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The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#331

Post by ja2ke »

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…

If the encyclopedia world's equivalent of Linus Torvalds was vetting Wikipedia entries I don't think there would be as much of an issue.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#332

Post by wpietri »

gergles wrote: post #319
wpietri wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ...

The most obvious thing is not always the most obvious thing. And the distinguishing characteristic of a vote isn't that people express opinions; it's how the opinions are counted.

Go read a number of closings of tricky AfDs and you'll soon see that it's the arguments that really matter.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#333

Post by vacri »

john_flintstone wrote: post #243
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 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…

Fair enough, but apart from your story all the others I've heard strongly complain about inaccuracy have been about subjective topics.

Still, if it's causing that much trouble in your community, why not fix the articles? Rather than spend time making fun of it, why not spend time fixing it - which is a double-barreled solution: not only do you lose the incorrect links, but people not associated with your group benefit from more correct advice.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#334

Post by voyou »

potatolicious wrote: post #284
_delirium wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal commun…

I think his point still stands - and this plays into the "systemic bias" point that other posters here have made. The issue here is not that citations are required (they ought to be, otherwise how can we ascertain truthfulness?), but rather it's heavily biased towards certain types of citations. A poster mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Wikipedia's articles on animal husbandry are laughably incorrect, to the p…

"If someone knowledgeable in the field were to come in and try to correct this nonsense, what exactly would they cite? Academic journals? Because information on animal husbandry is a frequent subject of academic debate. Newspapers and magazines? Surely a smash hit topic there."

I don't get your point. Of course there are academic journals on animal husbandry, as well as trade magazines and textbooks. Why would their be any difficulty finding material to cite on animal husbandry?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#335

Post by voyou »

sullivandanny wrote: post #16
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…

I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work. There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontrovers…

"There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted."

No, the Deletion Review page is for requesting that the debate about a deleted page get re-opened, that is, it's exactly the page you want. This seems pretty clear to me from the text on the page (especially the second paragraph), but if this wasn't clear to you I guess evidently the page could be worded better.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#336

Post by xyzzyz »

bane wrote: post #296
jarek wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If knowing the fairly simple rules of the site you are participating in counts as fanatic dedication, I weep for the internet. Do you feel one has to be fanatically dedicated to HN to know why "reply" links don't always appear right away?

The history of the problem with WP is not that there's a lack of people willing to provide quality participation. Everyone from professional authors to nuclear physicists have been screwed by the bureaucratic psychosis that pervades contributing to WP. Almost by definition, high quality participants are such because they have spent an inordinate amount of time in their area of expertise. They don't have the time to d…

I haven't ever seen quality contribution in scientific area to be rejected. The only people screwed by the "bureaucratic psychosis" are the ones who try to use Wikipedia as a way of self-promotion, which shows that the process works.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#337

Post by Flibbler »

I love Wikipedia, both the idea behind it and the site it's self, and have contributed plenty of time and cash over the years. However I have to agree that the processes have become far too labyrinthine and unfriendly for the uninitiated.

We (the existing Wikipedia community) need to have a rethink of how we lay out our rules and guides and the process for navigating them, we also need to start being a smidge more consistent about how we enforce the rules.

Mostly though, we need to be a little more tolerant of the N00Bs. I get it's tricky, you're busy, hundred things at once and some muppet comes in asking the same question we've been asked 16million times before; it's easy to be a bit terse, but if we want Wikipedia to continue to succeed we need to take a deep breath in those moments and remember to that person, at that moment, we are Wikipedia. A bad impression that turns them away from the site means they're unlikely to ever come back and that's the last thing we want.

I get why everyone's being defensive, and yes, the article was written in a very combative style, but we also need to face up to it landing a few fair points, lets take those and get working on that instead of wasting time rowing about who's in the right.

How can we clarify the deletion process for someone looking from the outside in? How can we make it clearer who to contact in those sort of circumstances? Is there any way we can make talking to people easier?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#338

Post by xyzzyz »

xtracto wrote: post #288
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…

And IMHO all those items that were removed contained information of some kind. I imagine the deletionism of wikipedia comes from the fact that it is very hard to pay the bills. But in my opinion, every piece of information (yes, even pages about fictional furry characters which clearly state that they are fictional and their context) should be preserved. However, I think wikipedia in its current structure falls short…

And who will be cleaning up all this mess?

Have you noticed that almost all Wikipedia articles are formatted in uniform way, categorized, templatified, infoboxed, interlinked, divided into sections, etc? Almost all contributions from new Wikipedians contain none of these things, and they all require to be cleaned up by someone more experienced. Contrary to what some people here say, this is the real problem, the difficulty of learning the technicalities of Wikipedia, and not policies. We believe that everyone has to read the most important policies, but not everyone should be forced to learn the Wikipedia markup and other technical stuff. This is what the Wikimedia Foundation works on, not on trivializing the policies.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#339

Post by Flibbler »

vacri wrote: post #215
eykanal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with all the hate? The author has a lot of valid points. 1) If it's supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then it should be easy to use. If the "anyone can edit" is marred by insane levels of bureaucracy, making it so that, technically anyone can edit, but realistically , only those who know how to game the system can edit, than the system as a whole is a partial failure. 2) Who are you to ju…

It is easy to use. It's just not mindless to use. It's easy to drive a car, but that doesn't mean there's no initial learning. Also, where you say 'game the system', you really mean 'follow the system'. I've made tons of correctional edits and vandal reversions on Wikipedia, and a small number of new info edits. Only one of them has ever caused a problem - that was a revert done by a bot that didn't recognise I was f…

Just because you find it easy doesn't mean others do, agreed there's an initial learning curve to everything in life but we (current Wikipedia contributors) could be doing a lot more to smooth that curve for less technically minded people who want to contribute.

We could also be doing more to make the basics of the rules clearer.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#340

Post by Flibbler »

tommorris wrote: post #279
tnuc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. In the Internet of old it was called lurking. You have to understand the community of people and their practices. It used to be considered good netiquette to spend a few days or weeks lurking in a forum before contributing. Then the user experience designers came along and said that anything that requires more than a modicum of brainpower was a "bad user experience". And everyone bends over and listens to them r…

I hate to have to point this out but we nerds no longer have the internet to ourselves, they let the rest of the world in and for good or bad, not everyone knows the rules; that's not their problem, that's Wikipedias unless we want the community to wither and die.

Wikipedia's supposed to be open to all and there's nothing that says an expert (in some obscure field we have no knowledge of) is also going to have the same understanding and experience of online communities as us.

It's nothing to do with UI/UX bias and more to do with looking at the processes we currently have from the perspective of someone who isn't us and doesn't have the same knowledge/understanding we do.

Wikipedia at the moment presents it's self as one thing 'an encyclopedia anyone can edit' but attempting to do so can be a daunting and labyrinthine process that does put people off. We're not practicing what we preach.

TL;DR - Go easier on the N00Bs and build a better FAQ.

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