User talk:William Pietri

Hi! If I've said something to you on your talk page, go ahead and reply there. I'm pretty good about checking out items on my watchlist, especially for people that I'm trying to chat with. Similarly, if you post a comment here, I'll reply here unless you request otherwise.

Tigers loose in the museum

Just want to leave a quick note to say how much I appreciated reading the "tiger quote" of yours that's copied here. It's wonderful stuff. --rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid (coṁrá) 02:30, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I came here to leave a very note. I loved reading your essay "beware the tigers" it is beautifully written and carefully thought out.meitme (talk) 23:41, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Flagged protection

Hi, William. I have little contact with BLPs but I am involved with a number of contentious areas relating to nationalist politics. Flagged protections could change the patterns of edit warring by taking the immediate pressure off to get the "right version" out. Some patterns that can be observed now are:

• IP sock-puppetry, leading to semi-protection
• Edit-warring between established editors (including sock puppetry), leading to full protection

I would be interested to see if flag protection would a) lead to a reduction in IP sock puppetry and b) what effect it would have on the approach of editors to edit warring.

On a), I don't know how it could be measured. If you were to try to measure it, you might measure the number of reverts by registered users against IPs that were not clear cases of vandalism (with the hypothesis being that they would drop). b) is more complex. Right now, locking a page to prevent an edit war simply stops it from being edited. Often this means that even discussion comes to an end because editors just walk away and continue the "fight" elsewhere. Some things you might consider measuring are:

• Do warring editors continue to edit a page after it has been flagged protected (given that their "right version" won't be seen by the majority of readers) or simply walk away and war elsewhere?
• Does flagged protection lead to a healthy editing pattern after protection or do editors simply continue warring? How long do they continue editing for after protections?
• Does flagged protection lead to more or less discussion on pages after protection compared to current protection?
• What frequency of editors (successfully) request that flagged protection be removed compared to normal protection (as this is an indicator that they warring has ended)? How long after the placing of protection compared to the current method? How long does it take to reach a consensus version compared to current system of protection?
• How many edits unrelated to the cause of the page becoming protected take place (i.e. what impact does the current system have for uninvolved editors)?

Some other questions may require focus groups after the period of the trial: Does flagged protection lead to a change in editing pattern altogether - More discussion? Less reverting? Do editor "game the system" either to avoid flagged protection or to cause it?

I hope these suggestions have been useful to you. Best of luck in your effort, --rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid (coṁrá) 23:47, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Quantifying the effectiveness of flagged revisions

If the following is incoherent, I'm up to late. Ask me to explain. Apologies for the delayed response.

I view this trial as a precursor to emulating dewiki and putting flagged edits on everything. As such, during the trial I believe that articles will be flag protected and stay that way - it won't be (generally) temporary, as it is with page protection. I believe that during the trial only a limited number of pages will be flag protected. These are my underlying assumptions, some of which seem at odds with rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid's.

Regarding rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid's comments:

I do my best to steer clear of contenous stuff these days. Early on, though, I did intentionally stake out a few places where edit warring and other unsociable things were common, trying to "defend" Wikipedia from POV pushing.

In sufficiently contentious articles/topics (global warming seems to have had gangs formed with us-vs-them mentalities), you're going to see multiple editors on each side of whatever fence it is that divides them. If one of the warring sides has someone empowered to "mark as patrolled" that will skew the visible version of the article. There ought to be a way of measuring this, although it may require contextual analysis. Perhaps all it requires is a measure of what editors get their edits marked as patrolled by whom within an article (or maybe just across the whole 'pedia, indicating a bias assuming that there's a alignment of interests). Every contributor that got patrolled in one hit would have to be included.

On flagged protection leading to a healthy editing pattern after protection or do editors simply continue warring, I have a guess: because the editors can see the up-to-date version, the edit wars will continue. IPs won't continue, because they can't see their changes, but registered users will.

Many of the things mentioned by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid for focus groups/editor interviews can actually be measured quantatively. The number of edits against the talk page of the flag-protected articles pre- and post- protection is an indicator of more discussion going on. Edit reverting can also be measured programmatically.

WP:WikiProject Vandalism studies ought to have interesting things to say, but you may need to contact the individual contributors as it seems dead there. I'd be interested in the ratio of IP-good faith edits to IP-vandalism, and the ratio of IP-good faith edits to registered-good faith edits. I'm concerned the IP-good faith edit count will go down. I have a sneaking suspicion that registered-vandalism will go up.

Given so many of these things can me analysed and measured after the fact, it would be helpful if enough data was gathered to make statisically meaningful statements. Vandalism study 1 was interesting, but they discovered after the fact that a sample of 100 articles just wasn't enough to have anything other than a fairly wide range for the vandalism rate they came up with. Assuming a sub-set of pages is marked for flagged protection during the trial, I'd encourage a substantial portion of the articles that would theoretically be begging for it - our most vandalized articles, for example - not receive this protection during the study as a control group. Same applies to BLP articles: explicitly leave some out of the trial. At the same time, include a wide, random selection of articles as flagged protected to measure what the turn-around on edits-to-patrolling is for unattractive ("boring") articles. Get a statistian/trained researcher to advise on this. I'm guessing 2000 general articles need flagging to act as controls, maybe more.

I suspect that vandals that start on a flag protected page will stop around-about there because of the lack of feedback; vandals starting on other pages will continue on to other articles.

Of interest: what happens to the use of Special:Watchlist when this protection is slapped on? My guess is that it may drop a fair bit (this may only happen when every article gets it). Is there an equivalent for unpatrolled changes: articles I care about that haven't been patrolled? Or a bit on the output of watchlist (like minor) showing unpatrolled/patrolled? A drop in watchlist usage could indicate a degree of trust in one's fellow editors.

Did dewiki gather stats, or did any researchers generate stats, on the outcomes resulting from flagged protection? Failing that, was the a broad consensus that flagged protection made the world a better place?

Must sleep now.Josh Parris 13:21, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Very important point re: if one "side" in contentious issue get "reviewer" status. There would need to be ground rules in who and when can mark a page as "reviewed" in the case of content disputes.

WRT to measuring "many of the things mentioned by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid for focus groups/editor interviews can actually be measured quantitatively", that is true - but how would you interpret them? The aspects that I mean should be measured qualitatively are issues around the way flagged revisions may be a "game changing" intervention. If quantitative measures of edits go up or of discussion goes down, we can only interpret that this means in terms of the way things are now. RFC/focus groups/qualitative respondents of some kind will be needed to measure the to what degree flagged revisions change the game and and so inform us of what changes in behavior may mean. In good research, qualitative an quantitative go hand-in-hand. --rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid (coṁrá) 19:01, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Are you Wikimedia staff?

I don't see you listed here: wmf:Staff, which is causing confusion about whether you're actually a member of the Wikimedia Foundation staff (or perhaps just a contractor?). Erik is hell-bent on not listing contractors (why? I have NFI), though apparently now Hampton's listed on the "Staff" page to add prominence to his work. Can you clarify, please? (And if you're feeling feisty, jump into this staff index mess and butt some heads about the current idiocy going on over there?) Thanks! --MZMcBride (talk) 06:52, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi! I'm a contractor. I was also puzzled by the caste divisions between staff and not-staff, but as a long-time consultant, I have a non-interference policy when it comes to a lot of company culture issues like that. :-) But yes, I agree that it's confusing for the general public, and I think your desire to change that is entirely reasonable. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 22:00, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Upraw

William

While I applaude the work you do on wikipedia, sometimes it's best to get facts straight. Yes I am high annoyed at your 'Blatent copyright infrigement comment on the newly created 'Upraw' Page created but the hobbit_of_doom.

1) I have not copied and pasted a damn thing from the myspace page.. If and I mean IF there is anything resembling it, it is pure co-inscience. 2) Everything I have written towards the page is my own words. 3) I am the drummer of the band that is putting the page up 4) therefore how can you copyright anything that is yourself?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hobbit Of Doom (talk • contribs) 09:03, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. Sorry the interface is so confusing; it has clearly caused some misunderstandings here. In March 2008, somebody created a page for Upraw, but they copied the text from the band's MySpace page. For legal reasons, we can't have any text copied from elsewhere. When editor Lankiveil noticed that, he marked the page for deletion; I checked his work, saw that it was a copyright violation, and deleted it.

Now jump forward to this year. It looks like you created a page on your band. An entirely different administrator, PMDrive1061, deleted the page. This time, though, it's because it didn't meet our criteria for including bands. For reasons I don't entirely agree with, we have very stiff requirements for getting your band into Wikipedia. Worse, because a zillion people have already tried to put bands they just started 5 minutes ago into Wikipedia, editors are very touchy on this subject.

If you'd like to have an article for your band here, you should make sure you meet those stiff requirements. Further, say that straight away in the article you post. And also include links to independent proof of your claims. E.g., if you've won an award, link to the award site. Or link to press articles that confirm what you say.

I hope that helps! Feel free to drop me a line if you have more questions. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 17:44, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Biographies of Living Persons Request for Comments

Hi William, a suggestion involving Flagged Revisions was made at the currently ongoing BLP RfC, section Flagged revisions, comment by Nathan. Could you comment if what is outlined there would be feasible, and if so, what timeframe would be required? Thanks for your time. --JN466 21:38, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi! The current proposal, which we are making good progress on, allows administrators to decide which pages get FlaggedRevs applied; it's basically treated as another kind of protection. Which pages get protected that way during the 60-day trial is up to the community. I'm sure it will get tried out on some BLPs. If you'd like to request features beyond what you'll find in the proposal, I'd suggest putting together a separate page with a clear explanation of what you'd want to add. Estimates take time away from developing, so unless there's a strong community consensus to delay development work in favor of estimating your proposal, we'd probably have to wait until after the trial starts to give you useful numbers. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 20:26, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

glad to here of the good progress, william :-) (and thanks for your efforts in this regard) - I don't know if it's possible, but could you put just a wee bit more meat on the bone in terms of your progress - are you maybe about half way through some stuff, so we should expect to wait perhaps 3 months or so, or is that way too long, or too short? A gentle update would be hugely appreciated :-) best, Privatemusings (talk) 10:19, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi, PM! Most of the work we know we want has been coded, but we can't see it yet. You can see that on our Tracker page. There are operations issues with getting it deployed, and I currently don't know how long that will take to fix. Once we get it up, people will discover other things they want before public release, and I also can't say how long that will take. So I honestly don't know yet, and don't have enough data that I can make a reasonable prediction. Keep an eye on Tracker, though, and you'll know what I know. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 20:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Maverick Concerts page

Dear William Pietri,

In the past I tried to create a page about Maverick Concerts in Woodstock NY. I work for Maverick Concerts, and the Board of Directors (chair Susan Rizwani (susanrizwani@nj.rr.com) has given me permission to, and in fact very much wants me to write a Maverick page for Wikipedia.

Yes, I used material from maverickconcerts.org because that is the material the board wishes to have on the Wikipedia Maverick page.

How can we get this to happen?

Thank you, Renee SamuelsHerveywhite (talk) 14:20, 4 February 2010 (UTC) for Maverick Concerts samuelsrenee@gmail.com newsatmaverick@aol.com

Hi, Renee. There are four issues here.

• The first is copyright violation. The copyright holder, which I presume to be Maverick Concerts, Inc, needs to donate the copyrighted materials as described in Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials. Mere permission to use on Wikipedia isn't enough, as all Wikipedia content must be reusable by anybody on the planet who is willing to comply with our terms of use.
• The second is your conflict of interest in creating this article; our goal is serving readers, not potential subjects. So often it's best to wait until someone with no connection to your organization thinks an article is necessary. However, if you are still eager to try to craft a useful, neutral article with no hint of marketing language or self-serving content, see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.
• The third is notability. A lot more people want to have articles about themselves in Wikipedia than our community currently thinks useful or manageable. Our tool for separating them is Wikipedia:Notability. You should only re-create the article if you can demonstrate that Maverick Concerts falls above the notability bar.
• The fourth is proving your claims. Regular encyclopedias rely on selecting contributors who are experts, either about the subject or on writing about subjects they aren't themselves expert in. Since anybody can edit Wikipedia, we instead try to only have content that can be verified in reliable sources. Make sure you cite sources for any claim you include.

I hope that helps. Feel free to email or leave me a note here if you end up with more questions. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 00:39, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Regarding Flagged Revisions

I am interested in deploying flagged revisions on a non-Wikimedia wiki as a means to allow anons to "edit" but not have their changes be visible to the casual visitor until they are approved by a small group of established editors. As I understand it, such a configuration is within the scope of the extension as it was installed on DE Wikipedia. Is that correct? Secondarily, since you are still doing development work on this, is there a good reason to wait to deploy it until later, or are the upcoming features basically irrelevant to the configuration I am interested in?

Thanks. Dragons flight (talk) 21:19, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi! Glad to help.

As to using the current version on another wiki, my understanding matches yours, but I haven't actually tried it on a non-test wiki myself. I don't think there's any huge reason to wait to deploy; the main upcoming changes are to allow it to be enabled on a per-page basis (as another sort of protection, basically) and a number of usability improvements. The usability improvements are surely relevant, but I think they matter a lot more at the scale of the English Wikipedia than they would on a site with a more focused audience.

Let me know if you need more detail. William Pietri (talk) 01:45, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

So I sat down to try this. However, right off, I hit a snag trying to follow the directions at mw:Extension:FlaggedRevs. There is no /maintenance/populateSha1.php in MW 1.15. Are the setup instructions obsolete / wrong? Dragons flight (talk) 02:47, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Hello. There will be "a number of usability improvements" before deployment, as you said. Can you give me any details about that? To be frank, I believe that the Flagged Revisions would do more harm than good because of its poor usability and interaction design. It would be one more strange thing that only power users understand to be added to Wikipedia. I love the concept of Flagged Revisions however, and I wish the Usability Initiative could work with you guys. Did you talk with the usability team about it?

I'd like to know what are the usability issues you noticed, and how you will fix them. I know the basics about usability, so I may be able to give a hand. Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 18:12, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi! Thanks for asking. We have indeed been working with the Usability Initiative through Howie Fung. From an interaction design perspective, the current version is pretty close to what will launch unless big issues are brought to our attention. Try it out, and give any feedback you have there. We intend to keep revising this based on community feedback even after launch, so comments big and small are welcome. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 00:23, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

I reported a bug on flaggedrevs's labs.

The UI improved greatly, weel done. I believe the UI is ready now. I hope the FlaggedRevs will be implemented soon. :-) Keep up the good work! Dodoïste (talk) 22:22, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi! I saw the flagged revisions as default on DE Wiki. Vandalism wants attention, so the edit volume will go down after implemented, at least I expect it. I do not understand that it is not implemented yet on EN Wiki as on DE Wiki. Vandals are inverting the meaning of sentences, the encyclopedia is worthless so. You can have the impression that it is organized to get the encyclopedia meaningless. Get this thing live soon, please. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 17:55, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

We are definitely working as fast as we can to get this up. We're pretty close now, as you can see at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Flagged_protection:_update_for_April_22. Thanks, William Pietri (talk) 05:48, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

What's happening behind the scenes?

Can you explain this comment? It seems to me that a lot of FlaggedRevs-related discussion isn't happening out in the open. RobLa has stepped in and is creating his own configuration for the English Wikipedia, apparently with the help of other Wikimedia staff. Is this the case? If so, why? --MZMcBride (talk) 16:52, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

There is no intent to do anything against community will, and we are trying hard to be transparent. Having spent a lot of time working on this, and being professionals with a lot of experience, we do have some opinions on the best way to do things, and are sharing them. I know you think we are all conspiring darkly to some malignant purpose, and given that our best efforts in the past to persuade you otherwise haven't done much good, I'm not expecting to succeed here either. But as far as I can see, everybody involved is a competent pro trying to do a good job on something they care about. William Pietri (talk) 05:39, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Your Wisdom has been Noted

I just wanted to let you know that one of your comments has been included (and attributed to you) as part of my Nuggets of Wiki Wisdom . Thanks, and if you object then let me know :o)   Redthoreau -- (talk) 07:17, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! That's very kind. If I had any idea how far that comment would have gone, I would have edited it a little more before posting! -- William Pietri (talk) 22:08, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

MSU Interview

Dear William Pietri,

My name is Jonathan Obar user:Jaobar, I'm a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University and a Teaching Fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program. This semester I've been running a little experiment at MSU, a class where we teach students about becoming Wikipedia administrators. Not a lot is known about your community, and our students (who are fascinated by wiki-culture by the way!) want to learn how you do what you do, and why you do it. A while back I proposed this idea (the class) to the communityHERE, where it was met mainly with positive feedback. Anyhow, I'd like my students to speak with a few administrators to get a sense of admin experiences, training, motivations, likes, dislikes, etc. We were wondering if you'd be interested in speaking with one of our students.

So a few things about the interviews:

• Interviews will last between 15 and 30 minutes.
• Interviews can be conducted over skype (preferred), IRC or email. (You choose the form of communication based upon your comfort level, time, etc.)
• All interviews will be completely anonymous, meaning that you (real name and/or pseudonym) will never be identified in any of our materials, unless you give the interviewer permission to do so.
• All interviews will be completely voluntary. You are under no obligation to say yes to an interview, and can say no and stop or leave the interview at any time.
• The entire interview process is being overseen by MSU's institutional review board (ethics review). This means that all questions have been approved by the university and all students have been trained how to conduct interviews ethically and properly.

Bottom line is that we really need your help, and would really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. If interested, please send me an email at obar@msu.edu (to maintain anonymity) and I will add your name to my offline contact list. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can post your nameHERE instead.

If you have questions or concerns at any time, feel free to email me at obar@msu.edu. I will be more than happy to speak with you.

Thanks in advance for your help. We have a lot to learn from you.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Obar --Jaobar