Appropriate editorial emphasis of the lead Global Warming article in Wikipedia

I.ve gotten a bit involved in trying to assist in bringing some more collegial editing to the Global warming and Climate Change areas within wikipedia

One thing that has come up is what the right emphasis for the lead article ought to be... should it be primarily science or should it be on more than just that, such as sociopolitical and economic considerations as well, and how much of which. My talk page has been abuzz with this and other GW related topics (for example see Primary focus (a permanent link once archived will be in archive 63)

I decided to see what Britannica had to say as a possible guide to the right emphasis...
here is what I found... Read it for yourself. I confess I found it a bit harder to follow what their lead was but they do seem to lead with the science. However there is a fair bit of emphasis given to other matters as well. So perhaps not a perfect test but interesting.

Why I chose not to run for ArbCom this year

This is not me...
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI have received a number of queries about why I am not running in the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections this year.

I was seriously considering it. I felt duty bound to put up or shut up, to try to effect the "change we need". But when I saw the quality of some of the candidates (whose views I by and large agree with) that were standing, I decided to stand aside. I have a lot of things to do and the last thing the project needs is another arbitrator that can't give full measure, attentionwise. I'd rather someone else were elected that could devote full attention. I hope I'm not wrong in judging their quality (and winnability) and that candidates I support and agree with do end up getting elected, and candidates I oppose don't.

But another factor is that with the SlimVirgin-Lar case so recently closed, after some analysis, I felt that the potential for drama and disruption if I ran was high enough that standing aside seemed a good thing to do for the good of the project. I'd note that the SlimVirgin motion has, even though it's been closed and SlimVirgin desysopped, been used by ElinorD to re-raise issues I feel are already well and truly settled, and by others to trumpet some of the victimization memes we've heard before.

As far as that case goes, I continue to feel constrained by privacy considerations about what I can and cannot say, and by decorum in not wishing to use the same level of vitriol as some of my opponents have employed, and by honesty in not wishing to distort matters in the way I feel some of my opponents have done... an election campaign with me in it at this juncture would possibly lead to more disharmony. Given that there are competent, generally right thinking candidates standing, why do it?

Instead I put those questions of mine together, at some considerable thought, as a summary of some of the important issues and philosophical underpinnings facing the project. Candidates have been evaluated by me (and others... I want to single out Kato for his particularly cogent and insightful work in this area) on how well they answered them. If the community nevertheless chooses candidates that fail to answer these well, so be it. But asking these questions and NOT running seemed more likely to effect the change we need than NOT asking them and running, and having the campaigns veer off into internecine warfare and drama.

So that's why.

If next year is a rerun of this year, if the candidates we elect this time, with the strongest community mandate for change we've seen yet, nevertheless give us the same arbcom we got before, or worse ... then maybe I'll run next year. Or find a different hobby. Because if there isn't a change for the better, we're in for it. And since I've been there, done that... I don't want to do it again.

Signal to Noise, part II

Robot Moderator?
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, in my post Attacking the noise, I described ROBOT9000, automated moderating technology introduced at one of xkcd's IRC channels as an interesting experiment. Apparently the idea has legs.

While reading a very interesting New York Times piece on trolling, The Trolls Among Us (which, by the way, "outed" several trolls, giving their real life identities or information sufficient for a determined person to track them down.... perhaps more on that later... the topic has come up on various WMF wikis and discussion groups) I ran across the tidbit (on page 7 of the piece), that ROBOT9000 has come to 4chan.

Sure enough, there is now a moderated subforum at 4chan called ROBOT9000 (or /r9k/ ).

Dan must be proud!

I for one welcome our new robot masters, if they can improve signal to noise...

Do you?

Knol and Wikipedia

Wikipedia's Knol page
Image by dannysullivan via Flickr
Fair use claimed for commentary
By now, everyone and their brother has blogged about Knol. If you don't know what it is, you've been under a rock, apparently (not that there's anything wrong with that)... follow the link. (which naturally leads to Wikipedia)

Probably half of those blogposts have to do with the relationship between Knol and Wikipedia. Again, go find them if you want to read them.

Some people are saying it's a new gold rush. I have an AdSense account so I decided to see what if anything in the way of gold there is to be had.

I've taken some content from Wikipedia and put it on Knol. The content I took is content I myself authored... I took my DYK articles, at the point of the last edit by me prior to the first edit by someone else, so all content was mine, and Knolised them. (why that edit? Because at that point the content is solely authored by me. That means I can relicense it as I see fit, granting GFDL does not take away the right to license under other terms as well)

The actual formatting leaves a lot to be desired, since they are paste jobs, if I see any signs of traffic I'll improve them. But for the most part at least so far, they are the only Knols on those topics. All their links lead straight to Wikipedia, at least for now.

I am not going to pimp them by linking... if you want to find them you can.

I'm curious as to how this all will play out... will these get any traffic? Will I get improvement suggestions? Will Knol itself complain? Most of these show high correlation to Wikipedia which is not unexpected.

What do you think? Have any of you done this? What will the long term effect be?

This post intentionally left blank

Blank pages in a book
Image via Wikimedia CommonsSo Risker pinged me on my talk page, and like these sorts of low semantic content conversations do, it veered off into other topics, notably how posts sometimes have little content... and whether "no comment" really is "no comment" or actually more like "almost no comment"... this led to "This page intentionally left blank" ... and well... I'll repeat what I said there.

IBM is famous for making a great deal of use of these pages (back when IBM published all its manuals in hardcopy form). They would carry a footer with the manual name and the page number of the manual where they belonged. I can recall inserting them into manuals on my desk, many a time. (Periodically one would receive packets of pages in the post containing fixes to manuals, which one duly inserted into the manual binders, hopefully in the right places. Sometimes some of the new pages would be blank, to replace a page that described something that had been obsoleted, and sometimes some of the new pages would be non blank, but would replace a page that had previously been blank, as they described something new which space had been reserved for in the organization of the manual) There is an apocryphal story that there was an APAR opened against the entire publication group, requesting that all pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" be replaced with pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT ALMOST BLANK" on the grounds that was a more accurate statement... Needless to say if there was such an APAR, it must have been rejected, as the cost of the PTF to identify, produce and print all those (thousands of different) pages (properly numbered and with proper footers, since that is how things were done), mail them out to every manual receipient, and so forth, would have been enormous. Even for IBM.

(this is not the only apocryphal story about APARs and PTFs, remind me sometime to tell the one about the APAR against IEFBR14)

Oh, and by the way, this whole post is a way for me to NOT talk about what really has me steamed right now.... perhaps I'll, in the best IBM tradition, replace this post with what I really want to say instead.

Update:

In accordance with the recommendations made by the This page intentionally left blank project, I decided that my personal site needed one of these. So I created one.

How to spot a cabal

Image via Wikipedia(This used to be in my user space, for a few hours... I had it tagged as an "essay")

The term "cabal" gets thrown around a fair bit in these parts (the english wikipedia). Sometimes in fun (see WP:LOC ) and sometimes not.

This essay is concerned with the latter kind. Because after all, what could possibly be wrong with the BRC?

The easiest way to detect a cabal is by the actions of those you think are members.
* If it seems that they always rush to each other's defense...
* If it seems like there is a "siege mentality"...
* If they offer defense for behavioural issues along the lines of "we are engaged in important work here" or "why are you saying these things", or "you're a proponent of X"...
* If they attack anyone "outside" their circle for raising issues...
* If they get angry if people observe they may be a cabal...
* If they deny the existence of the putative cabal...

...those are all bad signs.

In the course of normal events in collaborative projects, especially this one, it's natural to form working friendships with other editors, and even ask them to come in when you are in a spot where another set of eyes might be helpful. That's not cabalism, it's defending each other and is to be encouraged. There is a danger that this can slide down a slippery slope.

We should all be vigilant against that sort of sliding.

Anatomy of a BLP

Seal of Michigan,
NOT a seal of approval!
Image via Wikimedia CommonsTwo days ago, I wrote about the recent Supreme Court case involving the "Defense of Marriage" amendment. I mentioned our Attorney General, Mike Cox. On a whim, I decided to go actually look at the Wikipedia article that my post linked.

What a mess I found!

This article is a textbook definition of an unacceptable Biography of a Living Person (BLP) article. Take a look at this revision. It contains word for word text taken from his biography on the State of Michigan Attorney General site, text which is quite flatteringly written (no doubt lifted from his campaign 2006 site, which although now a bad link, is still linked from the article), and which is copyrighted by the State of Michigan.

To "balance" this it also contains text from an attack site, again lifted in large part without change.

No inline citations, just a lot of text. And the article has a long history of (mostly IP user) edits warring over various aspects of the content. You may want to look at the Wikiscanner results too, they are interesting.

Sorry, you don't write a neutral balanced well sourced article by lifting text from puff and attack sites in about equal measure. That gives undue weight to the wrong things. Two coatracks don't make a good article.

So I stubbed it out. This revision shows what it looks like now. Mike Cox deserves a better article than that, but at least it wasn't the mess it was before.

How many other articles like this one on second rank politicians, midsized company CEOs, B list movie stars and the like are there? Those that say there is no BLP problem miss the point.

What do you think? Any horrors you've seen that really need stubbing?

The 3RR exemption

Warning, esoteric topic!
Image via Wikimedia CommonsWarning, this is an esoteric topic. Those not steeped in the lore (and lingo) of WP may have no idea what I am talking about :)

The English Wikipedia Biography of Living Persons (BLP) policy includes an exemption to the normal prohibition on edit warring beyond three reverts (3RR) stating that reversion of edits that introduce problematic material (or which interfere with attempts to correct problematic BLP articles in general) are not subject to this rule, that is, reverts can be carried out indefinitely, if it becomes necessary.

Recently, Kim Bruning, who I generally admire strongly, attempted to edit the policy page to remove this exemption. A massive discussion ensued, starting at the section in the link, and going on for many subsequent sections over many screens (and spilling into various other pages as well, including the talk pages of most of the major participants, including myself)

Reading all this is instructive, as it shows that sometimes the Bold Revert Discuss (BRD) model breaks down in the face of trying to modify policy. There were a fair number of bones of contention, among them whether the BLP policy is prescriptive (it is written to be enforced as written, and changes when there is agreement it needs to change) or descriptive (it is written and updated to reflect actual practice, and changes as practice changes). Almost all policy at Wikipedia is descriptive but there are a few exceptions. Another bone of contention was whether there was a problem that needs remediating or not, and how did we measure it.

I am not going to in this post ascribe too much, as I was involved and the discussion got rather heated. It was a rather lame discussion in some respects.

What do you think? Should the 3RR policy have a BLP exemption? If so, is it properly being used/enforced? Was how Kim went at this the proper approach? Or did he mishandle things (it was for the most part him against a fair contingent of folk saying he had things all wrong)? Was my assessment after the fact too harsh?

Evaluating Britannica

Ann Eliza Bleecker
via Wikimedia Commons Some readers may recall that I was granted Encyclopedia Britannica access a while back, I described it here, and gave a possible gotcha (actually two, one relating to edit mechanics, and one relating to content licensing) here.

In the meantime I haven't been using it all that much, partly because it is not as well integrated in with Zemanta as referencing Wikipedia is, and partly because of the gotchas I describe.

On a whim, I decided to do a little test. Ann Eliza Bleecker was a writer and poet of the American Revolutionary era, who became famous after her death for the epistolary novel Maria Kittle, an important advancement of the then burgeoning captivity narrative genre.

"Historians today read Bleecker's stories and letters to gain a vivid perspective of war on the frontier, as recorded by an articulate, but terrified, young mother" (quoting from the Library Company site)

Presumably a fairly important person, right? Wikipedia until recently did not have an article on her at all. Now, Wikipedia does have a good one (I admit bias here, my wife did much of the work, starting from nothing to get the article to where it is now, and I helped a little... she also put up the text of Maria Kittle on Wikisource).

Britannica should have blown the doors off Wikipedia here, by having an article on her as well, right? And should have had it all along, right?

So I searched. (don't know if this link will work for you or not) Turns out, they do not have one.

At all.
Stephen Bleecker Luce
via Wikimedia Commons

The only American figure named Bleecker I could find in Britannica was Stephen Bleecker Luce, an admiral, editor and founder of the Naval War College. Here's the Britannia link, and here's the Wikipedia link. To my eye, the Wikipedia article is a BIT more comprehensive but they are about the same quality level just judging on appearance.

But no Ann Eliza

So what does that prove? I don't know. It's just a random sample. But I was surprised. I figured I would find a great article in Britannica. I didn't. One or two articles prove nothing, but anecdotally, it does show that at least for this one article (and the other one I wasn't looking for), Wikipedia is at this point, about 6 or so years in, more comprehensive.

What do you think? Fluke? or does this bear out in your observations? If you suggest an article or two to compare, maybe in a future post I'll do another sampling.

Ethnic Categories

These are not Wikipedia Editors
deciding how to categorize people
... or are they? Image via WikipediaI've been writing about non Wikipedia subjects for a while. That's partly because there are a lot of things on the boil over there that haven't quite come to a clear resolution... and partly because some of those things kind of upset me.

One of those things is the very existence of "ethnic categories" (for those who don't know, the Wikipedia category mechanism lets you put things, such as articles or user pages, or even other categories in categories. For example I'm in the category of Wikipedia administrators open to recall (among others), and my favorite article, SS Christopher Columbus, is in Great Lakes ships, Whaleback ships, Victorian era passenger ships of the United States, 1893 in the United States , and History of Chicago ... whew! go check to see what I mean, I'll wait).

An ethnic category, oddly enough, places a person's article into a category by what ethnicity they are. For example, the article on Barak Obama is included in the category Afro-Caucasian people among the many other categories it has been placed in. (again, go see, I'll wait)

So what's the harm in that, you ask and why am I upset? Well, because the BLP policy dictates, and good ethical behaviour requires, that editors do no harm. But the very act of categorizing someone is itself harmful. Especially if it is done "by eye". The project has seen editors who add someone to a category based on their appearance... if someone "looks a little bit black and a little bit white" they add them to Afro-Caucasian. We don't work that way, we need sources for things, not just eyeball identification. When challenged about this, some of these editors have resorted to calling those that challenge them, and remove the categories "racist", which is a bit of a stretch.

Further, in a fair number of cases there is little or no relevance to the categorization of someone as something. Consider Sydney Tamiia Poitier for example, you learn nothing from knowing she is in the category Afro-Caucasian, as the article at current does not touch on why it is significant that she is in that category. Yet we had edit wars over that category for some time.

The reader does not gain any understanding about the subject by seeing the category, and their ethnicity had no discernable effect on their career. The policy of undue weight says we should not be adding information to the article that doesn't advance the overall narrative, or that leaves false impressions.

I've been involved in some of these discussions with editors that resist removal of these categories and I find it highly frustrating. I wish the categories didn't exist at all. That's part of wishing we lived in a world where we are all color blind and don't care what a person looks like or where they came from, just what they bring to the marketplace of ideas. But if they must exist I want to see only people who have reliable sources documenting they belong there, and moreover, reliable sources documenting that it somehow matters. That it somehow is relevant to their biography.

So I'm frustrated with that.

What about you? Should we have ethnic categories at all? If we do, what should the criteria for inclusion in them be? Strict? Or not so much?

ArbCom Vacancy

Wherefore "justice"?
(as if!) Image via
Wikimedia CommonsI think the little corner of the blogosphere that I (and presumably, many of my readers) hang out in has discussed the departure of Newyorkbrad from the English Wikipedia project, the events leading up to it, the events surrounding it, and so forth, quite a bit, so I'll skip the background.

But the departure leaves a hole in the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. Brad was widely regarded as a very good arbitrator.

So now what. As the picture says, wherefore justice? (recall please that I feel that Wikipedia is not a government or experiment in justice or social systems, and that arbcom is designed to solve things, not dispense justice)

Traditionally, Jimbo does sometimes appoint to fill vacancies.

And speculation about who he might or might not appoint is already running at a fever pitch. Some speculate that the next people in order from the 2007 election, Rebecca and Raul654, are the most likely appointees.

Well, while they might be the most likely, and while they might not be "bad" arbitrators (both have experience), I think a better idea is to make a radical pick, one that shows some new thinking.

So obviously, I'm stumping for Giano. (you saw that coming, right? grin!) He is 3rd on the list when sorted by percentage, but first, when sorted by number of supports received. (and he got a LOT!) My reasons given at the time
are just as valid as ever, in my view.

What do you think? Am I crazy? If so, tell me! Am I spot on? If so, tell Jimbo! :)

Stemming the rise of the machines?

The machines are reading
(c) Wikimedia Foundation Sometimes events move faster than we plan.

Another tidbit of my visit to the Wikimedia Foundation office Monday was that I got a preview of this post by Cary Bass, which addresses robots.txt, the bit of magic that controls what is searched and what is not. (more specifically, well behaved robots/spiders honor what it says and do not scan pages it names off... Less well behaved robots/spiders eventually get blocked completely once their bad behaviour is discovered.) Specifically, it makes the case that non articlespace pages ought not to be quite as visible in searches as articles, because unlike articlespace pages, which were designed to be read by the intended audience of the encyclopedia itself, they often contain bickering, name calling, or even worse, "userified" pages that contain clear BLP violations, fringe theories given undue weight or all sorts of other problematic content.

Unbeknownst to Cary, after Cary had written that blog post but before it published (the wonders of delayed publishing) Newyorkbrad posted this to the english wikipedia and foundation mailing lists. In it, he advances a remarkably similar thesis, that we should act to avoid giving undue weight to material that really isn't intended for the readership.

Bugzilla mascot, Image
via Wikimedia Commons
Partially in support of this, I entered an enhancement request in Bugzilla for code changes to make it easier to control what is and isn't in robots.txt... your thoughts or comments on that bug would be appreciated.

See also this mailing list post by Jimmy Wales in which he expresses agreement with the general idea that we should use this as a way to avoid doing unnecessary harm. Bravo!

As it turns out, this topic (among others) has been getting considerable discussion at the dreaded Wikipedia Review, but I believe Brad advanced the idea because it's a good idea, not because of the pressure that some were trying to exert. More on that topic later, but for a taste of it you can review this thread.

Governance Reform for Wikipedia?

WMF logo as a mosaic of images
Image via Wikimedia CommonsPreviously, I wrote about a Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wide Wikicouncil. That idea continues to spark discussion (whether I think it's a good idea or not is another matter :) ) ... it has been the subject of discussion by the WMF board, but it appears that the idea is shelved, at least for now.

There is another initiative brewing, perhaps somewhat more grass roots, to foster "governance reform" on the English Wikipedia. The proposal and the talk page make interesting reading.

The argument put forth by proponents is that there has been a failure to get many proposals for reform enacted using the existing (consensus based) processes, and very few reform proposals imposed by fiat either, and that therefore a new process is needed.

Wikimedia Foundation wikis tend to operate using policy that is "descriptive", that is, policy lags behind practice and is written to describe how things are actually done, and as practice changes, policy changes to follow it, or lags practice. By contrast, "prescriptive" policy is written to describe how things ought to be done, and it is changed to force a change in actual practice, that is, policy leads practice.

If this proposal were adopted it would be a major change away from descriptive policy, and, some argue, away from the "wiki way".

Given the number of abortive attempts to change BLP policy that there have been lately, and the frustration I and others have expressed, this proposal has a certain attraction. Heck, it's a siren song... to think that if this were passed, 50 (or however many) reasonable people would now be able to change policy to be as I think it should be, regardless of "consensus" not being for the change. (we have seen things get 65% support and then be declared as dead, lacking consensus)

But there's the rub... who's to say that the 50 (or however many) people selected to be on this thing will be "reasonable", "thoughtful", "bold", etc? If the process used to select them is anything like the Request for Adminship process of late, it's just as likely that they will be popular, non controversial people who have never annoyed anyone or taken a stand on anything... and how do we know if they've never taken a stand what their stand will be on matters going forward? We won't know.

So I don't see this as a good idea, even if we wanted to change away from the wiki way of descriptive policy.

What do you think? Do you think the English Wikipedia has a problem with getting policy to change? If so, do you think the way to solve it is to change to prescriptive policy? And if so, do you think this governance reform is the way to achieve that?

I'd like to know! Tell me! Put your comments in on the talk page as well!