Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?

2012-03-07 Thread geni
On 7 March 2012 07:23, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
 I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people
 would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by
 railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering
 colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail.
 The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway
 geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job
 that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.


I don't know about the polish rail geeks but the british ones have
been nice enough to spend the last few decades churning out book after
book (along with journals and magazines) that qualify as reliable
sources.


-- 
geni

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?

2012-03-07 Thread Yaroslav M. Blanter
On Wed, 7 Mar 2012 09:10:17 +, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 7 March 2012 07:23, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il
 wrote:
 I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people
 would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by
 railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering
 colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail.
 The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway
 geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job
 that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.

 
 I don't know about the polish rail geeks but the british ones have
 been nice enough to spend the last few decades churning out book after
 book (along with journals and magazines) that qualify as reliable
 sources.

I was about to reply the same. The problem with a wiki is that (unless it
is premoderated) noone can guarantee the quality. Even if the wiki founders
are qualified geeks who are able to distinguish on a short notice what is
correct and what is not, if they are monitoring quality in real time, they
must be able to remove wrong statements relatively quickly, but only if the
wiki is small enough. This is actually something we all know about -
several years ago, we could still ensure there is nothing wrong in
Wikipedia by monitoring new edits, now even monitoring new pages becomes a
challenge. (And here we could start again talking about flagged revisions
and what they are good to - but I will better not divert the original
topic). 

The way out as I see it is (possibly in addition to wiki) to publish an
online journal or maintain a website, which would guarantee that everything
in there is quality stamped (may be as Amir suggests one could formally
asked an authoritative institution to do it). I know an example of a
Russian narrow-gauge railways geek, who is basically recognized as someone
who knows everything about narrow-gauge railways in former Soviet Union. He
sometimes publishes books (which he funds himself, so strictly speaking
they would not qualify as an authoritative source), and he maintains a
website which is again a self-published source, but since often his books
and his website are the only available information on the subject, they are
widely cited in Russian Wikipedia articles, and also I sited him several
times in English Wikipedia. Of course someone can always show up, remove
these references and require that other references have been added (and
then PROD the articles), but fortunately this did not occur so far. If this
occurs my motivation to participate would indeed decrease (though not be
completely killed at this point). 

On the other hand, if we let this go for railways, then next we will have
the fantasy, computer games, and anime fans at our doors, asking to
recognize fanfic and such as sources, and I am afraid this may be like
opening the Pandora box. Whereas I am pretty sure what I am doing about
railways is correct, I would not know how to respond to the fantasy fiction
fans.

Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?

2012-03-07 Thread teun spaans
quote
* They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible
 to follow development of the railway infrastructure and
 operations using only high quality published sources;

* They got bitten a bit by the notability discussions in their
 field; they want to document every track, every junction
 and every locomotive and they are tired of discussing
 how notable a particular piece of railway equipment
 really is.
/quote

Notability discussion seem to spring up on every wiki, and often seem to
lead to very heated discussions. The question of notability is also somehow
tied to reliable published sources. I remember a discussion where an
article on a game with 20 milllion players was removed because of lack of
appropriate sources.

Imho it is good that we do have rules on notability - we dont want to have
every wikipedian describe his entire family - but every rule seems to have
its quirks.

On the dutch wiki i recently encountered a discussion on notability of
Tolkien articles. Fans are describing every corner of the Tolkien world,
but in this discussion the notability of beetle species, plant species and
chess openings was also raised. Personally I don't mind too much about
notability - if the stuff seems relevant enough for a specialized paper
encyclopedia, i feel it's worth including it in a wikipedia.

''Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of all human knowledge''

I wish you health and happiness
Teun Spaans
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[Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?

2012-03-06 Thread Marcin Cieslak
[ Please excuse me if the subject has already been beaten to
  death here; I am not a regular visitor to this mailing list
  I tried to search for this stuff here  on strategywiki, but
  feel free to point me to the archives! ]


I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic
event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers
who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia
have virtually disappeared.

I remember that community being strong few years ago, and now we
found out that even some basic information about infrastructure is
left unchanged.

Few people who still maintain that stuff on the Polish Wikipedia 
showed me that at least two other MediaWiki-based projects have been
started to fill the gap: [2][3] The latter greets you even with a very
nice shot of *the* railway junction that was instrumental in a recent
railway crash.

One of the projects got started by experienced Wikipedia
editors. They still copy some of their content to the Polish
Wikipedia, but only after it matures; I asked them about the
reasons to go outside of the Wikipedia and they said:

* They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible
  to follow development of the railway infrastructure and 
  operations using only high quality published sources;

* They got bitten a bit by the notability discussions in their
  field; they want to document every track, every junction
  and every locomotive and they are tired of discussing
  how notable a particular piece of railway equipment
  really is.

I would have said it's just a single case, but I've seen
some successful web portals being launched by people interested
in history; what is different from many history research and
fan pages is that I've also seen some active members of Wikipedia
community becoming more and more active on those independent sites.

It might be that (unproven theory) really valuable authors
are living on a verge of original research; at some point
they might prefer to turn over to indepedent sites.
There may be other factors too: smaller, friendlier community;
possibility to start anew and so on. 

As few of those sites are using MediaWiki software I started
to call them pre-wikis. Some of them might become a sort of
a waiting rooms for the content to be published
on mature Wikipedia. To me, analogy to the Wikipedia-Nupedia
story is striking. 

What's interesting is that people are not afraid to use
MediaWiki *again* (with all its well-known deficiencies).


In general, I think this is nothing new. There are thousands
of fan wikis on places like Wikia, where certainly some
contributors copy over some mature content to Wikipedia,
should licensing allow that.

But maybe there is some trend that could probably be
better researched, and here are my questions to you:

(1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities
  (preferably not only English-speaking ones)?

(2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered
  development of the knowledge-related content (test
  wikis, pre-wikis, sighted revisions) or shall we pursue
 flat development space ideal?

(3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be
  generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research
  some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable
  effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia
  movement? 

(4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't
  we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like no
  original research, but not only) and try to address
  the issue there?

(5) Has Wikipedia as a product achieved some
  maturity in a way that the real growth and innovation needs
  to go somewhere else, as no product/project lasts forever?

Maybe it's something around the question that Kim Bruning
asked on strategywiki [4] and also [5]:

   we need to find some way to infuse new life
   into wikis that are coming to the end of the
   WikiLifeCycle. Wiki-communities can, do and will
   blow up, and we need to learn how to prevent it,
   or have plans on what to do and how to pick up the
   pieces.

//Marcin Cieślak

User:Saper from plwiki

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szczekociny_rail_crash
[2] http://enkol.pl/
[3] http://semaforek.pl/wiki/index.php/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna
[4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=942oldid=931
[5] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prevoldid=1075


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Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?

2012-03-06 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
2012/3/7 Marcin Cieslak sa...@saper.info
 I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic
 event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers
 who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia
 have virtually disappeared.

Thought provoking, thanks a lot for this.

 * They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible
  to follow development of the railway infrastructure and
  operations using only high quality published sources;

I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people
would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by
railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering
colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail.
The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway
geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job
that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.

So the root question is whom do we trust. It's the same problem as
with the recurring (and perfectly valid) Oral citations discussion:
What's important is not in which medium the source is published, but
how much do the no-original-research geeks trust it. And don't get me
wrong - in the vast majority of cases, both the railway geeks and the
no-original-research geeks are the good guys, who ultimately care
about the readers getting the best information possible.

I suppose that in this case of railways documentation, this problem
can be solved by some kind of a statement by a famous Polish
engineering college or the Polish railway company, which would say:
We salute the work of the volunteers who document the Polish railways
on this wiki. We checked their work and found it to be correct and
useful. It would have little substance, but it would be a kind of a
quality control stamp. Unfortunately we haven't found a better quality
control stamp yet.

And by the way, this doesn't necessarily mean that all the information
from this wiki should be copied to Wikipedia. It would be fine if that
wiki would simply be recognized by the Wikipedia community as a
reliable source.

 (1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities
  (preferably not only English-speaking ones)?

I can immediately remember similar cases in the Hebrew Wikipedia with
writing about sex and about Jewish religious communities and rabbis.
In the first case, this happened because the Hebrew Wikipedia
community is very averse to writing about pornography and anything
related to it - not because it's socially conservative, but because in
the first years of its existence writing about pornography was
strongly associated with trolls who disrupted other work. The
difference between pornography and sex is obvious, yet the
he.wikipedia community is very cautious now about both.

As for Jewish religious communities, many articles about them look
very similar to people who aren't involved, and this obviously raises
notability concerns, so Jewish religious wikis sprang up.

 (2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered
  development of the knowledge-related content (test
  wikis, pre-wikis, sighted revisions) or shall we pursue
  flat development space ideal?

It is perfectly legitimate. We are not supposed to want to swallow all
human knowledge; we are supposed to want it to be accessible.
Theoretically, such wikis could become new Wikimedia projects, but the
fact is that new projects have not been started by the Foundation in
the recent years. Another fact is that the Foundation gives little
attention to its own existing non-Wikipedia projects. So if
independent volunteers can make a good railway wiki by themselves, why
not?

 (3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be
  generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research
  some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable
  effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia
  movement?

See the answer to the previous question; The Foundation is mostly
preoccupied with Wikipedia. Though disappointing to Wikisource fans
like myself, it's not necessarily bad. I suppose that it's not even a
question of intent, but of capacity.

At the very least, it should be remembered that there are different
models of knowledge collection and sharing, so threads like this are
important.

 (4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't
  we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like no
  original research, but not only) and try to address
  the issue there?

*Wikipedia*'s core values are fine. Without the no original research
policy it wouldn't be as useful as it is now.

Such wikis can, theoretically, be adopted as other projects. Or maybe
as very particular namespaces in Wikipedia. The line must be drawn
somewhere, however.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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