Quality Control of 3% volunteers against bullies

The "Next Chapter of Wikimedia's History" must obviously involve major changes. Anything less would be some form of "straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic" rather than addressing the "big picture" of what needs to be improved. An obvious major change would be to improve Quality Control (QC) of articles and the quality of communications between users. At the core, Quality Control requires: control. The control provided by verified revisions is a good start. However, beyond controlling the article contents, there must be better ways to control what people are doing, in talk-pages, and in edit-block actions which can bully and intimidate other users. The history of charities reveals how volunteers are only 3% of people; the other 97% are not there to "volunteer" and the percentage of bullies or trolls needs to be feared.

Implementing strict controls will require a great shift in policies. The core principles must be hardened, to deal with hard-hearted bullies, as in:

• "Assume good faith but expect to be mugged in the big city wiki."
• "Text should be verifiable beyond just reliable sources."

In the big city, people should not carry money in the open, in a top pocket or in their hand. Similarly, some information in Wikipedia needs to be kept in guarded areas, with control limited to various levels of trusted-user access. The ongoing, extensive vandalism, 90% by IP addresses, should be stopped by a system of trusted IP addresses, perhaps start by limiting the number of edits per day by a non-trusted IP.

Of course, massive POV-pushing is rampant, everywhere, infesting Wikipedia like a plague. The idea that any user can change almost anything, delete anything, by tiny changes over a period of weeks or months, must be stopped, as with verified revisions. Also, major articles need to have layout-pages, perhaps a subpage of each talk-page, which define the groundrules for updating each article, so the erosion of contents is not allowed to violate the general scope of the article. Rules should be set for each article, as in the en:6 W's of Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. When someone wants to remove the dates and times of events, to give a false impression of when events occurred, then a layout-page needs to clearly state that the date and time of events is needed in the article because many people would assume months had passed when the events spanned just a few days. Such layout pages could be quickened by having some boilerplate stencil layouts, such as for the typical contents of a crime article: forensic evidence could no longer be deleted by "who cares" as an excuse to gut an article leaving no concept of how a crime occurred.

Similarly, there could be a set of "operating rules" for each user. Especially when some user had been caught deleting the date/time from events in an article, or for editors who spam an issue repeated into multiple pages. A user-restrictions page could warn of the known problems of each user, if any had been logged, with some details of events. To enforce the controls, more people are needed: automated procedures cannot battle the current POV-pushing and bullying. In the manner of a classroom staffed with 1 teacher per 25 students, then wiki-moderators would be needed to monitor perhaps each 40 active users. The control structure of each Wikipedia should be changed to empower moderators to warn troublesome users that they should observe policies against censorship. Each moderator could issue "demerits" for a particular user violation, perhaps as 100 or 300 demerits, where a total such as 1,000 demerits would lead to a 24-hour block. Users could earn merits, to offset the demerits, such as by updating dead-links in many out-dated articles. Most users would quickly learn how demerits accumulated to an automatic shut-off point, where they would sense some of the blame, rather than thinking an ogre admin was victimizing them. So, on fewer occasions, a wiki-moderator would request more powerful actions to be made by an admin, but would help some admins by reducing direct confrontations with so many users, as occurs today.

Bottomline: Wikipedia should be changed into a system which expects to control troublesome users who try en:WP:Gaming the system, rather than merely "Assume good faith" and realize, "Oh darn, they've ruined thousands of articles and alienated many users into quitting". An expert college professor should not come to Wikipedia and be totally insulted. The bullying is so rampant it can only be controlled by many dedicated users confronting the bullies to change their actions. Plus, those people controlling the bullies cannot be "their friends" who share the same POV-pushing mindset, but instead, there need to be sets of censorship controls which ensure people have a fair voice to expand article details. Hence, moderators should judge events based on policies, rather than if their friends should be allowed to remain wiki-jerks.

well that is an interesting view. I think it answers exactly the issues being raised on the article page about why new people are not joining wikipedia. Because they are not allowed to do anything. There is a pretty big learning curve before you dare edit something. Someone who 'owns' an article will come down on you like a ton of bricks because you just changed the consensus version argued over for months (even though everyone concerned agrees it is wrong!). Or because you added something which while well intentioned and even imparting useful information wasnt up to the standard someone expected - as in all those rules for writing article you just proposed.

One bit did make me laugh. "Text should be verifiable beyond just reliable sources." I dont know what you mean by that, but I would agree linking to sources does not guarantee accurate reporting, never mind truth. From time to time I have a go at the reference obsessives around here. I dont mind references, they are jolly useful. Great aids when it comes to sorting out a mess of complex facts. But they do not guarantee an article is correct. They are a tool to be used to slant content just as much as sly editing. It just pushes the battleground further on. The effort required to check sources is enormous and just multiplies exponentially if myriad refs appear on a page. So I get annoyed that some regard them as a cure for everything, and give them excessive weight when judging article quality. Most articles are still quite raw and yet there are those who demand the priority is to reference in detail, rather than expanding the content. I laughed because I agreed that references are over praised, but that might not be what you meant.

Wikipedia works because it has a sufficient number of people willing to hop in and deal with an article if it gets into trouble. Even people who are obsessives about some small area can be great contributors and should not be chased away because they espouse one extreme wing of a debate on some point. There have to be enough neutral people to hold the ring, but fanatics are great for bringing new content and spending the time needed to build and maintain an article. As the article here says, the risk is if you impose so many rules, no one like me who just likes to add some general knowledge is going to stay long. Because they will be chased away. Now, I'm past that stage. I even sit here with a dozen books obsessively noting a sentence from one then a paragraph from the next. But I do so with what I judge to be common sense. Part of being an editor is to read the books and then just write something which summarises them. The critical job of an editor is not to take one fact from here, reference it, then take a fact from there and do the same, but to synthesise those into an original work. Yep. The paradox at the heart of wiki content rules.

But i would agree, some articles are pretty good. It is very difficult as a newcomer to contribute to such an article. The easy targets have probably all been taken. Most people who come here at all are probably interested in writing and knowledge or they wouldnt try at all, so they start with better than average ability to contribute. But if a subject is of wide interest, then a wide number of people will have got there already. I dont believe articles will ever be finished - especially when they are written according to set rules and those rules change regularly- but hard to start on an article which is pretty good already. I have been here long enough to understand how to structure an article. Doesnt matter what it is about, chances are I can take some badly organised collection of facts and make it presentable. I know how to find things out, to attack an article which looks good, but on examination has serious faults if you start to examine its facts. I like organising things, so wiki appeals. I consider a good wiki editor is a generalist who can wade into even a big complex article, understand it and identify where it fails. None of that is very helpfull in suggesting how to get inexperienced people interested, but I also believe wiki is not paper. It may be a very impressive work, but it is a drop in the ocean of human knowledge. It is vital to allow new editors to arrive, play with an article on some abstruse subject and learn. It is no good having a play area. Who wants to waste time writing something certain to be thrown away? Wiki needs to allow the existence of bad articles which one day may become good ones.

As to verified versions, I just tried that. Sheer hell. Trying to edit the Fukushima nuclear disaster through verified version was mind numbing. No edit possible without conflict. Admittedly, plenty of problems because of ordinary edit conflicts, but a whole layer more trying to sort others edits. Then, when you simply decide to accept everything, still the added delays. The article is bouncing about between titles, so when it moved it left its status behind. Nothing terrible happened. Clearly there will be people from the pr department of the power company writing the article, or from greenpeace but even they may have some inside knowledge! I suspect some of the most polite anons trying to edit the page are people with relevant knowledge who could contribute more than simply spotting and linking news items, but must be very frustrating indeed for someone like that. Dont take that as my last word on the subject as this was an unusual situation for an article, but I judge it was adding to the difficulty of creating an article rather than reducing it. Most edits from people brought to wiki because they felt the subject important and wanted to help, were good.

Oh, and what I meant to say on this page: wiki is dead if it does not keep up numbers of editors. Folks, wikipedia is now IMPORTANT. Important enough for anyones PR department to put people on the case to edit for their interest. If there is not a sufficient body of independants it will go the way of whoever puts enough employees on the job.

Having seen a fair number of WP:AE threads, I completely disagree with "Even people who are obsessives about some small area can be great contributors and should not be chased away because they espouse one extreme wing of a debate on some point." I takes 6 to 9 months of persistent POV-pushing to topic ban someone for just about the same amount of time if they are civil. (The uncivil ones get indef-blocked sooner). So, someone who is inimical to NPOV but civil transforms a part of the topic area in a zero sum game for 1-1.5 man-years. Food for thought.