After the talk page degenerated into a Wikipedia-like morass of non sequiturs and some patent nonsense (hi Blissyu2!), Gregory Kohs was undaunted. Turning his back on wide-open models Kohs has announced his way forward.

Basically, it sounds like a kind of group blog, where each post will be reviewed (and hopefully improved) by the other writers. He hopes to recruit five initial founders, a pool of writers that will likely expand over time. Sounds like it will vet a lot of good work.

I hope that Kohs' project will be open to guest bloggers who might be willing to contribute a one-off research post to be reviewed and published.

I was impressed...

I don't think Greg really wants to undermine us here at WR, I just think he wants a less chaotic and somewhat more formal, peer-reviewed kind of environment, which I support whole-heartedly. Pro-WP folks might find themselves slightly less welcome over there, but that's probably for the best, particularly for a blog format.

He's actually a pretty nice guy, Greg is, unless of course you insult him.

This is a really, really good idea of Greg's - and is exactly the kind of thing I would recommend to do.

The fact that the five founders will be "real-name people" is a big plus. I wonder what the policy is about outing Wikipedians who hide behind screen names? The policy on this Board sucks, mainly because Somey and Selina are hiding, as well as most of the moderators. Just today I've seen a couple of magnificant outing posts that I read only eight hours ago, vanish into a black hole. They weren't my posts, but they were from well-established, respected members.

It seems to me that if Greg allows outing, his new project will play an important role. It would be reasonable to allow outing only if the person who offers up the outing research and signs it, is himself using a real name.

Hey, don't tell them we're operating a black hole! Those things are illegal, except maybe in Switzerland.

Anyway, you'd almost have people believe we were opposed to that sort of thing. Perish the thought!

I have set up the following page on MWB

http://wikipediareview.com/Wikipedia_Review

Contributions welcome.

Won't work. Sorry Greg.

Well, why don't you just sit back and see what happens first?

A few weeks ago I started to re-post (without removing the originals, of course) some of my post from WR on MWB. My thinking was that this might allow me to categorize, clarify and amplify my thinking on the topics and issues that interest me. Sometimes I am concerned that a discussion forum is so fluid, and at times disjointed, that it is difficult for other participants to understand any points or ideas broader than the immediate post in front of them. I am certainly grateful that MWB provides a tool for this task. On the other hand I think a wiki is a much inferior means of fomenting the discussion in the first instance.

I have flirted with disposing with my own pseudonymous posting. But recent events on WR and in my own life do not seem conductive to this change. I will probably revisit this question in a few weeks or months. In the mean-time I won't be participating in any project that requires that level of disclosure. Of course I may comment from time to time if that is permitted.

I have also raised idea of PRISM but for the reasons discussed above I won't be going forward with this immediately. This will also give Greg's project the chance to take off without a somewhat similar project (in some ways) as a distraction.

Good luck, Greg.

It's not a wiki: it's a closed-member blog. There will be five members to start, who will write blog pieces in turn, which will then be discussed in camera and then modified or added to as needed.

Greg is still putting together his "founding" team, so I'll wait until he's announced that officially. However, all members will be RL identities.

Precisely. A forum like this is designed to highlight the topics of current interest, and 'lose' those which are no longer fashionable. Also the signal to noise ratio is fairly high. In a wiki, by contrast, the content is fairly static, with lots of nice fixed links, and good editing will keep the 'signal' high. So both methods should be used. Unfortunately a lot of grouches and bad feeling have been taken off this forum, with the intent of setting up another, which will not work in my view.

[edit] As most of it consists of Moultong blathering on with the usual stuff about "Hammurabic Method of Social Regulation " and "drama in the sense of dramaturgy as a vehicle for embedding educational, cultural, or moral lessons within a dramatic literary storyline featuring interacting characters" it doesn't bother me too much.

What's "work" mean to you?

I am sitting back. I don't think Greg understands why his new project will not work.



By "work" I mean gain enough critical mass that it supercedes that which it is reacting to.

I think the "PoetGuy" affair has had a lasting effect on Greg. I can understand why he's doing it, but its the wrong approach.

Sounds like a lot of work. How is he going to find five people willing to work that hard?

I'm sorry, but I don't think this is right. He's not trying to found a popular community. He's trying to gather a circle of researchers to produce higher-level criticism of Wikipedia. Frankly, it wouldn't require much mass at all to supercede WR on that dimension.

This is a site more interested in the drama and abuse of wikipolitics than the big picture. I love the site for that reason, but that's not what Kohs is trying to replicate.

Greg has a track record of putting effort into his WR projects. He also has an enthusiasm for the task.

I am sure that we can support him, and use whatever Google juice we have to give publicity to his works, and this venue can be used to amplify or critique whatever output.

So if an alternative venue allows Greg to fulfil his personal mission and the wider world is educated, then that is supportive of our aims too.

I think it is indicative of the quality of this site at the moment that his Wikipedia Vandalism Study passed by without causing much of a ripple. That may in part be that events got in the way of Greg getting behind it to drive the issue as he often can. That is our loss, and collectively we should take responsibility for failing to get the best value out of that work, whether it is pro-Wikipedians taking that on board to go back to the other side to work on how Wikipedia can be improved (after all, Jimbo told us on the BBC that Wikipedia was responsive to criticism) or anti-Wikipedians using this ammunition to drive for enforced change or destruction as is their wont.

There were four of us who went through all of the diffs for all of the senators' articles for a three month period and methodically entered the data onto a spreadsheet. Greg did most of the final analysis in terms of statistics etc, but the others did quite a bit of "donkey work" which produced results which surprised even us in their implications.

If this study has hardly been mentioned here, it did get quite a bit of attention elsewhere. I think that this was one of the prime motivations for Greg to look for another venue, since this action was neither appreciated nor even perceived as being "interesting" in this one.

...that, plus the continued lack of clarity in terms of "what's really going on" here...but that's another story...

Indeed.

A similar thing occurred after Greg wrote an excellent piece on the links between Wikia and Wikipedia last year. Which didn't get much interest here from the troglodytes either. But became a "grower".

Greg's my main man (even if he did admit to being a fan of prog-rock also-rans Rush!!), and his style of criticism is the kind of thing that I most enjoy reading. It's creative, informative, factually based and often funny. And it often gets results as well.

Apologies for not spreading the credit where it was due - I was quite aware of it being a group effort, but the main point is that Greg got it off the ground. I note Kamryn has just asked the question "Why no discussion here" and I think it is indicative of the dramatic quality of this site at the moment.

We aren't very good at extracting the lessons of events at the moment. Perhaps it is indicative that most of the major issues are now well known and there isn't much for us to identify aside from "It still happens. Shrug." It's at a point like this we need Greg or equivalent to shake things up and have a project to make a difference.

My point was not to ask for kudos for being part of this but rather to point out that there are people (formerly) here willing to do this kind of work to create this kind of content. Since it is neither appreciated nor wanted here, it needed to go elsewhere.

I rather doubt that it will be discussed here very much in the future either, since even this went completely under the radar.

I understand that comment and sympathise with it. I would say though that like the dreaded "we", it is unfair to say that content was neither appreciated or wanted - clearly I appreciate it and want it or I wouldn't have highlighted the issue.

I'm of a view that perhaps a clearout of the membership is the shakeup the site needs to get back to its core purpose. Far too much content is "chat" about goings on on Wikipedia. Like others, I struggle with my motivation here. I'm in the "why do they let Wikipedia be crap when it could be good" camp; but without a fundamental shake-up in site management, which can only come from a radically repositioned WMF, there seems little point in me continually restating this. Without a big event, beyond the scope of what little old me can manage, WMF are not going to get the message.

Perhaps the problem with the 100 senators project is that it is American and I am divorced from the feeling of being able to do something with that group to lobby and embarrass. Perhaps what is needed is the 100 Celebrities, selected for their ego and willingness to attack - and also because politicians rarely garner public sympathy. Then perhaps you could have 100 Otherwise Unknown People.

The point of choosing the 100 senators was that the articles are POLICED. Most of the articles were under protection at least part of the time the study was underway, especially those of people like Obama, Hillary Clinton and other "people in the news". That did not stop vandals from being able to posting these things and from that vandalism being unreverted.

At the end of the day, ANY other subgroup of individuals who are in the public eye would most likely have as much vandalism, if not more, since these articles were being watched....Of course, to come to this conclusion would require actually analyzing the material itself and the context in which the edits were made...which hasn't been done here.

In terms of "recentering" this site and its function, that been a subject of discussion for quite some time. When the Baxter incident took place, I would told that I should stop discussing certain aspects of that business or else (and yes, there's much more to all of that which will eventually, I'm sure, come out...as the email hacking incident came out just this week)...It looks as if Proab, who is also certainly a valued contributor here, has also been given an ultimatum.

This is one of the ideas that I plan to develop on Greg's new project (as does Jonny) but the atmosphere of secrecy, the idea of "outing" being part of the game (with the extra added attraction of this being conducted by people who understand that context in a GLBT subtext), the way that sites such as ED and private blogs are used to generate gossip and conflict is an aspect of the equation that has caught up with this site. What is the solution? There's only one that I can see: not playing the drama card. And believe me, I speak from experience here.

And just as a nude person has the social advantage over someone who is clothed, a person whose identity is known has the social advantage over those who are hidding behind pseudos.

So, the issue of pseudos, the sooper-sekrit forums and discussions there, and everything that's not on the table will continue to be a source of conflict here. I (and many others) don't see a way of resolving this issue as many people (including Somey and Selina) feel that they need to remain anonymous. I can understand that because there are many crazy people on Wikipedia who would be very happy to give them the same kind of treatment that I got. What my message, finally, ends up being is this :



Everybody here needs to get over it and come out of the closet. That's the only way out.

Time to unlock and open those closet doors.


The Age of Immurement is over. Sure, there is Edgar Allen Poetry and all, but let's leave the WMF practice of binding and gagging others and locking them up in the janitorial hall closet to the Bomis Boyzâ„¢ Fetish Artists.

We (cough, cough) are more mature than that.

Somey, I want a Safe Word with you.

That study concerns me greatly... it suggests strongly that the measures employed so far to combat this sort of thing are not working. You say it's getting attention elsewhere, can you clarify where that is?

I thank those who took the time to put it together. It's the kind of work that can make a large difference, far more than the daily grist for the run of the mill discussions we see here...

Lar, this study doesn't suggest anything. It gives hard data concerning a specific group of articles. What that data means needs to be discussed, but it gives a very clear snapshot of what happened to those articles during a specific three-month period. If anything, WP should thank those of us who put this together, since WP can use this information as well. If they're honest about what is really happening, perhaps it might suggest (there's that word again!) possible changes which need to be made.

Right now, it's just a spreadsheet which gives information. How that information is used is anybody's guess right now.

In terms of press contacts and various sites who have looked at/are looking at this material, I personally know of Valleywag, other tech blogs, an outfit named "Chance News", various journalists (including one AP stringer) This material (or rather, the reporters' perceptions of it) will probably end up in quite a few articles.

Greg's handling the press on this one, so if you'd really like to know exactly, send him an email.

Thanks. I'm working with Greg on a write-up of this issue


http://wikipediareview.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study

I hadn't realised the point about the policing. Is there a link to anything about this? Who is policing? Is there a document on-wiki to reference?

All I mentioned, all of these articles are followed by various editors on WP, since these articles are all subject to vandalism. Most of them were protected at one point or another during the study. However, they are on many watchlists and some have people who are almost "designated police agents". In spite of this, the vandalism still happens.

The documented proof is in an examination of the article histories on WP.

Thanks. Is there any evidence that reasonable solutions have been proposed to WMF, but have been ignored, misunderstood and so on? I.e. is there evidence of systematic failure by the administration?

I don't know if the evidence has been amassed in that particular case, but I have a systematic method for amassing such evidence in any case.

Thus far, all the evidence in that exemplary case systematically reifies H1 and falsifies H0.

I obviously didn't examine ALL of the edit histories of these articles, but I can speak of what I saw in the 25 or so % sample that I did see.

What is clear is that these are articles which are on multiple watch lists and people who feel responsible for them take the idea of protection very seriously. However, we are all humans and sometimes people go on vacations, or have to work longer hours or get sick....and then vandalism slips through. It's such a huge problem that there's no way that any number of human beings, even if they were organized around the clock, could completely solve.

The other problem is with people being able to completely judge what vandalism is. The addition of the Senator who was having a divorce "because he was cheating on her" stayed in the article for quite some time simply because no one identified this as vandalism. Perhaps it was in the gossip column of the local paper or maybe it was something that "everybody knew", but it was not seen as being a harmful edit against the BLP policy. Another situation involved a Senator's place of residence given, right down to the street address. In another article, the first name and the name of the school of the Senator's daughter were given . In both cases, this information was not identified as vandalism and stayed in the article for weeks, and even months in the second case. With all sorts of nutcases on the web, I would personally consider this a breach of privacy, if not a breach of security.

Often, material that is posted requires some fairly precise knowledge to see the underlying malice. For example, there was an edit in which one Senator was accused of accepting bribes to pass a bill concerning waterways, even though there were no navigable waterways in his state.

So, what this study seems to underline is the idea that the only way to insure that these BLP articles are kept in a proper state is to use a system which uses flagged revisions which are "curated" by someone who knows enough about the subject to be able to judge what is vandalism and what is not.

Secondly, it would appear that many WP editors do not know what vandalism is to be able to identify it. Clear policy, stating what should be removed immediately, is obviously needed.

...However, this is nothing that hasn't been said here before. It's just that we have figures to back it up.

The WMF is too busy serving koolaid to even think about this, but perhaps somebody might be good enough to explain this to them?

I've just had an email from Greg who thinks that my point that these articles were mainly protected was perhaps an exaggeration. I did have Hillary Clinton on my list, which I did last, so perhaps my remembrance is skewed by that. He adds the following:



...This is perhaps the real central issue. Perhaps the worst vandalism are the things that have been there for years that nobody even knows are there. We didn't read all the versions of the articles, just the diffs. And no, we didn't know everything there was to know about these people. So, the situation could be, indeed, much worse than even this would suggest.

Thanks. But, again, is there any evidence that this solution was pointed out to WMF and that they consistently ignored the advice? I'm trying to put together some documents that would explain all this to an outsider. Thanks again.

There is none that I'm aware of, but that wasn't the point at all of this study. We were seeking merely to prove a point to attract the attention of people making laws. What the WMF does or doesn't do is beside the point.

However, if someone were to contact them about this, they might also want to examine what is going on in this ongoing situation, which seems to be somebody politically opposed to this candidate using his WP article to make a WP:POINT....

Sure, only asking. And is is relevant what WMF does, surely?

I don't think so. The 'community' has more or less always supported unrestricted editing. It's one of the Foundation issues. It's not like it's never brought up; it's on their list of perennial proposals.

Proposal: Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles - December 07/January 08
Proposal: Wikipedia:Editors should be logged in users - Oct 05

Does it even matter? If it hasn't been pointed out to the WMF then that just shows that they're too busy squabbling over petty internal affairs to pay any attention to what's going on in their own websites.

Of course it is, but we've already tried leading that horse to water and we've discovered that he isn't particularly inclined to drink....

I think that Peter is getting at the fact that WMF had formally been put on notice and chose to do nothing, and is therefore more culpable than if was the first time the issue had raised it's ugly head.

Your links, Kamryn, should be very helpful for that purpose.

Also, they have a list of most vandalized pages, and interestingly, a "vandalism studies" project. They have a lot of data similar to the data that Greg et al compiled. For example, a study about the levels of vandalism on the Barack Obama article. Their first study, which they finished a year ago, concluded that 97% of vandalism is done by anonymous editors. They're hardly unaware. The flagged revisions extension was created in June 2008, after at least two years of it being promised, but as yet has not been enabled for the English Wikipedia. They have the tools right in their hands to fix this problem. They also stated here, via Erik Moller, that they wouldn't be "imposing" the extension on the English Wikipedia if the people there decided they didn't want it.

This is why the focus of getting the word out has to be outside of the WMF and the "community", since they haven't done anything.

These figures speak for themselves. The fact that they already knew this also speaks volumes.

The "community is not interested" is why I believe the WMF angle is the most important issue. The edits themselves show that the community is incapable of resolving the problem, therefore a solution has to be imposed. There is only one legitimate body that can impose this, the WMF.

There is no evidence that they even consider this within their remit - though they would probably just say that teh community sort of works and given time it'll sort itself out - that is the typical Jimbo "la, la, la" response. What you need is the likes of Seth or Cade putting them on the spot and getting a attributable quote on what their position is.

Send not to know for whom the decibels toll …

And what do you hear those volumes say?

Jon

Actually what the idea was that the Senators might be prompted to do that...and maybe even reconsider the implications of Section 230, in light of having all of this personal information laid out for public display.

WMF already knows about this, but they're too busy writing grant proposals and doing "long-range" planning. If they suddenly have to police these things seriously, that might mean paying somebody...or several somebodies...and I don't think that they want to do that right now...




Sorry, you all know that I can't spell in English, but you probably don't know that I can't spell in French either....

"Critical mass" is a woolly term, but I don't think it's relevant. The critical success factor isn't mass, its the shape of the content. Avoid volume obsession.

It's a different ball game. I believe Kohs is aiming to put together a long-term quality resource which is something other than a list of which wikitwit is banning/reverting which other wikitwit this week. Though it has potential to become widely referenced, "critical mass" for the right kind of material is one influential reader.

OK then Greg's best approach is to invite specific people who have been harmed/flamed/whatever by Wikipedia to write a blog entry on their experiences - also from people who have written serious articles for serious journals or publications who wouldn't touch Wikipedia with an electronic bargepole.

Just an FYI...

The board of the Internet Review Corporation (non-profit) has voted to cease publication of Akahele.org, and the site will be dismantled in the coming week or two.

I'm sorry it didn't work out. I attribute the ultimate demise to the lack of editorial contributions from outside the core four board members.

This is sad. There is some fine writing there. Can't you at least maintain the articles in archival form?

Jon

Any plans for the Internet Review Corporation?

Sorry to hear that. Good writers are hard to find -- and if you don't believe me, look over at the mothership!

Agree. Paul Wehage's article on the development of online music industry, for example, was outstanding.

I plan to save all of my articles and all of Paul's articles in a space on Wikipedia Review. I believe that Judd has already preserved his work somewhere. And, I'm not sure of Anthony's designs on his work.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out

If you need webspace to host the site, just lemme know ...