User talk:SMcCandlish/On the Radar

Pakistan

Thanks for sharing this. It places WP, with its perennial internal quarrels in a whole new perspective. I was ready to quit. But forced to decide between the gigantic forces of the state and/or multi-million dollar companies on one side and a litigious global culture with a mid-level of squabbling on the other, I choose the latter. Historiador (talk) 05:44, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Caballero1967/Historiador, Glad you stuck around. See more recent item above this one.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:00, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Black-hats

The scary thing is, that has to be just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Total amateurs, practically waving a "block us now!" sign.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:00, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Sanger

Sanger is not really "Wikipedia's most outspoken critic" at all, and has continued working on a lot of WMF-compatible (but not -affiliated) projects in the public, educational interest [1].  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:00, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

The title doesn't accurately represent what Sanger says in this article; he actually has some thoughtful things to say. I think his most insightful comment is:

[Q:] What are your thoughts on Wikipedia today? Do you feel proud of it? [A:] I guess I'm moderately proud. I always sort of felt like we just got lucky with the right idea at the right time, and we had a reasonably successful implementation of the idea. I don't know how much the success of Wikipedia really reflects well on me.

It's amazing how who are willing to endorse the old chestnut "In theory, Wikipedia shouldn't work; in practice, it does" as a sort of software magic, while neglecting any further analysis of how collaboration here works. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm not writing about Sanger's opinion about everything, just his observations on WP's internal management and changes to its editorial culture. My very point in my comment above is that Sanger is not generally negative about WP as a whole.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:24, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. I wasn't commenting on your comment, but on the link itself. Blame the misunderstanding on my indenting? -- llywrch (talk) 21:53, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

OK.  :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:14, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

BOGOF

I'm not even sure how I feel about WP:BOGOF yet. Th argument is a valid one, yet if something's notable then it's notable. I think a compromise solution might be a one-year moratorium on the article appearing in mainspace, if it was created by a WP:COI.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:29, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

User:SMcCandlish "The BOGOF position is that spammy articles created by parties with a conflict of interest (especially paid editors) should be deleted even if neutral editors fix them to comply with WP's core content policies." really isn't my intended message, or IMHO an accurate summary of the essay, or any part of it. If any part of it gives that impression I will fix it. Just to clarify, BOGOF should not be proposing anything new apart from WP:TNT. There's a choice of 1. TNT or 2. rewrite in the paid COI context, discussing the issues around diverting finite editor resources to topics decided by market forces - so a systemic bias. I was just alerted to what appears to me an imperfect summary of the essay by User:Brianhe, and I agree with him. BOGOF should be highlighting that choice, which seems to be conflated in the summary. Widefox; talk 13:13, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

@Widefox: Understood. I did a rewrite [2]. Does that get at it properly? Sorry for the misinterpretation.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:35, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

OK, and I can understand that the lack of clarity of the rambling (personal) essay doesn't help. It's better but I'm not sure what the meaning/angle of the news article is? Some points:

• The AfD was closed "Delete" not "Keep"
• Often this is for borderline notability, and examples of promo articles may include many non-RS sources appearing notable when in fact not or difficult to say without eliminating the non-RS with much scrutiny, so this is more a practical issue of those problematic promo articles which haven't been assessed as notable, so not really fair to say that they are clearcut notable ie a priori "notable"
• Cause and effect - "the WP:BOGOF essay has led to some conflict there" or rather the issues / views documented in the essay that individual editors have raised which inspired the (somewhat personal, and not yet tidy) essay?
• The essay WP:BOGOF attempts to detail both arguably equally valid initial views (1. TNT vs 2. fix ie BOGOF outcome) and highlight the potential unintended consequences.
• Uncovering sockfarms, spam etc costs resources, as does complete rewrites. Widefox; talk 18:57, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
  • @Widefox: Revised again. The blue-link fooled me. Looking over that whole series of AfDs, a bunch of those articles are back now. I see the second point; used "arguably". Cause/effect: I clarified that; I was actually meaning to refer to the effect of the essay, not its genesis, but didn't phrase it well. The main point of the whole post is people who strongly disagree with the essay (or what people usually mean when they refer to it: "don't 'fix' spam; clean-slate it") derailed what was a probably-successful RfA, and this doesn't really make much sense in the traditional WP community context. The fact that pitting distrust of COI against inclusionist tendencies now tends to favor the inclusionism, and even punish those who favored caution and practicality, doesn't bode well and is clearly gameable.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:27, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

I'd have to look more at the RfA, but my gut feeling is that although BOGOF (and WP:BOGOF) were critically mentioned in it, more personally Brianhe's essay and some interactions which went above and beyond the TNT viewpoint in WP:BOGOF were the crucial points. There's much conflation, so any light on this is welcome.

From my part, BOGOF was specifically written to document the two legitimate viewpoints and explore this area, and in writing I came to the conclusion that it's more about a systemic bias, as normal content and COI mechanisms are effective but expensive and may (or may not) have unintended consequences. Dealing with undisclosed paid editor's promo content in exactly the same way as copyright violations may be legally justified (as they are breaking the ToU) but uncertainty in who the editors are and AGF and edits-not-editor mean this is a fine line. The bottom line is that only time will tell. There's no urgency now, but I did feel there was a weariness of some editors at COIN and BOGOF was written to make others aware of the potential unintended consequence of volunteer burden of fixing paid content.

There's clearly a downside to the essay title being an apt acronym, used in the RfA possibly in a pejorative - literally "BOGOF" is not a shorthand for how to interact with other editors (here in the UK, both meanings "bog off" (slang for "go away") and BOGOF (retail 2-for-1) are well known.

There may also be a false dichotomy in BOGOF - by volunteers subsidising the market, that may in fact take the money out of the market and reduce supply. Stubbing them may also be better (which is the purpose of TNT).

Anyhow, coming back to the RfA, the quotes were from Brianhe's essay not BOGOF, and AFAIK nothing from WP:BOGOF was quoted and BOGOF was not mentioned in closing, but interactions were. From what I can see, currently the wording puts undue weight on BOGOF. Widefox; talk 08:29, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

@Widefox: D'oh. I'll try to revise again when I get some time to mull it over. Not like anyone's really reading this yet, but I might as well learn how to do this better. In a former life I wrote news-snippets on a regular basis for a fairly high-circulation membership newsletter (30K+ subscribers), but I'm out of practice. Anyway, maligning BOGOF in any sense isn't the point. Rather, it was that there seems to be a sudden reverse-hostility appearing against "traditional" WP community hostility to COI, and this backlash played a major role in derailing an RfA, as well as being involved in a lot of AfD push-back against the half of BOGOF that is okay with the idea of stubbing instead of improving COI articles. Something like that is probably the outline I should have worked from.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:43, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

OK. My reading of the RfA is that it was more Brianhe's essay (which touches on BOGOF) and actions (irrespective of any essay). I'm entirely biased as the author of the BOGOF, but please see for yourself. And with that in mind, I'll let you make up your own. Widefox; talk 01:23, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

It was stale enough "news" I just archived the piece early (with a note that objections were raised about it). I'm not sure how to do much more to repair it other than re-doing it from scratch, and there's so many more pressing things to do here. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Sport vandalism

That 1,500 articles is pretty alarming. The rest of the piece outlines some similar incidents (not of vandalism but of the press massively running with stories about WP vandalism).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:10, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

WMF's Tretikov resigning

This is so very similar (at least to outsider eyes) to several ancien régime shakeups at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the mid-through-late-1990s. I'm going to trust that it's just growing pains and will not turn into the crisis some may fear it is. I don't know Tretikov or any of WMF's board personally, but can both sympathize and empathize with them over this. Mistakes were made, but they were errors of judgement and timing, not of various conspiratorial nonsense that people are burying User talk:Jimbo Wales with, I'd wager. It very often simply plays out that certain parts of an organization's leadership are the best thing to happen to the entity, for a while, and then are no longer what the entity needs. It can take several false starts, even, to find the right people to fill those voids, especially when it comes to an executive director, and eventually bringing on new board members. The board should not trust an incoming and perhaps temporary E.D. to fill all the vacancies, because if that person does not work out, whoever is left and competent will probably be filling that role for some time, and it won't do any good at all if they're simply cronies of whoever is the next E.D. to depart; they'd be very likely to bail, too, and to do poorly if they stayed.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:49, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Nations and Wikipedia

[No comments yet.]

Koch brothers whitewashing

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RfC on paid editors' off-site ads disclosure

I don't really buy the "it'll help prevent impersonation" angle; that seems like a red herring to me. The central issue is requiring people to disclose where they're advertising their services to edit WMF projects (other than those, like Commons, that have "alternative", permissive paid-editing policies).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  23:14, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Update: The proposal passed, but with suggestions for at least three refinements. I'm not sure whether those further discussions have happened yet, or where.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:27, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

WMF Community Wishlist Survey is system-gameable

Since 2015, the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey – an annual poll of the Wikimedia editorial community on what the WMF Community Tech team (mostly distinct from the Community Liaisons|Community Liaisons) should focus on in "meeting the needs of active Wikimedia editors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools" (i.e., getting the MediaWiki developers to focus on building and fixing particular stuff).

The 2017 survey has closed; the results are here – and raise the same issues as in previous years.

Statement of the problems: This process is fundamentally lopsided, for numerous reasons:

1. Only the top-ten items will have any resources devoted to them (barring some other process being invoked) – no matter how many proposals there are or how urgent or important any of them are.
2. Because it's a popularity contest, and a pure voting mechanism, normal Wikimedian consensus-building methodology is thwarted. Reasons don't have to be good.
3. While this is a weak form of proportional voting, it's a variant that directly encourages people to vote for the 10 things they want most, then ignore – or even vote against – every other proposal even if they agree with it. Votes on the same proposal across multiple years are also lost, so proposals cannot build support.
4. There's no "leveling of the playing field" between categories. For example, this year, 3 "Editing"-category proposals were approved, all 10 successful proposals were in just 6 categories, and 9 categories got nothing. This sort of pattern repeats year after year; important proposals of narrower interest (e.g. to admins, or to technical people) never pass, even if support for them would have built over years.
5. Proposals can be – and are – shamelessly canvassed with impunity; meanwhile, too few Wikimedians even know the survey exists or when it is open, which greatly compounds the skew caused by focused canvassing (i.e., there is no broad tide of input that washes away intentional statistical spikes – the spikes, along with lower-common-denominator appeal, and novelty, are actually what determine the outcome.

Some suggestions for making Community Wishlist work better

1. Expand the number of accepted proposals to 15 or more, and vary this number by the number of proposals, either increasing it to match the increase in proposals from last year, or just as a percentage of proposals this year.
2. Open a properly classified Phabricator ticket, if one doesn't already exist, for every proposal (probably should be delegated to the proposer, but made to happen regardless). Identify additional teams and processes to which a proposal that didn't make the cut, but was well supported, can be submitted. ("Some of the other top wishes may be addressed by other development teams" is meaningless if no one knows who/where those are.) If necessary, some Phabricator categories/projects might need to be created for dealing with survey proposals that do not touch on development matters. That system is already being used for things like real-world meeting planning, etc., so it can also be used for this.
3. Reduce the number of categories to, say, 5 major categories, e.g.: Editor Experience, User Experience, Multimedia and WikiData, Administration and Core Technology, and Miscellaneous. Subdivide each more topically; this will also make the proposal pages be less of a wall of unorganized proposal mess. Refactor the pages as needed to keep them organized.
4. Always accept the most-supported proposal in each major category as having passed (as long as support was over 50% of course, but it is never going to happen that a major category will produce all-failed proposals – few proposals are so bad they're outright rejected, since judgement is exercised before including a proposal in the survey to begin with). Accept two as having passed in a category that has a disproportionately large number of proposals. Or use a more specific algorithm to prevent one category from getting excessive attention and other categories getting nothing. After that, consider which remaining proposals, across all a categories, have the most relative support.
5. If a proposal reappears in a later year's survey, its votes from any previous year(s) – by different editors, who did not later change their votes – are counted for this year as well. The simplest way to do this is to transclude previous ones. (Easy, since the proposals are all on their own pages anyway.) This will help good proposals build support over time and not alway fall victim to new proposals that are attractive simply because they're new. It will also mitigate the tendency to vote against or remain silent on good proposals that just aren't among one's favorites.
6. Require that rationales be given with votes, and discount those that do not have one, or have one that makes no sense. (A "per Username" should be permissible, with the caveat that quality of that original vote affects the quality of votes that provide no rationale other than it.)
7. Make a clear statement against non-neutral pro or con advertising of specific proposals. There's no way to enforce this, but most editors will not canvass if told not to. (And not every project has an equivalent of w:en:WP:CANVASS, anyway, so conducting the voting on the projects and aggregating the data later would not be effective, even aside from the work involved.)
8. Advertise the survey in site-wide banners, at w:en:WP:Centralized discussions, at w:en:WP:Village pump (proposals), and similar processes on other wikis. Enlist the Tech Ambassadors and Community Liasons to help with this; for projects without any, ask that project's equivalent of the Village Pump for help in getting the word out.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< , 18:08, 19 December 2017‎ (UTC)

Broader discussion opened at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#WMF Community Wishlist Survey is system-gameable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  18:16, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Now archived at: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 143#WMF Community Wishlist Survey is system-gameable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:49, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

At last, an RfC on paid use of admin tools

Fortunately, this RfC concluded strongly in favor of both of the proposals:

• Admin candidates must disclose any prior paid editing.
• Admins may not use admin tools in furtherance of any paid editing (other than Wikimedian-in-residence or official Wikimedia Foundation work).

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:24, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Study confirms: people edit here to change public perception

This really needs some more statistically valid study (e.g. thousands of respondents, from diverse places).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:24, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

I had the same reaction to the summary, and went and read the paper. The kind of stuff people said was (in my view) what we want - namely putting good information in the hands of people, changes things. This group was for example working on articles about the history of women in science. One of the ways that sexist notions that "women don't do science" get perpetuated, is the absence of stories of women who have done science. Putting those stories out there (in here, actually) fills those absences and makes that notion harder to sustain. That changes the world.

That is what I took away from reading the paper...

That said, there are absolutely people come here to POV push and I would be interested to read research about that. (I asked about one form of this over-ardently a while back at Jimbo's talk page, here)

But I think what motivates even the purest Wikipedians among us is the idea that knowledge is power, and making it freely available does change the world. No? Jytdog (talk) 00:02, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I don't disagree with any of those points. My concern is more along "people edit here to change public perception about their pet-peeve topic", as it were. Something I said in response to someone's unblock request (which was denied) could be summed up thus: There are two kinds of editors here: those who come to push an agenda about something they feel strongly about and know a lot about (e.g. professionally or because it's key to their self-perception); and those who avoid editing in topics in which they can't be neutral. The latter are writing an encyclopedia, and the former are impeding that project, even if they produce a lot of verbiage some of which can eventually be massaged by the latter into encyclopedically appropriate material. To tie this into your example topic, we have proper encyclopedists who note a lack of good articles on women in science, and sport, and the military, and other topics, and write proper articles about them. But we also have users who overstate a particular female subject's accomplishments, or try to create articles on non-notable women, because they have an agenda to make coverage "more equal" without regard to the source material and the site policies. For them, quantity matters more than quality. And you'll likely get viciously smeared as a sexist, patriarchal oppressor if you try to do anything about it. I've experienced this directly more than once. Which relates strongly to the newer thread just below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:02, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Left but illiberal advocacy

Neutrality-minded editors – whether they be right moderates, centrists, or (the important part here) left moderates, with the third of these making up the bulk of Wikipedia's regular editors – find it more and more difficult to enforce WP:Neutral point of view policy (and WP:NOT#ADVOCACY, a related policy) when faced with far-left extremists, who are often the antithesis of liberality, focused instead on censorship, censure, witchunting, excommunication, and holy war in the name of one particular dogmatic viewpoint.

While the most poisonous of these personalities eventually get ejected by the community, it takes on average about ten times longer, after ten times more disruption, than banning of far-right extremists, because far more editors sympathize with some element or another of the far-left PoV being pushed, and know they'll be attacked as one kind or another of -phobe or -ist by those extreme activists if they dare to stand up to them and insist on neutral encyclopedia material backed by proper, independent sources. The activists have an "if you're not with us 100%, you are our enemy" viewpoint toward all comers.

This has been an identifiable problem since the mid-2000s, i.e. shortly after Wikipedia began to be taken seriously by the world, and it has gotten incrementally but palpably worse every year since then.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:00, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

See also https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-abortion-ban-highlighting-linguistic-153506514.html – seems that certain advocates would rather lose key legal battles than not get their way on language-change activism, and will attack other democrats for not towing their new party line. We're seeing a lot of that here, too: pushing of dogmatic activism positions at the cost of doing the encylopedic mission well or even intelligibly.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:34, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

In my honest opinion, I think the essay being referenced is incredibly incoherent and takes very random shots from the hip into the dark (or provides a good example of why gish galloping can be so counterproductive).

I know, I know, I know... Many are concerned about restrictions to freedom of speech, and rightfully so. I'll make an example that any progressive person should consider morally good, telling 7 year olds that "some men want to marry other men, and not women" exists and is normal. Some wrongfully call this "grooming". It is controversial to a lot of American Republicans, and they want all the censorship they possibly can achieve in LGBT subjects. We can't let our guard down on this subject. Yet it's extremely important to highlight that the liberal state already, and always has, placed heavy restrictions on speech considered to be harmful. E.g. defamation or insider trading or death threats to only name three of them.

Right now the younger and politically active generations have had a renewed interested in socialism/anarchism or adjacent political ideologies (on the soft end maybe something like Bernie bro). They have an interest in reshaping society to one with a greater emphasis on positive liberties. Is this inherently bad? Many, if not most of them, accept the liberal state, yet disagrees on how this power ought to be wielded. I think that this is a fair approach to take when reevaluating the liberal state in accordance to utilitarian principles. A common objection to this idea is that they "want things for free" or "are not willing to put in the work", but I ask those making these statements: is this not the society that liberals should strive for? Where we maximize the standard of living? And make sure that people are able to act in accordance with their negative liberties?

I'm suspecting that a possible reply to this could be a critique of the welfare state, and that ideally taxes should remain as low as possible to (in part) ensure that the state does not become overbearing on our liberties. Which is a perfectly fair consideration. However, I'm going to interject that the liberal state is not free regarding how property is treated. The undue and very oppressive violence that uphold the property right and/or property law are in direct opposition to the assumptions underlying Wikipedia project itself -- its justification for being a moral good is that property is private. A citizen of a country has the right to live in it; yet the same citizen does not have the right to a place to live within said country. This is the oppression by the liberal state, and younger generations seek to reduce its impact. Why is this a bad thing?

Interesting topic for sure. But, for me it mainly just seems like all the other times in history where the times moves past people that still hold values that were common in earlier decades. I'm basically arguing that it's just moral panic. I find it difficult to take too seriously when the arguments often are of the strawman type. Academia has always been slanted towards progressive ideas as innovation and critical thought is at the heart and core of the desire to advance society to new heights. I'm reminded of this Chinese proverb, “When the wind of change blows, some build walls, while others build windmills.” Kameloso (talk) 20:28, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Incoming WMF ED Maryana Iskander

I've been saying for a long time that WMF is clearly overdue for a transition to the next phase of the organization lifecycle, and that an executive director who is from the NGO world, not the tech world, would necessarily be a part of that. WMF is finally getting one of those, but before even assuming the job title, she's saying stuff in the press that ranges from excessively cagey to downright strange and red-flag raising, so this may not be the choice who carries WMF across that belated growth line. I guess time will tell.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:53, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

"Knowledge as a service"

Aside from rampant abuse of capitalization simply for visual emphasis, some material at the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2024-2025 is problematic, in keeping with the very long-running issue of WP being overwhelmingly dominated by people from the software industry and being run like a software company, instead of populated by board and key staff people from the NGO sector and operating as what it is, a public-interest nonprofit foundation. To wit:

The purpose of the Wikimedia movement continues to be grounded in the two key pillars of our Strategic Direction:

• Knowledge Equity: "advance our world by collecting knowledge that fully represents human diversity."
• Knowledge as a Service: "build the services and structures that enable others to do the same."

"X as a service" is a computing industry buzzphrase meaning "conversion of a service to a server-only model instead of client-server, by permitting access only over the Internet at a centralized distant server, and with control by the users removed, by not permitting them to use their own client machines to host and customize the service" (tied generally to period subscription fees or per-use access charges); and there's a narrower software industry meaning of "conversion of formerly perpetually or long-term licensed software products to a renewing periodic subscription model to maximize profits by forcing users to pay for the same software over and over again". Neither of these definitions have even the fainest hint of positive messaging for WMF's target audience, which is mostly the general public. Both types of "X as a service" are widely destested by everyone on the planet except corporate bean-counters (mostly the ones working for the company providing the service).

I have too much going on right now to work up an article about WMF's collective brainfarting in this regard, but I don't want to forget about it completely, so am annotating it here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:24, 23 May 2024 (UTC)