Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:30, 16 January 2006

I'm an Orthodox Jewish Wikipedian whose interests lie in computers, technology, mathematics, linguistics, science, religion, and so on. Below are my thoughts and ideas on Misplaced Pages, which I hope you'll find interesting at the least. If you think I've left out a valid criticism, or could have worded something better, or anything of the sort, go ahead and edit—I don't mind constructive edits to my user page (although I may, of course, revert them). Treat this like any other page, and improve it as best you can. Only if we get into an edit dispute, I win.  ;)

Consensus

Consensus is the soul of Misplaced Pages. All the following are my personal views on how Wikipedians should agree to run Misplaced Pages. As principles I believe in, they guide my comments and votes in various things here, and as arguments in favor of them, they hopefully sway at least a few others to agree with me—but above all stands consensus. I do and will always abide by even those policies I disagree with, just as I obey the law in real life. A wiki cannot operate except by consensus.

Admins and policy

What is adminship?

Administrators are those with a few extra abilities. They can block and unblock, protect and unprotect, and delete and undelete, as well as a few miscellanea. Admins exist because sometimes the wiki process gets out of control: sometimes free rein is abused. Blocking, protection, and deletion are all probably necessary to make a good encyclopedia.

So, all well and good. But who decides whether something warrants action? The community or the individual admin? If an admin makes an uncontroversial decision, of course, there's no issue. But what if a decision is controversial? Someone possibly innocent is blocked from editing, a page is perhaps unreasonably locked against the spirit of a wiki, potentially useful information is lost to all non-admins. Should it be reversed in a wheel war? Surely not. Most admins are leery of undoing others' actions, and for good reason, so all cases but the most passion-engendering (see WP:RFC/KM). Sometimes RFCs take place; sometimes discussion with the original actor is possible; but whatever the resolution, it means that a questionable state of affairs is in effect for some period of time.

On the other hand, what are the possible consequences of taking things too slowly? Obviously nothing as profound as rampant vandalism or edit wars, since the rules allow those to be dealt with easily. So something more insidious: personal attacks, perhaps, harrassment. And yet surely there are intermediate solutions in those cases—putting a user on a one-admin personal attack parole is an idea that's grossly underused, I feel. In such a case, the user in question can no longer commit possible offenses until the issue has been discussed more extensively among the community, but on the other hand he can still edit productively, and at worst he's not able to fully participate in talk page discussions for a few days. Where's the loss?

And so I argue that admin actions should always be taken slowly. If there's a firmly established precedent, strong community support for a very specific course of action—in other words, a policy—that policy should be narrowly followed. If there could be the slightest doubt about a policy's implementation, the matter should be left to discussion. I would go so far as to require admins to specify what deletion criterion they're deleting a page under when deleting, and likewise for blocking and protecting. There is no policy that need not be followed strictly and to the letter.

Arguments in favor

1. Wikis depend on free editing, and any impairment of that is automatically harmful except when failing to do so is even worse. Protection, blocking, and deletion all harm wikis if used to excess, and must be undertaken with great restraint.
2. Consistency is key to fairness. While admins will inevitable enforce slightly different standards, this should be minimized, so that the way you're treated is a consequence of your actions and not just the luck of the draw. This is not only basic justice, it's also common sense if we want people to continue editing here.

Arguments against

1. Admins can't be expected to memorize pages of rules. If admins know they can get in trouble for minor deviations from policy, then they'll be reluctant to enforce policy altogether.

   Counter-argument: There are plenty of admins and would-be admins in the Misplaced Pages community, and those who aren't willing to put in the effort to learn the rules for using a given power don't have to use it. It would suffice to keep in mind some of the most common ones, and refer to the full policy when uncertain. Of course, some degree of error would be perfectly acceptable; if an admin finds that it's too onerous to remember how to use a specific power, they can just stop using it.

2. The rules can't cover everything. What happens when something unexpected comes up? Are admins supposed to sit their twiddling their thumbs while the community builds a consensus?

   Counter-argument: The deletion and protection policies are excellent examples of clearly-worded policies that can be followed to the letter with no problems. I have never seen or heard of a case where admins had to act outside the then-existing policies since policies were really formalized—any conceivable difficulty can be either handled by the existing policies or put off for a few days. Pages almost never absolutely need to be protected, and certainly almost never absolutely need to be deleted (except for pure copyright violation, libel, and the like, which are all speedily-deleteable). The same goes for blocks, or would go for blocks if the current policy didn't give admins almost unlimited discretion.

Naming

MediaWiki, by default, has to some degree a very unique naming system. The highest privilege level is steward, rather than admin or operator. Those with the greatest powers are labeled merely servants. The next level is bureaucrat, one who mindlessly executes rules. These represent the ideal of Wikipedian ranks: ordinary users get to use higher-level powers by proxy. The rulership is bottom-up, not top-down.

But then we have sysop or administrator. To those not acquainted with MediaWiki's oddities, those would seem to be ranks of authority, not ranks of servitude. On an Internet forum, administrators are the supreme authority. As well, those terms are usually used in computer science for those with very high-level permissions. But neither of those describe Misplaced Pages admins.

So we should drop the terms. They're not really suitable. Admins should, instead, be known as trusted users. It far better describes their role in Misplaced Pages. Their powers are obtained by trust of the community and retained by trust of the community.

Desysopping

As noted above, admins are those who are trusted sufficiently to use their powers correctly. A full 80% must agree to grant any given user adminship, more even than the bar to establish a new policy. But what happens when they no longer become trusted?

Currently, they have to go through a long and cumbersome ArbCom process. Very, very few Wikipedians have ever been desysopped against their will. Look at the case of Freestylefrappe. It was opened December 24, 2005, presenting extensive evidence of Freestylefrappe getting into arguments with fellow Wikipedians, edit warring, failing to assume good faith, threatening those who disagreed with him, and unprotecting a page protected due to his edit warring. As of January 15, 2006, while the case was still plodding along, Freestylefrappe got into a wheel war. Is this a case of the process working?

It could be argued that the problem lies in the slowness of this particular ArbCom, not with ArbCom resolution in general. Of course, this is a point, but the ArbCom's task is to examine evidence thoroughly, so it will always be slow. Unless it begins removing adminship with injunctions, admins who don't have the trust of the community will retain their powers for some time after they begin misbehaving.

So what would an alternative be? Well, let's look to the wiki process—Misplaced Pages is, after all, a wiki, and it is the spectacular success of the wiki method that's made Misplaced Pages what it is today. What would the wiki thing to do be? Why, allow easy community desysopping and resysopping. That way, no admin who loses the trust of the community will remain an admin for long.

Let me clarify my suggested implementation. If, say, any five users requested it, they could require any admin to put up a new RFA. If the admin doesn't pass this, according to the usual standards, they would be desysopped. (It might be useful to give this power to the bureaucrats for ease of implementation.)

Arguments in favor

1. Becoming an admin will truly be no big deal. Famously, Jimbo Wales called adminship "no big deal". The problem is, it's not. Why? Because the powers bestowed are important, and it's virtually impossible to have them removed in cases of abuse. If the community knows that their choices will be under scrutiny, they'll be able to relax their standards, and we'll have more admins who are nevertheless more trustworthy due to the heightened scrutiny. This will allow administrative tasks to be handled more easily, making things more efficient.
2. The community should be allowed to desysop. Currently, the only ones empowered with the right to order desysopping are Jimbo Wales and the Arbitration Committee, not the community as a whole. Misplaced Pages is founded upon consensus, and allowing users that the community does not trust to rule over it violates that founding principle.

Arguments against

1. You'd force admins to walk on eggshells. They would have to live in constant fear of ticking people off and getting desysopped.

   Counter-argument: Exactly the point. Admins who are not supported by 80% of existing users should not be admins. Instead of being able to do whatever they want (within the bounds of sanity) without getting into trouble, they will be forced to act only on behalf of the community.

2. Admins shouldn't have to be subject to the whims of the community. They should have a certain degree of autonomy outside of what the community wants them to do.

   Counter-argument: Absolutely not. Administrators must not use their powers except exactly as the community wants them to. Anything else goes against the very soul of Misplaced Pages.

3. It would be too easy to harrass an admin by constantly RFAing them.

   Counter-argument: No more so than people could constantly open up RFCs on every little thing a user does. These are situations where being bold, removing the request, and RFCing the harrassers can be appropriate.

Notability

Misplaced Pages is not a paper encyclopedia. It has enough space to contain any amount of notable and non-notable information. Therefore, there is no reason it should not be the encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias—no information that is encyclopedic should be removed.

So what's encyclopedic? Encyclopedias, of course, must inherently follow certain rules as to the content they include; otherwise they wouldn't be encyclopedias, they'd be something else. I think that a proper encyclopedia must 1) contain only verifiable information, dealing exclusively with facts and not opinions (although facts about opinions are of course fine); 2) predominantly consist of some kind of narrative following the normal conventions of prose (simple lists and raw data are only encyclopedic as article indices or potential article indices, or as accompaniment to an article, not as sources of information in their own right); and 3) consist of a set of articles arranged topically for purposes of reference (a history book is not an encyclopedia because it's arranged by time or place and generally includes something of an overarching narrative, rather than being set up as a set of basically separate articles). Misplaced Pages must also adhere to neutrality, of course, and it shouldn't duplicate material found in its principal sister projects (dictionary definitions can sometimes be encyclopedic under the above definition), but otherwise I see no reason to restrict its purview beyond the restrictions inherent to the concept of an encyclopedia.

Except for one thing. Let's say I write an article on Simetrical's views on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clearly, the stated views would be mine, since they were added using my account. Do they belong in Misplaced Pages? I think not. There must be a very, very minimal notability threshold. My guideline would be: if more than a few dozen people in the world would likely be at least passingly interested on having more information on a specific topic, it's notable enough for Misplaced Pages.

In summary, I think Misplaced Pages should be an encyclopedia to end all encyclopedias. Anything that would fit into any encyclopedia, of any sort, should be eligible for inclusion in Misplaced Pages, provided it's neutral. I believe that there is no reason for Misplaced Pages to be anything less than The 💕. And that is why I oppose the deletion of anything verifiable from Misplaced Pages.

Arguments in favor

1. This will encourage users to join in and improve Misplaced Pages. See Eric Burns' remarks about Misplaced Pages as of November 1, 2004; compare to his remarks as of November 20, 2005. This is surely typical of deletions (or attempted deletions) of eager contributors' minor additions to our project. Who wouldn't be discouraged if his work was deleted?

   Sure, you might say, the article may not have been worth much anyway. But the author's future contributions might be broader. Dedication to specific articles might eventually become dedication to the project as a whole. People like that are going to be turned away if their articles are deleted.

2. Anything else is contrary to the Wikimedia Foundation's goals. The slogan of Wikimedia fundraisers is "Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." How is this goal being accomplished if encyclopedic articles deemed non-notable are deleted? Where will this verifiable human knowledge go? What those advocating a notability requirement are saying, essentially, is that Wikimedia's fundraising slogan should not, in a small way, be true. This is not a decision that we, Wikipedians, should make—the scope of the project should be in the hands of the Wikimedia Foundation itself.

   At present, of course, the Foundation has decided to let us decide. But our decision should conform to the goals of the project we work on, not least because of the importance and laudability of those goals themselves.

3. This will reduce systemic bias in selection of articles. What's "notable"? Even among those who agree notability should be a criterion, there's disagreement on some of the finer points. Look at the webcomic articles that have been deleted for non-notability—why are they less notable than a list of all Fletcher-class destroyers? Why hasn't anyone put the latter up for deletion? Because, I suspect, many of us have a deeply-rooted feeling that certain types of information are "valuable" and certain types are not. Because the one is "serious stuff", military-related, whereas the other is "mere" popular culture. Isn't this non-neutral?

   Perhaps that's just a coincidence, sure. What about schools? Virtually no school, anywhere, gets deleted. Why? Same sort of reason. There are enough people who think schools are "inherently notable" that all of them are kept. Why would they think that? Well, we surely have an awful lot of students at Misplaced Pages, and probably a quite disproportionate number of teachers as well. I can't see any other reason than that—and that's systemic bias.

Arguments against

1. Categories will be horribly confusing. If I had to wade through 12,985 articles in Category:American writers, I'd never be able to find what I'm looking for.

   Counter-argument: The existing category system needs to be redone in any case. There are already categories that contain so many articles that they have to be cut up into tiny pieces (Category:American writers is an example, in fact). As now, any overly large categories can be cut up into subcategories with no major loss until a better solution comes around. One part of a solution would probably be dividing some categories into "Non-notable", "Notable", and "Famous" subcategories.

2. It will make Misplaced Pages look bad. Who's going to trust an encyclopedia that has articles on every single Star Trek episode in history?

   Counter-argument: A lot of people. As in, roughly 84% of the Internet. We already have lengthy articles on every single Star Trek episode, and nobody seems to hold it against us. It just makes us more useful as a reference source, not less.

3. Non-notable articles are a waste of the Mediawiki Foundation's server space.

   Counter-argument: Having articles in the database imposes three basic forms of server load: hard disk usage, backup, and access usage. Hard disk usage is completely irrelevant; well over two million very large (32 KB) articles could be stored on a $100 80 GB hard drive (do the math). Backup is slightly more of an issue, but still generally doesn't consume much in the way of system resources. Access usage—the CPU time required to create a page from the database and the bandwidth required to transfer it—is overwhelmingly the largest expense for Misplaced Pages. If an article is very minor, it will be rarely accessed, and thus will impose exceedingly little strain on the servers.

   Is the above accurate? I believe so, through my modest experience with servers. But even if it weren't, I think Jimbo Wales wouldn't have opposed a notability requirement if he were worried above server costs. Leave it to those with access to the server logs to decide whether the strain is acceptable.

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