User talk:Randomran
In other languages: беларуская (тарашкевіца) (be-tarask) български (bg) বাংলা (bn) dansk (da) Deutsch (de) Ελληνικά (el) English (en) Esperanto (eo) español (es) euskara (eu) fil (fil) français (fr) Frysk (fy) עברית (he) हिन्दी (hi) hrvatski (hr) Bahasa Indonesia (id) italiano (it) 日本語 (ja) 한국어 (ko) ქართული (ka) Ripoarisch (ksh) latviešu (lv) македонски (mk) Malti (mt) नेपाली (ne) Nederlands (nl) norsk bokmål (no) occitan (oc) Kapampangan (pam) polski (pl) português (pt) română (ro) русский (ru) slovenčina (sk) svenska (sv) Tiếng Việt (vi) | Add translation [edit]Welcome to the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic planning process. We appreciate your interest in taking part. You can start by reading our Community guidelines. Check out the links on the Main Page and find an area that interests you. Please feel free to ask me any questions, or you may leave a message on the Village pump.
-- Philippe 22:06, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Appreciate the work on the summary of interviews
You're pulling some great content in, making that summary much more useful. Do you think the task forces are browsing through those quotes? Any ideas on how to get their attention there? --JohnF 18:20, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the info
Hello, thanks for telling me about that information you found. Lots to take in there. I'll try to get my head around some of it. Perhaps you'd like to place the link and your summary on Task_force/Enhance_community_health_and_culture_task_force/resources? --Bodnotbod 13:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
Community health task force: week of 11-09-09
Hello Randomran,
The Enhance community health and culture task force completed our first full week of work. I summarized our initial activities for our first Weekly Report and included a list of general activities for next week.
Task force/Enhance community health and culture task force/Weekly Report 01
Please add any specific activities that you plan to do for the next week here.
The clock is ticking so in order to stay on schedule we need to make a list of the research activities to complete by the end of the first month. Following this schedule will let us focus on writing the recommendation during the last few weeks because we will have the core research completed. Add your suggestions here.
Look forward to seeing your ideas and thoughts.
Sydney (aka FloNight)
Data 'n' Deadlines
Hi there, been noticing your contributions recently... thanks, I think I would feel very lonely in the TF if not for you :o)
As I've just reported on our TF Talk Page, John F made an edit to the Task Force pages today giving TFs the deadline of 12th January for their final submissions. I'm wondering if that's going to give us any realistic opportunity to organise getting any more data than we have. For example, that survey which we really need done might fall by the wayside if we don't act quickly on it; I would expect activity (which is hardly going at a pace right now) will drop off around Christmas so I guess we would want the survey to go out - at latest - end of November, maybe get 2 weeks of survey submissions and then a week to consider what we've learned from it?
That needn't be the timetable but my essential point is that the schedule is looking tight. Any thoughts? --Bodnotbod 22:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks for making this TF less lonely too :) I 100% agree on the survey. We'll want to try to get the survey out in the next week or two. I have no clue how to make that happen though. Maybe we need to take more initiative between you and me. Who do you think would be able to get a survey going? Should we talk to someone high up in the strategy wiki? Is there a process for making this kind of survey happen? Randomran 23:38, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
- I'll put a link to it in the Weekly Report 02, wait a couple of days and then leave a link to our report on Philippe's talk page with a note that we really need to take action on it. --Bodnotbod 10:57, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
- Sounds good. Maybe Thursday we'll bring it up with Phillipe if no one else has any ideas on how to get it going. Randomran 16:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
- I located 5 more studies based on interviews with Wikipedians. Several of these are studies about motivation for contributing.
- I see that you found information about WikiCup. I know that there are other contests and ways that users are rewarded on Wikipedia. I think it would be good to look at those already in use to see if they are successful, or are failure, or are under used but have the potential to be successful. I'll add links to them on the Rewards page you started. FloNight 21:15, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Task force/Community health
Hi,
Updating you about the task force activities and inviting you to update us about any work done related to Community health and your future plans.
See the reference section for new material to review. And here is a reading list of more studies related to the topic.
Additionally, I would like to set a time this week for us to do an interim status check on our work. Could you please indicate here the best days and time for us to have the discussion.
FloNight 11:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
re:saying hey
Glad you found them useful. --Piotrus 04:13, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks for the insightful comments. Btw - at this point the hope that our initiative here can fix the project is one of the main things still preventing me from leaving the project... :> --Piotrus 22:51, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
Tools
- If you look at the history of any Wikipedia article, you see several tools. Revision history statistics might be useful. Page view stats shows the level of interest in the article. There might be more. I'll check around to see. FloNight 01:50, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
Reminder
Reminder to add your comments to the Task force/Community Health/Weekly Report 04. And I want to highlight that the task force is having a meeting on Thursday at 22:00 UTC. FloNight 10:39, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
New thread weirdness
I started a new thread about English Wikipedia ArbCom using binding mediated decision making. [1] Doing it I moved my comment from an existing thread, and it left you responding to a post that is gone. I don't have time to sort out how to fix it now. So, I letting you know where my post went. FloNight♥♥♥ 20:07, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks a lot! Randomran 20:30, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
Task force/Community Health/Weekly Report 07
Hi :-)
- Take a look at the Community Health task force's discussion about narrowing our list of Recommendations. We are whittling down the list in order to have something concrete by January 12, 2010.
- And add your recent activities and planned activities to the Community Health Week 07 Report.
- Let me know how that I can better help you with your work on the Strategic Planning wiki.
Sydney aka FloNight♥♥♥ 19:01, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
Post
I like your post here. Can you bring it into discussion in some other more high profile thread,maybe? FT2 (Talk | email) 00:31, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
- Glad you liked it! I was looking at the latest bumped threads... but I realized that the issue is more or less dead. It doesn't look like there is much support for creating a barrier for new users, and even then, it wouldn't even be in the top four. Maybe it's something we can talk about more when we look at trusted/senior editors, and the barriers involved in getting to that level? Randomran 04:20, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Barnstar
 |
The Original Barnstar | |
| I'm absolutely in love with this page. Thanks for developing it! |
~Philippe 19:12, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks a million! I'm hoping to translate it into a concrete recommendation very soon. Randomran 19:33, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
WYSIWYG translation interface
Hi! I saw you had created an article that partialy where about user friendlier user interfaces. This is a recommendation draft from the Local language task force that probably will be dropped from the final recommendation documment. But I thought it might interest you as it considers a translation interface that could be part of a general WYSIWYG. The same document also contains a concept art of a possible translation interface.
- Thanks a lot. There are a lot of specific ways to implement an improved interface, so we're going to have to be picky about which ones we focus on. But translation is at least on our radar. Good luck with the local language task force. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Randomran 19:35, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
Commons content dispute
Currently on Commons there is a big content dispute. Right now several people are trying to reach a compromise in a Community discussion. From watching the situation there, I definitely think that a binding mediated process would help because the situation is one where will the dispute likely will restart with a new group of users unless an agreed upon semi-permanent or permanent solution is found. So I think the recommendations for binding consensus building could work on other wikis. I'll add the link to the Commons image conflict so you can look at it. FloNight♥♥♥ 13:25, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
- I definitely think it could help too. A lot of research explains the value of binding mediation, and I think the idea of settling an issue would be attractive to a lot of Wikipedians. I'd be interested to take a look at the dispute, if you can send me a link. Randomran 15:19, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
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- This proposal is being voted on in an attempt to address the issues raised by Cary Bass/Bastique at the start of the thread.
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- This conflict is complicated because it shows where there are gaps or conflict in existing policy.
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- 1)Commons does not have a written policy specific to living people. So there is not exceptions made that takes into account the effect images, image name, image description, or category could have on a person.
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- 2)And the method to categorize images is not standard. "Over categorizing" can put images in categories where people would be surprised to find the content. For example, if people search for a picture of a couch, they would not expect to find a sexually explicit image. But they might if we use categories as a way to tag the content found in the image. "Under categorizing" the images excluded images from a category where people would expect to find the image.
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- Unrelated to this dispute, I recently remove a category from an erotic painting because the category was a game played by children. The Wikipedia article about the game linked to the Commons category, and link took the reader to a page with Commons images including the erotic image. Not good because most people would not expect to find erotic image when reading an article about children's game.
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- In the Latuff categorization dispute, deliberately "under categorizing" the images is the best solution that anyone has come up with to resolve the problem. By putting them all in a single category, the content dispute about how to categorize them or whether to delete would end.
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- This is an interesting case. It would be one thing if a few people were trying to push a bad idea, and they were shouted down by reasonable voices. But there seems to be decent support for some kind of policy on this, with a somewhat smaller group obstructing it -- for valid reasons. This is exactly the kind of situation where Wikipedia breaks down, because the default is to stay the same, and not change. And there are not enough people who are willing to stick around and actually hash out something that would gain consensus. Representative mediation or binding mediation (or both) could help a lot, because it could finally get some of the opposition talking to some of the supporters to work out some kind of middle ground. Randomran 23:53, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
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Next steps (again)
Hi Randomran,
Thanks for all of your contributions to the strategy wiki to date! The strategic planning process wouldn't be where it is today without all of your help. Your early and frequent support was invaluable, and I want you to know how much of a difference that you made. I hope you'll continue to work towards finishing the plan...
We're about to move into the third and final phase of the process, and in many ways, this will be the most challenging. I'm hoping you will continue to be an active presence in shaping the movement's five year strategic plan.
Here are some concrete suggestions as to how you can help moving forward:
- Add your name to Strategic Planning:Hosts. This just formalizes what I think has been true all along; that you care about this process, and that you're doing what you can to help it along moving forward.
- Help organize and improve this wiki! Starting next week (January 18, 2010), we're going to be encouraging many more people to come participate, and we want to make sure this wiki is as presentable as possible. A comprehensive list of things to do is at Strategic Planning:To-do list.
- Invite people to participate! Encourage volunteers to discuss Task force/Recommendations.
- Finally, we need to clearly describe what this final phase is going to look like. In particular, we could use feedback and discussion on Strategic Planning:Decision-Making.
Let me know what you think! Many, many thanks! ~Philippe 01:00, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Random
Thanks for dropping off some tasks for me to do, I was just pondering what to do next. I'll address them this week. I haven't been contributing much but I have been following the changes and have been nodding approvingly at your contributions :o) (Well, except when you considered burying Social Features, hee hee :o) -- Bodnotbod 12:05, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
Strategy Task Force
I'm glad you joined! --Eekim 15:24, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
- We've had a good few months to discuss the Task Force recommendations, and it's important that we start converging on goals. If you could jump in on the most recent thread, that would be great. Thanks!
NASA collaboration
I'd like to solicit your opinion on a proposed collaboration with NASA, and get your thoughts as to whether this is is a good idea.Smallman12q 14:02, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
- [History↑]
Contents
| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Research project relating to the Wikimedia Strategy Process | 2 | 13:02, 25 August 2012 |
| Still haging around | 13 | 19:48, 27 December 2010 |
| Virtuous cycle | 4 | 22:17, 19 November 2010 |
| thanks | 0 | 18:13, 16 October 2010 |
| New York Times Citation Parser | 14 | 22:09, 21 July 2010 |
| Administrator Survey | 15 | 17:21, 13 July 2010 |
| How we handle expert | 4 | 19:26, 12 June 2010 |
| Let me try sn explain myself a different way | 3 | 20:19, 8 May 2010 |
| Content scope | 1 | 16:31, 6 April 2010 |
Dear Randomran,
My name is Gordon Mueller-Seitz and my colleague, Leonhard Dobusch, and I are currently engaged in a research project relating to the Wikimedia Strategy Process that took place in 2009-2010. Our key interest is to explore how this strategy process actually unfolded.
In this connection, we started with interviewing WM personnel and promoters such as Eugene Kim in a first step. By now we want to broaden our insights in a second step and we would like to kindly inquire if it was possible to make a short telephone interview with you concerning the WM strategy process? If yes, we would very appreciate it if you could suggest a date/time that would suit you and the telephone number we could reach you on.
Thank you very much for a brief reply. We look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Gordon and Leonhard
--
Dr. Gordon Mueller-Seitz
Freie Universitaet Berlin, Chair for Inter-firm Cooperation
School of Business & Economics, Dept of Management
Boltzmannstrasse 20, 14195 Berlin (Germany)
Tel.: ++49 30 838 56359, Fax: ++49 30 838 56808
Gordon.Mueller-Seitz[at]fu-berlin.de
89.204.155.238 08:33, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi Gordon, sorry for not replying sooner. I'd be glad to help out. It's been a busy summer but I have a bit more free time now. Hopefully I didn't miss any deadlines you might be working under.
Let me know if you're still interested. If so, then I'll email you and we can set something up.
Dear Randomran, thank you very much for your kind offer. My name is Melanie Denter, I am currently writing my bachelor thesis at the Free University of Berlin about the strategy process and Gordon and Leonhard are my colleagues. If you don’t mind, I would instead make the interview with you. If you write me an e-mail (m.denter[at]fu-berlin.de), we can agree on a date/time that would suit you. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Regards, Melanie
So you are still hanging around :p
Here and there. Just poking in to see how/if things are moving along. May get more involved down the line if something comes up.
I'm in the same situation and the more we wait and more deteriorated will be the situation in the English wiki. Last drama was about "Pending changes".
When i read the Foundation objectives for 2015, i could only laugh out of bitterness so much it's in out of synch with we discussed here.
I like you virtuous cycle but i have to point that somehow "Increase in quality standards" results too often by "Decrease of the community health".
I'm not sure that there's a link between increasing quality and decreasing community health. Even if there is, it's not the only way to increase quality, and I think you can even increase quality in a way that improves community health (by pinning down issues that people keep fighting over).
I actually think this business plan is pretty good. Objectives tend to be high level and not full of details that the soldiers on the ground can relate to. The problem isn't an issue of strategy or goals anymore. It's about action, IMO.
How to improve Wikipedia through provoked crisis for dummies:
Troll/Edit war => RfC => Tighter/Stronger guidelines or Policies => People leaving out of bitterness & burnout out
The most blatant example is the Unsourced BLP crisis in the English Wikipedia.
Second point, i will not struggle for people who don't get the reality check. You know :p That said i'm deeply concerned as the Foundation will probably aim for the most easily quantifiable objectives first unfortunately that won't work.
I can't remember the last time we added a major new policy. Maybe I'm out out touch. Almost every serious discussion of a topic area that I saw led to "no consensus". That's where the bitterness and burnout comes from, in my opinion. That people can't agree on basic principles for how to treat content, so it opens up a free for all. Fringe editors on one side battle fringe editors on the other side, and the same conflict happens on dozens or hundreds of different articles, over the span of multiple years. It's not that I think policies should be tight. But there needs to be some kind of common principle that people are loyal to, and we don't really have that anymore.
On the bright side, the foundation is doing a few things traditionally in their power. The main thing is updating the technology and the platform, which includes making the interface more usable. It can't happen fast enough. So I hope they really push hard.
The problem is they still refuse to get involved in how Wikipedia is governed, and how decisions are made. It's understandable why... the legitimacy of Wikipedia comes from the fact that the community controls it, not Jimbo. But I'm not confident the community has the power to fix its own problems.
Hi Randomran,
Trying to get some use out of your excellent graphic, File:VirtCirc3.png. Couple questions for you:
(1) Is it available under a free license? If so, do you think you could upload it to Commons?
(2) Any chance of uploading a vector version of it, for use in print and/or higher resolutions? Like an SVG file?
Many thanks!
I threw it together in powerpoint... I really hate fiddling with images. But you're welcome to upload it to commons or even duplicated it somehow.
I hear you, image work can be tedious. The challenge for me uploading it is that, since I'm not the author, it's impossible for me to assert convincingly what license it's been released under. Could you just state explicitly here that you release it under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (or another free license if you prefer) so I can link back here when I upload it?
By the way, Trevor made another version of this as well that we've been using. commons:File:Virtuous Circle - Monochrome.svg It's such an important concept to our strategic plan -- seems worthwhile to have at least one good visual representation, if not more! I've been using it in grant applications, and I'd imagine there will be many other uses for it going forward (both for Foundation staff and in the volunteer community).
Thanks!
Glad you're finding it useful. I might even add an external arrow now, coming from the outside flowing into "participation". Either way, I'll assert here that I transfer ownership of the copyright to you, Pete Forsyth. (And encourage you to give it to the Wikimedia Foundation.) Merry Christmas :)
I've written a fully working script at http://smallin.freeiz.com/beta/cite1.php . Currently it only handles articles from NYT, though I'm going to add blog support via the The Times Newswire API. Let me know what you think.
Try an article like http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/nyregion/25paterson.html which has 5 authors...
There are more than 120k links to nytimes from wikipedia, so I'll probably write a bot once I get all the exceptions worked out.
That is downright incredible. Is the script modular enough that you can easily add other reliable sources?
Yes, for now it only uses the NYT Article Search API so it can only handle articles from 1981 to today. Next I plan to add NYT Timesnewswire API so that it'll be able to handle nyt blog posts and certain other media offered by nyt. After that I'll add guardian, cnet, and then others...
Its similar to Reflinks, but I hope to add more independent site support.
I'll also write a bot later to automatically clean up citations once I get all the exceptions ironed out.
Thanks again for doing this. In terms of priorities, I'd much rather see a whole bunch of big reliable sites included in a sloppy way (e.g.: you get title and publisher, but it sometimes screws up the author) than to have only a few sites done perfectly. But above all, just keep going!
Well there are some that pull out the title and url listed at http://www.ehartwell.com/InfoDabble/Mediawiki_citations,_references,_and_bibliography_management
but I'll be adding quite a few next week.
Do what you can. Just an idea: you could have an "abstract" class that just grabs the URL, treats the domain as the publisher, and treats the meta-title as the title (and maybe tried to grab anything that looks like an author or date). So it automatically works for every site. But for certain sites, you add specific support, which is what you're already doing.
I actually remember seeing a few tools besides reflinks that did that...but it's pretty much what I plan on doing. I was curious if its worth getting references their own pages as is done with DOI citation on wikipedia.
I'd say it's worthwhile to have some kind of default. I wouldn't go crazy trying to craft a great default. Just something that can give us a decent starting point, so that citations are braindead.
Maybe one day, somewhere down the line, like V10.0 of this feature would integrate it right into this editor. I'd love to just type in an URL while editing an article, and see it automatically reformatted to a proper (or tolerable) citation template.
There a few tools that give title and url:
- http://toolserver.org/~holek/cite-gen/index.php
- http://diberri.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/templatefiller/index.cgi wp:User:Diberri/Template filler
I do hope to get to that point...possibly even offer an api that would allow tools to query the citation cite...
Took a little time off. Things have been busy. But I'm glad to see you're still working on this. I can't program, but let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
I've developed a further proof of concept in vb.net 2.0 called "AutoWikiCite". I've started a thread at Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Vpt#AutoWikiCite, but it hasn't gotten any response. The program can be downloaded at sourceforge and requires Windows XP or higher with .net 2.0. It's "portable" in that you simply unzip the file and run.
It currently can handle only several major news sites...but I plan to add a "library xml" file so that it could handle several thousand.
Let me know what you think.
I'm stuck on a mac, but I'm really excited that you did this. You should post something on the village pump here too. Try to build some interest in it. If there were a web version, I bet it would really take off. Randomran 02:54, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
I'm working on a web version & a java version as well. The core of the program will be an xml file with a list of the top 1000 or 2000 sites and "directions" for the program on how to extract data on those sites.
On wikipedia...there is something similar being done at Wikipedia:User:Rjwilmsi/CiteCompletion...though it hasn't gotten very far yet.
I'd like to help with the former administrator survey, since we've got a tentative commitment from WMF.
Hey! I'm gonna try to take a look at it later this week, but there's no reason that we can't get started sooner...
The first step would be to take the survey questions at Task force/Community Health/Former contributors survey and copy them to a new location (e.g.: Task force/Community Health/Former administrators survey). The idea is that we want the surveys to be similar enough that we can make comparisons. Of course, some questions just don't make sense when we're asking an active admin.
So the next step, after you've created a copy of the survey, is to flag some questions that you don't make sense to ask to former admins. And also propose some new questions -- some new pieces of information that you think would be helpful to find out. (Maybe even post a little notice at the thread on the topic, to get other peoples' feedback.)
Then we can discuss and change the survey. We'll want to balance the goal of getting relevant data about the admin attrition problem, while still having enough data that allow us to make valid comparisons between admins and your average user.
First draft is up at the link you suggested. Started a discussion on the talk page as well.
Thanks a lot! I'm gonna try to get some discussion started over there.
Hey Randomran! I just found out about this survey. It's great that you all are doing this!
I've taken a look at the survey questions/answers and they look great. I only have one comment that I've left here. I think it would be a good idea to ask Admins how they spent their time as an Admin since responsibilities seem to vary so widely. It would be interesting to see if different types of activities tend to correlate with higher levels of dissatisfaction. It would also be good to get some data (even if it's self-reported) on how admins divide their time amongst the various roles play.
I am very disappointed that you reverted my comments in a thread summary.
As a statistician, I have serious concerns about this behavior. Would you please telephone me so that we may discuss this matter? 650.335.5848
I agree with random ran. As a statistician surely you know that throwing a question like this into a survey will not get to the analysis you want. If there's something you'd like to test please feel free to design an experiment but do not hijack this survey when so many people are clearly opposed to the question you are proposing.
On the contrary, omitting an independent variable is a serious statistical mistake in survey design. What is your experience with survey design that you claimed is "not insignificant"? Do you agree strongly enough to debate the question in public? Your position has absolutely no support in the peer reviewed secondary medical literature, or among Stanford medical students and faculty surveyed. Mine has abundant and unanimous support.
Exactly what do you think "my position" is, James? You've misinterpreted and/or misstated my positions before. Let's start with that.
As for my experience: prior to coming to work for Wikimedia Foundation, I worked for a boutique research firm that dealt with evaluation of federal and state granted organizations, including survey design, execution, and analysis.
I urge you to refrain from further reversion without discussion.
For the record I would revert such an edit too. While physical health is obviously important to people and their lives and activities, we are after proximate causes - we also don't have questions about their heart conditions, genetic propensities, and the like. "I think photos show a disproportionate number of overweight people" is not salient to this issue.
The basis here is that users, managing their own lives, make choices of how they spend their leisure time. While a number of users will be influenced by bad health (I had an infarction so I couldn't edit as much or Was editing during recovery from injury, healed now and back to work etc) the question here is about their conscious choices of time usage and encouragement/discouragement, not their personal circumstances (family, health, work etc). The few for whom personal circumstances are major and influential will tell us anyway - and those could be any number of real-world issues (death, divorce, kids, finance, work, other hobbies) not just the one you're thinking of.
I'd revert such a narrow question too.
Do you also agree with reverting away evidence of the dispute, along with sources from the peer reviewed secondary medical literature?
There is a difference between asking about all possible causes of attrition and preventable causes of attrition. In this situation, there is in fact abundant evidence that the 2nd most prevalent cause in the locale of most admins (obesity) is more likely than the 1st (tobacco smoking.)
Can you find any support for your position whatsoever in even the peer reviewed primary medical literature? I doubt it.
This isn't a Wikipedia article. It's a community discussion on a strategy project. As such users alone decide what they feel relevant and what they don't, and that certain matters aren't agreed to be important in their eyes.
A researcher writing a medical paper where chocolate is relevant must assess how relevant and cover it if needed. Same researcher deciding what to chat about over supper can simply decide they don't give a care about it or it's simply not sufficiently interesting or relevant to them for discussion, and that's their right.
My personal view is that this isn't sufficiently central or helpful to be worth including. You're allowed to differ.
There's only so many times I can repeat myself. Others have tried to persuade you. You're allowed to stick to your opinion, but you're not allowed to force it on everyone else. I'll try to sum it up one last time:
- The purpose of this survey is to investigate why the population of administrators began to decline starting roughly in 2007. The medical issue you're citing has been an issue since before Wikipedia even existed. It's not going to explain why there was a sharp and sudden decline in 2007. If we want to talk about external issues that caused this sudden decline, I could list literally a dozen that would be a more likely explanation (e.g.: the recession, the rise of social networking, the shift towards mobile Internet access, even the excitement and volunteerism around the 2008 election). But we don't isolate those by asking a bunch of multiple choice questions like, "was it the recession?" or "was it twitter?" We let them say "I was drawn into other commitments" and offer them an open-ended question to describe in their mind why they decided to stop being an administrator.
Since you're not even close to building a consensus for your position, you have to understand that I'm being really generous by giving this issue this much attention. For that reason, I hope you'll understand why this will probably be my last comment on this topic, and that nothing has changed since I made my last "last" comment.
Hi,
I think you will interested by this ongoing AfD en:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/A-Girl (2nd nomination) and see by yourself how we handle rather badly expert inputs in this case en:Matt Thorn. Bottom line if you are an expert and want to interact with Wikipedia use your "Expert" Reliable Source website instead of contributing directly inside Wikipedia.
Yeah, that stinks. But I think that's the way it has to be.
Wikimedia can never be reliable because people trust their editors. For every expert, there's a dozen so-called experts, and a hundred ordinary people. If someone told me "Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman contributed to that article", as a reader I'd have no way to separate that expert fact from the dozens of lame observations. It's different if someone actually provides an attribution. "Oh, a link to a scholarly paper by a nobel prize winner. Yeah, I trust that fact."
What's worse, a featured article that might be approved by a consensus of editors can deteriorate. So even if a nobel prize winner were to sign off on an article and say "yes, absolutely, that's a fantastic piece of work", that seal of approval would spoil quicker than milk in the sun.
So we're left with attribution as the main measure of reliability.
What's funny is that eventually people will start creating reliable source link on the fly just to please Wikipedia which i'm not sure that will be a good Internet evolution.
Just like that:
Ok, Wikipedia doesn't want ABC fact because it's not asserted by any reliable source then i will contact XYZ reliable source to put online a news, an article or an obituary asserting that fact just for the sake to placate some editors.
Online contents "fabricated" for the single purpose to suit Wikipedia. Meeehhhhh!!!
I actually saw someone alleging to be a journalist saying "I'll just add it to my blog". He did. He posted the fact. And then he got into a edit war that led him to get blocked.
To paraphrase Churchill... attribution is the worst way to measure reliability, except for all the other ways that have been tried.
Attribution it is.
Yea.
But sometimes doing it this way could save us other form of edit war and frustration.
A good case is Fred Saberhagen death which whole edit war & drama could have been avoided had one of the contributor asked the SFWA to put an obituary on its official website which could have been easily done as members of the SFWA were among the involved editors of this whole mess.
Randomran, Based on your comments to two of my posts related to Inclusion and deletion, I admit my failure to communicate what I was really trying to say effectively. Your responses were logical, appropriate and I fundamentally support the ideas you were trying to convey. Unfortunately, my inability to communicate what I was really trying to say made the exchange seem a bit contentious which makes further discourse on the thread problematic, because there is absolutely no desire on my part for any sort of contentiousness in this strategy discussion. To that end, I wanted to try and convey to you my ideas here, in a slightly different way, to see if I could do a better job in communicating them.
I am a strategy consultant. I teach and believe in end-state goals and outcome driven strategy. Although tactical activity plays a critical role in the execution of a strategy, tactical solutions (activity) should never be incorporated into Strategic Goals because it allows people to easily lose sight of the desired end states and focus instead on activities that may seem perfectly logically, but don’t drive to the desired end state.
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Deletion is a Tactic [edit]
If you take the ideas of inclusion and deletion and think about them in a different way, I believe we can better deal with them without contention. First, I believe deletion is an activity, a tactic if you will, that supports an end-state goal of content quality. If there is content that does not meet the quality standard, deleting it is an effective tactic to upgrade the overall quality of project content. Second, inclusion is neither tactic nor strategy. Inclusion is the philosophy that there are alternatives to the tactic of deletion to improve quality. Here is a hypothetical (however improbable) example of what I mean. If the total content quality of the project was measured simply on a % scale where anything less than 100% indicated the project contained content that was below quality standards, you could have a simple strategic goal that said: In 2015, the quality of total project content is 100%. This would be a remarkable achievement, and as an end-state goal, says nothing of the path to get there as there could be multiple ways to achieve it.
One of those paths is simple and reflects to some degree how we operate today. When existing or new content is not up to quality standards and cannot be easily brought up to those standards, it is deleted and the overall quality of the project is raised. Deletion is a very effective tactic to improve overall quality.
Another path might be that any existing or new content that doesn’t meet quality standards is brought up to those standards by editors through mentoring, exhaustive research and rewriting. If all efforts to improve specific content failed, the deletion tactic can be employed. If that could happen, then the overall quality of project is raised as individual content is first either improved or as a last resort deleted.
A third path might be the establishment of mechanisms that essentially rendered deletion as a tactic unnecessary. Regardless of how it was accomplished, if all existing content was brought up to standard and any new content always met standards, the need for deletion would be diminished and the overall goal of content quality would still be achieved. Imagine a project that didn’t require substantive deletion because all new content met the quality goal. A lofty but not undesirable goal.
Tactics employed must not impede other strategic goals [edit]
Unfortunately, when there are multiple strategic goals in play, tactics chosen to achieve one goal, must not impede progress toward other goals. The project has participation and scope goals as well as quality goals. And there is a presumption that some tactics, deletion for one, adversely impact participation and scope by discouraging participation. This does not mean that deletion is a bad tactic to improve quality (it is actually a very efficient tactic in that regard), it merely means that when it is employed, it presumably impedes progress toward other goals—participation and scope.
Archimedes was deleted [edit]
The story of Archimedes’ death and the Siege of Syracuse (Sicily) provides an interesting historical example of this idea in the real world. Archimedes was a brilliant Greek scientist and mathematician whose contributions to the defense of Greek Syracuse had beguiled the Roman invaders for 2 years in 212BC. The Roman leader, Marcellus knew this and one of the strategic goals of the campaign was to capture Archimedes and use his wisdom and science for the benefit of Rome. Another obvious strategic goal of the campaign was the surrender of Greek Syracuse to the Romans. At this, the Roman soldiers prevailed because once the defenses of Syracuse were broken, the Romans were both tactically and numerically superior to the Greeks. When a Roman soldier on patrol encountered Archimedes in his home along with his scientific equipment, Archimedes resisted capture merely by refusing to go with the solider when asked to do so. The Roman solider, unaware of who Archimedes was or of his strategic importance to Rome, killed him—a perfectly rational, acceptable action for a soldier focused on doing his job in securing the city. Archimedes was deleted (CSD-A0). We will never know whether Rome’s failure to achieve its strategic goal of preserving Archimedes for Rome had lasting impact, but we are confident that they failed to achieve the goal.
It is not necessary to examine why this happened, but more importantly, we need to recognize that this type of conflict between tactics and strategy has consequences. We must strive to ensure that the tactics we chose to achieve one strategic goal (no matter how effective) must not impede achievement of other strategic goals. This is my point about deletion. It is absolutely not about those who delete, as they execute the tactic with skill, finesse and loyalty to the strategic goal of quality. It is about the potential impact deletion has on the achievement of other goals and finding ways to eliminate that conflict.
Apology for the long-winded essay [edit]
I trust the above, long-winded essay helps clarify my thinking and the comments I was trying to make on the Strategic goal threads. If it didn’t, I think I’ll go find a Roman soldier to come and shoot me. I look forward to continued discourse on the Strategic goals of the Wikimedia projects. Thanks for listening. --Mike Cline 16:05, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Mike Cline, I want to thank you for the thoughtful essay. I realize that we probably don't disagree on much, but that it's hard to have a conversation about this stuff because there is so much Wikipedia jargon. I want to give you a thorough reply, so that you know just where we agree and where we don't.
Let's start with where we agree. I probably don't have as much experience as you do with strategic planning, so it makes sense that we focus on strategic goals, and allow the tactics to be flexible. To that end, deletion is a legitimate tactic for improving quality, and we agree that it is certainly not the only tactic or best tactic.
There are editors who are willing to employ this tactic. Even in some situations where I would not delete, I'd concede that it is reasonable to delete. But I think you'd agree with me that there is a subset of editors who have turned deletion from a tactic to a goal in of itself. I sometimes refer to these editors as "extreme deletionists" in shorthand. It's easy for people to toss the word "extreme" around as some kind of insult, so let me be specific: extreme deletionists are the editors who are willing to make up new reasons to delete when old ones don't work. You might not be able to distinguish an extreme deletionist from merely someone who is willing to delete because both will often use sound reasons on articles that it might be reasonable to delete. But the extreme deletionist will reveal themselves when there are no longer any good reasons that really support deletion, but they invent a reason to delete anyway. (See this case study for what I mean.)
Your essay has a blind spot, though, and that's discussing inclusion. There's inclusion, and then there's inclusion in terms of what it means on Wikipedia. The word "inclusion" -- when we are talking about "inclusionists" on Wikipedia -- really means "keeping a separate article on a topic". To this end, keeping a separate article ("inclusion") is also a tactic, this time for the goal of content scope. But it is not always the best tactic. Just as with deletion, there are other paths to good scope: expanding a section in another article, expanding a list, merging content between articles and lists, transwikifying articles to other projects, redirecting a valid search term to a better article. And then there's the tactic that serves both quality and scope: improving articles to good standards.
So you can imagine what happens when "keeping a separate article on a topic" goes from a tactic to a goal. There are lots of times where keeping a separate article is reasonable. And then there are the "extreme inclusionists" who makes it their goal to keep separate articles on nearly everything, no matter how fundamentally problematic that content is.
What the extreme deletionist and extreme inclusionist have in common -- other than that they've turned a tactic into an end-goal -- is that they show no willingness to build consensus. You could score a win for both quality and scope if an article were merged, or redirected, or re-written and improved. Both sides could win if we had policies that were clear, and balanced these goals. But the extremists would rather hold things in conflict, because they'd rather fight on Wikipedia every day to win 50% of their battles, instead of making a compromise where they might have to put down their sword.
So I think we agree that tactics should not impede other goals. To that end, we should not embrace any tactic-as-goal, whether inclusionism or deletionism. Allowing people to keep or delete separate articles helps the encyclopedia, but committing ourselves to one tactic as dogma will force us to either sacrifice goals of quality or scope. Moreover, the editors who have embraced a tactic-as-goal often have the most destructive impact on the community. I wouldn't dare hand anything resembling immunity to either side of that debate, because they will find a way to use that shield as a weapon.
Hi Randomran!
As you took part in the discussion in the "Extending content"-thread on the strategy task force talk page that initiate the content scope task force, I hope you will join the continued discussion on the content scope task force talk page.
