![]() | This page in a nutshell: I'm inviting some people to a pragmatic discussion aimed at getting something actually done about BLPs. This isn't a place to debate things that are not going to happen. You are welcome to join in, if you are in basic sympathy (not necessarily total agreement) with the hypothesis. |
Hypothesis. Thinking Wikipedians can agree:
So far, so good? Honk if you are still with me.
OK, next point. My personal view is that we should be willing to pay a high cost to minimise the risks - I'd raise notability thresholds to remove the half of our least maintained articles. However, it is utterly pointless to have an argument about whether "extreme measures" are justified or not, since such things are not going to happen unless something, which none of us can predict, occurs. So, let's move on. Let's start at the other end. What can we work on which might help (even a bit) and have a sufficiently low cost to the project that it realistically might get consensus?
We don't agree on whether unreferenced BLPs are a particular risk, so let's debate that one elsewhere.
I suspect we'd agree that greatest risk is with the BLPs that are least scrutinised. What metrics do we think best identify such articles? There will be no absolute metric here, but how would we assess the following as indicators of high risk of under-scrutiny?
OK, if we can work that out, can we do a cost/benefit analysis on what might help reduce risk with these articles? I'd suggest we examine:
(1) IP asks to edit semiprotected article (2) In reply, admin or registered editor either unprotects or adds the material him/herself
(1) IP makes edit (2) A variable amount of time later, a Reviewer turns up and reviews material scratching head...
Now in my experience, the IP rarely adds a source. My problem here is that in the latter case, the IP is gone, leaving the Reviewer with (the possibly time-consuming) job of verifying and possibly snooping out a source. Contrast this with the former case, where an admin or registered editor can actually inquire of the requester before the edit is made. Hopefully in this case the person who is actually more likely to have a source can supply it, rather than the other party run off looking. Now don't forget the pages we're talking about covering are (presumably) the relatively obscure and/or esoteric BLPs, a group that is more likely to have obscure sources (you familiar with the Reliable Sources of Bangladesh, Surinam or Swaziland? Neither am I....) - hence the ferreting is likely to be harder...and if not found by google likely not added...and the IP, reviewer AND article creator's efforts are more in vain....Anyway, this is my thinking on how best to cover a great swathe of the less-watched BLPs and why after using Pending Changes I still prefer semiprotection, if not more so. Is my logic flawed in this? Casliber ( talk · contribs) 11:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
So, in a nutshell, I like targetted flagging but I'd use semiprotection. Almost all these articles are low-traffic, hence we don't risk losing loads of potential editors which might be the case if we semiprotected every BLP on wikipedia. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 11:48, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
Feel free to add to this.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
I'm not sure if "Long-term maintenance warning tags (unreferenced, debatable notability, COI, neutrality?)" is much of a issue. I think the poorly linked, poorly categorised, poorly wikiproject allocated will get the least views... an article can be "hidden" out there, unlinked, uncategorised and no-one will ever "drive by" it and check. Other than the sneaky vandal who in a moment of huggle downtime snuck in his negative comments. If it has on a long-term maintenance tag, then I reckon some day, someone will decide to work on the backlog and will see it.
I would love to see the Wolterbot project based cleanup tag listings return, but maybe my faith in wikiprojects is skewed by the Australian one being fairly active and organised. Plenty of other WPs haven't touched their UBLP lists, and even had a go at me for notifying them that the list exists!
The other thing is stopping new editors from creating articles and being able to remove their ability to create (apparently you can't take away someone's ability to create, but leave their ability to edit). As good as BLPPROD is at stopping new unreferenced articles, it still takes up time to detect, tag, prod and then either reference or delete, when the article should not have been let in the first place. Make editors edit for a week, 20 edits whatever. I'm sick of seeing a first contribution being an unreferenced, poorly written BLP on their favourite XYZ. Of course they can get around any delay hurdle, which is where we need to have a 3 strikes and you can't create rule to stop repeat offenders.
Interesting idea, glad you've moved away from UBLPS R EV1L and must be destroyed and started talking about the real issues, which occur in all BLPs, sourced or not. The-Pope ( talk) 16:36, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
My favoured matrix for identifying "unchecked and under monitored" articles would be number of page watchers. It isn't infallible either, but I suspect it is better.-- Scott Mac 18:26, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
Cleaning up old article is time consuming and imposing a tighter rules on them is difficult and contentious because many if not most were valid when they were created. But earlier this year we were able to partially close one stable door when we tightened the rules to require at least some source of source on new BLPs. Most people accept that this has largely worked, though with over 100 articles in that ten day process at any one time we clearly haven't yet succeeded at reeducationg all our new and infrequent editors.
Changing the article creation process so that the system automatically prompts authors for their source should be possible, I believe it is done on DE wiki and I doubt this would be particularly controversial. Once that technology is in place and has been working smoothly for a few months you could tighten the article creation rules to require a source, I'd like to see the rules change to require new articles to have a reliable source, but I know that would be contentious, and if we were doing this with a view to reducing risk then I think we'd have to concede that a University Bio or similar would be enough to reassure us that an article is safe and neither an attack, a hoax or NPOV - though it might not be notable or POV. Note I'm not suggesting that we only do this for BLPs - there are far too many problems in other articles to leave the other 80% of the pedia open. Ϣere SpielChequers 16:54, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm with the Pope on this, if anything it is the untagged articles that are more risky than the tagged ones as we can usually assume that a tag means someone has at least partially read the article. I use Botlaf to trawl through mainspace looking for high risk phrases such as "punched him", OK the vast majority are either sourced or innocuous, but when I find things that need to be blanked they are often if not usually in untagged articles. There are nearly 2,000 articles in mainspace with the word incest, over 400 with Mafiosi and over 7,000 containing the word mafia. Using Botlaf to screen them would be quite practical and fairly efficient. No policy change would be needed, though we would need to find a bot operator who codes in Python as Olaf Davies is retiring. You'd also need some volunteers to go through the reports, as currently I'm the only one using Botlaf. But this approach does work, I've already culled an awful lot of really problematic material with remarkably little dwamah. Ϣere SpielChequers 17:26, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
If you're using a bot that searches for certain phrases I have a framework that can easily do that and I'm sure there are many others. Coding a search bot that writes its results to userspace is a trivial matter. Getting such a bot approved is easy because there are no mainspace risks. Tasty monster (= TS ) 18:52, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
Just to be clear, we need to set up the discussion to define the individual processes proposed. So for mine there is the retrospective one of UBLP clearance (either continuing as is or Uncle G's proposal), and the prospective one(s) - of targetted flagging or targetted semi'ing (of a swathe of lower notability/traffic articles). Is it enough to define and focus on these?
My other idea was to do with the wikicup, which unlike other writing competitions held over the years on WP appears to have some traction. Operating on the carrots vs sticks approach - we've been discussing bonus modifiers to get contributors to focus on vital articles etc. I'd also propose BLPs there, which should result in a morale-boosting increase in some which are more ship-shape... Casliber ( talk · contribs) 19:32, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
It was pointed out a good while back, but ignored--because admitting it greatly increased the scope of the problem--that damaging error about living people and many other things also is present as much or more in the non-BLP articles as in the explicitly BLP ones. All of Wikipedia needs to be reviewed on a regular basis. The entire direction of concentrating further on BLPs is useless Our concern must be with all articles. I therefore see no basis for doing anything along the lines suggested for BLPs in particular, until a problem can be demonstrated.
I therefore take two approaches here. One is of trying to diminish the harm that the apparently inevitable concentration on BLPs will produce. The other is solving the problem. For the first part, I agree completely with the direction both Cas and Scott are taking, that concentration on uBLPs are not the answer. I also agree with the principle of trying to balance the most efficiency with the least harm--this factors do need to be considered together. And I also agree with the general feeling that delayed implementation of edits is always preferable to semi-protection except for dealing with short periods of real vandalism or otherwise unmanageable controversy on a very few hot topics. The trial showed flagging was not practical for heavily edited articles; I understand the developers are working on ameliorating the edit conflict problems involved, but for some articles it will always be a limitation.
But I recall that the trial also showed that there were too few edits to the unwatched least edited articles to be worth any special attention to them. The dispersion of effort over articles on this basis is too low in efficiency to be worth considering. Any use of targeted flagging will require something much more subtle. I suggest a general principle known to apply in other fields of activity: the best measure of an article being improperly edited is if it has been previously. (We know this already--it is the basis on we now use semi-protection). I could see a start by applying flagged editing for a short period automatically after a certain number of problems, and longer with increasing numbers, as we do in blocking. What the numerical values should be needs discussion. I'd be perfectly willing to accept the opinions of those who think that BLPs are the major problem by using smaller numbers of triggering events to such articles. As for practical application, we could make use of the edit filters to count not just successful improper edits, but attempts at them.
As for what I consider the actual problem:
The principle of many eyes will find most errors, but there is no way an unregulated process can possible find them systematically. What's really needed is some formal quality control and reviewing of everything here, on a regular and continuing basis. I do not know how this can be done within the principles of a collaborative project of the sort that Wikipedia is. I do not know how we will even agree on standards. The only data we have, the ongoing review of the politics material, shows that many users are willing to accept as adequately referenced even articles that have no references at all.
Our entire article creation & editing process will -- by its inherent nature -- be amateurish and unpredictable. Since there is no possibility of having top-down quality control, the only alternative is having yet more eyes, that is, greater participation. The only way to have greater participation is to have a high rate of conversion of casual readers to actual editors. On the basis of both formal surveys and my own informal discussions with readers at a very wide range of sophistication this requires two things: first, a much more obvious editing interface for the 95% of the world who are not willing to work with code, and second, much greater encouragement of people coming here for the first time and either fixing or starting articles. Anyone who discourage an editor harms both the possibility of filling in the enormous gaps and of correcting the existing material. The entire direction of concentrating on flagging tends to do this, and I therefore totally reject any approach along the lines suggested. We already are much too discouraging, and we should be moving in the opposite direction. In particular: we must do something about the way we notify people who have made unacceptable edits or articles in order not just to stop the bad work, but to persuade them to contribute good work. My first thought is to remove all the warning templates, but I can;t see how to totally avoid them--most patrollers are very unlikely to write a personal effective comment. In patrolling, I try to rescue potentially good editors who are already upset by the unfriendly attention they receive, but I am considering taking a break from this to rewriting the entire set of templates to make them half the length and twice as friendly. This is probably gthe way I personally can make the most effective contribution. DGG ( talk ) 00:07, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
This doesn't directly deal with the pages the info is on, but rather with those who are editing the pages, and looking at the behaviour of the editor.
One of the things that keeps coming up is the sense of how overly easy it is to get autoconfirmed.
I think (and partly based upon an rfc concerning this) that we should change the 4 days/10 edits to 7 days/20 edits.
The "urge" to edit in a way that may be deemed inappropriate (vandalism, etc.) can be cooled at least some.
I've found in dealing with such people, that once a person has to wait past their weekend (whatever days that might be), the urge is often gone and forgotten - typically replaced with other impulsive urges. And many editors have a 5 day school week or work week.
So simply increasing the number of days requirement from 4 to 7 might do wonders, and wouldn't affect those positive editors overly much (especially since admins can now give "autoconfimed" out ahead of time at their discretion.
And this would help directly deal with the question about the usefulness/effectiveness of semi-protection might be on low traffic/watched pages. - jc37 05:17, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
Do we think this is really a problem? I find when I semi- things, they stay pretty calm and the petty vandalism is largely fixed. This may vary with other people's experiences (and it sounds like it does). Casliber ( talk · contribs) 23:59, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
Okay, just clarifying. I was actually open-minded on this but tend to agree with you that there is negligible value in extending it. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 03:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
Can we tag all these high-risk BLPs and do the equivalent of new-page patrol on them? Rather than using flagged revisions, with all the issues associated with that, can we just have a mechanism where established and trusted editors and indicate that they have reviewed the changes? I've no idea how many folks would be interested in doing those reviews nor do I know if there is a solid mechanism for noting you've checked the edit (I haven't done NPP). But would that work? The partroller could then request a semi for some time period if vandalism was reoccuring. We could even lower the bar for giving that protection to high-risk BLPs (those with few watchers etc.) Thoughts? Hobit ( talk) 10:00, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
Those are excellent examples (although notice that unlike real watchlists they don't include changes on the talk page, which are significant in the case of BLPs). I would like to compile a list of the intersection of Special:UnwatchedPages and Category:Living people, which would also include the relevant talk pages. By looking at related changes to these pages we would pick up edits that would otherwise be all but invisible. For an example of how this works see the link marked "Related changes" on this old revision of my user page]. The master list is in User:Tony Sidaway/Articles under climate change probation (no longer being updated as I'm taking a self-imposed break from that topic).
Having public watchlists like this, adequately curated and regularly visited, greatly magnifies our effectiveness as a community.
Unfortunately the UnwatchedPages function is only accessible to admins, so I'll have to get a tech-savvy admin to run the job to create such a page. I have some candidates in mind so I'll get back to you on that.
Another thing I'd like to encourage is for all editors interested in BLPs to publish their personal watchlists. There are instructios on how to this at Wikipedia:Syndication#Watchlist_feed_with_token. Here is a link to my public watchlist. If for any reason you have to stop using Wikipedia regularly, others will be able to look at changes on your watchlist if you've had the forethought to put a link to your personal watchlist RSS feed on your user page.
I don't at all agree that unwatched and low-watchlist functions should be for admins only. If we all had access to such lists it would greatly improve scrutiny on the relevant changes. -- TS 16:15, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Is there any way to find out? (Please add any questions, or any answers you think might help.)
I suppose the questions are predicated on how we identify BLPs. I suggest that a suitably written bot can trawl the article list to find articles that are not yet tagged with Category:Living people but whose names are suggestive of an articla about a person. From the volume of those we will then know how to proceed. I suspect that most of our biographical articles are about living persons rather than historical figures--there is a very limited supply of historical figures but a seemingly inexhaustible supply of living people that people want to write articles about. Of the remainder we can probably turf out most of the deceased by selecting on words like "died" or on phrases suggesting birth years more than a century or so ago. But the details of what to do would depend very much on the results. Has anybody done something like this before? -- TS 21:31, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
I grabbed a snapshot of articles in Category: Living people and am in the process of splitting them into groups of 2000 articles. Here's the beginning of a conglomeration of these articles. See what you think.
The "related changes" links can be used to track recent changes in the articles, so if you click a single link you'll see what's going on.
Grouping the articles 2000 at a time may not really be the best thing to do, because there are about half a million articles so that's still about 250 articles lists. I'll experiment with larger list sizes. Getting down below 100 lists should be enough.
Meanwhile this gives a feel for how we could organize the division of labor.
One good thing about this kind of list is that it's very, very easy to update automatically. I could set up a bot to refresh the contents of all the lists at weekly intervals. This should be just a few lines of code with a good bot framework. -- TS 01:04, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Another thing that can be done is listing the articles by year and month or last edit. It would be a very low-cost operation for a regular editor to adopt a few hundred of the most rarely edited articles and put them onto his watchlist. In this way hidden vandalism might more quickly be detected. -- TS 01:36, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Okay, a bit more coding and here's the final thing: every single BLP in Category:Living people, arranged in 100 tranches of 5000 articles with a handy "related changes" link to click on each.
So from that page you can look at every single edit to a BLP on Wikipedia in recent days. Of course you can do the same with one link here, but that's just an overwhelming number of edits for one person to look at. -- TS 06:26, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
![]() | This page in a nutshell: I'm inviting some people to a pragmatic discussion aimed at getting something actually done about BLPs. This isn't a place to debate things that are not going to happen. You are welcome to join in, if you are in basic sympathy (not necessarily total agreement) with the hypothesis. |
Hypothesis. Thinking Wikipedians can agree:
So far, so good? Honk if you are still with me.
OK, next point. My personal view is that we should be willing to pay a high cost to minimise the risks - I'd raise notability thresholds to remove the half of our least maintained articles. However, it is utterly pointless to have an argument about whether "extreme measures" are justified or not, since such things are not going to happen unless something, which none of us can predict, occurs. So, let's move on. Let's start at the other end. What can we work on which might help (even a bit) and have a sufficiently low cost to the project that it realistically might get consensus?
We don't agree on whether unreferenced BLPs are a particular risk, so let's debate that one elsewhere.
I suspect we'd agree that greatest risk is with the BLPs that are least scrutinised. What metrics do we think best identify such articles? There will be no absolute metric here, but how would we assess the following as indicators of high risk of under-scrutiny?
OK, if we can work that out, can we do a cost/benefit analysis on what might help reduce risk with these articles? I'd suggest we examine:
(1) IP asks to edit semiprotected article (2) In reply, admin or registered editor either unprotects or adds the material him/herself
(1) IP makes edit (2) A variable amount of time later, a Reviewer turns up and reviews material scratching head...
Now in my experience, the IP rarely adds a source. My problem here is that in the latter case, the IP is gone, leaving the Reviewer with (the possibly time-consuming) job of verifying and possibly snooping out a source. Contrast this with the former case, where an admin or registered editor can actually inquire of the requester before the edit is made. Hopefully in this case the person who is actually more likely to have a source can supply it, rather than the other party run off looking. Now don't forget the pages we're talking about covering are (presumably) the relatively obscure and/or esoteric BLPs, a group that is more likely to have obscure sources (you familiar with the Reliable Sources of Bangladesh, Surinam or Swaziland? Neither am I....) - hence the ferreting is likely to be harder...and if not found by google likely not added...and the IP, reviewer AND article creator's efforts are more in vain....Anyway, this is my thinking on how best to cover a great swathe of the less-watched BLPs and why after using Pending Changes I still prefer semiprotection, if not more so. Is my logic flawed in this? Casliber ( talk · contribs) 11:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
So, in a nutshell, I like targetted flagging but I'd use semiprotection. Almost all these articles are low-traffic, hence we don't risk losing loads of potential editors which might be the case if we semiprotected every BLP on wikipedia. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 11:48, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
Feel free to add to this.
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
I'm not sure if "Long-term maintenance warning tags (unreferenced, debatable notability, COI, neutrality?)" is much of a issue. I think the poorly linked, poorly categorised, poorly wikiproject allocated will get the least views... an article can be "hidden" out there, unlinked, uncategorised and no-one will ever "drive by" it and check. Other than the sneaky vandal who in a moment of huggle downtime snuck in his negative comments. If it has on a long-term maintenance tag, then I reckon some day, someone will decide to work on the backlog and will see it.
I would love to see the Wolterbot project based cleanup tag listings return, but maybe my faith in wikiprojects is skewed by the Australian one being fairly active and organised. Plenty of other WPs haven't touched their UBLP lists, and even had a go at me for notifying them that the list exists!
The other thing is stopping new editors from creating articles and being able to remove their ability to create (apparently you can't take away someone's ability to create, but leave their ability to edit). As good as BLPPROD is at stopping new unreferenced articles, it still takes up time to detect, tag, prod and then either reference or delete, when the article should not have been let in the first place. Make editors edit for a week, 20 edits whatever. I'm sick of seeing a first contribution being an unreferenced, poorly written BLP on their favourite XYZ. Of course they can get around any delay hurdle, which is where we need to have a 3 strikes and you can't create rule to stop repeat offenders.
Interesting idea, glad you've moved away from UBLPS R EV1L and must be destroyed and started talking about the real issues, which occur in all BLPs, sourced or not. The-Pope ( talk) 16:36, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
My favoured matrix for identifying "unchecked and under monitored" articles would be number of page watchers. It isn't infallible either, but I suspect it is better.-- Scott Mac 18:26, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
Cleaning up old article is time consuming and imposing a tighter rules on them is difficult and contentious because many if not most were valid when they were created. But earlier this year we were able to partially close one stable door when we tightened the rules to require at least some source of source on new BLPs. Most people accept that this has largely worked, though with over 100 articles in that ten day process at any one time we clearly haven't yet succeeded at reeducationg all our new and infrequent editors.
Changing the article creation process so that the system automatically prompts authors for their source should be possible, I believe it is done on DE wiki and I doubt this would be particularly controversial. Once that technology is in place and has been working smoothly for a few months you could tighten the article creation rules to require a source, I'd like to see the rules change to require new articles to have a reliable source, but I know that would be contentious, and if we were doing this with a view to reducing risk then I think we'd have to concede that a University Bio or similar would be enough to reassure us that an article is safe and neither an attack, a hoax or NPOV - though it might not be notable or POV. Note I'm not suggesting that we only do this for BLPs - there are far too many problems in other articles to leave the other 80% of the pedia open. Ϣere SpielChequers 16:54, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm with the Pope on this, if anything it is the untagged articles that are more risky than the tagged ones as we can usually assume that a tag means someone has at least partially read the article. I use Botlaf to trawl through mainspace looking for high risk phrases such as "punched him", OK the vast majority are either sourced or innocuous, but when I find things that need to be blanked they are often if not usually in untagged articles. There are nearly 2,000 articles in mainspace with the word incest, over 400 with Mafiosi and over 7,000 containing the word mafia. Using Botlaf to screen them would be quite practical and fairly efficient. No policy change would be needed, though we would need to find a bot operator who codes in Python as Olaf Davies is retiring. You'd also need some volunteers to go through the reports, as currently I'm the only one using Botlaf. But this approach does work, I've already culled an awful lot of really problematic material with remarkably little dwamah. Ϣere SpielChequers 17:26, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
If you're using a bot that searches for certain phrases I have a framework that can easily do that and I'm sure there are many others. Coding a search bot that writes its results to userspace is a trivial matter. Getting such a bot approved is easy because there are no mainspace risks. Tasty monster (= TS ) 18:52, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
Just to be clear, we need to set up the discussion to define the individual processes proposed. So for mine there is the retrospective one of UBLP clearance (either continuing as is or Uncle G's proposal), and the prospective one(s) - of targetted flagging or targetted semi'ing (of a swathe of lower notability/traffic articles). Is it enough to define and focus on these?
My other idea was to do with the wikicup, which unlike other writing competitions held over the years on WP appears to have some traction. Operating on the carrots vs sticks approach - we've been discussing bonus modifiers to get contributors to focus on vital articles etc. I'd also propose BLPs there, which should result in a morale-boosting increase in some which are more ship-shape... Casliber ( talk · contribs) 19:32, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
It was pointed out a good while back, but ignored--because admitting it greatly increased the scope of the problem--that damaging error about living people and many other things also is present as much or more in the non-BLP articles as in the explicitly BLP ones. All of Wikipedia needs to be reviewed on a regular basis. The entire direction of concentrating further on BLPs is useless Our concern must be with all articles. I therefore see no basis for doing anything along the lines suggested for BLPs in particular, until a problem can be demonstrated.
I therefore take two approaches here. One is of trying to diminish the harm that the apparently inevitable concentration on BLPs will produce. The other is solving the problem. For the first part, I agree completely with the direction both Cas and Scott are taking, that concentration on uBLPs are not the answer. I also agree with the principle of trying to balance the most efficiency with the least harm--this factors do need to be considered together. And I also agree with the general feeling that delayed implementation of edits is always preferable to semi-protection except for dealing with short periods of real vandalism or otherwise unmanageable controversy on a very few hot topics. The trial showed flagging was not practical for heavily edited articles; I understand the developers are working on ameliorating the edit conflict problems involved, but for some articles it will always be a limitation.
But I recall that the trial also showed that there were too few edits to the unwatched least edited articles to be worth any special attention to them. The dispersion of effort over articles on this basis is too low in efficiency to be worth considering. Any use of targeted flagging will require something much more subtle. I suggest a general principle known to apply in other fields of activity: the best measure of an article being improperly edited is if it has been previously. (We know this already--it is the basis on we now use semi-protection). I could see a start by applying flagged editing for a short period automatically after a certain number of problems, and longer with increasing numbers, as we do in blocking. What the numerical values should be needs discussion. I'd be perfectly willing to accept the opinions of those who think that BLPs are the major problem by using smaller numbers of triggering events to such articles. As for practical application, we could make use of the edit filters to count not just successful improper edits, but attempts at them.
As for what I consider the actual problem:
The principle of many eyes will find most errors, but there is no way an unregulated process can possible find them systematically. What's really needed is some formal quality control and reviewing of everything here, on a regular and continuing basis. I do not know how this can be done within the principles of a collaborative project of the sort that Wikipedia is. I do not know how we will even agree on standards. The only data we have, the ongoing review of the politics material, shows that many users are willing to accept as adequately referenced even articles that have no references at all.
Our entire article creation & editing process will -- by its inherent nature -- be amateurish and unpredictable. Since there is no possibility of having top-down quality control, the only alternative is having yet more eyes, that is, greater participation. The only way to have greater participation is to have a high rate of conversion of casual readers to actual editors. On the basis of both formal surveys and my own informal discussions with readers at a very wide range of sophistication this requires two things: first, a much more obvious editing interface for the 95% of the world who are not willing to work with code, and second, much greater encouragement of people coming here for the first time and either fixing or starting articles. Anyone who discourage an editor harms both the possibility of filling in the enormous gaps and of correcting the existing material. The entire direction of concentrating on flagging tends to do this, and I therefore totally reject any approach along the lines suggested. We already are much too discouraging, and we should be moving in the opposite direction. In particular: we must do something about the way we notify people who have made unacceptable edits or articles in order not just to stop the bad work, but to persuade them to contribute good work. My first thought is to remove all the warning templates, but I can;t see how to totally avoid them--most patrollers are very unlikely to write a personal effective comment. In patrolling, I try to rescue potentially good editors who are already upset by the unfriendly attention they receive, but I am considering taking a break from this to rewriting the entire set of templates to make them half the length and twice as friendly. This is probably gthe way I personally can make the most effective contribution. DGG ( talk ) 00:07, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
This doesn't directly deal with the pages the info is on, but rather with those who are editing the pages, and looking at the behaviour of the editor.
One of the things that keeps coming up is the sense of how overly easy it is to get autoconfirmed.
I think (and partly based upon an rfc concerning this) that we should change the 4 days/10 edits to 7 days/20 edits.
The "urge" to edit in a way that may be deemed inappropriate (vandalism, etc.) can be cooled at least some.
I've found in dealing with such people, that once a person has to wait past their weekend (whatever days that might be), the urge is often gone and forgotten - typically replaced with other impulsive urges. And many editors have a 5 day school week or work week.
So simply increasing the number of days requirement from 4 to 7 might do wonders, and wouldn't affect those positive editors overly much (especially since admins can now give "autoconfimed" out ahead of time at their discretion.
And this would help directly deal with the question about the usefulness/effectiveness of semi-protection might be on low traffic/watched pages. - jc37 05:17, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
Do we think this is really a problem? I find when I semi- things, they stay pretty calm and the petty vandalism is largely fixed. This may vary with other people's experiences (and it sounds like it does). Casliber ( talk · contribs) 23:59, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
Okay, just clarifying. I was actually open-minded on this but tend to agree with you that there is negligible value in extending it. Casliber ( talk · contribs) 03:29, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
Can we tag all these high-risk BLPs and do the equivalent of new-page patrol on them? Rather than using flagged revisions, with all the issues associated with that, can we just have a mechanism where established and trusted editors and indicate that they have reviewed the changes? I've no idea how many folks would be interested in doing those reviews nor do I know if there is a solid mechanism for noting you've checked the edit (I haven't done NPP). But would that work? The partroller could then request a semi for some time period if vandalism was reoccuring. We could even lower the bar for giving that protection to high-risk BLPs (those with few watchers etc.) Thoughts? Hobit ( talk) 10:00, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
Those are excellent examples (although notice that unlike real watchlists they don't include changes on the talk page, which are significant in the case of BLPs). I would like to compile a list of the intersection of Special:UnwatchedPages and Category:Living people, which would also include the relevant talk pages. By looking at related changes to these pages we would pick up edits that would otherwise be all but invisible. For an example of how this works see the link marked "Related changes" on this old revision of my user page]. The master list is in User:Tony Sidaway/Articles under climate change probation (no longer being updated as I'm taking a self-imposed break from that topic).
Having public watchlists like this, adequately curated and regularly visited, greatly magnifies our effectiveness as a community.
Unfortunately the UnwatchedPages function is only accessible to admins, so I'll have to get a tech-savvy admin to run the job to create such a page. I have some candidates in mind so I'll get back to you on that.
Another thing I'd like to encourage is for all editors interested in BLPs to publish their personal watchlists. There are instructios on how to this at Wikipedia:Syndication#Watchlist_feed_with_token. Here is a link to my public watchlist. If for any reason you have to stop using Wikipedia regularly, others will be able to look at changes on your watchlist if you've had the forethought to put a link to your personal watchlist RSS feed on your user page.
I don't at all agree that unwatched and low-watchlist functions should be for admins only. If we all had access to such lists it would greatly improve scrutiny on the relevant changes. -- TS 16:15, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Is there any way to find out? (Please add any questions, or any answers you think might help.)
I suppose the questions are predicated on how we identify BLPs. I suggest that a suitably written bot can trawl the article list to find articles that are not yet tagged with Category:Living people but whose names are suggestive of an articla about a person. From the volume of those we will then know how to proceed. I suspect that most of our biographical articles are about living persons rather than historical figures--there is a very limited supply of historical figures but a seemingly inexhaustible supply of living people that people want to write articles about. Of the remainder we can probably turf out most of the deceased by selecting on words like "died" or on phrases suggesting birth years more than a century or so ago. But the details of what to do would depend very much on the results. Has anybody done something like this before? -- TS 21:31, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
I grabbed a snapshot of articles in Category: Living people and am in the process of splitting them into groups of 2000 articles. Here's the beginning of a conglomeration of these articles. See what you think.
The "related changes" links can be used to track recent changes in the articles, so if you click a single link you'll see what's going on.
Grouping the articles 2000 at a time may not really be the best thing to do, because there are about half a million articles so that's still about 250 articles lists. I'll experiment with larger list sizes. Getting down below 100 lists should be enough.
Meanwhile this gives a feel for how we could organize the division of labor.
One good thing about this kind of list is that it's very, very easy to update automatically. I could set up a bot to refresh the contents of all the lists at weekly intervals. This should be just a few lines of code with a good bot framework. -- TS 01:04, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Another thing that can be done is listing the articles by year and month or last edit. It would be a very low-cost operation for a regular editor to adopt a few hundred of the most rarely edited articles and put them onto his watchlist. In this way hidden vandalism might more quickly be detected. -- TS 01:36, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Okay, a bit more coding and here's the final thing: every single BLP in Category:Living people, arranged in 100 tranches of 5000 articles with a handy "related changes" link to click on each.
So from that page you can look at every single edit to a BLP on Wikipedia in recent days. Of course you can do the same with one link here, but that's just an overwhelming number of edits for one person to look at. -- TS 06:26, 3 November 2010 (UTC)