User talk:Jimbo Wales: Difference between revisions

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I'm back

I'm back to work!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:59, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back! (✉→BWilkins←✎) 09:44, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, welcome back, and I hope it was a restful Wiki-break. Say Jimmy, you know that self-award for experienced editors, the one that has the sticky note saying that you had called needing "advice"... well, I think we need your advice on a host of topics. If you could dash off a couple paragraphs on your views of the current state of the 'pedia and where you see us going from here, it would be appreciated, I am sure, by a number of us volunteer editors. Thanks for considering it. Jusdafax 10:17, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I'll think about that. I'd say my biggest concerns have to do with a desire to bring back more of the spirit of fun, and less of the spirit of rigid authoritarian rules-quoting.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Much obliged, and I agree about the more fun. 4-5 years ago there seemed to be a profound sense of amused responsibility and wacky comradeship that pervaded the project. Not sure how to regain that. Jusdafax 13:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

You can't. There are too many shadow bureaucracies and far too much OWN of policy. Once that happens, you can't wind the clock back. Once the power concentrates itself in the hands of people who are more interested in policy than they are creating articles things change. Intothatdarkness 14:45, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. Bureaucracy is a natural part of life and there's no rolling back the clock to the days of a zany startup where random people would roll long into an article, type what they knew or thought then knew, and call it good, trusting on the magic of "crowd-sourcing" to sort out the wheat from the chaff. WP can be fun, and there are things that can make it more fun, but the existence of bureaucracy needs to be acknowledged with open eyes and constant effort made to slow or halt bureaucratic creep. Carrite (talk) 15:35, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. Count Iblis (talk) 15:44, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

That's a standard tactic to deny the existence of the bureaucracies here, and one that really doesn't work. They're alive and well. Intothatdarkness 19:03, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

As I've said, the reason people keep doing that authoritarian rules-quoting is because the system is set up so that if someone is causing trouble, and you can quote the rules to him, you win. Only once you do that, it also works when the troublemaker is the one quoting the rules. You can't have rules that are rigid when used by the good guys and flexible when used by the bad guys. Ken Arromdee (talk) 20:15, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah baloney (in the spirit of light fun). Ken, that is just too dark a perspective for me to believe. Authority is not the issue when someone is doing what the consensus has guided them to do, Claims of authoritarian are a perception and not a fact. We all have the responsibility to act professionally and work with each other. In that way, editors sometimes need that extra guidance. Its how that guidance is applied where things go bad or when an accusation is made of "Authoritarian behavior" the person being accused becomes frustrated and is baited into a fight. The claim of authoritarian behavior is an accusation and many times unfounded just because someone templates another editor with a warning. We need to be more than neutral when we approach each other as our words alone can be misunderstood. We should be approaching editors for warnings in a friendly mentor like fashion or why would we be warning them at all unless the goal is intimidation. We should lighten up, get back to enjoying Wikipedia as editors and try to guide the project back to a spirit of fun.--Amadscientist (talk) 20:41, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back. Could I suggest that you have a go at editing any article, adding a reference or similar, and then comment at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback, or here, on what's been a major topic for some editors while you've been away. Thanks. PamD 10:38, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Great - I hope to use the visual editor extensively in the coming days, and also talk to people at the Foundation. At least preliminarily, I plan to speak about it at Wikimania... but I'm not sure yet that I'll have enough of interest to say!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

In the past when I've made major public mistakes, the best strategy was a sincere, heartfelt apology. Keeping it short tends to make it more credible. Since WMF doesn't seem inclined to apologize for the current condition of VE, perhaps you could do it for them.—Kww(talk) 19:13, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back. Hope we hear something about what you did on your time away.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 13:22, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't used to post on here but... welcome back, Jimmy. We missed you :) I wish I could hear you speak one day at Wikimania. Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 13:32, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

With all due respect, I'm not sure that "the spirit of fun" is a feasible goal at this stage of the project. Maybe it was pure fun in 2003, maybe Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had more fun running a business out of Dave's garage than they did in later years sitting in corporate boardrooms. But like it or not, this has grown into a far-reaching and influential (not always a good influence, esp when it comes to bad BLP articles) project, supported by a massive bureaucracy. Obviously people should want to contribute here and enjoy the time spent creating content, but doing things responsibly should be the #1 concern here rather than fun. Tarc (talk) 14:06, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I disagree, one could contribute responsibly and have fun at the same time. For example, isn't it fun to run around screaming "it is a sock of a banned user"? Also isn't it fun to harass and abuse banned users? They are not people, and in any case they cannot respond anyway. Another fun way to contribute to Wikipedia is deleting contributions made by banned users, especially good ones. Another way to have fun while contributing strictly within the policies is the opposing the deletion requests concerning BLPs especially, when the subject himself wants it gone. Really why to bother, if no matter what "It is screamingly obvious he is making a big deal about his birthday not because he doesn't want it published, but because he hates Wikipedia. Whether we publish this already well-known information or not he will continue to hate Wikipedia. " 76.126.142.59 (talk) 14:41, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

What other choice is there? If you allow such articles to stay around, you're basically saying "the user is banned except when he does good things". Since all users, banned or not, are supposed to only do good things, this is equivalent to not having bans at all.

Banning a user means we've decided the user causes so much trouble that it's not worth looking at the user's contributions one at a time to figure out which ones are actually good and correct the other ones. Going through the banned user's contributions to check for subtle vandalism just isn't worth it; we're better off deleting them and using the time for something else. Ken Arromdee (talk) 20:26, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Ay ay ay, silly me how didn't I think about the difficulties you're facing! Then it will be even easier, and much more fun to delete all contributions made by the banned users: good and bad, made before and after the ban. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 23:28, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Here are the posts you missed in your absence. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:14, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back. Hope the time off was refreshing. Take any pics?--Amadscientist (talk) 17:14, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back. I'm enjoying your talk in London. —Tom Morris (talk) 19:22, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back, Jimbo. GSK ● ✉ ✓ 19:42, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back Jimbo!, Great to have you back! - →Davey2010→→Talk to me!→ 19:48, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor nowiki tags or garbled tables

This is FYI about VE. As you likely know, many editors (usernames + IP editors) have been fed the VisualEditor (VE) when MediaWiki quietly switched the "Edit" button away from the wikitext editor. Consequently, hundreds of people try to insert "[[xxx]]" for a wikilink, unaware how the literal square brackets are inserted instead with nowiki-tags, to get: "<nowiki>[[xxx]]</nowiki>" inside the article text. As a counter-move, edit-filter 550 has been set to detect the added nowiki-tags:

Scan 550 log:  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&offset=&limit=250&wpSearchFilter=550

The nowiki-tagged pages are being saved at the rate of 23 per hour, 550 per day (or 17,000 per month), but fortunately, many editors are all re-editing those garbled pages, and perhaps only 5 garbled pages (of 550) slip through each day, uncorrected. However, even worse, people are trying to edit wikitables, with the VisualEditor, and getting hacked markup as "<nowiki>||</nowiki>" which puts the literal double-bar "||" in the page. A recent example was Canadian TV article "The Next Step (TV series)" (which I later corrected):

• VE duplicated wikitable rows:  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Next_Step_(TV_series)&diff=prev&oldid=565273641

By the time I had corrected the wikitables, there were 2 duplicate copies of the rows, so garbled that most editors would be unable to unscramble the hacked markup (unless they reverted several revisions, and then hand-edited for recent changes). We have seen that dilemma before: an article gets so garbled that anti-vandalism corrections are thwarted by the complexity of undoing numerous changes, for fear of losing some important new text. Bottomline: we have at least 550 articles, each day, altered by the VisualEditor in questionable ways, using nowiki-tags which might garble the page. There is a pending Bugzilla request for VE to accept "[[xxx]]" as a wikilink (rather than literal brackets) in the VisualEditor, which I think would solve many problems. More later. -Wikid77b (talk) 15:13, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

What you missed: VE

The most important thing that happened while you were away is that the Visual Editor was released to the broad community in spite of having an astonishing number of critical bugs and being almost unusable for some basic functions, such as adding references. See WP:VE/F for results. (For the record, I'm hugely in favor of VE, but another month of debugging would have paid great dividends. The release came with no feature freeze -- major functionality was being added right up to the last moment, with predictable results.) Looie496 (talk) 15:16, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

The saddest thing about this is the WMF ignored its own research. Of course, it had precedent: it ignored its own research with Echo as well.

1. VE reduces the likelihood of a newbie making his first edit by 43%
2. Echo increases the chance of a new editor being blocked by 20%

In both cases, WMF attempted to portray objections by English Wikipedia as being simply a result of conservatism, despite the fact that their own research demonstrates that the objections are well founded.—Kww(talk) 17:12, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree with the above. This is serious, and WMF should listen and change attitude accordingly. The attitude of WMF developers, asking for "zen acceptance" of critical decisions never discussed with the community ([1]), is worrying. -- cyclopia^speak! 17:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Having worked as a developer myself, I don't quite agree with those points. There is no way to introduce major new functionality without major disruption: the bad thing here is that the developers, probably as a result of being understaffed and overpressured, have not followed standard practices in the software industry. Looie496 (talk) 17:46, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I have worked as a developer, manager, director, and CTO. I will agree that this is not really the developers' fault: the blame lies with their management that has refused to withdraw the product until the errors are corrected. There's certainly a future that includes VE, but when a piece of software explodes this badly, you don't continue to roll it out.—Kww(talk) 17:53, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome back Jimbo, as a question related to the software rollouts, do you personally believe that the WMF has continued in the heart of what you meant when you wrote at User:Jimbo Wales/Statement of principles- "Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. We need to make sure that any changes contribute positively to the community, as ultimately determined by the Wikimedia Foundation, in full consultation with the community consensus." (bolding from original)? As Kwww states above, the Community does seem to get a response from the WMF of (in Kww's words) "objections by English Wikipedia as being simply a result of conservatism", that kind of response, in my opinion, does seem to stall any "consultation with the community consensus", but I am taking Kww's word for it that their response is that truly that overtly "Daddy knows best", I would like your opinion as you are close to the WMF and still close to the Community at large.Camelbinky (talk) 19:55, 22 July 2013 (UTC)