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The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#241

Post by DanBC »

wpietri wrote: post #239
DanBC wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under ideal circumstances he would have "known" the article was great and really important; he would have heard it got deleted; he would have gone to wikipedia and found short simple clear advice about what is included and what isn't included. Preferably in one place. Then he would have realised that the article was not a good fit for Wikipedia, but he would have met some people who were not fucking wingnuts and who…

Ok. So your ideal contribution from him in regards to this is no contribution at all, right? I agree it would be great for him to have a lot of love and handholding to get to the point where he realizes that he's in the wrong. And equally that it would be great for him to get enough support that he goes on to edit other things. But honestly, I don't expect that he would ever do that. He's a legitimately busy and impo…

Enjoy working with hyperactive twinkle using 14 year olds who rapidly revert[1] as much as they can so they can rack up "edits" in the mistaken thought that it's how you get to admin. Or dysfunctional trolls with a 10:1 meta:content edit ratio who have nothing better to do than hang out on ANI.

Those are pretty much the only people who'll have the time or patience to play the wikipedia game as it is now.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#242

Post by vacri »

dextorious wrote: post #224
vacri wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. Time and time again technical references have played out in personal and professional endeavours. They're clear and concise. You've got to accept that some topics, biographies for example, are inherently subjective and can't be purely objective. Wikipedia is the most rigorous source of 'truth' available to the masses, and the complaints of bias are ab…

"""The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. """ You don't really read many quality technical books, do you?

Sorry, I should have said "given the breadth". Even so, the information in wikipedia is regularly (though not always) more concise and palatable than textbooks.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#243

Post by john_flintstone »

vacri wrote: post #210
Animus7 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Because the alternative is massive systemic bias. This issue has been discussed to death and I won't argue anything here, but the point is that having a thick coat of process encourages a _certain kind_ of editor to participate in Wikipedia. Thus, proponents claim, the largest reference work on the internet is biased, in a very nonobvious way. This wouldn't be a…

The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. Time and time again technical references have played out in personal and professional endeavours. They're clear and concise. You've got to accept that some topics, biographies for example, are inherently subjective and can't be purely objective. Wikipedia is the most rigorous source of 'truth' available to the masses, and the complaints of bias are ab…

>The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none

Academic articles maybe, other articles, not so much. I run a website / forum in a niche area of animal husbandry, and one part of the site links to useful descriptions / information on different breeds. We've had no choice but to ban links to Wikipedia articles on individual breeds because they are simply factually incorrect, to the extent that even pre-teen site members find them funny and point out errors on our forums. Seriously, we have 10 year olds on our forums linking to Wikipedia articles and making fun of them - they really are that full of nonsense.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#244

Post by wpietri »

tnuc wrote: post #24
javert wrote: post #5

First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's…

>If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching... Half an hour? You cannot be serious?

Yes, he's serious.

By this point, Wikipedians have collectively spent hours on the specific article Sullivan's in an uproar about. Many of the volunteers he's addressing have spent years getting good at what they do. And they've collectively spent decades of effort figuring out how best to decide which articles are worth keeping and which aren't. And then documenting that in a fair bit of detail.

If Sullivan wants to tell Wikipedians they're all stupid and wrong, the least he could do is spend enough time to understand whether he has something approaching a point.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#245

Post by dendory »

tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

I've contributed a lot to wikipedia and would say there definitively an elistic attitude among the admins. That page was lucky to even go through a full deletion process, most just get SpeedyDeleted, which is as simple as putting a tag, and as soon as an admin sees it, they delete it, which could be minutes later. I've seen pages deleted this way about major topics, while similar, much lesser topic pages remain. Like anything else, it's more about who you are on Wikipedia than what you're writing about.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#246

Post by zbowling »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #223
zbowling wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is backwards. I'm not an admin on wikipedia (but I do have admin revert and reviewer flags) but I do help "run" wikipedia only because I participate in it. I been vandal patroller for years. I follow the AfDs and other actions and contribute to actions in different wikiprojects. I can say for a fact that there is no clear line between any of the two camps. Admins don't have the time to push agendas. They are way…

It's not about agendas or conspiracies, it's about a disconnect between the people who make the big decisions and the people who are building wikipedia. Different perceptions and motivations can lead quite easily to people making decisions that are deleterious to the community and the wikipedia project, even if at every step they are acting in what they perceive to be good faith.

What I'm saying is that there is no real line that you speak of. It doesn't exist. If you use wikipedia enough you will realize that.

People rise to being admins by editing wikipedia themselves enough and trying to maintain a few articles at a time after putting a lot into them. They grow into being admins. It's not some special power some people get arbitrarily. Everyone edits and everyone moderates. Just some that have been doing it long it enough have been voted by the community as being of sound mind and good faith to have a few extra privileges to carry out more tasks. If you ever seen a request for admin, it's extremely brutal the level people pick at your every decision. You have a problem with an admin that can't be solved, there is ARBCOM (arbitration). You won't normally see a nomination for anyone that doesn't have a few thousand edits themselves at least.

So no. Your comment makes no sense at all. Everyone helps "make the big decisions". I just joined a vote on changing the image thumbnails across all the pages. I'm not an admin. No body gets special privileges like that.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#247

Post by wpietri »

kstenerud wrote: post #70

What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snow…

> Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops.

That assumes that it would be beneficial to have people who don't understand anything about what makes an article worth keeping making requests like that.

It also assumes that requesting deletion review is Wikipedia's most valuable place to spend developer and designer time.

Neither is true.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#248

Post by zbowling »

bane wrote: post #106
zbowling wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bureaucratic as much you think. There is a system that is very easy to follow. 1. First they missed the delete review that normally waits about 7 days before taking action. 2. Upon discovering that their page was deleted found the archive delete review discussion. 3. Didn't understand what they were looking at and with disregard to the notes posted at the top saying that it's archive and not to edit it, edit…

So WP let him do a bunch of things he wouldn't have been able to do if it had a decent interface and/or couldn't find things buried under a pile of acronyms and bureaucratic opaqueness and that's supposed to be your evidence that it's not a broken process?

No. He clearly over and over ignored the information infront of him and proceded to do what he wanted. Then he complained about it.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#249

Post by nnythm »

aeontech wrote: post #13

Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether. Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo.…

Interestingly, I recognized the handle DGG from the article partially because he is a notable inclusionist.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#250

Post by zbowling »

philwelch wrote: post #100
sethg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people…

That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage. Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making p…

sigh

It doesn't work like that.

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