I am familiar with the citation hunt tool, but am not much of a fan of it.
Basically there is a tracking category built into the {{citation needed}} and
citation hunt returns you a random article in that category showing you a few
lines of text preceding the (I think) first needed citation in the article and
you can choose to accept it or skip it (whereupon it offers you another one).
Although intended as a lightweight way to try to engage librarians during
1lib1ref to scurry unto their collections to find a citation and add it. It
sounds superficially like a great idea, unless you do outreach with librarians
as I do and then you see how flawed it. If fails in at least three ways.
The first is that just because there is a citation needed template present, it
doesn’t follow that a citation will exists (it may be untrue information) so it
is often a waste of time searching. An inherent problem with that template is
that many people (librarians or others) may see it and try to find a citation.
When they fail to find one, what do they do? Answer: do nothing and move on.
Very few people feel confident to say “there is no citation, I will remove all
the text associated with the template” as firstly they realise there may be a
source that they failed to find and secondly they are uncertain how much
preceding text to remove in any case. It’s hard to make that call as an
experienced Wikipedian, it’s not an entry level task. The template does not
have a field to record how many attempts have been made which might be
accompanied by a (say) “3 strikes and it’s out” policy or a time-based deletion
criteria. Once added {{citation needed}} tends to linger for years, wasting
people’s time trying to resolve it.
Problem 2. A librarian will be asked to find a citation for content unlikely to
be held in their library; there are not a lot of books on baseball players in
an Australian library. You can skips through an awful lot of suggestions before
hitting one that might be in your collection. Although my personal observation
is that most librarians don’t look in their collection, they look for a quick
win with a simple google search which tends to fail (if it was that easy, it
would already be cited).
Problem 3. It is fundamentally sexist and some librarians notice this and
comment on it to others. Who writes Wikipedia? Well, we know it’s predominantly
men. Who are librarians? Predominantly women. So, ... the idea of using
Citation Hunt for 1Lib1Ref is that a woman is being asked to do a lot of work
(scouring their collection) to clean up after a lazy man who didn’t bother to
do their job right in the first place. Why does this scenario seem familiar to
many women? When you put it like that, would you ever suggest it again? I
wouldn’t but WMF does. Instead I have come up with 1lib1ref tasks that add
content with citation in topics that are relevant to the librarians I work
with. The librarians see this as a very positive activity. The task is almost
always do-able and adds content to a topic they perceive as relevant to their
library’s focus (no baseball tasks).
You can fix problem 2 though. If you use Petscan to compile some
whole-of-category trees, you can run Citation Hunt over that smaller list of
articles and keep the topics relevant to a particular group of librarians. I
did this manually one year, now it’s built-in to the tool I think.
So in terms of suggesting tasks to users, as much as resolving {{citation
needed}} is a high value result if it succeeds, the success rate of actually
doing so is low and the task can be frustrating. The other risk with new people
doing is that they don’t understand what a reliable citation is so they may
link to a Facebook post or a tweet or a webpage that on close inspection is a
mirror of Wikipedia and again even as an experienced Wikipedia, I struggle to
determine if a random webpage out there which is more or less identical to a
Wikipedia article is a copy from Wikipedia (and hence not a reliable source) or
whether the Wikipedia article is a copyvio of that webpage.
I’d have to say that putting a time limit on {{citation needed}} would be a
very good thing as it would limit the time questionable content exists without
citation and we could use imminent deadlines as the basis for a Suggest A Task
tool, on a “cite it or delete it” basis. This would empower people to delete.
I’d go further and suggest that citation-needed should have short default time
limits set on edits made by new users and the higher the importance or
readership of the article, the lower the expiry time should be. I think this
could be done with a bot where it is not set manually by the person who adds
citation needed. It would be really great if Twinkle allowed you to add the
citation needed tag and automatically set the expiry time according to whatever
policies exist.
Sent from my iPad
> On 27 Jun 2019, at 1:49 am, Morten Wang <nett...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As Stuart Yates kindly pointed out, SuggestBot is alive and well! (And in
> case it wasn't obvious, I know this because I'm the one maintaining it :)
> It's currently serving up article suggestions in seven languages. It also
> updates the list of open tasks (e.g. the one shown on the English Community
> Portal <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_portal>) in a few
> languages (those task list updates pick a random selection of articles from
> a given set of categories, they're not personalized recommendations).
>
> There is currently not as far as I know any similar tool that does
> personalized recommendations. Stuart mentioned some ways that wikipedias
> organize work lists and keep track of things that need to be done. There's
> also some tools that provide topical suggestions for things to do
> (e.g. Citation
> Hunt <https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/en>). I haven't dug into
> learning how those work.
>
> When it comes to published research on how Wikipedia contributors work with
> tasks, in addition to the two papers that have been published about
> SuggestBot there's also this one: Krieger, M., Stark, E. M., & Klemmer, S.
> R. "Coordinating tasks on the commons: designing for personal goals,
> expertise and serendipity" CHI 2009.
>
> Happy to answer any other questions you (or others) might have about
> SuggestBot, of course!
>
>
> Cheers,
> Morten
>
>
>> On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 18:21, Haifeng Zhang <haife...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks so much for answering my questions, Stuart.
>>
>> It seems redlinks are related to article creation only.
>>
>> Could you give me some detail about how "administrative groups" work in
>> term of task routing?
>>
>> I also found the following TASK CENTER page (
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Task_Center).
>>
>> Are the links/lists (under "Do it!") used frequently by editors as routing
>> tools?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Haifeng Zhang
>> ________________________________
>> From: Wiki-research-l <wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org> on
>> behalf of Stuart A. Yeates <syea...@gmail.com>
>> Sent: Sunday, June 23, 2019 11:37:38 PM
>> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
>> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Questions about SuggestBot
>>
>> (a) SuggestBot visited me in the last week.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AStuartyeates&type=revision&diff=902456290&oldid=901462765
>>
>> (b) There are lots of different task routing approaches: lists of
>> redlinks,administrative groups, etc.
>>
>> (c) Sentences containing the words 'bot' and 'documented' appear to
>> mainly exist for comedic value. Bots are typically even less
>> documented than usual.
>>
>> cheers
>> stuart
>> --
>> ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
>>
>> On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 15:24, Haifeng Zhang <haife...@andrew.cmu.edu>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Is the SuggestBot still in use in Wikipedia?
>>>
>>> Are there similar task routing tools that have been deployed in
>> Wikipedia?
>>>
>>> Where in Wikipedia the use of such tools or bots was documented?
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Haifeng Zhang
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>>
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