WMF and Community Changes Wishlist

[Midsize Jake]

Wikipedia can be fixed. And it's simple. Not easy. But simple.

It really doesn't matter if the solutions are easy, hard, simple, or complicated. If the lunatics who are running the asylum are the ones implementing the solution, you still end up with an asylum full of lunatics who will fail to implement it correctly, if they even try. And "accuracy" will still be the distraction that keeps people outside the walls from seeing it.

Also, don't forget the common rejoinder to these kinds of arguments: Printed references produced by professional researchers and academics contain inaccuracies too. Moreover, at least with Wikipedia you can fix the inaccuracies as soon as you spot them, etc. (just as easily as you can insert them, I might add). It's related to the Perfect Solution Fallacy; it's not quite the same, but still an example of reflexive black-and-white thinking. In effect, they're saying that since traditional methodologies didn't produce perfection, there's no justification for adjusting their methodology to be more traditional. Never mind that this might produce a best-of-both-worlds approach that would get you closer to perfection than ever before - the fact remains that the traditional approach didn't yield perfection, therefore it's completely worthless. That's how these people think.

[HRIP7]

For those interested, you can follow the discussion on the Wikimedia-l mailing list here, with appearances by David Gerard, Erik Möller, Phoebe Ayers, Wil, and others.

[Vigilant]

Thyge Larson aka Sir48

https://twitter.com/Sir48
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruger:Sir48/engelsk

seems like kind of a pointless twat.

Take your negativism from this sanctuary...

Of course he's on the gravy train
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/01/pr ... wikipedia/

Edit: Surprise, surprise, surprise...spends a metric ass ton of time in IRC.

[wllm]

9. Ensure that readers can tell whether or not an article on a company or organisation has been edited by principals, employees or agents of that organisation. (This is actually a legal requirement in many countries.)

As noted elsewhere, there is a discussion here on Wales' talk page, where a user – apparently a doctor working for the Cochrane Collaboration (T-H-L) who has edited the related Wikipedia article – suggests that like certain academic journals, Wikipedia should have a section below each article noting each author's competing interests.

Unlike the weaker kinds of disclosure championed by the Wikimedia Foundation's legal department (statement on the user's user page, the article talk page or in the edit summary) in the wake of the Wiki-PR scandal, such a disclosure would be visible to readers.

This is another area where Wikipedia, which ostensibly prides itself on its transparency, in fact does everything to hide the truth from readers, for no good reason that I can discern. The practice of declaring competing interests to the reader is sensible and well established in academic journals.

In my opinion, Jimmy Wales' leadership is the single biggest obstacle to introducing a similar sensible scheme in Wikipedia. It seems to me that Wales has always been paranoid that if readers were to find out just how much of Wikipedia's content is written by conflict-of-interest editors, the public would no longer trust Wikipedia, or turn against it.

But this ignores the actual reality that has developed, and has been established for many, many years. Wikipedia's "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" slogan, along with its anonymity and user name policy (note that per current policy, English Wikipedia users picking company names as their user names are instantly blocked and told to register a user name that obscures the company connection), has always encouraged under-the-radar conflict-of-interest contributions, with the result that such contributions are all over Wikipedia.

If people read a Wikipedia article on a company or organisation that was written by employees or agents of that company or organisation (or indeed those of the company's competitors), they have a moral right to know.

Wales is mentally stuck in the year 2002 on this issue, and has his head firmly buried in the sand. His pigheaded resistance to being open, honest and transparent to readers about who writes Wikipedia – which I believe to be motivated by nothing other than fear about how it would impact his public image – has created a situation where much of Wikipedia content is in violation of astroturfing laws. It's a disgrace. To me, it's fraud, if not in the legal, then in the moral sense.

So, I've asked a few WMF people about Jimmy's current role in the organization. They've told me that beyond a huge amount of soft power in the Wikipedia community, he has a somewhat special, permanent seat on the Board of Trustees of the WMF. I've been told he has no more power than any other Director of the Board. To be clear, are you referring to his leadership through soft power, or is my understanding of his power in the org inaccurate? Keep in mind, I'm talking about now and going forward.

,Wil

[wllm]

Looks like our new friend "wllm" has managed to leave the party without being banned. Pity, that.

The reports of my bailing have been greatly exaggerated.

[EricBarbour]

For those interested, you can follow the discussion on the Wikimedia-l mailing list here, with appearances by David Gerard, Erik Möller, Phoebe Ayers, Wil, and others.

Osteopaths.
Perhaps we could ask the chiropractors and homeopaths what they think too.
- d.

As someone else pointed out, "osteopath" means completely different things in the US and UK. It is a legitimate medical specialty in the US.

mr Andreas Kolbe,
I would like to tell you, that your mailings here strike me as being
negative and unhelpful.
If you have any suggestions for improvement, please put them forward, since
this is an interesting topic.
The "undisciplined crowd of random people" is what the world comprises, and
a subset of those are trying their best to bring knowledge to the world and
appreciate any help you may provide to improve and measure quality.

Who the hell is that? Apparently he's Thyge Larsen, WP ombudsman and auditor of Wikimedia Danmark. One of the deadest Wikimedia chapters I've ever seen. Is he worried that Andreas will shut off the money spigot?

[Kelly Martin]

So, I've asked a few WMF people about Jimmy's current role in the organization. They've told me that beyond a huge amount of soft power in the Wikipedia community, he has a somewhat special, permanent seat on the Board of Trustees of the WMF. I've been told he has no more power than any other Director of the Board. To be clear, are you referring to his leadership through soft power, or is my understanding of his power in the org inaccurate?

Jimbo is worshipped almost as a god by many in the Wikipedia community. Within the English Wikipedia, he putatively holds absolute authority over the entire project, and views his role there as comparable to that of a constitutional monarch. (As an aside, Jimbo is obsessed with the English nobility and has long expressed a desire to own a castle of his very own.) Outside of the English Wikipedia, he is taken with various degrees of seriousness, but this matters fairly little since the English Wikipedia is where most of the real action takes place. His legal authority over the Foundation is basically as you describe, and he fairly rarely involves himself in WMF business, mostly because he can't be bothered. Because of the cult-like adoration that he enjoys, his musings, no matter how feckless, influence the Foundation indirectly; board members who buck Jimmy's agenda risk losing reelection, and fundraising obviously depends on keeping the community happy.

[wllm]

mr Andreas Kolbe,
I would like to tell you, that your mailings here strike me as being
negative and unhelpful.
If you have any suggestions for improvement, please put them forward, since
this is an interesting topic.
The "undisciplined crowd of random people" is what the world comprises, and
a subset of those are trying their best to bring knowledge to the world and
appreciate any help you may provide to improve and measure quality.

Who the hell is that? Apparently he's Thyge Larsen, WP ombudsman and auditor of Wikimedia Danmark. One of the deadest Wikimedia chapters I've ever seen. Is he worried that Andreas will shut off the money spigot?

I was thinking about replying to that asking him to give specific examples of negativity, but I then realized Andreas' arguments were standing up for themselves without anyone's help.

[Midsize Jake]

I was thinking about replying to that asking him to give specific examples of negativity, but I then realized Andreas' arguments were standing up for themselves without anyone's help.

It's a typical attitude. "Criticism is bad, so go away."

[EricBarbour]

So,

Used ironically I hope?.....

I've asked a few WMF people about Jimmy's current role in the organization. They've told me that beyond a huge amount of soft power in the Wikipedia community, he has a somewhat special, permanent seat on the Board of Trustees of the WMF. I've been told he has no more power than any other Director of the Board.

That is a load of crap, although his ability to pull "strings" has declined in recent years. He has developed some enemies within Wikimedia's messy power structure. Still, he has the passwords to the servers, and "special founder permissions" on all WMF projects that no one else has. He pulls his political tricks behind the scenes. (If you want to see some examples, don't bother looking on Wikipedia, usually any traces have been destroyed. I'd have to show you what little evidence exists in a PM or email. Also, virtually all of the early insiders absolutely refuse to discuss Jimbo's political power or past history openly, with Kelly Martin being one of the very few exceptions.)

[Kelly Martin]

That is a load of crap, although his ability to pull "strings" has declined in recent years. He has developed some enemies within Wikimedia's messy power structure. Still, he has the passwords to the servers, and "special founder permissions" on all WMF projects that no one else has. He pulls his political tricks behind the scenes. (If you want to see some examples, don't bother looking on Wikipedia, usually any traces have been destroyed. I'd have to show you what little evidence exists in a PM or email. Also, virtually all of the early insiders absolutely refuse to discuss Jimbo's political power or past history openly, with Kelly Martin being one of the very few exceptions.)

It should be noted that one of Jimbo's long-term political enemies is none other than Erik Möller. The political dynamics of Wikipedia/Wikimedia are insanely complicated; we haven't even begun to cover all the complicated interrelationships. For example, I'd say that on Commons, Möller is probably more powerful than Wales.

Also, Wales' "founder" permissions have been revoked on at least some projects (didn't he explicitly lose them on Commons?), although they may have been forced back in via SUL.

Also, I'm not an "early insider". I didn't arrive on Wikipedia until 2005, and I never made it into Wales' inner circle. At best I made it to the outermost of the inner circles, and wasn't there long at all.

Although I've never had it confirmed positively, I'm fairly certain that Wales considers me an enemy. This is because I published leaks from various Wikimedia internal mailing lists, leaks that reflected badly on Wales and on others. Wales has never forgiven me for not revealing the source of these leaks.

[Midsize Jake]

I've asked a few WMF people about Jimmy's current role in the organization. They've told me that beyond a huge amount of soft power in the Wikipedia community, he has a somewhat special, permanent seat on the Board of Trustees of the WMF. I've been told he has no more power than any other Director of the Board.

That is a load of crap, although his ability to pull "strings" has declined in recent years....

Actually, the nature of their response to the question should tell you quite a lot in itself. They say he's "just another board member." Note that they don't actually state flat-out (to Wil Sinclair, at least) that he's the frontman, the media face of the whole enterprise, and the #1 spokesman and proselytizer. As such he wields a great deal of "power" in ensuring that things don't happen if he doesn't want them to, even in the face of public approbation.

Now, if he ever actually did want something to happen, he'd have a problem, because he doesn't actually drive the bus. But that doesn't matter, see? The media has a short attention span. If a scandal or other complaint arises in the mainstream media, he promises that they're going to take care of it, the media reports that it will be taken care of, Jimbo and the WMF get the credit, and then nothing happens. The promise is forgotten. It happened with Pending Changes, Commons porn, the image filter, and about a dozen more things. (I know, I once promised to write a blog post about this and blew it off... sorry about that.)

[Anthonyhcole]

Check this out. link What odds will you give me on that flying?

From my experience, the odds are very poor to nonexistent.

So, um. Ten bucks at 100:1 then?

[Zoloft]

So,

Used ironically I hope?.....

Now, now, using inside jokes on newcomers is hazing.
(Greg Kohs discovered while listening to videos of WMF speeches that many of their top people began their speeches and replies with "So..." It grated on his ears.)

[Kelly Martin]

Wikipedia basically exists for drama. It feeds off it, it lives off it. Drama is the air that it breathes. The "encyclopedia" is simply a means to an end, and that end is drama. As our own Kelly Martin once (somewhat famously) said, "Nothing reduces drama in the long term at Wikipedia; Wikipedia is constructed so as to maximize drama. The Wikipedia system interprets the absence of drama as damage and routes around it."

I had forgotten I'd said that, but it does sound like something I'd say.

Note that I don't think that Wikipedia was deliberately designed this way; this is an epiphenomenal effect of multiple bad decisions in Wikipedia governance in the early years. Most of that blame falls on Jimmy Wales' head, although there are certainly others (Erik Moeller, The Cunctator, and several others) who contributed to the culture. But really the main driver of this dynamic is simple human nature. "Someone is wrong on the Internet" is what drives long-term Wikipedia participation.

I've checked, and actually the above-mentioned quote is not entirely correct. I did say "Nothing reduces drama in the long term at Wikipedia; Wikipedia is constructed so as to maximize drama". The last sentence, however, is not mine; credit for that goes to GlassBeadGame.

I've had some choice quotes on the topic of drama on Wikipedia as well but it is insanely hard to search Wikipedia for content written by a specific editor, and so finding them at this point is difficult.

[Kumioko]

I have to be honest, part of me is holding out hope for significant changes on the part of the WMF and their new leadership and I a trying to AGF. I know these things are going to take some time and certainly we have waited this long, we can wait little longer. However, I am personally so disgusted with the community and the project at the moment if I walked by and saw it on fire not only would I not piss on the flame to put it out, I would probably tackle anyone who tried because I am more interested in seeing the flames light up the night sky. We have all seen a lot of people come and go in the organizations and I see nothing and I know too much about the organization and its culture, to make me think anything is going to change.

[Silent Editor]

Quickly reinforcing my view that Risker aka Anne Clin is dumber than a bag of hammers.


I see Michael Maggs has a new variant of a "Give me sum fookin' money!" for a doomed software project...
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Technolog ... _Wikimedia

Risks

Ultimately, this project has the potential to deliver a sophisticated set of widely-used tools to the Wikimedia communities and beyond. However, the costs and risks will rise in proportion to our ambitions, and for that reason we think it sensible to start small and build capacity/sophistication over time, based on the actual needs and desires of the Wikimedia communities. Fortunately, the project should be perfectly amenable to that approach, which means we do not need to decide on a set of all-or-nothing targets now.

That said, even to start on the path will be a fairly major undertaking as it will require the chapter to ramp up its technical (IT) capabilities. At the very least, it is likely require a commitment to fund at least one technical project manager and one or more full-time programmers, either as employees or on a fairly long-term contract basis. It will require the chapter to change its mindset, and its technical ambitions, and start thinking of itself as an entity that is able to provide some elements of leadership on IT for the movement as a whole. On that basis the chapter may want to look at building a sufficient technical capability to run several higher-impact IT projects than it has attempted in the past (eg accessibility?) to ensure efficient use of programmer resources.

You mean WMUK is planning to move beyond its current model of jobs, WiResidencies, computers and thumb drives for its ex-trustees and sundry insiders, cakes for meetings and transport costs of SnoutInTheTrough and the all other hangers-on (plus a Welsh version of all that, of course)?

[Vigilant]

Wikipedia basically exists for drama. It feeds off it, it lives off it. Drama is the air that it breathes. The "encyclopedia" is simply a means to an end, and that end is drama. As our own Kelly Martin once (somewhat famously) said, "Nothing reduces drama in the long term at Wikipedia; Wikipedia is constructed so as to maximize drama. The Wikipedia system interprets the absence of drama as damage and routes around it."

I had forgotten I'd said that, but it does sound like something I'd say.

Note that I don't think that Wikipedia was deliberately designed this way; this is an epiphenomenal effect of multiple bad decisions in Wikipedia governance in the early years. Most of that blame falls on Jimmy Wales' head, although there are certainly others (Erik Moeller, The Cunctator, and several others) who contributed to the culture. But really the main driver of this dynamic is simple human nature. "Someone is wrong on the Internet" is what drives long-term Wikipedia participation.

I've checked, and actually the above-mentioned quote is not entirely correct. I did say "Nothing reduces drama in the long term at Wikipedia; Wikipedia is constructed so as to maximize drama". The last sentence, however, is not mine; credit for that goes to GlassBeadGame.

I've had some choice quotes on the topic of drama on Wikipedia as well but it is insanely hard to search Wikipedia for content written by a specific editor, and so finding them at this point is difficult.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... edirect=no

[Kumioko]

The ironic part of all these jobs the WMF is hiring Wikipedians for is that the people who are qualified for them won't touch them. That's why they have to recruit from the community. Unfortunately the majority of the folks in the community that are looking for jobs are out of work for a reason. Well lots of reasons, depending on which Wikipedian we are referring too, but generally most of them lack any sort of social skills offline that are necessary in a decent job. Many of the people who don't thrive well in Wikipedia, myself included are fairly successful in real life. Its almost a comedy.

[Anthonyhcole]

I have to be honest, part of me is holding out hope for significant changes on the part of the WMF and their new leadership and I a trying to AGF. I know these things are going to take some time and certainly we have waited this long, we can wait little longer. However, I am personally so disgusted with the community and the project at the moment if I walked by and saw it on fire not only would I not piss on the flame to put it out, I would probably tackle anyone who tried because I am more interested in seeing the flames light up the night sky. We have all seen a lot of people come and go in the organizations and I see nothing and I know too much about the organization and its culture, to make me think anything is going to change.

Mmm. I'm impressed by Wil's frankness and willingness to listen, and am allowing a glimmer of hope to faintly twinkle.

[wllm]

Actually, the nature of their response to the question should tell you quite a lot in itself. They say he's "just another board member." Note that they don't actually state flat-out (to Wil Sinclair, at least) that he's the frontman, the media face of the whole enterprise, and the #1 spokesman and proselytizer. As such he wields a great deal of "power" in ensuring that things don't happen if he doesn't want them to, even in the face of public approbation.

Now, if he ever actually did want something to happen, he'd have a problem, because he doesn't actually drive the bus. But that doesn't matter, see? The media has a short attention span. If a scandal or other complaint arises in the mainstream media, he promises that they're going to take care of it, the media reports that it will be taken care of, Jimbo and the WMF get the credit, and then nothing happens. The promise is forgotten. It happened with Pending Changes, Commons porn, the image filter, and about a dozen more things. (I know, I once promised to write a blog post about this and blew it off... sorry about that.)

Actually, they all have mentioned that he's the face of Wikipedia- as much as it has any face. I think we can count that as soft power. "Just another board member" was referring to the weight of his vote in making decisions within the governing structures of the WMF, I believe. That it's semi-permanent is not always mentioned. Ultimately, I think it comes down to two questions: what powers does he have at WMF and what powers does he have in the Wikipedia community and on Wikipedia itself. It seems that, while his hard powers have been declining over the years in the Wikipedia-verse, he still has a lot. Unless one counts indirect power, his impact on decisions at WMF really comes down to one vote on the board. Does anyone think there's more to it than this?

BTW, I saw some news reports about that blog post a while back. Whatever happened to that?

,Wil

[Peter Damian]

I have to be honest, part of me is holding out hope for significant changes on the part of the WMF and their new leadership and I a trying to AGF. I know these things are going to take some time and certainly we have waited this long, we can wait little longer. However, I am personally so disgusted with the community and the project at the moment if I walked by and saw it on fire not only would I not piss on the flame to put it out, I would probably tackle anyone who tried because I am more interested in seeing the flames light up the night sky. We have all seen a lot of people come and go in the organizations and I see nothing and I know too much about the organization and its culture, to make me think anything is going to change.

Mmm. I'm impressed by Wil's frankness and willingness to listen, and am allowing a glimmer of hope to faintly twinkle.

Also.

[Peter Damian]

You'd think they'd never heard of academic peer review.

But that’s the thing, the Wikipedia myth I keep banging on about. What Wikipedia mean when they introduced it in January 2001? Not a piece of software. Rather, (a) a system in which there was no formal peer review, i.e. a nominated specialist author and a nominated specialist reviewer and (b) no notion of what is the ‘final version’. The idea is that authors and reviewers are the same bunch of people. Errors can be spotted by anyone, and corrected, and some quasi-Darwinian process of survival of the truth will ensure that falsehood is eliminated.

Think about that idea. It’s powerful and intriguing. It means you don’t need experts or people who set themselves above the common herd. It means you can afford to be hostile to experts. It’s a powerful idea, and it it is deeply embedded in the Wikipedian psyche.

So taking the helm of the WMF is not like taking control of a commercial organisation, where there probably aren’t that many true believers, passionately devoted to a cause, and where it is comparatively easy to effect change if you can persuade people that change will fill the cash registers.

It’s more like being elected the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Pope. Imagine if church leaders were recruited from outside and that they hired the CEO of a multinational company to head up the Catholic Church. “Ah yes there are some fundamental changes we need to implement here. I’ve been looking at the facts closely and this God person, well, there’s no such thing. We need to change our mission statement”.

[HRIP7]

So, I've asked a few WMF people about Jimmy's current role in the organization. They've told me that beyond a huge amount of soft power in the Wikipedia community, he has a somewhat special, permanent seat on the Board of Trustees of the WMF. I've been told he has no more power than any other Director of the Board. To be clear, are you referring to his leadership through soft power, or is my understanding of his power in the org inaccurate? Keep in mind, I'm talking about now and going forward.

,Wil

What you say is correct, and I was referring to what you call soft power. He no longer has the power to overrule the board, or overrule the community. He knows it, too, and after a few spectacular defeats now avoids direct confrontation. But when he makes statements to the media, for example, he models a certain kind of thinking, and that continues to remain very influential. Sociologically speaking, he falls into the bracket of a charismatic leader.

The difference is striking when you go to some of the foreign-language Wikipedias, where his influence is absent.

[Peter Damian]

Re quality studies.

Erik Moeller erik at wikimedia.org Wed May 7 23:17:27 UTC 2014

We commissioned one: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... ia_entries

Haha. That’s the Oxford study mentioned here

One of my recent posts on the unreliability of Wikipedia caught the eye of Edward Buckner, a medievalist, who shared with me a paper he has written about deficiencies in an Oxford University study of the reliability of Wikipedia.

You may be aware of a study in 2005 by the journal Nature that found Wikipedia to be, on the whole, about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. This study is what I take to be the frequently repeated claim by Wikipediasts that the two references are equally reliable, even though Britannica challenged the validity of the study.

A subsequent study bty Epic, an e-learning company, and Oxford University was published in 2012, and it is this study that Dr. Buckner addresses, particularly on the reliability of the Wikipedia articles on Thomas Aquinas and Anselm of Canterbury.

Dr. Buckner's paper, "Critique of the Epic/Oxford University pilot study into the comparative accuracy and quality of Wikipedia," catches some things that ther Epic/Oxford project did not: "It failed to pick up that the article ‘Anselm’ was one of the many articles in Wikipedia plagiarised from the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica in 2005. Thus, while it was meant to compare a ‘new media’ user-generated reference work with a ‘traditional’ reference work produced by selected paid expert advisors and editors, it was to a significant extent comparing an obsolete version of a traditional reference work with the modern version."

But that is not all: "More seriously, the study also failed to spot at least nine serious errors introduced by Wikipedia editors into the plagiarised section. One of the errors was the result of serious vandalism that has affected many articles in Wikipedia, still not cleared up."

Read more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/langua ... z316sal7L4

[Kelly Martin]

Actually, they all have mentioned that he's the face of Wikipedia- as much as it has any face. I think we can count that as soft power. "Just another board member" was referring to the weight of his vote in making decisions within the governing structures of the WMF, I believe. That it's semi-permanent is not always mentioned. Ultimately, I think it comes down to two questions: what powers does he have at WMF and what powers does he have in the Wikipedia community and on Wikipedia itself. It seems that, while his hard powers have been declining over the years in the Wikipedia-verse, he still has a lot. Unless one counts indirect power, his impact on decisions at WMF really comes down to one vote on the board. Does anyone think there's more to it than this?

It's hard for us to judge what power he has within the WMF simply because the WMF is fairly nontransparent as to what goes on within its Board. On several occasions, Jimbo has had Board minutes amended after-the-fact to "correct" him being on the wrong side of history, and in general we don't trust the Board's published minutes to reflect any semblance of what actually happened in Board meetings.

I think the most telling degree to which Jimbo has power within the WMF would relate to the WMF's handling of the Sarah Stierch and Ryan Kaldari incidents. Early on in the kerfuffle around Sarah Stierch getting caught in conflict-of-interest editing, Jimbo said, on his talk page, that she wasn't an employee of the WMF. Of course, she actually was an employee (Jimbo's ignorant assertion notwithstanding), so I predicted at the time that she would be fired to make the record conform with the Founder's statement. Not only was she in fact fired, but it has been suggested that she wasn't really an employee, but actually some sort of nonemployee contractor, a theory that does not conform with the evidence, but does conform with the Founder. Her Wikipedia biography was promptly scrubbed to remove mention of her affiliation with Wikimedia (and then deleted a few weeks later, which means I cannot link you to the scrubbing), and her LinkedIn profile no longer mentions her affiliation with Wikimedia either. We assume she received a settlement of some sort from the WMF.

Meanwhile, when Ryan Kaldari got in hot water for breaking a number of Wikipedia rules, Jimbo took the position on his talk page that by voluntarily resigning his Wikipedia adminship, Kaldari had suffered enough consequences for his actions. So far as we know, the WMF took no disciplinary action against Kaldari.

In both cases, what amount to passing, uninformed comments by Jimmy Wales appear to have determined the WMF's business operations. It's clear that many people, both in Wikipedia and the WMF, hang on every last word he says; his influence is far greater than the formal description that has been given to you.

Of course, people do buck Wales all the time, both overtly and covertly, but the decision to do so is not one that is undertaken lightly. The consequences of disloyalty can be severe (I wish I could find a copy of the email he sent out when he initiated a loyalty purge on the WMF's internal mailing lists; it clearly illustrated the unilateral obligation of loyalty he expects of Wikipedians). And of course WMF staff make a point not to tell him anything they don't want him to know. Jimmy has the attention span of a ferret on amphetamines unless you're either an attractive woman or a powerful man, so it's not hard to get away with not telling him things. If Jimmy comes out against something, you'd damn well better be sure you have strength in numbers if you're going to move on it anyway, or some way to establish plausible deniability in the event he finds out about what you're doing. It might not matter anyway; a lot of the time he says something, then forgets he said it, and when someone does something in contravention, he decides he never said whatever it was he said in the first place.

[HRIP7]

You'd think they'd never heard of academic peer review.

But that’s the thing, the Wikipedia myth I keep banging on about. What Wikipedia mean when they introduced it in January 2001? Not a piece of software. Rather, (a) a system in which there was no formal peer review, i.e. a nominated specialist author and a nominated specialist reviewer and (b) no notion of what is the ‘final version’. The idea is that authors and reviewers are the same bunch of people. Errors can be spotted by anyone, and corrected, and some quasi-Darwinian process of survival of the truth will ensure that falsehood is eliminated.

Think about that idea. It’s powerful and intriguing. It means you don’t need experts or people who set themselves above the common herd. It means you can afford to be hostile to experts. It’s a powerful idea, and it it is deeply embedded in the Wikipedian psyche.

So taking the helm of the WMF is not like taking control of a commercial organisation, where there probably aren’t that many true believers, passionately devoted to a cause, and where it is comparatively easy to effect change if you can persuade people that change will fill the cash registers.

It’s more like being elected the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Pope. Imagine if church leaders were recruited from outside and that they hired the CEO of a multinational company to head up the Catholic Church. “Ah yes there are some fundamental changes we need to implement here. I’ve been looking at the facts closely and this God person, well, there’s no such thing. We need to change our mission statement”.

Yes, quite so.

Wikipedians feel deeply uneasy about the idea that someone else, who isn't even a Wikipedian, should judge their work. It takes all the fun out of it, because the whole fun is premised on there being no higher authority than Wikipedians. It's okay of course if an outsider says something complimentary. Wikipedians will flaunt any such endorsements very happily and view them as welcome validation. But criticism is very unwelcome, and will be countered with endless and reflexive nitpicking that's often taken to a quite startling and eventually almost comical level.

[Kelly Martin]

The difference is striking when you go to some of the foreign-language Wikipedias, where his influence is absent.

Of course, as we've discovered over time, many of the foreign language Wikipedias are in fact house organs for political parties (usually the majority party, but occasionally the opposition) for the country corresponding to the language. A fact which Jimbo manages to be blissfully unaware, to occasionally embarrassing ends.

And then there's the one minor-language project that was taken over by a WoW clan and used for months as their clan wiki before anybody noticed (embarrassingly enough, at a public presentation that featured a slide show of project front pages; a guest noticed that one of them looked "odd").

[Peter Damian]

This post (David Cuenca Thu May 8 09:49:29 UTC 2014) also displays a common problem that we have discussed before.

You can create your own instance of Wikibase and decide on the structure, fields, ontology, etc

I haven’t the faintest idea what he is on about, but I think it’s connected with the belief, raised earlier in that list thread, that technology can somehow solve or automate error correction of quality control. So my ‘change wishlist’ would have to include the recognition that old-fashioned methods of quality control, like people who know what they are talking about being involved with checking, are indispensable. A corollary of that would be that subject matter specialists have a place in the organisation.

That doesn’t mean that technology can’t help us. But it’s a handmaiden to the queen, not the queen herself.

[thekohser]

So,

Used ironically I hope?.....

Now, now, using inside jokes on newcomers is hazing.
(Greg Kohs discovered while listening to videos of WMF speeches that many of their top people began their speeches and replies with "So..." It grated on his ears.)

Not just my ears.

[Peter Damian]

If the goal is to evaluated hundreds of articles, ideally, we would have a test that is easily done (or better yet automated) that can give us a “probability of goodness” with respect to the reliability of a medicine article. That way, the entire project is constantly monitored and poor articles improved. To create that, we need a gold standard and a test that can be validated. That way, the “test” itself doesn’t need to be labour intensive, just validated. I suspect there is some magical algorithm that measures frequency of updates, number and age of references and page views that when put together is proportional to the “goodness” of an article. […] Ian Furst (talk) 01:21, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... t_Medicine

There isn’t. The problem is the sheer number of Wikipedians who believe this sort of woo.

it's not really like taking over as Archbishop of Canterbury. More like the Church of Scientology. Good luck Lila.

[Kelly Martin]

If the goal is to evaluated hundreds of articles, ideally, we would have a test that is easily done (or better yet automated) that can give us a “probability of goodness” with respect to the reliability of a medicine article. That way, the entire project is constantly monitored and poor articles improved. To create that, we need a gold standard and a test that can be validated. That way, the “test” itself doesn’t need to be labour intensive, just validated. I suspect there is some magical algorithm that measures frequency of updates, number and age of references and page views that when put together is proportional to the “goodness” of an article. […] Ian Furst (talk) 01:21, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... t_Medicine

There isn’t. The problem is the sheer number of Wikipedians who believe this sort of woo.

it's not really like taking over as Archbishop of Canterbury. More like the Church of Scientology. Good luck Lila.

It might be possible to develop an automatable metric that could provide a rough predictor of quality, but before you can develop such a test you would first have to manually evaluate a fairly large sample of articles for quality. They're not willing to do that. Instead, what they're doing is trying to redefine "quality" to be some arbitrary metric ("number of references per thousand words" is one I'm seeing them burbling about, which is of course idiotic) that can be automatically measured.

I'm actually of the opinion that any sort of systematic review of Wikipedia content should involve the use of automated scoring system to identify potential quality articles for manual review, but that scoring system is simply a way to avoid wasting your time manually scoring crap articles. Automated scoring systems can probably also be used to (re)categorize articles, which is a real issue given how fucked up Wikipedia's category system is.

I actually have some more specific ideas for this, but they involve proprietary technology and I'm certainly not going to give them to the WMF for free.

[Peter Damian]

I made the mistake of visiting the mailing list and making a few comments about inaccuracies. Big mistake.

Please robustly define "glaring". Please also understand if I don't accept you as an impartial source on the matter rendering your subjective judgements of limited value.

I pointed out a few examples of glaring errors (such as the 15th century philosopher who was supposed to have studied Japanese martial arts), but the people on that list are deaf to criticism.

The exercise was worthwhile only to demonstrate the problem that Lila is taking on, otherwise it is futile. Andreas still contributes, but he has the patience of a saint.

[Midsize Jake]

I'm actually of the opinion that any sort of systematic review of Wikipedia content should involve the use of automated scoring system to identify potential quality articles for manual review, but that scoring system is simply a way to avoid wasting your time manually scoring crap articles. Automated scoring systems can probably also be used to (re)categorize articles, which is a real issue given how fucked up Wikipedia's category system is.

Agreed - in theory, there's nothing wrong with the idea of using automation to make a list of articles that are likely to be terrible based on a near-complete lack of references, misuse of categories, or even spelling errors.

But this is Wikipedia, so nothing is that simple. First, the "score-bot" will probably return about a quarter-million articles that have no references at all and/or simply suck major arse, and there's no way you'll get a group of human beings to fix them for free, since they'll all be obscure or pointless subjects anyway. It would better to just delete them all and assume that eventually new ones will be created as appropriate, but they'll never go for that idea, not in a zillion years.

Second (and this is more of a warning), if the score-bot actually does rate the articles at the high-end as opposed to only produce a list of the ones that fall below a set "quality" threshold, the Wikipedians are going to want to game the system by editing their owned articles in such a way that the score-bot will give them the highest scores possible, which may be to the detriment of article readability, etc. Remember, the highly-established Wikipedians, the cultists/gamers/rulemongers, don't usually write "crap" articles - if anything, their articles tend to be pretty good. But right now, the only real metric they have is the "Good Article/Featured Article" review process, which is eyeball-slow, doesn't handle heavy volume, and only happens once in an article's lifetime.

In other words, if they get their hands on a score-bot that gives them high ratings, it will be like automating the Narcissistic Supply chain, and it won't be long before they're proudly displaying their "aggregate article-quality score" on their user pages and then using that as an editor-quality metric in RFAs and Arbcom proceedings. Or, at least, that's the dystopian scenario they'll trot out as rationale for not having the score-bot in the first place.

[Vigilant]

I'm actually of the opinion that any sort of systematic review of Wikipedia content should involve the use of automated scoring system to identify potential quality articles for manual review, but that scoring system is simply a way to avoid wasting your time manually scoring crap articles. Automated scoring systems can probably also be used to (re)categorize articles, which is a real issue given how fucked up Wikipedia's category system is.

Agreed - in theory, there's nothing wrong with the idea of using automation to make a list of articles that are likely to be terrible based on a near-complete lack of references, misuse of categories, or even spelling errors.

But this is Wikipedia, so nothing is that simple. First, the "score-bot" will probably return about a quarter-million articles that have no references at all and/or simply suck major arse, and there's no way you'll get a group of human beings to fix them for free, since they'll all be obscure or pointless subjects anyway. It would better to just delete them all and assume that eventually new ones will be created as appropriate, but they'll never go for that idea, not in a zillion years.

Second (and this is more of a warning), if the score-bot actually does rate the articles at the high-end as opposed to only produce a list of the ones that fall below a set "quality" threshold, the Wikipedians are going to want to game the system by editing their owned articles in such a way that the score-bot will give them the highest scores possible, which may be to the detriment of article readability, etc. Remember, the highly-established Wikipedians, the cultists/gamers/rulemongers, don't usually write "crap" articles - if anything, their articles tend to be pretty good. But right now, the only real metric they have is the "Good Article/Featured Article" review process, which is eyeball-slow, doesn't handle heavy volume, and only happens once in an article's lifetime.

In other words, if they get their hands on a score-bot that gives them high ratings, it will be like automating the Narcissistic Supply chain, and it won't be long before they're proudly displaying their "aggregate article-quality score" on their user pages and then using that as an editor-quality metric in RFAs and Arbcom proceedings. Or, at least, that's the dystopian scenario they'll trot out as rationale for not having the score-bot in the first place.

I was trying to formulate this exact response, but yours was so much more elegant than mine.
This will make the WikiCup or Gibraltarpedia look like small beer.

[Kumioko]

Actually I would would say that the "sucky articles" are likely to number at least 1 million in the english language alone if we just include three things: Length, Referenced and structure. There are over 640, 000 stub class articles in the Stub-Class biography articles category alone. About another 100, 000 in Category:Articles lacking sources (some are the same ones). In fact there are more than 1000 in Category:Unreferenced BLPs.

[Midsize Jake]

Actually I would would say that the "sucky articles" are likely to number at least 1 million in the english language alone if we just include three things: Length, Referenced and structure.

Yikes! Well, you've dealt with this sort of thing directly, whereas I've always been just an observer, so I will defer to your numbers.

Still, I guess that even if you're talking about tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands (or a million), you'd still have to set the threshold at just a fraction above zero to begin with, just to come up with manageable numbers. Then, over the years you'd raise the threshold in tiny increments until it finally reached a point (maybe 10-15 years from now) where you might actually reach an ideal target threshold, which you might define as the point where you'd start asking if articles just below it should nevertheless be considered good enough.

There are over 640, 000 stub class articles in the Stub-Class biography articles category alone.

Stubs are another problem, and I might even say a different problem. I personally don't regard them as a QA issue, and I'm surprised they allow so many of them, since red-links are an important entry-point for new users. IMO this is one of the key areas where the interests of the WMF are not only opposed, but actively worked against, by the Faithful. In fact, if I were the WMF I would figure out a way to determine stub-status in the parser when rendering articles that link to them, and color those links red just as if the articles didn't exist. But since that would encourage more people to sign up, I shouldn't mention this idea because it would be a bad thing for the human race as a whole.

[Kumioko]

Actually I would would say that the "sucky articles" are likely to number at least 1 million in the english language alone if we just include three things: Length, Referenced and structure.

Yikes! Well, you've dealt with this sort of thing directly, whereas I've always been just an observer, so I will defer to your numbers.

Still, I guess that even if you're talking about tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands (or a million), you'd still have to set the threshold at just a fraction above zero to begin with, just to come up with manageable numbers. Then, over the years you'd raise the threshold in tiny increments until it finally reached a point (maybe 10-15 years from now) where you might actually reach an ideal target threshold, which you might define as the point where you'd start asking if articles just below it should nevertheless be considered good enough.

There are over 640, 000 stub class articles in the Stub-Class biography articles category alone.

Stubs are another problem, and I might even say a different problem. I personally don't regard them as a QA issue, and I'm surprised they allow so many of them, since red-links are an important entry-point for new users. IMO this is one of the key areas where the interests of the WMF are not only opposed, but actively worked against, by the Faithful. In fact, if I were the WMF I would figure out a way to determine stub-status in the parser when rendering articles that link to them, and color those links red just as if the articles didn't exist. But since that would encourage more people to sign up, I shouldn't mention this idea because it would be a bad thing for the human race as a whole.

It wouldn't be that hard to craft some java script to change the color to something. I would choose something else besides red to differentiate them though, maybe yellow or something between green for good and red for missing. The trick would be factoring out the sum of the categories and common templates like persondata, portals and infoboxes and then rendering the color based on the new article size value. Not very hard really, it would just take some experimenting to get it just right.

[Hex]

It wouldn't be that hard to craft some java script to change the color to something. I would choose something else besides red to differentiate them though, maybe yellow or something between green for good and red for missing. The trick would be factoring out the sum of the categories and common templates like persondata, portals and infoboxes and then rendering the color based on the new article size value. Not very hard really, it would just take some experimenting to get it just right.

Relatedly, there are already a gadget that displays an article's status in its heading, and a user script that changes the color of the "Talk" tab link depending on its content. I think the major technical barrier to changing the appearance of links in an article based on target content would be the overhead of doing it many many times per view, but there are smarter coders out there than I who could solve that.

[Peter Damian]

Enter Gerard (I don't know if Wil has come across him). #100 on the wish list, banish Gerard to the outer darkness.

On 08/05/2014 20:11, David Gerard wrote:
>>Your area is philosophy, and an obscure area at that.

My specialism covers the intellectual history of Western Europe from 400 CE to 1400 CE roughly. In the history of logic, right up to the late nineteenth century. If you remember, I wrote the first version (mostly unchanged today) of Zermelo_set_theory (T-H-L).

It's probably obscure relative to Pokemon studies and TV shows, sorry about that.

>>The thread is talking about medicine.

The thread is called "Metrics - accuracy of Wikipedia articles", and it opens "Could someone please point me to all the studies the WMF have conductedinto the reliability of Wikipedia's content? I'm particularly interested in the medical content, but would also like to look over the others too".

Erik mentioned the flawed Oxford study, which was in my area.

With every kind wish.

Edward

[Vigilant]

I agree.

Nobody on either side of the WP/WO divide would miss David Gerard.

[Poetlister]

I've never understood why, in pursuit of the aim of making the sum of human knowledge freely available to humanity, it should be better to have a constantly changing mediocre article than an excellent and stable one.

Yet in the Foundation's metric system lots of article changes are good, and a measure of success.

It's something to do with the Google algorithm. Pages with lots of recent changes tend to score better than static pages.

[EricBarbour]

Actually I would would say that the "sucky articles" are likely to number at least 1 million in the english language alone if we just include three things: Length, Referenced and structure.

Yikes! Well, you've dealt with this sort of thing directly, whereas I've always been just an observer, so I will defer to your numbers.

More like 1.8 million.

[wllm]

I've never understood why, in pursuit of the aim of making the sum of human knowledge freely available to humanity, it should be better to have a constantly changing mediocre article than an excellent and stable one.

Yet in the Foundation's metric system lots of article changes are good, and a measure of success.

It's something to do with the Google algorithm. Pages with lots of recent changes tend to score better than static pages.

I think it's public knowledge that Wikipedia is treated somewhat differently than other pages in Google's algorithm.

Someone mentioned an interesting metric called "saturation" to me the other day. I'm not sure how well defined it is, but it's basically a measure of how well covered a particular topic is in Wikipedia. At some point, an article for a static topic will theoretically approach an optimal state, at which point edits should either slow down considerably or stop altogether. If further edits really are meant to drive up Google search rankings, that would be a problem that could be presented to Google and potentially addressed by them through technology alone. But does it go further than that? Could it be that newcomers establish some sort of presence on an article by unnecessarily editing it? Does the rate of edits have any affect on the editors themselves in terms of power or recognition? What happens to the number of backed out edits as an article matures? What happens to the length of an article as it matures? Does these lengths typically approach an asymptote or do they continue growing indefinitely?

What other factors might incentivize unnecessary edits?

,Wil

[Midsize Jake]

I think it's public knowledge that Wikipedia is treated somewhat differently than other pages in Google's algorithm.

It's less conspiracy-oriented (though not necessarily more accurate) to say that Google has tailored its algorithm to treat Wikipedia as a kind of "ideal," which naturally leads to it getting higher PageRanks than sites that are more stable and less extensive. Either way, the important thing is that it's a symbiosis. The fact that one or the other participant doesn't publicly admit that the symbiosis exists is irrelevant - its existence is self-evident.

Someone mentioned an interesting metric called "saturation" to me the other day. I'm not sure how well defined it is, but it's basically a measure of how well covered a particular topic is in Wikipedia. At some point, an article for a static topic will theoretically approach an optimal state, at which point edits should either slow down considerably or stop altogether. If further edits really are meant to drive up Google search rankings, that would be a problem that could be presented to Google and potentially addressed by them through technology alone. But does it go further than that? Could it be that newcomers establish some sort of presence on an article by unnecessarily editing it? Does the rate of edits have any affect on the editors themselves in terms of power or recognition? What happens to the number of backed out edits as an article matures? What happens to the length of an article as it matures? Does these lengths typically approach an asymptote or do they continue growing indefinitely?

The unnecessary "further" edits aren't made for the purpose of increasing PageRanks; if they just wanted to do that they could program bots to make trivial changes on a near-daily basis that would change the CRC of the article content (presumably they don't CRC the page as a whole) and cause Google to reindex it and re-score it. I'd also assume that scrapers have tried this and it didn't work, or maybe it worked for a couple of weeks before Google figured out what was going on. Anyway, that has little or nothing to do with "accuracy" or even with maintaining articles in an optimal state.

If you want to look for good examples of what happens to "mature" articles, you might look in your own area of expertise, computer programming. Most early Wikipedians were computer nerds, and this was one of their favorite subjects to write about, for all the usual reasons. Take an article like Polymorphism (computer science) (T-H-L), for example. it was essentially "finished" years ago, to the point where it covers the topic with no spelling errors or obvious grammatical flaws, and yet it still gets people coming in and making changes every few days. So, you can now categorize the intent of each edit: People might want to "vandalize" it, simplify it, clarify a minor point, add links to their software product, remove links to (or mentions of) someone else's software product, and so on. Most of these edits get reverted immediately, of course. (For example: poor attempt at clarification; revert. Silly bit of vandalism; revert. Occasionally, there will be a legitimate correction, but those are increasingly rare.) A small group of people "own" this article, and they watch all activity on it and revert over the course of years and years because that's just what they like to do with their time.

The stated justification for letting all this go on is that the Faithful would rather deal with an endless, constant flow of bad edits, in the hopes of one day "getting one really good edit," than protect the article and lose the chance of getting that elusive "good edit" because the person who would have made it was intimidated by the page protection. But that's not the real reason; as we've already stated, the real reason is that they want the editors, good, bad, or indifferent. Even if the edit gets reverted immediately, the thinking is that the person who made the edit will have received a psychological charge (i.e., narcissistic supply) from seeing their change appear on a Wikipedia article, causing them to make more changes to more articles, and ultimately become psychologically addicted. Once that happens, the person is a de facto member of the "community" and can be further exploited to feed the drama-engine, etc. This is also what I mean when I say "vandalism is a recruitment strategy" - most of the edits made to a practically-finished article are "vandalism" of some kind or other, using the broad WP redefinition of the term.

To sum up, people can invent all sorts of "metrics" and scientific/statistical ways of trying to measure any number of problems relating to content, editor retention, editor recruitment, ad nauseam. And they have to do that, because the numbers are way too large to make article remediation practical on a case-by-case basis. But everything about the articles themselves is case-by-case. They have different writers, sources, controversies, politics, ideologies, levels of human understanding, whatever. At some point you have to stop trying to measure "the problem," because there isn't just one problem that you can stick a number on and say "this is our target." There are literally hundreds of thousands of little problems, most of which (I might add) are not seen as "little" at all by the people involved in them. And any one of them might suddenly break out into the mainstream media one day and bite you on the ass, until you wake up one day and realize that your ass has been bitten so many times it looks like it's been through a meat grinder, which of course would be disgusting.

Long story short, a new ED could hardly be blamed for just doing what the established user-base wants her to do, which is nothing.

[lilburne]

The web became too complex to index by about 2005, search for any subject and you will rarely find the most informative site on google's first few pages. Google applies tricks to hide the fact that they aren't indexing the "world's knowledge". Part of that the trick is to game your previous clicks, a site that is similar to one you've clicked on before is presented above anything else, a Wikipedia page is slung in because it generally won't be total drivel, then they try to drive out obvious SEO spam.

Most of the pages on my site haven't been modified in years, yet they still get a #1 or #2 search position for the things I have content on.

[Kumioko]

Actually I would would say that the "sucky articles" are likely to number at least 1 million in the english language alone if we just include three things: Length, Referenced and structure.

Yikes! Well, you've dealt with this sort of thing directly, whereas I've always been just an observer, so I will defer to your numbers.

More like 1.8 million.

I think thats a very realistic number, but I also think it depends on how we quantify poor articles. Some way argue that only FA articles are worthy of the title "not crap" and others would argue that anything above about start class could be considered. Even a lot of the FA's have been forgotten and need a lot of work but with the current purge of editors going on, its only going to get worse. The currenty atmosphere on Wikipedia is if you aren't an admin you aren't needed and since most admins do very little content work, declines in content development and maintenance are going to increase. Adding to that those admins that do content development like Resolute, who should have been desysopped long ago just due to his lousy demeanor and his tendency to treat editors like trash, and we are left with an environment that isn't very inviting to people for long.

[Midsize Jake]

I think thats a very realistic number, but I also think it depends on how we quantify poor articles.

Just to clarify, I generally try to be charitable about quality evaluations on individual articles, so when I use terms like "sucky" I'm referring to those that are practically worthless by any conceivable standard. Some people might look at an article that's reasonably well-written and includes sufficient citations - Dried nasal mucus (T-H-L) or the vanity/WP:AUTO/WTF BLP on David Fuhrer (T-H-L), just to use a couple of random examples - and say these articles are "sucky" because they're just so unnecessary. My own standards are actually fairly low, and I wouldn't put those two on my initial list at all, even though the first should probably be rolled into a larger article like Nasal cavity (T-H-L) or Nasal congestion (T-H-L) and the second should just be deleted.

In fact (and as an aside), I've often said that even BLP notability standards could come down if - and only if - Wikipedians were willing to implement a fairly liberal opt-out policy for BLP subjects. They'd get far more new articles than they would lose in "courtesy-deleting" existing ones, but they're more concerned with keeping the ones they have (since they wrote some of them themselves, and many of them are revenge attempts). In the medium-long term they also realize their editor numbers are dwindling, and since they can't possibly maintain the article counts they already have, there's no hope for the future at all if they allow significantly more of them.

[Neotarf]

Here is my wishlist for wllm, and thank you for asking.

A number of basic issues can be identified as having widespread agreement:

• Toxic editing environment: abusive admins and trolls who are given an endless supply of second chances.
• No accountability for admins.
• Systemic bias - gender. There is a perception that the average Wikipedia user is a 12-year-old male living in his mother’s basement.
• Systemic bias - “global south” (and no, this does NOT mean Australia!)
• Editor retention - Sue’s “holy shit slide” (see video at about 2:00) http://bambuser.com/v/2140682 and “endless September” (worth googling if you have never heard of it)
• “Small wiki syndrome” of sister projects - Commons, Wikinews, Wikivoyage - taken over by bullying admins who drive out the remaining normal participants
• Increased accountability for chapters, and refocusing of financial priorities to other areas.
• Two-year terms for admins, with periodic reconfirmation elections, have been widely suggested. The last RFC on the subject (Request For Comment, used to reach consensus for changes) failed miserably because it was incredibly badly written, and specified an election procedure that was obviously unworkable.

Problem descriptions

Blocks:
• Blocks are the currency of Wikipedia. A statement to the effect that an aspiring new admin has a “clean block log” is practically a prerequisite for RFA (request for adminship, used to reach consensus for approving new admins). Users who already have one block are more likely to be treated poorly or to receive more blocks or sanctions.
• A user’s block log can not be altered, outside of the WMF office, even in the case of bad or mistaken blocks.
• Users sometimes leave the project after getting a block.
• Fewer users with clean block logs means fewer users in the pool to qualify for admin.

Warnings:
• There is no consistency in blocking practice, tracking of admin practices, or accountability for admins. Some admins will warn a user they think is doing something incorrectly or try to have a discussion; others will block on sight and ask questions later.
• The current trend is away from explaining to editors what they are doing wrong and warning them about what they are expected to do in the future, or even listening to them, in favor of going straight to sanctions. For example, the recent arbcom discretionary sanctions review completely did away with warnings, as well as the arbcom warning template.

Admins:
• Admins are either in good standing or gone; there is no middle path, no allowance for a learning curve.
• While there are a number of adoption programs for new users, there is no training for admins. There is no “best practices” and no rating system, so that users can grade the admins, or admins can see their score, or try to improve.

Recommendations

• Visual editor - high priority. Should not be reintroduced in an unstable form. Beta version should be clearly marked and optional.
• Formal mandatory HR-level gender discrimination training for WMF staff, employees to learn the difference between acceptable office behavior and harassment.
• Training for admins. Establish best practices, ratings, self-test quizzes, and training programs. Formal “focus group” sessions to explore and incorporate various groups’ interests. Stronger recommendations for a code of admin ethics could be made for admins who are also WMF employees.
• Formal anti-bullying program. The available programs so far have been for school systems; this would be a ground-breaking role for Wikipedia.
• Focus on the Arab world (“global south”). The most recent strategic plan still focuses on Egypt, which has seen a mass exodus of westerners since the Arab Spring, and on Saudi Arabia, which is nearly impossible to get into without a work visa. Other countries have even more serious political obstacles. The most accessible Arab country is currently Jordan. Policies should more accurately address gender realities in this region, and encourage participation by Arab women. This may mean scholarships to events in the West, like Wikimania, that include being accompanied by a male family member, and support for obtaining visas, which are notoriously hard to come by for Arab nationals. Given the cultural gender separation issues, separate leadership and recruitment structures should be established for Arab women.
• Attract the right kind of editor. Promote stronger ties with educational institutions; initiate recruitment strategies with emphasis on the “emeritus” sector of graying academics. Promote small enclaves of editing groups within Wikipedia that will serve to socialize and train new editors.

[EricBarbour]

This is a good start, although it has a snowball's chance of being followed, even in part. To make these things happen, I say again: the WMF and the admin rolls must be purged, and that will not happen until editing collapses completely.