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Posted by: Mr. Mystery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giano/The_future.

Good luck with that.

Posted by: Peter Damian

More proof that Wikipedia is now a form of entertainment.

Posted by: RMHED

Giano is the ultimate masochist, show him a brickwall and he'll want to bang his head against it.
This is a marvellous exercise in futility and a fine example of an individuals inability to learn from the past.

Posted by: Giano

Oh c'mon - give me a chance.

2 years ago the very idea would have been unthinkable. Things are getting better, albeit too slowly. If no one tries then no one gets anywhere. I am determined to change things there for the better, more liberal and democratic - and many others appear to feel in a similar way - the aim is to build a concencus of opinion over what is wrong - no one has openly tried that before (on Wiki at least) and lived to tell the tale.

Give the page a chance - go (those of you who still can) and opine. Sooner or later things will get better, but they won't if people just sit here moaning saying "waste of time."

Giano

Posted by: Nerd

That's what the majority of Wikipedians do best! Moaning, groaning, and generally avoiding editing articles.

Posted by: MZMcBride

Personally, I find Wikipedia Review far more entertaining. I get the same level of interactivity as Wikipedia, but I'm not expected to be productive here. It's nice.

Posted by: trenton

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:GiacomoReturned&diff=prev&oldid=298120545

Pot, meet kettle.

edit: although to be fair, hysterical nonsense and drama are basically the only ways to get attention and change at wikipedia.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Oh, come now, can you really claim that you were expected to be productive at Wikipedia? The main difference is that it is rather difficult to get banned from the Review. Plus, we seldom discuss Pokemon.

Posted by: Kato

Oh good, Peter Jackson has a view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giano/The_future#View_by_Peter_jackson

No wonder that King Kong remake was such a crock.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

Actually, a majority of Wikipedia editors stick pretty much to editing articles whenever they happen to be in the mood. They have at most incidental or occasional involvement with the whole administrative apparatus of the site, or the various opportunities it provides for "moaning and groaning." Assuming that the editors who tend to be discussed on WR typify the majority of Wikipedians' experiences or behaviors is a fallacy.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

I am waiting for Xeno to show up and harass him again.



To semi-quote the cast of "The Band Wagon" -- that's entertainment?



Okay, so the voice of ArbCom says the majority of Wikipedia contributors only show up only when they are bored, barely do anything once they arrive, and aren't worth talking about once they leave? Gotcha!

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yeah, but Brad's observation explains why nobody reads WR. And also why the list of stuff over at WP:PERRENIAL is so short: good ideas from the few that care are adopted immediately, and most of the rest of editors aren't interested in politics, meta-issues, or the like; they just want to write.

AND, for free: Brad's comments explain why WP:LAME is so short: it was written as a humor piece by a few commedians, and doesn't really mirror what actually happens on WP. That's stuff's funny, but is not like it's real.

Not least, why a mighty team of 13 arbitrators (or whatever the number is now that another is disgraced) can take care of all the vast warring on WP and keep it going so smoothly. It's because the rest of us don't worry our pretty heads about it much, and leave it to the smarties who like that kind of thing. Genius lawyers and stuff.

Glad to be a Beta! Alphas work SO hard.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Don't sweat it, Giano...Horsey loves you!



Well...Brad reads it! And I wouldn't call Brad a "nobody." (A "fullbody" perhaps!) In fact, I would never call anybody a nobody...except A Nobody, of course, since that's his name.

Posted by: Milton Roe

As the great Yogi Berra was want to say: "Nobody drives in the city; there's too much traffic."

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Gotta love the Yogi aphorisms.

Posted by: Milton Roe

There's that wisdom which hard to nail down, but is in there somwhere:

"You can observe a lot just by looking." That one comes in handy in science. It's one of the favorite sayings of researchers. I've known some terrible observers. They saw but didn't look. Or looked but didn't see.

"Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't come to yours." This seems quite reasonable, too.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Yogi Berra and Giano? Hey, when would you ever think of having those two great minds mentioned together? All this thread needs is Patti LaBelle...and here she is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcWQMRCuJvo&feature=featured

Posted by: Casliber

I can second that - after two years editing articles and being involved in wikiprojects, all the arb-related pages, disputes, policy pages etc were like some surreal parallel wikipedia with all different people.
Cas

Posted by: Kelly Martin

I have seen no evidence that you have ever been productive at Wikipedia either, or that (in fact) anyone there is expected to produce anything in particular.


You left out a very salient point, and one which I think you would prefer to ignore: when they do run into the administrative apparatus of the site, the experience tends to convince them to find other pastimes. And yet, the administrativichiks, a caste of which you are a senior member, seem to think that this is not indicative of a problem.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

This calls for a thoughtful response, which will be easier to provide when I am more awake, so I will return to this thread sometime tomorrow.

Posted by: Casliber

I think there are signs this is changing. Some content contributors have gotten more involved this year and are sticking around thus far.

I am also not necessarily convinced that is a problem as the primary objective is still writing an encyclopedia.
Cas

Posted by: Kelly Martin

I remain to be convinced of that. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia (at least not one that any sensible person would be proud of), nor is it (as far as I can tell) getting any closer to being one. Its policies have been trending away from, not toward, positions that I would think likely to be conducive to the production of encyclopedic content, especially with the extremely strong (but very inconsistently enforced) proscription against editorial synthesis, which is, for all intents and purposes, the gravamen of the encyclopedia form.

I, personally, believe this is because of the general intellectual immaturity of the bulk of Wikipedia's editors (not to mention its Illustrious Leader), combined (of course) with the vested interests engaged in pitched battle. The former does not understand intellectual competence and so has no cause to value it, and the latter rightfully sees it as a threat, and these two forces combined to stamp out competence whenever they blunder across it.

Posted by: Casliber

'editorial synthesis'? - you mean Original Research? There is a huge amount of synthesis out there to inline reference just about everything. And if not, one has to wonder why no-one else has connected the dots before. I presume this is what you mean?

Re paragraph two, yes there are trouble spots, and yes there are vested interests, but these trouble areas take up alot of observation space at WR and blogs etc. Stuff which fares well is pretty boring to write about - lack of teh dramaz.

Pray tell me which intellectual competence you've seen stamped out?
Cas

Posted by: Milton Roe

Did you get that, Casliber? She's right and it's a devastating return. The POINT of any encyclopedia is to be sythethic (that's close to the definition of what an encylopedia article IS), and yet, speaking strictly, you've outlawed this. In your incredibly hypocritical way, your entire enterprise as Wikipedia survives ONLY upon the work of people who explicitly violate your rules in order to continue it. Many of us have realized this for years, and said it to you regularly.



But you ignore it. You're required to ignore it as part of the faith.

That one of the weirdest things about Wikipedia. It's certainly on my short-list of the "single mad belief" which qualifies an enterprise as a "religion." You know-- the one belief (like body thetans detectable with an E-meter), that's patently nutso, but that you're all officially required not to notice IS nutso? As part of the deal?

Posted by: Casliber

Hmmm, obviously synthesis is a fluid and multilevelled concept. Yes a whole article is a synthesis of sentences of sorts, but it is the micro-level, where one has fact 'a' and fact 'b' and is unable to connect them if the evidence is lacking. This OR safeguard works well in medical articles, where one has to be careful before jumping to conclusions if the proper evidence is lacking. My understanding of an encyclopedia was to report or reflect on current knowledge of a term, rather than synthesise new ideas as such.
Cas

Posted by: Milton Roe

Just reporting requires an amazing amount of synthesis to get the context right. Which is why journalism is crappy at that, since it has so little time and background knowledge. Medical review articles, which are NOT supposed to advance major new ideas, are written by Subject Matter Experts. They HAVE to be. It couldn't possibly be done otherwise.

Posted by: aeon

A month back you were convinced you were gone forever. "[W]hen I unfairly snapped at one of my kids who wandered into the study for a hug, I realised the time had come.", you said. What a load of hogwash now, hey? Now you're playing Wikipioneer and Leader into the Future.

Hate to say it, but http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=24369&hl=Giano: "Because, let's face it, you'll be back in a month anyway."

To the content of the page itself I won't be so critical. It's futile, of course, but a good read and an interesting approach.

Posted by: Peter Damian

This seems completely illogical and upside down. How is the primary objective of writing an encyclopedia consistent with this bland insouciance about putting off contributors? Explain.



That is one of the stupidest things that has been said in this forum (and that is quite something).



Quite.



This is also patently stupid and shows complete ignorance of what a reference work is.

Posted by: everyking

Some serious content contributors don't want to get involved with adminstrative issues. Others, as you might recall, are not allowed to get involved in administrative issues. I don't think there are very many who fall into neither group.

Posted by: MBisanz

Two concepts that have served me well on Wikipedia and in real life are accept change gracefully and be able to admit when you are wrong. Somehow I doubt the page in question would be playing out the way it is if the leaders on both sides were following these concepts.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

It's times like these that I find it hard to believe that you're college-educated, and yet I do seem to recall that you have some form of postgraduate training. Thank you for demonstrating exactly the sort of intellectual immaturity that I was referring to earlier. Is this perhaps just the thought-stopping influence of the Wikicult at work?

Posted by: sbrown

Anyone whose a serious editor and also an admin so knows whats really going on is very likely to get sick and leave.

Posted by: Cla68

I've had the ANI forum on my watchlist for about two years now. I agree that Wikipedia's admins are probably doing a better job now than they were three years ago when I first started editing. If you look at ANI, however, some posts still go unanswered and some still don't get resolved even after rounds of inane discussion by various admins.

What Wikipedia needs is more structure for admins, a "how to" guide that gives standard responses and block lengths for the same types of problems that occur over and over. The admins need some type of elected admin guidance committee, to which they can go to with questions or concerns instead of the unofficial, teen-age admin mutual admiration society which exists in the IRC forums. Perhaps a forum which can be seen by everyone, but which only admins can edit. An admin appeal board, such as Tony1 has been working on, needs to be formally established. When admins make good or bad decisions, such board needs to annotate this on a scorecard for each admin which everyone can see.

Every editor with 4,000 main space edits should be automatically granted adminship, but it also needs to be much easier to desysopp incompetent or inactive admins. If an admin performs no administrative actions within a six-month period, they should be automatically desysopped in order to influence admins to at least help out a little with admin work.



I have done synthesis in several of the featured articles that I have written. Synthesis is sometimes necessary in order to completely explore the topic of an article. If you do it right, the only people who will object are POV-pushers. Aren't we taught in school in the west to synthesize what we read in our sources when we report on something? In those instances, we're graded on the quality of our synthesis, i.e. if we're able to back it up with an argument that makes sense after looking at our supporting sources. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehime_Maru_and_USS_Greeneville_collision#Effect_on_U.S..2FJapan_relations which I wrote, is synthesis. Check the sources. So far, no one has objected to it, even though the article was featured on the main page and was looked-at by more than 100,000 readers. So I'm thinking that I did it right.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

A serious editor and also an admin? What's wrong with that sentence?

Posted by: Malleus

To be fair, I can think of quite a few who fit that bill. A few of them on here even.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

To be frank, I cannot name any person on Wikipedia who improved as an editor after becoming an admin. I am, however, finding a lot of admins who had some degree of editorial skill and human resources talent before their RfAs but almost immediately became sloppy, touchy and puerile afterwards. A few of them on here even!

Posted by: Casliber

I'd have to read them in a book somewhere sometime. This is the problem really in that we have allowed synthesis (everything is sourced and derives from a source, but it is how you put them together - the sentences reflect what the sources say, right?) and not-allowed synthesis (big time de novo construction of ideas.)

Cas

Posted by: Peter Damian

I know Giano's a bit weak on the spelling front but ....

[my emphasis]

Posted by: RMHED

I wish you luck, you'll need an incredible amount to effect real change.

Do consensus and democracy go together? Democracy is about counting the numbers consensus is somewhat more subtle.

Is a democratic Wikipedia likely to be more inviting, or is democracy itself a form of totalitarianism that doesn't recognise those who operate outside the democratic system?

Democracy is a dirty word used by the nation state to justify its aggressive excesses against those deemed outlaw.

Posted by: Lar

I wrote my first(1) FA after becoming an admin. Whether that's a sign that I improved as an editor is not necessarily clear to me

1 - and so far, my only one... writing an FA takes a significant chunk of time. Or did me anyway.

Posted by: MBisanz

I had 1 DYK when I passed RFA, I now have 25 DYKs, 2 FLs, and 1 GA, although I do have to admit that most of them are on boring topics.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

And I bet you cut a stunning sight in your Wikipedia Dress Uniform, what with all the cabbage you get to wear to go with all that alphabet soup.

And yet, despite all that, you have still failed to do anything to actually help create an encyclopedia.

Posted by: MZMcBride

Wait a minute. Acronyms and initialisms aside, MBisanz is saying he's created featured lists and new articles (with "Did you know" hooks). Yet he's "failed to do anything to actually help create an encyclopedia"? I'm lost.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

"Did you know" hooks are rarely encyclopedic; they're closer to "hey, look at the neat meaningless trivia I discovered", the sort of thing that the rest of us use Twitter to get. "Featured lists" are a concept invented by Wikipediots jealous that their writing skills (or political savvy) are too lame to negotiate the Featured Article minefield, so they too could get wikicabbage on their wikiuniforms. Creating lists is not remotely encyclopedic behavior; at best that is almanac level work.

When you guys start writing good, solid, high-level syntheses of broad topics for consumption by a general audience, that's when you'll be creating an encyclopedia. Discovering and cataloging mindless trivia doesn't cut it.

Posted by: RMHED

Possibly you're thinking; Wikipedia = aspiring encyclopedia.
Try thinking; Wikipedia = somewhat useful collection of trivia with a dash of libel just for fun.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Having an FA on Wikipedia is like being the tallest office building in Boise, Idaho. In the low-expectation world of Wiki-writing, it might be an accomplishment. Outside of Jimboville, however...eh.

And DYKs, please. Any idiot can get a DYK. That's like getting a medal for showing up at work. And the stuff they put up is so ridiculous. They should change the acronym to DYC - Do You Care?

Posted by: MZMcBride

Thank you for the clarification.

I agree that mindless lists are somewhat trivial, but I wouldn't ever say they're un-encyclopedic.

Posted by: tarantino

Posted by: RMHED

Isn't that the 'pedia equivalent of saying "I'm the biggest loser in the world, my life is an empty wasteland, please put me out of my misery as I lack the courage to kill myself."

Posted by: Casliber

Well, yeah. Depends how well-educated and to what level you wish to learn about something,doesn't it? I love the idea of not treating people as lowest-common-denominator-dullards and trying to expand knowledge with a depth hitherto unseen in a 'pedia (educate the masses and all that). Loved Eva's bridge articles, and some of the more obscure stuff. Got a real buzz researching Sirius when I buffed it up too.

i.e. may not be 'encyclopedic' if World Book is your idea of the acumen of encyclopedias
Cas

Posted by: RMHED

Too much personal information, please keep your sexual proclivities to yourself.

Posted by: Cla68

To return back to the original subject of this thread, I think Wikipedia has lost a lot of editors who had the potential of being able to do what you mention above, but left after they saw how disorganized, amateurish, and chaotic Wikipedia's administration was. The first time a relatively inexperienced editor takes a complaint to ANI, AN, or Jimbo's talk page, the response they receive is really important. If it's ignored or answered in a flippant, insipid, or ineffective way, then don't be surprised if many of them suddenly decide that there are much better things that they could be doing with their time.

By the way, Giano has opened another page to discuss possible solutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giano/_Findings_of_%22The_Future%22. RDH has already made some excellent suggestions.

Posted by: sbrown

And of course if there blocked there very unlikely to come back.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

AN and ANI is strictly a clubhouse for a select few within the Wikipedia community. You see the same names turning up over and over, and anyone outside of their tight circle is inevitably treated like crap if they turn up with a complaint.

Posted by: Malleus

Horsey, horsey, don't you stop,
just let your feet go clippety-clop ... because you're quite right.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yep. It's the drawing room for Wikipedia's House of Lords. "I say, Old Boy, how's the mansion these days? What shall we do about these new punks and hooligans and "yardies," and so on? Most of them seem to have lacked proper nannies at some point, don't you think?"

Posted by: RMHED

I always saw it more as Wikipedia's day care facility, never noticed the adult supervision though...