News users soon to be permabarred from creating new articles

You can talk about anything related to Wikipedia criticism here.
Post Reply

User avatar
Abd
Sucks Warrior
Posts: 749
Joined: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:22 pm
Has thanked: 72 times
Been thanked: 48 times

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by Abd » Tue Mar 27, 2018 3:50 pm

This is a classic example of Wikipedia taking years to do what would in a normal organization, take a few days. Or to be careful, a week or a month. Consider the labor wasted by dealing with all the crap that would have been prevented.

It's still incredibly easy to get around. Autoconfirmed status is trivial to get on Wikipedia. Just make ten edits that don't get you blocked. They don't have to be particularly good.

The real damage to Wikipedia has been from allowing anonymous administration. Slowly, it accumulated. As well, the Arbitration Committee was totally lax when it came to displays of bias and open disagreement with neutrality policy by administrators.

The truly powerful tool, Pending changes, if fully implemented, could have created a far more reliable project.

Basic structural shortcoming: no regard for efficiency. Standard dispute resolution process can take months to deal with a simple change, and far too much time involved. Solutions have been proposed: they are immediately shot down. "We don't do things that way."

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4534
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1096 times
Been thanked: 1793 times

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Mar 28, 2018 8:18 am

Abd wrote:This is a classic example of Wikipedia taking years to do what would in a normal organization, take a few days. Or to be careful, a week or a month. Consider the labor wasted by dealing with all the crap that would have been prevented.

It's still incredibly easy to get around. Autoconfirmed status is trivial to get on Wikipedia. Just make ten edits that don't get you blocked. They don't have to be particularly good.

Correct, and I expect the little snots will fight over petty details for years to come.....as usual, all the worst people voted to support, and anyone with an opposing viewpoint (no matter how reasonable or well-defended) is being attacked by shitheads like Kudpung and Ballioni. That "discussion" is full of freaks who should be banned from Wikipedia permanently; instead, they control and ruin the dialogue, by being the biggest assholes. Just another day in Wiki-Crap-Ville.

User avatar
CrowsNest
Sucks Maniac
Posts: 4459
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:50 am
Been thanked: 5 times

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by CrowsNest » Wed Mar 28, 2018 11:20 am

I already made a thread about this issue here......

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/vie ... f=13&t=502

It's a trifling measure, and shows their preferred method of dealing with the workload - brush it under the (AfC) carpet, and ignore solid evidence that the change damages Wikipedia in fundamental ways (less exposure to collaboration for new users, less likelihood of salvageable articles being saved).

It's all very well for people to argue for meaningfully restrictive measures, they just have to realise that had they been implemented from day one, Wikipedia wouldn't have been a success. And we in the HTD camp can lament they never went that route. But if they're arguing they're appropriate now, what are they basing it on? I've seen it said by many a cultist that Wikipedia is somehow mature now, virtually complete, and so these measures are part of a sensible transition to a maintenance phase. Those claims are easily debunked. Like, really easily.

Measures like this are merely an admission on the part of Wikipedians that their project is dead in the water, that all hope of new contributors arriving at the rate that would be needed to actually produce an encyclopedia, one that is comprehensive, neutral and accurate, is lost. So they recognise that what they must do now, to merely survive and hold the ground they have, is circle the wagons and make sure anyone who does make it into their club, is properly conditioned to their new reality.

Wikipedia is no longer about being open and inclusive, forgiving of mistakes and tolerant of people's difficulty with their steep learning curve. Wikipedia is now very much an elitist club, where newcomers are automatically assumed to be there to cause some kind of damage or disruption, and it is beholden upon them to show the opposite. Becoming a Wikipedian, certainly once they hit significant editor numbers, always was a baptism of fire, since they never really totally committed to the principles of AGF or CIV. Now, it's basically a job interview. The Wikipedian's mistake is assuming they have the luxury of a queue of a hundred suitable candidates in the waiting room. They don't. Hence why they were already seeing an actual decline in new editor numbers before this trial (thus no effect was actually not good news).

User avatar
michaeldsuarez
Sucks
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2017 1:50 am

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by michaeldsuarez » Wed Mar 28, 2018 1:16 pm

CrowsNest wrote:I already made a thread about this issue here......

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=502


Oops, sorry.

User avatar
Abd
Sucks Warrior
Posts: 749
Joined: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:22 pm
Has thanked: 72 times
Been thanked: 48 times

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by Abd » Wed Mar 28, 2018 9:18 pm

The early Wikipedians were naive about structure. Consensus governance works in small, reasonably tight groups, with unity of focus. In that context, protective structure, designed to increase reliability, may not be necessary, so it is not created. By the time it becomes necessary, an oligarchy has formed, which will resist change, since, they think, it works for them. Until they gradually, over time, the better ones, burn out. What's left is the control freaks with no real life.

There are projects afoot that will eat Wikipedia's lunch. They will harvest the crowd-sourced WP material, but add a layer of review, with more traditional or hybrid organizational structure. The goal would be "Wikipedia, but reliable."

Remarkably, the recent mess on Wikiversity over cold fusion and parapsychology and me created a new environment where starting a study of a fringe topic is prohibited without prior approval. For all users. Previously, anything could be studied on Wikiversity. The goal there was not "reliable articles," and opinion could be expressed, as long as it did not pretend to be commonly accepted fact. One of the original Wikiversity goals was "source studies." So if you wanted to study a topic, collect, on a Wikiversity page, sources. Documenting what is in the sources would be normal. Reviewing them as to interest or other aspects would be subjective, opinion, and thus to be attributed. Subpages could be created for details.

So Wikiversity allowed balancing possible imbalance on Wikipedia, but more than that, the collection of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and Wikiversity as allowing extended study of subject with no restrictions on notability, made the sum of the two a far more complete "compendium of all human knowledge." That has now been trashed.

Hence someone else will do it.

Deletionism was dumb, it might as well have been designed to create continual conflict. Rather, there were, long ago, proposals for -- say -- junkyard space. The old junkyards were places where material of relatively low value could be collected, to be re-used or recycled. So where a present decision would be Delete, the implementation would be a move to junkyard space. Excepting actually illegal material.

There was also Pure Wiki Deletion, where pages on non-notable subjects would be blanked instead of deleted. Anyone could read the content in history. The Deletionists, however, too often, were full of hatred for cruft or fringe or other detestables. For them, "All Human Knowledge" means "All That We Approve."

It was not necessary to set up the high-conflict Wikipedia environment to build an encyclopedia, but that is precisely what they did.

User avatar
CrowsNest
Sucks Maniac
Posts: 4459
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:50 am
Been thanked: 5 times

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Mar 29, 2018 2:28 am

Abd wrote:The early Wikipedians were naive about structure. Consensus governance works in small, reasonably tight groups, with unity of focus. In that context, protective structure, designed to increase reliability, may not be necessary, so it is not created. By the time it becomes necessary, an oligarchy has formed, which will resist change, since, they think, it works for them. Until they gradually, over time, the better ones, burn out. What's left is the control freaks with no real life.
Perhaps. There are arguments to be made that protective structures wouldn't be necessary even now, if they had managed to properly evolve, finding a way to keep consensus based governance, but on a large scale. Counter intuitively, this would have required strong leadership from the top, to ensure that unity of focus.
Abd wrote:There are projects afoot that will eat Wikipedia's lunch.
We've heard that before!!...
Abd wrote:They will harvest the crowd-sourced WP material, but add a layer of review, with more traditional or hybrid organizational structure. The goal would be "Wikipedia, but reliable."
No, this would be a dumb move. There's so much wrong with Wikipedia's content, any proposed replacement really is better off, from both a time and liability perspective, just starting from scratch. Even their indexes wouldn't be much use as a guide - their category system is a joke, thanks to being undermanned and unappreciated, and titles aren't much better. The only reason a Wikipedia replacement needs to be looking at Wikipedia, is to be able to spot sources corrupted by citogenisis.
Abd wrote:Remarkably, the recent mess on Wikiversity over cold fusion and parapsychology and me created a new environment where starting a study of a fringe topic is prohibited without prior approval. For all users. Previously, anything could be studied on Wikiversity. The goal there was not "reliable articles," and opinion could be expressed, as long as it did not pretend to be commonly accepted fact. One of the original Wikiversity goals was "source studies." So if you wanted to study a topic, collect, on a Wikiversity page, sources. Documenting what is in the sources would be normal. Reviewing them as to interest or other aspects would be subjective, opinion, and thus to be attributed. Subpages could be created for details.
Not my area of expertise. Have you noticed any parallels with the rise of the phenomena of no platforming?
Abd wrote:So Wikiversity allowed balancing possible imbalance on Wikipedia,
Perhaps, but this could hardly have been its official goal. Officially, Wikipedia is balanced, right? That it is not, is why we exist.....
Abd wrote:but more than that, the collection of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and Wikiversity as allowing extended study of subject with no restrictions on notability, made the sum of the two a far more complete "compendium of all human knowledge." That has now been trashed.
Did it ever really get started? It's taken them ages to set up the WikiJournals, and it doesn't seem like they're going mainstream any time soon.
Abd wrote:Hence someone else will do it.
Hopefully not in a way that solidifes Wikipedia's position though......
Abd wrote:Deletionism was dumb, it might as well have been designed to create continual conflict. Rather, there were, long ago, proposals for -- say -- junkyard space. The old junkyards were places where material of relatively low value could be collected, to be re-used or recycled. So where a present decision would be Delete, the implementation would be a move to junkyard space. Excepting actually illegal material.

There was also Pure Wiki Deletion, where pages on non-notable subjects would be blanked instead of deleted. Anyone could read the content in history. The Deletionists, however, too often, were full of hatred for cruft or fringe or other detestables. For them, "All Human Knowledge" means "All That We Approve."
And it is likely all these issues would have been resolved, had the governance system evolved. Crazy that they still go back and forth on what constitutes the border region, this is undoubtedly one of the major reasons people pack up and leave.
Abd wrote:It was not necessary to set up the high-conflict Wikipedia environment to build an encyclopedia, but that is precisely what they did.
I wouldn't say they set it up to be this way, they just didn't stop it from evolving that way.

User avatar
singora
Sucks
Posts: 58
Joined: Thu Aug 24, 2017 11:48 am

Re: News users soon to be permabarred from creating new arti

Post by singora » Thu Apr 05, 2018 10:56 am

ericbarbour wrote:Correct, and I expect the little snots will fight over petty details for years to come.....as usual, all the worst people voted to support, and anyone with an opposing viewpoint (no matter how reasonable or well-defended) is being attacked by shitheads like Kudpung and Ballioni. That "discussion" is full of freaks who should be banned from Wikipedia permanently.

I once came across Krapdung on FAC. He'd submitted a piece about a town in England. It took me less than 30 seconds to see the article was a straightforward oppose. Here's the review:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Malvern,_Worcestershire/archive1

He lives up in the north, but seems to have no interest in Thailand or its culture. Guys like that come here for pussy and nothing else. It's because they can't get it in their own countries.

The guy really is hopeless.

Post Reply