Hello there everyone. This essay was actually ready for print last week, however another editor had a piece waiting, which was in front of this in line. I didn't know that it would happen, but a few days after I wrote this essay, the Signpost put out a call for writers, which I responed to by volunteering to write the Discussion report, as well as coordinating the Opinion Desk. It was a complete accident that the first piece being published under my tenure is one that I wrote myself. While it certainly was enjoyable to write this, I won't be writing any more of them for a while, I only have so many interesting opinions, and I've got to save them up.
That means it's time for more shameless begging! If you have a Wikipedia related opinion, are capable of composing it coherently and in your own words, and are willing to share it with everyone else, I want to hear from you. Really, those are pretty much the only requirements that the Signpost has for opinion essays. It's not like they're flowing in so fast that we have to pick and choose; if you bring in a quality submission, the chances that it'll get run are exceedingly high.
I'm also not above going out and finding people who have already written essays on Wikipedia and asking them to run those essays on the Signpost. If I do ask you, please consider it an honor (and say yes).
The opinion section, more than any other area of the Signpost, can't work without members of the community becoming involved. I hope to hear from some of you soon,
- Sven Manguard Wha? 09:01, 29 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion hasn't really made it to the wikis yet, but at the Foundation, some of us are trying to start a movement towards documenting and re-examining how Wikipedia handles workflows. Firstly, the Foundation employees are hired for skill and availability, so they are rarely wiki-insiders, and often unaware of how complicated some of the processes are. Secondly, once you document these workflows, certain weaknesses in them become apparent.
It seems that this pattern comes up over and over again; where things are seriously broken, it's because there's no system to channel resources appropriately. So you need to make appeals for heroic behavior. This is unsustainable.
The wiki model is great when, in one person, you can combine a lot of roles: noticing a problem, doing research, scheduling a time to do the work, and the requisite technical skill. All that comes into play, even if you're just fixing a typo. But when the problems are larger and more difficult, it starts to make sense for there to be different roles and stages to the work, and maybe even different incentives.
A site of our size should not be frightened of a queue of work that is several thousand items long. We just have to figure out how to activate our readers' interest. What do you think?
NeilK (talk) 16:53, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I was made aware of, right after this went live, a German Wikipedia effort to curb backlogs. It's called Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb, and at this point all I know about it is that it's a massive competition that occurs several times a year and is devoted solely to backlog clearing. Wikipedians, or at least many of them, are competitive. We should harness that competitiveness with a similar competition. Sven Manguard Wha? 17:02, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think what it all comes down to is that we are all volunteers here, so we want to be spending our time working on things that will be noticed (like articles). The backgrounds stuff, like backlogs, are things that are rarely noticed and the only obvious benefit is a larger edit count (which does inspire some people to do it).
If you ever want the backlogs to be something that is heavily focused on, you need to have some sort of system that recognizes the work that people do in them. The more "praise-worthy" it is made in terms of rewards, the more people that will want to do it. And, hopefully, the higher in regard it will be held in places like RfA, though we all know RfA is thoroughly broken as it is anyways, so I kinda doubt that one. SilverserenC 17:37, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- All the more reason to give Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb a shot, yes? Sven Manguard Wha? 18:21, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I've worked on backlogs before. I've cleared out the backlog SandyGeorgia links to below several times. I just have a project and a test this week, so i'm a little busy. Ask me this weekend, I should be free then. SilverserenC 18:33, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I tried, in spite of my limited time, and I gave up because trying to clean out one measly category correctly could take me an entire week: my conclusion is reinforcement of the concern that as Wikipedia has become more known and has attempted to recruit to account for declining editorship, incompetent editors are replacing competent editors in droves. The notion that knowledgeable editors can address these problems is naive (just imagine trying to remove the POV from Chavez-- I've been working on that for six years).
So, I took what looked like a relatively easy category, less than 50 pages, that I thought I should have been able to empty Category:Pages with missing references list-- what I found was massive problems in every article I looked at, such that simply adding a reflist to the article would be irresponsible (and why can't a bot do that, anyway?). Perhaps I should lower my standards and just add the darn reflist parameter, but I'm not going to do that and then have someone come along and say, "look at that, she added the tag and didn't even notice the article was a copyvio". I found most typically Indian editors adding most likely copyvios and indecipherable text, I found text so utterly indecipherable that it would take me hours of research to figure out how to fix any one article, I found incorrect article names, dubious notability, you name it.
The problem is not that estblished editors are failing-- the problem is that there is simply too much crud coming in from incompetent editors for established editors to have a prayer of keeping up with the routine maintenance. In almost every case, I came to the conclusion that no text would be better than the bad text there: I don't know why we're actively recruiting editors who don't display competence or commitment to Wikipedia via university projects.
It's a nice editorial, but we can't get there from here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:45, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I have long advocated that Wikipedia needs to shed a few thousand articles, however while my view has little support. Meanwhile, users are able to mass create stubs with bots. I appreciate the ideal that we should strive to cover everything, but I also believe that we should prioritize on doing it right, rather than having something on everything now. All of this, however, is slightly off topic. We have the problems sitting around now, we really should try to fix them. For the sake of discussion, however, if articles really are beyond saving, deleting articles tagged with issues does lower the backlogs on those issues. Sven Manguard Wha? 18:13, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I know of a few thousand articles related to motorcycling topics that have been taggeed for years as being unsourced or original research and whatnot. But I also know that these articles, with only a handful of exceptions, get next to no traffic. It makes plenty of sense if you think about it: the reason the monster gets ignored is that nobody ever sees the monster. Because there are a million or so articles on Wikipedia which are so obscure that their maintenance tags are being seen by next to nobody, so next to nobody reacts to the maintenance tags.
There is a backlog of articles that get a significant amount of traffic which need to be cleaned up, but that backlog is a couple orders of magnitude smaller. So I disagree that Wikipedia is really failing its readers here -- in 99% of these cases there are no readers to fail. As a suggestion, I would want this backlog list sorted by traffic, so that the articles with the most readers are fixed first, and the ones with no readers are fixed last, or never. It would be a terrible waste of limited resources to work on the majority of these articles. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:07, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I think that sorting items in a backlog by hits is a good idea. At the very least, it allows us to save face easily. It does not, however, solve the problem of there not being enough people working to clean up the backlogs. As to the notion that we're not failing our readers because the articles that are tagged are not viewed, you're viewing them, so clearly there are people, however low in number, that do care about those articles. If we're neglecting small numbers of users simply because the articles that they are interested in aren't viewed very often, it dosen't mean that we're not failing our readers, it means we're failing a smaller number of our readers, and that's still unacceptable. Sven Manguard Wha? 18:20, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm sorry, but calling an article tagged for maintenance "unacceptable" is histrionic. Maintenance tags are a normal, healthy part of how Wikipedia works, and how Wikipedia gets better in an orderly fashion. The tags give readers adequate warning. If you want to say that about the 167 unreferenced BLPs, then maybe you have a point. You might even have a point if you were talking about unreferenced articles with no maintenance tags to warn readers. But it is not "unacceptable" that 1984–1985 United States network television schedule (Saturday morning)'s ~200 readers per month have no assurance of the accuracy of the article. Perhaps the statement that "From Jan 12-Feb, The Snorks and Pink Panther and Sons swapped time slots" is utter fabrication, but it doesn't bother me in the least. Not in the least. I have much, much better things to do.
Now the only reason I was viewing them is totally meta -- I was poking around at random on Wikipedia:WikiProject Motorcycling/Cleanup listing for important articles needing cleanup. But that was before Wikipedia:WikiProject Motorcycling/Popular pages became available; now I focus my efforts on what matters and lose no sleep at all over the bad pages with no readers.
If these neglected, unread pages bother you personally, that's fine. But you need a better argument if you're telling me to quit working on a page with thousands of hits per month because some page with 200 hits a month is unsourced. If anything, it would be beneficial to discourage editors from wasting time on pages like that.
But we do agree that the highest traffic pages should be fixed first, so by all means, push ahead on that front. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- You're right, maintenance tags are not, in and of themselves, problems. Having them in the tens and hundreds of thousands, however, is a problem. Having tags from a half decade ago is a problem. Maintenance tags work on the basic operating assumption that at some time in the near to intermediate future, they're going to get maintained. If that's not happening, we have a systemic failure. If tags are just going to pile up and never get fixed, the philosophy that "things don't have to be perfect now because there is no due date to have them done by" falls apart. That philosophy is part of Wikipedia's core. Sven Manguard Wha? 18:51, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Your argument is ad nauseam: you keep repeating what a problem it is that X number of articles have old tags. X happens to be 250,000 but so what? Why is that a problem? 250,000 out of 3.8 million articles is 6.6%. Why is 6.6% such a problem? What rational reason is there that this number is too high? Should it be 3%? Or 2%? Why? And if only a fraction of that 250,000 get much traffic, why indeed, is it a problem? You could recruit an editor to spend ten hours fixing 20 of these articles, and those 20 could only get a total of 4,000 hits a month. Whereas that same editor could be recruited to improve a popular article that gets 4,000+ hits in a single day, or even a single hour. The difference in impact is staggering, and to thoughtlessly suggest devoting time to such obscure articles when many, many times greater benefit can be had elsewhere is illogical. I am asking for evidence of why this work is more important than other work. If all the articles with 10 or 100 or 10000 times more traffic were flawless, then it might make sense to recruit editors to work the obscure ones. But you seem to think the mere fact that these poor articles exist is inherently a problem. If they are orphans and unread, then they are harming no one, or next to no one. Whereas every {{Citation needed}}-tagged fact in Mick Jagger is going to be potentially misinforming readers at a clip of nearly 500 per hour.
So what if they have been tagged for ten years? Many of them would take ten years to get as many hits as an important article gets in a week.
If you know how to find editors who share your peeve here, that these trees that fall in the forest that nobody hears are a "problem", and if (for some odd reason) these editors would not otherwise contribute, great. At least they're contributing something. But if you want to pull them away from fixing high traffic, or even moderate traffic, articles to fix these pages because they simply bug you, then that harms Wikipedia. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 03:22, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I'll note that the number of articles that are unsourced, undersourced, or have unsourced statements, as tallied at WP:GBD is just under 800,000, and that the number of content related tags on that page is around 1,407,000. Even accounting for articles that have multiple tags, that's well over 25% of our articles. It's clear, however, that we have fundamentally different views of the matter, and that our philosophies on Wikipedia are in conflict with one another. That's fine, and I'm glad that this opinion essay is able to spark discussion on the matter. I don't think, however, that asking users to clear backlogs is in any way harming the encyclopedia though, it it saddens me that this debate went to that argument so quickly. Sven Manguard Wha? 03:49, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Maybe a better sense of proportion would help. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:55, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Since "the Foundation employees are hired for skill and availability, so they are rarely wiki-insiders, and often unaware of how complicated some of the processes are" (and I've certainly encountered quite a few helpful and savvy Foundation employees), perhaps the Foundation needs to re-examine their HR process and possibly consider hiring a few "wiki-insiders" to provide a better mix of skillsets and life experiences. As it is, the positions I see posted for the Foundation are not generally "jobs" as we old fogies understand the concept, but rather temporary/LTE gigs of a few months duration, which nonetheless require the successful candidate to move to SF. When you select for people who either already live in the Bay Area, or are willing to pull up roots and can afford to move to one of the most costly housing markets in North America for a temp contract, you are not going to get a very representative selection of candidates. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:03, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Indeed; for many WMF jobs being a wiki-insider is the skill or should be. No wonder WMF's grasp of wiki-reality often seems tenuous. Work it out - the few lists the article mentions total nearly 800,000 articles. There were only 3349 editors making 100+ edits on en:wp in September 2011, most of whom won't abandon their usual editing for this. The relationship between tagged articles and articles with actual problems is pretty low in both directions - many of the worst articles aren't tagged & many tags are dubious. Johnbod (talk) 00:05, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- We already have a very large number of wiki-insiders contributing many hours' work for free. Offering to pay a tiny minority of them for that same expertise is unlikely to be the best way to solve any major problems, I think. If we need to hire employees to do jobs that aren't currently done by wikipedians then the hiring mechanism should concentrate on the skills needed for that job, although proficiency in editing wikipedia will often be a useful prerequisite. bobrayner (talk) 14:52, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- But is it the "same expertise"? Your own talk page says "I rarely touch articles related to my work", & I and many other editors are just the same. You suggest "proficiency" might be a "useful prerequisite" (what would a useless prerequisite be, I wonder), but more experience than that is apparently a bad idea. It's hard to see why. Fortunately some recent hires by WMF suggest they don't share your views, but the senior levels are still dominated by people with backgrounds in areas that were considered comparable to Wikimedia in a broad way, but actually are very different. Johnbod (talk) 16:07, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
To comment on the Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb, There is already a Wikicup, it ended today. 124 people signed up for 2011, and many more of us are likely to sign up for 2012, I know I will. It's purpose is mainly getting featured material. Maybe we should argue that there should be some lesser reward for getting maintenance tags removed. If it'd get passed, I'd not only take the challenge, but I'd have a chance of making it past round 1! Everybody wins! hewhoamareismyself 23:13, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The English Wikipedia is in great shape. If you think 250.000 unsourced articles out of 3.8 million are a problem, then you should try and take a look at other language versions of Wikipedia. Sure, it sucks that not all articles are perfect and that a lot of them have been tagged for half a decade, but people should not panic. It is going to be better with time. I can only speak for my self, but I don't like to drop in on a completely random topic of which I know nothing about, and then start writing. I have just decided to work on one article at a time. --Maitch (talk) 23:29, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Very true, context is key. I went on French Wikipedia and hit random article for 3 minutes before I found a sourced one. But I think we need to be able to fix up our own house before we can help out the other languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hewhoamareismyself (talk • contribs) 01:37, 2 November 2011
- Agreed. Also, the downward comparison is never a good idea. Of course other projects have worse problems in some areas, but is that the bar we're setting for ourselves as a project? Not being the worst? --195.14.206.143 (talk) 01:58, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The argument shouldn't be "We're really good, so this isn't a problem", it should be "We're really good, in spite of this problem". The first wording is tragically predominant, in everything from Wikipedia to corporate boardrooms to national political discourse, all that it does is hide things by contextualizing them. The statement "The rest of my body is fine, so this failing liver isn't a problem" immediately seems wrong and raises red flags, and yet it uses the same argument, right down to the word structure, as "The rest of Wikipedia is fine, so a quarter million unsourced articles isn't a problem", which seems to be eliciting less alarm, and even less recognition that there is a problem inherent in the statement. We should adopt the thinking "We're really good, in spite of this problem", because rather than discount the problem, that wording acknowledges it as being an issue. This subtle change makes all the difference, because it throws open the door for that problem to be addressed. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:07, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- You're almost overthinking it imo. From a "PR" angle (i.e. getting as many people as possible to help with the cleanup), that may be good and sadly even necessary. But the current situation should really never have happened in the first place. This whole backlog problem almost reminds me of the financial crisis in a way. All these tagged articles are a bit like I-owe-u's. They're a stain. Far from "We're really good, so this isn't a problem", and even from "We're really good, in spite of this problem", I wonder how good we really are for letting this get so much out of hand in the first place. But like I said, your comment makes sense, from the perspective of motivating others to help with the backlogs. --195.14.206.143 (talk) 04:27, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I am not saying it is not a problem. I would just like to argue that just because an article is unsourced, doesn't automatically make the article bad or untrue. If you take a look in a paper encyclopedia, then you won't find a reference for each written sentence. The very idea that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that anyone can contribute is what made Wikipedia a success. These days most of the "problem" articles are really esoteric topics. Surely we can do better and surely we will. Article creation drops steadily, which frees up time to work on those we already have created. Just don't panic! --Maitch (talk) 11:15, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- In addition, I would like to point out why I choose to go all the way to GA instead of just cleaning a bit up. Let's say I pick an completely unsourced article to work on. If I add 2-4 references, then it will be tagged with "needing additional references". If I add 10-20 references, then it will be tagged with "citation needed" all over the article. I may as well go all the way, so it won't be tagged again. It is a slow process, but you can see the ratio of FA's and GA's going up versus the rest.--Maitch (talk) 12:04, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Article creation drops steadily, which frees up time to work on those we already have created -- Isn't that a bit of a nonsequitur though? You're implying that the rate of article improvement is rising at the same time that article creation is dropping. But that is not the case.
Also, nobody is "panicking" and I for one resent that implication as well. We're addressing a veritable problem and thinking of possible solutions.
It's good that you're taking the time and investing the effort to go for GA, but many "articles" don't even resemble an actual article yet (think TV episodes) and many editors are simply not able to or interested in that level of work. Getting some of them to help make those articles meet the bare minimum requirements of our core content policies would be a gigantic step forward. --213.196.210.71 (talk) 13:01, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Maybe it is because I have been here since 2005 that I have different perspective on things. In those days most people were working on creating new articles and very few worked on improving the articles themselves. A "brilliant" FA had 20 references and most of Wikipedia was unreferenced. These days, it takes 200+ inline citations to get an article to FA standards and a "bad" article has 30-40 references. Article creation is dropping (just look at the statistics page) and the overall quality of articles are getting better. It only makes sense that people have time now to improve now that we pretty much got a page for everything.
- Now back to my point. I don't mind people working through backlogs in order to source articles, but usually if you just pick some random article and add a few sources, then it will likely be tagged for some else (additional references, inline citations, etc.). It is better to pick an article that you are knowledgeable about and fix all the problems with the article. Otherwise, you are just pushing the article over to another backlog. Finally, I don't consider 250.000 unsourced articles a failure. It is a great success and will improve over time - you just have to accept that things don't improve rapidly on Wikipedia.--Maitch (talk) 14:38, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Not only are they not improving at all, it's getting worse over time. I've been here since 2006, and I strongly resent your appeal to authority (i.e. greater experience) to silence valid concerns about the project. If you don't feel anything needs to change, then go about your business, but please stop trying to convince people who are at least as knowledgeable as yourself about the inner workings of the project that everything is fine and dandy. Just consider the rhetoric devices you've employed in your comments here: First you tried to paint those who voice any concerns as "panicking", now you're claiming you have a more relaxed perspective due to more experience. Turns out, you have neither. And clearing the backlogs isn't all that's required either. We need substantial reform, maybe even in the form of a board of chief editors. Not "right now" (as in "panicking"), but things shouldn't go on like they have. Back in the day, the proportion of clueful editors was much greater than it is today. They didn't need fast rules, their greater average wisdom enabled them to make clueful judgments about when to ignore a rule and when to follow it. The same is not true for the bulk of editors these days. They need rules, if only to prevent them from making up their own. If your years of experience on Wikipedia have taught you anything, it should be that. --87.79.231.188 (talk) 15:25, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Ok, I will stop commenting now. I don't have any authority over anybody and if I gave someone that impression, I apologise. I think I have made some valid and consistent points and I can see this discussion completely derailing. Cheers, --Maitch (talk) 15:48, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Yet another attempt of yours at stifling the discussion. It isn't "derailing". You are deliberately attempting to derail it. You did not make any valid or consistent points. There is a problem with the general way we're handling many things on Wikipedia. If you do not see that, you are part of the problem. --87.78.44.235 (talk) 16:30, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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