Shocked

Shocked

Edited by another user.
Last edit: 14:11, 28 January 2010

1. I'm shocked that Wikimedia is considering creating a system of "senior editors". It seems to go against the wiki concept. All the bureaucracy becomes increasingly irrelevant if a system is in place that essentially identifies a set of community approved editors -- it becomes an encyclopedic version of about.com. Furthermore, the "community of users" is not in a position to perform peer review on individual editors. Going to a system like that would be fundamentally going back to the system Wikipedia originally envisioned, and the founders subsequently objected to, before it came up with the actual wiki concept as presently understood.

2. Votes for "Senior Editor" will always remain a popularity contest. There is no mechanism that would not cause more problems than it solves. Consider: peer submission would imply existing Senior Editors in a given field vote new Senior Editors into their ranks. General collection of "votes" would consist of "barn star seniority". It also overturns the assumption that decent work by non-senior or non-regular editors will be evaluated impartially by the wider community of users.

3. Since senior editor status is about past as much as future performance, the number of senior editors vis-a-vis everyone else actually determines & modifies the function of senior editors and what they are implied to be capable of. This is a serious problem. If, as originally proposed, "tens of thousands" of senior editors are envisioned then you're looking at barn star seniority. If, OTOH, senior editors are supposed to be experts in the field to "guide any changes" made to high quality pages, then you might as well move to the "definitive publishable article" system where a peer-reviewed expert is voted in and editing is closed off after a page reaches A or FA status. If senior editors are merely supposed to guide content discussion to ensure quality work and mentor junior and infrequent editors (the rest of us), then you're looking at an entirely new and parallel system to the consensus-edit-rewrite process.

4. This new thread interface is the worst they could have picked. (I, and most people I know have always loathed the Google thread interface, but I guess with the near-ubiquity of Gmail, most people expect Wikipedia to look like the "Internet they are used to" when they open up their inbox.) More to the point, it crashes my browser entirely on my old computer (not just the discussion pages but the pages linked to LiquidThreads, such as strategy.wikimedia.org). (Google threads do not). This is a serious access issue.

Where and to whom should I address this issue? Interestingly, the threads for commenting on LiquidThreads are LiquidThreads themselves, and the Wikimedia policy discussions are in LiquidThreads so I have no access to read those on my other computer. Replying and searching for ones reply and trying to figure out which threads are nested where is slow as molasses on this computer, to boot.

--berr

216.15.63.6713:35, 28 January 2010
  1. I don't see how "All the bureaucracy becomes increasingly irrelevant ..." is a bad thing: surely it is highly desirable to have less bureaucracy and more encyclopedia?
  2. That "the "community of users" is not in a position to perform peer review on individual editors" and "Votes for "Senior Editor" will always remain a popularity contest." is true enough, and that is the Achilles heel of the proposal: for it to work, there must be a mechanism to avoid just that vote.
  3. It is indeed the intent that senior editors are not experts on the topic, but trusted users committed to the core values "... supposed to guide content discussion to ensure quality work ... [so that we]'re looking at an entirely new and parallel system to the consensus-edit-rewrite process." And surely that is a good thing: where the "consensus-edit-rewrite process" bogs down and produces nothing that is worthy of an encyclopedia then something new is called for. That is common sense. - Brya 05:36, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
And yes, this LiquidThreads is indeed a bad idea, to put it mildly. - Brya 05:36, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Brya05:36, 29 January 2010