THANKS to WSC
Those are good points -- I have a few days to make edits to the page
proofs; the article will appear in Oct 2012 J Military History.
Comments: I have not seen any editor make actual use of the Article
Feedback tool -- are there examples? Yes Wikipedians are very proud
of their vast half-billion-person audience. However they do not ask
"what features are most useful for a high school student or teacher/
a university student/ etc"
As for who does the work, I looked closely at the big military
articles especially 1812, & also WWI, WW2, Am Civil War, Am
Revolution and found that the occasional editors & IP's contributed
very little useful content. That is also my experience with the
political articles on presidents & prime ministers & main political parties.
Boasting like Mike Fink?-- well I read 500+ requests for access to
Questia, Highbeam etc. and looked for what boasts editors actually
make. As for higher degrees and scholarly publications, that does not
cut much mustard on talk pages. Very few editors -- maybe 2%--mention
their professional expertise on their user pages. Fewer than 1% give
real names that would permit validation of their claims. in Academe
these rates would be 99%
In a larger sense (but it's not in my article), perhaps there are two
wiki communities, one for law enforcement & one for content. That is,
we have vigilantes policing the encyclopedia and ranchers herding
ideas and moving them to market. (I would use the farmer metaphor but
growing a new crop sounds too much like OR). The cash market,
however, consists of praise from other ranchers (as in FA), not from
the half-billion customers whose opinion about the beef is not of interest.
At 05:59 PM 9/5/2012, you wrote:
Hi Richard, Interesting read, I noticed a few things, though its
possible that some may simply be that you are writing in American English.
"The article itself runs 14,000 words" - suggest "The article itself
runs to 14,000 words"
"That perspective is not of much concern inside Wikipedia, for it is
operated by and for the benefit of the editors.i Only readers who
write comments are listened to, and fewer than one in a thousand
comments." That's an interesting point of view, I've heard concerns
that we don't know enough as to what our readers want, however one
of the primary motives of most editors that I know is to make
humanity's knowledge freely available to the world,
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8>http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8
and I've met a number of editors who are extremely focussed on the
number of people who've read their work and ways to acquire more
readers such as getting their work on Wikipedia's mainpage. Your own
later comment "
Working on Wikipedia was most rewarding because it opened up a very
large, new audience" being a typical Wikipedian sentiment. Neither
of which accords with the idea that Wikipedia is operated for its
editors. If you've found that to be the view of some of Wikipedia's
academic critics it might be worth balancing that with information
on the readership survey
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey
and the way that and other metrics have been used to try and find
out what our readers want. I suspect that such criticisms also
pre-date developments such as the Article Feedback tool.
"That task is handled by the "Wikipedia community," which in
practice means a self-selected group of a couple thousand editors."
As well as adding an of I'd suggest that your numbers are out. Most
of the vandal fighting, categorisation, new page patrol and spam
deletion is done a relatively small community of a few thousand. But
the people who add content are an overlapping and rather larger
group. How you measure the size of the community is complex, and
many people ignore the IP editors who actually write a large part of
the content and focus on the currently active editors who have done
over a 100 edits in the last month - at 3400 or so that group isn't
far from being a couple of thousand.
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm>http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
But it is much larger when you consider the number of people who
have contributed content in the past but may be less active now. Our
2,000 most active editors accounted for 20% of total edits a little
over a year ago,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_the_community.png>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_the_community.png
but even that grossly overstates our importance as the minor edits
such as typo fixes are disproportionately done by us. Suggest: "That
task is handled by the "Wikipedia community," which in practice
means a self-selected group of a few thousand frequent editors and a
much larger number of occasional participants.
"Wikipedia editors almost never claim authorship of published
scholarly books and articles. That sort of expertise is not welcome
in Wikipedia; editors rarely mention they possess advanced training
or degrees" According to the editor survey 26% of our editors have
either a masters or a PhD. Academic expertise is highly valued in
Wikipedia, but it is best demonstrated by the quality of ones edits
and especially your sourcing. Afterall most of our editors are here
to share their
expertise
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8>http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8
"Wikipedia editors will boast like river boatmen about their output:
how many years they have worked on the encyclopedia, how many tens
or hundreds of thousands of edits they have made." There is some
truth in that, but in terms of status within the community featured
article contributions are a higher value currency than either tenure
or edit count.
"They do not gain by selling their product, and anyone suspected of
writing articles for pay on behalf public relations for an entity
comes under deep suspicion.i As a result how many people read an
article, or how its audience has grown or fallen, or how useful it
has been to the general public are not among the criteria used to
evaluate quality." That's an interesting synthesis, there certainly
is a distrust of those who edit for pay, especially if they are from
the PR industry. But I would suggest that the distrust is more a
product of people's experience with editors who have difficulty
writing neutrally about topics that they are being paid to promote.
A couple of good contrasts were mentioned in the translation
sessions at Wikimania in Gdansk in 2010, Google and its charity arm
Google org both presented about paid editing they'd commissioned in
Indic languages. The uncontentious operation was done by the charity
arm, translating English Wikipedia articles on medical articles into
various south Asian Wikipedia versions. Rather more contentious was
the commercial part of Google, they created missing articles for
their most common search terms, this lead to criticism from at least
one editor that they were writing an encyclopaedia and didn't need
articles on Hollywood stars. But the criticism
"The Wikipedia community uses kangaroo courts where the accused are
brought before a self-constituted jury, operating without formal
rules or defense counsel." That isn't too bad a description of the
RFC process but ARBCOM is elected, and for things that don't reach
Arbcom, only admins can block other editors and admins are not
simply self selected.
"I taught military history but he never wrote on the war of 1812,
and usually skipped over it in my lectures."
- Suggest dropping the word "he"
"That is a handful of established editors strongly resist any new
additions." Suggest "That is when a handful of established editors
strongly resist any new additions."
"The Military History Project is one of the largest and most
energetic of these. It enrolls over 700 editors and is coordinated
by Dank and a dozen volunteers who ride heard on 51,000 different
articles. " I'm pretty sure it is the biggest WikiProject, and would
suggest herd not heard.
"The problem is less severe in military history because academia
does not favor the field and much of the next writing is done by
self-trained scholars." next seems odd, best or new sound a little
more plausible to me - but both would be guesses.
"My recommendation for improving military history on Wikipedia is to
set up a program to help the most active military editors gain
better access to published scholarship, gain an appreciation of the
historiography, and start attending military history conferences."
You might be interested in some of our GLAM outreach work, thus far
I think that the military museums have been under-represented, but
in London Wikimedia UK recently ran this:
<http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-world-war-one-editathon/>http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-world-war-one-editathon/
"Germany has a strong chapter that handles the German language
Wikipedia." I think you'll find that the Austrians and Swiss also
get involved in DE wiki affairs, I suspect that there are several
other languages where a chapter more closely aligns with a language.
English of course has the UK, Australian and and Indian chapters as
well as the three North American ones and many editors not covered
by a chapter.
On a broader note, you might want to look through the logs for War
of 1812
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=War+of+1812>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=War+of+1812
It was first semi protected briefly in February 2006, was open for
anyone to edit for most of 06 and 07, but with a few short gaps has
been semi protected continually since 2010. There are very few
articles that have been semi protected for as long, and much if not
all of its subsequent reduced editing level will be from that. Semi
Protection is known to sharply reduce editing. There is also a
theory that people are reluctant to edit articles that have gone
beyond their expertise, and this article will clearly be beyond the
expertise of many.
Regards
WSC
On 5 September 2012 18:52, Richard Jensen
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
I have an essay that has just been accepted by the Journal of
Military History on
Military History on the Electronic Frontier:
Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812
It deals with the history of the "War of 1812" article on Wikipedia,
in context of military history and how Wikipedia operates.
<http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/6jensen-1812.docx>http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/6jensen-1812.docx
I would welcome any feedback.
Richard Jensen
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
User:Rjensen
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