Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 21 December 2010 19:58, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm Prof Goldman has followed up saying he was wrong, though we still of course suck, though he still consults Wikipedia daily: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict.htm - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/21/10 4:17 PM, Carcharoth wrote: Has anyone ever suggested a way for people to highlight a mistake and click to bring it to someone else's attention? But without logging any IP address. I suppose that sort of system would get overwhelmed by trolls very quickly. Maybe an off-wiki system to allow people using Wikipedia to generate a note for themselves on corrections to make later on? That seems more complex than fixing a simple typo. If I can go in and make a simple spelling correction it's done very quickly. On the other hand if I need to explain what needs fixing and where it is in a site it's just not worth my while. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/23/10 12:41 AM, David Gerard wrote: On 23 December 2010 02:37, Tony Sidawaytonysida...@gmail.com wrote: I have to disagree strongly with the calls for WYSIWYG editing, not that it's likely to materialize anytime soon. Wikipedia needs to encourage people to concentrate on meaningful content, not dick around with cosmetic matters. I think our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation. I don't have WMF numbers, but one contributor on mediawiki-l, who runs an intranet covering a large public service organisation in the US, reported a remarkable uptake in wiki participation just by going to FCKeditor. The users are smart, capable and competent people in their fields, but were seriously put off by wikitext. Wasn't the whole idea of wiki markup to have something simple that anybody can learn? It should continue to be the case that the essential wiki markup can fit onto a single page that an editor can print ans pin to the wall beside his computer as a cheat-sheet. What doesn't fit on that page isn't basic. Templates are only useful if you know which are there if you need them, and have the advanced skills needed to manipulate them to desired effect. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 28 December 2010 12:33, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Wasn't the whole idea of wiki markup to have something simple that anybody can learn? It should continue to be the case that the essential wiki markup can fit onto a single page that an editor can print ans pin to the wall beside his computer as a cheat-sheet. What doesn't fit on that page isn't basic. There's various levels here, all of which need to be removed: * What doesn't fit on a single-page printed cheat sheet isn't basic. * What doesn't fit in a pop-up box on a single screen isn't basic. * What doesn't fit in a line under the edit box isn't basic. * Wikitext isn't basic unless you assume HTML, which you can't. Wikitext is however powerful, and there are 160,000 editors in any given month on en:wp who cope with it. But that's a drop in the ocean. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/23/10 1:31 PM, George Herbert wrote: The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but one that all western society members who are modern communications literate are fundamentally equipped to handle. Some will fail at it but you really just need to be good at electronic communications, functionally literate, and social enough to handle basic give and take discussions. This seems to beg the question: How do you define modern communications literate? Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/27/10 9:04 PM, Fred Bauder wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Ray Saintongesainto...@telus.net wrote: On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote: I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing. I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites. snip The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites. Indeed. Just out of interest, how many people here would consider devoting the time and energy and resources into setting up a Wikipedia fork? I know some active Wikipedians have done so, but sustaining such forks can be very difficult. What practical steps can be taken to encourage a diversity of useful and sustainable forks that demonstrate what is and is not possible? Or is th etime better spent improving WMF projects? Carcharoth I'm not available for serious sustained work on any fork but Wikinfo, but I can help people get set up. There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into. Absolutely. It comes down to two issues: What Wikimedia *can* provide, and what the new project *must* provide. In addition to funding the new project must indeed provide a vision. A working WYSIWYG is indeed one such possibility, but the mediawiki software may not be so helpful to them. My idea was somewhat more modest in that it was content based. Although it would not reflect my personal philosophy something like Conservapedia is something to be encouraged. It's vision would likely only allow a limited and manageable subset of Wikipedia articles. Interwiki links from Wikipedia to that project could be given for those who would like an alternative view of the subject with the understanding that the other project may not be bound by NPOV. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/21/10 4:17 PM, Carcharoth wrote: Has anyone ever suggested a way for people to highlight a mistake and click to bring it to someone else's attention? But without logging any IP address. I suppose that sort of system would get overwhelmed by trolls very quickly. Maybe an off-wiki system to allow people using Wikipedia to generate a note for themselves on corrections to make later on? That seems more complex than fixing a simple typo. If I can go in and make a simple spelling correction it's done very quickly. On the other hand if I need to explain what needs fixing and where it is in a site it's just not worth my while. Ec This would be a generic equivalent of the Fix family of templates based on Template:Fix I hate this coding but selecting the text which needs attention and hitting enter could create a popup where the problem could be explained or at least noted, if the person did not want to spend time on it. Selection from a checklist would put tags like spelling verification needed Source? in at the end of the highlighted text. We have a wide variety of such template, although I would be at a loss to remember them all or use them without a crutch like the popup I suggest. A new editor, could never, of course. These templates are simple but there are lots of them, often duplicating each other. Fred Bauder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: On 12/23/10 1:31 PM, George Herbert wrote: The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but one that all western society members who are modern communications literate are fundamentally equipped to handle. Some will fail at it but you really just need to be good at electronic communications, functionally literate, and social enough to handle basic give and take discussions. This seems to beg the question: How do you define modern communications literate? Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, smartphone user. Those are a 95%+ solution for kids and young adults, if not 99%, and are easy enough for older adults (my parents, etc) to the point that they're arguably better than an 80% solution for the US population. If we were that good, we'd be golden. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:16 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: On 12/23/10 1:31 PM, George Herbert wrote: The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but one that all western society members who are modern communications literate are fundamentally equipped to handle. Some will fail at it This seems to beg the question: How do you define modern communications literate? Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, smartphone user. Those are a 95%+ solution for kids and young adults, if not 99%, and are easy enough for older adults (my parents, etc) to the point that they're arguably better than an 80% solution for the US population. Those examples are also widely used all over the world, including in regions where the Internet is still new. Most highly popular services start by letting each participant define themselves, and the default contribution that people are encouraged to make is usually permament and not subject to removal by others. One of the unkind and awkward aspects of the Wikipedia experience is, that the default requested contribution is an edit, new page, or upload, all of which may be reverted or followed by warnings and challenges, by people who expect you to RTFM to learn how to behave. Some possible improvements: - add new things that all users are encouraged to contribute (first-class citizens of the list 'ways to further the project'), which are entirely within the user's control: information about themselves and their environment, joining wikiprojects and work groups, taking part in polls and usability studies, answering questions from other users and readers - make a user's contributions permanently visible to them, if not to others (modulo vandalism), taking advantage of permalinks and file histories, even when those contribs have for now been removed from the default public view(s) of an article, or when they have been quarantined from view by other users for concerns about copyright status. this improves on the crude tool of deletion and keeps contributors from feeling that their hard work has been destroyed or disrespected, often due only to it being incomplete or not-yet-proven-notable. - develop better sandboxing policies, tools, and effective sandbox environments, so that new users can truly experiment and get used to editing before they are challenged, reverted, deleted, and blocked. Sam. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 7:40 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: There's various levels here, all of which need to be removed: * What doesn't fit on a single-page printed cheat sheet isn't basic. * What doesn't fit in a pop-up box on a single screen isn't basic. * What doesn't fit in a line under the edit box isn't basic. * Wikitext isn't basic unless you assume HTML, which you can't. Wikitext is however powerful, and there are 160,000 editors in any given month on en:wp who cope with it. But that's a drop in the ocean. Moving in the right direction. If we did this to articles, but not to templates, we'd at least have the confusing parts contained in their own little magic black box (or green box, or however else you want to express a template in the editing interface.). We could reasonably get that down to Section tags, emphasis tags, table tags, image tags, hyperlinks, lists, and template transclusions, plus the nowiki and comment functions. Some may argue, but everything else is superfluous to editing an article, or could be wrapped up nice and neat as a template to hide the deep magic of wikitext from the layperson. -Steph ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 6:09 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Those examples are also widely used all over the world, including in regions where the Internet is still new. Most highly popular services start by letting each participant define themselves, and the default contribution that people are encouraged to make is usually permament and not subject to removal by others. One of the unkind and awkward aspects of the Wikipedia experience is, that the default requested contribution is an edit, new page, or upload, all of which may be reverted or followed by warnings and challenges, by people who expect you to RTFM to learn how to behave. Some possible improvements: - add new things that all users are encouraged to contribute (first-class citizens of the list 'ways to further the project'), which are entirely within the user's control: information about themselves and their environment, joining wikiprojects and work groups, taking part in polls and usability studies, answering questions from other users and readers - make a user's contributions permanently visible to them, if not to others (modulo vandalism), taking advantage of permalinks and file histories, even when those contribs have for now been removed from the default public view(s) of an article, or when they have been quarantined from view by other users for concerns about copyright status. this improves on the crude tool of deletion and keeps contributors from feeling that their hard work has been destroyed or disrespected, often due only to it being incomplete or not-yet-proven-notable. - develop better sandboxing policies, tools, and effective sandbox environments, so that new users can truly experiment and get used to editing before they are challenged, reverted, deleted, and blocked. Sam. Soft deletion. I'm still a fan actually. While we still have way too many deleted revisions both from before and after oversight and revision deletion were introduced that are not fit to be seen, I think it would be worth revisiting a default form of deletion that preserves a public history, and reserving hard deletion and oversight-ish things for things that really need to go away forever. With regard to copyright though, unfortunately, those deletions do need to be hard. We can't knowingly let Wikipedia be used as a store for copyright violating materials, even if they are stored just for the benefit of one user, otherwise WMF could face legal liability issues.(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just an open source advocate with some personal interest in copyright law.) However, we should at least preserve a personal record of those contributions without the actual content, so that the user can understand why they were removed and learn from it. -Steph ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 2:44 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote: On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Stephanie Daugherty sdaughe...@gmail.com wrote: Of further concern to me is that we have far exceeded the limits of a wiki as an effective collaboration platform. Collaboration at small scale remains possible but talk pages dont scale well at all to tens of thousands of users. Most articles don't have tens of thousands of users. Most only have tens to fifties. Only the very largest discussions need to involve all active users, and even there the numbers taking part are not in the tens of thousands. I agree with you there. However, at any given time, that's a good guestimate of how many editors we have that can reasonably be considered active. The typical numbers are probably in the neighborhood of 25-500 depending on the issue, and those discussions fall apart even at that scale. Current archiving and hatboxes can be extremely disruptive to discussions at project-level, but they are absolutely necessary under the current system in order to keep the page readable. Project-scale discussions are important because they do affect everybody, in that every participant in the project is a stakeholder, and they are vitally important in guiding our future, yet, in most cases, they break down long before anything resembling consensus can be reached. The combination of talk page structure and a vigorous discussion can make it very easy to keep growing a conversation without ever making progress towards consensus, and with only a little persistance required to take part, we have our own form of fillibuster that allows only a very small handful of editors to preserve the status quo on almost any issue by keeping the discussion moving away from consensus. The process of large discussions is so painful and stressful that it's been a major factor in retirements and wikisuicides - editors that are passionate enough about the project to participate in these sort of discussions tend to be scarred pretty badly by the experience. Further the software was never designed to be used in the way we use it to implement process on wiki. Complex template based processes and conversations based around heavy template usage are unnatural, inefiicent, error prone, and have too steep a learning curve for newcomers. I agree templates can be confusing, but they provide great flexibility. If you are going to move to a different system, it has to be one that editors can make changes to and not rely on developers to make requested changes. For it to be an improvement over the current system, I think it needs to be an in-between. There needs to be enough cost to implementing and changing a template that it's not a trivial thing to do, otherwise we'll see template creep continue to be a problem. Templates simply shouldn't work in a lot of the ways they are now used. Our AFD process is an example of template creep going too far. It's a heavily template driven process, that's confusing and unwieldy enough that the regulars tend to use javascript tools just to navigate through it. Templates weren't built to do things that complicated, and using them in a way like that is prone both to breakage, and to scaring users off. As a radical solution, define templates at the page level. One article, one template. Give us a form-based interface to move through a template-based article. Make heavy use of advanced formatting within the templates themselves if you must, but advanced formatting should be completely absent from articles themselves - in other words, templates should have access to more markup than articles, and articles should lose the ability to use the more complex markup features. This sort of approach has a few advantages to us. The biggest is that it allows us to impose a consistent style on articles. which would give us a more professional feel, and would allow us to make changes across the project in a consistent manner. The second advantage, is that it gives editors a framework, to know what kind of information we want to see within an article. Templates become a sort of standard outline for an article as opposed to the sort of templates we are used to. Aside from that, move the articles towards semantic markup, and define styles for that markup across the project. A new what you see is what you mean editor for that markup would completely remove any need for formatting considerations from the average editor, make it easy to produce content for that markup, and would enable software tools to be used more effectively (and in many cases, more safely) for the advanced users. It may even make it possible to validate content to some degree for accuracy as well as spelling, grammar, and style. These issues are critical to fix if we are to scale but there is so much inertia that i fear it would only be possible if changes were forced. There are a lot of well established editors that
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/22/10 3:49 AM, Carcharoth wrote: On jargon, I still think Neutral point of view was a terrible name that confused neutrality with lack of bias. You cannot sum up a policy like NPOV in a single phrase, That last fact is precisely why it was such a good choice. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote: I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing. I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites. The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials. I don't see licensing as a big barrier. Because that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement - Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. - without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and expected*, and everyone else joins in. The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites. Perhaps Sanger could have succeeded if he had put more chips in his site than on his shoulder. For many, seeing the kind of budget that the WMF finds necessary can also be an intimidating factor. They could start with a narrower topic-specific project, but all still need to come to terms with the realities of financing their own site. Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely famous, beyond merely mainstream, to being part of the assumed background. We're an institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the last eight years a very special wtf moment technically. It means we can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity. (I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.) It's in the nature of institutions to seek uninhibited growth without the need to say so. Business strives for a bigger market share as an indicator of success. Since the total market share is always 100% that can only come at the expense of others. So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc materials. We can't change the world all on our own. The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our mission, for example. One of the most vibrant things that still happens is the independent development of other language Wikipedias without the need to have an exact copy of what appears in a dominant language. Media-wiki software is fully available to these other sites. Instructions on How to start your wiki could also be helpful. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 28 December 2010 03:07, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: (I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.) It's in the nature of institutions to seek uninhibited growth without the need to say so. Business strives for a bigger market share as an indicator of success. Since the total market share is always 100% that can only come at the expense of others. An important point here: we never actually sought this. It just happened this way! - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote: I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing. I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites. snip The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites. Indeed. Just out of interest, how many people here would consider devoting the time and energy and resources into setting up a Wikipedia fork? I know some active Wikipedians have done so, but sustaining such forks can be very difficult. What practical steps can be taken to encourage a diversity of useful and sustainable forks that demonstrate what is and is not possible? Or is th etime better spent improving WMF projects? Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
On 26 December 2010 00:28, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: TVTropes has forums which see some use: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/topics.php Yep. Note that those are running on separate forum software, rather than something added to their wiki software. (Also that TVtropes pages have talk pages too, though they generally don't see a lot of action.) - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
Maybe it would be better to try to define what the features we need for better communication are. I'm not quite awake yet, but here are a few thoughts: - Ability to follow conversations without having to jump around across multiple talk pages. - Ability to be notified of conversations that are interesting, for broad values of interesting. (Conversations about watchlisted pages, in particular categories, or part of particular wikiprojects for a start.) - A single page newsfeed of comments that combines conversations we are following and topics we've defined as interesting, as well as optionally RC feeds. - Ability to comment directly from a particular change, which could supplement or replace the edit summary. This also gets a lot of conversations off the traditional user talk page, because much of what we bring up on a user's talk page is about some edit they made. Keeping this with the change in question makes it easier for others to join the conversation. - Complete replacement for threadmode talk pages, possibly to the point where the talk tab gets replaced with a discuss tab. - Ability to tie in conversations elsewhere seemlessly without duplication. For example, a conversation may start over a particular page, but the issue being discussed is really a particular infobox. A cc feature used judiciously (and possibly one that's editable) would help this. This would be most helpful if you could CC another article's discussion, a wikiproject, and/or particular individuals. - Whatever solution needs to eliminate archives and hatboxes as we know them now. If conversations are to archive it should be straightforward to restart them, and doing so shouldn't be considered a taboo. Liquidthreads is a start, but it seems to me like the mission was figure out how to bolt forums onto an existing talk page, without enough consideration as to what problems need to be solved. It's an interesting hack, and it has let us experiment about what works and what doesn't, but without change it's not going anywhere. It's been my experience that talk pages melt down around 15 or so participants if the topic is contentious. A little below that and you can have a productive discussion, too much below that and you aren't getting anywhere. I think many of our best collaborations are small teams of 2-4 dedicated people, with a few more that come and go. Discussions between collaborators tend to fit into several categories: - One on one discussions between editors for mentoring, collaboration, or simply to find out WTF? - Asking is this ok? before making a change. (This is fine, but some of these would be better to just be bold.) - Asking what was wrong with that? after making a change that was reverted. - Small collaborations. - Local uncontroversial applications of policy and process. (Local, as in local to an article). The typical AFD falls into this one, with 2-20 participants. - Controversial applications of policy and process. Highly contentious AFDs, and virtually all requests for advanced permissions. Reason tends to go out the window on these, and the signal to noise can be really bad. - Global applications of policy and process. (Mass deletion, or controversial mass-changes.) - Dispute resolution and arbitration processes. - Project-wide discussions. Policy changes and the like. We need to have effective communication for all of these that can preserve a high signal to noise ratio, and that can scale well all the way from one on one to project-wide discussions. Right now, we're fairly strong at small discussions, but we break down horribly on big ones. It's also too easy to disrupt a large-scale discussion, and since we rely on consensus to make decisions, a little disruption can sometimes delay reaching consensus indefinantely, and can do so without crossing the thin line into what is perceived as misconduct. Also worth considering are social problems. Disruptive editing, personal attacks, privacy violations, and the like, although not technical problems, do have to be considered when designing discussion systems, because they are social issues that can be partly solved through good implementation. On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 7:37 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 26 December 2010 00:28, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: TVTropes has forums which see some use: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/topics.php Yep. Note that those are running on separate forum software, rather than something added to their wiki software. (Also that TVtropes pages have talk pages too, though they generally don't see a lot of action.) - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
I think trying to bolt on WYSIWYG to the current parser is a mistake. Even if it works there will be complex markup cases still that are beyond a WYSIWYG editor (and way beyond 99% of potential editors). Either replace the current parser, or strip out the complicated parts systematically. If you want to strip down the current parser, you could do this by making articles a small subset of the markup, and letting full markup be used in templates. Gradually depreciate, and then turn off features that are too complex. A good start would be HTML code in articles, it's not necessary, and it lets people introduce inconsistencies that look unprofessional, as well as leaves text in an article that's hard to edit. If you want to start over, start simple, and think WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean) rather than WYSIWYG. That is, the editor should make it easy to see the structure of the text and edit it without concern for the final formatting. LyX is a good example of this sort of interface, although the underlying LaTeX markup probably isn't what we want (just as complex as what we have now, it's still too presentation oriented, etc). If we end up replacing the parser, the only way to do that smoothly, would be to run both parsers at the same time during the transition period. Those articles that can be converted automatically are converted early on. Software restrictions (perhaps an edit filter) can prevent starting an article with the old markup, and discourage reverting to versions with the old markup. There would be a large number of articles that couldn't be automatically converted. There are a few ways to handle that. A large manual conversion effort would be needed. At some point, we should disallow saving changes to the old markup (forces editors to convert the article to edit it, or allow an automatic conversion that could break the article after a certian deadline. In either case, the process would be painful, but would pay off in the end with improved editorship, and I suspect greatly improved article quality. Editors that aren't familiar with the more advanced markup constructs tend to have to dance around them when editing, and that makes editing harder, as well as leaves behind broken markup. That means a lot of fixes end up either not happening, or happening anyway, and doing more damage than what they are meant to fix. This would amount to the largest usability project we've undertaken no mater how we go forward, but the payoffs would be enormous. On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 4:31 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:51 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 December 2010 11:48, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand, they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG). It's still annoying, though. Yeah. It won't be a happener on WMF sites, I think, until WMF has money to throw at developers to develop something that actually works and has fidelity with wikitext as it's used. This is a *big and hairy* problem that interested parties have been dashing their foreheads against for *years*. Right. The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but one that all western society members who are modern communications literate are fundamentally equipped to handle. Some will fail at it but you really just need to be good at electronic communications, functionally literate, and social enough to handle basic give and take discussions. Very few people master the markup; very many fewer than that can hack or understand the underlying code. I'm a coder; I've dived into the MW parser on and off, and other parts of it, to understand functional behaviors better. But I also do outreach and computer training at times, and most normal people could never approach that level, and find wiki markup onerous when I ask them about it... -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not about what you are taught to believe. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
Just to add, If we go with a new markup, make it XML based, please, and validate. There are existing tools for working with XML that can be leveraged both in building a parser, and in building interfaces and tools. XML assures that the markup is machine readable AND writable in all cases, which eliminates a lot of hell with using automated tools. Being easy to validate also eliminates a lot of hell with manually editing the code - you can make sure at the time text is saved that it will parse, even if it won't parse as expected, it will be easy to fix. We could even reuse an existing XML application like DocBook if so desired. Making it XML also means that upgrading the markup can be done less painfully in the future, even if the markup completely changes, XSLT offers a means to convert one XML markup to another predictably. There's also a side benefit. Almost all modern browsers can parse, style, and display XML natively, either by directly applying CSS styles or by applying XSLT to render the XML as XHTML. That means we can offload the parsing to the browser if so desired, and we could eliminate a lot of overhead for the site in doing so. The only major downside is that XML is much more verbose than wikimarkup. The learning code to produce basic documents directly (without a WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM editor) is a tad steeper, but becomes shallow after that, as once you understand the basics, everything else is easy. More verbose markup means more typing for those of us that do things by hand though, which does present a disadvantage. A good editing interface though with code completion, and a strong WYSIWYM or WYSIWYG editor with keyboard shortcuts would mostly negate this disadvantage. On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Stephanie Daugherty sdaughe...@gmail.comwrote: I think trying to bolt on WYSIWYG to the current parser is a mistake. Even if it works there will be complex markup cases still that are beyond a WYSIWYG editor (and way beyond 99% of potential editors). Either replace the current parser, or strip out the complicated parts systematically. If you want to strip down the current parser, you could do this by making articles a small subset of the markup, and letting full markup be used in templates. Gradually depreciate, and then turn off features that are too complex. A good start would be HTML code in articles, it's not necessary, and it lets people introduce inconsistencies that look unprofessional, as well as leaves text in an article that's hard to edit. If you want to start over, start simple, and think WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean) rather than WYSIWYG. That is, the editor should make it easy to see the structure of the text and edit it without concern for the final formatting. LyX is a good example of this sort of interface, although the underlying LaTeX markup probably isn't what we want (just as complex as what we have now, it's still too presentation oriented, etc). If we end up replacing the parser, the only way to do that smoothly, would be to run both parsers at the same time during the transition period. Those articles that can be converted automatically are converted early on. Software restrictions (perhaps an edit filter) can prevent starting an article with the old markup, and discourage reverting to versions with the old markup. There would be a large number of articles that couldn't be automatically converted. There are a few ways to handle that. A large manual conversion effort would be needed. At some point, we should disallow saving changes to the old markup (forces editors to convert the article to edit it, or allow an automatic conversion that could break the article after a certian deadline. In either case, the process would be painful, but would pay off in the end with improved editorship, and I suspect greatly improved article quality. Editors that aren't familiar with the more advanced markup constructs tend to have to dance around them when editing, and that makes editing harder, as well as leaves behind broken markup. That means a lot of fixes end up either not happening, or happening anyway, and doing more damage than what they are meant to fix. This would amount to the largest usability project we've undertaken no mater how we go forward, but the payoffs would be enormous. On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 4:31 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:51 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 December 2010 11:48, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand, they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their work
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Stephanie Daugherty sdaughe...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe it would be better to try to define what the features we need for better communication are. I'm not quite awake yet, but here are a few thoughts: - Ability to follow conversations without having to jump around across multiple talk pages. At the end of the day, they are separate talk pages that the majority of people will want to follow separately, so any such function to follow things across multiple pages would require the user concerned to mark the pages as such. This seems like additional watchlist functionality is what you are after (i.e. sub-watchlists). The current workarounds are: (a) to create accounts purely to maintain separate watchlists on separate topics; or (b) to list pages you want to watch on a subpage of your userspace and use related changes on that page. The latter has a few disadvantages: (i) less easy to maintain than a system where you click pages to watch and unwatch them; (ii) others can publicly see which pages you are watching; (iii) some of the additional features of watchlists are not available through 'related changes'. - Ability to be notified of conversations that are interesting, for broad values of interesting. (Conversations about watchlisted pages, in particular categories, or part of particular wikiprojects for a start.) This requires either people to categorise/tag the threads appropriately (this is done already for AfD), or for those wanting to follow the topics to tag them accordingly. I would love to be able to split up my watchlist several times over by topic, and tag them according to why I've watchlisted them. The ability to tag individual threads is, I believe, one of the big advantages of LiquidThreads or any forum-based approach. - A single page newsfeed of comments that combines conversations we are following and topics we've defined as interesting, as well as optionally RC feeds. Sometimes combining everything into one feed is the wrong way to go. The option should be available, but some people skim the surface too much when overloaded this way, and end up contributing quantity, rather than quality. Sometimes you can't live life at a frenetic pace, and you have to slow down and accept that some discussions and some activities take time to do properly. - Ability to comment directly from a particular change, which could supplement or replace the edit summary. This also gets a lot of conversations off the traditional user talk page, because much of what we bring up on a user's talk page is about some edit they made. Keeping this with the change in question makes it easier for others to join the conversation. This sounds like conducting parallel conversations via edit summaries. I would be dead set against this, as in my experience you end up with some people chattering away to each other in edit summaries, and others using the talk page and, others not talking at all. It tends to promote edit warring if people feel they can revert and talk to each other in edit summaries at the same time. There is a reason why a common edit summary is revert, please take this to the talk page, rather than revert, let's edit war and discuss in the edit summaries why we are making these changes. - Complete replacement for threadmode talk pages, possibly to the point where the talk tab gets replaced with a discuss tab. In articlespace, the talk tab was renamed some time ago now to say discussion, and from the looks of it in all other namespaces as well. Maybe I've misunderstood what you are proposing here? Are you using an old Wikipedia viewing skin, possibly? - Ability to tie in conversations elsewhere seemlessly without duplication. For example, a conversation may start over a particular page, but the issue being discussed is really a particular infobox. A cc feature used judiciously (and possibly one that's editable) would help this. This would be most helpful if you could CC another article's discussion, a wikiproject, and/or particular individuals. I tend to add a see also template to the front of all such discussions to tie them together. If done early enough, this works and discussion does tend to split the right way among the venues, or centralise (if that is more appropriate). Wikilinks are the logical way to tie such discussions together. The more annoying thing is how archived threads change location and so links made previously break and don't work. If that was fixed, the current system would be fine. - Whatever solution needs to eliminate archives and hatboxes as we know them now. If conversations are to archive it should be straightforward to restart them, and doing so shouldn't be considered a taboo. I think hatboxes are OK. I agree archiving is clunky in the current set-up. Liquidthreads is a start, but it seems to me like the mission was figure out how to bolt forums onto an existing
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
On 22 December 2010 12:44, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 December 2010 12:15, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Liquid threads is an interesting idea in principle, but the reality is at best unfortunate. I've pretty much stopped editing on the Strategy Wiki because of it - I have broadband and a reasonably fast machine but I don't have the patience to wait for Liquid threads to load even when it works. Even on tiny wikis it's too much of a PITA in practice. RationalWiki tried it and the consensus was KILL IT WITH FIRE. Which is unfortunate, because it's a nice idea. However, a wiki isn't a forum. Facebook is probably working to change that. TVTropes has forums which see some use: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/topics.php Wikis with social networking and the like attached can certainly be successful. See Hudong for example. -- geni ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 23 December 2010 02:37, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: I have to disagree strongly with the calls for WYSIWYG editing, not that it's likely to materialize anytime soon. Wikipedia needs to encourage people to concentrate on meaningful content, not dick around with cosmetic matters. I think our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation. I don't have WMF numbers, but one contributor on mediawiki-l, who runs an intranet covering a large public service organisation in the US, reported a remarkable uptake in wiki participation just by going to FCKeditor. The users are smart, capable and competent people in their fields, but were seriously put off by wikitext. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
2010/12/23 WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com: I don't use talkback templates myself, and find them somewhat irritating, but I can live with them if that keeps liquid threads at bay. Talkback templates are incomparably more bogus than LiquidThreads. Something like LiquidThreads is the future. Currently the right thing is to patiently try them somewhere and to report bugs - not to kill them with fire. If anyone feels that they are too early to be forced on the users of a production wiki, then they should be disabled there. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace. - T. Moore ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: 2010/12/23 WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com: I don't use talkback templates myself, and find them somewhat irritating, but I can live with them if that keeps liquid threads at bay. Talkback templates are incomparably more bogus than LiquidThreads. What do people here think of this method? Might not scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirror_thread Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 23 December 2010 08:41, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I don't have WMF numbers, but one contributor on mediawiki-l, who runs an intranet covering a large public service organisation in the US, reported a remarkable uptake in wiki participation just by going to FCKeditor. The users are smart, capable and competent people in their fields, but were seriously put off by wikitext. I took a look at this: http://ckeditor.com/demo While that demo doesn't really match what a fully integrated Mediawiki-based WYSIWYG editor would look like (no internal links so you have to enter the full URL for every link, for instance), it does give a taste for how ckeditor would differ from the plain text and markup we use now. Personally I find that kind of stuff hopelessly confusing and off-putting, and I would hate to have to use it, but I take your point that it might improve takeup for people who find to messing with complex toolbars easier than learning half a dozen simple text markup rules ([[a|b]], [a b], ''italic'', ''bold''',' ref name=/ref, ==section==). ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
On 23 December 2010 10:33, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: What do people here think of this method? Might not scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirror_thread A solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If you start a discussion somewhere, interested people will tend to pick it up. If you get no response take it to a noticeboard. If you wanted a particular person's comment you should have raised the question on that person's user talk page in the first place. Watchlists work fine, there's nothing wrong with them so there's no need to fix them, Duplication of material on a wiki should always be avoided. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 23 December 2010 10:33, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Personally I find that kind of stuff hopelessly confusing and off-putting, and I would hate to have to use it, but I take your point that it might improve takeup for people who find to messing with complex toolbars easier than learning half a dozen simple text markup rules ([[a|b]], [a b], ''italic'', ''bold''',' ref name=/ref, ==section==). To clarify my skepticism, the complexity of Wikipedia doesn't arise at the user interface level at all but at the level of social interaction. This is unavoidable because you're dealing with other human beings, not a machine. The complexity is necessary, even desirable, for exactly the same reason. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 23 December 2010 10:55, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 December 2010 10:43, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: To clarify my skepticism, the complexity of Wikipedia doesn't arise at the user interface level at all but at the level of social interaction. This is unavoidable because you're dealing with other human beings, not a machine. The complexity is necessary, even desirable, for exactly the same reason. True. However, the markup is really an important way to put off the n00bs. People who are used to wikitext don't believe it, and say but I'd think that XXX - but here's the data point: You've convinced me. This in particular: [CKEditor] very closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten used to while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost immediately. For me WYSIWYG is synonymous with annoying stuff that gets in the way of the code I want to write, and of course I take it as read that the code stands for a procedural or functional abstraction of what the computer is supposed to do. I don't find it difficult, but then I've been doing it since I was in the lower sixth at school when I had to type computer instructions on a teletype connected to a land line by acoustic coupler. Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand, they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG). It's still annoying, though. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 23 December 2010 11:48, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand, they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG). It's still annoying, though. Yeah. It won't be a happener on WMF sites, I think, until WMF has money to throw at developers to develop something that actually works and has fidelity with wikitext as it's used. This is a *big and hairy* problem that interested parties have been dashing their foreheads against for *years*. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 22 December 2010 07:27, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 December 2010 00:17, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Actually, I often see things that need fixing, but I'm in look up mode and using Wikipedia as a starting point for finding some information I'm after, and often don't have the time to even make a note to come back to the article later. If I see things that need fixing when I'm in Wikipedian mode, I do fix things then (but even then, there is a trade-off between temp fix now, or detailed fix that will take more time). It comes back to that trade-off in time spent doing other things. Hm. I often hit edit on a section just to fix a typo I've spotted in passing. Resisting the time-sucking qualities is, of course, a problem. But when I'm reading other wikis I'll also happily hit edit to fix a typo (if they allow IP editing). - d. I do think there are fewer opportunities for such easy edits on Wikipedia now. Typos seem to be far less common thanks to semi-automated tools such as AWB, and most articles are generally more mature. Plus the wikicode of articles grows ever more intimidating. Has anyone analysed if the number of new contributors has risen since the Usability Project improvements? Obviously that was one of the major aims. Pete / the wub ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
The single best way to improve usability of Wikipedia would be to scale back the use of jargon. if you look at early discussions in those days they were usually held in plain English, with very little jargon. I've tried to keep up that style, but it is now quite rare. I don't see why this should be. Our policies have perfectly good English language names, Neutral point of view, What Wikipedia is Not, Verifiability, and so on. There's absolutely no need to replace these English phrases with gobbledygook. We have no strictures against this exclusive practice, mainly because it was seen as obviously undesirable in the early days. But communities inevitably acquire exclusive practices as they develop--it's seen as one way to identify yourself to other people as a member of the in group. And so now when I discuss matters on Wikipedia talk pages even I, an editor since 2004, find myself shuddering inwardly at the impact of all the alphabet soup. If the damage this practice does to the openness of the community were more widely recognised it would be possible for us to agree to scale it back, but it just isn't on the map. in all conscience I cannot see anything wrong with our user interface. It's exemplary, and its having changed so little in all this time is good evidence of that. If we were to try to emulate monstrosities like the ever-changing Facebook it would be a step backwards from our unflinching commitment to a good, clean, simple interface. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On jargon, I still think Neutral point of view was a terrible name that confused neutrality with lack of bias. You cannot sum up a policy like NPOV in a single phrase, so in that case, I think NPOV is better than saying neutral something. Sometimes a Wikipedia term of art can be misleading and the abbreviation is *less* misleading. On interfaces, I think the main improvements will probably be in the realm of templates and how references are added. At least that is what I am hoping for. Talking of other interface things, what do people think of LiquidThreads, which looks like it is in use on some wikis now, from what I can see. Carcharoth On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: The single best way to improve usability of Wikipedia would be to scale back the use of jargon. if you look at early discussions in those days they were usually held in plain English, with very little jargon. I've tried to keep up that style, but it is now quite rare. I don't see why this should be. Our policies have perfectly good English language names, Neutral point of view, What Wikipedia is Not, Verifiability, and so on. There's absolutely no need to replace these English phrases with gobbledygook. We have no strictures against this exclusive practice, mainly because it was seen as obviously undesirable in the early days. But communities inevitably acquire exclusive practices as they develop--it's seen as one way to identify yourself to other people as a member of the in group. And so now when I discuss matters on Wikipedia talk pages even I, an editor since 2004, find myself shuddering inwardly at the impact of all the alphabet soup. If the damage this practice does to the openness of the community were more widely recognised it would be possible for us to agree to scale it back, but it just isn't on the map. in all conscience I cannot see anything wrong with our user interface. It's exemplary, and its having changed so little in all this time is good evidence of that. If we were to try to emulate monstrosities like the ever-changing Facebook it would be a step backwards from our unflinching commitment to a good, clean, simple interface. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
Liquid threads is an interesting idea in principle, but the reality is at best unfortunate. I've pretty much stopped editing on the Strategy Wiki because of it - I have broadband and a reasonably fast machine but I don't have the patience to wait for Liquid threads to load even when it works. It is also a pain that one can't just quickly alter one's talkpage comments even to strike out a resolved point. I've just gone back and logged in for the first time in weeks. I clicked on new messages and after a while lost the will to live. When it eventually showed me my talkpage - (to be fair it did work this time) there were a fraction of the messages I get on EN wiki. I'd hate to think how slow things would be if it was implemented on EN wiki. WereSpielChequers On 22 December 2010 11:49, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On jargon, I still think Neutral point of view was a terrible name that confused neutrality with lack of bias. You cannot sum up a policy like NPOV in a single phrase, so in that case, I think NPOV is better than saying neutral something. Sometimes a Wikipedia term of art can be misleading and the abbreviation is *less* misleading. On interfaces, I think the main improvements will probably be in the realm of templates and how references are added. At least that is what I am hoping for. Talking of other interface things, what do people think of LiquidThreads, which looks like it is in use on some wikis now, from what I can see. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:15 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: It is also a pain that one can't just quickly alter one's talkpage comments even to strike out a resolved point. Some bulletin board software allows you to do this, leaving a note that the post was edited after it was originally posted. What happens to page history in a liquid threads environment? Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
I see where you're coming from Tony, but ultimately, you can't herd cats. A
campaign against jargon is only going to make minimal headway.
The are some structural things that Wikipedia needs to do:
1) WYSIWYG would be fantastic, but I've no idea what that would meet in
practice.
Sticking to the achievable:
2) That need for posts to be signed with is counterintuitive. If I
create an account on any other site, a sig in a discussion is unnecessary. I
assume liquid threads would rid us of this? Is there another way?
3) The growing use of protection on high profile articles needs more
discussion. There used to be a principle that the more an article was
visible the less we should protect it. (After all people are told anyone
can edit and high profile articles are watched enough to revert quickly.)
We now seem to have reversed this - with the attitude that the article is
now fairly good, and most IP edits are unhelpful. But the outsider comes in
by experimentation. Actually, I'm a supporter of more liberal
semi-protection (particularly on BLPS) but I'd use it on marginal articles
where incoming edits are under-scrutinised - not one those where it is a
hassle to vandal-fighters, but we always catch them.
4) Perhaps we need more integration with other social network and internet
platforms. I mean, Amazon has seen the potential for someone reading a
Wikipedia article to buy a book - but the reverse is true. Please buying
books on Italian History are precisely the people we need to help us with
articles on Italian history. Facebookers with an interest in Pokemon are
precisely the people who can (and have the time to) help improve out
deficiency in Pokemon articles...(ok, maybe not, but you get the point!)
5) I see the growing use of {{talkback}} templates. Personally, I hate them.
However, the assumption that everyone masters watchlists and knows how to
find discussions - and sees replies people make to them in any one of 27
noticeboards, talk pages etc is also counter intuitive. Could we develop
software that flagged a user when someone replies to their post, wherever
the reply might be? So if I post anywhere and someone posts indented below,
I get some form of automatic notification? I don't know how it would work -
but Facebook's beauty is that wherever I comment, or wherever someone
comments about me, I get notified - that tends to keep me interested in
continuing the discussions rather than drifting off. Watchlists were great
in 2002, but they are part of an increasingly tired looking infrastructure.
Just some thoughts. I suspect to solve these problems would need some
serious investment - but I just see Wikipedia slowly becoming dated. (Of
course those who grew up on it will say it is fine - but then that's the
way with everything.)
Scott
-Original Message-
From: wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tony Sidaway
Sent: 22 December 2010 10:55
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
The single best way to improve usability of Wikipedia would be to
scale back the use of jargon.
if you look at early discussions in those days they were usually held
in plain English, with very little jargon. I've tried to keep up that
style, but it is now quite rare.
I don't see why this should be. Our policies have perfectly good
English language names, Neutral point of view, What Wikipedia is
Not, Verifiability, and so on. There's absolutely no need to
replace these English phrases with gobbledygook.
We have no strictures against this exclusive practice, mainly because
it was seen as obviously undesirable in the early days. But
communities inevitably acquire exclusive practices as they
develop--it's seen as one way to identify yourself to other people as
a member of the in group. And so now when I discuss matters on
Wikipedia talk pages even I, an editor since 2004, find myself
shuddering inwardly at the impact of all the alphabet soup. If the
damage this practice does to the openness of the community were more
widely recognised it would be possible for us to agree to scale it
back, but it just isn't on the map.
in all conscience I cannot see anything wrong with our user interface.
It's exemplary, and its having changed so little in all this time is
good evidence of that. If we were to try to emulate monstrosities like
the ever-changing Facebook it would be a step backwards from our
unflinching commitment to a good, clean, simple interface.
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: 1) WYSIWYG would be fantastic, but I've no idea what that would meet in practice. It's been desperately wanted for years and is no closer now than it ever was. Just some thoughts. I suspect to solve these problems would need some serious investment - but I just see Wikipedia slowly becoming dated. (Of course those who grew up on it will say it is fine - but then that's the way with everything.) I have on occasion thought the best thing to do about the Wikipedia community would be for it to implode as fast as possible. I've thought this since about 2006 and the encyclopedia has vastly improved in that time, so I might be wrong. The community does, however, frequently sum the total of human stupidity. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - Liquid threads
On 22 December 2010 12:15, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Liquid threads is an interesting idea in principle, but the reality is at best unfortunate. I've pretty much stopped editing on the Strategy Wiki because of it - I have broadband and a reasonably fast machine but I don't have the patience to wait for Liquid threads to load even when it works. Even on tiny wikis it's too much of a PITA in practice. RationalWiki tried it and the consensus was KILL IT WITH FIRE. Which is unfortunate, because it's a nice idea. However, a wiki isn't a forum. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
on 12/22/10 7:42 AM, David Gerard at dger...@gmail.com wrote: I have on occasion thought the best thing to do about the Wikipedia community would be for it to implode as fast as possible. I've thought this since about 2006 and the encyclopedia has vastly improved in that time, so I might be wrong. The community does, however, frequently sum the total of human stupidity. It must be very lonely out there where you are, David. Marc Riddell ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:
5) I see the growing use of {{talkback}} templates. Personally, I hate them.
However, the assumption that everyone masters watchlists and knows how to
find discussions - and sees replies people make to them in any one of 27
noticeboards, talk pages etc is also counter intuitive. Could we develop
software that flagged a user when someone replies to their post, wherever
the reply might be? So if I post anywhere and someone posts indented below,
I get some form of automatic notification? I don't know how it would work -
but Facebook's beauty is that wherever I comment, or wherever someone
comments about me, I get notified - that tends to keep me interested in
continuing the discussions rather than drifting off. Watchlists were great
in 2002, but they are part of an increasingly tired looking infrastructure.
This is one of the main benefits of LiquidThreads. The system is coded
and in use on a few wikis (the strategy wiki en.wikinews comment
pages spring to mind), but I can't see it ever being introduced on
en.Wikipedia without serious resistance. It's a big change from the
current discussion model, and unlike skins there's no way for
individuals to opt-out.
Pete / the wub
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:42 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: 1) WYSIWYG would be fantastic, but I've no idea what that would meet in practice. It's been desperately wanted for years and is no closer now than it ever was. I am not 100% convinced of this, but my current overwhelming inclination is to state that WYSIWYG is incompatible with existing MediaWiki markup, and therefore requires a Flag Day conversion to a new encoding scheme which is less compact but also unambiguous and properly specified from the beginning. Which may not be community practical, given how much people invested in existing markup customization to get little graphics benefits now. On the other hand, that question has never been presented as such to the community in general and the markup coder wizards who did a lot of the complex templates and such in particular. It might be worth the Foundation and CTO taking a run at discussing it with the community writ large. So the question is, is lack of WYSIWIG in the mid to long term a painful enough problem to justify the short to mid term disruptions that converting away from Wikitext would require? I don't know the answer to that. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 22 December 2010 09:53, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: I do think there are fewer opportunities for such easy edits on Wikipedia now. Typos seem to be far less common thanks to semi-automated tools such as AWB, and most articles are generally more mature. I had an interesting discussion a year or two ago with someone about the absence of redlinks in high-quality articles - in the past few years, there's been a definite trend to arguing that redlinks are detrimental to a finished article, and should be removed even when an article is pretty much guaranteed to be created eventually. Net result, of course, is that the article is more polished-looking - to us, at least, even if not to a reader unclear on the red/blue distinction - but has marginally less reminders of its editability. I suspect this is part of a similar trend! It reminds me of the spirit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Always_leave_something_undone Whenever you write a page, never finish it. Always leave something obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a question in the text (with a not-too-obscure answer someone can supply), wikied links that are of interest, requests for help from specific other Wikipedians, the beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply must fill in, etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage others to keep working on the wiki. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
I have to disagree strongly with the calls for WYSIWYG editing, not that it's likely to materialize anytime soon. Wikipedia needs to encourage people to concentrate on meaningful content, not dick around with cosmetic matters. Inline citations seriously hamper editing, however, and ways of keeping such clutter out of the edit box can and should be developed. Doing so would help editors to concentrate on content. I largely agree with most of Doc's other suggestions, and sadly agree that it's too late to roll back the jargon. The time to curb that tendency was before the population explosion of 2005/2006. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
While i am not happy with the current status of liquidthreads i still
see it as a way forward. Its far from perfect but it solves some huge
communication problems that exist with large busy talk pages. Right
now we tend to address those issues with agressive archiving, which i
have seen some major issues with. The primary concern is that on
tenditious policy issues, it becomes impossible to have a meaningful
discussion before archiv ing effecively buries it. A secondary concern
is with the use of hat boxes in such talk pages.
Liquidthreads makes some progress towards solving those problems by
making it very easy to revive a conversation and by making it
difficult to impossible to bury one before it has run its course.
These are its strongest points and i believe these enough are reason
enough not to abandon the idea.
That said in the current state, its not very usable. There is a lot of
work to be done but we desperately need something in the same spirit
even if liquidthreads is the wrong form.
On 12/22/10, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote:
I don't use talkback templates myself, and find them somewhat
irritating, but I can live with them if that keeps liquid threads at
bay.
Watchlists have some limitations, I would like to be able to watchlist
a section and have that watch transfer to the archive when the section
moves. I'd also like to be able to filter my watchlist by some sort
of priority system. But even with over 11,000 articles on my watchlist
I find it very simple to use and highly effective.
After my experience on Strategy I would be loathe to Liquid threads
introduced on EN Wiki.
I believe David Gerrard said that Rational Wiki decided to destroy it
with fire, does that mean that Liquid threads are reversible, and if
so could we remove them from Strategy?
WereSpielChequers
On 22 December 2010 22:09, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote:
On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:
5) I see the growing use of {{talkback}} templates. Personally, I hate
them.
However, the assumption that everyone masters watchlists and knows how to
find discussions - and sees replies people make to them in any one of 27
noticeboards, talk pages etc is also counter intuitive. Could we develop
software that flagged a user when someone replies to their post, wherever
the reply might be? So if I post anywhere and someone posts indented
below,
I get some form of automatic notification? I don't know how it would work
-
but Facebook's beauty is that wherever I comment, or wherever someone
comments about me, I get notified - that tends to keep me interested in
continuing the discussions rather than drifting off. Watchlists were
great
in 2002, but they are part of an increasingly tired looking
infrastructure.
This is one of the main benefits of LiquidThreads. The system is coded
and in use on a few wikis (the strategy wiki en.wikinews comment
pages spring to mind), but I can't see it ever being introduced on
en.Wikipedia without serious resistance. It's a big change from the
current discussion model, and unlike skins there's no way for
individuals to opt-out.
Pete / the wub
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--
Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not about what you are
taught to believe.
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
If we decide we want a bulletin board discussion instead of a talk page it would not be difficult to do this from scratch (actually we'd probably want to import code from existing licence-compatible open source BBS projects--many BBS packages seem to be coded in PHP, which would make integration a doddle). As I understand it, Liquid Threads is just a kludge to make something resembling a BBS using talk pages and a lot of cocktail sticks and sticky tape. That's why it's such a hideous mess in practice. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
I would honestly say that the existing markup has long outlived its usefulness. Editors should not only be free from dealing with intricate markup, they should actually lack the tools and markup to do such complex formatting because it is detremental to writing an encyclopedia. Instead of wysiwyg how aboud wysiwym (what you see is what you mean) with clean symantic markup and all the issues of styling handled out of site by the software through stylesheets. This would not only make editing easier but also hold us to a high standard of consistancy while enabling us to reach better quality standards and allowing us to build better tools on top of that framework. Of further concern to me is that we have far exceeded the limits of a wiki as an effective collaboration platform. Collaboration at small scale remains possible but talk pages dont scale well at all to tens of thousands of users. Further the software was never designed to be used in the way we use it to implement process on wiki. Complex template based processes and conversations based around heavy template usage are unnatural, inefiicent, error prone, and have too steep a learning curve for newcomers. These issues are critical to fix if we are to scale but there is so much inertia that i fear it would only be possible if changes were forced. There are a lot of well established editors that actually benefit from the status quo - the complexity and confusion inherent to policy process and discussion tend to create a sort of inner circle of editors that can effectively leverage the situation to their advantage through the combination of knowledge and persistance. On 12/22/10, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: I have to disagree strongly with the calls for WYSIWYG editing, not that it's likely to materialize anytime soon. Wikipedia needs to encourage people to concentrate on meaningful content, not dick around with cosmetic matters. Inline citations seriously hamper editing, however, and ways of keeping such clutter out of the edit box can and should be developed. Doing so would help editors to concentrate on content. I largely agree with most of Doc's other suggestions, and sadly agree that it's too late to roll back the jargon. The time to curb that tendency was before the population explosion of 2005/2006. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not about what you are taught to believe. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia - talkback templates
Right. The issue is, in practice large talk pages in threadmode are as much or more of a mess. Archives dont solve it because they break conversation flow and bury conversations. Refactoring would but its a lost art that seems to be at odds with a culture that treats a signed comment as invioably sacred, not to mention the issues of neutrality and time involved. So we are stuck with two solutions (talk and !iquidthreads) that both have their own cludginess and inability to scale. What we need is a collaborative discussion platform that is designed to scale, preserve transparency, and allow users to track scattered conversations in one place. While i dont meam to suggest that we become anything resembling a social network there are aspects of the lifestream interface model that lend well to the type of communication necessary for collaborative work - the ability to follow specific conversations as well as groups and pages as well as a request inbox that could be leveraged as a process model. On 12/22/10, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: If we decide we want a bulletin board discussion instead of a talk page it would not be difficult to do this from scratch (actually we'd probably want to import code from existing licence-compatible open source BBS projects--many BBS packages seem to be coded in PHP, which would make integration a doddle). As I understand it, Liquid Threads is just a kludge to make something resembling a BBS using talk pages and a lot of cocktail sticks and sticky tape. That's why it's such a hideous mess in practice. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not about what you are taught to believe. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Always_leave_something_undone Whenever you write a page, never finish it. Always leave something obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a question in the text (with a not-too-obscure answer someone can supply), wikied links that are of interest, requests for help from specific other Wikipedians, the beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply must fill in, etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage others to keep working on the wiki. I tend to try and not leave the public-facing page incomplete, but sometimes that is inevitable (not enough sources or an incomplete list), but put requests for help and suggestions for further editing on the talk page. A plea to future readers and Wikipedians that pass by. Though, sadly, I get the impression not many people actually read the talk page notes I leave behind, and they end up being more notes for myself to refer back to months or years later. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Stephanie Daugherty sdaughe...@gmail.com wrote: Of further concern to me is that we have far exceeded the limits of a wiki as an effective collaboration platform. Collaboration at small scale remains possible but talk pages dont scale well at all to tens of thousands of users. Most articles don't have tens of thousands of users. Most only have tens to fifties. Only the very largest discussions need to involve all active users, and even there the numbers taking part are not in the tens of thousands. Further the software was never designed to be used in the way we use it to implement process on wiki. Complex template based processes and conversations based around heavy template usage are unnatural, inefiicent, error prone, and have too steep a learning curve for newcomers. I agree templates can be confusing, but they provide great flexibility. If you are going to move to a different system, it has to be one that editors can make changes to and not rely on developers to make requested changes. These issues are critical to fix if we are to scale but there is so much inertia that i fear it would only be possible if changes were forced. There are a lot of well established editors that actually benefit from the status quo - the complexity and confusion inherent to policy process and discussion tend to create a sort of inner circle of editors that can effectively leverage the situation to their advantage through the combination of knowledge and persistance. Most policy discussion and process doesn't affect articles, surprisingly enough. Not directly, anyway. To be able to edit articles well, all you really need is a general sense of how things work (using examples from other articles that are clearly good examples), a willingness to learn and discuss with others, some good sources to work with, a basic ability to write and organise your thoughts, being able to balance what different sources are saying, and some common sense. Everything else is instruction creep, but often useful instruction creep as long as you don't pay too much attention to it. Pay attention to it when you need to, but at other times just use common sense and ask yourself if what you are doing will improve, or lead to an improvement in, an article or set of articles. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
Since Wikipedia grew and became more ambitious in its scope, there have been predictions of its downfall, many of them giving an estimate for the timescale of its demise. If you hunt around you may find a prediction by me that Wikipedia was unlikely to survive much beyond 2010 because I thought it would decline in populatrity. Since then Wikipedia has cemented itself into the fabric of modern culture and become particularly useful in academia, where its strengths and limitations are now well understood. Reading the references Joseph Reagle's book I encountered this: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm Wikipedia, it appears, was destined to die within four years--by December 5, 2010, because it would be involved in an unwinnable war with marketers, Since it's Christmas, the new year is coming, and we'll soon be bouncing out of that into a celebration of Wikipedia's first decade, perhaps now it the time to look back at the predictions of Wikipedia's demise. What are your favorite predictions of Wikideath? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
I thought I read somewhere that Rupert Murdoch seeks to shut down Wikipedia because of its free information threat to his and other similar media empires. -MuZemike On 12/21/2010 1:58 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote: Since Wikipedia grew and became more ambitious in its scope, there have been predictions of its downfall, many of them giving an estimate for the timescale of its demise. If you hunt around you may find a prediction by me that Wikipedia was unlikely to survive much beyond 2010 because I thought it would decline in populatrity. Since then Wikipedia has cemented itself into the fabric of modern culture and become particularly useful in academia, where its strengths and limitations are now well understood. Reading the references Joseph Reagle's book I encountered this: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm Wikipedia, it appears, was destined to die within four years--by December 5, 2010, because it would be involved in an unwinnable war with marketers, Since it's Christmas, the new year is coming, and we'll soon be bouncing out of that into a celebration of Wikipedia's first decade, perhaps now it the time to look back at the predictions of Wikipedia's demise. What are your favorite predictions of Wikideath? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tuesday, December 21, 2010, Tony Sidaway wrote:
Reading the references Joseph Reagle's book I encountered this:
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm
Yes, I've been thinking that it would be neat to have an online debate or
something over this, as I write in the conclusion of the book:
Wikipedia's status as an encyclopedia was debated from the start, even by its
founders, and continues to be thought suspect by critics, particularly when a
new scandal erupts as they seem to do every so often. This then prompts much
discussion. In fact, the community has discussed every conceivable aspect of
its identity and work. As I noted at the beginning of this book, this
conversation is frequently exasperating and often humorous, but we now know
it is also rather pragmatic and governed by good faith norms. Indeed,
Wikipedia is an exemplar of the reflective character of open content
communities. And just when arguments that Wikipedia would never amount to
anything ceased, new arguments about its imminent death took their place.
Based on research showing that Wikipedia contribution is slowing, journalist
Stephen Foley asks, is Wikipedia cracking up? \acite{Foley2009siw} In 2005,
law professor Eric Goldman predicted Wikipedia would fail in 2010 (i.e.,
close access or become spam ridden), repeated the prediction in 2006, and in
2009 made the claim at a conference \acite{Goldman2006wwf,Anderson2009dww}.
(If you can still edit Wikipedia when you read this book, it is safe to
conclude that he was wrong.)
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
This is a dangerous thread. It is certainly the case that Wikipedia has exceeded all expectations (not least of those who set it up) and confounded the naysayers, Jeremiahs, and doom merchants. No doubt there's some justification in digging up falsified eschatological visions and gloating with hindsight at their folly. However, there's a problem here - and the problem is the great monstrous beast of complacency. For if we say, we endured even all this - and so with righteousness we will survive the ages, even unto the end, then we are in danger of creating a myth of invulnerability, based on the preservation of the wiki-saints, which can only serve to prevent us heeding genuine prophets of future dangers. Beware the true apocalypse. Let Him That Thinketh He Standeth Take Heed Lest He Fall It would be far more profitable (or prophet-able) to seek to divine the undoubted demons ahead, that we might remain strong unto the end. If I dare to be a seer, I worry about software that looks increasingly 2004 in a Facebook world. And I'd be interested to wonder what other nightmares of the future keep the Wiki-saints in fear and trembling. -Original Message- From: wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of MuZemike Sent: 21 December 2010 20:05 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia I thought I read somewhere that Rupert Murdoch seeks to shut down Wikipedia because of its free information threat to his and other similar media empires. -MuZemike On 12/21/2010 1:58 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote: Since Wikipedia grew and became more ambitious in its scope, there have been predictions of its downfall, many of them giving an estimate for the timescale of its demise. If you hunt around you may find a prediction by me that Wikipedia was unlikely to survive much beyond 2010 because I thought it would decline in populatrity. Since then Wikipedia has cemented itself into the fabric of modern culture and become particularly useful in academia, where its strengths and limitations are now well understood. Reading the references Joseph Reagle's book I encountered this: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm Wikipedia, it appears, was destined to die within four years--by December 5, 2010, because it would be involved in an unwinnable war with marketers, Since it's Christmas, the new year is coming, and we'll soon be bouncing out of that into a celebration of Wikipedia's first decade, perhaps now it the time to look back at the predictions of Wikipedia's demise. What are your favorite predictions of Wikideath? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 12:36 PM, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: [...] If I dare to be a seer, I worry about software that looks increasingly 2004 in a Facebook world. Let me focus that a bit, if you don't mind - Craigslist looks like 1997; other than the occasional image change for the logo, Google's main search page and its results look like about 2000 still (and not much different, to me, than AltaVista did shortly after it launched, though it's subtly better in many ways). Yahoo has a lot more modern interface design than its competitors; it must be successful, right? I believe that from a user (reader) point of view, Wikipedia is suitably capable from an interface standpoint. From a user (editor) point of view, there is a distinct remaining lack of WYSIWIG and steep learning curve. Our existing editor base are used to it, but I always wonder if we're not losing significant potential contributors from the Facebook generation who aren't willing to put up with learning our syntax. General worry? No. Discouraged potential contributor worry? Yes. And I'd be interested to wonder what other nightmares of the future keep the Wiki-saints in fear and trembling. Community actually hitting a consensus management barrier, though I predict we'd muddle through a representative system of some sort if push came to shove. Someone (else) doing a WYSIWIG, sematic / fact based competitor with at least equal participant community access and a dump of our database as a seed point, with a way for them to do AI-scanned update management from the Wikipedia pages. Expanding - Wikipedia is several things - an online encyclopedia (the actual article content, images, etc), a software system for managing that content, and a community that does the management. What's functionally critical are the content and the community, though the software is an enabler. If people could walk across the street to NextPedia and have a really snazzy UI experience to updating the shared content and still have the supportive and managing functions of the community... Wikipedia NG discussions are a perennial favorite, and always hit a tactical wall. Strategically, I feel that's a mistake. Not that I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but it always worries me. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 21 December 2010 19:58, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Reading the references Joseph Reagle's book I encountered this: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm Wikipedia, it appears, was destined to die within four years--by December 5, 2010, because it would be involved in an unwinnable war with marketers, Yes. Has anyone been in touch with Mr Goldman and asked for an update? Or, rather, has anyone not? - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 21 December 2010 20:51, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia NG discussions are a perennial favorite, and always hit a tactical wall. Strategically, I feel that's a mistake. Not that I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but it always worries me. It's annoying, because we need competitors. Being a monopoly is not good for us and is not good for the mission. Here's something I sent to foundation-l yesterday (no responses so far): -- Forwarded message -- From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Date: 20 December 2010 20:59 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Tendrl to Knowino To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org On 20 December 2010 19:47, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: Is there a general consensus about achieving a monopoly as a good goal. Is this part of some public strategy? Is this the position of WMF? Of chapters? I thought I heard some weeks ago on that mail list that diversity is good. That competitors are healthy. Could we have a clarification of positions about this? I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing. The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials. Because that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement - Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. - without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and expected*, and everyone else joins in. Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely famous, beyond merely mainstream, to being part of the assumed background. We're an institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the last eight years a very special wtf moment technically. It means we can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity. (I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.) So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc materials. We can't change the world all on our own. The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our mission, for example. As I said, I can't speak for anyone else, but if anyone here disagrees I'm open to correction on any of the above. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
Pride matters, arrogance is harmful. What we have achieved is to demonstrate that legitimate, free, open, collaborative knowledge is to be taken seriously, and some knowhow about its creation and maintenance. That's not a reason for arrogance and does not mean we are best or have some kind of guarantee for future. Commercially, enterprises often flourish in an ecosystem of similar enterprises or related needs. Those lacking competitors and alternatives tend over years and decades to become lazy, inefficient, and complacent. Those with others around have the best the rest of the world can devise to measure up to, compare with, and provoke improvement. Like others have said, we need others around. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but for the future. FT2 On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 December 2010 20:51, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Wikipedia NG discussions are a perennial favorite, and always hit a tactical wall. Strategically, I feel that's a mistake. Not that I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but it always worries me. It's annoying, because we need competitors. Being a monopoly is not good for us and is not good for the mission. Here's something I sent to foundation-l yesterday (no responses so far): -- Forwarded message -- From: David Gerard dger...@gmail.com Date: 20 December 2010 20:59 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Tendrl to Knowino To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org On 20 December 2010 19:47, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: Is there a general consensus about achieving a monopoly as a good goal. Is this part of some public strategy? Is this the position of WMF? Of chapters? I thought I heard some weeks ago on that mail list that diversity is good. That competitors are healthy. Could we have a clarification of positions about this? I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing. The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials. Because that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement - Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. - without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and expected*, and everyone else joins in. Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely famous, beyond merely mainstream, to being part of the assumed background. We're an institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the last eight years a very special wtf moment technically. It means we can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity. (I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.) So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc materials. We can't change the world all on our own. The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our mission, for example. As I said, I can't speak for anyone else, but if anyone here disagrees I'm open to correction on any of the above. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 1:47 PM, FT2 ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: Pride matters, arrogance is harmful. What we have achieved is to demonstrate that legitimate, free, open, collaborative knowledge is to be taken seriously, and some knowhow about its creation and maintenance. That's not a reason for arrogance and does not mean we are best or have some kind of guarantee for future. Commercially, enterprises often flourish in an ecosystem of similar enterprises or related needs. Those lacking competitors and alternatives tend over years and decades to become lazy, inefficient, and complacent. Those with others around have the best the rest of the world can devise to measure up to, compare with, and provoke improvement. Like others have said, we need others around. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but for the future. There are two schools of thought here - One, that competition is always great and effective. Two, that sometimes a natural monopoly develops of some sort, and that for the time that the paradigm remains valid there's really only one player of note. The Internet sees examples of both types of activity. Google has search competitors, by dint of Yahoo not having gone bankrupt quite yet and Microsoft having thrown Bing in as the default search engine for the OS of choice for 90% plus of the computers sold today (plus a lot of phones). A lot of people want it to be in Category One, but it seems to be at least marginally a Category Two case. Craigslist killed a whole paradigm (classified ads in print newspapers) and has not evolved any useful competition. Ebay took the rest of that market, and invented a new market, and has not had any credible competitor. Both are Category Two. Amazon invented its field, but has active competition (Borders, BN at least). Clearly Category One. The Internet Archive has no (public) competition. Nobody's even interested. The social network website arena has had intense competition, which is settling down into a Category Two monopoly around Facebook. Twitter fused SMS with broadcast and has not evolved any competition; Category Two again. Skype is only one of many internet phone services now. For nonprofit / public service organizations, there's an ulterior motive in any case. Two, actually... The exterior ulterior motive is helping other people, and the not-so-secret personal or interior ulterior motive, that people enjoy being seen as contributors and participants, it's an ego boost. Neither of those ulterior motives is like the motives for a business, which are primarily to make money (preserve and gain market share and margins). We have analogs to market share and margins but they're not the same. Because they're not the same, some of the inertial resistance to change is different and operates in different mechanisms. Wikipedia remakes itself regularly, though there are longterm participants, rules, and goals. We change the software, editing standards, our IP license, community membership and active editors set, community participation and rules. We actively and moderately skeptically review all the policy and core values in the community. Because of that, I think we're more effective at responding to pressure to change than a typical business. In some ways we aren't - we lack leadership in many senses of the word, though we have leaders who people listen to and who focus discussion and debate. But we aren't institutionally opposed to changing things to make them better. We don't need an external competitor to tell us that we have problems, to the degree businesses often do. I won't pretend that we're really good at it; the community is analagous to herding cats in many ways, and people are resistant to change at times and in some ways. But I think we're better enough, in some key ways. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On competition: In terms of on-line encyclopedias Wikipedia has no effective competition. If you sit to research, you'll look at Wikipedia. If you want to contribute it will be Wikipedia. But. where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due largely to their being more grown up social networking phenomena than there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the myspacers have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once might have been Wikipedia contributors? As Facebook adds bells and whistles and Wikipedia's interface becomes more tired and (relatively) less friendly to new users - does this continue? How much is the Foundation investing in software development? I was appalled last year to discover that the flagship of flagged revisions had been entrusted to some guy named Aaron who was doing it between exams! How do you ever hope to keep up if that's the level of commitment to development? (No disrespect to Aaron who was probably working his butt off!) On ability to adapt: I could not disagree more with GWH here. I think en.wp greatest weakness is that it is largely leaderless, and tied to a consensus model that simply doesn't allow for change much at all. To quote myself (a real sign of vanity) Wikipedia isn't governed by the thoughtful or the informed - it is governed by anyone who turns up. ... There are a larger group who are too immature or lazy to think straight. And then there are all those who recognise something must be done, but perpetually oppose the something that's being proposed in favour of a better idea. The mechanism is rather like using a chatshow phone-in to manage the intricacies of a federal budget - it does not work for issues that need time, thought, responsibility and attention. I doubt this problem can be fixed - since it needs structural change to decision making - which is impossible for precisely the same reasons. Scott -Original Message- From: wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of George Herbert Sent: 21 December 2010 22:09 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia There are two schools of thought here - One, that competition is always great and effective. Two, that sometimes a natural monopoly develops of some sort, and that for the time that the paradigm remains valid there's really only one player of note. The Internet sees examples of both types of activity. Google has search competitors, by dint of Yahoo not having gone bankrupt quite yet and Microsoft having thrown Bing in as the default search engine for the OS of choice for 90% plus of the computers sold today (plus a lot of phones). A lot of people want it to be in Category One, but it seems to be at least marginally a Category Two case. Craigslist killed a whole paradigm (classified ads in print newspapers) and has not evolved any useful competition. Ebay took the rest of that market, and invented a new market, and has not had any credible competitor. Both are Category Two. Amazon invented its field, but has active competition (Borders, BN at least). Clearly Category One. The Internet Archive has no (public) competition. Nobody's even interested. The social network website arena has had intense competition, which is settling down into a Category Two monopoly around Facebook. Twitter fused SMS with broadcast and has not evolved any competition; Category Two again. Skype is only one of many internet phone services now. For nonprofit / public service organizations, there's an ulterior motive in any case. Two, actually... The exterior ulterior motive is helping other people, and the not-so-secret personal or interior ulterior motive, that people enjoy being seen as contributors and participants, it's an ego boost. Neither of those ulterior motives is like the motives for a business, which are primarily to make money (preserve and gain market share and margins). We have analogs to market share and margins but they're not the same. Because they're not the same, some of the inertial resistance to change is different and operates in different mechanisms. Wikipedia remakes itself regularly, though there are longterm participants, rules, and goals. We change the software, editing standards, our IP license, community membership and active editors set, community participation and rules. We actively and moderately skeptically review all the policy and core values in the community. Because of that, I think we're more effective at responding to pressure to change than a typical business. In some ways we aren't - we lack leadership in many senses
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: But. where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due largely to their being more grown up social networking phenomena than there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the myspacers have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once might have been Wikipedia contributors? I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to be left undone because people are wasting their time on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and the like (and all the other websites and other online distractions out there)? You would *hope* that the truly exceptional in each generation avoid such traps and fulfil their potential, harnessing the power of the internet rather than being sucked into a churning maw, but you never know. And yes, I do think being a Wikipedia editor is more productive than using Facebook and Twitter. :-) Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 21 December 2010 23:55, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: But. where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books I was chatting with User:Ciphergoth the other week about getting people involved in stuff. He occasionally asks people if you see a typo in Wikipedia, do you fix it? And people *just don't do that*. This is something that needs remedying. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: But. where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due largely to their being more grown up social networking phenomena than there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the myspacers have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once might have been Wikipedia contributors? I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to be left undone because people are wasting their time on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and the like (and all the other websites and other online distractions out there)? You would *hope* that the truly exceptional in each generation avoid such traps and fulfil their potential, harnessing the power of the internet rather than being sucked into a churning maw, but you never know. And yes, I do think being a Wikipedia editor is more productive than using Facebook and Twitter. :-) My god, this is getting serious. Maybe we should ban cafes. And bars. And these movie theater things... And what's this all about with this Television thing, now, it's clearly just wrongheaded... Actual work, and the average portion of actual work that people do on a volunteer basis, isn't changing much. How people socialize is, but people are social animals. We do that. We're wired to do it. We're supposed to do it. Anyone who thinks that 14 hour workdays 7 days a week is preferable to the usual 8x5 is welcome to their obsession, but will stand alone. The work product of normal humans that don't socialize enough drops off, according to numerous professional studies over many decades. There's a reason most workweeks are targeted at 40 hrs. That's the maximum you can get out of average information workers before they drop overall output. We get a slice. It's not an insignificant slice. We can do better with utilizing it, but we're doing pretty damn well all things considered. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:58 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 December 2010 23:55, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: But. where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books I was chatting with User:Ciphergoth the other week about getting people involved in stuff. He occasionally asks people if you see a typo in Wikipedia, do you fix it? And people *just don't do that*. This is something that needs remedying. A) Yes, people should feel free to just fix it; not enough do. B) Many studies indicate that our core contributors are large chunks of the total content add process, and we need to not lose track of that, while simultaneously encouraging anons to just fix typos and the like. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:58 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: I was chatting with User:Ciphergoth the other week about getting people involved in stuff. He occasionally asks people if you see a typo in Wikipedia, do you fix it? And people *just don't do that*. This is something that needs remedying. Actually, I often see things that need fixing, but I'm in look up mode and using Wikipedia as a starting point for finding some information I'm after, and often don't have the time to even make a note to come back to the article later. If I see things that need fixing when I'm in Wikipedian mode, I do fix things then (but even then, there is a trade-off between temp fix now, or detailed fix that will take more time). It comes back to that trade-off in time spent doing other things. Has anyone ever suggested a way for people to highlight a mistake and click to bring it to someone else's attention? But without logging any IP address. I suppose that sort of system would get overwhelmed by trolls very quickly. Maybe an off-wiki system to allow people using Wikipedia to generate a note for themselves on corrections to make later on? I'm also convinced that the generation that has grown up able to correct things on wikis or editable bulletin boards after they've posted them, are more prone to posting typos in the less flexible media, such as e-mail and non-editable bulletin boards. The number of times I've clicked send and spotted a typo and cursed my inability to make an instant edit to correct it! Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
I think viewing competition from the standpoint of competition for people's time can be very useful. There has been some data that's pointed to how Internet users as a whole have been shifting their time towards social networks (namely Facebook) and gaming at the expense of other sites/activities [1]. A few months ago, I ran some quick numbers using ComScore data to show how the allocation of user's time online is shifting. I posted the information on my talk page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Howief The ComScore numbers (read [2] for a overview of the benefits and limitations of their data) show that time on Facebook has increased by 48% in the past year while overall time spent online has increased only 5.6%. Many other sites within the top 10 are either flat or declining with respect to user time. This data is far from telling us anything conclusive about impact on editing. For starters, it's a measurement of internet users as a whole which, for Wikipedia data, comprises mostly readers while we're probably more interested in editors/potential editors. But I do think the data points toward the direction of further exploration than away from it. Quantifying the effect of competition for people's time is going to be difficult, but if anyone wants to help in that effort, please drop a note on my talk page. Howie [1] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-americans-do-online-social-media-and-games-dominate-activity/ [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia#Discussion_of_comScore_.26_Wikimedia On 12/21/10 3:55 PM, Carcharoth wrote: On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wikidoc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote: But. where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due largely to their being more grown up social networking phenomena than there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the myspacers have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once might have been Wikipedia contributors? I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to be left undone because people are wasting their time on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and the like (and all the other websites and other online distractions out there)? You would *hope* that the truly exceptional in each generation avoid such traps and fulfil their potential, harnessing the power of the internet rather than being sucked into a churning maw, but you never know. And yes, I do think being a Wikipedia editor is more productive than using Facebook and Twitter. :-) Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 21/12/2010, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to be left undone because people are wasting their time on Wikipedia I argue precisely the opposite. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to happen that wouldn't otherwise because we open source lots of information from closed source articles? A lot of the articles are based on summarising information culled from paid-for sources. These sources are not generally available to people outside certain closed groups of people, at least, not without paying money, and except for recent works, who ever does that? Carcharoth -- -Ian Woollard ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:58 AM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: On 21/12/2010, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to waste their time than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to be left undone because people are wasting their time on Wikipedia I argue precisely the opposite. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to happen that wouldn't otherwise because we open source lots of information from closed source articles? A lot of the articles are based on summarising information culled from paid-for sources. These sources are not generally available to people outside certain closed groups of people, at least, not without paying money, and except for recent works, who ever does that? Agreed. But I would still urge students (later years of secondary school and at university) to not let Wikipedia and other user-edited sites overwhelm them. They should get the balance right between the various aspects of the information resources available to them, and engage in a mix of contributing, learning, and creating. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
On 22 December 2010 00:17, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Actually, I often see things that need fixing, but I'm in look up mode and using Wikipedia as a starting point for finding some information I'm after, and often don't have the time to even make a note to come back to the article later. If I see things that need fixing when I'm in Wikipedian mode, I do fix things then (but even then, there is a trade-off between temp fix now, or detailed fix that will take more time). It comes back to that trade-off in time spent doing other things. Hm. I often hit edit on a section just to fix a typo I've spotted in passing. Resisting the time-sucking qualities is, of course, a problem. But when I'm reading other wikis I'll also happily hit edit to fix a typo (if they allow IP editing). - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
