Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-07-25/In the news

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For god's sake, Wikipedia is not a "social media site". It's an encyclopedia. Yes, we cover popular things, often very well, but at the very least very thoroughly. Yes, some people do use their talk pages as chat boards or "walls", although that's technically frowned upon. Yes, the WMF has shown a desire to make Wikipedia more like a social network by implementing or planning to implement such features as WikiLove and the MoodBar, even though WikiLove has stirred some resentment, and if the WMF bothered to properly ask Wikipedia about MoodBar, it would get even more opposition than Wikilove. But, as I just said above, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The purpose of the talk pages is to facilitate collaboration and help run the project. As long as people keep lumping Wikipedia in with such nonsensical timesinks as Facebook and Twitter, Wikipedia will never be as trusted or respected as it deserves. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:19, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

For god's sake, Wikipedia is not a "social media site". It's an MMORPG :-) --Slashme (talk) 14:53, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

On a mostly unrelated note, I echo Mat Honan's statement. I think that the Feedback tool, while spawned from the desire to get inside the heads of readers (a good idea), is implemented in a way that will produce little constructive feedback. A better idea would be to attach a comment box to the tool, and then have volunteer editors filter though the comments, filter out useless "8==D" style comments, sort the rest, and pass their findings onto the foundation. Insight on why a reader gives something 2 stars is more valuable than the simple knowledge that a reader clicked the two stars button. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:24, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

There's a VP thread about MoodBar here, as noted there, it has nothing to do with "making Wikipedia more like a social network"; it's simply a tool for collecting microfeedback about annoyances, frustrations and other elements of the new user experience. As explained in the VP thread, this first deployment is a minimal test to examine the S/N ratio of the collected feedback. We should find out pretty quickly whether this approach generates useful data or not.

Similarly, with AFT, the feedback tool simply represents a first view of what a tool like this can be used for. You can see that we've been thinking about many possible different future directions for this tool on mw:Article feedback/Extended review, including extended comments and meta-moderation of those comments. I wouldn't discount the value of the data that it's currently collecting, and which is available for further digging into here, but I agree that free text comments are the logical next frontier for the tool.--Eloquence* 22:43, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

The experience of Reddit has been that no amount of pleading will stop people from downvoting things they disagree with. One interesting idea is to give the user two votes, one for article quality and one to express approval/disapproval of the topic. A possible further refinement would be to discount votes on quality by voters who always mark articles they disagree with as low quality and always mark articles they agree with as high quality. Guy Macon (talk) 00:09, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

The existence of multiple rating categories, instead of one, is partially designed to counter or detect rating bias. For example, you could look for raters who rate in extremes across categories, or specifically look for raters who rate articles both as 1 in "objectivity" (a rating category that is more likely to elicit approval/disapproval) and in "well-written" (a rating category that should be fairly independent of the rater's view on the topic).--Eloquence* 02:07, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Of course it's a social media site. Anywhere people gather is social; Wikipedia has a society; and we are definitely in the media business. Powers ^T 20:16, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Aaron Swartz

While I'm not criticizing this part of the story, as it's been widely echoed in the media, just as a comment it's not clear to me if it's actually true that "JSTOR have said they ... have asked the US Attorney's Office to not pursue criminal charges against Swartz". The JSTOR statement is very legalistic, and I've dealt with enough lawyers and PR flacks to be suspicious of their phrasing. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:06, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

What else could they mean? -- œ^™ 12:04, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

They could mean merely that they aren't ones who do the criminal prosecution (the government does), which is quite different from asking not to prosecute. For the Federal government to undertake such a prosecution against the expressed wishes of the main victim is possible, but it's odd enough to wonder about JSTOR's PR. Note their statement does not say "have asked the US Attorney's Office to not pursue criminal charges against Swartz". You might think it says that, but close inspection shows it does not in fact say that anywhere. Which is a good signal to wonder if one is being fed a PR line. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 12:54, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

• It's interesting to note that BLP concerns (hysteria?) don't seem to reach The Signpost. That's kinda refreshing.
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:39, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I think Aaron Swartz is popular enough with the sort of person who edits Wikipedia that his biography page will be treated well. This does not provide any guidance for the general case, especially someone NOT popular with that sort of person. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 12:30, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

To my mind, this comment is really illustrative of the problems that we continue to have dealing with the BLP policy. It seems as though, since Swartz is "one of our own", that we're not as concerned with "protecting" him. Contrast that viewpoint with what's going on surrounding the Anders Behring Breivik article and it's pretty clear that there is a (rather severe) double standard in the community when it comes to dealing with BLP articles.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 21:20, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I look at it from the other direction - just as a statement of fact, he's both at low risk from people wanting to use Wikipedia to attack him, and has a high likelihood of being defended against any attacks which happen to be made. Of course there's favoritism, and that's wrong. I'm not approving of it. I'm simply saying he's one of the favorites. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:15, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Could you elaborate on that, Ohms law? The Signpost takes its responsibility towards its subjects seriously, and if readers are concerned by our coverage of living people, I want to hear about it. Skomorokh 14:54, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Hey, I think it's great. If the Swartz article were new though, there's no way that it would survive here with the current climate surrounding biographical articles.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 15:47, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

RIP Aaron Swartz

Just a link back to User_talk:AaronSw#RIP. Bennylin (talk) 14:23, 16 January 2013 (UTC)