[ Please excuse me if the subject has already been beaten to death here; I am not a regular visitor to this mailing list I tried to search for this stuff here & on strategywiki, but feel free to point me to the archives! ]
I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia have virtually disappeared.
I remember that community being strong few years ago, and now we found out that even some basic information about infrastructure is left unchanged.
Few people who still maintain that stuff on the Polish Wikipedia showed me that at least two other MediaWiki-based projects have been started to fill the gap: [2][3] The latter greets you even with a very nice shot of *the* railway junction that was instrumental in a recent railway crash.
One of the projects got started by experienced Wikipedia editors. They still copy some of their content to the Polish Wikipedia, but only after it matures; I asked them about the reasons to go outside of the Wikipedia and they said:
* They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible to follow development of the railway infrastructure and operations using only high quality published sources;
* They got bitten a bit by the "notability" discussions in their field; they want to document every track, every junction and every locomotive and they are tired of discussing how "notable" a particular piece of railway equipment really is.
I would have said it's just a single case, but I've seen some successful web portals being launched by people interested in history; what is different from many history research and fan pages is that I've also seen some active members of Wikipedia community becoming more and more active on those independent sites.
It might be that (unproven theory) really valuable authors are living on a verge of original research; at some point they might prefer to turn over to indepedent sites. There may be other factors too: smaller, friendlier community; possibility to start anew and so on.
As few of those sites are using MediaWiki software I started to call them "pre-wikis". Some of them might become a sort of a "waiting rooms" for the content to be published on "mature" Wikipedia. To me, analogy to the Wikipedia-Nupedia story is striking.
What's interesting is that people are not afraid to use MediaWiki *again* (with all its well-known deficiencies).
In general, I think this is nothing new. There are thousands of fan wikis on places like Wikia, where certainly some contributors copy over some mature content to Wikipedia, should licensing allow that.
But maybe there is some trend that could probably be better researched, and here are my questions to you:
(1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities (preferably not only English-speaking ones)?
(2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered development of the knowledge-related content (test wikis, "pre-wikis", sighted revisions) or shall we pursue "flat development space" ideal?
(3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia movement?
(4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like "no original research", but not only) and try to address the issue there?
(5) Has Wikipedia as a "product" achieved some maturity in a way that the real growth and innovation needs to go somewhere else, as no product/project lasts forever?
Maybe it's something around the question that Kim Bruning asked on strategywiki [4] and also [5]:
"we need to find some way to infuse new life into wikis that are coming to the end of the WikiLifeCycle. Wiki-communities can, do and will blow up, and we need to learn how to prevent it, or have plans on what to do and how to pick up the pieces."
//Marcin Cieślak
User:Saper from plwiki
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szczekociny_rail_crash [2] http://enkol.pl/ [3] http://semaforek.pl/wiki/index.php/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=942&oldid=931 [5] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=1075
2012/3/7 Marcin Cieslak [email protected]
I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia have virtually disappeared.
Thought provoking, thanks a lot for this.
- They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible
to follow development of the railway infrastructure and operations using only high quality published sources;
I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail. The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.
So the root question is whom do we trust. It's the same problem as with the recurring (and perfectly valid) "Oral citations" discussion: What's important is not in which medium the source is published, but how much do the no-original-research geeks trust it. And don't get me wrong - in the vast majority of cases, both the railway geeks and the no-original-research geeks are the good guys, who ultimately care about the readers getting the best information possible.
I suppose that in this case of railways documentation, this problem can be solved by some kind of a statement by a famous Polish engineering college or the Polish railway company, which would say: "We salute the work of the volunteers who document the Polish railways on this wiki. We checked their work and found it to be correct and useful." It would have little substance, but it would be a kind of a quality control stamp. Unfortunately we haven't found a better quality control stamp yet.
And by the way, this doesn't necessarily mean that all the information from this wiki should be copied to Wikipedia. It would be fine if that wiki would simply be recognized by the Wikipedia community as a reliable source.
(1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities (preferably not only English-speaking ones)?
I can immediately remember similar cases in the Hebrew Wikipedia with writing about sex and about Jewish religious communities and rabbis. In the first case, this happened because the Hebrew Wikipedia community is very averse to writing about pornography and anything related to it - not because it's socially conservative, but because in the first years of its existence writing about pornography was strongly associated with trolls who disrupted other work. The difference between pornography and sex is obvious, yet the he.wikipedia community is very cautious now about both.
As for Jewish religious communities, many articles about them look very similar to people who aren't involved, and this obviously raises notability concerns, so Jewish religious wikis sprang up.
(2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered development of the knowledge-related content (test wikis, "pre-wikis", sighted revisions) or shall we pursue "flat development space" ideal?
It is perfectly legitimate. We are not supposed to want to swallow all human knowledge; we are supposed to want it to be accessible. Theoretically, such wikis could become new Wikimedia projects, but the fact is that new projects have not been started by the Foundation in the recent years. Another fact is that the Foundation gives little attention to its own existing non-Wikipedia projects. So if independent volunteers can make a good railway wiki by themselves, why not?
(3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia movement?
See the answer to the previous question; The Foundation is mostly preoccupied with Wikipedia. Though disappointing to Wikisource fans like myself, it's not necessarily bad. I suppose that it's not even a question of intent, but of capacity.
At the very least, it should be remembered that there are different models of knowledge collection and sharing, so threads like this are important.
(4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like "no original research", but not only) and try to address the issue there?
*Wikipedia*'s core values are fine. Without the no original research policy it wouldn't be as useful as it is now.
Such wikis can, theoretically, be adopted as other projects. Or maybe as very particular namespaces in Wikipedia. The line must be drawn somewhere, however.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On 7 March 2012 07:23, Amir E. Aharoni [email protected] wrote:
I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail. The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.
I don't know about the polish rail geeks but the british ones have been nice enough to spend the last few decades churning out book after book (along with journals and magazines) that qualify as reliable sources.
On Wed, 7 Mar 2012 09:10:17 +0000, geni [email protected] wrote:
On 7 March 2012 07:23, Amir E. Aharoni [email protected] wrote:
I'm taking a hint from Clay Shirky's books here: What most people would consider high quality published sources - in this case, by railway companies, governments, standards institutions or engineering colleges - simply don't have the capacity to go into that much detail. The Polish (Russian, Israeli, American, Indian) volunteer railway geeks do have this capacity, and quite possibly the quality of the job that they can do is just as good as that of the above institutions.
I don't know about the polish rail geeks but the british ones have been nice enough to spend the last few decades churning out book after book (along with journals and magazines) that qualify as reliable sources.
I was about to reply the same. The problem with a wiki is that (unless it is premoderated) noone can guarantee the quality. Even if the wiki founders are qualified geeks who are able to distinguish on a short notice what is correct and what is not, if they are monitoring quality in real time, they must be able to remove wrong statements relatively quickly, but only if the wiki is small enough. This is actually something we all know about - several years ago, we could still ensure there is nothing wrong in Wikipedia by monitoring new edits, now even monitoring new pages becomes a challenge. (And here we could start again talking about flagged revisions and what they are good to - but I will better not divert the original topic).
The way out as I see it is (possibly in addition to wiki) to publish an online journal or maintain a website, which would guarantee that everything in there is quality stamped (may be as Amir suggests one could formally asked an authoritative institution to do it). I know an example of a Russian narrow-gauge railways geek, who is basically recognized as someone who knows everything about narrow-gauge railways in former Soviet Union. He sometimes publishes books (which he funds himself, so strictly speaking they would not qualify as an authoritative source), and he maintains a website which is again a self-published source, but since often his books and his website are the only available information on the subject, they are widely cited in Russian Wikipedia articles, and also I sited him several times in English Wikipedia. Of course someone can always show up, remove these references and require that other references have been added (and then PROD the articles), but fortunately this did not occur so far. If this occurs my motivation to participate would indeed decrease (though not be completely killed at this point).
On the other hand, if we let this go for railways, then next we will have the fantasy, computer games, and anime fans at our doors, asking to recognize fanfic and such as sources, and I am afraid this may be like opening the Pandora box. Whereas I am pretty sure what I am doing about railways is correct, I would not know how to respond to the fantasy fiction fans.
Cheers Yaroslav
<quote> * They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible to follow development of the railway infrastructure and operations using only high quality published sources;
* They got bitten a bit by the "notability" discussions in their field; they want to document every track, every junction and every locomotive and they are tired of discussing how "notable" a particular piece of railway equipment really is. </quote>
Notability discussion seem to spring up on every wiki, and often seem to lead to very heated discussions. The question of notability is also somehow tied to reliable published sources. I remember a discussion where an article on a game with >20 milllion players was removed because of lack of appropriate sources.
Imho it is good that we do have rules on notability - we dont want to have every wikipedian describe his entire family - but every rule seems to have its quirks.
On the dutch wiki i recently encountered a discussion on notability of Tolkien articles. Fans are describing every corner of the Tolkien world, but in this discussion the notability of beetle species, plant species and chess openings was also raised. Personally I don't mind too much about notability - if the stuff seems relevant enough for a specialized paper encyclopedia, i feel it's worth including it in a wikipedia.
''Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge''
I wish you health and happiness Teun Spaans
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 4:28 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter [email protected] wrote:
On the other hand, if we let this go for railways, then next we will have the fantasy, computer games, and anime fans at our doors, asking to recognize fanfic and such as sources, and I am afraid this may be like opening the Pandora box.
I do not see how anime fanfics is possibly analogous to railroad fans reporting the results of their investigation in non-academic form. There is no analogy: the point of fanfics is that they *aren't canon and are made up by fans*.
The truer analogy would be "then next we will have anime fans asking that their translations of official Japanese materials be usable or their records of convention Q&A panels admitted as sources". And I don't think that would be a bad thing at all...