Ming wroted a blog post!

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CrowsNest
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Ming wroted a blog post!

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Oct 13, 2018 11:39 am

Ming wrote a blog post.

http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/10/10/du ... neglected/
http://archive.is/2gCZt

Perhaps proof that he can be prodded into doing something through relentless cutting criticism. You are welcome Jake.

The title, "Dusty, Forgotten and Neglected", is not as regular readers might assume, the epitaph of Wikipediocracy as a criticism site. No, we are promised "An Analysis of Wikipedia’s Least-Updated Articles". Is this Wikipedia criticism? Possibly I guess, although you can easily imagine the same title appearing on the WMF blog.

Interesting to note this is not the blog on the subject Jake has been saying they should be writing, the observation that the way the WMF is tackling the gender gap is a grand deception. So we can assume that either Ming doesn't think that is a worthwhile topic, he doesn't know enough about it to write a post on it, or he didn't want to do it because he has been working in this piece for months. All are feasible, given what we know about Ming the Mediocre.

We are first treated to a byeline, which for some reason is extremely long. Ridiculously long...
Wikipedians often tout the website’s article count (currently over 5.7 million on the English version) as one of its advantages over traditional encyclopedias. Many of the pages included in this count are actually short “stubs,” lists, disambiguation pages, templates, and (depending on who you ask) redirects, but in addition, large numbers of article pages are simply added, often en masse by automated processes, and rarely updated or viewed by humans. The 500 most egregious examples of this are listed in a report, helpfully produced each week by Wikipedia developers, called “Forgotten articles” — and their fates (or lack thereof) may provide a preview of Wikipedia’s possible decline.
We can surmise it is this length is because the likely author, Jake, has foreseen the problems in Ming's work, and is trying to compensate for it.

Overall, this is a poor effort at criticism. He totally avoided any discussion of why this critical maintenance activity has such a patchy record of ownership/development. Digging even only a little way into that, reveals a Wikipedia truth the public is sorely ignorant of - how crazy it was to assume volunteer coders and the WMF could ever work together on a common cause. Even more so now the enthusiasm has waned, and enmiity between the two has become culturally entrenched (Wikipediocracy having played a big part in that).

One of the main reasons this report is not as good as it could be in its nominal task of highlighting articles that have not been edited in a while, and where that might indicate a quality issue is because nobody cares. Wikipedia is in a death spiral.

Reflecting the decline of the volunteer's interest in maintaining the content (which the history of these reports revealed was occurring as early as 2006, just before peak Wikipedia), they can't even be bothered to note what the list is for. The history reveals they did once know this, the following being present in the "Dusty Articles" report......
These articles may be fine as they are, but because none of them have been updated in several years, it might be useful to revisit and expand the article in light of new information or new standards or styles.

Note that this list is generated manually, and if currently empty, all entries have been "dusted" since last generation.
The report is no longer generated manually of course, but the principle is the same - they're meant to be dusting stuff, which would then remove it from the list. No substantial improvement is necessary or implied in articles dropping off the list, as Ming wrongly seems to think.

If you 'dust' an article here by tagging it as lacking references, that merely shifts it into the huge pile of similarly tagged articles, that nobody is working to reference, at least not as a systematic maintenance activity. The articles on this list are not receiving substantial updates over time for the same reason the vast majority of Wikipedia articles are not (but could be) - nobody gives a shit, and Wikipedia is dying.

If you consulted proper critics, they would happily tell you this stuff as vital context, rather than taking you down misleading paths, stealing your life force by making you read mindnumbingly boring statistics which Ming has found.

The most important fact is that under their own metrics, 99.4% of Wikipedia articles are potentially awaiting substantial improvements. The real figure may be somewhat lower, but it is undoubtedly still quite high. Crucially, they don't care enough about their own product to give an accurate figure, which would be the outcome of any properly organised maintenance effort, a proper spring clean if you like. As such, deep analysis of their efficiency in merely doing the dusting, or the statistical breakdown of the dust, seems largely irrelevant, a curiosity.

To return to his topic though, do your dusting well enough, and there is a necessary kludge in the code that means you can empty it, until they alter a value in the code to allow newer articles to be listed. Again, none of this is documented for editors using the list.

We can assume nothing is documented because the coders are assuming the editors know what the list is for and how it works or should be used. A couple do, but that's about it. Not enough for a quality encyclopedia to come out the other end, by about a factor of a hundred. Which matches the shortfall in willing and well organised volunteers pretty much everywhere else in the giant junk pile.

There's a hilarious oversight in the blog too. The person responsible for the code now, is Software Developer Niharika Kohli, a woman, and she is not white. It might have been nice to credit the WMF with having the right attitude regarding corporate diversity and their gender issues. It might have also been nice to give the context that explains this curious comment......
This project needs way more love than I'm able to provide in my spare time. I'll make a not [sic] to put it up for the next wishlist survey. -- NiharikaKohli (talk) 10:06, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
While she is nominally responsible, it's still open source code. Nobody cares to modify it to be more useful, because Wikipedia is dying. As this one small aspect shows, the WMF are desperately trying to use their burgeoning employee ranks to shore it all up long enough to get the Endowment matured. At which point it won't matter how rubbish Wikipedia is now, they will literally have forever to improve it. Which is, after all, the key doctrine of Wikipedia (eventualism). At least they are doing so with an above industry average level of diversity in their tech department, and with an aim to go even further. Silver linings and all that.

The lack of such credit or indeed context might worry readers, since contemporaneous with this blog post, was a forum thread on Wikipediocracy where an angry old white dude from Manchester, England is railing against some perceived problem with the WMF's diversity goals.......

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/vie ... f=10&t=823

Ming's one and only contribution to that thread seems highly embarrassing in context......
Carly Fiorina did nothing at all towards making the engineering culture at HP anything but the mostly-male place it always was, and she was less isolated from her employees than WMF is from the editorship-- after all, she could set hiring goals. At any rate ideological diversity is manifestly more of a problem in WP.
The figures suggest differently, and he had a reminder of it right here, in something he was presumably researching at the same time as he wrote that comment. Who knows why he got this wrong, but I think it obvious that Ming thinks of himself as the most woke of Wikipediocracy members, although admittedly that isn't hard. We know so little about what might motivate or interest Ming, since we genuine critics are denied the opportunity to know the name of Ming's Wikipedia account.....

Ultimately, the mysterious Ming invites us to draw our own conclusion from his excessively detailed "analysis". I think readers will have stopped reading long before they got that far. I confess to not knowing what his conclusion is. Other than what could have easily been surmised by simply reading the title.

At the end of the day, if you want criticism that does a little more than this, if you need the view from 50,000 feet, if you need someone who can tell the public what they have found, what it all means, you really can't use a Wikipedian. But when it comes to sourcing writers who aren't Wikipedians, Jake is pretty much shit out of luck.

People who are not Wikipedians will have been screaming from the rooftops for years about the risk to humanity of Wikipedia ever being allowed to reach the point of being truly self-sustaining. Wikipediocracy, not so much.

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Graaf Statler
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Re: Ming wroted a blog post!

Post by Graaf Statler » Sat Oct 13, 2018 12:08 pm

Mings blogpost could be a random topic in the Dutch village pump, De Kroeg from years ago. So many users who have left long ago out of frustration warned they where on the wrong way, but so called inclusionists, including gender inclusionists have hyjacked the project years and years ago with the blessing of WMF. The wiki projects have changed in a house of a tramp what has to be cleaned up by the Salvation Army, but WMF is dreaming from a great future where every man is trangenderd in a woman in 2030, and there projects leading are in this world of knowledge, what ever that might be.
It is all so unrealistic, I can't understand why people are still using there energy to defend it on WO, special Jake who claimed to be one of the biggest critics of wikipedia. Or is Jake only trolling there?

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