netmouse | Wikipedia Task Force: Reader Conversion

The procedure for discussion on Wikipedia is completely unclear, and I say that as somebody who has been editing articles for years. It must be completely invisible to newcomers, they probably don't even have a clue how to enter in.

Or, to put it another way, are we supposed to just start editing your list?

Gack; and it wants me to create a THIRD username/password pair for what is, to me, "the same thing"? And I think it said the username I use on Wikipedia isn't even a valid one at Wikimedia.

Hee. That right there is a wonderful point. When I invited people to discuss, my assumption was that people would come to the user page, click on the "Discussion" tab, either join or start a new topic, and write their comments in some sort of hierarchical (indented) list.

I have seen this problem come already in one of the other pages, where discussion is a mix of numbered topics and bulleted lists and comments that are just indented without numbers or bullets.

It gave me the same issue with not being able to use my wikimedia username even though it says you should be able to. You'd think they'd have those sorts of details smoothed out by now. After all, they've had some practice!

The discussion tab gets me a page strangely different from the page you linked to, starting with a welcome post that seems to be from somebody else. All confusing!

And I've been somewhat active at Wikipedia for quite a long time; I think longer than you (I also think less active). I'm not a complete stranger. (In fact the time may be part of why I get confused so easily, they change things out from under me.)

If you are going to add social interactions to wikipedia, you might suggest a reputation system like stackoverflow.com has for editing entries.

Huh, unification seems to have worked for me, and I *can* log in with that username to the strategy discussion you link. Without even waiting more than a few seconds (I don't mean it failed and when I waited seconds longer it worked; it worked right away, and I didn't delay so it was only seconds later). So that part at least is working for me.

the couple times I have tried to contribute anything to Wikipedia, it was met with such incredibly nasty attitude, that I never went back.

I was an interested editor when Wikipedia first started up, but after the third or fourth time my extensively researched pages were dumped for some fanboy's screed I just stopped trying.

Now years have passed, it has no doubt vastly improved, and I really need to be doing my grad school work right now. i figure I'll check in with Wikipedia again next summer.

Can you clarify? What do you mean by "it was met with such incredibly nasty attitude"?

Do you remember which pages you tried to contribute (to)?

Do you mean your edits were reversed, or re-edited?

Did people make nasty comments on the article discussion page, or on your user talk page, or both?

I suspect that adding social interactions of that sort would be counter to what wikipedia seeks to be.

Thing is, anyone can do that sort of "dumping", and it's also easy to un-dump. I've occasionally checked back on pages I edited in the past, and restored my work when I thought it was pointlessly damaged or replaced. People who care enough to come back and engage with that, often have something useful to contribute.

Did you actually have the very same page consistently destroyed? Or do you mean that this happened for several different pages, and you didn't restore your work?

I suspect it has improved, but I think this is a really core comment. The most highly rated survey response for why people edit wikipedia (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation/Drivers_of_participation) is that they 'like the idea of sharing knowledge and want to contribute to it'. Learning that your contributions will not last seriously undermines that motivation.

(and yes I know they averaged together ratings on a subjective scale, which is statistically a horribly wrong thing to do. I sigh.)

Two reasons:

1) The process is fairly opaque to me. I don't really know how to start; people say it's easy, but from what I see on my remote viewpoint is that there's actually a lot of political stuff (Home on the Strange had a web page, then got deleteamated for "not being of interest," despite the fact that it had like 30,000 daily visitors), so why bother?

2) I'm never clear where the lines are drawn, and anything I'm interested in, I'm involved in. I know that making my own Wikipedia entry is wrong (not that I would), but I'd also feel uncomfortable editing, say, the Clarion page because I'm involved with that. Or Kelly Link, because I know her. In short, there's some fuzzy line between "my own self-interest" and "the public good," and I'm not sure where to draw that. But the places I'd be most likely to know enough to edit are the ones where I'm not sure if I'm ego-editing.

There's a real problem with admin attitude. It's nearly always the case, when I've seen it happening, that the admin is relatively ignorant in the area of the article compared to the contributor he's arguing with. But they puff themselves up and try to make themselves look big. Since, on Wikipedia, they ARE big, bigger than me, there's usually nothing I can do about them, so I go away. Admins should be trying to help people make the pages better. Having to delete something is a *failure* for Wikipedia.

I have gotten the feeling that if you're not part of the secret cabal, then any changes you make will just get dumped. Doesn't matter how useful or not. Or, maybe labeled as irrelevant and not worth having in wikipedia, then dumped.

Both really. The main page I was struggling with was never just "dumped", but would be substantially re-written, often with many errors. At first I tried to incorporate whatever it was they were trying to get in there, at least the parts that were correct. But then two days later the page would have changed yet again in yet another manner.

And it was only a write-up about a manga title, not something critical I felt the need to fight for.

I also saw a lot of other people's work voted out as Not Notable, almost always by people who openly admitted that it must not be notable because they personally hadn't encountered it before.

Big Sigh. And more useful things to put energy into.

I don't consider myself an expert, generally speaking - I suppose I could go trolling video-related web pages, but my skill-set is very well represented, I think. Essentially, I would have to go looking for something specific that I know more about than most people, such as something local.

And at that point, when I'm trying to hunt down anything I might have unique knowledge of, it starts to sound more like a chore, y'know?

First was a private conversation some time ago with an admin about proposed changes to the childbirth article. He was very clearly of the mind that unless it was put out by the ACOG, it was bunk. It's been a few years, so I'd mostly forgotten it.

Second was trying to help with a page for a webcomic that was also published by Image Comics, and then nominated for an Eisner in its first year. Was shot down (twice) by the admins as being a 'vanity' entry, and the comic not being notable enough, along with some other snark. One other fan involved in the process was told 'quit trying to post that crap comic'. This despite the fact that the authors have another entry for one of their published print comics.

The other bit is that when I asked for technical help, just trying to figure out how the whole edit-a-wiki thing worked, I was treated like I was an idiot. Yea, I had RTFM... for me, getting hands-on help and clarification makes new things easier to learn.

Yep. Observing that if you care enough to do the work you also need to care enough to constantly monitor and correct any erroneous changes.
It just wasn't worth it at the time. And now I'm busy.

That was my impression: what counted was not how much time you spent researching the actual subject, but how much time you spent maintaining the page (and learning the ropes and gaming of Wikipedia, and perhaps social networking with the relevant clique).

It was discouraging to see subject matter cut because someone (who obviously knew less about the subject as well as less about English grammar) thought it made the article too long. I thought the principal of Wikipedia was that links could be given to anything relevant.

It made this article (on C. S. Lewis iirc) seem like the preserve of a clique, and an immature clique at that. This was discussed on alt.books.cs-lewis (while that lived) and the consensus was to stay away, not waste time adding material that would disappear or become distorted.

My experience of Wikipedia as a community has been pretty negative.

Example 1) A friend of mine was an editor, was blocked in error in July 2007, and it seemed absurdly difficult to unblock him - let alone for anyone at Wikipedia to take responsibility for the mistake or to apologise. See this affair chronicled at these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive276#User:Gerry_Lynch_Unfairly_blocked_as_a_sockpuppet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alison/Archive_12#Gerry_Lynch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gerry_Lynch#Unblock

It seemed to Gerry (and it seems to me) that if he and I had not flagged up this on our respective blogs, and got friends to directly lobby the admin involved, his block would have been allowed to stand. (And one person who tried challenging the block on Gerry was then himself blocked, which is appalling.) As it is he is discouraged from contributing as he once did, and I am discouraged from doing much at all.

http://sammymorse.livejournal.com/tag/wikipedia
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/905163.html
http://matgb.livejournal.com/222634.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009200.html

Example 2) This is rather more minor but much more personal to me. Back in January 2008 I created a page about my ancestor Sir Nicholas White - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_White - who was a moderately well-known political figure in 16th-century Ireland. I was dismayed to get a comment a few months later on a livejournal post on a completely different topic as follows:

Do you think you can make your way towards supplying sources for Nicholas White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_White), specifically the ones you were working from when you created the article? This stuff is supposed to be verifiable, in case you've missed the last more-than-half-a-decade's worth of policy development.

No "thank you for your contribution to Wikipedia", just, as a subsequent commenter put it, an "insultingly offhand and demanding" comment which very effectively vandalises my commentary on the quality of St Mark's written prose. Why did this anonymous person not email me, or comment on my user page? Is it wikipedia policy to vandalise newbie users' blogs if they don't keep every rule? Because that is what I felt had happened.

Well, bugger that. I shall create content where I know it is valued and useful, which is clearly not Wikipedia.

Your list of points is very good. I completely agree that "conventions are non-obvious"; I also agree that it is a problem that if your own wikipedia page is wrong, you can't change it yourself or even put in an official request to have it changed, you have to find a friend who knows their way around Wikipedia and isn't obviously linked to you, which is an absurd way of having to game the system. But very simply, there is no openness, no obvious way into the system, no helpdesk. Wikipedia appears to cater for experienced Wikipedians without very much interest in increasing their number - indeed, the two examples I gave above actually look like attempts to intimidate the faint-hearted, and frankly whether or not that was the intention it was successful for both me and Gerry.

Yes, there is no way I am going to try and work out how to contribute to the discussion on that page; I will stick with a threading format that I can understand!!!

It's point 1) for me too. There was a period a few years ago where one or two editors had targeted webcomics as an area that needed tidying up. They were deleting as non-notable webcomics which had higher reader numbers than many US newspapers, and which the creators were making a living from.

No amount of rallying from the readers would persuade these editors not to delete these entries.

I still occasionally tweek errors in articles, but don't normally bother.

For instance in Time of Eve, it states that couple of things happened, when they are only _implied_ to have happened. A big difference in a show where the main premis is about the characters concealing things. But I can't be bothered to edit it, as there's every chance it'll be decided it's non-notable and disappear soon anyway.

Another option not listed (that I can see):

I don't take Wikipedia seriously.

Sure, I do use it from time to time, but I'd never use it as a serious citation and would always double-check "facts" on an entry with another couple sources.

It seems the most under-represented group is "people who actually know what they're talking about and care more about the subject than about scoring points."

I don't consider myself to be expert enough on a large variety of topics. Where I do think to make a contribution, generally someone else has made it first.

As others have mentioned, the interfaces, both technical and social, are not of the friendliest.

A couple of examples:
At a very basic level, if one clicks on the link to edit a Wikipedia article, one is usually confronted with a mass of wiki mark-up. for the uninitiated, this, in itself, is sufficiently daunting to have a good chance of scaring one away. The same applies to discussion. In addition, for discussion pages, one must understand that the discussion page is a wiki, itself. This is not necessarily obvious even to someone who already uses the web; it is not the usual interface for providing content.

I have not contributed to Wikipedia at all, even to fix obvious typos. I have read quite a few history and discussion pages for Wikipedia articles. Much there often seems to be expressed in such a way as to lead me to doubt intent toward cooperation.

Interesting that you should be bringing this up today. It was only a Tuesday that I became curious about what hacking might be happening using Wikipedia. I searched on just those terms and came up with a bunch of articles such as this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia. It seems that there is a certain justifiable paranoia, though that is no excuse for unpleasantness as a policy or even as a common response when dealing with newbies.

I will, however, plug another on-line, volunteer cause: Distributed Proofreaders (www.pgdp.net). I did a bunch of work for them early on (about 2000-2001). It's fun nit-picking, if you like that sort of stuff and I think that the cause is good. I should really get back to doing more of that.

Do you remember one or two examples of which webcomics got deleted?

It goes back through 2005, and 2006, but the biggest fuss I recall was in 2007.

The attempt to delete one of the longest standing webcomic hosting projects, Keenspot, was particularly daft.

Notability is a cultural value judgment. Some subcultures are welcomed on wikipedia and considered notable while others are not. It feels arbitrary and unsafe.
I recommend you use "uncomfortable", "unwelcome", or "exclusionary" when that is what you mean. Over-use of "unsafe" frames a problem of etiquette and diplomacy as if it were a moralized issue of injury, and makes the statement hyperbolic.
People do not want to invest time in an article only to have it deleted because a band of young male editors don't appreciate it.
There is definitely a problem with 14-year old guys. This is why Metafilter is so great. The $5 one-time fee, and one week before being allowed to post or comment, is all the barrier to entry a community needs.

That having been said, I would still stop contributing if women or the elderly unjustifiably deleted my work. Sometimes I've posted to Metafilter and it was deleted for reasons that I understood better afterwards. But if it happened for reasons I disagreed with, I'd just stop attempting to contribute. Wikipedia needs standards that they can justify to a broad range of people. But there will always be a spectrum outside that range who will never contribute for this reason.

Interesting. Thanks for the links.

Because editing Wikipedia gives the appearance of being A Way Of Life, rather than Just A Goddamn Hobby.

As a smaller matter, I don't understand the entire philosophy of looking for entries to delete. If an entry is totally wrong or useless, sure, delete it. If it's 100% pure vanity, sure, delete it.

But otherwise, what's the point in deleting entries that are about minor subjects? Is Wikipedia going to run out of room?

That a lot of time seems to be wasted on arguments about what constitutes "too minor" is a canary to me indicated that people waste too much time on pointless arguments. Which is what most of wikipedia involvement looks to consist of.

If it were just a matter of adding good information, relatively seamlessly and transparently, rather than giving the appearance of having to take a combination of grad course and fraternity initiation in order to understand the arcane rituals, and then devote hours per week to upkeep on one's pet articles, I could see spending a little time on Wikipedia.

Though my other big reason not to is avoidance of more timesuck. But the overall issue is that the timesuck seems vastly disproportional to any ultimate benefit.

Maybe my perception is completely out of whack with reality since it is, to be sure, second-hand.

You're right about the markup. It's the templates and all the special things, which cluster at the start of the article. I've done web development professionally, and I'm self-taught in that and computer software, and I've been doing computer software for 40 years, which is to say I'm used to diving in and learning stuff and I'm not easily intimidated. And Wikipedia still looks like kind of a mess at the "looking at start of article" level.

(The templates and such are used for a reason, and they're a pretty decent mechanism for what they do, so I don't have a really good solution here. Maybe better tutorials? Or more loud assurances that mucking that stuff up a little bit isn't that serious a thing.)

That's an excellent thought. If there were an announcement line at the top of each editing page (preferably in an unusual colour) telling people that, no matter what they do, the version that they saw when they clicked the "edit this page" link can be recovered in about 15 seconds, it would likely go a long way toward alleviating newbie hesitancy. It would probably annoy the experienced users and would probably come to annoy the very people who needed it in the first place but that's a risk of moving the balance in favour of friendliness toward people who otherwise might not use or help the resource.

well, and the technology could very well be capable of discerning that a user is a first-time editor and just show that message if your IP or user ID has not previously edited wikipedia.

There are a number of things it might be good to show in a "so this is your first time editing?" message.

Thanks for the comments. I clarified my language a bit.

I do think that people feel injured when their work is destroyed. Not in a "moralized" sense, but simply in the sense of having experienced a loss and also perhaps an insult.

It's certainly been a loss of time. As were apparently the comments I made here yesterday using Anonymous instead of logging in. There's an option for Disabling Anon if you don't want them, rather than letting them be added then never appear.

Well, to be charitable, maybe no one has had time to unscreen them yet?

I had read them, but failed to note that they were screened and required action. People very rarely make anonymous comments on this journal, so I've not built up a standard habit with regard to making sure they are unscreened. Sorry about that.

(Thanks for bringing it to my attention.)

I'm not sure this forwards the discussion, but here's another example of why Wikipedia isn't attracting the high quality of input it wants: even people who aren't using the page feel insulted and belittled by the attitudes they encounter from the current admin.

that's exactly what happened with PX!, and that was in '08. The PX forums are gone now, so I can't dig up dates.

Wikipedia Task Force: Reader Conversion

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