Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On 04/07/11 11:37 AM, Sarah wrote: One of the key skills that Jimbo brought to Wikipedia was knowing when to be hands on, and when not. If you look through the early mailing lists -- not just the very early ones, but the first few years -- that's the thing that shines through again and again. If I had to point to one issue that made Wikipedia successful it was this ability to steer without micromanaging. This is an important observation. It contrasts with some of his later efforts at wading into controversial issues. These have often seemed as drive-by efforts by someone who was not completely up-to-date with the matter at hand. These would generate more controversy in an already dirfficult issue that just needed time to be worked through. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On 04/07/11 2:29 PM, David Gerard wrote: On 7 April 2011 21:56, MuZemikemuzem...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps I'm missing the point, but isn't that what we have been doing so far (i.e. with all the other sister Wikimedia projects)? Yes, but also other niches Wikipedia leaves. Wikia, for example, started to form wikis of any sort, but has rapidly taken over the niche of fansite wikis. An who can complain about that? The sister projects began by filling in important niches. The first, Meta, provided a way in which we discuss activities and ideas about ourselves and policy that was not inherently encyclopedic. Wiktionary was a response to Wikipedia is not a dictionary. etc. A fork could easily start with copied material which from that moment would evolve differently. They may choose to abandon NPOV. Having several sites that freely and independently do this would in fact put our own NPOV in a broader perspective. Another may choose to be more aggressive in the treatment of copyright. They would assume the risks at a level which makes them comfortable, but in the longer term we too would benefit from their efforts to free data. They need to be willing limit the growth of their projects to match their funding. A project that tries to duplicate everything on Wikipedia is dooming itself to starvation. Subject specialization is the most evident criterion for this. From the Wikipedia side we need to link to these projects for alternative views. They are not our enemies. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On 04/07/11 4:13 PM, Fred Bauder wrote: On 7 April 2011 21:56, MuZemikemuzem...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps I'm missing the point, but isn't that what we have been doing so far (i.e. with all the other sister Wikimedia projects)? Yes, but also other niches Wikipedia leaves. Wikia, for example, started to form wikis of any sort, but has rapidly taken over the niche of fansite wikis. That's what draws a crowd. A lesson there. I still think we should eat their lunch; I was never a deletionist. I confess that when my wife and I are sitting in front of the TV, and a question arises from whatever we are watching, Wikipedia's relevant articles become a first source of information on our laptops while we're watching. When we do that we seldom feel the need to follow the sources. Ec Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On 04/07/11 5:03 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: You should be careful what you wish for. It's not hard to make a 'viable competitor' encyclopedia that would be so corrupt and inaccurate it would make the Fox News network... look like a news network. And if it was glossy and facile enough, plenty of people would probably be dumb enough to use it. That would be great! Maybe Fox News itself can pick up the idea. Their accuracy and corruption is not our responsibility. If they're bad enough, that will make us look better. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On 04/07/11 9:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty wrote: IMO, the next best thing will be whatever can come along and solve our social and community problems technologically, while being easier to edit. Social and community problems cannot be solved technologically. Treat assholes like bugs in the software - code around them, figure out how you can make the experience downright painful for them while making it easier for the sort of people that you really want to attract. Build the software to guide people in the direction of correct behavior, and to inherently track sourcing, etc. If you approach an asshole directly you just get shit on your face. We do better by encouraging good behaviour than by spending time dealing with a handful if problem people. Do this right, and wikipedia will be pretty much dead, do it wrong, and we'll be laughing at you here in 6 months. :P Sure enough, Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On 07/04/2011 19:26, David Gerard wrote: snip Knowino (and Argopedia, and the survivors of Citizendium, and everyone in fact) needs to look at this and see what they can do. Is there room in the encyclopedia game? I sure hope so. How do you beat Wikipedia? Work like a startup. Wikipedia now changes at dinosaur pace and seems utterly unable to solve the problems it knows it has, let alone the ones it doesn't. If room to zip around it exists, something small enough to be nimble can find it. Of course the niches are there. The real question is more like this: you have to avoid the general encyclopedia market for the general reader. So what do you set out to do? One idea is to have a forum as front end, and a team of editors who collate material from the forum as back end. This was pretty much the theory of the first wiki I worked on (except the forum was a newsgroup). The Web is full of transient material, and specialised discussions, and all you really need is some working understanding of what kind of collation is worthwhile. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
We already have several rivals, including the Chinese, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike and the largest online encyclopaedia Hudong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong At some point in the near future translation software will improve to the point that they can compete against us in languages other than Chinese. Also I suspect we are already losing ground to more inclusionist projects such as IMDB. We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the small print that says their words now belong to the website they've written them on. Willingness to adapt to the desires of National Governments and even cultural prejudices also creates niches in much if not most of the world. I've no idea how good Chinese to Arabic translation software is, but the combination of an adequate translation and a filter agreed with relevant governments or religions would probably beat us in the Arab world. I don't like the idea of political censorship, but I do like the idea of enabling people to make their own choices as to what they see. If our user preferences included two stick figures and a sliding bar that enabled every option from burka to thongless then my personal choice need not concern others any more than theirs mattered to me. Other interesting niches would be for a child safe, unscientific or mono-dialect encyclopaedias. I'm not convinced that the young earth creationists with their American English at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia or the Australian English equivalent at http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are sufficiently mainstream to do this, let alone the absolutist flat earthers at http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page But I suspect that a mainstream trusted brand could find a niche here, perhaps even with a bowdlerised mirror of Wikipedia. I've seen many newbies get an early warning by starting their wiki career correcting articles to the version of English that they are comfortable with, and I'd like to see us resolve this by making display dialect a user preference http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:More_multi_dialect_wikis I think this would have a secondary benefit that identifying and appropriately marking ambiguous words such as bonnet, hood and fender would make it easier to translate those articles into other languages. Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. WereSpielChequers ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current community of editors. It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability policy gets you. The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to be too drastic. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Advertising a work depicting child sexual abuse
The [[Fan service]] article on en:WP has for some time included an image advertising Kogaru Diaries, a graphical work that features depictions of child sexual abuse (erotic spanking of prepubescent girls). The work is not notable; nor is its creator, beyond the fact that he is banned from Wikipedia (by ArbCom) and Commons, and allegedly also from DeviantArts. While we encourage the creation of original artwork, using free artwork to advertise non-notable -- and in this case likely illegal -- off-site content in Wikipedia seems a bit off. Is there anything in policy about this? Incidentally, the fan service article also features Wikipe-tan in a bikini to illustrate the fan service concept. Use of both images is being discussed on the fan service talk page. Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fan_serviceoldid=422954498 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fan_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kogaru1.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Kogaru1.jpg#File:Kogaru1.jpg_2 http://spankingartwiki.animeotk.com/wiki/Kogaru_Diaries http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1466A.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_2256000-.html Andreas ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:43 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: On 04/07/11 9:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty wrote: IMO, the next best thing will be whatever can come along and solve our social and community problems technologically, while being easier to edit. Social and community problems cannot be solved technologically. I beg to differ here. While not every social or community problem has a technological answer, that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek one out where a suitable one exists. We've already been doing it successfully - things like the edit filter are applications of technology to social problems (in this case vandalism) that have been proven to have real world value. When you have a small community, the community itself tends to propagate and enforce certain standards of behavior, and distance themselves from those that don't follow them. As that community grows, it eventually reaches a point where people are added faster than they can be assimilated into the norms of the community, and the behavior of the community changes to follow the behavior of the masses that are joining it, rather than people changing their behavior to fit community norms. Making some of those norms part of how the system works - that is, inside the black box that is the software, takes the confrontations out of the equation, while keeping the pressure to adhere to community norms in place long after a handful of editors trying to enforce them would have been overran and given up. Obviously you can't code assume good faith into the software, but you can change the workflows and information flow, and communication structure, and even site permissions to encourage this, and to give someone a chance to stop unwanted behavior like [[WP:BITE]]ing before it actually has an effect. Not every technological answer is going to be direct either - when you are looking at fixing a people problem with a technological fix, you have to look at the whole workflow in question, with a mindset of what can I change to head this off what else will it effect... will it work It may take several rounds of that before a solution is obvious, and even then, it may not be the right one, or there may not even be one, but if you start thinking outside the box, oftentimes something will come out of it that does work :) Of course, it also works the other way -- look at how some templates are being used on Wikipedia - the technology is often used to create problems :) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:26:41 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: I confess that when my wife and I are sitting in front of the TV, and a question arises from whatever we are watching, Wikipedia's relevant articles become a first source of information on our laptops while we're watching. When we do that we seldom feel the need to follow the sources. One time I can recall that such a situation came up was during the Super Bowl halftime a couple of years ago; somebody I was watching it with started wondering how old Bruce Springsteen (the feature performer there) was, so I grabbed my iPhone and looked it up through a Wikipedia app. Unfortunately, the page had just been vandalized to alter his birthdate to be 10 years earlier than it really was, so I got a wrong answer. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 08/04/2011 11:09, WereSpielChequers wrote: snip Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. Hmmm yes. It is interesting to me that Google Knol is nowhere on your list of viable competitors (you did make some good points in favour of those you mentioned). Notability has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and has fewer problems: in a word, deletionism can work well enough. Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is about topics you recognise. Salience is the neglected concept, which is relative to topic. To get back to knols: this sort of factual blogging isn't really likely to produce much interesting content, absent incentives. And no serious publishing process is likely to produce anything that is way better, unless it is quite complicated. I feel that's the correct conclusion from (en)WP. There may be an improved model, but please don't tell me that a few tweaks will eliminate the complexities entirely. There are choices that can be made about where to place the tricky parts. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name wrote: On Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:26:41 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: I confess that when my wife and I are sitting in front of the TV, and a question arises from whatever we are watching, Wikipedia's relevant articles become a first source of information on our laptops while we're watching. When we do that we seldom feel the need to follow the sources. One time I can recall that such a situation came up was during the Super Bowl halftime a couple of years ago; somebody I was watching it with started wondering how old Bruce Springsteen (the feature performer there) was, so I grabbed my iPhone and looked it up through a Wikipedia app. Unfortunately, the page had just been vandalized to alter his birthdate to be 10 years earlier than it really was, so I got a wrong answer. Probably another Superbowl watcher who's halftime entertainment was to vandalise articles about people he or she had just seen on the television. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 8 April 2011 15:17, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Notability has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and has fewer problems: in a word, deletionism can work well enough. Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is about topics you recognise. Salience is the neglected concept, which is relative to topic. I am told anecdotally that many native speakers of German who also speak good English prefer en:wp for its comprehensiveness. This may be an example of what we think we should be about conflicting with what readers actually want and expect. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
On 08/04/2011 15:57, David Gerard wrote: On 8 April 2011 15:17, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Notability has always been a broken and widely-misunderstood aspect of enWP. My impression is that deWP, for example, sets the bar higher, and has fewer problems: in a word, deletionism can work well enough. Comprehensiveness is of course about total content, while notability is about topics you recognise. Salience is the neglected concept, which is relative to topic. I am told anecdotally that many native speakers of German who also speak good English prefer en:wp for its comprehensiveness. This may be an example of what we think we should be about conflicting with what readers actually want and expect. It's not actually terribly surprising, given that there are probably at least four times as many native speakers of English as of German. In the areas I work in I often come across cases where deWP has a better article on a topic than enWP. These are things you'd expect, anyway. The real point is that deWP's model seems clearly viable, if a bit different. We'll see, in the longer term. The gap between content and featured content (optimised) still seems huge (FAs cover half a week's additions at the current rate, by number of topics). We've got a long way with good enough content. Charles= ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
With regard to the Chinese examples specifically, they may have a lot of articles, but content-wise, they are a mess. And that isn't just me, the biased Wikipedia editor saying that. A lot of Chinese people I've talked to don't trust their content either, particularly Hudong, which is worse than Baidu Baike. In addition, their communities are weak in terms of project building, I think. Editors may create articles to gain in their point systems, but they have no buy-in in terms of making a good encyclopedia, because they don't make those decisions. Finally, I doubt that we will have to compete with them in any other languages, because Chinese websites just don't seem to be interested in that. There are enough mainland Chinese users for any website to live off of. The largest video portal site in China, Youku, doesn't even have a version in traditional Chinese characters, much less any foreign language. There are plenty of similar examples. All of this is just to say, I think there is still space for Wikipedia, even when other competitors exist. When Chinese people are exposed to Wikipedia, they seem to like it and find it reliable. The hard part is getting that exposure. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia. - maintanability of BLPs
Tom, The maintanabilty test strikes me as an interesting one, but I'm not sure it scales. On Citizendium you had essentially one language and a relatively small community, on Wikipedia you have: * * a much larger multilingual community so exponentially more difficult to know if someone is sufficiently interested to update it when the subject dies. * a large proportion of editors who edit as anonymous IPs, so you have no easy way to discover in advance whether an article would be updated if the subject died. * tools such as http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table so you don't need someone on the Lain Wikipedia to be keeping an eye on whether someone is alive, there could be someone on the French, Russian or Tamil wikipedias and it then gets circulated as a death anomaly. * the critical mass that means that when someone notable dies a bunch of newbie and IP editors often turn up at their Wikipedia article As for the obscure English grocer, at present he wouldn't have an article unless he was notable for something else - not every sportsperson stays in sport till their retirement. I think you could expand notability a long way without including every shopkeeper, but as I said I think this is easier for IMDB and similar specialist pedias than for us. One area where I do think we could make a difference is to change our policy to accept the concept of transient fame. For example anyone signed as a player of a major football club is of interest to a certain section of our readers, if they are dropped from the squad without ever playing then they cease to be of interest. Currently our policy requires them to have made a first team appearance, but currently in the squad or having in the past made a first team appearance would be more rational. WereSpielChequers On 8 April 2011 11:30, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote: Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current community of editors. It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability policy gets you. The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to be too drastic. -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? -- David Goodman Yes, let's do that. Fred Bauder ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness
-- Forwarded message -- From: Ting Chen tc...@wikimedia.org Date: 8 April 2011 20:35 Subject: [Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org Dear community, on the IRC board meeting at April 8th 2011 the board approved unanimously the following resolution: We, the Wikimedia Foundation Board, believe that the continued health of our project communities is crucial to fulfilling our mission. The Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness, participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors. As laid out in our five-year Strategic Plan, and emphasized by these findings, Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse editors, and to retain our experienced editors. A stable editing community is critical to the long-term sustainability and quality of both our current Projects and our movement. We consider meeting this challenge our top priority. We ask all contributors to think about these issues in your daily work on the Projects. We support the Executive Director in making this the top staff priority, and recommend she increase the allocation of Foundation resources towards addressing this problem, through community outreach, amplification of community efforts, and technical improvements. And we support the developers, editors, wikiprojects and Chapters that are working to make the projects more accessible, welcoming, and supportive. The Board resolves to help move these efforts forward, and invites specific requests for Foundation assistance to do so. We welcome and encourage new ideas to help reach our goals of [[strategy:Openness|openness and broader participation]]. We urge the Wikimedia community to promote openness and collaboration, by: * Treating new editors with patience, kindness, and respect; being aware of the challenges facing new editors, and reaching out to them; and encouraging others to do the same; * Improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion; * Supporting the development and rollout of features and tools that improve usability and accessibility; * Increasing community awareness of these issues and supporting outreach efforts of individuals, groups and Chapters; * Working with colleagues to reduce contention and promote a friendlier, more collaborative culture, including more thanking and affirmation; and encouraging best practices and community leaders; and * Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers. ;Resources : [[strategy:Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary|Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary]] : [[strategy:Editor_Trends_Study|2011 Editor Trends Study]] ([[strategy:March_2011_Update|Executive Director's summary]], [[strategy:Openness|ideas]]) -- Ting Chen Member of the Board of Trustees Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. E-Mail: tc...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
Already been done, Conservapedia. The most disgusting mockery of conservatives I've ever seen. Then again, isn't this one of the sites Jimbo runs? Bob On 4/8/2011 3:32 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: On 04/07/11 5:03 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: You should be careful what you wish for. It's not hard to make a 'viable competitor' encyclopedia that would be so corrupt and inaccurate it would make the Fox News network... look like a news network. And if it was glossy and facile enough, plenty of people would probably be dumb enough to use it. That would be great! Maybe Fox News itself can pick up the idea. Their accuracy and corruption is not our responsibility. If they're bad enough, that will make us look better. Ec ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.
That wouldn't solve anything, except further draw a hard line and create an even larger rift between editors. If we strive to be an open community where we bring people together, then we would collectively be making it more closed by doing this. -MuZemike On 4/8/2011 1:26 PM, David Goodman wrote: I've also suggested this, calling it '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists will have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists will have it not rejected. But it would be interesting to see a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable(W)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 15:57, Bob the Wikipedian bobthewikiped...@gmail.com wrote: Already been done, Conservapedia. The most disgusting mockery of conservatives I've ever seen. Then again, isn't this one of the sites Jimbo runs? Definitely not. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
Good :) I'd be embarrassed for whoever does run that site. On 4/8/2011 6:08 PM, Sarah wrote: On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 15:57, Bob the Wikipedian bobthewikiped...@gmail.com wrote: Already been done, Conservapedia. The most disgusting mockery of conservatives I've ever seen. Then again, isn't this one of the sites Jimbo runs? Definitely not. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:17 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: A fork could easily start with copied material which from that moment would evolve differently. They may choose to abandon NPOV. Having several sites that freely and independently do this would in fact put our own NPOV in a broader perspective. What do you think about having multiple consistent points of view on tricky subjects, on some things, for example my favorite kosovo topic, it is very very hard to find any neutral point of view and the articles on that subject are widely separated. Some like the main article are vaguely neutral, and most of the smaller articles are really not. There are not even any consistent policing of them or manpower to do it. I would like to see some way to identify and isolate fragments of things that are not neutral, but clearly mark on what point of view they represent. That would allow for a clear separation of the one side, Kosovo is serbia and marking and clearly giving them a say on the matter, and also another point of view, Kosovo is free with equal rights in speaking, at least that would give a way to manage the discussion. Right now you have a big mess where the two sides are just mixed up and each side is basically fighting on wikipedia. mike ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
