This may infuriate the “Don’t discuss Wikipedia at all” party and may be send instantly to the Annex, but I’ll post it anyway. There is a proposed article for the Signpost, draft here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wik...articles_debate . It is interesting: the gist is that there have been very few good featured articles since 2008. They are all about hurricanes and US roads and obscure insects. But donors give money to Wikipedia because they they want a better Wikipedia for readers, not editors. Why is Wikipedia incentivising the high production of low importance articles and discouraging the opposite?

This has kicked off a terrible row. The editor proposed to run the story http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=462131614 and there is a furious argument on his talk page. I’m not sure of the politics, but I think the FA crew don’t like the article, for obvious reasons, and are trying to have it pulled. On the other side are the WMF crew suggesting that the FA process be opened up.

This problem would be solved in a real business by having a model with some sort of marketing strategy. Decide what the target audience should be, decide what articles appeal to that audience, and get together a team of people that can write these. Keeping the staff happy (not ‘the community’) would be important, but secondary, and balancing these often opposing forces is the art of good management. But Wikipedia doesn’t have this. As one commenter says “there's nothing that the Foundation or any Wikipedian has to offer that can mechanistically determine which FAs will be written. The motivators are collaboration, reputation and pride of accomplishment.”

Just as a note, I had 12 FAs and 11 of them were on the mainpage. The only one not on the mainpage so far has been Nicolo Giraud, which is probably for the best.

Why did I mention that? Raul chose them on the mainpage, and he chooses pages based on what he considers interesting, encyclopedic, and overlooked. This both shows that my articles are (in Raul's mind) important but also not common among the FAs. (PS, I was banned for all of those mainpage displays except for 2. Raul knows that and didn't care. Many people who aren't ban beg to have their articles on the mainpage are ignored.)

Out of interest I wonder why the article on Narcissism is not an FA?

Some of this has been discussed in the threads on FAs elsewhere, but given who has created this thread, there is a question of what the purpose of the Wikimedia project is. Is it

a) a charitable project aiming to make knowledge available online (and perhaps on a ROM medium) for free to those who would not otherwise be able to access it,

or

b) a corporation aiming to dominate the marketplace in provided information online,

or

c) a chance for all sorts of people, especially the monarch, a chance to massage their egos.

The argument at FA has brought into focus aspects of c. However many of those involved in Wikimedia are focused on b.

In his evidence to the The Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions of the UK parliament (discussed in the Fae thread) Ashley van Haeften mentions at least twice that Wikipedia is a top-6 site. It seemed more likely marketing than something that addressed the committee's purpose except to say that an article in Wikipedia might do mroe to damage someone's privacy than one on most other sites.

Similarly, at one of the Wikimeets I attended, someone was expressing regret that the English Wikipedia was no longer the largest user-generated online encyclopedia. The POV issues that of neccessity apply to a project based in the PRC make it far from ideal that this was the encyclopedia that overtook Wikipedia. But I remember thinking that the person expressing the regret was overidentified with Wikimedia.

Sue Gardner has spoken about the problems Wikimedia has in penetrating much of the non-Western world as represented by which language versions are flourishing and which are not. But again why does this matter?

Now, what has this to do with vital articles? The answer is that if your main purpose is to spread access to knowledge, then the priority should be to provide knowledge that is not available elsewhere. And this means that the so-called vital articles may be the ones where it is most important that there is information easilly available somehow. (That is if the list is well-selected.) But, if someone else has already provided that information, it is not vital that Wikipedia does so.

When there is a major disaster - where the term "vital" genuinely applies - the major UK charities do not run campaigns going "We have saved more starving children than anyone else." Instead they jointly campaign usign the Disasters Emergency Committee. The view of the Wikimedia empire, however, is that they have to do it. We are buying inito the vision of Wales and his lackeys if we accept the notion of vital articles as they provide it. If Citizendium or Google Knol or anything which actually still resists the Wikipedia steamroller covers a topic well, then a truly charitable organisation would direct readers to that.

So, for me, the most valuable articles on Wikipedia are those that are not well-covered for free elsewhere on the internet. In particular, these are ones which may be covered in books or in subscription sources such as academic journals which can be digested for a broader audience.

...which is shitloads of animal breeds (covered very poorly), insects, fungi, plants etc.....

I still can't get my head around who would go and look up "history" or "geography" as a generic term.....



'cos I didn't write it

High school seniors who are trying to decide what they might choose in college as their major subject. See, that wasn't so difficult, was it? WR to the rescue, once again.

The dog breed articles that I have spent the most time looking at seem to veer between "All [insert breed here] will bite the head off anyone who so much as looks at them" and "All [insert breed h ere] are sweet and well behaved dogs and make ideal babysitters".

As for your point, these may be within the range, (though I suspect that many are covered well elsewhere by special interest groups,) but a lot of art and literature is also included. As Ottava has been boasting above, I looked at his Wikipedia user page and picked an article on a subject I had never heard of Easter Holidays. I can't immediately find a better online discussion of the poem though other sites provide the full text.

(link fixed per OR comment below)

Try Easter Holidays (plural and common mistake).

Sadly, I was never able to finish that page - I use to do huge swaths then come back and slowly build them to GA then build the really important ones to FA. I still have about 35 different books on my shelf dealing with Coleridge that weren't used for information on that poem (not all of them are there but yeah).

The problem is that those like Jimbo don't care enough to let me build them. I was able to import over 3 pages through shaming the community (and with Sj's and Iridescent's help). I had 6 other pages that were improved by admin moving over some content to already built pages but that was mostly done in secret.

Who else is going to work in the area with a background in it? Awadewit? She is only there for political/feminist stuff and mostly doesn't have a well balanced or informed background when she works on her pages. Her pages contain a very skewed and minor source on the summary because she refused to talk about Percy Shelley, whose poetic additions are the only reason why people ever cared about those plays. Note how the poems by Shelley and his contribution are skimmed over, whereas there are tons of sources on them. Her purpose is not to flesh out a literature article but try and make it seem that women were as important or more important than men in the past.

And that gets in the way of Wikimedia's charitable aim. There are some people who, for whatever reason, cannot function within the community as currently constituted. Some of these are trolls, self-publicists or POV-pushers and banned can mean banned for them. However, some of them create high quality content and there should be a way to import high quality material. If providing you with a sandpit and a button to press which flags up a message saying "it's ready now" produces a way for good articles to be produced and imported to Wikipedia and that cuts out all the interpersonal and provides you with at least the satisfaction that your work is getting to be seen by readers, then fine.

If the godking does not like it, then the godking should be turned into a constitutional monarch and everyone can get on with ignoring him. Maybe a black box means of communication can be set up GA and FA assessment where you send emails which are filtered down to "Ottava agrees with this suggestion." "Ottava points out that Bloggs (2005) says "(verbatim quote)" might help

(Explicit examples such as "Larkin (1971) says 'fuck you'" can be filtered out by the black box.)




I don't want to get into whose fault problems between you two were. I don't have the knowledge or access to relevant texts to match either of you. I doubt that there are free resources better than what she has produced on Wollstonecraft. I doubt that there are free resources better than GAs that you have written on less well-known poems.

Except that I have done things just like that. When To Autumn was rewritten to have a lot of original research, plagiarism, etc., I did that and it didn't go anywhere. When Kubla Khan just was, I pointed out all the original research and misusing sources, and there were 3 important reverts but the guy persisted and people stopped caring. It is how Wikipedia fails.

Now someone is adding all sorts of BS to the Samuel Johnson page, which is heavily watched but after SandyGeorgia's original revert no one cares.




My point was that the poems were actually more well known but didn't fit the feminist agenda. That isn't good for literature, especially when students are going through a whole author's set of poems and having to write papers on them. My whole idea was to hopefully provide a primer for such papers.





Here is another one where a guy completely trashes We Are Seven. Very important poem but no one cares about upholding the policies against these trolls. He removes highly important sources, adds in gibberish, etc. He even takes the summaries, which are sourced to important critics, and replaces them with his wrong original research or statements that aren't reflected in the actual sources.

Oh shit...

OR has found someone who's willing to argue with him.

I think I've seen this before...

How does one embed the Twilight Zone theme in a thread? (just asking...)


edited to remove all the "quoted" stuff the "reply" button puts in by default - I'll watch out for that in future...

Right. So, yes, the policies get in the way of the charitable aim to provide knowledge. The thing is that you are probably more interested in the accuracy of these specific articles than any other volunteer.

If they paid me with some of their charity money, then I would be willing to work at maintaining articles by banned users who provide good content but if it's my spare time, then I'll be focussing on my own interests. And if they paid me, I'd probably be prevented from saying what I think of Jimbo.

Indeed, you should read the WMF "whistleblowers" policy, which basically says that if you blow the whistle in any way, or say anything the WMF deems detrimental about WMF or anything related without getting explicit management approval first, the WMF will fire you out of the nearest cannon with all due haste.

In the UK there are laws which supposedly protect whistleblowers. However, their effectiveness is questionable. Which reminds me. Given this sort of thing as an indication of the WMF as an employer and what I know of how bad various charities in the UK are as employers. My advice to any WMUK employee reading this is to join a trade union now so that you have access to their legal services when you need them.

It's amusing that so many Wikipedia editors don't understand why generic terms get more page-views than obscure articles about specific subjects. It's all a question of audience. An academic interest in specific topics is not the bread-and-butter of internet traffic. The ignorant rube who wonders what the hell the word "semiotics" means will google it and read the first few words in the Wikipedia article taking it as gospel. If you want to reach the masses, stick to articles about simple subjects and only edit the first paragraph or first sentence. There are some who realize this is the case and it's pretty easy to identify their accounts. Not all of them (or, actually, almost none of them) are on the up-and-up.

The deal is this. Not all editors can write FAs. Expert editors can write FAs. Expert editors are not experts in general subjects, but in specialized subjects. Thats what they write their FAs about.

For general topics like Philosophy, Language or History one of two things happen:

*Either everybody consider themselves experts in which case the article turns into a madhouse as all of these "experts" fight to determine who gets to write the article. Then we get articles that just degenerate or become stagnant.
*Or only one person is an expert, but since is actual expertise is in a tiny corner of the larger topic he writes alot about that and neglects the other parts he knows less about and we get skewed articles that treat the general topic from a peculiar angle.

The only way to get general articles to FA status is by make a collaboration between experts on all the relevant subtopics of the general topic. That requires someone to organize others which is what wikipedia is worst at - because it requires immense efforts and initiative. That is the short story on the vital articles.


I amk trying to do something like this for Language, wikipedia have a number of linguists specializing in different subfields. I have proposed an article structure and invited them to participat by writing a section on their particular area of expertise. One has already written the section I asked for, really well. One other went to the talkpage and wrote a long section of constructive critique, but did not edit the article, presumably assuming that I would rewrite it following his advice (as if I was an author and he was the peer reviewer, not as if I was an anthology editor and he was a contributor). The others didn't respond, and are generally absorbed with particular pet peeves of theirs.

Wikipedia is unable to do it because people like you with no reason to be on Wikipedia get friends to give you power and then you go around abusing it. You have actively chased experts off, broken up collaboration, dramatically rewrote rules and standards, and many abuses. Wikipedia wont ever work until everyone like you is utterly banned.