Wikipedia talk:Webby Awards

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[edit] From MediaWiki talk:Watchdetails

No advertising on Wikipedia, please. That includes both banner ads and annoying junk in my watchlist. Thank you. Martin 21:07, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You probably best take that up with Jimbo on the mailing list - particularly the wikitech-l one where he asked for prominent advertising of this stuff. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 22:34, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I refer to this post. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 22:38, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I recommend we ignore Jimbo's recommendation, get on with creating an encyclopedia, and forget about random award ceremonies. People only need to be told about this once, at most, not every time they edit every page. Martin 22:59, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Someone has taken up Jimbo's "on every page edit" recommendation. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:35, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Martin, I was interviewed today by Newsweek magazine. This is worth doing. Please give me this one thing without a fight -- I'm on vacation. We can argue about it next Monday. (This is not a decree, but I'd be disappointed if you chose to edit war with people on this.) Jimbo Wales 01:52, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

In case anybody thinks Martin is the only person who isn't keen on this, he's not. I'm not keen on it either. --Camembert
Nor am I, as I've already posted on wikitech-l. Didn't know this was being discussed here. Arvindn 16:56, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] from MediaWiki talk:Copyrightwarning

Jimbo has asked on wikitech-l [1] for this message to contain text similar to the following:

<div style="align: center; border-width: 1px; width: 60%">
<a href="http://www.webbyawards.com/">
<img border=0 src="http://www.webbyawards.com/main/images/webby_logo_sm.gif">
</a><br />
If you have a couple of minutes, we'd really appreciate your going to 
<a href="http://www.webbyawards.com/peoplesvoice/index.html">vote for Wikipedia at the People's Choice Webby Awards.</a></div>

But I'm not much of a web-design wizard, can someone pretty it up and post it? -- Tim Starling 02:34, Apr 21, 2004 (UTC)

Better yet, can we remove it again? Martin 17:30, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well, it's back. Just in case anybody thinks Martin is the only person who doesn't like this, he's not: I don't like it either. Admittedly, the advertising has worked: it got me voting where I certainly wouldn't have done otherwise. OK, I put my cross next to BBC News and Livejournal, but hey, that's democracy.

I'm happy with this being mentioned on the main page - that's the natural place for it - and I can live with it being on recent changes if people really want it there, but do we really need it below the edit window as well? Every time I preview an edit I have to scroll past this spam and that logo (especially that logo), and it's quite annoying. --Camembert

Ah, we must have our preferences set differently somehow, because I don't have to scroll past anything, it is always at the bottom, and thus less annoying for me than it is for you. Maybe removing the logo but keeping the text would be one way of compromising... although the notices at RC and Watchlist were unacceptable too and they didn't have logos. Maybe those against all this could spell out the offensiveness of it a bit better... calling it "spam" is not enough for a thicko like me... spam makes me think of ads in email for cheap loans and viagra. This seems different somehow.. . Some questions:
Is it offensive because we are somehow advertising a commercial company? I.e. Is The Webby Awards a for-profit organisation? Note that we already display Google and Yahoo!'s logos.
Is it a technical/bandwidth sucking thing? Note there has been a dramatic increase in page size of popular pages, and increasing use of MediaWiki: namespace making pages bigger across the board.
Is it a morality issue - ballot-stuffing is wrong? Note that the "nominees pack" encouraged this - presumably to raise the profile of their awards.
Something else?
Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 13:19, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It is offensive and wrong that we are advertising the Webbys when doing so gives us no encyclopedic benefit. Google is fine, because the search makes us a more useful encyclopedia, and that's a good trade of. I have no idea what you mean w.r.t. Yahoo.

I'd've thought an old-timer like yourself would use search now and then... I've been here a mere fifteen months but have noticed the Yahoo! logo directly beneath the Google one for the last two or three of them :-) ... see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=flibble&fulltext=Search

The current placement is hideous for people who use the preview feature and have their preferences set to preview articles below the edit box, as Lee points out. The current default is above, but oldtimers like myself and Camembert probably haven't switched over. That apparently nobody considered this is insensitive.

I think it is more of a function of there being so many preferences that it is easy to forget to think of something ... I know Brion plans for reform in this area. But yes in the interim this is annoying... I am surprised you don't find the copyright message you have to scroll past almost as bad... maybe we should budge the developers to refactor the preview screen if you do.

Advertising on every page edit is ludicrously badly targeted. Firstly, people who only read Wikipedia won't ever see it, which is 90% of the potential voters gone right there. Secondly, most people who edit will make more than one edit during the duration of the vote, and will therefore get to see the advert many many times, even after they've already voted. That's spam, and it should be stopped.

Well the only way to capture the other 90% is to have a notice on every page which is even more intrusive (note that a vast majority of traffic does not visit the main page; see the stats). The 10% who edit are likely to be the 10% that care most any way.

The donation campaign was a good idea, because they had a moderate level of intrusiveness for a demontrable return to Wikimedia's coffers, which led to a direct improvement in the quality of the encyclopedia. By contrast, winning the "people's vote" of the the Webbys is entirely likely to achieve nothing worthwhile for us. Wikipedia hardly has a shortage of media exposure anyway. Martin 18:40, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I find it pretty remarkable that you seem a little grudging about even the donation campaign - the content may be free but nothing else. That you have to suffer looking at an "advert" for a while because the person forking out for the bandwidth happens to think there is more potential gain in winning the award than you do, is a very small price to pay. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 19:05, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I agree with Martin. The advertisement for the Webby awards is tacky and self-aggrandizing. If it were anyone but Jimbo who placed the message there, I would have reverted it, based largely upon Jimbo's stated policy of no advertising on the 'pedia. I'm a bit frustrated and confused at Jimbo's apparent lack of integrity here. -- Seth Ilys 18:47, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Ahem, my "lack of integrity", Seth? Thanks for the vote of confidence. It's always astonishing to me how quickly people are willing to sink to moral insults in the face of my years of service to the community. Come, let's reason together, not sling insults.

Martin is wrong that this gives us "no encyclopedic benefit". This is an important and influential award. Already I have been contacted by several media organizations who have expressed interest in what we're doing. One of our major purposes is to show that GNU freedom or "open source" works, that a community of volunteers can do something extraordinary, exceptional. To carry that message to the world, we want to carry it to the world, hold our banner high, get our message out.

This is a spectacular opportunity to do that.

I see absolutely nothing tacky about it -- I see no lack of integrity, period.

Martin says that Wikipedia "hardly has a shortage of media exposure anyway". I do not agree at all. Search Google news for "Britannica" and "Wikipedia" -- they have (as of this moment) about 4 times as many media mentions as we do. And they are manifestly _not_ a GNU free project or product, they are not a community, they can not match our quality in either depth or breadth.

I would venture to guess that if you went to a public place and interviewed 100 people, 95 of 100 of them would have heard of Yahoo and Google and Britannica and similar names. Fewer than 1 or 2 in 100 will have even heard of us. We have a long long way to go.

The day will come when I will put out the call for funds to distribute paper copies of Wikipedia to every child in every third world country in the world. This, too, is our mission. We aren't writing an encyclopedia for our own amusement, nor to satisfy Martin's sense of what is and is not tacky. We are here to succeed, we are here to do something magnificent and huge. I have no tiny goals for us.

But to achieve those goals will require us to become famous, to become a household name to every single person on the planet. Why? Because to distribute our work to everyone in the world is going to cost an enormous ton of money, more than I have, and much more than we could ever raise by hiding our work out of an excessive sense of puritan pseudo-pride.

We are not anti-commercial, we are pro-freedom.

Just to make sure I've covered all the bases... first, it is well targetted to place it on the edit screen, because that page speaks to our community, rather than random passerby. If your compromise suggestion is to place it on every single page of the site, I'm all for it, but even I don't think that's necessary right now. After all, we're winning the vote. Second, having people see it more than one time is very much not spam. That's an emotionally laden misuse of terminology.

Spam is unsolicited commecial email, not just "anything that Martin doesn't like."

Jimbo Wales 19:37, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oh dear, this has become awfully emotional. I'm sure we all appreciate your work for and generosity towards the Wikipedia, Jimbo - I certainly do, and I thank you for all you've done. And I'm sure we all want the Wikipedia to become something really great. But - just to concentrate on this logo which bugs me so much - does it really add very much? Is it really necessary? If we just have the text, people who haven't seen it before will notice it, I'm sure, and it'll be much less annoying to those who have.
As for exactly what "spam" may or may not be, it's open to debate, but it's not as simple as just "unsolicited commecial email" - see spamming. But OK, if you don't want to call it spam, I won't call it spam any more. I'll just call it annoying ;)
OK, I'm going to go and write some encyclopedia now. --Camembert 20:23, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Here's what I wrote before edit conflicts with the above (there may be some duplication, sorry):

For me, it's mainly the fact that every time I edit a page I get a logo which has nothing to do with the Wikipedia and nothing to do with what I'm doing at the moment - as I say, this is particularly annoying when I preview (I have the edit window above the previewed text). I already know about the vote, I've already voted, I don't want to be told about it again. I say it's spam because it is unsolicited (and fairly untargetted) mass advertising (whether the Webbies are profit-making or not is beside the point). This is different from the Google and Yahoo logos, which only appear when there's a chance you might use their search engines.

If the logo went but the text remained, it would be considerably less annoying - probably enough to stop my whining ;) But I don't really know why we need it on the edit page at all - regulars will probably know about this by now and non-regulars probably won't vote anyway. I wouldn't be saying this if there was money or servers or something in these awards for the Wikipedia, but I don't think that is the case.

There are other reasons for me disliking it - I'm not sure it's really becoming of a serious encyclopedia to do this, for instance (imagine news.bbc.co.uk soliciting votes in a similar way) - but more than anything it's the annoyance factor of being told to vote every time I edit a page.

I can see that in the grand scheme of things this isn't a very big deal, and there are more important things to worry about, but still, this annoys me a bit. --Camembert

start from talk:MyRedDice

I was just about to write more to you about this, here, except that during the time I had allocated for this, I ended up on the telephone with a reporter arranging for a nationwide radio appearance this Saturday in conjunction with the Newsweek article. I think that says what I wanted to say better than anything I could have written, at least in terms of convincing you that this Webby Award thing could be powerful for us.

How does this benefit the encyclopedia? You said (I hope I didn't confuse the attribution, anyway) that you understood the fund raising pitch. Well, this is important for exactly the same reason... more users means that the next fund raiser will raise more money, which will mean even more improvements to our infrastructure.

But it's more than that -- getting our message out is absolutely central to what we're doing. We need to be a household word to prove that the Wikipedia model is everything that you and I both know it is. We're taking part in a revolution here, not playing around with a sideline hobby, and we want to shout it from the rooftops.

I do not appreciate, not one bit, cracks about spam or tackiness, in light of my own view of what I'm doing here. I fully intend to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet, and I'll do what it takes to get there. Even if you think it's tacky. ;-)

Still, you know my style. I'm not one for decreeing. I can only urge you to change your mind, get on board, and help me move in the same direction. Jimbo Wales 19:54, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Jimbo, the importance, value, and urgency of the message do not change the fact that its means of distribution is inappropriate and sets poor precedent. We have an announcements page, which is widely read. We have the mailing list. We have the village pump. Any of these would have been appropriate. Instead, placing such promotion in highly visibile places along with an image that takes another five seconds to download (for those of us with dialup connections) cheapens us in a qualitatively similar way to the nagging ads at Yahoo groups. And where was the community consensus prior to deploying this campaign? UninvitedCompany 20:23, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

end from talk:MyRedDice (moved here to concentrate discussion in one place)

This extra advertising might mean the difference between winning and losing one or both of the "people's awards". On the other hand, we might lose both even with this advertising, or we might win both even without this extra advertising.
If this extra advertising makes a substantial difference to winning the "people's award", it might mean extra coverage. But it probably won't, or not significantly. Online polls are unscientific, and don't tend to carry a lot of weight. But we'll get a chunk of the coverage just from the nomination. And we'll get a chunk of coverage if we win the real Webbys (rather important).
I'm not debating that the Webbys will get us lots of nice coverage. However, the chance of possible extra coverage (above and beyond what we already get) for winning a "people's award" must be weighed against the inconvenience and irritation to potential and actual contributors, and the loss of image in looking tacky.
I'm not averse to advertising the Webbys per se, and I'm fine with the mention on the main page (which none of our competitors for the awards seem to have, at least not yet), and of course the announcements on mailing lists. That should be enough for now. The Webby servers will likely be at high load and lag right now anyway - or at least that's my experience.
This sort of thing should be at least minimally discussed, rather than a handful of folks leaping to put it onto main page, recent changes, watchlist text, and under edit box, all within 24 hours of the announcement, after a brief discussion on wikitech-l (of all places). Voting closes May 7, so it might make more sense to have just the main page advert initially, and increase it closer to the deadline. Martin 20:50, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Results

So far, Wikipedia is kicking ass (pardon my french) in both catorgories! In Best Practices, its beating out Google!!! Google has 25% and Wikipedia has 57%. NOW, I call that dedication! --Saint-Paddy 19:50, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Votes as of 4-29-2004, 17:53 UTC

Best Practice
BBC News 12%
Google 57%
LEGO.com 5%
Turner 3%
Wikipedia 20%
Community
FictionAlley.org 13%
Friendster 3%
Livejournal.com 64%
SuicideGirls (naked women) 8%
Wikipedia 10%

[edit] Strategy

Well, the reality is that we're getting our ass kicked by LiveJournal and Google in the People's Voice votes. Advertising on the edit page itself is not particularly effective; if you want to reach all the thousands of folks who know us, ironically, from Google, Template:Fromwikipedia would be the right place. Of course you'd have to clean out the Squid first because most of the anonymous viewers get cached pages. Which in turn would result in a slowdown ..

It's really unfortunate that we're not in the Education category, where we'd probably win hands down. LiveJournal is huge and competing on the basis of reaching the largest number of users is going to be difficult. If Google doesn't advertise the PV vote, we can beat them in Best Practices (but only if we significantly increase exposure), if they do advertise it we're dead meat.

So we can do either of two things, in my opinion - campaign for this seriously, and that means tacking it on every page. That won't happen unless Jimbo explicitly decrees it. Or just wait for the result of the - at least as important - jury decisions, where we stand a better chance. I think a jury award in Best practices is what we can most hope for.

A subdued campaign is really not going to work. Either we do this the right way, or we don't do it at all.--Eloquence* 21:15, Apr 22, 2004 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure Jimbo would be fine with adding such a message to every page. Why not email him? --mav 07:37, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
The cost-benefit analysis is already finely balanced as the overheated chat above indicates. The prospect of a forcing a complete cache rebuild could well tip it firmly into the "let's just hope we win one of the jury awards" category. Could someone who understands the technical issues give a guesstimate of the slowdown it would cause? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:31, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Integrity of Wikipedia as an Encyclopedia

While I was voting for Wikipedia under the category of community, I ran accross a comment that suggested Wikipedia is not a community and that the encyclopedia was losing its integrity as a pedia because members were making some sort social hierarchy which resulted in the deletion and reverting of articles on the basis of who the it instead of the accuracy of the article. Should these accusations be true, then the goal of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia has be compromised. What I want to know is, are these supposed deletions and revertions on the basis of the writer of an article indeed occuring?

If you want to veiw the comment on the Webby Awards website, go there, log in and look under "community" for comments, it will be listed as comment number 6.

YanA 18:43 22Apr04 (UTC)


Strictly speaking, those accusations are true, although they are a bit misleading. For example, User:Michael is hard-banned and on auto-revert. When he attempts to add to the 'pedia in contravention of his ban, he is automatically reverted on sight. This has nothing to do with the content of the specific edit that he attempts to make, it is a general policy formed from his past history of inserting seemingly factually accurate (but actually erroneous) data into a variety of articles. Therefore, both because of the danger of allowing intentionally bogus data into the 'pedia and because of his banned state, he is automatically reverted ... because of who made the edit, not because of the content of the edit.
Now, that being stated, that is an extreme and very limited case. Anyone using that as an example of how the Wikipedia process is "broken" or how a social hierarchy is ignoring the content of articles in favor of focusing on individual contributors would be, imho, extremely disingenuous. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 17:47, Apr 22, 2004 (UTC)

I confess than if a user has previously made 300 edits denying holocaust I tend to revert his edit without carefully reading his text :-) Ericd 17:48, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have posted a review there which describes Wikipedia from my perspective and attempts to address what jrrt was saying without giving too much credence to charges which are, as Dante rightly notes, disingenuous. After having posted it I worried that my putting my name there would be perceived as a little too proud, but find I can't edit it out to anonymity. I hope my words speak for many here, and if they do not, I hope they will be forgiven as a well-meaning attempt to defend a community which has welcomed me and made me feel as though I have something to offer of worth. Jwrosenzweig 17:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Amazingly, AdHominemRevert and AdHominemDelete are actually policy on Wikipedia and some other poorly managed large public wikis, and are applied with amazing regularity both here and on Meta-Wikipedia, but only by certain people - who employ it as a deliberate power grab by the sysop power structure to make it difficult for those who disagree with it, or the GodKing to communicate even the most essential concepts to the end user... suggesting very strongly that political disputes underlie all such reverts/deletes. JRR Trollkien (see warning) 19:25, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Speaking of disingenuous, I forgot to mention that some people also make assertions that are outright lies and border on slander/libel. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 20:14, Apr 22, 2004 (UTC)
I agree with you about outright lying -- one only needs to look at the convenient claim that "egregious vandalism" originated from IP ranges in Halifax (when in fact it was a trolling/political issue). Or such fatuous statements as "no legitimate use" applied to anonymous proxies, when there are whole IP ranges blocked. JRR Trollkien (see warning) 21:20, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The comments at the Webby awards are in the characteristic writing style of 142, a disgruntled former Wikipedian. He believes that there is no such thing as an online community, and that we should avoid the metaphor of websites as physical meeting places. He also believes that trolls should rule wikis [2][3][4] and that the point of view expressed by Wikipedia should be the outcome of conflict between factions [5][6][7]. Since trolls are the best at conflict, contributors who want their views to be represented would have to learn some trolling techniques [8]. Unfortunately some of the best references for this point of view were lost when recyclopedia was "slashdotted" by VfD. -- Tim Starling 01:09, Apr 23, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] RC link

I've removed the Webby link from MediaWiki:Rclistfrom, because it was getting in the way, and because it didn't seem to have any effect (we're getting our asses kicked in both categories, by LiveJournal and Google respectively). If we want to win the community vote, we have to campaign for it on every wiki, on every page. I think that kind of attention should be reserved for annual or biannual fundraising events rather than for a commercial award which, at least in the people's choice category, we do not seem to have much of a chance of winning.--Eloquence* 18:12, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] copyright warning msg gone

So I took that out. Jimbo said he'd discuss it more last Monday, but he's been too busy. And, as noted, the wildly unscientific vote is utterly going against us. user:Jengod rm'd the notice from the main page a little while ago, replacing it with an (inaccurate as it happens) explanation for slowness. Martin 00:45, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

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