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User:Wikid77

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Wikid77 (talk | contribs) at 17:15, 18 October 2007 (→Articles edited: updated tips, noting 273,000 edits). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 17:15, 18 October 2007 by Wikid77 (talk | contribs) (→Articles edited: updated tips, noting 273,000 edits)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Misplaced Pages user Wikid77 is an American computer scientist, home repairman, and world traveller.

His interests include astronomy, search engines, programming, computer graphics, ergonomics, and electronic encyclopedias.

He has been editing Misplaced Pages since March 2006 (or earlier), in over 5,000 articles.
Contact by: leave him a user-talk message: he checks Misplaced Pages daily, but is extremely busy, often gone over 13 hours, never reads Misplaced Pages on vacation.

Details

Userboxes
This user lives in the
United States of America.
This user lives in the
U.S. State of Texas.
This user knew massive PNG-format images were often 8x to 21x slower than JPEG or GIF images in Wiki / Wikimedia in 2007.
This user contributes using Firefox.
This user is a member of the Association of Structurist Wikipedians.
enThis user is a native speaker of the English language.
de-1Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse.
GTThis user attends or attended Georgia Tech.
C++ This user can program in C++.
C This user can program in C.
xml This user can write XML.
Java This user can program in Java.
<html> This user can write HTML.
css This user can write Cascading Style Sheets.
This user enjoys photography.

Misplaced Pages articles: 6,930,417    Edits: 1,260,716,328

To do


 Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Wiki opinions

Wiki collaborations are often wide-open territory, ruled by groups. There is little protection of an individual, except in a Wikiproject or such. Diversity is not sought, since "concensus" ranks higher than "correctness" and power is controlled by groups. If you want civility, join or form a group: else, the law of the Old West applies, so don't get stabbed in the back.

Useful links

Friends

  • Everyone, hopefully.

Useful Templates

Useful or Interesting Pages

Articles edited

Keeping revisions below 18,000 extensive edits, I have worked on over 6,900 WP articles, hundreds anonymously, including:

I would have made over 273,000 edits, but I learned (after months) to edit offline, then check an article's revision history to merge multiple edits using just one SAVE operation. Tips:

  • Copy to text editors: copying the edit buffer to a text editor allows multi search-and-replace.
  • Use subheaders: Collaboration is facilitated by having titled sub-sections for each person to edit.
  • Note multi-changes: Edit-summary lines can be long: 5 or 6 sets of changes can be abbreviated as just 1 edit-summary save.
  • Copy before Send: Copy (ctrl-C) the edit buffer before Preview/Save in case a send transmission-error loses the edit data.
  • Avoid other edits: Check revision-history to avoid when revisions are frequent, or edit during slow periods of activity.
  • Avoid busy articles: Anticipate changes being reverted depending on peer comprehension, and consider updates to other thousands of quiet, but significant articles, instead.
  • Avoid one-word changes: (make over 10 changes at once) when fixing a spelling error, also add text or source footnotes; make each revision 10x times more significant.
  • An edit-page window can be updated between sessions by login via a 2nd window, then previewing differences to merge intermittent changes as just one save.

Double-checking of modifications can avoid creating another 20,000 edits, by waiting and combining updates as one save operation. Remember: Many planned changes can be postponed until other changes are ready; tolerance for vandalism has provided tolerance for "late" changes to be batched together.

Images edited

I have created and uploaded hundreds of images, many to Wikimedia Commons.

Comments

  • The Misplaced Pages project has struggled for years, but, like the initial years of the Internet, the information is maturing. Rampant vandalism is being fought by protected articles & anti-vandal bots.
  • I have added hundreds of articles, mostly historic or year-in-topic.
  • The search for knowledge is a fool's errand. The most valuable knowledge I have learned is to be polite and forgiving with other people (although WP can be an extreme test of patience!).
  • (The name "Wikid77" is a contraction for "Wiki id77" as a user name.)

Wiki opinions continued

The Misplaced Pages collaboration is a vast organization that allows, not only writing in encyclopedia articles, but also copy-edit revisions of articles, writing reviews of articles, and judging deletion/cleanup of various articles and templates, etc. There are many groups of cooperating users, some organized as Wikiprojects, and some acting as "inter-wikicity gangs" with limited civility (speaking euphemistically); however, the Misplaced Pages universe is vast enough to just ignore some groups and focus on wide-open areas of frontier articles. In 2007, there still remain thousands of articles that can be revised/expanded without clashing with groups of a particular mindset. Thousands of important articles are still drafts.

Writers needed: For people who are good at writing but strongly dislike the idea of their articles being hacked within 2 months, the process of review writing might be a better avenue, since reviews are based on personal written remarks, not subject to such rehashed writing. However, even in articles, original authors are usually free to correct added text for grammar errors and awkward word-flow, which often gets introduced within a few months of the original writing. Thousands of new articles have been requested, such as:

Freedom awry: Wiki efforts are hindered by the catch-22 problem of "freedom of editing" which allows anonymous truth to be revealed, but more often allows anonymous slanting or hacking of articles. A large amount of slanting is done by registered users, because there is little to "block" any registered user against psychological or commercial tainting of text (or images): if users were blocked for slanting, they could return as an IP address or sock-puppet name, so blocking is currently a waste of time, resulting in rampant slanting. In extreme cases, wiki-terrorism is facilitated when people become upset and generate widespread hacking of articles.

Screening needed: Despite complex anti-vandal, robotic bot edit programs, reliability of articles remains a major problem in Wiki efforts, which need a verification process before release. Almost any article, after hours of polishing, can be hacked to add "not" or defamatory "was widely condemned for child abuse" (etc.). Most articles should have an honest top disclaimer stating, "Unverified: articles often contain errors or hidden jokes" as a warning to readers. Wiki credibility could be improved by a 2-step approach that would release screened articles to be tagged "Verified for facts and serious tone" while hacked articles continue the warning "Unverified" before screening. Screening actions could be widespread, similar to widespread editing, but disallow anonymous or same-ID self screening, making editing and screening as 2 separate steps, with screening accountable to user name.

Mob rule: Large areas of Wikis are run by mobocracy voting. Numerous edit wars and conflicts exist in some highly popular groups of articles, especially in recent events or news articles. In those conflicts, typically 99% of debates are decided by mob rule, not mediated reason. Some article cuts are extreme, such as the deletion of the statement that the Virginia Tech shooter was "suspected of prior bomb threats and had been under investigation" for months: that statement was immediately censored as "clever vandalism" (only to be justified days later by news that school officials had referred him to psychiatric counseling).

Avoid trouble: As in any psychological conflict, it is better to avoid conflicts involving people or groups with severe mindsets: it is difficult to know who is "gunnysacking" resentment against another person. Just walk away into another open frontier of the Wiki universe, until policies are developed to restrict such difficult people. Troubled people might seem to be living in an unreal world, but they could be discovering real residential or workplace addresses.

Future open: From what I've seen, the Wiki concept could be extended to greatly improve reliability, but allow anonymous editing of articles outside a screening phase, warning users to refer to the fact-checked revision as screened for accuracy. Perhaps users could select a setting to default to viewing screened articles (when available). Rampant hacking could be reverted by an "undo-all" tool to revert all unscreened changes by a given user. However, many people have quit using Wiki due to the demoralization of hacking and censorship that thwarted their efforts to improve the maturity of the Wiki information.

Wiki problems

There are many wiki problems, easily hundreds, with priority depending on what each person wants. Some problems are:

  • Weakipedia: Many articles have limited, hollow content that still lacks simple reference footnotes to support claims. Because many articles were created as quick stubs, with no follow-up plan, they have remained weak (for years). Also wiki collaboration lacks the power to deter troublemakers, since the system is too weak to "ban" people, while "freedom of editing" allows users to hack articles from hundreds of anonymous IP addresses. Anyone with a mindset or corporate agenda can "hire" people to slant wiki articles, and so information is only revised as neutral due to extensive efforts of many part-time volunteers. Ask any school teacher what would happen if chemisty labs were left unlocked day-and-night (also see: poisoning wells).
  • Hunches: Some articles contain several hunches about the information, even though many articles could be sourced with verifiable footnotes, within only 2 hours of editing. There is great potential for management to direct efforts in quick, effective avenues, rather than let trivial minor edits dominate the landscape.
  • Edit wars: A huge amount of time is wasted in "edit wars" due to a lack of focus in writing. Most conflicts are decided by mob rule, so joining an active group can help resolve some conflicts.
  • The vision thing: Unlike organizations that teach a short overview of project vision and supportive goals, wiki efforts can seem like mindless chatter. Joining any of the various Wikiprojects could help provide some vision to avoid wasting efforts on useless activities.
  • Unsourced images: Within 6 months, any non-free image is likely to be deleted as a total waste of time. Uploading popular images, CD or book covers requires complex, specific "fair use rationale" that takes time to handle smoothly. Perhaps 3 or 4 solid days of examining other non-free images/sounds should be spent to better understand how fleeting those files can be, and avoid the wasted time of uploading non-free files that will be axed within weeks.
  • Subheader traditions: A "typical" wiki article has specfic subheader titles and almost never has an "overview" section, for separate editing, so keep the lede section short, and add subheaders such as History, Career, Family, Legacy, etc. The ending bottom sections are typically given exact subheader names (in order): See also, Notes, References, External links, as fully described in the WP article "Misplaced Pages:Guide_to_layout" (or WP:GUIDE).
  • Strict consistency: Even though a consistent format can allow repeated edits to a pattern or common displays from a template, some people try to use "consistency" as a means of suppressing changes. Quoting "consistency" is a false justification, because the first improved article is inconsistent with the others. Use the 80-20 rule, and accept that 80% of particular articles being consistent is a plateau goal, but remember that only 20% of particular articles will be read by 80% of all users. That viewpoint avoids the push for strict consistency.
  • Psycho-pressures: With millions of articles and images to sort/revise or remove, there is a frantic tendency to go, go, go. Few take the time to recruit or mentor others to be productive team players. Rather than teach others to focus on writing/uploading quality files, many people are obsessed with slashing, trashing and deleting the unfocused stuff that gets thrown hourly into the wiki giga-bit-bucket. The lack of visionary teamwork produces a somewhat psychotic, adversarial attitude (of almost everyone), fostered by fringe element types that are slanting articles or scattering corporate "ads" in hopes to mass-market via wiki. Some people seem compelled to struggle faster, harder, as if speed and determination will end the need for garbage trucks in a city. It's another fool's errand. The wiki world seems a chaotic mix of "stamping out fires" while trying to hold sandpiles of accuracy in bare hands. The burnout pressures are very great.
  • No feedback: Visionary management would use customer feedback and trend analysis to analyze responses from users and track which article groups are read most (at what time of the year), in order to focus efforts in those arenas as trends are spotted.

Those are just a few of the many wiki-problems. Stay tuned for more....

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