| Revision as of 09:28, 26 August 2014 editRitchie333 (talk | contribs)Edit filter managers, Autopatrolled, Administrators125,314 edits →Could more information help to keep newbies?: cmt← Previous edit | Revision as of 10:02, 26 August 2014 edit undoKudpung (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users, Page movers, File movers, Mass message senders, New page reviewers, Pending changes reviewers, Rollbackers, Template editors109,245 edits →Could more information help to keep newbies?: cmtNext edit → | ||
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| :::That was a great example of how not to do stats. When they took two very different but true statements "30% of our most active editors have been blocked at least once" and "most blocks are for vandalism" they should have done a reality check before saying that 1 and 1 make 11 as they did in that (now thankfully discontinued) leaflet. I have since encountered or heard of at least four editors who started as vandals, there may be more. I'm not against the idea in theory that vandals can be reformed and become good editors. Clearly some of the adolescents who we block for vandalism will grow up into responsible teenagers and adults who come back many years later, but they are rare and I'm not convinced that they would be more likely to come back as goodfaith editors if we were harsher or milder when they were vandals. However the concern about losing editors was not caused by that mistake, it was caused by the stats on the declining proportion of new editors who go from their 5th edit to their 100th and their 100th edit to their 1000th. We shouldn't greatly worry about the drop in editors doing their 5th edit, it usually takes 5 vandalisms to get all four warning levels and a block, so the rise of the edit filters between 2009 and 2012 accounts for a large amount of the perceived drop in the number of people doing their first five edits in that era, if not the whole 2007-14 era of decline in new editors. There is less certainty as to why we have greater attrition of new editors between their 5th and 1000th edits. I have a couple of theories, in particular I think that the decline in use of the citation needed template and the increased tendency amongst the regulars to revert unsourced new content is driving people away. But we need to test whether our retention of people who do cite their sources has held up, and if I'm right we need a better way to train new editors to cite their sources - simply reverting them doesn't seem to work. '']]<span style="color:#CC5500">Chequers''</span> 14:47, 25 August 2014 (UTC) | :::That was a great example of how not to do stats. When they took two very different but true statements "30% of our most active editors have been blocked at least once" and "most blocks are for vandalism" they should have done a reality check before saying that 1 and 1 make 11 as they did in that (now thankfully discontinued) leaflet. I have since encountered or heard of at least four editors who started as vandals, there may be more. I'm not against the idea in theory that vandals can be reformed and become good editors. Clearly some of the adolescents who we block for vandalism will grow up into responsible teenagers and adults who come back many years later, but they are rare and I'm not convinced that they would be more likely to come back as goodfaith editors if we were harsher or milder when they were vandals. However the concern about losing editors was not caused by that mistake, it was caused by the stats on the declining proportion of new editors who go from their 5th edit to their 100th and their 100th edit to their 1000th. We shouldn't greatly worry about the drop in editors doing their 5th edit, it usually takes 5 vandalisms to get all four warning levels and a block, so the rise of the edit filters between 2009 and 2012 accounts for a large amount of the perceived drop in the number of people doing their first five edits in that era, if not the whole 2007-14 era of decline in new editors. There is less certainty as to why we have greater attrition of new editors between their 5th and 1000th edits. I have a couple of theories, in particular I think that the decline in use of the citation needed template and the increased tendency amongst the regulars to revert unsourced new content is driving people away. But we need to test whether our retention of people who do cite their sources has held up, and if I'm right we need a better way to train new editors to cite their sources - simply reverting them doesn't seem to work. '']]<span style="color:#CC5500">Chequers''</span> 14:47, 25 August 2014 (UTC) | ||
| :@Nagle, it isn't how many goodfaith but unhelpful newbies go on to become good editors that is the issue, we know that currently it is very few. The issue is how many would have become useful editors if their first edit had been corrected rather than reverted. One theory is that the difference between our currently closed community and the much more open community of 2003/6 is that new editors were much less likely to have their first edits rejected in that era. It would be possible to test that, for example by comparing people who did their first 1000 edits in 2006/7 with people doing their first 1,000 edits in the last couple of years, and look at when they first added referenced information. If the theory holds up, the few editors who have recently become active will be more likely to have been citing sources earlier. Of course we could find that Misplaced Pages has never been good at training people to cite sources, and what we are seeing is that we have always lost editors eventually if they didn't cite sources, and that currently we just get rid of them earlier. My hope is that if someone researched this we would find that a worthwhile proportion of new editors used to learn citation and so forth in their first thousand edits or so, and that being nicer to goodfaith newbies used to turn a useful proportion of them into good editors. But I don't believe that anyone knows for certain whether we used to turn newbies into useful editors by tolerating inexperienced edits, or if we didn't whether we now could. '']]<span style="color:#CC5500">Chequers''</span> 15:19, 25 August 2014 (UTC) | :@Nagle, it isn't how many goodfaith but unhelpful newbies go on to become good editors that is the issue, we know that currently it is very few. The issue is how many would have become useful editors if their first edit had been corrected rather than reverted. One theory is that the difference between our currently closed community and the much more open community of 2003/6 is that new editors were much less likely to have their first edits rejected in that era. It would be possible to test that, for example by comparing people who did their first 1000 edits in 2006/7 with people doing their first 1,000 edits in the last couple of years, and look at when they first added referenced information. If the theory holds up, the few editors who have recently become active will be more likely to have been citing sources earlier. Of course we could find that Misplaced Pages has never been good at training people to cite sources, and what we are seeing is that we have always lost editors eventually if they didn't cite sources, and that currently we just get rid of them earlier. My hope is that if someone researched this we would find that a worthwhile proportion of new editors used to learn citation and so forth in their first thousand edits or so, and that being nicer to goodfaith newbies used to turn a useful proportion of them into good editors. But I don't believe that anyone knows for certain whether we used to turn newbies into useful editors by tolerating inexperienced edits, or if we didn't whether we now could. '']]<span style="color:#CC5500">Chequers''</span> 15:19, 25 August 2014 (UTC) | ||
| ::One of the reasons that new editors are not seeing their contributions stick is because the overall quality of the encyclopaedia has increased, at least in certain areas. Ten years ago, articles were missing or factually incomplete and we wrote about whatever knowledge came to hand. Since then, articles have been improved both formally to GA / FA levels, and informally by citing additional sources. The net effect is that a new editor could easily add unsourced trivia to ] in 2004, but they'd have no chance of doing it today. The amount of skill and effort required to stay in Misplaced Pages gets higher and higher as the years go on and the project matures. | ::One of the reasons that new editors are not seeing their contributions stick is because the overall quality of the encyclopaedia has increased, at least in certain areas. Ten years ago, articles were missing or factually incomplete and we wrote about whatever knowledge came to hand. Since then, articles have been improved both formally to GA / FA levels, and informally by citing additional sources. The net effect is that a new editor could easily add unsourced trivia to ] in 2004, but they'd have no chance of doing it today. The amount of skill and effort required to stay in Misplaced Pages gets higher and higher as the years go on and the project matures. | ||
| ::Because editing Misplaced Pages has become a non-trivial skill, paid editing would help. I'm not talking about what we normally refer to as "paid editing", but a trained individual who understands Misplaced Pages markup and policies helping out somebody else who wants to contribute genuine encyclopaedic information, but doesn't have the skill to do it. In that respect, it's no different from paying a company to do corporate web design. The reason paid editing has a stigma is the stereotypical editor that does it ''doesn{{'}}t'' have a good grasp on policies (specifically notability, NPOV and conflict of interest). ] ] ] 09:28, 26 August 2014 (UTC) | ::Because editing Misplaced Pages has become a non-trivial skill, paid editing would help. I'm not talking about what we normally refer to as "paid editing", but a trained individual who understands Misplaced Pages markup and policies helping out somebody else who wants to contribute genuine encyclopaedic information, but doesn't have the skill to do it. In that respect, it's no different from paying a company to do corporate web design. The reason paid editing has a stigma is the stereotypical editor that does it ''doesn{{'}}t'' have a good grasp on policies (specifically notability, NPOV and conflict of interest). ] ] ] 09:28, 26 August 2014 (UTC) | ||
| :::Probably the last thing we need is paid editors, if only because that would be open to so much misinterpretation and defy the huge initiatives we have made in the past 12 moths to try and stop the wrong kind of paid editing. | |||
| :::What we need to do is to find ways of better training our new page patrollers, recent edit patrollers, and vandalism patrollers. Unfortunately, even if we admins give them a hat to wear, those are the areas that are a magnet to inexperienced maintenance users who don't understand the differences between good faith but inapproriate pages/edits, and blatant vandalism from kids, SPA spammers, religeous propagandists, and hoax/attack pages. I've been patrolling the patrollers for an hour a day since I got home from the UK, and I never get past 20 newly patrolled pages without finding a critically wrong patroll or a page that has been passed that should have been tagged for deletion. I don't know what goes on at recent changes etc because I can't be everywhere. At the end of the day however, I think we're too paranoid about losing editors this way. I'm still convinced that ] would have relieved us of a lot of this mess and that anyone wanting to abide by the rules can easily wait 10 edits and 4 days before creating an article. I don't believe that the ability to make spontaneous edits or creations helps grow the encyclopedia or turn people into regular, dedicated Wikipedians. | |||
| :::The only real solution IMO, is more outreach, and, although I hate to suggest it, using some of the surplus funds to buy some advertising on TV: ''Text this number to give just 2 pounds a month to ensure that everyone on the planet has access to free knowledge''... WP is one of the few among millions of interactive websites that allows people to edit/post without first registering or the content first being rewiewed by a moderator. WP has grown over the past 10 years and I think that rather than the WMF constantly trying to come up with new ways of providing stats for what ''they'' want us to believe, it's time to tighten up those old presumptions and realise that that old free-for-all culture is no longer appropriate for something that has grown to the stature of today's Misplaced Pages/Wikimedia. I'm not suggesting that we should all wear suits and ties to work on WP or all be over 40, but it's time for some people to realise that WP operates on a multimillion dollar budget, has real offices around the world, and is not a web project being run from a back bedroom or a converted garden shed by someone in torn jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, or an ill-fitting junior high school uniform. The sooner we get that message across, the sooner the quality will improve. It would not affect the mantra that ''Misplaced Pages is the encyclopedia anyone can edit'' but it would help to prevent it from being ''the website any troll can wreck''. ] (]) 10:02, 26 August 2014 (UTC) | |||
| == Another editor gone? == | == Another editor gone? == | ||
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User talk:71.239.82.39
Losing another expert content contributor. (No analysis at Editor Retention?) Ihardlythinkso (talk)
WikiProject Birds and "downcasing" imposition
- I am revising the heading of this section from WikiProject Birds and "downcasing" imposition to WikiProject Birds and "downcasing" imposition, in harmony with WP:TPOC, point 12 (Section headings). The new heading is intended to facilitate links to it, for example the one in Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Editor Retention#Bird names in lower case.
- —Wavelength (talk) 01:13, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
I am wondering whether anyone has looked at the effect of blind imposition of Misplaced Pages:Manual_of_Style guidelines on the retention of knowledgeable editors in a project like WikiProject Birds.
For a bit of background: This is all about the naming style for bird names for which many sources and bird authorities use a capitalisation style like "Red Robin" but MOS insists on "red robin". The wikiproject dedicated to improving the bird articles has long used the former standard (from the projects inception as far as I know), but recently it has been decided by others that these must all be changed to lowercase.
The merits of either approach are not what I want to rehash. But it is the effect upon this dedicated community of editors that I am dismayed to see (I am not a member of the project, but do often edit articles about NZ birds so are sort of on the periphery observing the effect). Most members just want to improve the bird articles and are not into wiki lawyering or fighting whatever you want to call endless brow beating arguments from people who apparently have no interest in content creators, but only trying to achieve a standardised look.
From this small community we've already had one editor leave citing this as the final straw, and another about to leave suggesting the creation of a separate wiki where they can continue contributing their knowledge without arbitrary 'standards' imposed. I expect that some will continue to belittle members by characterising this as "people throwing their toys out of the cradle". The group as a whole isn't going to do a mass walkout, but I expect this is just one more niggle that will prompt them to spend a little less time here, and wonder why they bother.
For me the loss of even one experienced and dedicated editor over a matter like this is depressing. It is not about the merits of either argument, but how the result is being imposed and how the views of project members have been dismissed. Volunteers don't ask for much in return, but they're not going to bother if their experience, knowledge, effort and views are not appreciated. --Tony Wills (talk) 07:30, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
- I agree that the MOS crowd are out of control—it's the tail wagging the dog. An RfC was held here, but MOS is run by highly verbose and domineering editors who made a discussion of the underlying issues impossible. Any benefit from all names being in lowercase does not justify forcing difficult-to-implement requirements on editors who have built excellent content and who know how bird names are written in comparable documents. No doubt the MOS wizards are working on a proposal to make all words the same length, and we will be informed in due course. Johnuniq (talk) 11:42, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
- Name even one single argument, point or aspect of "a discussion of the underlying issues" that was not addressed in that RfC, in which "the WP:BIRDS crowd" were plenty verbose yourselves. The RfC was started and "managed" (over my procedural objections, an entire subsection of them) by a pro-capitalization partisan, and the RfC was closed by an admin who was also pro-capitalization personally. At some point, when an argument doesn't go your way, and others who held your view have graciously conceded and moved on to something productive, you just have to live with it, and stop trying to demonize everyone involved and the process itself. Using the shift key less frequently is not a "difficult-to-implement requirement". And "comparable documents" (i.e. other encyclopedias and similar generalist works) overwhelmingly do not capitalize common names of species of anything. That's the main reason the RfC went the way it did, remember? PS: "The MOS crowd are out of control" is a blanket personal attack and bad faith assumption against all editors of probably the most-watchlisted guideline on the entire system. You should retract that. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- Is there some part of "MOS is run by highly verbose and domineering editors" that you disagree with? Johnuniq (talk) 10:39, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Name even one single argument, point or aspect of "a discussion of the underlying issues" that was not addressed in that RfC, in which "the WP:BIRDS crowd" were plenty verbose yourselves. The RfC was started and "managed" (over my procedural objections, an entire subsection of them) by a pro-capitalization partisan, and the RfC was closed by an admin who was also pro-capitalization personally. At some point, when an argument doesn't go your way, and others who held your view have graciously conceded and moved on to something productive, you just have to live with it, and stop trying to demonize everyone involved and the process itself. Using the shift key less frequently is not a "difficult-to-implement requirement". And "comparable documents" (i.e. other encyclopedias and similar generalist works) overwhelmingly do not capitalize common names of species of anything. That's the main reason the RfC went the way it did, remember? PS: "The MOS crowd are out of control" is a blanket personal attack and bad faith assumption against all editors of probably the most-watchlisted guideline on the entire system. You should retract that. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- @Tony Wills: All of what you've posted needs to be addressed, but that will be long (your number one complaint seems to be "dismissiveness", so I'm going the opposite route and engaging you point-by-point). I'll collapse it so it doesn't drown out the rest of the thread:
| Itemized response to Tony Wills |
|---|
|
- — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
I know full well of several people who have glanced at discussion like the MOS one linked here for about ten seconds and concluded "I will not edit Misplaced Pages - it is full of jerks" and walked away. Personally, however, I generally ignore MOS and take the line that it's either common sense and I do it anyway as it's something I learned from school, or a bot or gnome will make the change for me and I will accept it. Ritchie333 12:01, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
{{weasel-inline}}. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- The MOS is full of idiosyncratic and unexplainable choices that are the result of complex compromises. If some style choice is not exactly "what I learned in school" I just ignore it and move on. It's a small price to pay for not having to argue style choices over and over on every article. —Neotarf (talk) 13:27, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
- I'm also concerned about this. Birds apart, there's a small group of editors who feel it's okay to impose their style preferences on articles they otherwise have no involvement in, and it causes bad feeling. At least two ArbCom rulings asked editors not to edit-war over style, but perhaps we need another one. Or we could add a sentence to the MoS stressing that it isn't policy.
- We already have WP:STYLEVAR: "Style and formatting should be consistent within an article, though not necessarily throughout Misplaced Pages. Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a good reason." But the style editors interpret "where more than one style is acceptable" to mean "acceptable by the MoS." SlimVirgin 03:54, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
- True dat. Fewer rules better. I like to write "In March of 1965..." but that's not allowed. It must be "In March 1965...". I write "March of 1965" anyway, but someone will come along and change it eventually. Meh, I don't care, but if I objected strongly enough I'd be hounded off the Misplaced Pages I guess. It's human fact that people like things to be neat, and to make rules about stuff for other people to follow. Hobgoblins, little minds, and all that. But it's "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit", not "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit who writes like I do".
- This doesn't apply to the bird thing and doesn't solve most problems, but as practical advice for some situations, I would say to all and sundry:
- If someone makes any change to a Manual of Style page, and there hasn't been a very lively and very well-populated discussion showing very clear support for the change, revert on sight. Exercise your WP:BRD rights. Even if you personally agree with it, revert on sight. I do. If someone wants to make a rule that if we want to work here we must write "he graduated from Yale" and cannot write "he was graduated from Yale" or whatever (and I'm sure there're people who would love to do just that), make them run a proper RfC and get a proper close showing that most everyone agrees with that. Put the ball in the pettifogger's court. Watchlist as many MoS pages as you can stand and BRD BRD BRD.
- People, please do not !vote in the discussions along the lines of "Well, I don't really much care, and I can kind of see both sides, but I suppose I kind of like 'he graduated from Yale' better personally, so Support. In other words, let's make that an absolute ironclad rule and drive those who don't like it from the project". Don't !vote like that and call out people who do. Explain the implications of making votes like that. Make them say how many people they're willing to drive from the project as the cost of their vote. Herostratus (talk) 06:31, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
- In theory, you might expect that to get results. However, in practice I find discussing MOS issues drains my mental energy like a sieve, which leaves me less time to write and improve articles. I've never "got" the difference between em-dash and en-dash, and perhaps I never will. On my user page, I satirically note that extreme MOS zealots would happily gloss over a false accusation of murder and focus intently on a full stop appearing after a ref tag. I don't mind fixing up technical specs at work to confirm to some arbitrary formatting rule, but - unlike Misplaced Pages - I get paid real money to do so. Ritchie333 11:01, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
- So, unlike everyone else who edits Misplaced Pages, you refuse to obey its rules unless you're paid? PS: "extreme MOS zealots" is a blanket personal attack and assumption of bad faith against all regular MOS editors, and should be retracted. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- No, you've misunderstood. I'm just stating my personal view, which is that I find MOS issues dull and in general I find rules questionable unless I can understand how they apply to a particular set of circumstances. Satire can be cutting but I am certainly in no way belittling or putting down people who enjoy gnomish fixes that I'm generally not interested in. Chill. Ritchie333 10:53, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- So, unlike everyone else who edits Misplaced Pages, you refuse to obey its rules unless you're paid? PS: "extreme MOS zealots" is a blanket personal attack and assumption of bad faith against all regular MOS editors, and should be retracted. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- In theory, you might expect that to get results. However, in practice I find discussing MOS issues drains my mental energy like a sieve, which leaves me less time to write and improve articles. I've never "got" the difference between em-dash and en-dash, and perhaps I never will. On my user page, I satirically note that extreme MOS zealots would happily gloss over a false accusation of murder and focus intently on a full stop appearing after a ref tag. I don't mind fixing up technical specs at work to confirm to some arbitrary formatting rule, but - unlike Misplaced Pages - I get paid real money to do so. Ritchie333 11:01, 4 July 2014 (UTC)
- @Herostratus:
- If you "don't care" if your "March of 1965" will be changed to "March 1965", why do you raise it as an issue and ridiculously claim you'll be hounded off the system if you objected? That's pointless WP:DRAMA. Back in reality, WT:MOS is largely formed an adjsted, day in and day out, from objections to the over- or under-breadth of one rule or another, and debate about these points is the principal way MOS evolves and changes over time. You're also sorely misapplying Emerson, as virtually everyone does who ever quotes "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". We was referring to the foolish consistency of refusing to change one's own mind, in publication, over time when the facts, evidence or circumstances have changed, the failure of the "little statesmen and philosophers" he derides, the latter his critics for his own pattern of frequently changing his philosophical positions. Emerson, an experienced writer and editor, would never have agreed with the notion that a collected, multi-editor work (like an encyclopedia) should not have a consistent style guide used by its writers, and his own writing displays a great deal of editorial consistency, even across decades, despite his inconsistent views in his essays and lectures. Next, there is no policy requiring you to abide by every MOS rule in order to edit at all; please stop making up misleading nonsense like that.
- To address your troubling numbered proposals:
- See WP:CONSENSUS, WP:BOLD, WP:FILIBUSTER, WP:TE, WP:DE, WP:EDITWAR, WP:GANG, WP:BATTLEGROUND, WP:NOTHERE, etc. Putting together a revertwarring faction to do nothing but blockade all progress at MOS pages by blanket-reverting, day in and day out, simply to grind MOS to a halt, will get you blocked. WP:BRD is not a "right", it's not even a policy, it's just an optional process. It's one that often works, but only when it's used in good faith and sparingly. Also, if simply having a style, punctuation or grammar rule about anything would "drive those who didn't like it from the project", there would be no editors at all, or no MOS at all, just as a matter of basic reasoning. If this were how people reacted to linguistic rules generally, we could not have evolved language. Hyperbolic exaggeration isn't helpful, so please stop injecting it.
- You'll probably also get blocked if you engage in poll-stacking by programmatically badgering people to change their !votes to reflect your wiki-political priorities. See WP:CANVASS. Asking people to clarify vague statements, in good faith is one thing, but browbeating them to take a stronger position in favor of your views is not permissible.
- Neither of your proposals are viable, nor ethical. I can only assume this was all meant as some kind of Juvenalian satire, in which case you're no Swift. If you're serious, you need to strongly reconsider; if not, you should clarify that you're not actually advocating these combative tactics. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- @Slimvirgin: Of course STYLEVAR's "acceptable" means "acceptable within the context of MOS". Otherwise it would be perfectly "acceptable" to impose hip-hop slang and writing style as our default for articles on hip-hop music and subculture on the basis that that's what's "acceptable" in "reliable sources" about hip-hop, like hip-hop magazines and autobiographies and whatnot. There is no rational interpretation of STYLEVAR, to the extent it's not just ignored, other than that it absolutely cannot be used by specialist interests to force an external style on WP:OWNed articles by them or their wikiproject. This is just basic logic, really. In any system of rules, any provision with regard to what is allowed or not necessarily means with regard to the internals of that rule system, or it simply isn't a rule system at all. E.g. "a license-holder may operate any vehicle permitted by law" means within the same legal system (e.g. Ireland's); it's not a magic loophole to be used to drive a flame-throwing armored tank in Ireland just because some jurisdiction somewhere else, perhaps a small island nation, can be found that doesn't technically have a law against flame-throwing armored tanks in the hands of civilians with basic driver's licenses.
STYLEVAR's editwarred-in "within an article, though not necessarily throughout Misplaced Pages" wording is nonsense; the entire purpose of MOS (and AT policy, closely tied to it) is cross-article consistency, and everyone knows and accepts this and always has since these pages have existed (long before my time and probably before yours); within-article consistency flows from this naturally, and is almost never an actual concern (where it can be, it is covered by separate provisions, e.g. WP:ENGVAR, that actually have real community buy-in). I remember some RFC a while back to fix that wording, but it didn't arrive at a consensus replacement. Time to revisit that, if anyone's actually trying to take that wording at face value, which is logically impossible given what MOS is and does.
And this is emphatically a WP:OWN issue; your "articles they otherwise have no involvement in" phrasing indicates you are seriously failing to reconcile with policy your view of how much authority a wikiproject (or any other topically-focused group of editors) has over other editors on an article the former consider within their scope of editorial interest (hint: it's zero). There is no proprietary interest in articles or topics, much less one that would prevent the application of basic grammar, punctuation and style rules to content generally, just because some of that content happened to be in an article involving a particular topic, like birds. Every time an editor with a beef about MOS couches things in terms of "articles you don't even edit" or "a subject you're not an expert in", they've already conceded the debate by accident, on incontrovertible policy grounds.
We have indeed had RFARB cases about people (usually wikiprojects) getting into protracted fights and editwars over style, naming and related policy/guideline matters. The principal result of this has been an actual change in policy to put a stop to it, namely WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, which makes it crystal clear that wikiprojects or any other insular groups of editors cannot make up their own rules in defiance of site-wide consensus as codified in our policies and guidelines. Disputes like the birds flap (no pun intended) have protracted for as long as they have only because MOS people are much more reluctant to fire up ARBCOM machinations and are more committed to consensus building than is typical of parties in regular content disputes (e.g. the Turks vs. Armenians vs. Kurds vs. Azerbaijanis editwarring behind cases like WP:ARBAA2). MOS is an internal Misplaced Pages governance matter, not a routine editing kerfuffle, and has consequently been treated more patiently, at least from the MOS regulars. But if wikiproject people with axes to grind continue to try to tell MOS and LOCALCONSENSUS policy to go to hell, which is telling the entire WP community generally to go to hell, it will inevitably lead to RFARB cases, and policy already tells us which way those cases will go.
PS: There's also the ARBCOM's warning, arising from individuals engaging in hateful personal attacks in style- and naming-related debates, to not "personalize" MOS/AT disputes with unfounded accusations and assumptions of bad faith, on pain of discretionary sanctions; many complainants against MOS in this and other forums transgress this on a regular basis (cf. attacks like "extreme MOS zealots", etc.) They cannot pretend they're unaware of this rule and its consequences; MOS's talk page has a prominent warning about it at the very top of the page. Far too many threads with a MOS gripe to raise have resorted to these sorts of blanket "MOS editors are scum"-spirited attacks, often in their opening sentences, and while this has been ignored for over a year, it won't be for much longer. The WP:BATTLEGROUND mentality is turning toward a pogrom/cleansing mentality, and this has to stop, like yesterday. As an MOS-active admin (last I looked, anyway) I would have expected you to help rein this in, not encourage more of it with unsupportable vague accusations like MOS just being "a small group of editors who feel it's okay to impose their style preferences". Comments like that would seem to make you WP:INVOLVED in MOS/AT matters (and CONSENSUS and RS matters, etc. directly relating to MOS/AT), because it's evidentiary of a direct assumption of bad faith toward MOS regulars. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- @Slimvirgin: Of course STYLEVAR's "acceptable" means "acceptable within the context of MOS". Otherwise it would be perfectly "acceptable" to impose hip-hop slang and writing style as our default for articles on hip-hop music and subculture on the basis that that's what's "acceptable" in "reliable sources" about hip-hop, like hip-hop magazines and autobiographies and whatnot. There is no rational interpretation of STYLEVAR, to the extent it's not just ignored, other than that it absolutely cannot be used by specialist interests to force an external style on WP:OWNed articles by them or their wikiproject. This is just basic logic, really. In any system of rules, any provision with regard to what is allowed or not necessarily means with regard to the internals of that rule system, or it simply isn't a rule system at all. E.g. "a license-holder may operate any vehicle permitted by law" means within the same legal system (e.g. Ireland's); it's not a magic loophole to be used to drive a flame-throwing armored tank in Ireland just because some jurisdiction somewhere else, perhaps a small island nation, can be found that doesn't technically have a law against flame-throwing armored tanks in the hands of civilians with basic driver's licenses.
... how the views of project members have been dismissed. Volunteers don't ask for much in return, but they're not going to bother if their experience, knowledge, effort and views are not appreciated.
I couldn't agree more. The problem is that although we may gain some minor satisfaction by moaning about it here, it appears that nothing will change. It's a perennial issue with weakly regulated democratic enterprises (study the history of idealistic communes): an aggressive minority drives out the reasonable majority until the project collapses. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:23, 4 July 2014 (UTC)- @Peter coxhead: As I noted in responding in more detail to Tony Wills's many severable issues, this sounds like projection, since "an aggressive minority driv out the reasonable majority" to the point of collapse is precisely how the pro-caps WP:BIRDS camp's refusal to go along with MOS:LIFE looks to everyone but that camp. There's over eight years of constant objection by unconnected editors from all over Misplaced Pages and with all sorts of backgrounds being derided and browbeaten into complying with the off-wiki style demands of a tiny handful of WP:BIRDS editors (no more than maybe a dozen in the faction at any given time), whenever one of "their" articles was being edited, until the situation led to an untenable impasse and a breakdown of relations. (I've documented this in more than enough detail here, and that's without even finishing the analysis of WT:BIRDS's own archives, which are riddled with more proof of this.)
I agree that well-founded organizational life-cycle studies can be brought to bear on WP. I've raised that in a separate thread below. Your aggressive minority in the commune is generally going to the same parties as the "visionary" leaders and early adopters or their immediate prodigies, who necessarily propel an organization in phase one, begin to become insular and disaffected, less visionary and less leaderly, in stage 2 because they don't delegate well or accept systematic change, and ultimately have to either adapt or leave in stage 3, which is where WP is right now. These people are generally not MOS editors (those are a phase 2-3 group, mostly; perhaps PMA was an an exception). There is a high concentration of editors with a "founder", phase-1 approach in the larger, more entrenched wikiprojects, however. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- @Peter coxhead: As I noted in responding in more detail to Tony Wills's many severable issues, this sounds like projection, since "an aggressive minority driv out the reasonable majority" to the point of collapse is precisely how the pro-caps WP:BIRDS camp's refusal to go along with MOS:LIFE looks to everyone but that camp. There's over eight years of constant objection by unconnected editors from all over Misplaced Pages and with all sorts of backgrounds being derided and browbeaten into complying with the off-wiki style demands of a tiny handful of WP:BIRDS editors (no more than maybe a dozen in the faction at any given time), whenever one of "their" articles was being edited, until the situation led to an untenable impasse and a breakdown of relations. (I've documented this in more than enough detail here, and that's without even finishing the analysis of WT:BIRDS's own archives, which are riddled with more proof of this.)
- Based on the results of various RFCs, it looks like the majority is the bunch that prefers that WP adopt uniform style rules, and the various minorities, like the birders, who want to have their own special styling for their own special stuff, are whining about not getting their way. I don't see much impact of any particular style decisions on editor retention, but the bickering about "a small group of editors who feel it's okay to impose their style preferences on articles they otherwise have no involvement in" as SlimVirgin misrepresents the issues, and Tony Wills's claim of "blind imposition", are not helpful. We could do things differently if we had an RFC showing the community consensus is to have each wikiproject make their own style guidelines, but that's not where we are. Dicklyon (talk) 17:20, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
- Conflicts cause stress, frustration, anger and fatigue, and may indeed have impact on editor retention. Most volunteers feel passionate about the parts of the project they work in. But I think it's incorrect and over-simplistic to single out Capitalisation of Bird Names or any other issue. When there are disagreements, tempers in the editing community can and do rapidly spiral out of control. The ethos of any MOS must be to achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the work that it guides, otherwise there is no point – the whole think will disintegrate and become a style anarchy that is in nobody's interest. From observing the above, it seems that some Birds editors are unhappy at not prevailing/triumphing in arguments at the MOS, and have come here to flag this issue as a cause of disharmony.
The problem is more fundamentally about the way we communicate with each other, and finding consensus or groups of editors accepting rules that they may disagree with because of the greater good. Nobody can get it all their own way, but it seems some may have lost sight of this. If we look deeper, we need to see that style is merely form, so we should not let this get in the way of substance. -- Ohc 04:42, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- Conflicts cause stress, frustration, anger and fatigue, and may indeed have impact on editor retention. Most volunteers feel passionate about the parts of the project they work in. But I think it's incorrect and over-simplistic to single out Capitalisation of Bird Names or any other issue. When there are disagreements, tempers in the editing community can and do rapidly spiral out of control. The ethos of any MOS must be to achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the work that it guides, otherwise there is no point – the whole think will disintegrate and become a style anarchy that is in nobody's interest. From observing the above, it seems that some Birds editors are unhappy at not prevailing/triumphing in arguments at the MOS, and have come here to flag this issue as a cause of disharmony.
- Based on the results of various RFCs, it looks like the majority is the bunch that prefers that WP adopt uniform style rules, and the various minorities, like the birders, who want to have their own special styling for their own special stuff, are whining about not getting their way. I don't see much impact of any particular style decisions on editor retention, but the bickering about "a small group of editors who feel it's okay to impose their style preferences on articles they otherwise have no involvement in" as SlimVirgin misrepresents the issues, and Tony Wills's claim of "blind imposition", are not helpful. We could do things differently if we had an RFC showing the community consensus is to have each wikiproject make their own style guidelines, but that's not where we are. Dicklyon (talk) 17:20, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
- Well said. Furthermore, I see no evidence of any kind over the nearly 9 years of this draining dispute that a single editor, on either side or otherwise, has left over this matter, who was not deeply involved in WP:BATTLEGROUNDing their personal viewpoint about it (even if they were also productive content editors), and who did not also give plenty of other reasons for leaving. The tiny number of editors who leave in part over style fights are leaving because they're not WP:WINNING and it frustrates their wiki-political goals. No one is leaving because a style rule at MOS is genuinely making it difficult for them to contribute to the encyclopedia. It is not hard to not editwar over trivial style quirks. It's not hard to use the shift key less. It is not hard to just click the en-dash character in the toolbox below the editing window. We all know that editors are free to ignore MOS rules with impunity, and many of the geeky ones are. No one is going to "hound" you if you don't put an en-dash where there should technically be one, or use American spelling when adding material to a British article, or capitalize a bird name. Others or their bots will just fix it later. (Note that is different from being a disruptive jackass who editwars to stop people from MOS-correcting their additions, or who goes out of their way to introduced such problems for others to fix, just to be WP:POINTy.) Seriously, all of this psychodrama is like grief wandering around looking to drum up a death to attach itself to. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: see User:Chuunen Baka; I see no evidence that he or she was engaged in battlegrounding – their edits were overwhelmingly in article space. You keep going back to the substance of the bird naming debate; it's simply not relevant here. The editor retention issue is how to have these debates and make decisions in a way that alienates as few people as possible, maintaining the maximum of respect on all sides. It's a fact that Chuunen Baka is not alone in feeling bullied. Feelings matter. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:35, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Feelings do matter. MOS regulars, who have feelings too, have quit for essentially the same reason (though often their plight has been worse - tendentious anti-MOS people have periodically enlisted sympathetic admins to harass us off the system with false accusations, topic bans, etc.) Just on the birds matter, lots of editors outside that project who've tried to get them to use normal English on the encyclopedia have felt bullied by the wikiproject's self-described "style warriors" (KvdL came up with that term). If people actually wanted to enforce WP:AE's discretionary sanctions against "personalizing" style/titling debates, at least half a dozen WP:BIRDS people could be blocked right now for vicious personal attacks and continued baseless accusations of bad faith. Everyone regularly at MOS is being quite respectful of these wikiprojects and their participants, and avoiding attacks, bad-faith assumptions, and accusations of disruptive collusion, at least within the last year. But people from quite a number of wikiprojects (some biological, some sports-oriented, etc.) are doing precisely the opposite, and spewing a constant firehose of what can reasonably be described as pure, unadulterated hate. And it's been going on for years, with impunity. No one at MOS wants to use legalistic process like AE, ANI, etc. to forcibly muzzle editors just because they're being disagreeable, while those very same disagreeable editors want to use every means at their disposal, including many that violate policy, to shut up anyone who disagrees with them (see #The MOS Conspiracy theory, below). Maybe Chuunen Baka (who did participate in these debates, just not frequently) has a right to feel put-upon, but so do many other people who since at least 2004 have been challenging that blatantly WP:OWN-violating faction behavior of some participants in that wikiproject (and others; I don't mean to single out the birds project, it's just what we've been talking about).
Chuunen Baka's "I quit" statement is a three-pronged personal attack on all MOS regulars in the same breath (and factually incorrect, to boot – no one involved in the debate was "ignorant" of why the project wanted to capitalize; we simply presented a strong rationale for not doing it here, and sourced the issue more convincingly). Even when it was explained to Baka, on his talk page, why calling all MOS editors "small minded" was a personal attack (which it is - ask any AE admin, and they'll agree that calling 100 fellow editors something insulting is 100 personal attacks at once, not magically zero attacks just because you grouped them into one blanket statement), he refused to accept it and just repeated the attack and added more of them. So, tell me again how he gets to claim aggrievement? A debate didn't go his way, he blew up on people, and he stormed off. Let's revisit this in a month or three and see if Baka's still not editing. I'd bet good money an editor that long-term and consistent will simply take a wikibreak. Some of us do this for a year or longer, usually in response to heated debates and after leaving a departure message very similar to Bakas. BT;DT, and the break can be quite refreshing.
This "MOS is making real content editors leave" claim people keep making is a red herring. Almost all of MOS's frequent contributors are also major content editors, and some of these anti-MOS topical editors spend more time in Wikipedia_talk namespace, where MOS/AT issues mostly get argued, than do the MOS/AT regulars.
- Feelings do matter. MOS regulars, who have feelings too, have quit for essentially the same reason (though often their plight has been worse - tendentious anti-MOS people have periodically enlisted sympathetic admins to harass us off the system with false accusations, topic bans, etc.) Just on the birds matter, lots of editors outside that project who've tried to get them to use normal English on the encyclopedia have felt bullied by the wikiproject's self-described "style warriors" (KvdL came up with that term). If people actually wanted to enforce WP:AE's discretionary sanctions against "personalizing" style/titling debates, at least half a dozen WP:BIRDS people could be blocked right now for vicious personal attacks and continued baseless accusations of bad faith. Everyone regularly at MOS is being quite respectful of these wikiprojects and their participants, and avoiding attacks, bad-faith assumptions, and accusations of disruptive collusion, at least within the last year. But people from quite a number of wikiprojects (some biological, some sports-oriented, etc.) are doing precisely the opposite, and spewing a constant firehose of what can reasonably be described as pure, unadulterated hate. And it's been going on for years, with impunity. No one at MOS wants to use legalistic process like AE, ANI, etc. to forcibly muzzle editors just because they're being disagreeable, while those very same disagreeable editors want to use every means at their disposal, including many that violate policy, to shut up anyone who disagrees with them (see #The MOS Conspiracy theory, below). Maybe Chuunen Baka (who did participate in these debates, just not frequently) has a right to feel put-upon, but so do many other people who since at least 2004 have been challenging that blatantly WP:OWN-violating faction behavior of some participants in that wikiproject (and others; I don't mean to single out the birds project, it's just what we've been talking about).
- @SMcCandlish: see User:Chuunen Baka; I see no evidence that he or she was engaged in battlegrounding – their edits were overwhelmingly in article space. You keep going back to the substance of the bird naming debate; it's simply not relevant here. The editor retention issue is how to have these debates and make decisions in a way that alienates as few people as possible, maintaining the maximum of respect on all sides. It's a fact that Chuunen Baka is not alone in feeling bullied. Feelings matter. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:35, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Well said. Furthermore, I see no evidence of any kind over the nearly 9 years of this draining dispute that a single editor, on either side or otherwise, has left over this matter, who was not deeply involved in WP:BATTLEGROUNDing their personal viewpoint about it (even if they were also productive content editors), and who did not also give plenty of other reasons for leaving. The tiny number of editors who leave in part over style fights are leaving because they're not WP:WINNING and it frustrates their wiki-political goals. No one is leaving because a style rule at MOS is genuinely making it difficult for them to contribute to the encyclopedia. It is not hard to not editwar over trivial style quirks. It's not hard to use the shift key less. It is not hard to just click the en-dash character in the toolbox below the editing window. We all know that editors are free to ignore MOS rules with impunity, and many of the geeky ones are. No one is going to "hound" you if you don't put an en-dash where there should technically be one, or use American spelling when adding material to a British article, or capitalize a bird name. Others or their bots will just fix it later. (Note that is different from being a disruptive jackass who editwars to stop people from MOS-correcting their additions, or who goes out of their way to introduced such problems for others to fix, just to be WP:POINTy.) Seriously, all of this psychodrama is like grief wandering around looking to drum up a death to attach itself to. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
| Let's look at some numbers |
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- So, who wants to call us non-content editors again? Here's the real, kinda embarrassing truth: Those who get into WP:SSF-type naming & style squabbles with MOS/AT people fixate on any "enemy", and especially note his/her presence in style debates, do not regularly encounter that editor elsewhere because everyone's content topics of highest interest differ, and they then forget that to everyone else they themselves look style-obsessed because they keep popping up in style debates pertaining to whatever topic X that their wikiproject focuses on. They're pots calling the kettles black. It's instinctive human nature to attempt to impose patterns on what we observe, even when the patterns are illusory, and especially if we're under any form of stress; we're hardwired to blame, shun and threaten by default. This is exacerbated by our broader but equally in-born territoriality and tribe-formation instincts. These urges must be resisted in a collaborative work environment, and cannot be relied upon in judging others' character and motivations.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the editor retention approach is, as such, but "empathize exclusively and unquestioningly with some wikiproject editors who hate MOS because they lost a style argument, and support them while they demonize MOS editors and call for a mass revert-war" can't be it. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 22:50, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
- So, who wants to call us non-content editors again? Here's the real, kinda embarrassing truth: Those who get into WP:SSF-type naming & style squabbles with MOS/AT people fixate on any "enemy", and especially note his/her presence in style debates, do not regularly encounter that editor elsewhere because everyone's content topics of highest interest differ, and they then forget that to everyone else they themselves look style-obsessed because they keep popping up in style debates pertaining to whatever topic X that their wikiproject focuses on. They're pots calling the kettles black. It's instinctive human nature to attempt to impose patterns on what we observe, even when the patterns are illusory, and especially if we're under any form of stress; we're hardwired to blame, shun and threaten by default. This is exacerbated by our broader but equally in-born territoriality and tribe-formation instincts. These urges must be resisted in a collaborative work environment, and cannot be relied upon in judging others' character and motivations.
The MOS Conspiracy theory
MOS is one of the most watchlisted pages on the entire system, and one of the most-edited policy/guideline pages we have (by far the most, if you count its various subpages). This idea repeated so many times, as an article of sheer faith, that some tiny oligarchy controls WP:MOS (and WP:AT, when style issues arise in article names), is nonsensical on its face. Very active MOS/AT editors like me and Noetica can disappear for a year or longer, with almost no effect, because the community as whole creates and manages it. Because of its importance and high level of scrutiny, it cannot be any other way. If you add something boneheaded to MOS/AT or delete something important, it doesn't take evil bad SMcCandlish to fix it; any number of people will revert or modify it. Only those with the interest and background for it participate in MOS frequently, but this is true of virtually every single page on the system, and in all of these cases including MOS (and WP:BIRDS), who the active people are – the ones at whom detractors want to point "conspiracy!" fingers – changes constantly, with very few long-term regulars after more than a year or two. All of this "MOS is some special cabal, some weird case that must be stopped" hysteria that pops up in style debates is the false pattern recognition that the human mind engages in. When things don't go our way more than once in a row in similar circumstances, we often conveniently look for a hateful collusion instead of going the more laborious but sensible route of checking to see whether our approach and expectations need to be adjusted. I see a lot of that every time this or a similar debate arises. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:45, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
PS: It really is a genuine conspiracy theory; see for example this bon mot from WT:BIRDS: "I think some of the most zealous style-over-substance supporters may well be long-term detractors of Misplaced Pages whose main aim is perhaps to destroy the long-term editor-base."
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 00:11, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Wow. That's staggering. --John (talk) 09:43, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- And it's not just that editor. It's a common sentiment among (and almost exclusively among) editors in wikiprojects that have come up with "their own rules" (against WP:OWN and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS) to ignore something in WP:MOS/WP:AT rather than work to change consensus on what MOS/AT says and abide by what they say, as with all policies and guidelines. They don't even hide it; they'll tell you outright "we know MOS/AT says X, but at WikiProject Y, we came to our own different consensus to do Z instead." I encounter statements like this sometimes several times in the same week (most recently to do with horse breed article names and dog breed article names, both WP:AT/WP:DAB matters, and flag icon usage in association football tables, a MOS:ICONS matter). It's a "consensus is fine to pay lipservice to, but only as long as it produces the results we demand, otherwise raise the drawbridge and bring forth the catapults" approach. See also the recent proposal on this very page to use an anti-MOS tagteam to filibuster all MOS pages with a disruptive revertwarring campaign, and then browbeat all fence-sitters in MOS-related RFCs to !vote their way.
The continual personal attacks labeling MOS regulars "small-minded", "stupid", "bad faith", etc., flow like a river, yet despite clear discretionary sanctions notices about personalizing style debates, no admin ever acts on them even to issue warnings. Only MOS regulars get sanctioned, should they say something incivil or bad-faith-assumptive in exasperation or retaliation. This one-sided, anti-MOS administrative approach caused me to quit WP for a year, two other MOS regulars to quit for extended periods of time, and one of MOS's most productive, expert and even-handed major contributors (also a regular content editor, as I am) to leave WP permanently. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 22:50, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
- And it's not just that editor. It's a common sentiment among (and almost exclusively among) editors in wikiprojects that have come up with "their own rules" (against WP:OWN and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS) to ignore something in WP:MOS/WP:AT rather than work to change consensus on what MOS/AT says and abide by what they say, as with all policies and guidelines. They don't even hide it; they'll tell you outright "we know MOS/AT says X, but at WikiProject Y, we came to our own different consensus to do Z instead." I encounter statements like this sometimes several times in the same week (most recently to do with horse breed article names and dog breed article names, both WP:AT/WP:DAB matters, and flag icon usage in association football tables, a MOS:ICONS matter). It's a "consensus is fine to pay lipservice to, but only as long as it produces the results we demand, otherwise raise the drawbridge and bring forth the catapults" approach. See also the recent proposal on this very page to use an anti-MOS tagteam to filibuster all MOS pages with a disruptive revertwarring campaign, and then browbeat all fence-sitters in MOS-related RFCs to !vote their way.
Technological MOS conflict solutions
I wonder if automation might reduce some of the conflict. In an age of spelling and grammar checking software, is it not possible for the default editing tool to auto-correct to follow MOS in many or most instances? It may (or may not) be a big programming project, but that is no reason not to explore technological aids. If one contributes to almost any publication, one expects that the editors in charge will conform submissions to follow the work's MOS. Better yet, a software solution might even make it possible for readers to set their own MOS preferences for many, perhaps all, instances where there are variations that are widely used (e.g., DD-MM-YYYY vs. MM-DD-YYY) which would allow those with strong views to read Misplaced Pages in their preferred style. I view accurate content as the most pressing concern, but if there are software solutions to lessen conflict in other areas, I think they should be considered. • Astynax 00:18, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- @Astynax: Two different ideas, and both worth looking into. A "MOS checker" built into the editor would be very difficult indeed. On the other hand, I've long proposed using CSS, Javascript and templates to give both editors and readers more choice (e.g. UK vs. US spelling, different punctuation rules, etc.) I think various solutions of that sort are easier to implement. The ideas would definitely complement each other.
It could indeed resolve a lot of "experts vs. ignoramuses" (really "narrow topic experts vs. language/writing experts tired of being called ignorant by the former") style disputes. For, say, capitalization and/or hyphenation of species common names, you could have a template to wrap around a vernacular name like Chinese fire belly newt that allowed the user to render this as "Chinese fire-bellied newt", "Chinese Firebelly Newt", "Chinese Fire-bellied Newt" "Chinese Fire-Bellied Newt", even "Chinese Firebellied Newt", depending on what "standard" their field or simple whim demands, while defaulting to whatever best matches everyday English (the first example). User:Peter coxhead and I were thinking about ways to implement a testbed of this, but it kind of got put on the backburner. Anyway, I wouldn't get too in depth here; this isn't a tech development page or a place for developing MOS improvements. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 04:02, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- People already come by later (sometimes assisted with tools) to update text to conform with the Manual of Style, as has been mentioned above; the problem is some editors do not agree with having the text updated. Regarding trying to apply a given style based on reader preferences: first, this would not affect the vast amount of readers who are not logged in. Second, assuming a wide variety of style options would emerge (every WikiProject might develop its own set of options, for example), it would be difficult to develop a configuration interface that would not quickly become tedious to configure. Third, it would be tricky to deal with style options that mandated conflicting results (one rule might require upper case and another lower case, for example). Fourth, it would pose a significant performance problem, as different versions of the page would have to be generated and cached for each different set of selected style options. Fifth, using wrapper templates would complicate the lives of editors who edit the wikitext directly (in theory, the Visual Editor could be extended to help hide the insertion and editing of the wrapper templates). Without something visible marking up the text in question, the conversion process would be complex, as the code doing the conversion would have to understand the context properly, and so it's highly likely it would get it wrong a significant portion of the time. isaacl (talk) 04:29, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- That's a lot of caveats! 1) Yes, we'd have to have the "official rule" be something useful for our most general-audience readership; this feature would be mainly an editor retention tool, to stop people quitting over style pet peeves. 2), 4) & 6) It's only expected that the most give-me-my-way-or-I-quit editors would bother with this stuff. The complexity of it would probably discourage implementation and encourage collaboration, and it would only be deployed in a handful of die-hard cases like this bird caps business, and even then only until people just got over it and moved on. 3) Conflicting style rules would already be auto-handled by the CSS cascade. If you don't personally like the result you get, just change the load order in your user style page here (or change a true local stylesheet in your browser). 5) Meh; we all already use an enormous number of wrapper templates, so a couple more won't have any notable effect. Anyway, the idea is that this would mostly be a stop-gap, last-resort tool, not something to propagate willy-nilly. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 12:01, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
- It would more likely be implemented with server-side scripting in Lua than CSS, but even so, you're assuming there is a linear order to apply the rules that makes sense, and I'm not sure that is the case. Personally (without checking), I don't encounter that many wrapper templates when writing article prose. Nonetheless, there are many words and entire phrases that would have to be wrapped to deal with language variants, punctuation (for example, all quotations with trailing punctuation could become candidates for wrapping), dates, and so forth. Regarding the performance and caching issues, once a wrapper is introduced, it has to be processed for everybody. I don't think this approach would be very cost-effective as a stop-gap tool; it would impose a great deal of overhead for the benefit of what you are postulating to be a small few, and yet still not work very well for that group of persons. isaacl (talk) 15:29, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
- That's a lot of caveats! 1) Yes, we'd have to have the "official rule" be something useful for our most general-audience readership; this feature would be mainly an editor retention tool, to stop people quitting over style pet peeves. 2), 4) & 6) It's only expected that the most give-me-my-way-or-I-quit editors would bother with this stuff. The complexity of it would probably discourage implementation and encourage collaboration, and it would only be deployed in a handful of die-hard cases like this bird caps business, and even then only until people just got over it and moved on. 3) Conflicting style rules would already be auto-handled by the CSS cascade. If you don't personally like the result you get, just change the load order in your user style page here (or change a true local stylesheet in your browser). 5) Meh; we all already use an enormous number of wrapper templates, so a couple more won't have any notable effect. Anyway, the idea is that this would mostly be a stop-gap, last-resort tool, not something to propagate willy-nilly. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 12:01, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
Editor retention is a factor of organizational life cycle, and wikiprojects aren't helping
This draft really needs to be somewhere else, then you can point to it here and we can chat about it, but all these drafts are drowning out regular business here. See how ϢereSpielChequers did it above? Like that. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 23:20, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
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We know from the study of organizational life cycles that participants in an organization have to adapt to its changing needs and crises in different stages of its development, or they must be replaced. When they will not adapt, they become hindrances to progress, unhappy and disaffected, and sometimes even witting or subconscious saboteurs of necessary changes. In the standardized organization life cycle model, Misplaced Pages successfully (for almost a decade now) left the entrepreneurial or birth stage (which is dependent on visionary leadership and experimentation) and fully developed its growth (collectivity) stage (dependent on delegation and the marshaling of resources). It is only now transitioning (starting about 2 years ago, I'd say, overall, though different parts of the system are aging at different rates) into the third stage, maturity (formalization), characterized by systematizing and codifying how things are done so they're done efficiently, predictably and accountably. The "crisis" point of this state is eventual bureaucracy and red-tape, which we're already seeing the beginnings of in ARBCOM, too many noticeboards with different rules, etc. The decay shift from useful structure to clumsy process as bureaucracy increases is a gradual and slow one, that can be mitigated by conscious efforts at red-tape reduction. To address the above MOS-related squabbling: Some have expressed a belief that MOS is a symptom of this problem. But MOS has not actually changed or grown all that much in several years, since deep in the second phase. It's mostly just massaged details, and even gotten rid of cumbersome rules like date linking. It is almost entirely people from, or with the approach of, "maverick" stage-one participants who feel this way about the whole project (and yet act themselves within their more rapidly-evolving and -declining wikiprojects as the same sorts of bureaucrats of a stage-three organization they're critical of on the larger org scale). The fact is that the overwhelming majority of editors on WP have no issues with MOS and just use it as intended. An increasing number of "fight to the death" camps are popping up over MOS issues because and only because MOS is codifying system-wide rules and actually implementing them, and some wikiprojects going all the way back to stage 1 have conflicting preferences. They did not participate enough or at all in the stage 2 processes that led to the stage 3 rules, despite those processes being wide open. They just declare themselves immune to them and ignored them until too late. It's unfortunate, but so it goes. It will really probably be several more years before WP hits the stage three crisis point and organizationally enters the decline and "elaboration" (or "navel-contemplation and busy-work" as I call it) stage, after which it will undergo a new stage 1 renewal, or if worse came to worst, die. We're really not much past the beginning of stage three. Any regularization across the whole project, of any kind, looks like "too many rules" and "too much bureaucracy" to anyone with a stage-1 approach, since they were already being alienated and started bunkering themselves in stage 2. And, in any organization, many of them will in fact leave rather than adapt. I'm old and experienced enough to know what this looks like in the real world, in both commercial and non-profit organizations. There's lots of hair-pulling, but in the end, it's best for everyone involved and certainly for the organization's health. Some who leave even come back later in totally different roles. Note, by the way, that our stats do not support the oft-repeated but false idea of a huge decrease in editing. What we see instead is precisely what we should expect for this phase: Gung-ho early adopters and people trying it out while the idea was new have receded, and we have pared down to a long-term, stable (though, yes, slightly declining, probably due to the economy wearing on people's free, volunteer time), plateau-shaped editorial pool, largely renewing itself as old hands and curious dilettantes "retire": File:Active editors on English Misplaced Pages over time.png. These non-adapting, lingering stage-1 participants are generally not people deeply involved in developing WP policy today, especially not the WP:Manual of Style, WP:Article titles, WP:Identifying reliable sources, and WP:Notability (other than jealously-guarded topic-specific subpages thereof) – i.e., the policies and guidelines that actually most determine what shape our content takes. While some stage-1 hold outs are long-term admins whose approach has failed to adapt to changing community norms, as well as frequent participants in more "destructive" processes like the XfDs, more often they're "sovereign city-state"-mentality "leaders" of topical wikiprojects who foment organized discord against any regularizing process that evolves when it does something they're not used to or in favor of. Their frequent indignant outbursts along the lines of "these articles have always done it this way", "this wikiproject came to its own consensus to do it differently", and "you outsiders have no business telling us how to write our articles", is clear evidence of this, as is their dogged adherence to some "vision" of how "their" project should do things, arrived at several years ago, when the rest of the encyclopedia isn't with them on that any longer or never was. It's happening constantly with regard to MOS, WP:AT, WP:N and its sub-guidelines, WP:RS and what qualifies, WP:CONSENSUS and how it applies, you name it – these disputes are everywhere, and almost invariably coming from some entrenched topical wikiproject with self-appointed "leadership" claiming to speak for all participants, and pretending that WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and WP:OWN policies don't exist. (NB: I say this as the founder of more than one wikiproject, and one who arguably was an over-controller of this sort, several years ago. I adapted, but former regulars at, say, WP:CFD and WP:SFD will remember what a pain I was with regard to WP:WikiProject Cue sports back in the day.) I've said it before and will say it again that we need to rethink the entire wikiproject system, which acts far too much like departments or regiments or counties to be useful any longer. We badly need to get away from anything so skeumorphically territorial as "projects". They're increasingly turning into hotbeds of disruption that pursue their own independent agendas above those of the encyclopedia. The real concern for Misplaced Pages is not stopping these people from leaving, it's attracting replacements who have outlooks and expectations more compatible with a long-term strategy and process for building (and administering) the encyclopedia than with an anarchic free-for-all like there used to be in the 2000s. To use a geographical metaphor, Misplaced Pages today is more like a unified, modern Italy, instead of the independent medieval city-states some of our older and larger wikiprojects (and other fiefdoms) try to still act like. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 21:51, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
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Why should I contribute here and be a part of this community ?
I asked this question on my talk page a week ago, and haven't received any answer or response. I just want to ask everyone that why should I or anyone else edit/contribute here and be a part of this community ? Editing the encyclopedia by creating and improving articles and doing other maintenance/cleanup work is a good thing, but the negative atmosphere, fighting, insulting, grudges, hostility, ranting, abuse and many other things like that happen here frequently which demoralizes and eventually drives away the good faith editors. Why does this happen and why can't we all do something about it ? More importantly, in this type of scenario do you think I or anyone else can contribute here without being affected by it in any way ? When I joined Misplaced Pages, I did so with high hopes of improving it in any way I possibly could and be happy and proud about it. Over the past three years since I've been a member here, I've seen many editors and administrators leave Misplaced Pages of which many of them never came back. Therefore I want to ask everyone, why should I continue to edit/contribute here and be a part of this project and community ? What makes you happy while editing and being here ? Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions on this matter, and also if you could share any type of experiences you may have had since you've been editing here. Thank you. TheGeneralUser (talk) 11:38, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
- For me, the name of the game is content. When other areas of the encyclopedia baffle me or anger me, I just find a sucky article, and spend an hour or two making it less sucky. Then I remember why I joined – to improve the world's most-visited encyclopedia, specifically its coverage of topics that interest me. Sure I am an admin, and participate in some maintenance areas, but I predominantly do that to "chip in"/"do my fair share" so others can work on content too. To reiterate, I edit so I can write/expand/improve articles; everything else is secondary. Go Phightins! 12:14, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
- I was an admin primarily to work on project banners, which at the time only admins could do. As a kid some years ago I grew up in a smallish city in the US plains whose libraries and access to information wasn't impressive - I honestly knew there were more things I was potentially interested in I couldn't know anything about because of lack of accessible information than those I could know about. And I also know that today there are several countries where the libraries I had access to would be objects of envy. I also once in a while catch some news from the national services of developing countries and have been surprised how much of the background info they have mirrors our own or is even directly cited to us. It actually scares me a bt that in some significantly large areas of the world we may be one of the few good sources they can access, but that is a motivation to me to help try to improve the information that they do have access to. John Carter (talk) 19:41, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
- For me, it is about content, free to the world. I know I'm not the greatest content creator, so I do what I can, and then found a calling so to speak, by trying to help those that do create great content. An advocate at times. Kind of the reason I started WER, why I patrol the worst areas for abuse at Misplaced Pages, and try to find solutions to blocking people when I can. Frankly, some days and even weeks, I don't feel like I'm making a difference. Some days make up for that. WER wasn't so I could share my wisdom on keeping editors, I don't have any. It was to share my struggle. I've taken a two year break myself, just edited as an IP but rarely then. Earlier this year I took a long break and wondered if I needed to come back, but in the end I did. So I ask these questions regularly of myself TheGeneralUser. Very, very seldom do I ask them or indicate my frustration publicly because I think it would be detrimental to the things I'm trying to accomplish and perhaps it might negatively affect others. Sometimes, I just need to change what I'm doing and unwatch all the boards and work on something else. So why do I come back? At least 51% of the time, I feel I cause more good than the bad that is done to me. I know it isn't much consolation, but you aren't alone in asking. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 21:00, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
- For me, it is about making Misplaced Pages more effective as an encyclopedia, helping fix any problems (if I'm able) and, if possible, helping Misplaced Pages adopt more multimedia. Misplaced Pages has many problems, from lack of multimedia, to unstable funding, to loss of editors/contributors over time, and many more. You and your colleagues know the problems better than I do, I am merely an inexperienced newcomer. Eager to help improve Misplaced Pages, but unsure of how to achieve this.
- Misplaced Pages is the world's virtual portal into useful encyclopedic knowledge. It is a primarily text-based encyclopedia that has become increasingly out-of-date as multimedia technology has progressed around it. Whether or not Misplaced Pages wants to facilitate the adoption of multimedia will be decided by consensus, but I for one think adopting multimedia is extremely important to ensure Misplaced Pages's long term survival. Unfortunately, I just finished a three-day camping trip with a close personal friend who co-runs the largest multimedia generation organization in Oregon (focused on making multimedia for non-profits), and he flat out informed me there was nothing he could do for Misplaced Pages unless they adopted an additional "educational-use only" optional license for multimedia that allowed him and his colleagues to make multimedia under "educational-use only"/"fair use" copyright law. The liability for him and for the Wikimedia Foundation would be too great to make educational videos, or indeed any multimedia, under Misplaced Pages's current "commercial use" license. He really wanted to help, but his hands were tried until this new "multimedia license" was agreed to. I strongly suspect there are many other multimedia creators who feel the same way. I don't know if we as a community could even change this policy even if we wanted to, as copyright policy is set by the WMF and permitting commercial use of Misplaced Pages's multimedia, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, is very important to them. I don't yet know the deeper reasons behind the WMF's position, or what else I am missing from this picture, that will require more analysis and thought, but I understand the initial appeal of keeping content "as free from restrictions as possible" and understand why that was proposed, adopted and defended to this day. However, as an empiricist, it seems to be my unfortunate position to have to point out that, based on the results to date, this goal has largely backfired from a multimedia perspective and has resulted in such a restrictive copyright policy at Misplaced Pages that multimedia generation, such as educational videos, are almost impossible to make. The most effective audiovisual learning tools available to us can't be created on our most popular encyclopedia. This is a big problem and is only going to get worse over time as the multimedia generation technologies gets even easier to use. There are multiple commercial and non-commercial entities that would love to replace Misplaced Pages as the world's number 1 encyclopedia, and our lack of multimedia puts us at significant long term risk. But we shouldn't be facilitating the adoption of multimedia because we're scared, we should be doing it because it is the right thing to do. We all know that, and indeed when I look back at the comments, suggestions and advice I've received to date (sorry for the ones I have not replied to yet), the overwhelming consensus is that Misplaced Pages probably should have more multimedia on it.
- I obviously need to do a lot more background research before formally suggesting any Wiki-project on the subject, but my current extremely simple preliminary position is that Misplaced Pages is a non-profit Wiki-based encyclopedia, and should, in an ideal world, strive to be the best encyclopedia it can be. According to our beloved Misplaced Pages, the word "encyclopedia" comes from the Greek "enkyklios paideia", meaning "general education". Together, the phrase literally translates as "complete instruction" or "complete knowledge". According to the 18th century French Philosopher Diderot "the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come." I share this dream of what an encyclopedia should be, and I propose that restricting the most effective methods of transmitting information, namely the incorporation of multimedia, is not in any encyclopedia's best interests.
- I believe in the Misplaced Pages dream and want to do my part, however small, to help. Best, Jim Jim-Siduri (talk) 20:43, 16 July 2014 (UTC)
- When I edit Misplaced Pages I feel that I am contributing to something worthwhile, while at the same time improving my general knowledge of the world through the articles that I edit. The mixture of personalities and the diverse points of view among the editors can be disconcerting at times, but it can also be challenging. In my real life I am used to either being in control of my projects or working with small groups of people who share my interests and attitudes. I've never participated in social media because so much of it is trivial and shallow, but Misplaced Pages discussions are focused and goal-oriented (well, mostly). Each editor can find a spot in the community where his or her skills are useful. Passionate and strongly opinionated editors inevitably get involved in more of the drama than more laid-back people just by the controversy level of the articles they choose to edit. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:12, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- For me, its the people that edit and work here, the reality behind the aliases. Its the wonderful capacity for users to communicate, eloquently or poorly, with facts or with fancy. Does the negativity draw me? Only in the personal hope that I can be an assistant for resolution of conflict. Does the drama draw me? Not any more. I started editing in 2008 on the Sarah Palin article when she was first announced. I came to Misplaced Pages to find out who she was and I've never left. The arguing and the bickering and the cajoling was constant. With the daily-changing campaign in full swing, every day brought a new factor to consider, a new argument to win. Of course, it was inevitable to gravitate toward like-minded editors and gain a respect for their minds and their hearts. I still hold many of those editors as wiki-friends. I see Misplaced Pages as a community with characters as diverse as can be imagined. This is my Facebook. This is my Twitter. I come here just about every day. ```Buster Seven Talk 06:03, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- I edited WP for years without getting involved in the back-room stuff or even knowing about it until I was extremely badly treated by an admin (now thankfully desysoped).
- There are over 4 million articles on en.Wki and when you are a user creating or editing uncontroversial content you are hardly likely to get involved in drama or even know what goes on behind the scenes among those who have chosen to be maintenance workers and/or admins. In those cases, we get involved in contentios issues, it's not pleasant work, it's a choice we make, and someone has to do it, but I believe it to generally affect only a small part of the work on building this huge encyclopedia. Those like me and Anne Delong and Dennis Brown, for example, and the volunteers at OTRS, who often find themselves in the thick of things may think otherwise, but I'm sure it's only a impression we get from having to deal with ugly customers and nasty issues - but I guess we obtain some satisfaction in resolving them competently and fairly.
- Understandably, and inevitably, bonds do get created, so although WP is absolutely not a social media, there is some comfort in working as a team, just as there is in any other workplace or collaborative activity. Anyone who has been to a meet-up or a Wikimania will know what I mean. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:15, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- I once offered advice to a scientist who expressed frustration with how difficult it was to adapt to Misplaced Pages's procedures. I pointed out that if he helped build an article here, that work would be near the top of any Google search and would be maintained by others and likely to last indefinitely. By contrast, if he were to publish a page on a personal website, very few people would see it, and the page would probably disappear within a decade. Johnuniq (talk) 11:00, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- Well life is short and it's important to do things that make you happy, and if editing the Misplaced Pages isn't one of them then for your own sake you might want to do something else. I dunno about "negative atmosphere, fighting, insulting, grudges, hostility, ranting, abuse and many other things like that". I guess you do see that some (just as you do everywhere else in the human world), but it's also possible to avoid it a lot I guess. I mean if you strictly work on articles, especially on non-controversial subjects, you don't get into a lot of fights. Also having a relaxed and patient attitude about that stuff is helpful.
- While it's reasonable to hold that there's a larger and noble purpose here, there's also something to be said for not taking this too seriously. The Misplaced Pages is useful and fulfills its original stated purpose of "making the internet not suck" in that it makes it easier for people to look stuff up. If the Misplaced Pages didn't exist people'd just use Google, but it would take longer. And people are grateful for that, and if you talk to people outside Misplaced Pages you'll see that they find it useful and are glad of it. It's not really changing people's lives or the larger culture much, though.
- So relax. I look at a lot of what I do as being instead of doing Sudoko or crossword puzzles or whatever, except that it's more satisfying in that I'm making stuff that's useful to someone, plus there's a modicum of interpersonal interaction which is, taken overall, pleasant. It's pleasant for me anyway because I try to be nice, take a relaxed attitude, and recognize that the other fellow is often right and even if not it probably doesn't matter that much. (I often enough don't succeed in this, granted, and like any person I can get grumpy). But if things here were stressing me out to the point that it wasn't fun overall I'd leave and I really can't counsel anyone in that position to stay. Why? Herostratus (talk) 12:19, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- A couple of editors above say "stay away from controversial subjects and you won't get into fights" and while that may be generally true, it doesn't always work, you can find yourself in the middle of a very bitter, prolonged, hate-filled feud over whether an article should be titled Persian cat or Persian (cat), the article on Don Carlos should have an infobox or not, or whether "Spanish-American War" should have a dash or a hyphen. WP is now the resource people turn to for information more than any other, that carries a big responsibility, for instance I happened to notice that the article on a fairly obscure opera,Handel's "Orlando" was getting over a thousand page views a month all of a sudden and the article was little more than a stub, pretty useless really, whatever those people were hoping to find it is unlikely it was there so I have been working at improving it.Smeat75 (talk) 14:01, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- But the point is, how about just walking away? It doesn't matter if Spanish-American war has a dash or hyphen. It really doesn't! It's an interesting question and sometimes it's fun to delve into that and look at best practices elsewhere and have friendly if heated arguments about that if you're enjoying it. Otherwise, relax, go do something else! The world will survive, and there's plenty of other tasks here to suit all kinds of temperaments.
- Patience, too. Cultivate it! We're here for the long term. Here's an example of both virtues (relaxing, and being patient) in a microcosm, since only two editors were involved: Talk:Norman O. Brown#So what was he?. Note where I left it: ("Tell you what. I think you're wrong, but I don't really feel up to going to the next level on this. You obviously feel strongly about this and who knows, maybe you're right. So let's let it go for now."). It's not that important to the point of getting upset about! Besides which, and here's where patience comes in, I came back 18 months later and the other editor was gone, so I changed it to what I wanted anyway. (This doesn't prove that the other editor wasn't right of course.)
- It's not a panacea (there are plenty of things that are important to argue about, and sometimes you can't help getting caught up in contention) and I'm not holding myself up as a paragon (I do get involved in stuff and cranky about it way too much), I'm just saying these're goals to strive for for a happier Wikiexperience: 1) relax, and 2) be patient. Herostratus (talk) 18:50, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- The number one reason I edit Misplaced Pages is the discovery, the learning and the better understanding I get from the research on the content...and that is the second reason. Content creation, article creation etc. I like the ability we have to creat completely new articles and am pleasantly surprised to find new subjects that have no article, which gives us/me room to add it.--Mark Miller (talk) 22:46, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I contribute here because I read a lot out of innate curiosity, & find that I end up with a chunk of knowledge that I need to do something with. What better use for it than to add it to Misplaced Pages? And I've found that as long as I keep focused on that aspect of Misplaced Pages, I'm untroubled by what assholes do here, no matter who they are.
As for conflict, Misplaced Pages shares with other Internet websites an overlooked feature: one must go to a given page or follow a link to it, to find out what goes on there. Let me explain with a pair of examples. If two people are having the Flame War to End All Flamewars at a specific URL, one can visit any other URL without ever knowing about it, or needing to know about it. On the other hand, if someone is doing wonderful things at a given URL, unless goes there & shares knowledge of that URL no one will know about it. Working on articles no one ever visits -- which are probably 90% of Misplaced Pages's articles -- gets awfully lonely sometimes. -- llywrch (talk) 16:23, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
- Why do I contribute? Currently I primarily write about chemistry, especially the elements: and that has been my primary focus on WP since about 2011. So there's that added bonus that my work will get seen by a lot of students, especially for important articles like alkali metal. And lots of students often go to WP for research. So if I can give them a good, solid article, that's great and it not only makes WP better, it also makes me feel happy. I don't really feel this so much for less important topics, like individual Mozart works (I've written quite a bit on those as well), complicated geometric shapes, etc. And also because I know quite a bit about this area and so feel that I ought to use that knowledge to help build this encyclopaedia. Quite a lot of my knowledge on very rare elements like the transactinides comes from reading articles, both on- and off-line – by putting the info on WP, I've saved future researchers time in searching, because they then have access to an outline and a list of sources. Double sharp (talk) 21:03, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
Recruiting and retaining women-- WikiProject:Women's Corner
Disclaimer - I'm male.
Would women be more likely to stick around if there were a well-publicized "Women's Corner" of some kind? Women only post, anyone can read. Purview is whatever they want to talk about. In my idea, the Women's Corner would have no authority to make binding declarations on anything other than their own opinions. But they could critique, opine, recommend, scold, whatever, and without male editors getting in the way of their talking to each other. As result, more women might stick around. If this already exists, then is it being adequately advertised? I've been around 3.5 years and have never run across it.
Thoughts - especially from women editors?
NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 17:16, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Hi NewsAndEventsGuy. There was something on Meta a couple of years ago, the WikiWomen's Collaborative. The idea was engage with each other via a Facebook page, blog, wikiwomen's bootcamps etc.. But it's basically defunct. This would be an impossible project to "enforce" (so to speak) on Misplaced Pages itself. With anonymous editing, there's nothing to stop anyone from claiming to be a woman. But even if it were possible, and speaking as a woman, I wouldn't touch something like that with a 10-foot pole. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 17:43, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- There are some wikiprojects about women, listed at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject women (which is a DAB right now). Perhaps that page may be turned into a general parent wikiproject for all things related to women? A Portal:Women may be a good idea as well. Or perhaps not. Something that would help a bit more would be if the general forums of wikipedia (Village Pumps, noticeboards, talk pages, nomination pages, etc) were user-friendly to both men and women. I suspect that most women would not be interested in joining wikipedia only to edit or talk about the articles of "girly" topics (or to stay confined at a special "girly" area of wikipedia). Instead, I think they will want to take part on the general interest articles, those who talk about things that have weight for all people of either gender (politics, economy, history, science, arts, religion, etc.); and for that we should see that those talk venues do not become too "manly". Still, most things associated with manly talk are not allowed by our civility rules anyway. Cambalachero (talk) 18:17, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Just to be clear, my original idea was making no assumptions about what women at such a venue would want to talk about. Maybe they want to critique the writing at the top article in my main subject area Global warming. Great! If they want to do that, women to women, I'd really be keen to know if they generate observations that would not come up at the article talk thread, just because they were talking women to women. Or they decide to talk about civility issues, and whether AGF is working well, or how XYZ could be improved, or whether ANI is women friendly? The very notion of girly talk vs manly talk is sorta repugnant, sorry, and not what this idea is about. Unless, of course, that's what interested women want it to be about. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 18:51, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- There are some wikiprojects about women, listed at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject women (which is a DAB right now). Perhaps that page may be turned into a general parent wikiproject for all things related to women? A Portal:Women may be a good idea as well. Or perhaps not. Something that would help a bit more would be if the general forums of wikipedia (Village Pumps, noticeboards, talk pages, nomination pages, etc) were user-friendly to both men and women. I suspect that most women would not be interested in joining wikipedia only to edit or talk about the articles of "girly" topics (or to stay confined at a special "girly" area of wikipedia). Instead, I think they will want to take part on the general interest articles, those who talk about things that have weight for all people of either gender (politics, economy, history, science, arts, religion, etc.); and for that we should see that those talk venues do not become too "manly". Still, most things associated with manly talk are not allowed by our civility rules anyway. Cambalachero (talk) 18:17, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I don't think ANI is PEOPLE friendly, let alone friendly or hostile to a specific gender. I would, however, be concerned about the creation of any sort of "xyz group only" area. That, to me, seems discriminatory and rather against the open aims of the project as a whole. Intothatdarkness 19:06, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Agreed. As a male who knows a few females, most if not all the ones I know would consider such a group to be well-intended segregation, but still segregation and perhaps a step to further segregation, maybe less well-intentioned. They would tend to revile it and avoid it. John Carter (talk) 19:24, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- WikiChicks? The back pages of Misplaced Pages sometimes resembles a bunch of old men sitting in the underwear, scratching, farting and hitting each other with rocks and stick, but we are blessed with some strong and capable women at Misplaced Pages. Like John, I think that many may find the idea segregationist, which is why they haven't. Personally, I think many of Misplaced Pages's problems would be solved if half the editors were women instead of 10% or less. Hope I don't sound old fashioned or sexist, but the mere presence of women has a civilizing effect upon most men. I'm a fan of chivalry, not because I think women are weak, but because I understand they really ARE the stronger sex. I will always open a door for a woman out of sheer respect and awe, not from being condescending. We certainly need more women at Misplaced Pages, and if they want a Wikiproject, they are more than capable of starting one. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 19:50, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Agreed. As a male who knows a few females, most if not all the ones I know would consider such a group to be well-intended segregation, but still segregation and perhaps a step to further segregation, maybe less well-intentioned. They would tend to revile it and avoid it. John Carter (talk) 19:24, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I don't think ANI is PEOPLE friendly, let alone friendly or hostile to a specific gender. I would, however, be concerned about the creation of any sort of "xyz group only" area. That, to me, seems discriminatory and rather against the open aims of the project as a whole. Intothatdarkness 19:06, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Out of sheer respect and awe and FEAR, little Dennis, admit it! bishzilla FART!! 21:17, 25 July 2014 (UTC).
- Ok, maybe a little. I've seen birth, we men could not do it, we aren't tough enough. We are bigger and stronger on average, but in no way tougher. And the two gents below me need to be nicer to each other. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 21:41, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- You know...I always thought that myself...until my sister told me the Gout was more painful than child birth.--Mark Miller (talk) 21:49, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I know I certainly am in fear of another, um, explosion like that last one. John Carter (talk) 22:12, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I'm almost afraid to ask what the last explosion was.--Mark Miller (talk) 22:41, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Explosion take place in Bishzilla's special sig above, modded for this occasion only. Note incidentally, all genders welcome in Victorian Poets' Corner in Bishzilla's pocket! bishzilla ROARR!! 23:44, 25 July 2014 (UTC).
- I'm almost afraid to ask what the last explosion was.--Mark Miller (talk) 22:41, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I know I certainly am in fear of another, um, explosion like that last one. John Carter (talk) 22:12, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- You know...I always thought that myself...until my sister told me the Gout was more painful than child birth.--Mark Miller (talk) 21:49, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Ok, maybe a little. I've seen birth, we men could not do it, we aren't tough enough. We are bigger and stronger on average, but in no way tougher. And the two gents below me need to be nicer to each other. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 21:41, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Out of sheer respect and awe and FEAR, little Dennis, admit it! bishzilla FART!! 21:17, 25 July 2014 (UTC).
- It would be segregationist in my opinion. There is no place on Misplaced Pages for any specific gender only posting. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and is not a social networking site. The above seems very much geared to that. Also, I can't help but wonder why the OP had to drop a link about global warming, a topic they seem to have been mentioning in a number of places. I can't help but see this as possible spamming and cross posting.--Mark Miller (talk) 19:57, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- How ironic to be accused of dastardly deeds at the editor retention board. And we wonder why retention is a problem! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:38, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Sure...dastardly...whatever. That isn't an accusation. It is a legitimate concern. Especially after my comment here to go to my talk page and accuse me of stalking you to this talk page. Pretty odd since it was you that brought up editor retention on the village pump where I said it was a important to me and then you show up the next day to post this and the minute I criticize the proposal you attack me on my talk page, accuse me of stalking and harassment and threaten me with AN. Dude...go for it.--Mark Miller (talk) 21:33, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- I'm not into attacks on the OP directly, for what it's worth. And having worked in a number of female-majority or female only environments I can say women are at least as capable of Dennis' scratching and farting behavior (if not worse) as men. We are all people at the end of the day, and no gender has a monopoly on either caring behavior or bad behavior. Social stereotypes do more to develop that than anything else. Intothatdarkness 21:01, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Sure...dastardly...whatever. That isn't an accusation. It is a legitimate concern. Especially after my comment here to go to my talk page and accuse me of stalking you to this talk page. Pretty odd since it was you that brought up editor retention on the village pump where I said it was a important to me and then you show up the next day to post this and the minute I criticize the proposal you attack me on my talk page, accuse me of stalking and harassment and threaten me with AN. Dude...go for it.--Mark Miller (talk) 21:33, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- How ironic to be accused of dastardly deeds at the editor retention board. And we wonder why retention is a problem! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 20:38, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- My personal opinion is that I have no interest in participating in a discussion where only women can take part. I can't think of a single topic in which I have any interest where men's input would not be welcome, and I hope the same is true in the other direction. I am a human being first. Yes, there need to be discussion areas for topics which are about issues which affect women more than men (and the other way around), and about dealing with the editor gender gap, but why should only women have opinions and ideas about this? If these subjects don't become of interest to the general community, they will go nowhere. Also, I expect every talk page on Misplaced Pages to be civil enough for me to participate without cringing, not because I am a woman - plenty of men object to boorish behaviour. Even if the discussion area was created and some cutesy "girly" topics were found, there is an assumption that all men are "tough guys" and would have no interest in these topics. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:21, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- What problem is this proposal intended to solve? I've always been extremely dubious about the accuracy of the headline claim that only 13% of editors are female, as I'd say that about 50% of the editors I come across and work with, perhaps even more, are female. And none of them seem to be even remotely interested in girly topics unless you classify coal mining, medieval history or folklore as girly. Can you even begin to imagine the outcry there would quite rightly be if someone suggested a male-only corner? I have no stats to back this up, but I'd be prepared to bet that whatever gender imbalance there is would be easily addressed by requiring all editors to be adults. In other words the real demographic imbalance isn't gender. Eric Corbett 23:30, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- Not all of us are as sexy as you, Eric Corbett. Now that I think of it, I can say that over 13% of the people I work with are women. Maybe not half, but still a lot more than 1 in 8. On a different note, I added a couple photos on my user page, you might like them. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 00:01, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- But it gets worse, just listen to this:
"Ought Misplaced Pages to endorse an affirmative action program adapted to incentives for showing preference to edits originating from women editors".
So any edits I might make are to be considered of lesser value than any edits made by a female? Eric Corbett 00:03, 26 July 2014 (UTC)- That is insulting to women, I would think. That their edits are so poor, we have to give them "extra credit" when considering them. Wow. There is plenty of individual sexists (and racists of every flavor), but this flat out sounds like they thinking women can't compete on a level playing field. Just....wow. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 00:10, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- A final comment on "girly topics". I'm the fourth-highest contributor by number of edits to an article on one of the Disney Princesses, Ariel (The Little Mermaid). Does that make me an honorary female? Eric Corbett 00:17, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- OK Eric...as a gay man, I formally advocate for you to be an honorary "Female". Women may now add their opinion. ;-)--Mark Miller (talk) 00:21, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- A final comment on "girly topics". I'm the fourth-highest contributor by number of edits to an article on one of the Disney Princesses, Ariel (The Little Mermaid). Does that make me an honorary female? Eric Corbett 00:17, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- That is insulting to women, I would think. That their edits are so poor, we have to give them "extra credit" when considering them. Wow. There is plenty of individual sexists (and racists of every flavor), but this flat out sounds like they thinking women can't compete on a level playing field. Just....wow. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 00:10, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- But it gets worse, just listen to this:
- Not all of us are as sexy as you, Eric Corbett. Now that I think of it, I can say that over 13% of the people I work with are women. Maybe not half, but still a lot more than 1 in 8. On a different note, I added a couple photos on my user page, you might like them. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 00:01, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
My proposal would be that only female editors work on Category:Footballers' wives and girlfriends. Johnuniq (talk) 02:57, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
OP here
(A) It's hilarious that only two of the gender-identifiable eds (by statement or name) are female.
(B) The real question is what do women who are former editors think? After all, women who have self-selected to stay in are not really the target demographic of this idea.
NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 03:40, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
- This kind of proposal came up a few years ago and there were various objections which I don't remember off hand, but the WP:Teahouse came out of it. I think every corner should be a women's corner, with the other women's wikprojects supporting them in the different ways that they need it. The Gender_gap_task_force which is slowly coming together is working on some forms of editor recruitment/support/retention and the projects and resources listed there (and at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject women) also have different kinds of aid and assistance. Expanding those up with new members and activity is probably a better idea. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 21:27, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks for constructive remarks; I wonder if readers are familiar with research on Muted group theory, though my university grapevine says that article needs someone who knows the subject to update it. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:37, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
- You might also be interested in this discussion from some time ago: Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Editor Retention/current discussions/gendergap. Perhaps it can be kick started back up.--Mark Miller (talk) 21:43, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks. I wasn't aware of it. For now will put it down as a resource on the main page. Unfortunately, we're having to put time into dealing with disruption of the task force on the talk page, leading members to quit or stay quiet. So focusing on what we want to do and who we want to connect with is quite difficult. Have note into the larger Countering Systemic Bias taskforce which hopefully will help out. Sigh... Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 23:31, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
- You might also be interested in this discussion from some time ago: Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Editor Retention/current discussions/gendergap. Perhaps it can be kick started back up.--Mark Miller (talk) 21:43, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks for constructive remarks; I wonder if readers are familiar with research on Muted group theory, though my university grapevine says that article needs someone who knows the subject to update it. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:37, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
Request for Assistance
Hi. I wasn't aware that this project existed until a few days ago, but have been working on my own to encourage disheartened editors. I'm particularly interested in helping new-ish editors who are having some trouble adjusting to the Wiki way of doing things, and spend part of my time talking them through their difficulties. Generally I aim to play "good cop" where some other editor with "bite-y" tendencies has played "bad cop".
I've recently been working with a young (I suspect) editor who started with an initial burst of keen enthusiasm, but was a little careless and got called on this a few times. Nothing serious, I think, but the editor who called him on this was a bit of a perfectionist and decided to track his edits for a while, inevitably finding more errors and acting hypercritically. This led to bad feelings on both sides, but eventually calm re-asserted itself. The young editor, though, found himself deprived of his "auto-patrolled" rights (which he's recently tried to get restored, though the assigning administrator deemed this too early). However, over the past few months he's been working steadily, and has done a nice batch of article creations, generally on second-tier cyclists. Though these articles are not perfect they're reasonable starter articles, and clearly show that this editor is willing to work hard. In addition, his error rate is improving.
However, the editor is young, and seems to get easily discouraged. I've done my best to provide some positive support, but sometimes it's useful for an independent voice to give some encouragement too. With this in mind, I'd like to ask an interested member of this project to take a look at the editor's work, and, if they feel it's appropriate, to consider endowing the editor with some suitable laurels. For obvious reasons, I'd prefer if this could be done without reference to this conversation here.
Because mentioning someone on a talk page seems to lead to an automatic message for them, I can't give a direct link to the editor (because I'm hoping to do this discreetly), but his name is OldxTimexMusicxFan (without the 'x's), and you can get to his page by typing "User:" plus his name in the search box.
Obviously, I'm more than happy to provide similar assistance to other members of this project: I am strongly of the view that good contributions should be recognised.
Thank you for your help with this. RomanSpa (talk) 09:31, 27 July 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks for the important work. It's difficult providing advice in sensitive situations, but anyone wanting a quick link can see WP:PERM/A. The real problem with discussing a user is that we're supposed to notify them, but that would not be helpful. The user is only notified automatically if a comment adds a link to a user page and a signature in the same edit (User:Example will be notified in this message). Johnuniq (talk) 10:14, 27 July 2014 (UTC)
Update Some recent additions at WP:Notifications#Technical details have contradicted earlier advice, and it claims that linking to a user page, or user talk, or user contribs will cause a notification if other conditions are satisfied. Johnuniq (talk) 00:22, 30 July 2014 (UTC)My confusion! Johnuniq (talk) 10:31, 31 July 2014 (UTC)- @ User:RomanSpa You are absolutely right...good contributions should be recognised. Just a suggestion but you might consider nominating "OTMusicFan" for an Editor of the Week Award. Just go to WP:WikiProject Editor Retention/Editor of the Week/Nominations and follow the simple instructions. ```Buster Seven Talk 06:51, 30 July 2014 (UTC)
Despair
I'm seeing 4 good editors leave or say they are leaving in the past few days. A couple in part over the Eric Corbett kerfuffle (not blaiming Eric here), a false accusation of child porn, another leaving because of a probable sock's disruptive editing. Dougweller (talk) 19:10, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
- Doug, don't despair. Just leave them a nice message, encouraging them to stay, or come back one day. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:44, 2 August 2014 (UTC).
- Oh I've done that. But they are all leaving or reducing their participation because of the conditions here. Maybe we should focus more on dealing with individual problems facing specific good editors - a bit like the article rescue squadron. Dougweller (talk) 07:21, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't know whether it's something in the water or whether nobody can think of what article they're going to work on next, but the drama level on (especially) ANI, Jimbo's talk and Arbcom has exploded. This will end in tears (whom for exactly is still up for debate). The only advice I can offer is to ignore all dramas. Bury your head in an article and forget about the shenanigans. You will feel much better and as an added bonus, the encyclopaedia will get better. Everybody wins. Ritchie333 09:33, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
- Maybe we should focus more on dealing with individual problems facing specific good editors - I think so and have said that before. I have seen the most valuable editors in the field of early Christianity (History2007) and Roman history (Cynwolfe) leave because of "the dysfunction of dispute resolution. It's just too exhausting" - Cynwolfe. All editors are not equal, the valuable ones should be protected, this site has got itself into the position where it is the number one resource for knowledge in the world, that is a huge responsibility but the way it is set up leaves it open to constant assault by ignorant / POV / fringe theory pusher editors who turn up and are treated with the same respect as neutral editors who have some idea what they are writing about. It is very very wrong.Smeat75 (talk) 11:47, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks. I can't bury my head this way, there are editors who need support and that I am supporting. And History2007 and Cynwolfe are good examples. Dougweller (talk) 15:37, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
- Sharing my personal experience on Misplaced Pages to the Editor Retention WikiProject. I am one of the (many) editors leaving or reducing their participation because of the conditions on Misplaced Pages created by admins like Dougweller and "his pals". My talk page talks about my experience in general terms. In short, it is my very strong opinion that Dougweller and admins like him should not be allowed to be admins and feel entitled to start, at whim, instigating an editor the moment he or she makes a small "very knowledgeable and well sourced" edit in an article after months of leaving or reducing their participation, and then go around campaigning just to paint them as outcasts. An example of a decent, unbiased, fair and problem solving admin is Master of Puppets that Jimbo needs to honor. I do not have the time or desire to give any more evidence, and I do not have time to deal with Dougweller ganging up to make this about me rather than the Editor Retention WikiProject. I just felt it was the right and courageous thing to do by saying what I just said in the hope that the culture will one day change on Misplaced Pages, but that's debatable. Worldedixor (talk) 11:57, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
- This has nothing whatsoever to do with you and I have never used my Admin tools on you or suggest I would. I have no idea why you've come here unless it is to do with my trying to support an editor that you've tangled with today calling them two-faced and underhanded, the sort of language that does drive editors away. By the way, that editor seems to have reconsidered their post today to your talk page and removed it, but you reinstated it. Not really helpful. Dougweller (talk) 15:37, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
Apparent bureaucratic mistreatment of a new editor
I've just come across the disturbing case of User:Verycarefully. This good-faith editor, previously unregistered, found Template:J unable to continue editing due to an Template:J block covering his Template:J entire university campus. The editor then registered a user account, only to promptly fall victim to a CheckUser-sanctioned block due to an unfounded accusation of sockpuppetry. The situation snowballed as this good-faith editor struggled to understand why this was happening and how to contest it, only to be smacked down by repeated unhelpful, jargon-laden responses from various admins. The experience left the editor with a feeling of disgust, saying Template:J desire to continue contributing to Misplaced Pages had been quashed. The coup de grâce was the final indefinite banning of the editor's account by yet another admin.
It appears to me that what the editor experienced ought to be examined by WikiProject Editor Retention as an example of how certain very bureaucratic processes of Misplaced Pages can impact new and inexperienced editors in a way that is very detrimental to editor recruitment and retention.
— Jaydiem (talk) 23:06, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
- What's the evidence that all of these admins were wrong? Isn't it more likely that this really was a sockpuppet? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅ᴥⱷ≼ 16:39, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
- Did you not read the entire thread? I find the user's explanation to be entirely plausible and credible. It appears to me that no substantial evidence was ever given by anyone to support the accusation of sockpuppetry. — Jaydiem (talk) 18:05, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
- The good-faith editor made a new account, put "Hello world" on their user page, then voted "oppose" at AN for two editors facing a topic ban for their promotion of Jews and Communism. Of course they were blocked as a sock—what other interpretation is available? Bear in mind that being ultra nice to newbies has side effects because it drives away good editors who are fed up with the crap. The two editors facing a topic ban were being disruptive, and the topic ban was necessary to reduce damage to the project. Johnuniq (talk) 00:32, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
- Since you don't seem to be paying any attention to what the editor wrote, let me quote it for you here:
- The good-faith editor made a new account, put "Hello world" on their user page, then voted "oppose" at AN for two editors facing a topic ban for their promotion of Jews and Communism. Of course they were blocked as a sock—what other interpretation is available? Bear in mind that being ultra nice to newbies has side effects because it drives away good editors who are fed up with the crap. The two editors facing a topic ban were being disruptive, and the topic ban was necessary to reduce damage to the project. Johnuniq (talk) 00:32, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
- Did you not read the entire thread? I find the user's explanation to be entirely plausible and credible. It appears to me that no substantial evidence was ever given by anyone to support the accusation of sockpuppetry. — Jaydiem (talk) 18:05, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
I've edited sporadically for a year, and probably a dozen times in the previous years. My first edit with this account was not my first or tenth edit. Recently, I had taken an interest in the community forums, but when I tried to add my 2 cents I received a message that the IP was blocked. I might be misremembering but I thought the message encouraged me to register an account. So I did, gave my 2 cents, and was promptly blocked.
- The editor asked repeatedly whose sockpuppet he was accused of being, and it wasn't until his third unblock request that anyone deigned to answer him: "Sockpuppet of Minorview per Timotheus Canens." The editor then demonstrated that that accusation made no sense whatsoever:
Minorview isn't blocked and is uninvolved in any of the 2 areas I edited. This IP is accessible to a few thousand people. Are you going to block all of them as sockpuppets of Minorview, who doesn't seem to have been blocked in over a year and who hasn't even edited in months?
- Misplaced Pages admins' response? "Please log into your main account and post an unblock there"—merely continuing the presumption that the editor had a "main account" other than the one he was using.
- ⋮
- It was only after all of the foregoing that someone explained to the editor that no admin could unblock him even if they wanted to because he had been blocked by a checkuser, and that there was an entirely different procedure for appealing checkuser blocks. I can't help but empathize with the frustration the editor then expressed:
It sure would be helpful if this sort of thing were made clear the first, second, or third time I appealed, or if the page "UTRS" said anything about being the correct method for checkuser blocks, or if indeed there were a clear guideline explaining that checkuser blocks must be appealed in a different way, or if such a guideline does exist buried somewhere on some page that it be presented to users when they are checkuser blocked, or that the blocking admin, knowing it is nearly impossible to appeal his block in the normal ways took some responsibility to pay attention to the effects of his block, or if Misplaced Pages in general treated people with a minimal degree of competence. I've edited for a long time minimally without an account, such as fixing typos when the page allows IP-edits. I can't imagine taking any deeper interest in Misplaced Pages given the character of the community and my experience to-date.
- After making this statement, the editor was blocked indefinitely even from editing his own talk page. The justification given? "too many unblock requests".
- ⋮
- I am appalled by the byzantine treatment to which this editor was subjected, and given his experience, I can't blame him for being turned off from ever contributing to the project again. What's even more disturbing is what another admin told the editor near the end of his ordeal:
Do you think you are the first person this has happened to? Do you think you will be the last?
- There is a serious problem here, folks. — Jaydiem (talk) 13:50, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
- The serious problem is that anyone would imagine that it would be desirable to create a new account, put "Hello world" on the user page, then voted "oppose" at AN for two editors facing a topic ban for their promotion of Jews and Communism—do you know the background of that article and the damage it was causing? Johnuniq (talk) 01:26, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Obviously the first edit is quite suspicious. It is possible they have a history of their own edits on other topics which they could have been asked about. This way even if they actually knew the users in question from their university and were asked to do this by them, they at least could prove that it was a mistake to post there (which might lead to 24 hour block), as opposed to a sock puppet offense. Just to cut the possibly new editor a bit of slack. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 16:17, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Gentle reminder for experienced editors to remain civil?
Boldly cutting this off. Question asked and answered. No sense in descending into name-calling and uncivil discussion about civil ways to alleviate incivility. Go Phightins! 03:33, 16 August 2014 (UTC)The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I've come across quite a few cases recently where experienced editors have acted inappropriately in various discussions. What can be done to remedy this and discourage future behavior that is bitey, condescending, and/or callous towards other Misplaced Pages veterans? That is, what can be done beyond the normal procedures (the editing goals on the front page of this project, resolution disputes, etc) to push users to be more civil?
Could we create a gently-worded template for use on the talk page of a user who has acted uncivilly in a discussion that doesn't quite chastise editors, but still forcefully reminds them to remember the human and to check WP:CIVIL, WP:AGF, WP:BITE, WP:HUMAN, or other relevant policies? Ideally, a stigma against receiving such a template on one's talk page would develop within the community. As with everything else, there is the potential for abuse, but I think that any problems that might occur are dwarfed in comparison to the potential benefit it may bring via community morale and editor retention.
...or is this a terrible idea? - SweetNightmares 17:40, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- It's a terrible idea. Why have these experienced editors you're complaining about responded in ways that you consider to be inappropriate? If they're just bad people then no amount of templating is going to change that. And if they've come to end of their tether with a particular editor then you need to look more closely at the cause. There's far too much of this "the first one to become frustrated and use sharp words is the one who needs to be punished" nonsense here already. Eric Corbett 17:48, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- "You're complaining," "that you consider to be inappropriate," and "nonsense" imply that my issue is not a valid one. These are not personal beefs that I have with editors, nor are they "complaining;" I am trying to find a viable solution to a site-wide problem that greatly hinders the very cause of this entire project. Excuse me for making the suggestion. - SweetNightmares 18:06, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Templates are not going to fix the problem. Nor is "moral ambitiousness". Ultimately, we probably need to have a sweeping RFC on civility, the drafters of which ought to come from different opinions on the subject to give the RFC credibility. Go Phightins! 18:08, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- I agree with User:Go Phightins!. It is a well-meant idea that won't work. Some experienced editors consider it insulting to be templated with any template. (I disagree, because I think that some experienced editors take advantage of their experience to resist both templating and reasoning.) Also, a few experienced editors dislike the idea of limits of content creators. Civility is declining, and is likely to continue to decline until something happens, such as the sweeping RFC that GPh suggests, or the intervention that some want and some fear of the WMF. I don't think that new templates will help, or that there is any easy solution. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:16, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- And it needs to include more than just cursing, honestly. I've seen some incredibly offensive, pedantic displays that often don't draw a comment at all. And it's hard to scream about civility when DICK is still used as pseudo-policy. Intothatdarkness 18:27, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- So is WP:CIR. Who here - we are the editor retention project, after all - will promise not to cite that essay as though it were a guideline or policy? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 18:42, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- Last time I checked, competency is not considered an offensive word (at least not in most normal circles). Dick is. There does seem to be a wee bit of difference between the two. Intothatdarkness 19:06, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- I agree that civility does not simply mean the avoidance of cursing. At the same time, it does include the avoidance of cursing. It also includes the avoidance, as mentioned, of mean-spirited pedantic rants. The original question did not appear to involve cursing, but biting of newbies. I don't exactly understand the reference to competence. We shouldn't want to retain incompetent editors (and that policy isn't about new editors, so much as about editors who either won't learn, or who can't write comprehensible English, or who have other issues). Competence is a different issue than civility (except that there are some incompentent uncivil editors). Robert McClenon (talk) 21:30, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- However, with regard to editor retention, the widespread acceptance of cursing (in some cases of language that is known and probably calculated to be offensive) is indicative of the larger problem. There is no obvious easy answer, but if something isn't done about incivility, retention of new editors will continue to become more difficult. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:30, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- Robert, you say above that "civility is declining". Have you evidence for that, or did you just make it up? I don't get the impression civility is declining apart from the manner some users want control over what content builders say and do. But most of those users themselves seem to contribute little content. You also say above that "we need fear of the WMF". Is this a continuation of your campaign for blind totalitarian control by the WMF? --Epipelagic (talk) 21:46, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- You are misreading my post. I will try to clarify later, but I think that you have your mind made up, so that any clarification will be for other editors. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:44, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- Robert, you say above that "civility is declining". Have you evidence for that, or did you just make it up? I don't get the impression civility is declining apart from the manner some users want control over what content builders say and do. But most of those users themselves seem to contribute little content. You also say above that "we need fear of the WMF". Is this a continuation of your campaign for blind totalitarian control by the WMF? --Epipelagic (talk) 21:46, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- That's nonsensical. I merely quoted you verbatim and asked for clarification, or confirmation that what you said is what you meant. How can that be "misreading" your posts. You are avoiding clarification. --Epipelagic (talk) 01:11, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- @Robert: WP:BITE doesn't only apply to newbies, IMHO. I know that's what the policy says, but the spirit of the policy is basically summed up by "don't be an asshole, it's bad for the long-term goals of the project." I've witnessed accomplished editors stand up to some unnecessarily harsh insults, and while someone usually steps in to diffuse tension, it still causes unnecessary gray hairs and there's plenty of times a tit-for-tat takes place with no witnesses. Having a crocodile-thick skin should not be a requirement to partake in the Misplaced Pages community. Obviously users here shouldn't be babied, but empathy ought to be advertised more if we hope to maintain activity on Misplaced Pages. - SweetNightmares 23:27, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- No. That policy is about biting new editors, and is specific. What you are referring to is the more general, and largely ignored, policy about civility toward everyone. I agree with you that a crocodile-thick skin should not be necessary, and too often is. I don't think that a special template will be useful. We have enough templates with levels 1 through 4; we don't need another. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:44, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- @Robert: WP:BITE doesn't only apply to newbies, IMHO. I know that's what the policy says, but the spirit of the policy is basically summed up by "don't be an asshole, it's bad for the long-term goals of the project." I've witnessed accomplished editors stand up to some unnecessarily harsh insults, and while someone usually steps in to diffuse tension, it still causes unnecessary gray hairs and there's plenty of times a tit-for-tat takes place with no witnesses. Having a crocodile-thick skin should not be a requirement to partake in the Misplaced Pages community. Obviously users here shouldn't be babied, but empathy ought to be advertised more if we hope to maintain activity on Misplaced Pages. - SweetNightmares 23:27, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
As I said, I am aware that's what the policy says, but its intention is to ensure that experienced editors don't dissuade others (not necessarily new editors) from partaking. It's even there in the second sentence: "Remember: ... in some ways ... even the most experienced among us are still newcomers." Regarding the templates, to what are you referring when you say "levels 1 through 4?" - SweetNightmares 23:55, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
- Is "asshole" OK to use here now? HiLo48 (talk) 00:05, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- Since it wasn't directed towards any individual, I don't see why it would be unacceptable? - SweetNightmares 01:01, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I respectfully opine differently here.
Let's not forget that we have nice and friendly lady editors and admins who are non-toxic and do not have truck driver mouths. The use of incivility and profanity, albeit totally unnecessary, will not appeal to them and will certainly do NOTHING beneficial to "retain" them. Worldedixor (talk) 01:14, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I respectfully opine differently here.
- I'd like to throw around Schlappschwanz myself. But it's called self-control. Some people just don't have it. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 01:19, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I'd like to throw around Schlappschwanz myself.
- Worldedixor - Please stop generalising. Occupation or gender do not automatically make one person's language usage nicer or worse than another's. Do we really want to force your stereotypical truck drivers to use "nice" language before their thoughts are welcome here? How about we ask the nice ladies to swear more instead? In a phase of my life when I worked in primary production I was once asked by a female co-worker, who I regarded as very polite, why I didn't swear more. This issue is not about ladies, or truck drivers. HiLo48 (talk) 01:24, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- How hypocritical of you to use "respectfully" and "truck driver mouth" in the same breath. Nevermind the fact that your fixation upon my apparent profanity has nothing at all to do with the point I was making in summarizing WP:BITE. Excuse me for thinking this was a friendly discussion between adults. - SweetNightmares 01:29, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I respectfully think you misconstrued my point. A truck driver's mouth is a factual representation of a person who uses profanity as clearly described here http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trucker%20Mouth. Kindly assume good faith. I am here to support civility. Thank you. Worldedixor (talk) 01:36, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- "factual representation" huh. Since you give urban dictionary as an authority, I guess you'd agree with it's def of "slut" --- meaning a "women with the morals of a man.Moriori (talk) 02:00, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- Your lack of respect and disdain for truck drivers is noted. I hope, for your sake, that one never moves in next door. HiLo48 (talk) 01:38, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I respectfully think you misconstrued my point. A truck driver's mouth is a factual representation of a person who uses profanity as clearly described here http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trucker%20Mouth. Kindly assume good faith. I am here to support civility. Thank you. Worldedixor (talk) 01:36, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I did not mean truck drivers per se, I used a common term. My next door driver is a very nice person who is a truck driver, and uses profanity but I respect him. Your allegations that I have "lack of respect and disdain for truck drivers" is false. That was not my intention. I meant persons who use profanity and incivility. Worldedixor (talk) 02:03, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- Where is the civility in this discussion?... I will recuse myself from this discussion. Worldedixor (talk) 02:05, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- How about also striking out the part implying that I am toxic because I swore, as well, before you leave? I, too, am wondering where the civility went. I came here looking for constructive comments, but was met with "you're complaining," "you're morally ambitious ," and "you're toxic and have a truck driver mouth." If this is just another Friday night for you guys, I am withdrawing my participation in this project, since it appears to be a total bastardization of its original intent. - SweetNightmares 02:26, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- Nah, it's already Saturday afternoon where I am, and by saying that I want to emphasise that the world is a very big place, with huge range of cultural norms. Truck drivers may be the metaphor for unacceptable language (whatever that is) in some parts, but certainly not everywhere. Some cultures have very different linguistic niceness standards from others. For one group to demand that everyone else be like them is never going to be a successful strategy on Misplaced Pages. There are no universally agreed standards of niceness. HiLo48 (talk) 02:43, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- How about also striking out the part implying that I am toxic because I swore, as well, before you leave? I, too, am wondering where the civility went. I came here looking for constructive comments, but was met with "you're complaining," "you're morally ambitious ," and "you're toxic and have a truck driver mouth." If this is just another Friday night for you guys, I am withdrawing my participation in this project, since it appears to be a total bastardization of its original intent. - SweetNightmares 02:26, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- Where is the civility in this discussion?... I will recuse myself from this discussion. Worldedixor (talk) 02:05, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I did not mean truck drivers per se, I used a common term. My next door driver is a very nice person who is a truck driver, and uses profanity but I respect him. Your allegations that I have "lack of respect and disdain for truck drivers" is false. That was not my intention. I meant persons who use profanity and incivility. Worldedixor (talk) 02:03, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- Another vintage civility comedy, brought to you by Misplaced Pages! --Epipelagic (talk) 03:26, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
- I find this conversation amusing because my father owned a big trucking company and had to herd truck drivers all day, using their language. Which, of course, I learned. So you can see why I can lecture on self-control. Self-control is just a way of proving you care more about the Misplaced Pages project than, as libertarians call it, "macho flashing." Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 04:21, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
Sfan00_IMG - Taking a break before my Wikistress gets too high
(Moving from (WP:AN)
Please see the top of User_talk:Sfan00_IMG, Certain events in the last few days, not least "disruptive-actions" by a specfic user, have convinced me that it's time to take an extended break, until specific individuals and organisations are prepared to accept accountability, and make active efforts to apologise.
I am not happy, and dissapointed that there are still those within this project that cannot accept that some things are simply unacceptable.
I am making this notifcation to WP:AN because whilst very disappointed, I remain optimistic that there are still a majority of trusted people within the community that are prepared to hold indviduals and organisations to account, and will implement the tough measures needed to refocus the project so that it is once again a neutral encyclopedia, and not another website on which individuals and organisations abuses in promoting various agendas (be they political, extremist or troll).
The admins and community already know what tough measures are needed, but it seems at times lack the ambition to implement them. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 20:30, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
- It would be a lot easier to reassure you, or summon you back, or whatever you're hoping for us to do, if we had any idea what you were talking about. I, at least, do not. I'm sorry you're disillusioned with the project, but there's really nothing actionable - or admin-notification-related - in this post. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 23:56, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
- The admins(and the wider community) know which indviduals and organisations are the problem, but seem unwilling (or unable for some reason) as I said to take the firm action required, I am not going to name the specfic individuals and organisations concerned, as they are already known to both the community and administrators.Sfan00 IMG (talk) 06:44, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- Sfan00 IMG, for editor retention's sake, you might want to copy paste this entire thing over to the Editor Retention talk page and delete the post here.--Mark Miller (talk) 00:06, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- Suggestion noted, Thread copied. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 06:44, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- Fluffernutter's an admin and she doesn't seem to know what you're talking about, so perhaps a bit more detail is in order. KoshVorlon Angeli i demoni kruzhyli nado mnoj 10:33, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- Sfan00 IMG, I see about 4-5 different situations which fit your description, but I don't see you embroiled in any. That's life on Misplaced Pages, unfortunately and without discussion, we can't come up with solutions. A bit more information would help. Worm(talk) 10:50, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- You asked for more detail.
My reasons for taking a break are based on the following. 1 The modifcation of a userbox on my talk page which was modified by a (suspected) russavia sock 2. Claims by The Times newspaper that Misplaced Pages was trying to sabotage 'right to be forgotten' 3. The 'monkey-selfie' (see Commons) 4. Paid editing. 5. The inclusion of direct links to the Wikileaks.org site 6. POV Pushing needs to be handled much more vigorusly. (and I would welcome a discussion about indef bans for users distributing/linking extremist materials) 7. Paid editing, the current situation is ridiculous as corporate accounts can't be held accountable if they can't be identified as such 8. Copyright misunderstandings on the part of some users (too numerous to list here) 9. BITEy admins. etc. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:45, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- Ammended ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:07, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- Ok, well, I'm happy to comment on some of those - if it'll help.
- 1. I don't see the specifics, despite a quick look, but unfortunately banned users try to cause disruption regularly. There's nothing more that we can do besides ignoring them.
- 2 - 7. These are all massive issues and there's no right or wrong answer. In some of the cases, people strongly believe one point of view and take bold action because they do. The way that we handle these sorts of things on Misplaced Pages is to discuss them, or if you don't have a strong view, ignore them. The days of administrators leading force are long gone - the amount of mess it causes is phenomenal.
- 8. This is always going to be an issue, because copyright is so complicated. I generally point people to my adoption course on the subject, which I think explains it so that a competent individual could understand.
- 9. Unfortunately being ad admin isn't a fun job - you see the same mistakes over and over. Some get jaded and become BITEy. I'm not excusing it - but I do try and mitigate it. If you have some examples, please do email them over and I'll try and have a chat with them.
- So, most of your problems with Misplaced Pages are philosophical - and a break may well be helpful there. Perhaps see if you can get yourself to a WikiMeetup, debate these issues with a real person. The human interaction is always helpful in reminding you of the positives too! Worm(talk) 12:07, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
- In respect of 1, I am convinced that some of them won't stop until they are compelled by force of court to do so, but the Misplaced Pages community and WMF have traditionally been unwilling to take matters that far.
There are also some actions of other organisations off-wiki (which the Misplaced Pages community can't obviously assist with) which are also responsible for my decision to take a wiki-break. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:41, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Could more information help to keep newbies?
The first article rejection is a critical stage where we are likely to lose a newbie.
I know that the Page Curation tool was designed to give newbies less in the way of alarming templates on their talk pages, and to reduce the amount they have to read, but I wonder if it has gone too far. The typical newbie who has put in an inadequate article gets only something like this.
That is excellent as far as it goes, clear and conversational, and it provides an invitation to contact the tagger, but it does very little to provide guidance about how to do better next time. I believe that, for a new user, that message should be accompanied, preferably preceded, by a welcome message, both to say "Welcome to Misplaced Pages!" (giving a slight warm feeling to balance the coldness of rejection) and to give links to further information, so that a newbie prepared to do a little reading and learning has got somewhere to start. (That will include most of those who will go on to become productive editors). Some of the standard welcome messages like {{welcomeg}} are overwhelming, but I think the basic {{welcome}} does a good job.
We could advise New Page Patrollers to preface a message to a new user with {{welcome}}, but that might be difficult with the present curation system (it would mean an extra step of looking at the target talk page) so my suggestion is that, if the recipient's talk page is empty, the curation message should automatically place a welcome message before the "rejection slip". Some existing templates do this - the PROD template adds {{firstarticle}} - so it should be possible.
I would like comments here before suggesting this to the page curation people. JohnCD (talk) 21:50, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- I would support having the Curation tool also leave a welcome message. We need to make sure newbs are aware how they can do x better/right next time. I suggest using {{welcome-graphical}}. I think it covers a good amount of policies (especially WP:DEVELOP) that don't overwhelm the user. It also includes a few help pages unlike {{welcome}}. Regards, MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 22:47, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- Isn't about time the fundamental problem was addressed here, which is that no new editor can be expected to do anything other than fix typos, spelling or grammatical mistakes? The mantra of "anyone can edit" has long been a lost cause, and rightly so. Eric Corbett 23:03, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- While I agree with your first statement, you need to realize that's how we see it as seasoned editors, but newbs can't and don't see it that way. MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 23:09, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- Then it needs to be made clear to them, rather than pussy-footing around. Eric Corbett 23:12, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- Easier said than done. MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 23:14, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- Is that a reason not to do it, because it's not easy? Do you only do the easy things, and not the things that need to be done? Eric Corbett 00:03, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Nope, I don't believe I ever suggested that. MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 00:07, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Yes, new editors can't be expected to do much at first....but what is it that Eric is wanting them to have made clear? That they aren't expected to have abilities right off the bat. I could support that, but I am not clear that is the message Mr. Corbett is wishing to get across to "them".--Mark Miller (talk) 00:09, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- I never respond to those who switch from calling me "Eric" to "Mr Corbett" in a vain attempt to patronise me. Eric Corbett 00:14, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- I could easily just refer to you as Eric Corbett, but I was indeed raised to also use Mr. as a form of respect (since we do know this is not a user name and is indeed your actual name)...not as a patronizing reference. Not everyone is after you. You made a comment and I am asking for clarifcation.--Mark Miller (talk) 00:18, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- I never respond to those who switch from calling me "Eric" to "Mr Corbett" in a vain attempt to patronise me. Eric Corbett 00:14, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Yes, new editors can't be expected to do much at first....but what is it that Eric is wanting them to have made clear? That they aren't expected to have abilities right off the bat. I could support that, but I am not clear that is the message Mr. Corbett is wishing to get across to "them".--Mark Miller (talk) 00:09, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Nope, I don't believe I ever suggested that. MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 00:07, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Is that a reason not to do it, because it's not easy? Do you only do the easy things, and not the things that need to be done? Eric Corbett 00:03, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Easier said than done. MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 23:14, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- Then it needs to be made clear to them, rather than pussy-footing around. Eric Corbett 23:12, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- While I agree with your first statement, you need to realize that's how we see it as seasoned editors, but newbs can't and don't see it that way. MrScorch6200 (talk | ctrb) 23:09, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
- At any rate this does indeed bring up something that, while it is possible was not actual the intent, does raise a rather interesting perspective...that we should not be expecting new editors to have the immediate ability to do the same work as experienced editors. It should, some how, be expressed that it is not expected of them at the beginning and that...perhaps, that could take a bit of pressure off new editors.--Mark Miller (talk) 00:38, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- WT:Page Curation#The effect of this tool on newcomers. Current. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:00, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Re "The first article rejection is a critical stage where we are likely to lose a newbie." How often does a new editor whose first edit is really lame (and is immediately reverted or speedy-deleted with good cause) become a useful contributor? We need statistics on this. If the odds are low, we're worrying too much about initial rejection. John Nagle (talk) 22:31, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
- Stats can't measure that kind of thing. Sure, you can get metrics on what happens, but not on what the users think - the vast majority of them are SPA anyway, or simply hoaxers or vandals who probably have no intention whatsoever of becoming regular Wikipedians; the very idea of assuming they all would is frankly ridiculous. The paranoia about losing editors was largely started by the flyer that was distributed at the Haifa Wikimania by the WMF in which was stated that most of our prolific editors began their Wiki careers as vandals (or words to that effect). Duh! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:38, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
- That was a great example of how not to do stats. When they took two very different but true statements "30% of our most active editors have been blocked at least once" and "most blocks are for vandalism" they should have done a reality check before saying that 1 and 1 make 11 as they did in that (now thankfully discontinued) leaflet. I have since encountered or heard of at least four editors who started as vandals, there may be more. I'm not against the idea in theory that vandals can be reformed and become good editors. Clearly some of the adolescents who we block for vandalism will grow up into responsible teenagers and adults who come back many years later, but they are rare and I'm not convinced that they would be more likely to come back as goodfaith editors if we were harsher or milder when they were vandals. However the concern about losing editors was not caused by that mistake, it was caused by the stats on the declining proportion of new editors who go from their 5th edit to their 100th and their 100th edit to their 1000th. We shouldn't greatly worry about the drop in editors doing their 5th edit, it usually takes 5 vandalisms to get all four warning levels and a block, so the rise of the edit filters between 2009 and 2012 accounts for a large amount of the perceived drop in the number of people doing their first five edits in that era, if not the whole 2007-14 era of decline in new editors. There is less certainty as to why we have greater attrition of new editors between their 5th and 1000th edits. I have a couple of theories, in particular I think that the decline in use of the citation needed template and the increased tendency amongst the regulars to revert unsourced new content is driving people away. But we need to test whether our retention of people who do cite their sources has held up, and if I'm right we need a better way to train new editors to cite their sources - simply reverting them doesn't seem to work. ϢereSpielChequers 14:47, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
- Stats can't measure that kind of thing. Sure, you can get metrics on what happens, but not on what the users think - the vast majority of them are SPA anyway, or simply hoaxers or vandals who probably have no intention whatsoever of becoming regular Wikipedians; the very idea of assuming they all would is frankly ridiculous. The paranoia about losing editors was largely started by the flyer that was distributed at the Haifa Wikimania by the WMF in which was stated that most of our prolific editors began their Wiki careers as vandals (or words to that effect). Duh! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:38, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
- @Nagle, it isn't how many goodfaith but unhelpful newbies go on to become good editors that is the issue, we know that currently it is very few. The issue is how many would have become useful editors if their first edit had been corrected rather than reverted. One theory is that the difference between our currently closed community and the much more open community of 2003/6 is that new editors were much less likely to have their first edits rejected in that era. It would be possible to test that, for example by comparing people who did their first 1000 edits in 2006/7 with people doing their first 1,000 edits in the last couple of years, and look at when they first added referenced information. If the theory holds up, the few editors who have recently become active will be more likely to have been citing sources earlier. Of course we could find that Misplaced Pages has never been good at training people to cite sources, and what we are seeing is that we have always lost editors eventually if they didn't cite sources, and that currently we just get rid of them earlier. My hope is that if someone researched this we would find that a worthwhile proportion of new editors used to learn citation and so forth in their first thousand edits or so, and that being nicer to goodfaith newbies used to turn a useful proportion of them into good editors. But I don't believe that anyone knows for certain whether we used to turn newbies into useful editors by tolerating inexperienced edits, or if we didn't whether we now could. ϢereSpielChequers 15:19, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
- One of the reasons that new editors are not seeing their contributions stick is because the overall quality of the encyclopaedia has increased, at least in certain areas. Ten years ago, articles were missing or factually incomplete and we wrote about whatever knowledge came to hand. Since then, articles have been improved both formally to GA / FA levels, and informally by citing additional sources. The net effect is that a new editor could easily add unsourced trivia to Manchester Ship Canal in 2004, but they'd have no chance of doing it today. The amount of skill and effort required to stay in Misplaced Pages gets higher and higher as the years go on and the project matures.
- Because editing Misplaced Pages has become a non-trivial skill, paid editing would help. I'm not talking about what we normally refer to as "paid editing", but a trained individual who understands Misplaced Pages markup and policies helping out somebody else who wants to contribute genuine encyclopaedic information, but doesn't have the skill to do it. In that respect, it's no different from paying a company to do corporate web design. The reason paid editing has a stigma is the stereotypical editor that does it doesn't have a good grasp on policies (specifically notability, NPOV and conflict of interest). Ritchie333 09:28, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
- Probably the last thing we need is paid editors, if only because that would be open to so much misinterpretation and defy the huge initiatives we have made in the past 12 moths to try and stop the wrong kind of paid editing.
- What we need to do is to find ways of better training our new page patrollers, recent edit patrollers, and vandalism patrollers. Unfortunately, even if we admins give them a hat to wear, those are the areas that are a magnet to inexperienced maintenance users who don't understand the differences between good faith but inapproriate pages/edits, and blatant vandalism from kids, SPA spammers, religeous propagandists, and hoax/attack pages. I've been patrolling the patrollers for an hour a day since I got home from the UK, and I never get past 20 newly patrolled pages without finding a critically wrong patroll or a page that has been passed that should have been tagged for deletion. I don't know what goes on at recent changes etc because I can't be everywhere. At the end of the day however, I think we're too paranoid about losing editors this way. I'm still convinced that WP:ACTRIAL would have relieved us of a lot of this mess and that anyone wanting to abide by the rules can easily wait 10 edits and 4 days before creating an article. I don't believe that the ability to make spontaneous edits or creations helps grow the encyclopedia or turn people into regular, dedicated Wikipedians.
- The only real solution IMO, is more outreach, and, although I hate to suggest it, using some of the surplus funds to buy some advertising on TV: Text this number to give just 2 pounds a month to ensure that everyone on the planet has access to free knowledge... WP is one of the few among millions of interactive websites that allows people to edit/post without first registering or the content first being rewiewed by a moderator. WP has grown over the past 10 years and I think that rather than the WMF constantly trying to come up with new ways of providing stats for what they want us to believe, it's time to tighten up those old presumptions and realise that that old free-for-all Alternativbewegung culture is no longer appropriate for something that has grown to the stature of today's Misplaced Pages/Wikimedia. I'm not suggesting that we should all wear suits and ties to work on WP or all be over 40, but it's time for some people to realise that WP operates on a multimillion dollar budget, has real offices around the world, and is not a web project being run from a back bedroom or a converted garden shed by someone in torn jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, or an ill-fitting junior high school uniform. The sooner we get that message across, the sooner the quality will improve. It would not affect the mantra that Misplaced Pages is the encyclopedia anyone can edit but it would help to prevent it from being the website any troll can wreck. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:02, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Another editor gone?
I just noticed that Ryan Vesey has not made an edit since May 19th of this year.--Mark Miller (talk) 02:01, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
- I think Ryan's one of those people who might come and go depending on life's other commitments. Hopefully we'll see him again soon. Worm(talk) 07:53, 26 August 2014 (UTC)