Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals
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Poor communication[edit]
Browsing through articles recently, there is a startling number of articles tossed due to the freshness criteria. Knowing full well that all of us are contributing out of our own time, it beseeches on how to streamline the process. So I have a few thoughts on how to communicate better during the review process.
- If a reviewer rejects the article on any grounds dictated by Wikinews's policies, they should make themselves available to answer any direct questions regarding the specific article and respective review for the next 24 hours.
- If an editor, disagrees with a reviewer's stance then an appeal could be requested and documented.
- Any non-article related statements with the goal of disparaging remarks and/or intentionally driving collaborative discussion unproductively would be could constitute a 'troll' status for that article.
- A new category for publishing articles that are larger and more comprehensive would by released only on Sunday's, more like a news magazine.
I believe that these are options easily implemented as Wikinews is trying to gain social critical mass. With the reviewer pool currently, it is asking a lot but laying the framework is worth doing. AZOperator (talk) 17:15, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
- (1) seems to be a matter of trying to be helpful. Reviewers generally put huge effort into trying to be helpful.
Reviewers are chosen to be highly experienced; basically, experts (anyone who isn't shouldn't be a reviewer); and don't throw their weight around for the hell of it. One thing that's pretty sure to sink any news article is for newbies to try to argue with the review, as if it were just some miscellaneous user's opinion and this were Wikipedia where vicious squabbling is routine and tends to succeed as a strategy; our policies and practices are streamlined to avoid controversies entirely, because it's a total nonstarter on a news deadline. Newbies who seek to learn, and expect to keep learning indefinitely (nobody here should ever stop learning), may hope to become veteran experts themselves; newbies whose basic impulse is to argue with reviews not only sink their own articles, they generally don't succeed at Wikinews (this is an attitude shared by all the most spectacular failures on Wikinewsies I can recall).
AZOperator, if I might opine a moment, I've generally been heartened by your positive attitude. It seems to me there are some basics of news writing that we need to find ways to help you get the hang of, and (sadly) a distraction from that discussion has been another user who was systematically fouling our attempts to help newcomers (one of the major activities we sink time into); hopefully, removing that distraction from the mix will allow us to spend attention more efficiently.
You see to have gotten diverted by the idea that the primary difficulty with your articles has been that they were too large for the reviewers to deal with. I do not believe this to be so. You're trying to write big articles without having mastered basic principles that would get in the way of smaller articles too; and the fact that the articles are big is causing secondary problems that make learning much less efficient. It's not that long articles aren't more challenging for reviewers, but the most effective mitigation for that is a reporter who's really good at Wikinews writing, which is hard to get to if you're only writing long articles that tend to bog down the learning process.
We've also had some users around lately trying to push a higher level of collaborative writing than Wikinews usually supports. My attitude has, until now, been rather indulgent — perhaps warning them that long Wikinews experience has demonstrated that seriously collaborative writing does not work well here, but then just letting them try and find out for themselves that it doesn't work. But I'm thinking that may have been a mistake on my part. Because it's occurring to me now that intensively collaborative news writing may severely degrade a reviewer's ability to give feedback to individual writers, which is essential to the health of the Wikinews project: it's how newcomers progress toward becoming experts, the way we can develop new generations of reviewers.
I was rather shocked when (a few years ago) I first looked up "meritocracy" on English Wikipedia and found an article heavily biased toward preaching the evils of elitism. There is a more positive sense of the word, which Brian McNeil used to use here, in which Wikinews is a meritocracy; our solution to the problem that expert tasks require a high priesthood is to do all we can to help everyone who comes here to learn how to become a high priest. --Pi zero (talk) 18:30, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
- At the vary least, self policing is a something that is really lacking here. Even a list of usernames of potential trolls could be put together and I could put into the code that a 'troll designator' follows all additions, collaborations or articles, follows the user until they can prove non-troll actions through an appeal. AZOperator (talk) 02:27, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
- @AZOperator: Keep in mind that Wikinews has very different social dynamics than Wikipedia. People here are individuals in a way that doesn't really have any Wikipedia analog. Brian McNeil used to tell people, "You're not in Kansas anymore." Brianmc was himself something of a case in point: a curmudgeon, is the way we often used to put it. Where Wikipedia elevates "Assume Good Faith" to the status of sacred writ, we explicitly reject it; we make quite a point of being uncensored; and while we seek to avoid squabbles and Wikipedia-style debates we value the right to dispense with time-consuming pleasantries and be blunt. It does require that we have confidence in each other's devotion to the project mission, which we achieve through accumulated reputation (see Wikinews:Never assume). There's some deep philosophy behind that:
- Wikipedia needs people to instantly work together with others they might never have met before and might never meet again, using AGF to try to make that happen, and deprioritizing technical considerations which can be left to take care of themselves over arbitrarily long periods of debate/squabble; and part of the result is that, by superficially-trusting, Wikipedia ultimately trusts no-one. On Wikinews, though, we treat social relations as something for the long run, whereas technical interaction has to work in the short run; and we need to apply keen judgement to the question of trusting people, just as we do to (other) sources, where there is no such thing as perfect, uninformed trust, but much of the time we're able to pull back to things that sources say that we can have high confidence are true (even when there are other things being said by the same source at the same time that we either mistrust or simply treat as opinion rather than fact). When I first came to Wikinews, and watched prominent interactions on the water cooler, I quickly realized that this place was the advanced course in social interaction, whereas everybody on Wikipedia was permanently stuck with "training wheels" (I used those once when learning to ride a bike; ghastly restrictive, basically kept me from doing anything but going forward and backward). Wikipedia tries to treat everybody the same; Wikinews tries to treat each individual person as an individual so that their individual trust-worthiness character can be judged as closely as sources are judged, and our whole infrastructure is geared for that. It's a profoundly different way to run a wiki, and yes there have been problems and challenges, we continue to work on some aspects, and there are concerns about problems of scale (right now we're a small community where everyone pretty-much knows everyone else).
(I vividly recall once, years ago, when Jimmy Wales came over here — as steeped in Wikipedian culture as it is possible to be, of course, and always out of his element with news — and, with Wikinewsies explaining things to him, when he finally got some inkling of just how much trust we put in the person who reviews an article, his apparently very-authentic reaction was to think we were completely insane. It reminded me of what Wikipedians say about their own project — that it only works in practice; in theory it could never work.)
- Wikipedia needs people to instantly work together with others they might never have met before and might never meet again, using AGF to try to make that happen, and deprioritizing technical considerations which can be left to take care of themselves over arbitrarily long periods of debate/squabble; and part of the result is that, by superficially-trusting, Wikipedia ultimately trusts no-one. On Wikinews, though, we treat social relations as something for the long run, whereas technical interaction has to work in the short run; and we need to apply keen judgement to the question of trusting people, just as we do to (other) sources, where there is no such thing as perfect, uninformed trust, but much of the time we're able to pull back to things that sources say that we can have high confidence are true (even when there are other things being said by the same source at the same time that we either mistrust or simply treat as opinion rather than fact). When I first came to Wikinews, and watched prominent interactions on the water cooler, I quickly realized that this place was the advanced course in social interaction, whereas everybody on Wikipedia was permanently stuck with "training wheels" (I used those once when learning to ride a bike; ghastly restrictive, basically kept me from doing anything but going forward and backward). Wikipedia tries to treat everybody the same; Wikinews tries to treat each individual person as an individual so that their individual trust-worthiness character can be judged as closely as sources are judged, and our whole infrastructure is geared for that. It's a profoundly different way to run a wiki, and yes there have been problems and challenges, we continue to work on some aspects, and there are concerns about problems of scale (right now we're a small community where everyone pretty-much knows everyone else).
- On the particular notion of possible-troll listing, I'm immediately concerned about the danger of blacklisting. Keeping things running smoothly here can be a complex task and, like all exercise of judgement here, falls very disproportionately on the inner circle of the community (which even Wikipedia is unable to avoid, though in giving elevated powers to admins, to crats, to ArbCom, they're constantly at war with their own egalitarian ideals). It can be tricky to pin down, in a publicly visible way, when genuine trolling goes over the line here on Wikinews, in a context where mere abruptness is not necessarily trolling, and the most seasoned members of the community are supposed to tell newcomers with dispatch what they've done wrong, without beating around the bush (and yes, doing so in the most-positive, hence most-useful, way is an additional challenge of review, which we all have our individual perpetual struggles to improve at). --Pi zero (talk) 13:19, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
- @AZOperator: Keep in mind that Wikinews has very different social dynamics than Wikipedia. People here are individuals in a way that doesn't really have any Wikipedia analog. Brian McNeil used to tell people, "You're not in Kansas anymore." Brianmc was himself something of a case in point: a curmudgeon, is the way we often used to put it. Where Wikipedia elevates "Assume Good Faith" to the status of sacred writ, we explicitly reject it; we make quite a point of being uncensored; and while we seek to avoid squabbles and Wikipedia-style debates we value the right to dispense with time-consuming pleasantries and be blunt. It does require that we have confidence in each other's devotion to the project mission, which we achieve through accumulated reputation (see Wikinews:Never assume). There's some deep philosophy behind that:
- At the vary least, self policing is a something that is really lacking here. Even a list of usernames of potential trolls could be put together and I could put into the code that a 'troll designator' follows all additions, collaborations or articles, follows the user until they can prove non-troll actions through an appeal. AZOperator (talk) 02:27, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
