Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-28/In the news
The closed, unfriendly world of Wikipedia, fundraiser fun and games, and chemists vs pornstars
The closed, unfriendly world of Wikipedia
The catacombs of contested deletions
Search marketing specialist Danny Sullivan wrote a scathing account of his experiences on Wikipedia trying to intervene on behalf of a colleague, Jessie Stricchiola, whose article had been deleted at AfD in late October. While the unpopularity of Wikipedia's restrictive notability policies for biographies among internet users and the furor of subject matter experts at its egalitarian norms will not be news to readers, Sullivan also had harsh words for the complexity and relentless user-unfriendliness of the procedures he encountered. Confronted with {{Afd-top}} – The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.[1] – Sullivan seethes "Already, I’m annoyed. As usual, trying to contribute to Wikipedia means that you’ve got to know what a "talk page" is or where to find a "deletion review"." Finding that the talk page the notice directed him to had evidently been deleted, and no indication as to where the "deletion review" might be found, Sullivan (as Dannysullivan (talk · contribs)) tried to post directly on the closed AfD itself his rationale for why Stricchiola merited an entry.
Next he was confronted with an email notifying him that his user talkpage had been changed (this feature, activated by default in user preferences, is documented at mw:New Editor Engagement/Email notifications), linking to a diff of the edit in question, which provoked Sullivan further: "OMG, my message is a revision comparison of what’s been added to the user talk page that I barely even know that I have? Who creates this type of mess? Who tolerates this as an effective working environment?" The edit was an explanation that posting comments on a closed AfD is discouraged, and containing a link to the deletion review. Sullivan followed the link in the email to the userpage of the editor who had left the message to respond, but was greeted with a {{notice}} asking him not to post messages there, but on the user talk page instead, leading him to remark "Oh, don’t post messages on the page I was specifically told to go to in order to contact the editor. Nice, Wikipedia." At the top of the user talkpage, the following notice appeared:
 | If you need assistance relating to a particular article, please try to provide a link to the article so I can see what the problem is in regard to. If your question relates to an article that has been deleted, please provide an appropriate red link, like this one, to the former article. |
This served only to incite Sullivan further: "Yeah, there’s nothing like that. If you’re leaving a message about an article that was deleted, assuming you even know how to leave a message, you’re also informed to do it with an “appropriate red link” with instructions on how to make links red, except that leads to a page that doesn’t explain this, and OMG, did my head just explode over all this bureaucracy?" He protested to the editor who had left him the message, venting his frustration questioning whether the Wikipedia interface and bureaucracy was serving the interests of creating an "accurate crowd-sourced encyclopedia", or only those of the "incredibly tiny few number of people who care to play in the high priesthood of Wikipedia editing". From here, he proceeded to deletion review, but the morass of unintelligible instructions there failed to indicate to Sullivan that it was the appropriate venue for objecting to closed deletion discussions, and he sought out Requests for undeletion instead. The sight that confronted him (pictured at top) sufficed to push Sullivan over the edge. The process asked for the title of the deleted page, which he did not know how to find, and explained the venue's purpose in alternately vague and impenetrable terms (for pages that have been "uncontroversially deleted" by processes "such as CSD G6" or that had had "little or no participation"). After leaving a request for the restoration of the article, which was declined with a default template, he concluded:
It’s insane. It really is. And with respect to the many hardworking people who have created a generally useful resource, it’s not a friendly resource. It doesn’t have systems, as far as I can tell, designed to help it improve. It has walls, walls you believe (with many good reasons) are designed to protect it from being vandalized. But those walls themselves are their own type of vandalization of the very resource you’re trying to protect.
The internet responds
"It took two weeks for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article – the guy found out how many libraries carried her book.
Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. In every one of those retarded articles, someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. Every time.
Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works."
— From the top-ranked post in the Hacker News discussion, by commenter tptacek.
Comments were closed on Sullivan's post, but it was picked up at Hacker News, where it attracted reams of discussion between sympathisers and Wikipedia defenders. Commenters defended Wikipedia's inclusion criteria, made the point that people should not try to add or edit content about subjects related to them due to potential conflict of interest, and debated whether those responsible for creating the bulk of content on Wikipedia were a separate caste from those controlling the byzantine and cryptic maintenance systems. That these systems were prohibitively bureaucratic and hostile to new participants was less contested, but many put the blame on an overactive immune system that had developed in response to combating articles like the one that Sullivan was trying to save.
Journalist and Wikipedia critic Seth Finkelstein wrote a response to the episode on his personal blog, focusing on the issue of the treatment of subject matter experts, which he said was indicative of "very troubling social undercurrents" – that experts such as Sullivan expect to be treated with respect but run up against a status hierarchy of an altogether different kind at Wikipedia, where only "with the right political skills, clique alliances, and of course a huge amount of time and effort, that expert could hope rise to as exalted a ranking level as the Wikipedia editor". Finkelstein cited this culture, and the alienation of experts it inspires, as a contributory factor in his not embracing the project.
A twist in the tale
ReadWriteWeb senior writer Marshall Kirkpatrick was also inspired to respond to Sullivan's post, but from a different angle: his own experiences in writing the Fubonn Shopping Center article as an inexperienced editor. His account is markedly different from that of Sullivan. Kirkpatrick's first step was to review and copy the coding of the articles related to the topic, then adapt it to fit his topic, and finally flesh it out with sources gleaned from Google News. He ran into a stumbling block when trying to copy an image from Flickr's Creative Commons section for use in the article, as it was swiftly deleted, as he learned from "a long paragraph of confusing explanation". A patrolling editor made some minor changes to the article and assessed it for WikiProject Oregon as Start-class and Low-importance, causing Kirkpatrick to take issue with the latter designation, after research revealed the notoriously uneven application of the rating of the assessment scheme. He commented:
There were some parts of the experience that I found confusing and disappointing, but when I woke up in the morning I felt silly for having complained about that the night before on Twitter and Google Plus. This was my first major contribution to the giant sprawling, pseudo-democratic experiment that is Wikipedia. Why am I entitled to just jump in and be praised for everything I do?
Despite conceding his encounter with Wikipedians had made him "bristle", Kirkpatrick did not endorse technologist Nat Torkington's acerbic invocation of Wikipedians as "vain nano-Napoleons" who "having built a valuable resource ... hide behind hostile UIs". He was enthused by the positive responses to the Fubonn article expressed by readers through the Article Feedback Tool, and began to muse that involving his nine-year-old niece in contributing to Wikipedia would be "an incredibly empowering experience for a young person old enough to appreciate it." He concluded:
If Wikipedia can figure out how to welcome more and more new editors onto the site, and I don’t think coddling us is necessary, perhaps that will become reality in the future. It’s an incredibly complicated community management situation though. Danny Sullivan’s experience having his entry about an important woman in technology get deleted is super frustrating and an example of how things can go wrong. But there’s a whole lot about that’s right about Wikipedia, too. The difference between many Wikipedia entries and old encyclopedia entries on the same topics is so substantial that it deserves to be sung about from mountain tops.
Fun and games with the Fundraiser
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The 2011 Fundraiser continued its successful start this week (see "News and notes"), but its reception in the news media and wider internet focused less on its record-smashing haul of donations and more on how to get rid of or ridicule the donation appeal banners, which have been variously found to be sources of annoyance, intimidation and hilarity.
Female-oriented tech site Chip Chick led the coverage with one of the more serious assessments, outlining the background of what the Wikimedia Foundation is and why it has opted for funding based on donations rather than advertisements—as some commenters have called for (see Signpost coverage). Network World revealed that even Jimmy Wales found the banners annoying, but as TechEye reported defended the use of his appeal as effective in raising money, while TIME magazine offered readers "three easy steps" to banishing the banners from reader's view.
On November 22, the Jimmy Wales banners were replaced with those of Wikimedia Foundation Senior Designer Brandon Harris (Jorm), whose long, lustrous hair and stern countenance elicited much glee, fear and speculations as to the programmer's possible biker gang/metal band affiliations from internet denizens. TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis reacted to the switch by swiping "Now You’re Just Messing With Us Wikipedia", after being inundated with emails comparing Harris's appearance to that of Jesus, Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger and a member of Hell's Angels. The column was greeted with fierce defences of Harris and the fundraiser in the comments.
Such was the reaction on the wider web that Harris submitted an AMA ("ask me anything") question-and-answer session on Reddit, the popularity of which soon took off and rocketed the programmer to the front page of the site. A link to the Foundation's fundraiser statistics visualisation tool Harris included to illustrate fundraising progress drew so many views that it crashed the tool and caused a server outage that brought down Wikimedia sites for 30 minutes on November 27 (see "Technology report"). The Q&A drew the attention of Gawker, New York magazine and a recalcitrant TechCrunch. The focus of the coverage was Harris' revelations that the alignment of the pictures in the appeals over the titles of articles was intentional on account of being lucrative, and the secret fashion tip he used to get his hair just so.
The internet was not done with the jovial potential of the fundraising drive, as Crunchyroll and Something Awful offered parodies – "Get Moe Wikipedia" Offers a Personal Appeal from K-On's Azusa and Please read: A personal appeal from Wikipedia guitarist Dave Mustaine – the Daily What proffered an animated interpretation and twitterers exulted over the availability of a Jimmy Wales action figure. Readers alarmed by the paucity of levity in responses to the charitable appeal may take comfort in the hypothesis that sober-minded analyses are being held at bay while the Fundraiser statistics tool recovers from the voracious interest of internet users overwhelmed by the charisma of Wikipedia's hirsute ambassadors.In brief
- ANC article blackout protest: Times LIVE reported the blackout protest instigated in this edit to the Criticism section of the African National Congress (ANC) article in protest at passage of the Protection of State Information Bill by the ANC-dominated South African National Assembly (edit summary: Censored by the POIB on 22 Nov). ANC spokesman Keith Khoza decried the action as inconsistent with a civilised society, asking "How does that assist any cause or anybody to tamper with information?" Critics of the bill allege it is an attack on press freedom. The IP address from which the edit was made geolocates to Johannesburg. The story was also picked up by News24, Business Live and Memeburn (who identified the use of similar tactics in Twitter protests).
- For whom the bell Knols: Google this week announced the closure of a number of its faltering initiatives including Knol, a user-generated reference work hailed as a potential "Wikipedia-killer" after its launch in 2008 (see Signpost coverage). The announcement was widely picked up on in the online tech press, with articles in the Wall Street Journal blog, ZDnet, PC Mag, TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch and Technologizer, which offered an analysis seeking to explain "Why Knol Failed". The demise of Knol, whose contents are expected to be exported to WordPress-based platform Annotum, had long been anticipated, as Business Insider reported, saying "Knol was supposed to provide a more authoritative source than Wikipedia – articles are written by subject matter experts – but after almost two years, the site has so many gaps in content that it's practically worthless. Google should be indexing the Web's knowledge, not providing a half-hearted storehouse for some randomly selected portion of it." One Wikipedia competitor refusing to give up is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose launch of their latest mobile offering, an app for the iPhone, was this week noted by the Chicago Tribune.
- Scientists urged to flock to the wiki that dismisses them: Inside Higher Ed covered the recent "call to duty" by the American Sociological Association for its members to get involved in improving Wikipedia. This announcement was soon followed by that of the Association for Psychological Science's own Wikipedia Initiative, as Scientific American reported. Both focus on having students contribute to Wikipedia articles as part of assignments, to strengthen the encyclopaedia's coverage of their field, and are supported by the Wikimedia Foundation's United States Education Program. Meanwhile, chemist Antony John Williams, head of the ChemSpider public chemistry database which encourages its members to act as custodians of Wikipedia content, wrote a post asking "Why are pornstars more notable than scientists on Wikipedia?" in which he expressed his frustration that so many of his contributions were being rejected on the site. Williams' edits of his contemporaries' biographies had been flagged for conflict of interest and notability concerns, which led him to explore what else Wikipedia demarcated as (un)notable, a quest which concluded in his drawing attention to the gulf between the notability requirements for academics and those for pornographic actors.
Corrections
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Discuss this story
And reading Sullivan's response, he not only showed inexcusable arrogance -- in truth, does he take this attitude when talking to the average random contact at for-profit Internet projects like Yahoo or Amazon? -- I thought he showed a surprising lack of clue at how an online forum works. Specifically, where he accuses Metropolitan of asserting something on his Talk page, when it's clear that someone else had written it.
A lot of this miscommunication could have been prevented if both parties had tried to treat each other as individuals & not as a subgroup of a type. Here I'm tempted to come down harder on Sullivan since he was the one who wanted something from the exchange: he wanted the article, so at the least he should have remembered the old saying about flies, honey & vinegar when contacting a Wikipedian. (For all anyone knows, Metropolitan is a stereotypical 15-year-old living with his parents. Many of them respond poorly to criticism. Fortunately, Metropolitan did act maturely.) Less obvious would be that almost any Wikipedian, with more than minimal experience, who is confronted by someone claiming to be an expert -- either in general or a specific expert individual -- is to suspect the opposite. Never say you are an expert; just show it. Another important point is that just because a Wikipedian makes an edit, there is no guarantee that she/he will ever make another; there have been countless Wikipedians who, after making hundreds or thousands of productive edits, just stop contributing. And had Metropolitan quit Wikipedia in the middle of this, where lesson would Sullivan had taken away from this?
I know I'm preaching to the choir in writing the above, but maybe, just maybe, someone will point certain WMF employees to my comment the next time they criticize how Wikipedians treat new people. We didn't become unfriendly, insular members of an important project out of choice or careful reflection, but as a response to chronic frustration from problems in trying to create a reliable encyclopedia. These problems include dealing with people like Sullivan who, although well-intentioned, treat us like front-line employees in a faceless call center. -- llywrch (talk) 18:35, 29 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You all might be interested to know that Mr. Sullivan has been editing since this story broke; here is his latest:
"I know you're trying to help me; I do. And I do appreciate the effort you're putting in. But I don't need that help. Wikipedia needs the help. That's the core point in all this. It's not that I or Wikipedia outsiders are broken and just need to get up-to-speed on Wikipedia. It's that Wikipedia is this incredibly dysfunctional system. Seriously, just how we're conversing. This messaging system isn't a messaging system; it's archaic.
Help Wikipedia, that's what needs it."
Take care not to shoot the messenger. Food for thought. Skomorokh 22:48, 29 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As much as I understand all the processes we have, I really have to agree with Danny. The METHOD in which we run our processes is so incredibly convoluted, it needs changing, and we really all need to understand HOW broken our system really is. 217.114.102.131 (talk) 10:31, 30 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Chemists thus make up over 1 per thousand of WP articles, which I think is a good representation. (Whether we have, pari passu, to much coverage of pornographic actors, I am not qualified to guess, let alone judge.) Similarly while Wikipedia has 273 pages related to Pokemon, we have 10,000 on bird species and many more on fish, plants and animals. It is certainly clear that the "Otaku attack" in absolute terms is loosing its power.
On a similar bent, Wikipedia was attacked for being too liberal recently, I noticed one of the metrics was the low proportion of criticism in the article on Michael Moore. The writer (who I recall was a well known pundit) had not noticed that there are whole articles of criticism that have been spun off.
I do think WP has some fundamental problems, but they are not really brought to light by writing based on what are virtually made-up figures. Rich Farmbrough, 00:47, 1 December 2011 (UTC).[reply]
Importance
Can we get rid of it? It's more subjective than class assessment. WikiProject Environment got rid of importance assessment years ago and we hadn't have any problems with it since. OhanaUnitedTalk page 13:13, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Improve the user experience
WMF should hire some usability experts. Many templates presented to the user are too hard to read, have too much text, are unclear etc. And get that WYSIWYG editor going. And make it clearer that people can edit even without registration. Many people know how to post stuff on Facebook (even the less tech savvy) but they wouldn't even change a simple spelling mistake on Wikipedia. SpeakFree (talk)(contribs) 19:50, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What I Wanted
From above: "Here I'm tempted to come down harder on Sullivan since he was the one who wanted something from the exchange: he wanted the article...."
No, I wanted an ordinary person to be able to give Wikipedia feedback about articles, such as errors in them, or suggestions on how they might be improved, or guidance to the resources that the editors themselves say they want, without having to go through a convoluted process full of strange acronyms and editing systems that seem designed by something a young Bill Gates concocted in his spare time from writing DOS.
That's what I wanted.
You can kill the article or not. I don't give a toss. If my goal had been to try and keep that article, I would have written something in depth on my blog about the absurdity of questioning her notoriety. You know, maybe something like this:
Open Letter To Wikipedia Editors: Yes, Matt Cutts Is Notable http://searchengineland.com/open-letter-to-wikipedia-editors-yes-matt-cutts-is-notable-10216
That is what you do, if you're trying to rally opinion outside Wikipedia that a page should be kept. But what I wrote was instead an indictment of the inability to simply communicate with Wikipedia editors.
That's what I want to see fixed. If you cannot fix it, I promise you this. Wikipedia will follow the course of The Open Directory, a crowd-sourced project with great promise that heads to the dustbin of the internet because it failed to evolve.
"But I guess Danny Sullivan thinks he doesn't need to bother reading help pages…."
Actually, I come away thinking each time someone from Wikipedia says this that they didn't bother reading anything I wrote. I did read your help pages. I described how despite reading them, you couldn't do the things promised. Comment on the talk page for an article that was deleted — it has no talk page. I described this insanity and the further insanity of actually reading and trying to follow your instructions.
It shouldn't take more time to learn how contribute information as an outsider for Wikipedia editors to consider than to actually contribute the information. It's like saying that to mail a letter, someone should first have to read a 3 page article about envelopes, followed by how to lick a stamp, followed by the way to write the address, how to open the post box, and so on….
"Whereas Sullivan immediately went into full-on rant and tantrum mode…."
I did not. I actually came to the page, looked around for how to contribute information on the talk page that simple didn't exist, or the deletion review which didn't exist (because as I explained, there was no way to make a deletion review for this type of article). After doing these things, I left a message as best I could figure out explaining in the message why I was doing it.
Rather than ANY Wikipedia editor simply copying those comments over to the mythical talk page or submitting their own deletion request (despite the impossible nature of this, according to your own rules that I did read), one simply said, when another editor alerted him to this, that if that information was to be considered, then I should do the request that I mentioned already wasn't possible to do. A second editor, on seeing the same information, did what he felt was the courtesy of alerting me to do the things that I'd already tried and explained in my note couldn't be done.
I understand he meant it as a courtesy. I do appreciate the attempt. But the bottom line is that two different Wikipedia editors, who clearly know Wikipedia inside-and-out, failed to do any of the things that were either impossible or incredibly difficult to do to an outsider — things that would have, at the very least, allowed for a better debate on the subject you were considering.
But yes, I was clearly the unreasonable one.
"About the only other thing Metropolitan could have done differently would have been to offer to help in that process -- but should a Wikipedian be expected to go that far? Do we all need to provide excellent customer service?"
Actually, he should have just done the deletion review. It's not about customer service. It's about deciding if Wikipedia has all the facts to make the decisions it does. I documented seven or eight different points, and I think the information was self-evidently solid to at least be consider.
That's especially so when this deletion was NOT done with a consensus, as your own rules require. I've yet to see anyone seriously question how Wikipedia allowed a single editor to declare that a 7-6 vote equals consensus to delete a page, when all your own rules say that when in doubt, without consensus, err on the side of caution and do NOT delete.
"Less obvious would be that almost any Wikipedian, with more than minimal experience, who is confronted by someone claiming to be an expert -- either in general or a specific expert individual -- is to suspect the opposite. Never say you are an expert; just show it."
Wikipedia declares me to be an expert. You've determined that I'm notable enough to have my own page. I didn't create the page. I have no idea who did. But someone did, and it has been maintained, so you — Wikipedia — are declaring me so. That's why when I (or anyone you've deemed notable in a field) comes in to say hey, I see you're having a debate on this subject — here are some facts you might want to consider, we shouldn't have to give up our careers in the fields we're experts at to become experts at Wikipedia to communicate with you.
That doesn't mean I or anyone is demanding you do what we say. It's just that there should be an easier way to talk, to communicate, to provide the information you seek.
Actually, a Wikipedian first should welcome an expert suggest sources to them that they might not locate themselves (which I did, several URLs that your notability requirements demand). And when confronted by an expert? Confronted? How about when in contact with one, but maybe questioning if they are, do some basic research. Because it's not hard to look up who I am and decide if you think I'm an expert or not.
Let me see: http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/#start
I'm the first non-interested outsider mentioned on that timeline from Google, about its rise. That's just one of many references anyone could easily find about me, if you wanted — beyond looking at my Wikipedia page itself.
Of course, my page its riddled with errors. Funny story — one of my sons was told at school not to trust Wikipedia by his teacher. I said that's crazy, there's plenty of good information there. Let's look at my page….
Oops. Guess not. It's pretty accurate, little things that are factually incorrect here and there. I'd tell you what they are, but oh no, that would be deemed too much self-interest. Can't have that.
"As for deference to expert opinion, their arguing that they are right because of a title or certificate will always be obnoxious or self-defeating, whether they are making their point in a classroom or on Wikipedia. Were they to approach us as individuals motivated to get the facts right -- often adequately educated, but always willing to learn more about the subject -- they would have a better experience here."
I didn't argue for deference. I argued that it is extremely difficult to send expert information across to Wikipedia for consideration, for you all to make reasoned decisions. And approaching you as individuals — how? Which individual is in charge of what page? How do we know who is a higher ranking editor? Who makes the final call on what? And using what feedback form? Most of the profiles you all have don't have email addresses. Do we approach five of you as individuals? 10 of you? Which of you is expert enough to understand that what we're saying even makes sense.
You have a dysfunctional system that has grown over time to exclusive to receiving information. I know why — because you're subject to so much spam. But as I said, the same walls you keep building higher to protect you are also making you worse.
"Experts are great for providing pointers to sources, and for less controversial work, but they are not and should not be our principle source of content."
Exactly. Again, I didn't argue that you just have to take what I say as an expert and do it. I actually provided multiple references. It's just so flipping difficult to provide that.
"So at the least he should have remembered the old saying about flies, honey & vinegar when contacting a Wikipedian...."
No, I don't have to remember that. That's because it implies that things only get fixed at Wikipedia if someone takes a positive tone, and in converse, any negative opinion will result in negative coverage.
Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral. That's your jobs as editors. Volunteer or not, that's your job. So do it, do it right, be neutral and evaluate the facts and make the right decisions based on them, not because you feel like you've been unjustly treated or that the proper procedures weren't followed, so you'll ignore important information.
Do your job right, or don't do it at all. Because when you do it wrong, you let down the very project you're trying to support.
To conclude, Wikipedia is an incredible resource. It really is. And it is made that way through the hard work of the volunteer editors. I've run forums. I cover the search marketing space. Believe me, I know the type of spam attacks that you face. I know them very well.
But to thrive, Wikipedia has to change. You have to get a system that doesn't make people think there's a little high priesthood happening here, one that's almost antagonistic to the subjects being covered.
Have a page about an subject? Why not work to verify people you really believe and agree are experts, and allow them special areas to leave a sentence or two or three where they won't be edited, so that they don't feel like they're potentially wasting their time.
Why not let a company profiled in Wikipedia have a box to say 500 words about whatever they want, a right of response, I chance to at least express their own viewpoint?
And why not, when Wikipedia receives so many inbound links, find a way for Wikipedia to give back to the resources it mines its knowledge from with non non-follow links, vetted, locked-down links that share back some of the deserved link love that helps other sites do well in the search engines.
I have no incentive — none — to share my knowledge of search on Wikipedia pages, because I have no idea if someone who knows nothing about the subject is going to come along and just overwrite it for no good reason. Instead, I'll just continue to publish separately, on my own site.
That should scare you. Because at some point, if your content is deemed not actually being authoritative, Wikipedia could find itself subject to being penalized in Google in the same way that content farms suffered under Panda this year. You might think that seems crazy, far-fetched, but it's not. It would only take a few cases of really big error here to cause the entire effort to be questioned.
But more important, this could be done better. It really could. You could find a way for people to contribute to editors for review without the insanity that is this bureaucratic system. You should want that. Dannysullivan (talk) 06:36, 3 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
My original point was that there was a problem in communicating here, with enough blame to go around. I expected you to do a better job of it because being a journalist is how you make a living, & you have to meet some minimum standards. I doubt Metropolitan makes any money contributing to Wikipedia; I've earned couple of tee shirts, & two complimentary copies of books over 9 years of contributions. The minimum qualifications for contributing to Wikipedia is the ability to find the edit key, know how to press some keys on a keyboard, & how to find the save key; there are some contributors who barely pass that bar. So excuse me for holding you to a higher standard. (BTW, did you ever apologize to Metropolitan for claiming he wrote this when another editor had? I expect someone who wants to be taken seriously would have.)
Funny thing is that I don't disagree with the statement that things are broken at Wikipedia. The statement "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is correct only if it's qualified with "But you will be held responsibile for anything you add, because no one associated with Wikipedia will care about it unless it embarrasses someone." Individuals do the best job they can manage, while experiencing increasing levels of frustration dealing with others over articles -- both inside Wikipedia & outside -- over both articles & policy which has an orthagonal relationship with common sense, until one day that individual wonders if it is worth the time & sacrifices to spend dozens of hours improving a bad article -- & leaves. However, the myth is that Wikipedia works in some magical way to bring about great encyclopedia content without the WMF needing to spend a cent on it, & if we could distill the that magic from the Wiki Wiki software, then mankind could achieve world peace, end poverty & ignorance in Africa, sexual satisfaction to the entire world, & decent clothes & a haircut to posterchild Brandon Harris. P.S., if anyone wants to discuss my opinions about Wikipedia, email me. I'm tired of outsiders attributing what Jimmy Wales, Sue Gardner, Steven Walling, Rich Farmbrough, or Lir has written or said as what I have written, said or believe. -- llywrch (talk) 22:05, 5 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Closed unfriendly world
Danny Sullivan's story shows exactly why we urgently need to introduce an effective mentoring system for new editors who are identified as more likely than most to become long-term contributors. The Foundation should be working out which patterns of early editing bot-assisted human overseers can use to flag those who are worth the investment of personal mentorship. I for one am willing to participate in a mentoring scheme—perhaps one that uses another title to avoid any sense of putting down newbies, like a Pair with an established editor scheme.
The Foundation seems to be fixated on article creation as the benchmark for taking on new editors: this is fundamentally wrong; we have nearly 4M articles, many of them crappy little drive-by stubs. What we need are more editors who will do what most of us do: improve existing articles. Why isn't the Foundation getting this right? Tony (talk) 08:39, 3 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dannysullivan (talk) 17:16, 3 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Mediawiki is a wiki
It's not forum software. It's not a feedback form. It's not a ticket system. For whatever reason though, we have this silly idea that we should use normal wiki page editing to do all of those things. One of the reasons Wikipedia administrative areas are so hard for people to use is because we are turning everything into a nail for our hammer. In the beginning, I was actually shocked that people on Wikipedia were using normal editing on talk pages for discussions, having previously used other Wiki software that actually supported threaded comments. This was almost 10 years ago. 10 years and we still abuse the wiki to do all these things it's not designed to do. No wonder people are frustrated. Gigs (talk) 20:53, 5 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]