly written. In other words, when something is controversial
and has a high rate of editing, the readability quality invariably
decreases in the ensuing chaos.

The name of the three editors who have approved the Citizendium
article makes interesting reading as well:

Gareth Leng
D. Matt Innis
Dana Ullman

Weirdly, most of the history is not there:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Homeopathy&action=history

But has been moved to a draft page:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Homeopathy/Draft&action=history

So maybe I should have read that draft instead. It would be nice to
know which versions were approved by the three editors above, and at
what stage.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Charles Matthews
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
>
> 1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
> quality.
>
> 2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
>
> 3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
>
> 4. Aggressive people who won't permit quality will
> follow an article.
>
> 5. Over the long term, the dynamics of wikipedias
> practices will not prevent editors who will not
> allow quality on wikipedia from dragging it down
> to the level that they aggressively and persistently
> insist on bringing it down to. There are no working
> heuristics to allow it to transcend that attractor.
>
> *Understanding* the logical flaws of those 5 statements
> is left to the student.
>   
It would be rash to say you couldn't find any examples where this is 
true - there is a large selection of articles.  It might be a fair model 
for the article about, for example, a controversial Governor of Alaska 
who didn't get chosen as a candidate for Vice-President.  But you could 
click Random Article for a little while before you came up with an 
article to which this argument really would apply.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread David Gerard
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews :
> K. Peachey wrote:

>  >'But the failure to take seriously the suggestion of any role of
> experts can only be considered a failure of imagination,' writes Sanger.
> 'One need only ask what an open, bottom-up system with a role for expert
> decision-making would be like.'

> In other words, despite all appearances, CZ is superior to WP. Well, I
> think we saw where this was going a little earlier.


Which in practice will end up a bit like this:

http://reinderdijkhuis.com/wordpress/2009/02/12/citizendium-the-encyclopedia-only-pro-homeopathy-editors-can-edit/

Precis: experts are not a panacea.

cf: Stirling Newberry's many posts several years ago to wikien-l and
wikipedia-l pointing out that the problem with a lot of experts is
that they got to be experts by pushing a POV better than anyone else.

(Larry Sanger is aware of this blog post, and dismisses it as missing
the point. However, the Citizendium article on homeopathy is still an
NPOV disaster.)

In any case, we're not short of experts on Wikipedia. You can hardly
move without bumping into a Ph.D. It's not nicknamed "Unemployed Ph.D
Deathmatch" for nothing.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Charles Matthews
K. Peachey wrote:
> Just a Heads Up slashdot has new article about wikipedia up and it's
> use of experts - "The Role of Experts In Wikipedia"
> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/0210251
>   
 >Sanger says the main reason that Wikipedia's articles are as good as 
they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom 
deference is paid, although voluntarily, but that some articles suffer 
precisely because there are so many aggressive people who 'guard' 
articles and drive off others (PDF), including people more expert than 
they are.

The good articles are good basically because smart people take the 
trouble to research them and write them to a decent standard. The 
article on topic X is good, when it is, not usually because A, an expert 
on X, has filled it with A's expert knowledge, but because B and C and 
maybe others have looked at some literature on the topic and done a 
decent job of constructing a precis for the general reader. I would make 
an exception for some areas (e.g. mathematics, medicine) where an expert 
is going to have a view that is 1000% clearer than someone coming in 
from outside. The bit about "deference" shows a fixation on the more 
combative aspects of WP. Most articles aren't that contentious.

 >'Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there 
is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward 
continual improvement,' writes Sanger.

No reason for Sanger to think that, since he continually misses the 
point of the wiki. Most articles, numerically speaking, just wait until 
someone who cares comes along and upgrades them.

 >Wikipedia's success cannot be explained by its radical egalitarianism 
or its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, 
openness, and bottom-up management and there is no doubt that many 
experts would, if left to their own devices, dismantle the openness that 
drives the success of Wikipedia.

Yeah, we know about such experts, but they are not experts _on 
Wikipedia_! How about a little respect for the expertise of people who 
spend time doing it, rather than talking about it? 

 >'But the failure to take seriously the suggestion of any role of 
experts can only be considered a failure of imagination,' writes Sanger. 
'One need only ask what an open, bottom-up system with a role for expert 
decision-making would be like.'

In other words, despite all appearances, CZ is superior to WP. Well, I 
think we saw where this was going a little earlier. 

The brass neck involved in implying that WP is "unimaginative", which is 
largely wrong, rather than too utopian, which is certainly an arguable 
point, is breath-taking.  A propos FR, or other such things, there has 
been this constant debate in which the "pure wiki" model is held up 
against what amount to pragmatic suggestions for change in aid of the 
encyclopedic mission.  This discussion goes on all the time.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Ian Woollard
Well... that does happen. It's basically WP:OWNership. I find that
ownership usually, but not always, stops an article reaching its
maximum quality and/or coverage.

But ownership doesn't seem to dominate the wikipedia. And sometimes if
the owner really is really good then the article can end up just fine.

On 16/02/2009, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen  wrote:
> Carl Beckhorn wrote:
>> Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be
>> worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the
>> following claim is quite accurate to my experience:
>>
>>   Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a
>>   random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most
>>   persistent and aggressive people who follow an article.
>>
>
> It is a nice use of rhetoric, but accurate? NOWAI!
>
> Let me paraphrase it in a way that will make the logical flaws
> more apparent.
>
> In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
>
> 1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
> quality.
>
> 2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
>
> 3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
>
> 4. Aggressive people who won't permit quality will
> follow an article.
>
> 5. Over the long term, the dynamics of wikipedias
> practices will not prevent editors who will not
> allow quality on wikipedia from dragging it down
> to the level that they aggressively and persistently
> insist on bringing it down to. There are no working
> heuristics to allow it to transcend that attractor.
>
> *Understanding* the logical flaws of those 5 statements
> is left to the student.
>
>
> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>
>
>
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-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Carl Beckhorn wrote:
> Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be 
> worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the
> following claim is quite accurate to my experience:
>
>   Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a 
>   random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most 
>   persistent and aggressive people who follow an article. 
>   

It is a nice use of rhetoric, but accurate? NOWAI!

Let me paraphrase it in a way that will make the logical flaws
more apparent.

In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:

1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
quality.

2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.

3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.

4. Aggressive people who won't permit quality will
follow an article.

5. Over the long term, the dynamics of wikipedias
practices will not prevent editors who will not
allow quality on wikipedia from dragging it down
to the level that they aggressively and persistently
insist on bringing it down to. There are no working
heuristics to allow it to transcend that attractor.

*Understanding* the logical flaws of those 5 statements
is left to the student.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen



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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-15 Thread Carl Beckhorn
Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be 
worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the
following claim is quite accurate to my experience:

  Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a 
  random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most 
  persistent and aggressive people who follow an article. 

- Carl 

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-15 Thread Tim Starling
K. Peachey wrote:
> Just a Heads Up slashdot has new article about wikipedia up and it's
> use of experts - "The Role of Experts In Wikipedia"
> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/0210251

"Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed
predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the
question of the proper role of experts."

Strange, I thought it was because he stopped being paid for it.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/My_resignation--Larry_Sanger

"As you know, since the beginning of February, I've been working on
Wikipedia and Nupedia as a part-time volunteer. I haven't been able to do
nearly as much as I wish I could do, but job-hunting and money-making
activities necessarily occupy a great deal of my time. Unfortunately, I do
not expect to see, within the foreseeable future, any sort of compensation
for the time and responsibility I've continued to hold in the projects.
Now that I'm unemployed, I can ill afford to spend my free time this way.
This is, I'm afraid, by far the most important reason for my resignation."

He then forgot about Wikipedia completely for a few years, and re-emerged
a critic once the media started paying attention to it.

-- Tim Starling


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[WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-15 Thread K. Peachey
Just a Heads Up slashdot has new article about wikipedia up and it's
use of experts - "The Role of Experts In Wikipedia"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/0210251

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