NYB on The Volokh Conspiracy, Some First Thoughts on Wikipedia Options

[tarantino]

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242098183.shtml

Ira requests:

I make only one request: that regular Wikipedians who are looking over my shoulder, as well as Wikipedia critics from Wikipedia Review and elsewhere, bear in mind that this is a general-interest audience. Please don't hijack the comment threads with our own internal disputes and debates. No one here wants to read who is a sockpuppet of whom or whether so-and-so's block was fair or not. We have ANI and Wikipedia Review to hash those things out later.

[Jon Awbrey]

One of the questions that always comes to mind when discussing ArbComics, stand-up or otherwise, is this —

How could any Wikipedian, much less a high ranking one, be sooooo clueless about the realities in the trenches of Wikipedia?

WikiChecker Data : Newyorkbrad

• 21,835 — Total Edits （25 Feb 2006 – 15 May 2009)
• 11,516 — Project, Help, MediaWiki, Portal
•  6,599 — User Talk
•  2,584 — Article Page
•    466 — Article Talk
•    428 — User Page
•    242 — Category, Image, Template

O I C …

Jon Awbrey

[Newyorkbrad]

One of the questions that always comes to mind when discussing ArbComics, stand-up or otherwise, is this —

How could any Wikipedian, much less a high ranking one, be sooooo clueless about the realities in the trenches of Wikipedia?

WikiChecker Data : Newyorkbrad

• 21,835 — Total Edits （25 Feb 2006 – 15 May 2009)
• 11,516 — Project, Help, MediaWiki, Portal
•  6,599 — User Talk
•  2,584 — Article Page
•    466 — Article Talk
•    428 — User Page
•    242 — Category, Image, Template

O I C …

Jon Awbrey

Well, yeah. When I started I contributed to mainspace, including having created more than 75 pages, but lately I've been focused primarily on arbitration and related activities.

Although I'm not denying the trend you see there, do bear in mind more generally that the pure edit-number data can be misleading. If I create a page in mainspace, that's one edit. If I then vote paragraph-by-paragraph through an arb decision, that can be 20 edits....

I am determined to get back to more article work once the current round of ArbCom cases is wrapped up and my guest-blogging stint on Volokh is completed. And I'm sure Mr. Awbrey will remind me if I forget, because making sure that there are lots of good contributions to Wikipedia mainspace is very important to him.

[Jon Awbrey]

One of the questions that always comes to mind when discussing ArbComics, stand-up or otherwise, is this —

How could any Wikipedian, much less a high ranking one, be sooooo clueless about the realities in the trenches of Wikipedia?

WikiChecker Data : Newyorkbrad

• 21,835 — Total Edits （25 Feb 2006 – 15 May 2009)
• 11,516 — Project, Help, MediaWiki, Portal
•  6,599 — User Talk
•  2,584 — Article Page
•    466 — Article Talk
•    428 — User Page
•    242 — Category, Image, Template

O I C …

Jon Awbrey

Well, yeah. When I started I contributed to mainspace, including having created more than 75 pages, but lately I've been focused primarily on arbitration and related activities.

Although I'm not denying the trend you see there, do bear in mind more generally that the pure edit-number data can be misleading. If I create a page in mainspace, that's one edit. If I then vote paragraph-by-paragraph through an arb decision, that can be 20 edits …

I am determined to get back to more article work once the current round of ArbCom cases is wrapped up and my guest-blogging stint on Volokh is completed. And I'm sure Mr. Awbrey will remind me if I forget, because making sure that there are lots of good contributions to Wikipedia mainspace is very important to him.

Do what you like. I am simply stepping through the steps of the inquiry process, that begins by "abducing" an explanation for a surprising observation.

The surprising observation is that a presumably intelligent person could continue repeating the same old mythology about Wikipedia — after all these years — in the face of all the contrary evidence that spits in the face of every trooper who spends a long enough time in the trenches.

There are as many likely explanations as there are favorite ways of denying the evidence — I simply picked on a likely first guess.

Of course, it hardly amounts to a fair test anymore — a Modern Major General slumming in the trenches for a day is just not going to get dressed down for having lacquered brass, now is he?

So you really missed out on all that, poor sap …

Jon Awbrey

[Somey]

Although I'm not denying the trend you see there, do bear in mind more generally that the pure edit-number data can be misleading. If I create a page in mainspace, that's one edit. If I then vote paragraph-by-paragraph through an arb decision, that can be 20 edits …

Do what you like. I am simply stepping through the steps of the inquiry process, that begins by "abducing" an explanation for a surprising observation.

If I understand this correctly, Mr. Awbrey is suggesting that Mr. Brad is too far removed from the realities of WP article-editing to fully understand how bad it can be for people with knowledge of a given subject to deal with the cluelessness and general interference than occurs on a fairly regular basis...?

That may be, but in Mr. Brad's defense, I've looked at his editing history without the benefit of a statistics generator, and IMO he's actually more like me, just on a different website. It isn't just that he uses the Preview button - he clearly tries to fully prepare articles in advance of their initial posting. That can indicate any number of things - meticulousness, mental organization, and most commonly of all, an attempt to avoid unwanted attention, particularly from people who might challenge the article's content or try to have it deleted. It's almost the opposite of the more attention-seeking narcissistic tendency to create new articles in as many edits as possible.

For example, take this relatively early-in-career stub: J. Daniel Mahoney (T-H-L-K-D). The initial edit is here, with all links and such already in place. After that, NYB makes only one edit to the article, to add a "source" template.

OTOH, most of Mr. Brad's newly-created articles have been about various Federal judges, so there isn't a lot of variety in the stubs - they all follow a fairly similar format. That makes it a little easier to obtain a low ratio of edits to newly-created articles.

Unfortunately, on Wikipedia it's difficult to determine user motivation unless that ratio is very low - I suspect that many non-narcissistic people deliberately use more edits to post a new article than they would otherwise need or want, merely because they don't want to be left in the dust by the edit-countitis sufferers, and they can see that few people really look at the details.

[Jon Awbrey]

For example, take this relatively early-in-career stub: J. Daniel Mahoney (T-H-L-K-D). The initial edit is here, with all links and such already in place. After that, NYB makes only one edit to the article, to add a "source" template.

Perfect Illustration of what I'm talking about

Here is the entire 3 year edit history of the article, which remains a stub to this day.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to find yourself slimmed, er, slammed up against the wall by the Cabal in the neighborhood of that kind of turf — we all know better than that — but it's nowhere near as likely as working on Pseudoscience (T-H-L-K-D), or Sigmund Freud (T-H-L-K-D), or Truth (T-H-L-K-D), or even Charles Sanders Peirce (T-H-L-K-D), if that is where they or their minions stalk you back to.

Do you really think I put over 400 edits into an article like Charles Sanders Peirce out of narcissism?

Give me a break …

Jon Awbrey