I do not think we have too much of an issue here, thanks to Undue Weight
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources_and_undue_weight>:
an encyclopedic article has to show the respective weight of every
viewpoint. Of course, whenever the coverage topic is frenquently
changing (typically, a current event) or quite small, you're likely to
report "all points of view". I don't know how often Undue Weight is
quoted on the English Wikipedia, but the French adaptation I've drafted,
Wp:PROPORTION
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Importance_disproportionn%C3%A9e>,
has proven quite useful to solve this regular encyclopedic challenge…
As an aside, a good idea to ease the verification of Wikipedia sources
would be to exploit the current expansion of open access sources and
develop a side-to-side checking feature: you would get the wikipedia
article on one side and the original source text on the other (with
perhaps even some markup on the likely parts covered by the reference,
thanks to some text mining magic). Wikisource has already a similar
feature (with the pdf on one side and the translated text on the other)
to ease retranscription. That's typically the kind of suggestions that
would rather appear within the community (and here we get back to my
suggestion of a wishlist).
PCL
Le 28/10/14 17:20, Jack Park a écrit :
Not "trolling", but wondering if there is a different lens through
which to view the present situation.
Let me preface a question with this:
NPoV has worked spectacularly well on topics that are largely text
book(ish), but it would appear that current events, which do not
easily submit to text-book analysis, seem to be the attractor basins
for the issues in play.
My question is this:
Is NPoV the right model for dealing with current events, particularly
in the case of issues where *all* points of view, that is,
as-well-as-possible justified points of view, are crucial to
understanding the situation?
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Nicolas Jullien
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello,
to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work
by Marwell and Oliver
"The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y
which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature"
and need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered
in adulthood (which is, sometime, boring)
Nicolas
Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :
Hi everyone,
I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
*"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not
result in
even higher levels of bureaucracy? Internet technologies have
certainly
allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules.
Yet, I'm not
so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's
probably
still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
active contributors during the past month, the English
Wikipedia is by
far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience
(I do not
have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller
communities
like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of
bureaucracy
sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly.
If you
want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess
you would
have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
*"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive
flexibility". I
would rather point a lack of communication between the
community and the
WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
<http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021> on
Wikipedia
politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the
high level
of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of
important
features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do
not have
any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to
reestablish this
link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
*Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all
communities
tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and
stagnate.
The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
<http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241> after 2012. This is not
because these
communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that
OpenStreetMap is
way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free
time (in
addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web)
is still a
rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all
these
current events of life strongly limits the level of
implication within
the population that would likely participate. Free time would
certainly
not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger
issue for
women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a
lot of
home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long
focused on
enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active
project
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil> to greet
newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed
down an
inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but
hardest) way to
enhance participation would be to make some global change on
society
(reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working
time,
creating a basic income, you name it…).
That's all, folks
PCL
Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :
Hey folks,
I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not
really
relevant to the thread it appeared in.
Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia. I'm studying the
nature of
socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an
interesting case
study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for
something, but
personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature
communities/systems
work & break down. When it reaches maturity, I hope that
Wikidata
will benefit from what I have learned.
-Aaron
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