Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?
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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?
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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?
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 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pre-wikis vs. maturing Wikipedia: taking away dedicated editors?
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 ___
