Archive for the ‘Wikimedia’ Category
Finally back into Wikipedia
One of the things that I’d been intending to this summer was get back into Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia arena, after having to go on wikibreak for all of this school year for simply not having the time. A few weeks ago as school wound down to the extent that I was barely going in due to so many subjects having finished I started gradually working myself back in, but found it difficult and not particularly entertaining: it’s hard to get back into the swing of things and I didn’t fancy working through the backlog of things under my wikibreak notice. But I went for it and now it’s great to be working away quietely. As a friend points out however I’m only going to become inactive again from September. But my workload will be a lot less next year because I won’t have my heavy-duty history since I’ve now dropped that subject. So we shall see.
I started off a few days ago by getting back into recent changes patrol. This involves watching the feed of edits to Wikipedia and opening and reverting if necessary problematic, nuisance ones we refer to as vandalism. I started off making good use of my new dual-monitor setup (which I will get round to blogging about) by having CDVF display a flitting list of changes on my smaller screen, with Firefox open on the other. It went reasonably well and I did a fair bit of vandal-whacking; reverting edits and posting warnings to the talk pages of the vandals in question using a pretty little script called Twinkle and if necessary blocking the users when they clearly weren’t going to be constructive. This is the old-school way of patrolling, although my use of scripts to speed some things up would probably be scoffed at by the really nostalgic Wikipedians out there. However, after a bit I found myself being repeatedly out-reverted by users of Huggle, an app that tries to make things even more automated, even faster, getting those vandals down in mere seconds. At first I kept going with my old-fashioned methods (that always used to work) but it was soon clear this wasn’t going to last much longer: I was out-reverted four times on one article by someone using Huggle (it was being vandalised repeatedly). Clearly, I needed to try Huggle if I was going to be a useful patroller.
So I booted over to Windows (the app won’t run in Linux, it uses .net – don’t worry if that doesn’t mean much to you…) and downloaded Huggle, read the instructions and got going. And got very, very scared. The sheer speed of the whole thing makes me worry about how many mistakes can so easily be made. Firstly, you work with two buttons in the main: one to advance to the next edit, one to revert the edit and warn the user generically. Other options are to leave messages (such as encouraging anonymous users to make an account if they are being a decent contributor) and to revert for other reasons, such as the introduction of copyrighted material grabbed from somewhere else on the web. Secondly, all of the above can be done with keyboard shortcuts. So with one hand on space to move on, and one on Q to revert and warn (and I note that such edits are queued up and done in the background for you without interference, so you can shoot ahead assuming you have a decent Internet pipe), I was rattling through hundreds of edits.
As I mentioned earlier, mistakes are very possible. Several times someone else got there before me but I had already hit Q as I could see their revert appear on the screen. So Huggle obiediently reverted their reversion (restoring the vandalism) and warned them for unconstructive edits. Eeek. Frantic scrambling to Firefox to apologise ensued. More simply, one finds oneself getting subconciously into a race to work through the edits and revert ‘before someone else does’. I caught myself thinking like this a few times and took a deep breath.
Another scary thing about this program is how it progresses from warnings to blocks. In general people get four warnings for vandalism, with wording decreasing in friendlyness, before they are eligible for a block, starting at for many of us admins one day, and then repeated violations gaining weeks, months etc. in an attempt to get people bored with the whole practice by not being able to do it for a while. Huggle takes this to the next level. If you hit Q when the user already has four warnings, a form comes up to block the user immeadiately. You get options for length, softness/hardness (if you block an IP address (i.e. an Internet connection rather than a logged in user) you can elect to disable account creation or not, and various other things), and a table displays the warnings, times of said warnings and who they were left by, including the various automated anti-vandal bots we have running. Okay, I thought, this is maybe just a little bit far. I was blocking someone without ever having seen their talk page or contributions beyond being told they had the warnings. But what else was I to do? The evidence was there that a block was appropriate and so I set it. But I was left feeling somewhat uneasy.
In any case the app is very impressive with everything that it can do (I’ve only talked about a small set of its features here) and I congratulate the author, Gurch. If used correctly it’s a great way of relieving the monotony involved in keeping Wikipedia vandalism-free. My only concern is that I would perhaps prefer a few more seconds of vandalism existing than the potential recklessness. But maybe I was just an abusive Huggle user. In any case, I shall now reveal my levels of geek with the fact that I was absorbed in my keyboard shortcutting for roughly two solid hours yesterday afternoon.
I’ve also got back into some admin-specific tasks. Speedy deletion is the process by which articles can be nuked without the usual consensus-building discussion when it is clear we don’t want them; for example blatant advertising or articles containing only nonsensical gibberish can be deleted on-sight by an admin. I’ve always found this to be a nice, useful little time-filler so I got going, and ended up creating controversy. Wow. Straight into the thick of it by spawning several sides of discussion on the administrator’s noticeboard over my deletions. This never normally happens to me! I’m normally very much under the radar on Wikipedia, only doing silly little things that keep me entertaining that aren’t often noticed. But this was a change. I’ve also been doing other such tasks. I spent an hour and a half or so this afternoon working my way through the Articles for Deletion backlog, that is closing discussions and determining whether or not there was a consensus to keep, delete, merge etc. So I’ve been keeping busy and being reasonably useful to the encyclopedia.
I worry, however, about my whole outlook towards things with the project: I’ve never been fantastically good at just getting on with jobs unless they are new (novelty value, which I am getting now since I haven’t been around for so long) or are exciting, such as answering press enquiries coming into Wikimedia. We all know of the right people to call on when things need doing and I’m probably not on anyone’s list (although I most definately have a personal list of *cough*slaves*cough* myself). I need to find useful things to do that I can beaver away at.
All in all, it’s good to be back on what still is a fantastic set of projects, for all its faults.
Restoring sanity to the masses
It seems my recent reminiscence is shared by a friend David Gerard, who pointed me in turn at Clay Shirky, one of Wikimedia’s advisory board members. As David claims he was, I was mentally nodding as I read through, as the patterns that are described for online communities are ones that I think I have been subconciously noting for some time, as I’m sure many have. However, the theme seems to be that things need to be done before a community is set up in order to avoid problems later on. While Jimmy probably envisioned that a community would arise surrounding the encyclopedia project, it seems unlikely that he and his fellow starters would give it much thought as that was not what they were aiming for. If only Shirky’s essay had been written a little earlier, people might start to notice the tell-tale signs of things going wrong before they got to the point of no return. While Wikipedia trundles on and will probably keep doing so in its current form, it could be so much better if we were to sort out a lot of the problems that the community faces. But either people are powerless to do so (and likely don’t know what to do either, like me), or those who do have that power haven’t got a clue what to do about it, however much they want to.
In the comments following his post David seems to think that the best thing to do is to put the developers in charge as an ultimate authority (something we don’t really have at the moment). He claims they already have a great deal of power anyway. While those who administrate our servers will always have the ability to “pull-the-plug”, for some it will cost them their jobs and really, we are not going to have a developer revolution. Yes, we depend on software to keep us going, and yes the developers control the code and the implementation of it, and yes they have a well-established cabal like the rest of us. But I don’t think an automatic shoulder-load of power to them makes sense because a good coder does not necessarily equal a good leader. Don’t get me wrong here, I have great respect for the devs and what they do (you have to be a really good coder or sysadmin to navigate the mess of our servers, apparently) but at the same time you can’t be good at everything at once, generally speaking. A technocracy isn’t fair.
The problem is that I don’t have any solutions to the problem either, and it seems no-one does. So people pull back from the encyclopedia with a “screw this” attitude into their cabals, they work away at either things above at Foundation level, they move to other Wikimedia projects to write dictionary entries or news articles instead (this is fine, but it may not be what they want to do), or they hide away with articles that get little attention and work quietely. People are only going to keep seeing the attraction of this, with closed mailing lists and IRC channels being so much more pleasant. When you are in one or two the outside community starts to look a lot worse than it used to, as you realise the alternative. freenode staff and helpers have had this problem recently as I describe here, because our own private communities are a lot nicer than the outside, public social channels. Unless we do something soon, more and more will retreat up and out – including me.
Reminiscence
An experienced Wikimedian who is involved with more Foundation-level stuff told me today that he thought he really didn’t know “how the English Wikipedia works anymore”. I was inclined to say the same thing about myself because it seems that I have pulled back out of Wikipedia itself and into the Foundation stuff too (that is, Wikimedia rather than Wikipedia) – but via a different route. In general experienced users who have been around for a long time have in recent years pulled out of editing to a great degree due to the fact that things are getting more and more unpleasant down in the article editing bazaar. People fight more, rules are tossed about. This is due partly to the steady growth of Wikipedia in active users and articles, but I get the impression those who wish to do the community harm are more prominent. The other reason is that sane minds are generally needed at the Foundation level. So they all gather up there, and thus cabals inevitably form.
The above is the usual for people who were involved in the encyclopedia long in the past. For myself I seem to be in the same negative position of not really knowing what is going on for a lot of the time but I got there a different way. I was never a proper article writer because I don’t know a lot to add that isn’t there. I don’t really have the patience to research and source long and complicated articles. But when I started out I still really wanted to help with Wikipedia because it is something good that can really benefit humankind (and other things we may come into contact with, due to our improved education, such as the environment on this planet). So I got into vandal-fighting and mediation and IRC (and then freenode staff through this). I then began to prepare myself to run for adminship, as my intention was to help administrate the project as I thought I could really help here. At this point I began to move into Foundation matters, finding it more interesting. And then I realised I no longer knew what was going on over on Wikipedia – I found myself spread way too thin as can happen and so started cutting back on what I do, severing connections.
So as it stands now, I look back on working on the English Wikipedia itself with nostalgia in a way. I knew friends back then who now have little time for the project due to real life commitments and I miss simply plugging away at tasks. So, the answer is arguably just dropping back in and doing them. This I would like to do, but I simply don’t have the time with crazy volumes of reading material stemming from my e-mail inbox and elsewhere, and jobs that need to get done that I have responsibility for – or so it seems. And yet I still sometimes find myself floating between things, not sure what to do. I’m no longer really comfortable in what I am doing, and it makes me less productive and useful to Wikimedia. However, I will keep going, and hope that I slot down into a niche where I can trundle along 
Changes to #wikipedia
Well, today has been pretty harrowing. I’ve been addressed as “Premier Whitton” and asked to step down in various Wikipedia positions, but thus far I’m still alive. For it was today I initiated decisive action to solve a problem I have been aiming to solve for literally months (since I took on the role of IRC Group Contact for Wikimedia). Today, #wikipedia’s access list was cleared of all operators, and a new system has been put in place to try and improve things. Today, the blasted wasteland that was #wikipedia has started the road to recovery. Or so I hope.
A month or so ago I started talking to people about making changes to #wikipedia to make it better. It was prompted by a fellow freenode staffer telling me “you really really need to sort out #wikipedia” and this encouraged me to take some more proactive steps to improve things. Before, it was known as a burnt out wasteland by a lot of Wikimedia’s community, and was avoided. Since the channel is suppose to be helpful to the community, it really wasn’t desirable that there was such a rift between IRC users and those who stuck to other forms of communication. There wasn’t (and isn’t yet, but it’s coming) a sense of continuity between what happened on IRC and what happened on the projects etc.
So, myself and the other group contact, James Forrester, chatted about it. I was pretty out of idea as I recall as I didn’t want to do anything drastic. However, James suggested that we simply clear out the ops list and start again with a new channel leader figure and a deputy. The raional for this was that a previous attempt to establish new guidelines essentially failed because there was no coherent agreement among operators that they were something to be enforced. By removing them and then readding the vast majority (hopefully, if they ask to come back, as we want their skill at the job), we can reaffirm commitment to the same goals (I’d argue it’s more important they are the same than anything else). I had also at this point opened discussion on an internal Wikimedia mailing list that was somewhat calmer than the public ones. Some good feedback was gained. So we formulated a plan, wrote some new guidelines and published them, and as soon as everything was in place I made the changes.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy. However, after fielding things for a bit, I employed a few other ops to keep an eye on things and dissapeared for tea followed by a cracking episode of Dr Who (I’m so proud – I guessed it was The Master five minutes before he said it 
). Coming back, I found the above calls and accusations in my away log. I opted to only look briefly and not read every word, thinking that it’d be pretty repetative. I hope I didn’t ignore too much because, don’t get me wrong here, I want as much input as possible into this process. It is a wiki-based organisation, after all, and therefore we can change things very easily. This brings me on to a criticism I have received, about not allowing much community input. The fact is that Mark, someone involved, posted a link to the draft guidelines a number of days before today (which have since changed very little) and no real comments were made. We therefore went ahead with no communtiy saying it was a bad idea. I’m not sure I could have done much better than this. Of course, the reason I particularly have been targetted for blame is because I was the one with his name on everything. We were aiming to act as a group, honest!
To conclude, I am happy with what is happening now. The channel is looking a lot better. freenode’s staff have been encouraging me on the situation and have said that it’s good to experience the position of being disliked because one can learn from it; I certainly have. But as they point out, as long as I am doing the right thing and am succeeding at it then there is nothing to fear. And, as I say above, all discussion is very much welcome. I may well write to this blog later with the status quo then.