Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Ray Saintonge wrote: I'm making a point of replying to this before I read any of the other responses to avoid being tainted by them. Since I think you make several insightful observations well worth focusing on, I hope you will in return not mind me replying in several messages to your one, just so I don't create a huge long message, but can focus on each point with the detail and consideration it deserves. (I may take some time between each partial reply, just so I don't give a quick and shallow reply.) I concur and thank you. Even though I had already trimmed down Sue's comments to isolate the ones that I wanted to address, I should know by now about the problem of having long and thoughtful responses that exhaust the attention of some. Sue Gardner wrote: * Do we think the current complaints resolution systems are working? Is it easy enough for article subjects to report problems? Are we courteous and serious in our handling of complaints? Do the people handling complaints need training/support/resources to help them resolve the problem (if there is one)? Are there intractable problems, and if so, what can we do to solve them? Training accomplishes very little if we don't know what we want that training to accomplish. At some level it is important, but it is not in itself THE problem. Courtesy is a personal quality that is most often not amenable to training. Discourtesies need to be handled with an even hand. If courtesy is shown to the subject, but not to the apparently offending writer, the problem is exacerbated when the writer feels pushed to defend his actions. An intervenor who takes an unnecessarily aggressive approach to fixing an article is as much a part of the problem. The intractable problems are rooted in human nature. I have always believed that the subjects of BLPs should have a right of reply. To some extent they should have the right to publicly rebut what is said about them. Such rebuttals need to be clearly identified and attributed, and, unless they launch a clear personal attack on some other person, even an outrageous reply needs to be added without content editing. Personally, (and I admit, this inflames me no end, and I *do* lose sleep over it) BDP's should have a right of reply too, from beneath the grave (yes, I am referring to Biographies of Dead Persons), but they rarely get an even shake. There are various Biographies of specific Swedish nobles from the late 18th century whose portrayal is clearly libelous, if it were said of a living person, as it was written in the 1911 edition of EB - and largely unedited, incorporated into the English language wikipedia. (I wish I had the historiographical/biographical know-how and energy to rectify that, but I have to admit I don't.) Not that I know anything of 18th century Swedish nobility. There is an important point to be made in what you say. If the only reason for being more rigid about BLPs is the fear that we might get sued, or that our reputation might otherwise suffer, our actions are rooted in a false premise. The ethical approach is to have all biographies brought to a high degree of accuracy. We may begin with certain preconceptions about the accuracy of the 1911EB, but we should never be shy about questioning those preconceptions when warranted by alternative evidence. Most of us lack not only the know-how and energy, but the resources as well. It's very easy to underestimate the magnitude of the tasks. And I am not claiming outrage at a systemic bias, but just flagrant bias as per the author of the specific entry. The systemic bias in your examples is not one of our creation. Sure, the persons themselves can not be harmed, but our deep understanding of the forces of history, and what force personality, heredity, cultural context and up-bringing play within it, is immeasurably impoverished by getting a view that is faulty. In the preface to the 1971 printing of the 14th edition of the EB editor Warren E. Preece notes: The world before the war of 1914-18 was no more 'normal' than the world after it; the series of battles fought between 1455 and 1487 had hardly lost some of their importance and all of their immediacy before man's historians had named them; there is a danger that in looking back over what has been, what has most recently been will assume an importancethat is in large part only apparent. Looking at the first 10 articles of the 1930 printing of the same edition, A1 at Lloyd's, Aal, Aalen, Aalesund, and Aali, Mehemet were no longer in the 1971 printing. 50% is quite an attrition rate. Of the first 10 biographical articles, only 4 survived. Not all casual library visitors seeking information will have the same result. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: * Wikimedians have developed lots of tools for preventing/fixing vandalism and errors of fact. Where less progress has been made, I think, is on the question of disproportionate criticism. It seems to me that the solution may include the development of systems designed to expose particularly biased articles to a greater number of people who can help fix them. But this is a pretty tough problem and I would welcome people's suggestions for resolving it The problem with rules that are too detailed is that the letter of the rules often overrides the spirit of those rules. It does little good when a discussion about a possibly derogatory statement migrates to one about the use of primary or secondary sources. When every detail about a BLP receives the same scrutiny the really bad stuff tends to fall into the background, and energies are sapped by being perfect over details which, even if wrong, are harmless. The question, for example, of where the subject attended school is not usually harmful if it's wrong. If the subject tries to correct this we need to trust him in the absence of reason for the contrary, and we need somehow to credit him as the source of that information. To question this without reason presumes bad faith. This is not unexceptionally accurate. There are many details of biographical articles where it is not even close to presuming bad faith on the person in question to assume they might out of a perfectly natural human foible (a foible is not even close to bad faith) wish to gild the lily or embellish, or even retouch a blemish. I certainly know I have fallen for that in many instances, when telling tales of my deeds, and know many people who probably remember events I have personally witnessed wholly sane, sober and of sound mind with a vivid memory, but they remember what happened to their own benefit, quite naturally and non-bad-faith. This is not a matter of actual bad faith on the part of the article's subject, but of presuming bad faith in anything that he might say. As long as we are dealing with the most pedestrian of biographical facts we should assume that the subject will be truthful about this, not that he is trying to be deceptive. The kind of data to which one might remember to his own benefit is by nature more subjective. What school he attended, and what did he do there differentiates two different kinds of questions. For the tales of your deeds I hope to be still alive when the Kalevajussi is published. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Fred Bauder wrote: This would exclude a great deal of pornographic actresses and actors. Which I don't think is a bad thing, in fact. I'm far from a prude, but someone who is solely notable for appearing in a few pornographic films seems to contradict what our policy is regarding other inclusion categories; and these articles seem to have a higher-than-average incident of compliant rate, notably when personal information begins to appear on their articles. Cary That would not preclude an article about the movie, if notable, although only a few films spring to mind. And the name of the actor can be mentioned but ought not be a redlink, unless the person's private life is notable and the subject of substantial information published in reliable sources. He may have appeared in more than one film, or he may have received awards for his performances, or he may have been active in free speech politics. This still does not touch on his personal life . Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Sue Gardner wrote: I am just clarifying - default to delete unless consensus to keep would be a change from current state, right? In terms of policy, default to delete is the current state for BLPs. To be more exact, the important bit is: If there is no rough consensus and the page is not a BLP describing a relatively unknown person, the page is kept and is again subject to normal editing, merging or redirecting as appropriate. However, that is at least somewhat new (several months old, I think), and I am not certain how universally administrators apply it at this point. The relevant policy is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DP#Deletion_discussion Dominic ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
In Norway its covered in Lov om behandling av personopplysninger (personopplysningsloven) §7; Forholdet til ytringsfriheten (Relation to freedom of speech) [http://www.lovdata.no/all/tl-2414-031-001.html#7] It is an exception for kunstneriske, litterære eller journalistiske, herunder opinionsdannende, ... or artistic, litterary and journalistic, including opinion building purposes. John Lars Aronsson skrev: Tomasz Ganicz wrote: least in Poland at some legal risk. In Poland there is a law that a person can always ask for removing his/her personal data from any electronic database (except govermental ones). There is a similar law in Sweden (Personuppgiftslagen, PUL), but it has an exception for the freedom of the press and similar journalistic purposes (det journalistiska undantaget), and this exception is always referred to for websites similar to Wikipedia. The Norwegian law apparently has a similar exception, that also covers opinion pieces (opinionsdannende). The Danish law apparently refers directly to article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights. What you could do is to ask Polish journalists how they operate newspaper websites under this law, and how they (as guardians of the freedom of the press) would react if the Polish Wikipedia was censored in this way. Perhaps they should write a newspaper article about how this musical artist tries to hide her real age. This doesn't necessarily bring an answer to the question, but establishing a good link with journalists is always useful. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
In Norway it seems that neglecting to do something will not lead to any real danger of legal actions, its phrased uforstand, but gross neglectence, or grov uforstand could be punishable by law. An example given is that if an admin is notified on email about specific child porn in an article (that was the example given in an email thread) and refuses to take action it might be grov uforstand, while if a group of admins are notified it will not be more than uforstand from those that does not react. If someone in fact writes back and says go away, we're not interested that might be labeled as grov uforstand. It seems like this kind of scenario is the only real danger for an admin at no.wp for something he has not done himslf. John David Gerard skrev: 2009/3/2 Michael Bimmler mbimm...@gmail.com: Well, I could think of a couple people who might be subject to persecutions (depending on how serious Polish prosecution authorities are...) : - Administrators who were made aware of this on-wiki but declined to react by removing the data - Polish volunteers of the info-pl-OTRS queue who were made aware of this via email and rejected to intervene Is there likely a legal obligation to act? Shall we exclude them all? (Note, this is all speculation, but it's a discussion worth having imho) If administrators are subject to legal danger for *not* performing given actions, their power to take those actions must be taken away, for the protection of the encyclopedia. I don't say that lightly, but I can't see any other way things could be. I have a pile of special superpowers on en:wp, but if I were being legally required to exercise them for reasons other than the good of the encyclopedia, I'd be fervently hoping someone would take them away without me actually asking them to. What is the realistic legal danger of people being forced to take actions on the encyclopedia just because they can, in Polish law? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
If I'm not mistaken it should be possible to detect the presence of a text which describe a person, and then include a link to a contact form about BLP. John Nathan skrev: Personally, I'd like to see a prominent Report a problem with this article link or box only on BLPs for starters. We don't want to overwhelm OTRS with complaints about other sorts of less time sensitive errors, nor do we want to discourage people who notice errors from figuring out how to actually edit. I wonder if something can be attached to categories? Like subcategories of Category:Living people if such a thing exists, and have the report link on all pages in those categories. You still have the problem of uncategorized pages, but at least it makes the report link stick out by not having it be part of the typically ignored interface framework. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Cabal?
Hi! I realise, and beg of people not to actually believe I buy into this, but when someone makes an accusation that someone is claiming to be a WMF employee and claims that there is a conspiracy, I tend to bring it up. I beg of people to not take me for an idiot. Thats what more thought of subject lines are for :-) If you tag the conversation with Cabal?, of course you will get answers with Cabal :) BR, -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: 2009/3/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: Excellent. Getting some idea of community opinion is very important. However, has anyone carried out my suggestion of consulting with the CC lawyers? We've been in repeated conversations with CC about the possible attribution models. CC counsel has commented specifically that attribution-by-URL is a permissible attribution model that is consistent with the language and intent of CC-BY*. And that explicitly included offline reuse? If so, it looks like we're ready to present a final proposal for the community to vote on. Even with such a small sample size, those numbers are pretty conclusive. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Sue Gardner wrote: 2009/3/3 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net But someone making a request is a sign that the article really needs a hard look, and quite possibly should be removed for not meeting our standards. So the reversed presumption of default to delete, unless consensus to keep is a good idea for living subjects. I would add that when this is in question, arguments that make excuses for the current state of the article are not valid reasons to keep it. I am just clarifying - default to delete unless consensus to keep would be a change from current state, right? I ask because I got a call the other day from someone asking to have the BLP about her deleted. The article centred around a single incident in her life. I handed it off to a longtime English Wikipedian (doesn't matter who), who told me the subject was notable and therefore the article would be kept. That experience was consistent with my general understanding - that it has been extremely difficult for even marginally notable people to get the BLP about them deleted. So -again, just to clarify- if Wikipedia adopted a practice of defaulting to delete unless there's consensus to keep, that would be change from how BLPs are handled today - yes? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I am not sure how it is handled on en-wp. If it was on zh-wp and if it is me whom you wrote I would do following: I would put the article to vote for delete with a remark that the person requested for delete. I would put a remark in village pump because this is a delete request that is not under the usual procedure to get more attention and I would leave a remark with link on the Skype chat room (this mainly because of the chinese community heavily use Skype) I would also leave a remark on the user talk page who had created or largely extended the article about the delete request. So it is either a per default keep nor a per default delete. I think it is a your attention please we need talk about this. Ting ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: (My usual answer: Email info at wikimedia dot org, that's wikimedia with an M. It'll get funneled to the right place. All other ways of contacting us end up there anyway. This seems to work a bit.) Ha. Tie this into Thomas's suggestion... ...print up a sheaf of business cards, with Got a problem? info @ wikimedia.org in nice clear bold lettering, the puzzle-globe at one edge; the other side just WIKIPEDIA writ large. Distribute them to everyone who does PRish stuff... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: 2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: (My usual answer: Email info at wikimedia dot org, that's wikimedia with an M. It'll get funneled to the right place. All other ways of contacting us end up there anyway. This seems to work a bit.) Ha. Tie this into Thomas's suggestion... ...print up a sheaf of business cards, with Got a problem? info @ wikimedia.org in nice clear bold lettering, the puzzle-globe at one edge; the other side just WIKIPEDIA writ large. Distribute them to everyone who does PRish stuff... Best. Idea. Ever. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: And that explicitly included offline reuse? If so, it looks like we're ready to present a final proposal for the community to vote on. Even with such a small sample size, those numbers are pretty conclusive. 1) Have the numbers been released? All I saw was a selective summary. 2) What do you think they're conclusive of? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
On Mar 4, 2009, at 7:17 AM, Andrew Gray wrote: Ha. Tie this into Thomas's suggestion... ...print up a sheaf of business cards, with Got a problem? info @ wikimedia.org in nice clear bold lettering, the puzzle-globe at one edge; the other side just WIKIPEDIA writ large. Distribute them to everyone who does PRish stuff... Great idea. But also, we simply must change the culture of those who see these things on wiki. For instance, today I declined a page protection request from an editor who saw a BLP subject making changes to their own biography. Amazing! A BLP subject sees factual errors in their biography, tries to change it, and rather than helping them through the changes or referring them to OTRS or anywhere, we're asked to protect the page from the changes since the subject's version was... wait for it... INACCURATE?! I know there may be COI issues, but it seems to me that for whatever reason there's this adversarial us vs the subject relationship that's been built up... it's so dangerous and potentially damaging. sigh /rant ___ philippe philippe.w...@gmail.com [[en:User:Philippe]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/2 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: As far as I can make out, the present situation on en:wp is: a proposal was put which got 59% support. That's not a sufficiently convincing support level. So Jimbo is currently putting together a better proposal, with the aim of at least 2/3 support and hoping for 80% - it'll be more robust. Timeframe, er, I just asked him as well. Bleh. Well, at least it's *something*. I did a headcount the other week of all the OTRS simple vandalism and uncomplicated BLP tickets I handled - ie, all the ones not needing digging and arguing with people and so on. 80-90% of them would have been avoided by flagged revisions. This leaves lots of BLP stuff (the systematic POV problems, etc) that it wouldn't address, certainly, but I reckon at a stroke it would pre-empt a good *third* of our email load. It'd probably prevent even more by proportion if we turned on a report this function, since that'd heavily be skewed towards vandalism. Enabling both, together, would be excellent. But I think making it something for after we get the thrice-blesséd FlaggedRevs might be the most efficient approach. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review (was:Re: Cabal?)
If we were doing such a thing: 1. we wouldn't be paying anyone 2. we'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Nice idea, actually. Anyone feel they could put together a serious programme to recruit academics to such a cause? (changed subject as this is an interesting discussion) I was thinking about this as well recently and yes, Thomas, I agree, this is something that could coordinated or at least supported by chapters, many of which have good connections to local universities. Michael Just to remind that I am a university professor and that I posted my thoughts a while ago on meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yaroslav_Blanter/Temp17 So far, nobody showed any interest. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: And that explicitly included offline reuse? If so, it looks like we're ready to present a final proposal for the community to vote on. Even with such a small sample size, those numbers are pretty conclusive. 1) Have the numbers been released? All I saw was a selective summary. 2) What do you think they're conclusive of? The numbers given by Erik at the start of this thread are sufficient to draw the conclusion that a significant majority of the community will be happy with attribution by URL. My one concern with the survey is that the options were not particularly clearly defined - I'm not sure everyone taking it would have understood what the online/offline split was all about. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: 1) Have the numbers been released? All I saw was a selective summary. 2) What do you think they're conclusive of? The numbers given by Erik at the start of this thread are sufficient to draw the conclusion that a significant majority of the community will be happy with attribution by URL. Less than half of people answering the survey ranked attribution by URL first. You're assuming that those who ranked no credit is needed first will be happy with attribution by URL, and you're assuming that those who ranked credit can be given to the community will by happy with attribution by URL. But these people will also probably be happy with attribution by listing of authors. So you can easily draw the conclusion that a significant majority of the community will by happy with attribution by listing of authors. In fact, making your assumption you could say that the survey showed that 100% of them are happy with it. My one concern with the survey is that the options were not particularly clearly defined - I'm not sure everyone taking it would have understood what the online/offline split was all about. It was horribly designed, but this much seems true - 1 in 5 Wikipedians surveyed expect that an offline copy of a Wikipedia article to which they have contributed, will contain their name. But according to Creative Commons, CC-BY-SA does not require such attribution. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: And yes, 80% of people ranked one of 4 options which I consider unacceptable first. But then, 67% of people would have done so even if everyone chose their answers randomly. Now, how many of the 20% who wants their name cited would have given the same response to something like: Would you be happy to piss everyone off if your name does not appear in a list of about 100 authors of a Wikipedia article cited by Xyz? Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: You're assuming that those who ranked no credit is needed first will be happy with attribution by URL, and you're assuming that those who ranked credit can be given to the community will by happy with attribution by URL. But these people will also probably be happy with attribution by listing of authors. So you can easily draw the conclusion that a significant majority of the community will by happy with attribution by listing of authors. In fact, making your assumption you could say that the survey showed that 100% of them are happy with it. I think it is reasonable to go with the simplest solution that a significant majority are happy with (I'm assuming everyone is in favour of making things as easy for reusers as possible, while maintaining what they consider adequate attribution). The options given, in order of simplest to most difficult are: No credit Credit to Wikipedia (or similar) Link to article Link to history link online, full list of authors offline full list of authors (Does anyone disagree with that ordering? I don't think it should be very controversial. I would be interested to know how many people didn't order the choices in a way compatible with this ordering - by that, I mean starting at a certain point as (1), then assigning subsequent places to subsequent options until you reach the end and ranking the remaining options in reverse order - and by how much they varied.) If we look at just people's first choices (assuming they ranked the options in way compatible with my ordering, first choices are sufficient) then: 12.11% would be happy with no credit 39.48% would be happy with credit to Wikipedia 69.66% would be happy with linking to the article 80.89% would be happy with linking to the version history That clearly shows that a significant majority would be happy with attribution-by-URL (you can argue over where the URL should point). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.com: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: And yes, 80% of people ranked one of 4 options which I consider unacceptable first. But then, 67% of people would have done so even if everyone chose their answers randomly. Now, how many of the 20% who wants their name cited would have given the same response to something like: Would you be happy to piss everyone off if your name does not appear in a list of about 100 authors of a Wikipedia article cited by Xyz? Do we really want to only listen to the opinions of those people actually willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way? I imagine most Wikimedians are sufficiently mature to accept it if the majority disagree with them. (This is assuming only options actually legal under the license are considered.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: You're assuming that those who ranked no credit is needed first will be happy with attribution by URL, and you're assuming that those who ranked credit can be given to the community will by happy with attribution by URL. But these people will also probably be happy with attribution by listing of authors. So you can easily draw the conclusion that a significant majority of the community will by happy with attribution by listing of authors. In fact, making your assumption you could say that the survey showed that 100% of them are happy with it. I think it is reasonable to go with the simplest solution that a significant majority are happy with (I'm assuming everyone is in favour of making things as easy for reusers as possible, while maintaining what they consider adequate attribution). What constitutes a significant majority? What if the survey results had said that a significant majority was happy with their work being released into the public domain. Would you then find it reasonable to release *everyone's* work into the public domain? If we look at just people's first choices (assuming they ranked the options in way compatible with my ordering, first choices are sufficient) then: 12.11% would be happy with no credit 39.48% would be happy with credit to Wikipedia 69.66% would be happy with linking to the article 80.89% would be happy with linking to the version history That clearly shows that a significant majority would be happy with attribution-by-URL (you can argue over where the URL should point). Order of difficulty is not the same as order of happiness. I would be happier with no credit than credit to Wikipedia. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: Do we really want to only listen to the opinions of those people actually willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way? We should. If someone isn't willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way, they don't really care in the first place, do they? I imagine most Wikimedians are sufficiently mature to accept it if the majority disagree with them. Accept what, that the majority disagrees with them? If that's what you mean, yeah, most Wikimedians are. (This is assuming only options actually legal under the license are considered.) I don't think that caveat has been met, though I'd present a higher one either. Only ethical options should be considered. Mere legality isn't sufficient. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: Do we really want to only listen to the opinions of those people actually willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way? We should. If someone isn't willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way, they don't really care in the first place, do they? Ah, so the only people who matter are the immature children who throw temper tantrums while the adults are busy with important work? Interesting concept, although I can see how people who believe this would be tempted to act like immature little children, because there's the expectation that such behavior should yield good results. The people who matter here the most are those that are hard-working, productive, helpful. The people who aren't whining like a tired baby on every mailinglist thread that they find disagreeable. This is a group of people that tend not to make their opinions well-known, but scarcity is directly proportional to importance here. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: What constitutes a significant majority? What if the survey results had said that a significant majority was happy with their work being released into the public domain. Would you then find it reasonable to release *everyone's* work into the public domain? No, because that wouldn't be legal. I think I've made it quite clear that community opinion is only relevant when it comes to legal options. I'm not a statistician, someone else can work out how large a majority is needed from a sample size of 570 to be confident (at the 95% level, say?) that a majority of the population as a whole agrees. If we look at just people's first choices (assuming they ranked the options in way compatible with my ordering, first choices are sufficient) then: 12.11% would be happy with no credit 39.48% would be happy with credit to Wikipedia 69.66% would be happy with linking to the article 80.89% would be happy with linking to the version history That clearly shows that a significant majority would be happy with attribution-by-URL (you can argue over where the URL should point). Order of difficulty is not the same as order of happiness. I would be happier with no credit than credit to Wikipedia. Could you explain your reasons for that? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Do we really want to only listen to the opinions of those people actually willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way? We should. If someone isn't willing to make a fuss if they don't get their way, they don't really care in the first place, do they? Ah, so the only people who matter are the immature children who throw temper tantrums while the adults are busy with important work? Not what I said at all, and in fact I was interpreting make a fuss as making any positive action to express their displeasure with the situation. The people who matter here the most are those that are hard-working, productive, helpful. If that's the axis you want to measure based on, sure, that's true, although I'd say that anyone who is productive matters, and mattering more doesn't have much meaning. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: And yes, 80% of people ranked one of 4 options which I consider unacceptable first. But then, 67% of people would have done so even if everyone chose their answers randomly. Now, how many of the 20% who wants their name cited would have given the same response to something like: Would you be happy to piss everyone off if your name does not appear in a list of about 100 authors of a Wikipedia article cited by Xyz? Not clear. That question wasn't asked. In fact, it's not clear that only 20% want their name cited. If you ranked full list of authors must always be copied second, does that mean that you expect all authors to be listed, but just that you expect something else more, or does it mean that you don't expect all authors to be listed at all? It's not clear. The survey methodology was horrible. Far be it for me to disagree with survey results that back up my position on attribution :) ... but I actually agree with Anthony on this one. This is a very small, self-selected sample; there would be no harm or cost associated with turning it on for a much larger percentage (or all) of logged-in users on the top-ten languages, not just English or German alone, which both have peculiarities associated with being the largest Wikipedia communities. I agree also there was not a middle-ground option for those who think only the top (no matter how that gets determined) authors should be attributed. On the other hand, I can't recall for sure what the questions said, because I can't see them, having already taken the survey... is there a meta page with the questions somewhere? I know there's time pressure on this... but on the other hand, we've waited years :) It would be worthwhile to get better stats before making sweeping generalizations about the community's desires. -- Phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com: I know there's time pressure on this... but on the other hand, we've waited years :) It would be worthwhile to get better stats before making sweeping generalizations about the community's desires. That we've waited years is irrelevant. We make a decision soon, or the decision is made for us. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I imagine most Wikimedians are sufficiently mature to accept it if the majority disagree with them. Accept what, that the majority disagrees with them? If that's what you mean, yeah, most Wikimedians are. Accept that they've lost the argument and move on. This is more than just an argument if it's being used to purport to give copyright licenses away. In fact, it's not much of an argument at all - arguments aren't won by voting, unless you're defining the argument as which position more people agree with. (This is assuming only options actually legal under the license are considered.) I don't think that caveat has been met, though I'd present a higher one either. Only ethical options should be considered. Mere legality isn't sufficient. How are you going to define ethical? It's an entirely subjective concept, a vote is pretty much the only way we can handle it. I define ethical as that which promotes the good life. I don't think it's subjective at all. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: What constitutes a significant majority? What if the survey results had said that a significant majority was happy with their work being released into the public domain. Would you then find it reasonable to release *everyone's* work into the public domain? No, because that wouldn't be legal. What if the FSF could be convinced to come up with a GFDL 1.4 which makes it legal? I'm not a statistician, someone else can work out how large a majority is needed from a sample size of 570 to be confident (at the 95% level, say?) that a majority of the population as a whole agrees. So if 51% of Wikipedians wanted no attribution (say everyone was polled), and the government made it legal, then the other 49% should lose their right to attribution? Order of difficulty is not the same as order of happiness. I would be happier with no credit than credit to Wikipedia. Could you explain your reasons for that? Probably not easily. We'd have to get way off topic for this list (and I'd have to make statements that would hurt people's feelings and be seen as inappropriate). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: This is more than just an argument if it's being used to purport to give copyright licenses away. In fact, it's not much of an argument at all - arguments aren't won by voting, unless you're defining the argument as which position more people agree with. I've made my views on the legality clear, I'm just talking about the legal options and then it is simply an argument about personal opinions. How are you going to define ethical? It's an entirely subjective concept, a vote is pretty much the only way we can handle it. I define ethical as that which promotes the good life. I don't think it's subjective at all. Are you serious? I think I've made my opinions perfectly clear (several times), you are clearly aren't actually listening, so I'll stop banging my head against a brick wall now. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: I did a headcount the other week of all the OTRS simple vandalism and uncomplicated BLP tickets I handled - ie, all the ones not needing digging and arguing with people and so on. 80-90% of them would have been avoided by flagged revisions. Please say this REALLY LOUD to the objectors this time around. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
(Last email, since I received this I was I was typing what was meant to be the last one. Then I'll really stop.) 2009/3/4 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: What if the FSF could be convinced to come up with a GFDL 1.4 which makes it legal? They can't. The GFDL requires future versions to be in the same spirit. I'm not a statistician, someone else can work out how large a majority is needed from a sample size of 570 to be confident (at the 95% level, say?) that a majority of the population as a whole agrees. So if 51% of Wikipedians wanted no attribution (say everyone was polled), and the government made it legal, then the other 49% should lose their right to attribution? If the government (or governments, depending on if you care about non-US jurisdictions) makes it legal, then they have no (legal) right to attribution. Moral rights (in the sense of the dictionary definitions of the individual words, not the legalistic sense of the phrase - let's not get into *that* argument again!) are completely subjective and are very difficult to have a meaningful debate about. That said, I'm not sure I would consider 51% sufficient for such a decision (I know that somewhat contradicts my previous statement). Order of difficulty is not the same as order of happiness. I would be happier with no credit than credit to Wikipedia. Could you explain your reasons for that? Probably not easily. We'd have to get way off topic for this list (and I'd have to make statements that would hurt people's feelings and be seen as inappropriate). In other words, you've had a falling out with the Wikimedia movement and don't feel it deserves the credit for your work, even if that means no-one gets the credit. Fair enough. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not a statistician, someone else can work out how large a majority is needed from a sample size of 570 to be confident (at the 95% level, say?) that a majority of the population as a whole agrees. If the 570 people are a RANDOM sampling of the underlying population: 307 people (53.5%) If 307 out of 570 people (53.5%) agree with statement X, you can be confident at the 95% level that at least 50% of the underlying population would agree with X. Of course the current sample is not random, and I don't think rights should be apportioned by simple majority either. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2009/3/4 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: I did a headcount the other week of all the OTRS simple vandalism and uncomplicated BLP tickets I handled - ie, all the ones not needing digging and arguing with people and so on. 80-90% of them would have been avoided by flagged revisions. Please say this REALLY LOUD to the objectors this time around. - d. Won't work. So of us objectors have overlarge watchlists see so we also know about the cases where long standing issues have been picked up and fixed by IPs. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Sue, As far as default to delete goes... There was a high profile proposal about it awhile back, written by Doc_glasgow (now en:User:Scott_MacDonald), which got significant support but appeared to fall short of a consensus. Nonetheless the deletion of articles on marginally notable living people became more common shortly afterward - not necessarily as a default to delete, I think the increased awareness of the danger that marginally notable BLPs present convinced more people to argue for deletion at AfD. I'm surprised to see that a version of default to delete made it into the deletion policy - supports the notion that policy follows practice, I suppose. However, the policy and the proposal behind it didn't mention or account for the wishes of the subject (that I recall); in deletion discussions those have largely been seen as not relevant. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/4 Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com: Phoebe writes: This is a very small, self-selected sample; there would be no harm or cost associated with turning it on for a much larger percentage (or all) of logged-in users on the top-ten languages, not just English or German alone, which both have peculiarities associated with being the largest Wikipedia communities. Is there a version of the survey that does *not* entail a self-selected sample? The methodologist in me wants to know, because it seems to me that selection bias is inherent in any survey of this sort. (What's more, it seems fairly predictable in which direction that bias would skew results.) Well, you could block access to all Wikimedia sites until someone from your IP address has completely the survey. I wouldn't recommend it, though! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
One of your points there was: 6. The current experience (or at least my current experience) is not really encouraging. The real top researchers just plainly have no time to edit articles, nor are they really interested. Those who come are mostly interested in editing article about themselves or about their immediate research, and view this as a kind of free PR. The same might be said of articles about Wikipedia. If you don't get any responses within 48 hours you are unlikely to get any at all. I see one response there but that is most likely because of the message to which I am responding. Your comments are on Temp17 of what is probably a much longer series of personal subpages. There is very likelihood that anyone will ever see it, let alone respond. Ec Actually, I only have Temp17, and I was preparing it in my personal space (so far provided links to several users), but on one occasion a couple of months ago I posted it in this mailing list. It there is any interest, I will obviously move it to the general meta namespace. I did not yet check the comments, will do now. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Phoebe writes: This is a very small, self-selected sample; there would be no harm or cost associated with turning it on for a much larger percentage (or all) of logged-in users on the top-ten languages, not just English or German alone, which both have peculiarities associated with being the largest Wikipedia communities. Is there a version of the survey that does *not* entail a self-selected sample? The methodologist in me wants to know, because it seems to me that selection bias is inherent in any survey of this sort. (What's more, it seems fairly predictable in which direction that bias would skew results.) --Mike This is true -- though I'm no statistician and I'd love to hear from those who are (Robert?) I have wrestled with this question before and I'm not sure there's any way to get a non-self-selected survey about anything on the projects due to anonymity concerns. However, I'm mostly concerned with: * getting responses from more language communities * it seems there may be a difference between those who see the notice popup on their watchlists (the 5%) and those who chose to go to the survey to take it (people like me, who really care about this issue). For instance, we ran an item about the survey in yesterday's English-Wikipedia signpost; enough people read this that could cause a spike in responses. I'm not sure if this is a valid methodological concern or not -- or perhaps we are mostly interested in getting responses from people who really care? I'm not sure. * the short time frame arguably leaves out the class of editors who only log in occasionally; their responses may be different from the editing-every-day crowd due to a qualitative difference in participation. (Or not! Who knows). Also, some clarity in what each of the options means would be good; the question about participation in foundation activities in particular seemed a bit vague. More to the point, while I agree it's interesting to know what infrequent-editors versus heavy-editors think about the question, how is participation level and thoughts on attribution going to be correlated? Do one's thoughts matter less if one is an infrequent editor? Etc. One quick way to get some expert feedback about all these questions would be to submit the survey design to wiki-research-l, where the researchers hang out. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
http://www.onelook.com/?w=encomium a formal expression of praise http://www.onelook.com/?w=hagiography a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint) http://www.onelook.com/?w=saccharine overly sweet On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, What is: * encomium * hagiographical * saccharine sentiment PS You lost me. Thanks, GerardM 2009/3/3 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com While I find it impossible to disagree with your characterization of the current situation in any depth, and for sentimental reasons don't wish to engage teh view expressed by Jimmy Wales above your reply; I am bound to note that this state of affairs does present a certain historical irony, in that Criticism and controversy sections did not originate as a way of starting a biasing against a person whom the article was about, but as a way of keeping the main body of the biographical wholly hagiographical, and all the seamy sides being able to be rebutted in the controversy section, with none of the encomiums and even the worst saccharine sentiments in the hagiographical portion challenged at all by even the gentlest critical glance. Yes, we won't be removing that sourced information, just moving it out of the way of the main flow of our sweet article about this wonderful person. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 quiddity pandiculat...@gmail.com: http://www.onelook.com/?w=encomium a formal expression of praise http://www.onelook.com/?w=hagiography a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint) http://www.onelook.com/?w=saccharine overly sweet *cough* you mean, of course: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/encomium http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hagiography http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/saccharine - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
*phoebe ayers* phoebe.wiki at gmail.com writes: ++ I'm not sure there's any way to get a non-self-selected survey about anything on the projects due to anonymity concerns. ++ I'm a 17-year veteran of implementing professional quantitative survey research. Self-selection bias is a very complicated study, but there are some fairly accessible and intuitive techniques one may implement to create a thoughtful survey of a target population which minimizes self-selection bias concerns. This allows the stakeholders to focus on the challenge of deriving meaning from the response data rather than feeling nausea over the sampling methodology. I am willing to give, pro bono, 45 minutes of telephone consulting time to any Wikimedia Foundation staff member who is attached to this particular survey project, on the condition that they will be open and attentive to the possibility that a properly-designed and fairly-executed survey may not return results that foster their preconceived desires to railroad through a license migration (which, unfortunately, is my key takeaway from observing this discussion). -- Gregory Kohs Cell: 302.463.1354 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
This entire field has been formalized but in my experience the key things to worry about are experimenter and subject bias. Experimenter bias in a survey context means that the survey writer (Erik) has expectations about the likely community answers. This has been clearly demonstrated, as he already has a feeling about what the German survey results will be even though it hasn't been written. Writing an unbiased survey requires very careful wording and is a tough job. If the entire point of the survey is to find out what the community thinks then the survey should be unbiased. A variety of types of subject bias are overcome by taking a random sample. The claim that the survey takers are self selected is overcome by also recording various demographic information and normalizing the number of responses from demographics, or some other kind of filter. You essentially need to employ psychometric techniques in order to verify the construct validity of the survey (that you can really draw those inferences from those questions). Erik's survey, in my opinion, is likely to have low construct validity and should have been created by a blind, relatively unbiased 3rd party instead. Creating a survey in which the subjects are non-self-selected is a practical impossibility. I can think of some software methods that might help but the better solution is to gather rich demographics and then filter. On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com wrote: *phoebe ayers* phoebe.wiki at gmail.com writes: ++ I'm not sure there's any way to get a non-self-selected survey about anything on the projects due to anonymity concerns. ++ I'm a 17-year veteran of implementing professional quantitative survey research. Self-selection bias is a very complicated study, but there are some fairly accessible and intuitive techniques one may implement to create a thoughtful survey of a target population which minimizes self-selection bias concerns. This allows the stakeholders to focus on the challenge of deriving meaning from the response data rather than feeling nausea over the sampling methodology. I am willing to give, pro bono, 45 minutes of telephone consulting time to any Wikimedia Foundation staff member who is attached to this particular survey project, on the condition that they will be open and attentive to the possibility that a properly-designed and fairly-executed survey may not return results that foster their preconceived desires to railroad through a license migration (which, unfortunately, is my key takeaway from observing this discussion). -- Gregory Kohs Cell: 302.463.1354 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
Gregory Kohs wrote: *phoebe ayers* phoebe.wiki at gmail.com writes: ++ I'm not sure there's any way to get a non-self-selected survey about anything on the projects due to anonymity concerns. ++ I'm a 17-year veteran of implementing professional quantitative survey research. Self-selection bias is a very complicated study, but there are some fairly accessible and intuitive techniques one may implement to create a thoughtful survey of a target population which minimizes self-selection bias concerns. This allows the stakeholders to focus on the challenge of deriving meaning from the response data rather than feeling nausea over the sampling methodology. I am willing to give, pro bono, 45 minutes of telephone consulting time to any Wikimedia Foundation staff member who is attached to this particular survey project, on the condition that they will be open and attentive to the possibility that a properly-designed and fairly-executed survey may not return results that foster their preconceived desires Except of course, that such a survey would arguably not have preconceived desires. So much for empiricism! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: 2009/3/3 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net But someone making a request is a sign that the article really needs a hard look, and quite possibly should be removed for not meeting our standards. So the reversed presumption of default to delete, unless consensus to keep is a good idea for living subjects. I would add that when this is in question, arguments that make excuses for the current state of the article are not valid reasons to keep it. I am just clarifying - default to delete unless consensus to keep would be a change from current state, right? I ask because I got a call the other day from someone asking to have the BLP about her deleted. The article centred around a single incident in her life. I handed it off to a longtime English Wikipedian (doesn't matter who), who told me the subject was notable and therefore the article would be kept. That experience was consistent with my general understanding - that it has been extremely difficult for even marginally notable people to get the BLP about them deleted. So -again, just to clarify- if Wikipedia adopted a practice of defaulting to delete unless there's consensus to keep, that would be change from how BLPs are handled today - yes? As for the german Wikipedia, that would be a change of policy, The policy mentioned on the en-WP fro BLP is not present on de-WP. Best, Philipp ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
Gregory Kohs wrote: *Phil Nash* pn007a2145 at blueyonder.co.uk said: ++ Except of course, that such a survey would arguably not have preconceived desires. So much for empiricism! ++ I offered to give some pro bono guidance on overcoming (to a degree) self-selection bias, even among an anonymity-heightened population. I didn't say that I would be involved in the actual design and execution of the survey. So much for civility! I was not intending to be uncivil, merely to point out that surveys are often designed to elicit a particular response rather than cold, hard, facts. Apologies if I conveyed a contrary impression, but having been a serious victim of such a survey, I am somewhat sensitive to the weaknesses therein. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
The official results of the survey haven't even been announced yet, and already it is being accused of bias. Have any of you actually looked at the survey? It does include demographic questions and it's a ranked preference poll. If someone were trying to skew the results in a particular way, this survey would be a pretty poor way to attempt it. Ryan Kaldari On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: As a non-statistician (and, from this list, you'd think there are lots of professional statisticians participating...), can one of the experts explain the practical implications of the bias of this survey? It seems fairly informal, intended perhaps to be food for thought but not a definitive answer. Is this survey sufficiently accurate (i.e., accurate in a very broad way) to serve its purpose? How much will problems with methodology (which I'm sure Erik knew would be pointed out immediately) distort the results? Nathan On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: This entire field has been formalized but in my experience the key things to worry about are experimenter and subject bias. Experimenter bias in a survey context means that the survey writer (Erik) has expectations about the likely community answers. This has been clearly demonstrated, as he already has a feeling about what the German survey results will be even though it hasn't been written. Writing an unbiased survey requires very careful wording and is a tough job. If the entire point of the survey is to find out what the community thinks then the survey should be unbiased. A variety of types of subject bias are overcome by taking a random sample. The claim that the survey takers are self selected is overcome by also recording various demographic information and normalizing the number of responses from demographics, or some other kind of filter. You essentially need to employ psychometric techniques in order to verify the construct validity of the survey (that you can really draw those inferences from those questions). Erik's survey, in my opinion, is likely to have low construct validity and should have been created by a blind, relatively unbiased 3rd party instead. Creating a survey in which the subjects are non-self-selected is a practical impossibility. I can think of some software methods that might help but the better solution is to gather rich demographics and then filter. On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Gregory Kohs thekoh...@gmail.com wrote: *phoebe ayers* phoebe.wiki at gmail.com writes: ++ I'm not sure there's any way to get a non-self-selected survey about anything on the projects due to anonymity concerns. ++ I'm a 17-year veteran of implementing professional quantitative survey research. Self-selection bias is a very complicated study, but there are some fairly accessible and intuitive techniques one may implement to create a thoughtful survey of a target population which minimizes self-selection bias concerns. This allows the stakeholders to focus on the challenge of deriving meaning from the response data rather than feeling nausea over the sampling methodology. I am willing to give, pro bono, 45 minutes of telephone consulting time to any Wikimedia Foundation staff member who is attached to this particular survey project, on the condition that they will be open and attentive to the possibility that a properly-designed and fairly-executed survey may not return results that foster their preconceived desires to railroad through a license migration (which, unfortunately, is my key takeaway from observing this discussion). -- Gregory Kohs Cell: 302.463.1354 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:27 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/3/4 quiddity pandiculat...@gmail.com: http://www.onelook.com/?w=encomium a formal expression of praise http://www.onelook.com/?w=hagiography a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint) http://www.onelook.com/?w=saccharine overly sweet *cough* you mean, of course: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/encomium http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hagiography http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/saccharine *hums innocently* but no, not until we implement wikidata will Wiktionary not make me cringe slightly... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata I might have linked to omegawiki.org too, if any of those words existed there... Are these two still at all likely to merge? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OmegaWiki or have the ... copying and pasting these lists from one language Wiktionary to another was inefficient and error-prone ... problems been solved since I last read up on this? q ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
For what it's worth, what Nathan says basically sums up my concerns as well. I think for a (relatively informal, community-opinion) survey it's less important to have an absolutely rigorous methodology (not what I was asking for) than it is to ask the question: is this good enough for our purposes? (and indeed, what *are* our purposes, and how does that influence what we ask?) Saying that community opinion should be taken into account on this question is wonderful, and crucial -- but as we all know it's damn hard to determine community opinion with any degree of reliability. Devoting some thought to this non-trivial matter has useful implications for determining *all sorts* of controversial, broad-scale questions, however, and getting it right means that we are one step closer to better community governance. Or if we can't get it right, let's acknowledge what the biases are, and be very clear on the kinds of input that did go into this conversation. For instance, many of the people who have participated in the GFDL rewrite and the discussion so far are some of the preeminent free-content, free-culture, open-knowledge experts in the world: that should be acknowledged. There are many more potential constituencies that haven't had a say, however. For instance, a while back I polled a handful of librarian colleagues who are occasional Wikipedia contributors about their thoughts on attribution, just for my own edification. Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I still found their anecdotes interesting. These are all people who know something about copyright and quite a bit about 'attribution' in the academic world (our job, as librarians, is often to advise people on how to provide proper credit to sources). They were all firmly against the list-all-authors method of attribution. One said: I expect no personal attribution whatsoever for work on WP. The point of WP is that it is a communal/communitarian encyclopedia. To give credit to individual author defeats that aim. Further, pages evolve, even if some given selection of articles wind up printed. To identify authors as of 2009 ignores the work that will almost certainly come later, and it implicitly devalues that later work by giving primacy to the people who got the ball rolling on an article. This is a strong and interesting opinion that as far as I know hasn't even been expressed in quite that way on this mailing list. Part of my questioning the survey is because its design explicitly excludes the opinions of people like my friend, who edits under an IP afaik. -- Phoebe On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: As a non-statistician (and, from this list, you'd think there are lots of professional statisticians participating...), can one of the experts explain the practical implications of the bias of this survey? It seems fairly informal, intended perhaps to be food for thought but not a definitive answer. Is this survey sufficiently accurate (i.e., accurate in a very broad way) to serve its purpose? How much will problems with methodology (which I'm sure Erik knew would be pointed out immediately) distort the results? Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm confused. Doesn't the current (English) policy say if there's no consensus ... the page is kept. So, default to _keep_, rather than default to delete...? It's only the English policy, so I realize it's not necessarily representative/reflective of any of the other language versions, regardless. But in general, my understanding is that default to keep is more-or-less standard practice Wikipedia-wide (as much as all language versions can be said to have a standard practice), and the English policy seems to support that. Recapping this piece of the thread: It seems to me that default to delete is not widely considered satisfactory, if it is interpreted to mean an automatic or near-automatic deletion upon request. Human judgment needs to be applied. Erik had proposed that articles which meet these three criteria be deleted upon request: 1) they are not balanced and complete, 2) the subject is only marginally notable, and 3) the subject wants the article deleted. This would shift the bar towards a more deletionist stance for BLPs, but would preserve articles which are either complete and balanced, _or_ which are about people who are clearly self-evidently notable. Assuming there is some consensus about what clearly self-evidently notable means, or that some consensus could be created . does that proposal make sense to people here? According to Dominic's quote, it says default to delete if the article is *not* a marginally notable BLP. Not a very elegant way of changing the policy, but perhaps it was intended to slip past wide notice. While deleting marginally notable BLPs has become more common, even where no consensus to delete exists, the proposal did fail. As far as granting significant weight to the wishes of a subject? Subject request has consistently been rejected as a basis for deleting an article, and many comments in the deletion discussions I've read have even rejected lending weight to these requests in any way. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: According to Dominic's quote, it says default to delete if the article is *not* a marginally notable BLP. Not a very elegant way of changing the policy, but perhaps it was intended to slip past wide notice. While deleting marginally notable BLPs has become more common, even where no consensus to delete exists, the proposal did fail. As far as granting significant weight to the wishes of a subject? Subject request has consistently been rejected as a basis for deleting an article, and many comments in the deletion discussions I've read have even rejected lending weight to these requests in any way. Nathan I'm sorry - the quote is default to *keep* if the article is not a marginally notable BLP - which, through negatives, means default to delete for marginally notable BLPs. -- Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Dominic dmcde...@cox.net Sue Gardner wrote: I am just clarifying - default to delete unless consensus to keep would be a change from current state, right? In terms of policy, default to delete is the current state for BLPs. To be more exact, the important bit is: If there is no rough consensus and the page is not a BLP describing a relatively unknown person, the page is kept and is again subject to normal editing, merging or redirecting as appropriate. However, that is at least somewhat new (several months old, I think), and I am not certain how universally administrators apply it at this point. The relevant policy is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DP#Deletion_discussion I'm confused. Doesn't the current (English) policy say if there's no consensus ... the page is kept. So, default to _keep_, rather than default to delete...? It's only the English policy, so I realize it's not necessarily representative/reflective of any of the other language versions, regardless. But in general, my understanding is that default to keep is more-or-less standard practice Wikipedia-wide (as much as all language versions can be said to have a standard practice), and the English policy seems to support that. Recapping this piece of the thread: It seems to me that default to delete is not widely considered satisfactory, if it is interpreted to mean an automatic or near-automatic deletion upon request. Human judgment needs to be applied. Erik had proposed that articles which meet these three criteria be deleted upon request: 1) they are not balanced and complete, 2) the subject is only marginally notable, and 3) the subject wants the article deleted. This would shift the bar towards a more deletionist stance for BLPs, but would preserve articles which are either complete and balanced, _or_ which are about people who are clearly self-evidently notable. Assuming there is some consensus about what clearly self-evidently notable means, or that some consensus could be created . does that proposal make sense to people here? Yes, however, the key words are Human judgment needs to be applied. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 KillerChihuahua pu...@killerchihuahua.com: I cannot stress enough how strongly I agree with this assessment. If NPOV, V, and RS were followed - as they should be by normally intelligent adults wishing to write good articles - BLP isn't even needed at all. I support BLP existing, although I've seen it misused a good bit - but IMO it wouldn't hurt a bit if someone IAR'd and gutted a lot of the other policies that have grown up like weeds over the last couple of years. More will only make matters worse. Not quite - the important difference with BLPs is that we cannot be eventualist (start with an awful article and let it improve with time) - we do not have the luxury of eventualism. With BLPs, we must be immediatist - we must not have a live version that violates the content rules. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report a problem link
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 15:52, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: The final page for people who have a crappy article about themselves still needs severe tightening and organisation, though with a mind to not causing trouble for OTRS volunteers, who after all are the ones getting the crapflood. Could an OTRS BLP queue handler please have a go at giving that page a severe Strunk Whitening? I'm working on that now. I've half a mind to increase the point size on the phrase Wikipedia has no editorial board and put it in blink tags; if people could actually grok that, then much of the rest of that text could become unnecessary. (BTW, I like the banner on Help:Contents.) -- Jim Redmond jredm...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Nathan nawr...@gmail.com On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: As far as granting significant weight to the wishes of a subject? Subject request has consistently been rejected as a basis for deleting an article, and many comments in the deletion discussions I've read have even rejected lending weight to these requests in any way. I understand appreciate the desire to proceed solely on the basis of 'what makes a good encyclopedia,' without incorporating any considerations outside that. Seriously, that makes a lot of sense to me. But having said that, there doesn't seem to be a really clear consensus on 'what makes a good encyclopedia' when it comes to BLPs - witness for example, all the discussions about what constitutes notability. Since no clear consensus has emerged, and nobody seems to be arguing that retaining biographies of marginally-notable living people is an obvious and important good thing to do ... then why _not_ shift the bias towards deleting the marginally notable upon request? I don't think that would lead to hagiographies Wikipedia-wide. You could just as easily argue it would improve quality by eliminating some mediocre articles that nobody cares about much .. while also, as a lucky side effect, reducing unhappiness among the subjects of those articles. Perhaps our stance could shift to _thanking_ subjects of bad BLPs for helping to police quality :-) I'm sorry - the quote is default to *keep* if the article is not a marginally notable BLP - which, through negatives, means default to delete for marginally notable BLPs. I get it now, thank you :-) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
2009/3/4 Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org: Erik had proposed that articles which meet these three criteria be deleted upon request: 1) they are not balanced and complete, 2) the subject is only marginally notable, and 3) the subject wants the article deleted. This would shift the bar towards a more deletionist stance for BLPs, but would preserve articles which are either complete and balanced, _or_ which are about people who are clearly self-evidently notable. The main problem with this proposal might be the definition of self-evidently notability. How do you want to evaluate it? -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
There are a couple of reasons I can think of why shifting to delete-on-request for marginally notable BLPs would be problematic. (1) As Tomasz notes, the idea of marginal notability is one that doesn't play well to non-Wikipedians and isn't well defined in any case. (2) We'd still have to have a deletion discussion, and if the default to delete in the absence of a consensus policy change continues to stick then having an additional default to deletion in the absence of consensus situation is duplicative. (3) If the idea is to skip deletion discussions entirely, then we would be leaving the determination of marginal notability up to the admin reviewing the request. I can't think this would go over well - speedy deletion (i.e. deletions requiring the opinion of only one or two people) is a sensitive subject, and the criteria are intended to be strictly interpreted. (4) How many requests do we actually get from article subjects to delete the article about them? I would think most would be happier with an article that speaks well of them and/or is simply factually correct. If we were to adopt this particular approach (and if it were not redundant, perhaps because the existing approach failed to take root permanently) would it have much practical impact? We should keep in mind that deleting marginal BLPs is not a solution for the BLP problem. The process requires that someone who is aware of the policy comes upon a page that could stand deletion and takes the correct steps to see it deleted. Marginal BLPs, by their nature, are often poorly linked or orphaned and not well monitored by people versed in deletion policy; if they were, then we would have no problem with them. Maybe by giving subjects a more obvious and easy way to complain we can get past this hurdle, making OTRS respondents responsible for starting AfDs. But we still have a whole constantly expanding host of articles and potential articles on living people who are too notable to delete; a deletion default doesn't help with those. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Report a problem link
2009/3/4 Jim Redmond j...@scrubnugget.com: I'm working on that now. I've half a mind to increase the point size on the phrase Wikipedia has no editorial board and put it in blink tags; if people could actually grok that, then much of the rest of that text could become unnecessary. I just put big tags around it in both places ;-) I'm working on the assumption that someone with a bad article about them is upset and angry and won't read clearly - large print, simple directions. All the pages still feel too long. They could be shorter if there was a Special:Contact page set up (wtih nice dropdowns, etc) - people are used to those. (Offer an or email directly to this address link of course ;-) But OTRS' load would go *way up*. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
Chad wrote: While working with OTRS, I actually sent several articles through AfD. And I typically didn't announce that it was an OTRS thing, so as to let the community judge the article on its own merits. This would actually be a decent policy to follow: encourage OTRS respondents to send the marginally notable through the normal AfD process (like any other) and allow those in the community more equipped to deal with deletion/BLP issues handle it. This assumes that both of those groups are the same. Many people involved in the deletion processes are rather unconcerned with BLP issues (or things like sourcing and NPOV, as long as its notable), and many people concerned about BLPs don't involve themselves in the deletion process. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Alex mrzmanw...@gmail.com wrote: Chad wrote: While working with OTRS, I actually sent several articles through AfD. And I typically didn't announce that it was an OTRS thing, so as to let the community judge the article on its own merits. This would actually be a decent policy to follow: encourage OTRS respondents to send the marginally notable through the normal AfD process (like any other) and allow those in the community more equipped to deal with deletion/BLP issues handle it. This assumes that both of those groups are the same. Many people involved in the deletion processes are rather unconcerned with BLP issues (or things like sourcing and NPOV, as long as its notable), and many people concerned about BLPs don't involve themselves in the deletion process. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) Those that involve themselves in BLP matters should perhaps frequent AFD more often. Provided that is still how we delete articles that aren't speedyable. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
But I do not believe that experts should have any special powers in the editing of articles. Rather, I think they should be encouraged to act in a pure review capacity, assessing the existing work of Wikipedians, and making recommendations for improvement. This might also be partially implemented through flagged revs, and I could also envision a type of button at the top of articles that says see last version assessed by an expert. My point is actually that for majority of articles on science-ralated (and possibly some article on humanity-related, here I understand the situation less) there is nothing to review - they are either stubs or non-existent. Somebody needs to write them. You can consider this as a kind of review if you wish. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
