User talk:Dendodge/Project focus
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I think most of the ideas you discard with red text are good -- and should be implemented. We know nupedia didn't work despite excellent and skilled participants, and great intentions regarding quality and expertise.
I think all of the features you identify at the bottom in bold as a path forward are quite good, and should be pursued as a refined focus for the project. sj (talk) 04:05, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
Hm[edit]
Dendodge, I don't think we disagree on nearly as much as we sometimes appear to.
We go off in different directions somewhere in the vicinity of the word "focus".
You've said (one place or another) that we should focus more on OR, and that if that means our output is lower, fine. But there's nothing about the way we treat synthesis needed to make that happen. Wikinews is here to support publication of citizen journalism. We have high standards, and those standards are what makes us work; which just means review is part of the 'publication of citizen journalism' we're here to support. Some thoughts (okay, a humongous pile of thoughts; but any list this long must be leaving some out :-):
- English Wikipedia's educational value is pretty much entirely in reading the information content of its output. Old English Wikipedia's educational value (the example I cited on foundation-l) seems to me, anyway, to be mainly in studying the form of its output and in creating its output. English Wikinews's educational value seems to me to be some mixture of all three. On the contributing side, there's learning to write; learning to check facts first — along with the closely related skill of reading comprehension, applied to the sources; learning to find and frame a neutral perspective even when one has an opinion oneself; and for that matter learning how to use sources without plagiarizing from them. (All in addition to learning about the particular stories one writes about.) Studying the form of our output also has some value in learning some of those skills; it's more dilute through that vector, of course. And our output has value, varying from case to case — you've mentioned neutrality and OR, value can also be contained in our choice of what to cover (stories that can do with more exposure), accuracy (incidentally, yes we can do better than BBC on some kinds of stories), the fact our material will never disappear behind a paywall, and yes sometimes the depth of our coverage (depth is not the same thing, btw, as being "comprehensive"; indeed, including everything one can find, besides being dubious in terms of copyright of sources, may be less desirable than a discerning choice of what's most important). I may well be leaving out some important value somewhere, but that's a start.
- One of the various spectra on which en.wn is the extreme opposite of en.wp is individuality. They function as a sort of hive mind, never placing great reliance on any individual, which is why Wikipedians quite commonly never learn various of the things I listed for our contributing side. We're all individuals here; we strongly emphasize accumulated individual reputation, and apply that accumulation as a basis for deciding whom to trust in a way that's just utterly alien to the basic Wikipedian mindset (yes, plenty of Wikipedians make the adjustment; my point is there are also plenty who don't). Jimbo when last here first had trouble comprehending the level of trust we place in reviewers, and then apparently couldn't imagine that it could possibly work; proving, I suppose, that someone who's had one really good idea many have trouble grokking situations in which that one idea doesn't apply.
- I've been saying, what we're doing does not, essentially, need changing; what we need to do —and what I've been working on, slowly but surely (how else?)— is finding ways to make it a little be easier to do what we do, and a little bit easier, and a little bit easier. And it'll add up. For example:
- I'm interested in (and am finally getting around to approaching Bawolff for suggestions about) adding cumulative data entry fields to the article wizard. That's one.
- Trivial though it may sound, the {{w}} was another (everything helps); I'm really quite pleased when I think back on how rampant violation of the prefer-local-links policy used to be, and now there's very little of it at all.
- Brianmc was commenting that automated help checking for copyvio would be good, though we pointed out that there are some difficulties with an automated system both in false positives and false negatives (which reminds me, I really want to see us put together a good how-to guide about not plagiarizing, and yes I have some ideas).
- I'm sure with a little thought we could remember other more-or-less-little stuff we've had in mind, and come up with some new items for a wish list (some are harder than others, of course) — oh, here's one. It'd be great if we had a convenient way to make independent accept/reject decisions about edits within a long series of unsighted edits, without having to do them chronologically. Basically, we'd often like to be able accept/reject edits independently for different paragraphs, say, rather than by the whole article. I often find myself looking through a series of edits chronologically, accepting one, accepting the next, and so on, and then partway through the list I have one that should be rejected — and because the rejection then comes chronologically after all the others, I then can't accept any other intermediate version, because I mustn't accept any intermediate version that precedes my reverting edit.
- To me, changing focus means working especially hard to make certain things easier. Synthesis is an essential part of the project, both having all three kinds of value and also serving as a way to accumulate trust — though there's no reason it can't be combined with some simple and fairly checkable OR, such as on-the-spot pictures. (Brianmc understands that stuff far better than I.) And that doesn't mean we can't do things to make OR easier. Brianmc's notion of an essay about how easy OR is, "Look mom, I'm a reporter!", is one. Blood Red Sandman's idea of having professors lined up ahead of time available for timely OR quotes, is another. I'm dubious about the "completeness of coverage" thing as it might apply to synthesis, for the reasons I mentioned above, but... my point is that there's enormous scope for incremental improvements that can add up to great strides.