Wikipedia:Expert retention
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Expert editors are a valuable resource to maintain both the viability and credibility of Wikipedia. Such experts may become easily frustrated by Wikipedia's loose structures, policies, guidelines and lack of formal processes. It is the goal of this proposed guideline to steer disaffected expert editors toward improving policy, processes and articles rather than leaving Wikipedia in a flameout of critical opinion.
Below is a verbatim article about Wikipedia discontent from User:LinaMishima/Experts Problem. This is a good starting point for understanding the problem. By moving this out of userspace and into Wikipedia namespace, consensus and a guideline on how to retain experts can be achieved.
[edit] Experts Problem
- Further information: User:LinaMishima/Experts Problem
The Experts Problem is the perceived withdrawal of expert editors from Wikipedia due to discontent.
[edit] Aims of this article
This article is an attempt at a community project to investigate this issue, and an investigation into what further wikiprojects would be useful. This page, which is open for the community to work upon, aims to:
- Record those expert editors who are becoming discontented with Wikipedia
- Formulate clear statements of the issues and problems they have with the project
- Locate evidence, where possible, that these are genuine problems
- Discuss solutions to the above
- Decide upon further wikiprojects to create or call upon to help with this
[edit] Who are expert editors and why should we worry?
Expert editors are one of Wikipedia's most valuable resources. These people are subject experts or skilled writers who hold the potential to significantly improve and add to Wikipedia's coverage of their subject. Jimmy Wales has stated that Wikipedia is in need of more work on quality of articles (as opposed to quantity), and expert editors are amongst some of the most able members of the community for much of this quality improvement drive. Peer reviewing of articles is dependent on peer reviewers, who by their nature have to be experts within the field of the articles they peer review.
[edit] Expert users on en-Wikipedia
[edit] Those who have departed Wikipedia or are on long-term hiatus
Some of these users may still participate in meta topics on Wikipedia (such as this discussion), but are not actively contributing to articles.
- J. Noel Chiappa[1], an admin and one of the founding fathers of the internet [2], left after a confrontation with a clueless, argumentative, biased, stubborn nitwit who persisted in trying to fill major articles with erroneous, highly-biased POV, based on ignorance, prejudice, and personal research. See his parody here.
- Chris Hillman was a great editor, got fed up with cranks. Did a lot of research and writing in the period after he stopped activ editing but before he left. Highly recomended reading, but is probably no longer available.
- DV8 2XL
- Windy City Mike. Mike has left, but has a great piece here.
- Bertrand Meyer, noted computer scientist and inventor of the Eiffel programming language, biographical article at Bertrand Meyer (see here). "Please do not believe anything you see on Wikipedia articles. If you are tempted to, please try the following experiment for a few weeks: write on an important subject that you know and care about; write your best, making sure to apply the strictest standards of scholarship and objectivity. Don't spend too much time on it, but just do it right. Then wait a little. You'll understand".
- St. Anne gone after a few short weeks. "This is not (and likely never will be) an encyclopedia. It is more like the large filing cabinet stuffed with clippings, half finished projects, notes, the travel pamphlet collection, manuals for obsolete software and long discarded small appliances, and odd photos etc. that sits in my den and that I will sort through someday".
- Dr. Edward Buckner. Now left. His special moment was an amateur philosopher who insisted that the article on Astral planes belonged in the philosophy department.
- Frescard
- Philosophus
- User:Rcpaterson per this.
- User:Ikkyu2 per What's_wrong_with_Wikipedia, by User:Ikkyu2. A professional neurologist who warns his patients not to read Wikipedia. His final moment came when one of his articles was "improved" by an editor who had the idea that "all religious experience is a product of complex partial [epilectic] seizures (the idea came to him while watching Joan of Arcadia)".
- Ben Brumfield per this. "Cranks do tend to get edited out of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this is a never-ending job, and editors get tired of it. Worldwide access means that the lunatics appear in unexpected places. In the Code of Hammurapi article, I've mediated feuds between one crank who insists the Code proves the historicity of Abraham and another who believes redactor theory implies that the Torah was composed ex nihilo in the fifth century."
- User:Sdedeo per User:Sdedeo#Wikipedia_and_the_problem_of_expert_knowledge.
- Gareth Leng, a Professor of Experimental Physiology [3], per User:Gleng#Goodbye.
- Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias
- User:Jbolden1517, mathematician, mediator.
- User:Askolnick, expert on the Natasha Demkina case.
[edit] Those who are contemplating leaving, or are in the process of leaving
- Kim van der Linde[4], an admin and expert in evolutionary biology. "My prediction for Wikipedia is that it becomes more and more a vehicle for POV-pushers, while the good editors and experts will leave Wikipedia disgruntled. The high degree of historical revisionism, fringe science, extreme minority viewpoints etc. makes Wikipedia already highly unreliable as an encyclopaedia. Now that the main articles have been written, Wikipedia becomes increasingly vulnerable for this."
- Samsara (talk • contribs), an admin and evolutionary biologist. "We have too many lurkers who hesitate to make constructive edits and enjoy criticising others, if not attempting to pummel the constructive ones into doing extra work. Have we degraded into suits?" - Samsara (talk • contribs) 17:23, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Those who are still active on Wikipedia
- Bmorton3, Dr. Brian Morton, professor of psychology at Indiana State University
- user:jkelly, an admin
- Timothy J Scriven
- User:Olin
- User:William M. Connolley (William M. Connolley). His case (in which he was briefly sanctioned by the ArbCom after a nasty edit war with a crackpot editor) received significant attention in the press.
- User:Vonkje
- User:CSTAR mathematics PhD, Harvard, 1960's/1970's,, expert on quantum mechanics and C-star algebras, took a half-year haitus in 2005/2006 after he became exhausted patrolling the articles on quantum mechanics (primarily Category:Quantum measurement) for crank/crackpot/pseudoscience edits. (by personal communication, no public statement of general discontent).
- User:Linas -- I restrict my editing to the placid, pleasent and hopeful corner of WP: the obscure, arcane topics. I've long ago given up hope on articles dealing with subjects taught in high-school or college, after watching any number of good articles get trashed by self-assured but incompetent students who think they know it all because they passed a mid-term exam last week. linas 23:54, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Those who are content
See also Wikipedia:Missing_Wikipedians. Note however that this latter list is of all Wikipedians who have left (including clearly some cranks or vandals who were 'encouraged' to leave). The list here consist specifically of those who are discontent because of the crank or edit creep problem (many of which have not left and are continuing to work despite discontent).
[edit] Stated reasons for discontent
Please only list here reasons that can be directly attributed to expert authors
[edit] Edit creep
- According to Hillman "Articles reach a state of which WP can be proud, but then are gradually dismantled by careless edits, sometimes from well-intentioned registered users who are too hasty or inexperienced to take care not to shove in new material any old place, but rather to to try find some place where it fits neatly, or barring that, rewriting nearby paragraphs in order to correct any damage done to the previous flow of ideas." [1]
- Novice editors are typically insensitive "to the sometimes challenging high-level intellectual task of seeing how to fit material they wish to add into the existing structure and vision of a given article. In an unstructured wiki model, all too often, novice writers prove unable to maintain consistent paragraph structure, verb tense, terminology, and notation. Or even worse, they often do not appear to even be aware of such issues!". [1]
- " … other irritants include those that feel the need to 'polish' otherwise stable articles with bad grammar and oversimplifications; editors for whom English is a second tongue but have no grasp of this language's idiom making a stand on what they perceive the meaning to be". [2]
[edit] Failure to recognise edit creep
- There is a widely held belief in the WP community that there is no such problem. "Hillman talks of "the naive expectation that Wikipedia articles tend to naturally improve monotonically, at least "on average"". [Franco] A dangerously naive WP myth holds that (apparently by some previously unknown law of nature) articles can only improve monotonically in quality." [1]
[edit] Cranks
These fall into two classes:
- The loners. "Some users pose a particularly insidious threat to the content value of the Wikipedia, because they are engaged in a persistent, determined, and often quite ingenious campaign to portray their highly idiosyncratic (and dubious) personal opinion as well-established mainstream scientific or historical fact.".[1] "By nature the classic crank is only interested in his own unique and bizarre vision (and cranks often abuse each other with extreme viciousness)". Hillman, [3]
- "A few months before I left I was treated to the spectacle of no less than six editors claiming PhDs trying to reason one of these idiots out of his notions of the existence of a ceramic gas, and thinking what waste of talent. In the end the crank had to be brought before ArbCom and was subsequently barred, but only after tying up mine and several other editors time for months. Undaunted, this individual has opened several sockpuppet accounts and continues to push his ideas on the same pages he was barred from. The fiction is that these people need to be educated in the ways of the 'pedia - the truth is that by in large they are beyond redemption because they are parasites, scofflaws or insane." [2]
- Note: The preceding comment concerns a debate in which the foremost expert in the field has repeatedly expressed agreement with the so-called crank and disagreement with his opposition ("no less than six editors claiming PhDs") who have no particular experience in the field. Additionally, several peer-reviewed publications support the so-called crank's assertions. The phone number and email address of the expert, who has over 45 years of experience with the ceramic gas in question, are available at the wikilink provided.
- Crank groups. However, "There are fairly sizable subcultures which adhere strongly to various anti-scientific conspiracy theories (e.g. Free energy suppression) or anti-scientific political movements (e.g. Intelligent design) masquerading as "scholarship", and therefore many science/math articles at Wikipedia have been slanted in cranky ways by several editors working together." (Hillman, [3]). "The bad guys (the ideologues, hoaxers, linkspammers, crank physikers, undercover political "dirty tricks" operatives, and guerrilla marketeers, among others) are winning this struggle for control of the Wikipedia.".[1]
There is an oddball... who has edited in passages of bewildering incoherence... What is happening is precisely what I feared... the work is being bowlderised and corrupted"[4]
[edit] Lack of adherence to or understanding of scholarly values
Hillman. " in order to make good judgements in content disputes regarding encyclopedia articles on scientific subjects, one must neccessarily adopt scholarly values. Unfortunately, the populist values of many prominent Wikipedians are generally antithetical to scholarly values, which is a huge part of the problem in attempting to deal with bad content in the scientific categories." [1] "There exists a class of editor so driven by ideological agendas that they simply will not recognize Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View Policy or seem to believe that it means that it guarantees uncritical place for their interpretations regardless of how flimsy the supporting facts or underlying logic might be. Worse, after an exhausting effort to bring these under control in a few months a fresh batch of POV pushers, unrelated to the first, show up to the same topics and the process must begin again from scratch." [2]
"I am sorry to report that I begin to feel-after very few weeks of browsing and editing-the whole Wikipedia enterprise verges on the worthless... It's a pity, really-but there are just two many people with perverse agendas, who care little for clarity or objective truth.... I did try reversion,.. but it was promptly edited back again without explanation. The whole exercise then becomes pathetically childish, and I simply refuse to compromise myself any further. If people prefer ignorance, so be it. I do not want to give you the impression that I consider myself to be infallible; I am as capable of error as any other individual; but I always welcome reasoned challenges to any point I put forward. Sadly, apart from one or two people.. it is not forthcoming."[5]
"There is, I think, a deep flaw in the philisophical grounding of the whole project, the assumption that 'truth' can somehow emerge through consensus. What emerges-depending on the topic- is a kind of mad Berkeleian world, where ideas struggle for dominance in complete disassociation from physical reality-I shout the loudest, therefore I am!."[6]
[edit] Vandalism
"the constant drizzle of schoolboy vandalism." [2]
[edit] Procedures
A comment when the Template:Tone tag had been placed on an article: "If you think it needs work then do it instead of adding puerile tags" [7]
[edit] Proposed solutions to the problems
Please suggest here solutions based directly upon the discussion of problems only - for concepts not drawn directly from detailed problems
[edit] End anonymous editing
- For the definitive statement of this perennial suggestion, which has been suggested since 2003, see m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles.
- Anonymous editing should be eliminated if only to cut down on the vandalism level.
- Require positive (and difficult-to-forge) identification so that banned editors cannot come back under yet another sockpuppet account.
- Anonymous editing has served its purpose, no one can rationally argue that Wikipedia's policy of permitting anyone to edit is not well known, and thus needs to be promoted. The argument that most editors started off as anons is somewhat disingenuous as it assumes that these folks would not have opened an account had they not first contributed without one. There is simply no proof of this statement at all.
- Wary internet users aware of the hazards of being spammed to death or having their computers hacked when they identify themselves on a new website may initially dabble in Wikipedia as anonymous editors. When the overall experience is positive, and they come to understand the system, then they may come on board and obtain an identity. Being very quick to semi-protect frequently vandalized pages may be the better compromise solution. People new to wikipedia could thus understand the need to have something positive to contribute and "earn" their way in by making contributions to less-protected articles first.
-
- How about making the most contentious articles -- the ones that have been edited the most often -- more difficult to edit? How about requiring editors to have made X number of edits before editing an article that has been edited Y times? Proper levels of X and Y to be empirically determined. Right now, some articles are functioning merely as bulletin boards. Frex, the Muhammad article is reworked several times a day, by a never-ending flood of new editors, a great many of whom seem to me to be motivated by the opportunity to piss off actual live Muslims. If only editors with over 10,000 edits, say, could work on the article, it would stabilize rapidly. I don't think we'd be missing any great new information (I don't think any has been added in the last year!), we'd just lose all the attempts to capture the article for one POV. Editors would have to EARN the right to edit the contentious articles. Also, if we threw out the loons faster, we wouldn't have any loons upending the contentious articles. Zora 23:24, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Three deadly rules
- At the root of all of the above issues is Wikipedia’s corpus of policy. It is gaps in this area that create the conditions that permit cranks and the incompetent to operate freely and makes bringing them under control such an exhausting exercise.
- The issue with the rules here stems from the fact that they are all in tension with each other. This along with the disabling policies of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules and Wikipedia:No binding decisions is an invitation for anarchy.
- Exacerbating this condition, ArbCom has as part of its policy that it will not be bound by precedent. Wikipedia:Arbitration policy/Past decisions. As a consequence this internal tension cannot ever be eased by due process. The excuse that this is to avoid having to repeat a ruling that may have proved not to be workable, is ludicrous on its face; they are not the last level of appeal, that belongs to the Foundation and Wales. If a precedent needs overturning it can be done there.
- A doctrine of open ended rules was appropriate in the beginning of the Project; it provided room for quick maneuver and adjustment during the initial phase and allowed for some flexibility as the project defined itself. However if it is to mature beyond its present state some solidification has to occur. Getting rid of those three 'anti-rules' would be a good start.
[edit] Expand ArbCom to deal quickly with cranks
- Cranks show themselves early on, not immediately perhaps, but sooner than most problem editors. One thing that works very well, albeit slowly, in dealing with problematic editors is ArbCom. Naturally as a court of last resort that is involved largely with serious charges of rule-breaking, cases that wind up there are complex and thus require careful and lengthy examination of the evidence. However all of the conflicts that wound up at ArbCom, started as content disputes that escalated. Looking back on many other cases that have gone to ArbCom it's apparent that this is the situation in for most of them, and in the overwhelming bulk of those there was an apparent violation of basic policy, like one of the Five Pillars, or What Wikipedia is Not. Had evidence been presented then and there a ruling could have been made and it would have been over. Some of these were clear issues of NPOV violations, yet the bickering went on for months until it got to the point where behavior problems broke out and it was on these that it went to arbitration.
- The present system of dispute resolution is quite simply overwhelmed which results in disputes escalating far beyond the point where they need to be, thus becoming far more complex to sort out than they have to be. The solution is to create a much larger pool of arbitrators who would accept cases earlier in the conflict, and expand the purview of arbitration to include violations of basic policy.
[edit] Featured Articles as a cure for edit creep
- An established process exists to nominate and approve an articles promotion to the status of ‘featured,’ also a similar process can be invoked to demote it. Featured should also automatically render the entry fully protected. At least until it falls back down to the lower level.
- Talk pages would still be open, of course, and should it be felt that some error, or important new information need to be inserted, it could be discussed first and when consensus had been reached any administrator could unprotect the article to permit changes to be made and lock it up again after. Should the contents need a more detailed reworking then a nomination to have it demoted would pass through existing channels. Thus this doesn't mean an article is declared "finished," only that an extra layer of oversight is added to prevent unilateral changes without broad support.
- Editors would be encouraged by this policy to clean-up and nominate entries as they would know that there would be some stability obtained from their efforts. As it stands it’s just not worth the trouble as nothing is gained except exposing your work to more intense vandalism.
[edit] Ban tendentious editors
- Users who persist in making unfounded or poorly-sourced edits in the face of opposition, who continually attempt to include original research, who continually attempt to use Wikipedia to promote theories which are widely discredited or continuously attempt to insert inappropriate POV's against general consensus should be blocked or banned from the project.
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and a serious reference work, and a professional endeavor. Readers ought be able to consult it with the expectation that they are get information which, if not always the most well-researched or best-documented, at least does not fly in the face of established knowledge. Articles may be written by experts in the field, or by amateurs; as long as readers can be confident that the information presents the state of the field accurately, the sources does not matter.
- Some contributors, however, seek to exploit our openness in order to promote controversial or extreme positions, often attempting to present them as fact or as theories which have recognized merit among experts in the relevant field. Other editors stubbornly modify articles to represent their own, incomplete or inaccurate interpretation of their sources. Just as Wikipedia chooses to exclude spam and propaganda, we also choose to exclude advocacy of crackpot theories. Persistent attempts to include such material, after being informed that it is inappropriate, constitutes disruption of the encyclopedia; many editors find themselves having to spend a considerable amount of time reverting the edits of users who persist in advocating theories for which there is no discernable support among experts in the field.
[edit] Ban editors from both main pages and talk pages
- Banned editors should lose their rights to both sets of pages. They can continue to dupe unsuspecting new persons to the page, and continue to swamp up discussion. If they make truly good points, other editors will take up the slack.
[edit] Create a parallel series of ExpertEditions
- There are two competing priorities here.
- Cited experts should not have to compete with cranks and other forces of erosion such as edit creep and vandalism.
- The general public should be able to edit Wikipedia pages.
- Accordingly, Wikipedia shall have two versions of TechnicalPages, for example 1) Natural selection (expert edition) and 2) Natural selection (public edition) where Natural selection (public edition) would be governed as the Natural selection page is now and the Natural selection (expert edition) will be opened for edit only by those experts that Wikipedia as a community will elect based on citations to the experts' work in the publications available on PubMed. In this way, the reader can judge between the two versions "Expert" and "Public," and, given the Wikipedia community, the expert version will be expected to lead and anchor the other. But the work of vital experts will not be subject to the current forces of erosion. And the public will still be able to edit Wikipedia as they do now.
There is considerable bureaucracy involved. Experts need to be verified. A sensible condition might be having a PhD in the subject area under consideration, a sufficient criterion would be having published at least two papers in reputable journals in the area (so as to encompass individuals who change subject after their PhD). Implied is that experts are only qualified to write about their given subject. This makes a software implementation marginally more complex. Basically, it amounts to "tagging" both people and articles in the flickr/technorati sense (and don't anybody quote me the Revelation here). It also requires some amount of disclosure on the part of applicants.
A remaining concern is how to ensure that the articles are still written in a way suitable for laypeople to read. It's also possible that at least some "public" articles will expand at a greater rate than their "expert" equivalents, in which case, the expert version would not be leading the public one.
[edit] Disallow ephemeral sources
Currently, articles naturally deteriorate with time, because most articles contain online sources that eventually turn into dead links. Such sources should not be used, both because they are an easily accessible source of crackpot science, and because they undermine the quality of articles by eventually falling to dust.
[edit] Improving the quality of debate in talk pages
An expert is someone who has studied for years to acquire expertise. To acquire expertise, it is necessary to read many books and to submit to the methodology of a field of study. To make sure that an expert get more influence on the contents of an article, i want to propose to promote the acquiring of all relevant literature on a subject and debate on this, before editing an article. The resulting version of an article after the debate can be immortalised in a template on the talk page of the article and on a special project page where the debates are organized. This project page will be hosting several unchangeable versions of articles and it will be an integral part of Wikipedia, without breaking any of the rules, while circumventing the bureaucratic system of Wikipedia.
My suggestion on the procedure of a high-quality debate is:
- Picking an article.
- Searching for all relevant literature.
- Making sure that all participants of a debate have all the literature.
A solution for people who live far away from a major library and can't get most of the literature is to make all literature (temporarily) available on the internet.This would violate copyright in most countries. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 10:13, 18 October 2006 (UTC). Another solution would be that participants get the literature from a major library in their neighbourhood.--Daanschr 10:29, 18 October 2006 (UTC) - (Picking a chairman with the task to make sure that the debate is about the literature and not about something else. He could also make sure that the debate comes to an end.)
- The debate. The new version of the article will be constructed during the debate. Changes made by casual users to the old version of the article during the debate should be discussed as well. New participants of the debate will be asked to join our project and to read the literature during the debate. New titles can be added during the debate.
- Replacing the old version of the article with the new version.--Daanschr 18:38, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
It is better to make a dicesion and to act instead of keeping the discussion and the complaints going on for ever, therefore I have started a project to create an expertise-friendly section within Wikipedia: WikiProject organized debate.
[edit] See also
For articles not directly associated with this topic but may also be of use, see…
[edit] Links documenting "expert frustration"
Some links where contributions from (alleged) subject-matter experts, who consider their contributions to be authoritative, have been reverted or met with resistance by editors who may lack expertise in the subject matter (or in some cases, who may be pushing "crank" theories).
- Talk:Consciousness#Oh_Lord.... Consciousness is understood as a symbiosis (interaction) of Mind and Information.
- Controversy over Cantor. Cantor was wrong.
- Talk:Uranium trioxide One amateur holds out against a team of PhD's
- Note: The preceding comment concerns a debate in which the foremost expert in the field has repeatedly expressed agreement with the amateur in question and disagreement with his opposition who have no particular experience in the field. Additionally, several peer-reviewed publications support the amateur's assertions. The phone number and email address of the expert, who has over 45 years of experience with uranium trioxide gas, are available at the wikilink provided.
- Talk:Albert_Einstein#Reverted_without_comment Einstein argued that time is pseudo-directional.
- Rat Park. [5] A "biography of an experiment, with a vested interest in its truth", according to its Featured Article review (see Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Rat Park). Despite faulty methodology the experiment has been cited a healthy 100 times in the literature, yet the main author insists that "the experiment is now largely forgotten".
- Talk:pseudoscience An editor holds out for the claim that chiropractic is used to cure homosexuality (hence proving that it is pseudoscientific) in the face of the bemusement of assorted chiropractors and others. When (eventually....) it is shown (by a letter from the equally bemused author) that the claimed reference does not mention chiropractic, he then claims as an alternative V RS, an article in a monthly Society newsletter not listed on ISI, written by a private sex counsellor with an MA in psychology. Nobody has seen the text because that issue is witheld from the Society online archives. He is still active, others have just left in disgust.
[edit] Links to versions of very bad articles
- A diff from the Consciousness article. [6]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f User:Hillman/Wikipedia_quality_control
- ^ a b c d User:DV8_2XL
- ^ a b User_talk:Hillman#Crank_.28person.29 (by User:Vonkje
- ^ comment by Rcpaterson
- ^ comment by Rcpaterson
- ^ comment by Rcpaterson
- ^ comment by Rcpaterson
[edit] See also
- Wikipedia:Expert editors
- User:LinaMishima/Experts Problem
- Wikipedia:Expert rebellion
- User:Jnc/AstronomerAmateur -- a parody of what we're talking about.
- Departures and threatening to leave
- User:Nikodemos/Asymmetric controversy discusses some of the social dynamic behind these controversies
![[2]](http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/history/Internet_plaque.jpg){kind=link}