Hi Cherian,
Thanks a ton for sharing!
I'm going through th discussions on
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update
I am finding echoes here with an earlier email I'd shot out, requesting the
community to end the article genocide and to treat new articles as babies:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update#A_modest_proposal_for_.22incubating.22_new_articles_8231
I hope the community takes decisive action against the negative elements
soon before it is too late. My take : stop accepting bullying as if it's a
part of life. And let's take a stand against it.
Two solutions suggested that I think would go a long way in getting us out
of this mess:
1. Limit terms of editors (aka the privileged class) and keep a considerable
gap before they are allowed to edit again.
2. Make any deletion, if at all, a matter of voting among a panel of
randomly selected editors. Automatically this measure will also guarantee
more time provided for the article before speedy deletion that has come down
to a few minutes now.
One question that's been bugging me vis-a-vis India:
I, and many others, DO NOT TRUST our mainstream media, including our
established newspapers. They have been betraying us time and time again with
erroneous or biased coverage and in many cases, outright suppression of
stories till the point where it's inevitable. The peer-reviewed journals
culture doesn't extend to every single topic under the sun in this country.
Book culture isn't quite widespread. Many books have bias or lack sound
research. Blogs and small online news groups are more of opinion. In this
vacuum, how can wikipedia expect REFERENCES? Most references cannot be
trusted. In many cases, for genuine topics, adequate references do not exist
- compounding the need for that topic to have a presence on wikipedia.
I fear references have become a crutch and wikipedia is getting handicapped
because of them. As long as we keep putting our faith in them, the real
contributions will not come. May we ask ourselves this question : Do we want
wikipedia to be the world's largest knowledge repository, or the world's
largest reference repository?
-
I wish there were a system to thumbs-up comments or replies on that page,
sharing here a few good ones I found:
The Swedish language Wikipedia appoints administrators for one year at a
time. It works great and everybody is happy.
-
(this one sent me the shivers: Coz it's happened with me too!)
Recently I had an article nominated for speedy
deletionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_for_speedy_deletionwith
an amazingly strong emphasis on speedy. After researching other
similar articles (about websites) I proceeded to write mine. Within an hour,
a more experienced editor nominated it for speedy deletion and tagged it.
When I signed back on several hours later, I saw the tag and read that I
could request a stay of execution, but when I went to the article it had
already been deleted by a different and apparently even more experienced
editor. And the method used for deletion requires a editor with certain
privileges to retrieve it, otherwise its actually gone from WP. I have to
locate a senior enough editor and then convince them to retrieve my article.
Rather than point out the perceived problems with my, the choice was to
erase it. It was demoralizing to say the least. -
Scalhotrodhttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scalhotrodaction=editredlink=103:31,
13 March 2011 (UTC)
-
As someone who came into the project about 18 months ago and was extremely
enthusiastic to start, fell into being morally crushed by highly-experienced
users, had come back and again soundly mentally defeated, I feel there is a
gigantic problem with exclusivity (or cabal-like behavior) by longer-term
users, and among administrators in particular.
As someone who came into the project about 18 months ago and was extremely
enthusiastic to start, fell into being morally crushed by highly-experienced
users, had come back and again soundly mentally defeated, I feel there is a
gigantic problem with exclusivity (or cabal-like behavior) by longer-term
users, and among administrators in particular.
---
Asking people who tried, in current times, to write for Wikipedia how was
their experience, their answers is pretty and a little shocking revealing: “
*I gave up, the administrator was a bully, I don’t have time to deal with
that*;” or “*I just have published a small number of lines while still
writing and few seconds after my article was erased, I hate this rudeness,
scr.. up Wikipedia*.”
---
It is really necessary to end with personal abuses by some administrators.
The deletion of articles must be attributed to a *random commission* of
administrators composed by *dozens* of them and *never* by few couples of
them.
--
The key point to attracting people is to value their work. Deletion of
articles is the
