Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is failing

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This article should be redirected to WP:NOT#Failing. — BRIAN0918 • 2007-02-14 15:41Z

"A modest proposal"

I think I have a pretty clear solution for this problem:

1. Flag all articles with their rated Class and Priority (averaged if more than one project has rated them)

2. Flag any unrated article with "Unrated, but presumed a Low-priority Stub-class"

3. Outright warn readers that any article not rated F.A. should be treated with caution.

4. Readers that articles rated below G.A. should be treated with blatant suspicion

5. Have Wikipedia not return searchs results for articles rated below G.A. directly, but with an intermediate page saying basically "we have no good article on this topic, but do have one that is inferior; do you still want to see it?"

6. 1-year limit on every article, to achieve G.A. status, or be auto-deleted (can be recovered to userspace for further work)

7. 1-month warning before this happens.

8. 3-month limit on Stubs to achieve Start class.

9. 1-week warning.

10. Direct advocacy of removing unsourced information from articles; reverting such a deletion will trigger a new 1RR rule with regard to unsourced information. The uw-unsourced tags for warning users against the addition of such material would be used with the same vigor and consequences as the uw-vandalism warnings.

What else tough but quality-reinforcing can be thrown in...?

11. De-sysop every admin, without exception (but maybe a 2-month warning) that does not pass the enhanced Diablo test, and make it part of Policy at RfA.

12. Add fame and importance criteria back into the notability concept, until such time as consensus agrees we have G.A. or better articles on every important topic that should be in an encyclopedia.

How's that? I think every article but maybe 10, maybe even less, that I've spent any significant work on would get nuked under this policy, but I'd sure be working hard to improve those few gems up to better-than-Britannica F.A. standards instead of futzing with 300 stubs of dubious merit here and there! And we'd be rid of the "fancruft" that may complain consumes 90% of WP's human and electronic bandwidth.

Or then again, uh, maybe Wikipedia isn't failing. Perhaps some people just have highly personal particular expectations that aren't being met?

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 23:17, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Your first set of suggestions are amazing. But I do not agree with the second part starting from "What else tough but quality-reinforcing can be thrown in...?"

I recommend this suggestion to be seriously considered. --169.229.6.145 00:27, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[I'd forgotten all about this post, did not watch this page, and certainly didn't expect this level of feedback about it.] Um, just in case this wasn't clear to anyone: I WAS KIDDING. I thought that the "A Modest Proposal" heading would give that away. I actually think a handful of the ideas have a grain of merit apiece, if de-extremized, but please. The proposal as a whole was meant as an ironic comment on the projectpage to which this talk page is attached. Anyone who knows me on here at all would know this was a joke from point #12 alone, give how hard I argued for months against such subjective nonsense. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I took your last two points as an obvious joke. But you should have been much more outlandish with the rest if you wanted them to be clearly humorous. Worldtraveller 00:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I made your list numbered, hope you don't mind. I think number 5 would do amazing things for overall quality, as would number 8 (I suggested something similar to that a while back). 6 and 7 would also help a huge amount. Of course, many people would probably object to GA being used as a standard, but in principle I think those four measures would absolutely transform things in a very short time. I'd also add that new articles which cite no sources a week after their creation should be speedy deletion candidates. We have to get some things right from the very start.

For me as well, that would mean a lot of my articles getting wiped. Even though I enjoyed writing FAs particularly, and did 24 of those while I was actively editing, I made loads more unreferenced stubs. I expect the majority are still stubs, a year or two years on. The encyclopaedia would hardly be much worse off if they were temporarily removed. Worldtraveller 00:30, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Your numbering didn't seem to stick; looks like someone reverted it, not understanding WP:REFACTOR. For the record, people should feel free to recast a talk page bullet list as a numbered list if they honestly think that will be somehow useful, and people need to get over their YOYOW possessiveness about their talk page posts; Wikipedia is not The WELL. I put the numbering back, just so these followup discussions make sense (and noting again, as above, that the entire post is an ironic joke.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

These are excellent ideas, although I need to mention that there are numerous B-class articles of very high quality, whose authors have not initiated the whole "nomination" thing.

Consistent with your ideas, I'm thinking of starting a WikiProject Unassessed Articles that would allow us to rank articles for importance and quality, even if they don't have a sponsoring WikiProject of their own at present. Does that seem like a good idea to the people here? Hoping for constructive feedback, Willow 00:34, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

This would be duplicative of existing efforts. The WP:1.0 project is already handling this. The WikiProjects, like WP:BIO are using their article rating system. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Other than our stub, there is no information on the web about Meade Island. Would you delete a valid, attributed, irreplaceable (on the Web) article simply because it has a stub tag on it? I share Worldtraveller's views on unattributed information, but I find the idea of deleting brief but fully attributed stubs absolutely deplorable. Hesperian 00:44, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

The fictional "me" that wrote this piece would say, "Yes! If no one cares enough about your silly little island and its article, it is self-demonstrably non-encyclopedic, and will never, ever have a Featured Article, and since the goal of WP is for every article to eventually achieve F.A. status, it must go." In reality I'm a quasi-inclusionist, so of course I would not actually advocate removal of a well-sourced stub, and I think hard-core immediatists need to go soak their heads. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Heh, following these standards Wikipedia would never have gotten off the ground at all. :] --CBD 00:48, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

That was half the point (the other half being that an arguably rational position can be defended that things have changed ergo WP's nature has to, to "keep up with reality". I leave it to the reader/editor to determine just how defensible that view is; cf. User:Worldtraveller's material below, and the very existence of this document. If it were absurd it would be ignored. But the fact that is sparks honest debate doesn't mean that it ulitmately represents the truth either.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, Hesperian, if actually the article says all that reasonably can be said about the island, then it shouldn't be marked as a stub. Stub means 'very small article which will be expanded later'. I think when SMcCandlish said 'delete' he made clear that didn't mean delete really, but move or hide or otherwise take out of article space.

I actually meant (in a devil's advocate way) delete, though intentionally left in the caveat that any so-deleted article would be userspaced on request for further work. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

CBD, you're quite right, but then what got Wikipedia off the ground will not necessarily correspond to what will transform it into a reliable and authoritative reference work. Worldtraveller 00:55, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that it says all that reasonably can be said. But I do think that anyone seeking information on this obscure island would search the Web with very low expectations, and would be overjoyed by how much information Wikipedia has. Making this information inaccessible would be cutting off our nose to spite our face. Hesperian 01:00, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Or, to put the devil hat back on, requring people who believe the island to be of encyclopedic value to really do their homework and make a fantastic article about it. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

So what is stopping it saying all that could be said? How long is it likely to stay a stub, in the absence of an incentive to expand it? Worldtraveller 01:02, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

(i) The difficulty of sourcing information, which I believe to be out there, even if I haven't found it yet. (ii) In the absence of an "improve or delete" imperative, it will probably still be a stub in 100 years. That is an argument in favour of such an imperative, only to those who think well-written, neutral, fully attributed stubs are a bad thing. Hesperian 01:10, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Do you see it as a problem if unfinished articles remain unfinished indefinitely? Shouldn't we have an incentive to encourage people to finish articles rather than just stub it and run? By the way, fully attributed does not apply to the vast majority of stubs, and I think perhaps the article we're talking about right now shouldn't be called a stub. Worldtraveller 18:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, sounds like a "Start"-class article, though I haven't looked at it myself (and not like I'm an authority on such things; just saying I'm agreeing in principle, not on specifics. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, changes like this now would be worse than having it that way from the start. With the restrictions in place from the beginning you'd have a very slow process which would probably die of inertia, but could plod along and amount to something after a hundred years or so. Basically... Nupedia. Putting strictures like this into place NOW? Immediate insanity of unimaginable scope. A hundred thousand screaming Pokemon/South Park/Boy band/Whatever fans all going ape shit simultaneously. The site would be completely trashed and never recover. --CBD 01:06, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Addendum to "Proposal": 13. So, when they cross the line, ban them. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I doubt they'd have that much impact actually. I doubt many people would get angry, especially if restrictions were only placed on new stubs with a much more generous timescale for existing ones - similar to how unsourced images were purged. Worldtraveller 18:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

To me (1), (2), (3) and (4) seem excellent suggestions. The rest are a bit radical though. --Aminz 02:44, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Ya think? >;-) I'm frankly surprised that 1-4 went over well! That's kind of scary actually. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I imagine that implementing such an idea would devestate a large proportion of the encyclopedia. Assuming that people could stomach the idea of working to have it deleted, to work to have it deleted (like building a sandcastle where the waves are lapping). Some articles might be recreated over time and deleted again a year later. Result: more wasted effort. In reality, most people would just leave. --Seans Potato Business 02:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

That was the idea I was trying to get sarcastically across, in opposition to the essay this talk page belongs to. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't believe for a second that most people would leave. Yes, according to WP:1.0/I, assuming no-one did any stub expansion, 64% of all articles would be under threat; but without any incentive at all to expand or improve, then most of them will never become non-stubs anyway. The project would be much better off if they were merged into broader articles. If we had a culture that viewed barely-started articles as a bad thing, and a suitable length of time before sanctions against them were enacted, huge numbers of stubs could be expanded. Worldtraveller 18:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Obviously this is a terrible idea, but there might be something useful to fish out of it. Some of the worst elements of this proposal:

• Any unrated article is assumed starting out to be an unimportant stub. What? 1.0 has about 193,000 articles assessed out of 6,877,463. The others are all unimportant stubs? I just had a look at a few of my own articles - computational phylogenetics, implicit solvation, and homology modeling all fall into the unassessed category; they may not be that important, but they certainly aren't stubs. This proposal assumes that we can realistically get all (or at least the vast majority) of articles assessed. I don't know, I'd rather be writing them than writing 'B' on the talk page.
• In practice, 'B' is used to mean 'this article is in a usable state'. There is no accessible rating above B for most individual assessors. Claiming that all B-level articles are of low quality or should be treated with 'blatant suspicion' is nonsense.
• The GA process cannot cope with the massive influx of articles that would result from something like this. GA is already perpetually backlogged, and the quality of the reviews varies so enormously that it's effectively useless as a means of getting feedback on an article. The number of people just clearing the backlog, reviewing articles that they know nothing about, can only increase. If I can use my own as an example again (those are the ones I remember, you know ;), computational phylogenetics failed GA with a review that said, and I quote, "the prose, I was starting to fell asleap". (It later got a much more useful review from an expert, fortunately.)
• Since assessments are given by a single user, what's to stop me from thinking, 'hm, I wrote this pretty okay stub 2.9 months ago and nobody's edited it since, but it's pretty big for a stub, I'm just going to call it start since it would be dumb to delete it'. With 1.6 million articles, are these things going to be noticed? If they're going to be policed more strictly, where will we get the police?
• Unsourced statements aren't evil. I categorically oppose any variation of 'all unsourced material will be deleted, period' because some people have such incredible difficulty with concepts like 'common knowledge', and this causes a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife situation, since nobody wants to be on the side of lax referencing and low standards.

A less invasive idea: introduce a simple wikiproject certification scheme. Binary decision, 'this article is usable as a reference on the topic' or 'this article is not usable as a reference on this topic'. The intuitive response to the limitations of the existing assessment system is to add more dimensions, but that would only worsen the inter-project inconsistencies. Also, the emphasis on utility eliminates the tendency in grading schemes to use them as relative rather than absolute ranks; if an article is 'start' under the current system but hits all the basic points on a subject and contains a reference to a source of more information, it could still be certified as usable. Articles that are claimed by a wikiproject but not certified as usable can be tagged to notify the reader of their deficiencies. Opabinia regalis

Exactly. WP isn't broken. It's doing a great job as-is, with the human resources available. It's a true wonder, and expecting it to be wonderful x 1000 is just silly (like Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing). — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:16, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

What's silly is replying to data showing significant problems with a statement as bland as 'it isn't broken'. That really doesn't advance the discussion at all. If you have evidence to show exactly how Wikipedia cannot be improved and is not suffering from any significant problems in producing high quality encyclopaedic content, please share. I see nothing at all in what you've said here that demonstrates any serious problems with the analysis in the essay. I invite you to have a look at Tool, Litre, Market, Dictatorship, Mind, South America, and Herodotus and consider whether they meet the standards you'd expect of a high quality encyclopaedia. All are on WP:VA. Worldtraveller 00:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Stop focusing time and effort on inconsequential articles about things that do not exist!

Much effort is expended on documenting the intricacies of the Star Wars universe, or anime cartoons, or obscure characters from comic books, etc. This is not only amateurish for an encyclopedia, but the time spent making these articles and editing them could be better spent on articles that actually belong in an encyclopedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.131.43.48 (talk • contribs) 07:33, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The obvious fallacy is the notion that those same editors who work on that sort of thing would spend their time writing scholarly material if we somehow got them to cut out the cruft. This is unrealistic. Friday (talk) 15:05, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

This is true, but if there were far fewer comic and cartoon articles, you might find that far more academics and experts were interested in getting involved. Worldtraveller 18:42, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I doubt it. Wikipedia is Wikipedia, no matter how many articles like that there are. Academics and experts are still going to be skeptical of an encyclopedia whose fact checking method is hoping that if something is wrong, someone will wander by and correct it. -Amarkov moo! 19:19, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The academics and experts I know and chatted about the wiki with never minded the pop articles. Their problem with the wiki is this.

Everyone bases their work on the work of others. In order to avoid being wrong, they can only

• make sure there is no fault in their original parts and
• make sure there is no fault in their choice of sources.

Sources can be wrong, and one can't check everything, so there is no guilt in falling for the mistake somebody else made. It is just that one's choice of sources has to be reasonable. They have to be things that, if wrong, "could have misled anyone", because otherwise. The wiki, not even claiming to be definite, cannot serve this purpose. So if any mistake from the wiki were to be propagated in scholarly work, the academic/expert himself would have made a mistake, in an environment where single mistakes can end careers. This is an unacceptable risk. The presence of pop articles is entirely unrelated to that. Denial 13:15, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia fail when ...

The wiki fail, when ...

• it is not a wiki.

The encyclopedia fail, when ...

• it is not an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia fail, when ...

• it fail to be wiki and encyclopedia at the same time.

It is not a wiki, when ...

• It does not have a freedom to edit and publish with good faith.
• The editors do not have a wiki mind or wiki spirit.

--Ans 03:10, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

The question is, is the wiki- bit subsidiary to or more important than the -pedia bit? If aspects of a wiki system conflict with aspects of an encyclopaedia building project, then what gives? Worldtraveller 18:35, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

If they conflict, then wikipedia fail :) --Ans 12:57, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Why so? Worldtraveller 00:28, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

That's simple, since "if" it can't be both wiki and pedia at the same time, then it fail to be wikipedia, or it shouldn't be called wikipedia. --Ans 10:37, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I think what is leading to failings is the assumption that a wiki is good for every single aspect of writing an encyclopaedia. I think many people love the idea of a wiki so much that they are not willing to accept that it can conflict with the aims of the project. I think it would be great if more people saw that a wiki is amazingly good for generating content, but useless for maintaining it. Editors are forced to spend more and more time reverting vandalism instead of writing articles, and if you don't watch an article quite carefully it will soon degrade under the pressure of vandalism and poor edits. At the moment the project is like an assembly line where the finished product keeps on getting put back onto the conveyor belt. Worldtraveller 12:25, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Too popular causing it to fail?

Could the fact that WP (1) has become so popular and (2) the fact anyone can edit both be failing WP keeping it from being a true resource for accurate information? I will give you two examples in line with the above: 1) Trying to find the exact city where an individual was born (it was not listed in this site's article), I typed the person's full name and his US birth State (the info given in the WP article) into Google. The top results I got were the WP article as well as word for word copycat articles on Answers.com and several other sites. Making the assumption that the article was first created here (though I have no proof either way), if any of the information happened to be incorrect, it not only corrupts WP as a reasource but several others that copied the article from here (possibly done due to the site's popularity). Checking several other articles I got the exact same type of copy-paste results from WP to these other sites. 2) Diane Ladd: "At this time, there is some contention about her birth year. Some claim she was born in 1932 and others claim 1942." Despite 80 edits, no one has "facts" of when this person was born because of what "different sources say"? I have never encountered a general "It could be this or it could be that" comment in a Britanica. If I wanted to look for information on someone similar, having seeing this, WP is less likely a place I would come because I then feel the need to reverify everything -- something which I have less of a need to do using a professional, static encyclopedia. Comments? — CobraWiki ^{( jabber | stuff )} 03:58, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm confused. The first part of your criticism makes some amount of sense, although I'm not sure why it's a sign of failure. But the second part makes no sense to me. Why would you want an encyclopedia to always present something as the truth, even if it's in contention? Wouldn't you prefer an unbiased encyclopedia that just tells you about the controversy, without taking a side in it? -Amarkov moo! 04:23, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry to confuse. My point is that I believe the second example is actually in contention only because the "sources" are possibly unsoured assumptions themselves or a mix of results on the web rather than a "no one really knows" situation. Both can't be true, and I'm sure if research was done using actual paper birth records, a single answer would be derived rather than there be any contention, which is what a typical encyclopedia does over partly information found on the web. To further explain this, I know for a fact that Jimmy Reed was born in the not-so-well-known town in Mississippi called Dunleith. However, many biographies credit him to being born in nearby Leland, Mississippi where he spent his childhood. For others who aren't certain, this could be in contention but I know it as fact, so what web sources say is irrelevant, however, anyone could very easily get into a revert war with me over the issue because a web search for this information shows an equal number of sites claiming each to be his home. How can WP be viewed as a good/accurate source of information on this specific piece of information if people can't agree on something that shouldn't even be debatable since he was only born in one of the two towns? This small example leads me to a larger believe that any information found here should not be taken as fact directly and should always met with some skepticism, which I don't think is a good word to be used with any information source that wants to maintain high stands (and it is most often these little things more thna the larger ones that show whether or not the standards are being met). That is why it concerns me. Maybe "fail" is too strong of a word to use, though. — CobraWiki ^{( jabber | stuff )} 06:16, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The assumptions are incorrect...

...thereby invalidating any logical conclusion the essay may reach. Specifically assumption no. 2:

• That articles which are not either FA or A-class fall below the standards that a reference work should demand of its content.

Virtually every article in the Micropedia of the Encyclopedia Britannica would, if included in Wikipedia, be start- or stub-class, having no references, no named contributors and only a couple of paragraphs of text. I think we should be aiming for more than that, but I think B-class is fine and GA-class more than enough, and there's nothing wrong with start- or stub- class for obscure topics – Qxz 22:50, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Additionally, we have more Featured Articles than there are articles in the Macropedia; and then the GA and A-class articles on top of that, all of which are larger than anything EB has outside the Macropedia. So we're already well past "Britannica-standard" in terms of quality – Qxz 22:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Have you read the criteria by which these gradings are given? For B-class articles ...a serious student or researcher trying to use the material would have trouble doing so, or would risk error in derivative work. For GA-class, other encyclopedias could do a better job. Worldtraveller 00:14, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Then the gradings are being handed out wrongly, which invalidates the first assumption instead. Unless you're taking "other encyclopedias could do a better job" literally – that is, if another encyclopedia chose to "feature" that topic in whatever way they have of doing such things, it would be better than Wikipedia's version. However this ignores the fact that in most cases no general encyclopedia has done a better job, and a more specialist work would need to be consulted to find a better article – and of course Wikipedia can never hope to beat all specialist works in their field, making this irrelevant as an assessment – Qxz 01:11, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, what "class" would you assign the Micropedia articles to? Start- or stub-class, as I suggested (and seems to fit the definition of the classes most closely)? If so, then by the arguments here Britannica has completely and utterly failed as an encyclopedia too, as has every other encyclopedia ever written. When you come to that sort of conclusion, it's time to go back and question your assumptions – Qxz 01:14, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

So what is wrong with the gradings? What should be different? If Wikipedia can never hope to beat specialist encyclopaedias then it must be failing if it is trying to do so.

No, I don't think stub or start classes apply to micropaedia articles. They have extensive systems in place to ensure that each article, long or short, is edited and vetted by several layers of process before it gets published. We don't have that. I don't think many people at all would say that Britannica articles are often "still weak in many areas, and may lack a key element", or "At best a brief, informed dictionary definition". Worldtraveller 10:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I looked at a couple of Britannica online articles (university subscription) when this essay was first publicized. They were very long; often one article on Britannica corresponds to five or more articles here. But if the parts of the EB article were split into the corresponding five articles, each one would rate no higher than Start class, because the coverage is quite shallow. In short, comparison with EB is only reasonable for a small number of articles about basic topics. For the majority of articles, as Qxz points out, there is no other encyclopedia that covers them, so whether another encyclopedia covers them better is a vacuous question. The fact that the topics are covered is already an initial success. CMummert · talk 04:27, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Can you give examples of Britannica articles that could reasonably be described as start class? That is, "The article has a meaningful amount of good content, but it is still weak in many areas, and may lack a key element...Substantial/major editing is needed, most material for a complete article needs to be added". Worldtraveller 10:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Assuming you have access to Britannica, how would you judge, say, La Chanson de Roland or Naryn River? On what we'd call "core topics" Britannica is mostly very good but their fringe articles are often lacking somewhat. --Cherry blossom tree 12:54, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

An article like Naryn River should not, in my opinion, be marked as a stub here. It says really all that needs to be said; it will never be a 20kb brilliant article. As for its comparison with Britannica, well, they too say basically all that needs to be said, although they quote 700km for length where we have 807. I wouldn't describe either article as lacking. The other one I can't see right now but can look at from work on Monday.

This touches on what I think is a major problem - that because FAC increasingly approves articles that are way way over the recommended size (WP:SIZE), a lot of people think that short articles are no good. Instead of writing long articles on the most important subjects and short or even very short articles on anything else, increasingly people write massive amounts on articles that really don't require massive amounts, and neglect short articles because it clearly is not possible for them to become FA-style long articles. Worldtraveller 14:31, 3 March 2007 (UTC)