User:Simetrical

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I'm an Orthodox Jewish Wikipedian and MediaWiki developer whose interests lie in computers, technology, mathematics, linguistics, science, religion, and so on. Below are my thoughts and ideas on Wikipedia, which I hope you'll find interesting at the least. If you think I've left out a valid criticism, or could have worded something better, or anything of the sort, go ahead and edit—I don't mind constructive edits to my user page (although I may, of course, revert them). Treat this like any other page, and improve it as best you can.

Contents

[edit] Consensus

Consensus is the soul of Wikipedia. All the following are my personal views on how Wikipedians should agree to run Wikipedia. As principles I believe in, they guide my comments and votes in various things here, and as arguments in favor of them, they hopefully sway at least a few others to agree with me—but above all stands consensus. I do and will always abide by even those policies I disagree with, just as I obey the law in real life. A wiki cannot operate except by consensus.

Of course, "Wikipedia is not a democracy". "Polls are evil". I don't disagree with those, precisely, insofar as they mean that large polls will often be uninformed (see rational ignorance), and a smaller group of trusted people may therefore need to override votes with more informed decisions. But still, most policies on Wikipedia are decided by general agreement, and I don't think that should change.

[edit] Notability

Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. It has enough space to contain any amount of notable and non-notable information. Therefore, there is no reason it should not be the encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias—no information that is encyclopedic should be removed.

So what's encyclopedic? Encyclopedias, of course, must inherently follow certain rules as to the content they include; otherwise they wouldn't be encyclopedias, they'd be something else. I think that a proper encyclopedia must 1) contain only verifiable information, dealing exclusively with facts and not opinions (although facts about opinions are of course fine); 2) predominantly consist of some kind of narrative following the normal conventions of prose (simple lists and raw data are only encyclopedic as article indices or potential article indices, or as accompaniment to an article, not as sources of information in their own right); and 3) consist of a set of articles arranged topically for purposes of reference (a history book is not an encyclopedia because it's arranged by time or place and generally includes something of an overarching narrative, rather than being set up as a set of basically separate articles). Wikipedia must also adhere to neutrality, of course, and it shouldn't duplicate material found in its principal sister projects (dictionary definitions can sometimes be encyclopedic under the above definition), but otherwise I see no reason to restrict its purview beyond the restrictions inherent to the concept of an encyclopedia.

In summary, I think Wikipedia should be an encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias. Anything that would fit into any encyclopedia, of any sort, should be eligible for inclusion in Wikipedia, provided it's neutral. I believe that there is no reason for Wikipedia to be anything less than The Free Encyclopedia. And that is why I oppose the deletion of anything verifiable from Wikipedia.

[edit] Arguments in favor

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  1. This will encourage users to join in and improve Wikipedia. See Eric Burns' remarks about Wikipedia as of November 1, 2004; compare to his remarks as of November 20, 2005. This is surely typical of deletions (or attempted deletions) of eager contributors' minor additions to our project. Who wouldn't be discouraged if his work was deleted?

    Sure, you might say, the article may not have been worth much anyway. But the author's future contributions might be broader. Dedication to specific articles might eventually become dedication to the project as a whole. People like that are going to be turned away if their articles are deleted.

  2. Anything else is contrary to the Wikimedia Foundation's goals. The slogan of Wikimedia fundraisers is "Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." How is this goal being accomplished if encyclopedic articles deemed non-notable are deleted? Where will this verifiable human knowledge go? What those advocating a notability requirement are saying, essentially, is that Wikimedia's fundraising slogan should not, in a small way, be true. This is not a decision that we, Wikipedians, should make—the scope of the project should be in the hands of the Wikimedia Foundation itself.

    At present, of course, the Foundation has decided to let us decide. But our decision should conform to the goals of the project we work on, not least because of the importance and laudability of those goals themselves.

  3. This will reduce systemic bias in selection of articles. What's "notable"? Even among those who agree notability should be a criterion, there's disagreement on some of the finer points. Look at the webcomic articles that have been deleted for non-notability—why are they less notable than a list of all Fletcher-class destroyers? Why hasn't anyone put the latter up for deletion? Because, I suspect, many of us have a deeply-rooted feeling that certain types of information are "valuable" and certain types are not. Because the one is "serious stuff", military-related, whereas the other is "mere" popular culture. Isn't this non-neutral?

    Perhaps that's just a coincidence, sure. What about schools? Virtually no school, anywhere, gets deleted. Why? Same sort of reason. There are enough people who think schools are "inherently notable" that all of them are kept. Why would they think that? Well, we surely have an awful lot of students at Wikipedia, and probably a quite disproportionate number of teachers as well. I can't see any other reason than that—and that's systemic bias.

[edit] Arguments against

  1. But that's ridiculous. Let's say you write an article on Simetrical's views on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clearly, the stated views would be yours, since they were added using yours account. Do they belong in Wikipedia? That's insane.
    Counter-argument: Why is it insane? Give me a concrete reason, cost-benefit, not just "it's insane". What's the cost? If nobody cares about it, nobody will view it, and it can be ignored.
  2. It will make Wikipedia look bad. Who's going to trust an encyclopedia that has articles on every single Star Trek episode in history?
    Counter-argument: A lot of people. As in, roughly 84% of the Internet. We already have lengthy articles on every single Star Trek episode, and nobody seems to hold it against us. It just makes us more useful as a reference source, not less.
  3. Categories will be horribly confusing. If I had to wade through 12,985 articles in Category:American writers, I'd never be able to find what I'm looking for.
    Counter-argument: The existing category system needs to be redone in any case. There are already categories that contain so many articles that they have to be cut up into tiny pieces—Category:American writers is an example, in fact. As now, any overly large categories can be cut up into subcategories with no major loss until a better solution comes around (see Mediazilla:5244). One part of a solution for the present, assuming anyone bothers to create a page about their opinions, would probably be making "non-notable" subcategories where needed. (Obviously, this involves value judgements, which may be POV, but that's inevitable, and it certainly occurs already in notability deletion debates.)
  4. Non-notable articles are a waste of the Mediawiki Foundation's server space.
    Counter-argument: Having articles in the database imposes three basic forms of server load: simple hard disk usage, backup, and access usage. Simple hard disk usage is completely irrelevant; well over two million very large (32 KB) articles could be stored on a $100 80 GB hard drive (do the math). Backup and general redistribution to squids, etc. is slightly more of an issue, but still generally doesn't consume much in the way of system resources. Access usage—the CPU time required to create a page from the database and the bandwidth required to transfer it—is overwhelmingly the largest expense for Wikipedia. If an article is very minor, it will be rarely accessed and will rarely need to be recached, and thus will impose exceedingly little strain on the servers.

    Is the above accurate? I believe so, through my modest experience with servers. But we don't have access to the details of the server information. If you wish to make this objection, I suggest you ask one of the developers rather than working off your own (probably quite limited, even if you're familiar with IT generally: how much do you know about Wikimedia's server setup?) knowledge.

  5. Significant articles will be clogged up with links to garbage. A link to Simetrical's views on the 2003 invasion of Iraq would just be clutter on 2003 invasion of Iraq.
    Counter-argument: Obviously the content of any individual article must be prioritized by order of interest to the reader. It would be absurd to argue that every single link that would possibly be tangentially related to an article should be under "See also". Utility is reduced if readers have to wade through tons of garbage to get what they want; the reason that's not an argument for the existence of articles is that such articles don't get in the way of an uninterested reader. They'll only be presented to interested readers, probably by external links to them.
  6. Nobody will bother to verify non-notable articles, even if they're theoretically verifiable. They'll probably be clogged up with senseless junk for all eternity.
    Counter-argument: Maybe, maybe not. I suspect that there are people who would be willing to help clean up such articles. Until then, they can just be slapped with a {{verify}}, and eventually have all unsourced content blanked and the article stubbed (with something like {{nn-stub}}, of courses). Information of dubious reliability is always better than no information at all.

[edit] Admins and policy

What is adminship?

Administrators are those with a few extra abilities. They can block and unblock, protect and unprotect, and delete and undelete, as well as a few miscellanea. Admins exist because sometimes the wiki process gets out of control: sometimes free rein is abused. Blocking, protection, and deletion are all probably necessary to make a good encyclopedia (although of course, it used to be thought that an editorial team was necessary to make a good encyclopedia).

So, all well and good. But who decides whether something warrants action? The community or the individual admin? If an admin makes an uncontroversial decision, of course, there's no issue. But what if a decision is controversial? Someone possibly innocent is blocked from editing, a page is perhaps unreasonably locked against the spirit of a wiki, potentially useful information is lost to all non-admins. Should it be reversed in a wheel war? Most admins are leery of undoing others' actions, and for good reason, in all cases but the most passion-engendering (see, e.g., WP:RFC/KM). Sometimes RFCs take place; sometimes discussion with the original actor is possible; but whatever the resolution, it means that a questionable state of affairs is in effect for some period of time.

On the other hand, what are the possible consequences of taking things too slowly? Obviously nothing as profound as rampant vandalism or edit wars, since the rules allow those to be dealt with easily. So something more insidious: personal attacks, perhaps, harrassment. And yet surely there are intermediate solutions in those cases—putting a user on an ad-hoc probation without ArbCom order, for instance. In such a case, the user in question can no longer commit possible offenses until the issue has been discussed more extensively among the community, but on the other hand he can still edit productively, and at worst he's not able to fully participate in talk page discussions for a few days. Where's the loss?

And so I argue that admin actions should always be taken slowly. If there's a firmly established precedent, strong community support for a very specific course of action—in other words, a policy—that policy should be narrowly followed. If there could be the slightest doubt about a policy's implementation, the matter should be left to discussion. (Accusations of illegality in page content should be presumptively deleteable, however, for fairly obvious reasons.)

There is one exception that only makes sense: if no admin is willing to revert an action, that shows agreement is probably clear enough that the action can stay in place pending discussion, since it's very unlikely that consensus would come out against the action. So don't require admins to revert out-of-process actions, but do prohibit them from reinstating reverted out-of-process actions. (As with wheel-warring, the ArbCom would decide whether to impose sanctions if this rule is broken.) This is, I feel, a sufficiently wide exception to permit flexibility while not unduly restricting the wiki process.

[edit] Arguments in favor

  1. Wikis depend on free editing, and any impairment of that is presumptively harmful. Protection, blocking, and deletion all harm wikis if used to excess, and must be undertaken with great restraint.
  2. Consistency is key to fairness. While admins will inevitably enforce slightly different standards, this should be minimized, so that the way you're treated is a consequence of your actions and not just the luck of the draw. This is not only basic justice, it's also common sense if we want people to continue editing here.

[edit] Arguments against

  1. Admins can't be expected to memorize pages of rules. If admins know they can get in trouble for minor deviations from policy, then they'll be reluctant to enforce policy altogether.
    Counter-argument: Of course not. That's why this is a wiki: people can reverse each other's actions. If an admin makes a mistake, a more informed admin can reverse it, and little harm done. I don't propose anybody be sanctioned for taking out-of-process actions that are ex post facto determined to be revertable by another admin; I only suggest that they be barred from reverting a reversion of an out-of-process action.
  2. The rules can't cover everything. What happens when something unexpected comes up? Are admins supposed to sit their twiddling their thumbs while the community builds a consensus?
    Counter-argument: Pages almost never absolutely need to be protected, and certainly almost never absolutely need to be deleted (except for pure libel, personal info, or the like, which are all speedily-deleteable). In the not-uncommon case where a user absolutely needs to be blocked, it's incredibly unlikely any admin would revert the block, even if it weren't covered by policy.

[edit] Naming

MediaWiki, by default, has to some degree a very unique naming system. The highest privilege level is steward, rather than admin or operator. Those with the greatest powers are labeled merely servants. The next level is bureaucrat, one who mindlessly executes rules. These represent the ideal of Wikipedian ranks: ordinary users get to use higher-level powers by proxy. The rulership is bottom-up, not top-down.

But then we have sysop or administrator. To those not acquainted with MediaWiki's oddities, those would seem to be ranks of authority, not ranks of servitude. On an Internet forum, administrators are the supreme authority. As well, those terms are usually used in computer science for those with very high-level permissions. But neither of those describe Wikipedia admins.

So we should drop the terms. They're not really suitable. Admins should, instead, perhaps be known as trusted users. It far better describes their role in Wikipedia. Their powers are obtained by trust of the community and retained by trust of the community.

[edit] Desysopping

As noted above, admins are those who are trusted sufficiently to use their powers correctly. A full 80% must agree to grant any given user adminship, more even than the bar to establish a new policy. But what happens when they no longer become trusted?

Currently, they have to go through a long and cumbersome ArbCom process. Very, very few Wikipedians have ever been desysopped against their will. Look at the case of Freestylefrappe. It was opened December 24, 2005, presenting extensive evidence of Freestylefrappe getting into arguments with fellow Wikipedians, edit warring, failing to assume good faith, threatening those who disagreed with him, and unprotecting a page protected due to his edit warring. As of January 15, 2006, while the case was still plodding along, Freestylefrappe got into a wheel war. Is this a case of the process working?

Well, what would an alternative be? I'm not sure. One possibility I've considered is that all admins be granted the power to desysop any admin, who would then have to go through RFA again. This would certainly be fast, and would also certainly follow the wiki way, but it would also be quite chaotic, and distressing to the target (who is presumably a dedicated Wikipedian). Probably a better idea would be to encourage the ArbCom to accept all cases involving admin abuse, and be liberal with issuing injunctions to desysop. If the admin was then exonerated in the full case, they would have their adminship restored; otherwise, they would have to request adminship again at RFA. I'm open to suggestions, but I'm not happy with how the current system works.

[edit] Obligatory barnstar section

[edit] Statistical Thanks

The Original Barnstar
I'd like to thank you for putting in anon statistics for the User:Kaiwen1/Vote to prohibit anonymous edits page. It really drives home just how important anon users are. Emmett5 20:05, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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