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The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#311

Post by wpietri »

gergles wrote: post #164
zbowling wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you are getting down-voted for your comment. This is exactly what happens. I've been in on more than 30 or 40 so AfD discussions. There is usually a deep debate of it. In the end it's not about votes either. We leave long explanations as our points for or against. We weigh the arguments. It prevents the "+1 me too! I agree!" responses from adding to it so consensus by vote doesn't always matter…

The actual results were 7:6. On what planet is that "consensus"? Oh wait, another WikiMagicThing is that only some votes count and some votes count more than others and what votes count is completely up to the arbitrary decision of someone who has no accountability for their decisions. Right.

AfD closure isn't a vote. It's a discussion. The closer resolved on the merits of the arguments. And they are of course accountable; people who do a bad job closing can end up taking a ton of heat. But they're accountable to the Wikipedia community, not to the general public.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#312

Post by wpietri »

kstenerud wrote: post #280
zbowling wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are simply way to many forms and inputs we have to deal with on Wikipedia to make it a one off for every case. We eat our dog food all over wikipedia for that reason. Personal user styles and javascripts are even stored as wiki-pages. We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere. User's get used to it and can figure out wikisyntax through the site and i…

"We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere." And that's actually a big part of the problem. You're extending a paradigm far beyond what it's good at. When you're researching, you're looking for all of those deep nuggets of information that you'll get from poring over reams of data. Those tangental links are a joy to discover. For a user trying to accomplis…

That's a reasonable concern, but I think the alternative historical paths are all worse.

Wikipedia was run on a shoestring for many years. Developer time was in incredibly short supply, and was mainly spent on keeping the site alive. However, there was a massive surplus of labor from people who could work a wiki. People did what they could with what they had.

Had they put more of there developer time into lower-priority features (e.g., a fancy but unnecessary discussion system), they could well have blown up. Or they could have tried to get more developer labor by increasing revenue sooner. But that would have meant ads, which could have destroyed Wikipedia in a different way.

Going forward, Wikipedia should definitely be more friendly, and the Mediawiki Foundation is devoting substantial resources to that.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#313

Post by kstenerud »

wpietri wrote: post #302
kstenerud wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it assumes that user task design should follow the tenets of good UI design. What I'm hearing you say is that usability barriers are a good thing because they stop people who don't understand the system from using the system, which is the refrain of all defenders of bad UI design. We've seen plenty of disruption in the area of software UI design in recent years that disprove such a theory.

UI design is not a religion whose tenets are to be followed for their own sakes. It's a practical art. Good UI makes easy things that should be easy, and hard that which should be hard. (E.g.: http://www.zen171398.zen.co.uk/Alien%20Page%206/Ian%20Wingro... ) Your mistake is naive optimization of one part of the process. In this case, the right system would be one that makes it very easy for deletion review to process…

I haven't made myself clear. I'm not saying that someone should understand what the CONTENTS of their submission should be with only 1 minute's worth of reading, but rather the ACTIONS the user must take from a UI perspective in order to go through the process should not take more than 1 minute's worth of reading.

If the content of the user submission should be carefully thought out prior to taking the action, that's fine, but you shouldn't be deliberately throwing obstacles in the way just for the sake of slowing them down. What ends up happening when you do this is that knowledgeable people (who generally happen to be busy) won't bother contributing. I've seen this sort of situation occur countless times on Wikipedia (in general, not just with the deletion process).

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#314

Post by wpietri »

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #66
felipemnoa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Everyone should have a wikipedia page Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, Google+ is for? Wikipedia is trying to collect all of human knowledge. They are trying to hold themselves to a higher standard than a site like Facebook.

I'm not arguing to suddenly put irrelevant info onto WP. The high standard can still be achieved, the level of detail is just higher. Turing might get its own set of pages , while my kindergarten teacher maybe gets a few lines.

It's an interesting notion, and Wikipedia used to be more like that, but Wikipedia has gone the other way for a lot of good reasons, including fairness to both readers and subjects.

Readers are poorly served by a one-line biography for somebody obscure, and even more poorly served by the typical marginal biography, which is a couple paragraphs of poorly written cruft sans citations.

Subjects are poorly served by shaky biographies because suddenly the top search result is a couple of semi-random sentences covering the few things that happen to be verifiable about them.

For example, when you search for my mom's name, the top result is her obituary. I carefully wrote it in consultation with the family to give a balanced view of her life, so I'm happy to see it there. But suppose there were a Wikipedia article about her. If you went and pulled all her public records, I think you'd get a) her birthdate, b) her bankruptcy, c) her real estate broker's license, and d) the times she was the victim of a crime. I would hate it if she had an article in Wikipedia, because nothing that really matters about her life would be a part of it, and if I tried to put it in I'd (correctly) get [citation needed].

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#315

Post by [deleted] »

bane wrote: post #297
_delirium wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, people cite online stuff more, because people are lazy. But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books. That's mostly what I cite, since I write articles while I'm working my way through books, citing the book in the process. People seem to actually welcome it, if anything. I've added some information not previously available online that way about some archaeological sites, Greek wines, old AI sys…

"But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books." If you recall the great programming language AfD wars of recent. The problem was precisely that the editors exhibited an extraordinary bias against two things: a) references of printed material -- because they didn't have a copy so they couldn't verify it, and/or the proceedings were not perceived to be notable enough on that particular editors radar to…

[deleted]

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#316

Post by _delirium »

bane wrote: post #297
_delirium wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, people cite online stuff more, because people are lazy. But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books. That's mostly what I cite, since I write articles while I'm working my way through books, citing the book in the process. People seem to actually welcome it, if anything. I've added some information not previously available online that way about some archaeological sites, Greek wines, old AI sys…

"But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books." If you recall the great programming language AfD wars of recent. The problem was precisely that the editors exhibited an extraordinary bias against two things: a) references of printed material -- because they didn't have a copy so they couldn't verify it, and/or the proceedings were not perceived to be notable enough on that particular editors radar to…

If anything, I've found the experience has gotten better over the past few years, in that "notability" has been almost entirely trumped by "verifiability". These days, if I write an article with a few solid sources, I don't get hassled at all. I just wrote something a few days ago on an Ottoman-era castle in Greece, citing an offline (and not even very easy to get) book, and nobody hassled me.

I mean, you don't have to believe it, but I would guess that if you pick up a solid book, and write some well-referenced articles based on it, you aren't going to have problems either.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#317

Post by kstenerud »

wpietri wrote: post #312
kstenerud wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere." And that's actually a big part of the problem. You're extending a paradigm far beyond what it's good at. When you're researching, you're looking for all of those deep nuggets of information that you'll get from poring over reams of data. Those tangental links are a joy to discover. For a user trying to accomplis…

That's a reasonable concern, but I think the alternative historical paths are all worse. Wikipedia was run on a shoestring for many years. Developer time was in incredibly short supply, and was mainly spent on keeping the site alive. However, there was a massive surplus of labor from people who could work a wiki. People did what they could with what they had. Had they put more of there developer time into lower-prior…

That's very cool. Right now many experts are turned off by the unfriendliness of the system as it stands today. If that can be remedied, it will be a great boon to human knowledge as we'll see an increase in expert contributions.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#318

Post by waqf »

njharman wrote: post #182

Wikipedia is a clique. But, the author is kind of a "clueless as to how to work with strangers, esp voluntary strangers" idiot. The key to getting your way (in anything) is to work the system. Learn it's idiosyncrasies, etc. Complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to is fail.

I love how you spelled "idiosyncrasies" correctly but failed with "its".

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#319

Post by gergles »

wpietri wrote: post #311
gergles wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual results were 7:6. On what planet is that "consensus"? Oh wait, another WikiMagicThing is that only some votes count and some votes count more than others and what votes count is completely up to the arbitrary decision of someone who has no accountability for their decisions. Right.

AfD closure isn't a vote. It's a discussion. The closer resolved on the merits of the arguments. And they are of course accountable; people who do a bad job closing can end up taking a ton of heat. But they're accountable to the Wikipedia community, not to the general public.

Wikipedia editors can claim all day long it isn't a vote, but the sailent point of the AfD "Discussion" is a bolded "Keep" or "Delete" right at the beginning of each response. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, ...

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#320

Post by j_baker »

mangodrunk wrote: post #289
j_baker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. You point all the bad things the author did in regard to wikipedia's process, which I suppose is fair. But at the same time, you don't really make a compelling argument that the person in question doesn't belong in wikipedia. Should I take this to mean that the merits of the article in question are secondary to Wikipedia's processes?

I will take your comment as your ability to ignore all the comments showing how the article was correctly deleted.

You might also take it as my inability to see comments that didn't yet exist.
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