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[This is basically a draft WP:ESSAY, posted for initial discussion & brainstorming.]
We know from the study of organizational life cycles that participants in an organization have to adapt to its changing needs and crises in different stages of its development, or they must be replaced. When they will not adapt, they become hindrances to progress, unhappy and disaffected, and sometimes even witting or subconscious saboteurs of necessary changes.
In the standardized organization life cycle model, Wikipedia successfully (for almost a decade now) left the entrepreneurial or birth stage (which is dependent on visionary leadership and experimentation) and fully developed its growth (collectivity) stage (dependent on delegation and the marshaling of resources). It is only now transitioning (starting about 2 years ago, I'd say, overall, though different parts of the system are aging at different rates) into the third stage, maturity (formalization), characterized by systematizing and codifying how things are done so they're done efficiently, predictably and accountably. The "crisis" point of this state is eventual bureaucracy and red-tape, which we're already seeing the beginnings of in ARBCOM, too many noticeboards with different rules, etc. The decay shift from useful structure to clumsy process as bureaucracy increases is a gradual and slow one, that can be mitigated by conscious efforts at red-tape reduction.
To address the above MOS-related squabbling: Some have expressed a belief that MOS is a symptom of this problem. But MOS has not actually changed or grown all that much in several years, since deep in the second phase. It's mostly just massaged details, and even gotten rid of cumbersome rules like date linking. It is almost entirely people from, or with the approach of, "maverick" stage-one participants who feel this way about the whole project (and yet act themselves within their more rapidly-evolving and -declining wikiprojects as the same sorts of bureaucrats of a stage-three organization they're critical of on the larger org scale). The fact is that the overwhelming majority of editors on WP have no issues with MOS and just use it as intended. An increasing number of "fight to the death" camps are popping up over MOS issues because and only because MOS is codifying system-wide rules and actually implementing them, and some wikiprojects going all the way back to stage 1 have conflicting preferences. They did not participate enough or at all in the stage 2 processes that led to the stage 3 rules, despite those processes being wide open. They just declare themselves immune to them and ignored them until too late. It's unfortunate, but so it goes.
It will really probably be several more years before WP hits the stage three crisis point and organizationally enters the decline and "elaboration" (or "navel-contemplation and busy-work" as I call it) stage, after which it will undergo a new stage 1 renewal, or if worse came to worst, die. We're really not much past the beginning of stage three. Any regularization across the whole project, of any kind, looks like "too many rules" and "too much bureaucracy" to anyone with a stage-1 approach, since they were already being alienated and started bunkering themselves in stage 2. And, in any organization, many of them will in fact leave rather than adapt. I'm old and experienced enough to know what this looks like in the real world, in both commercial and non-profit organizations. There's lots of hair-pulling, but in the end, it's best for everyone involved and certainly for the organization's health. Some who leave even come back later in totally different roles. Note, by the way, that our stats do not support the oft-repeated but false idea of a huge decrease in editing. What we see instead is precisely what we should expect for this phase: Gung-ho early adopters and people trying it out while the idea was new have receded, and we have pared down to a long-term, stable (though, yes, slightly declining, probably due to the economy wearing on people's free, volunteer time), plateau-shaped editorial pool, largely renewing itself as old hands and curious dilettantes "retire": File:Active editors on English Wikipedia over time.png.
These non-adapting, lingering stage-1 participants are generally not people deeply involved in developing WP policy today, especially not the WP:Manual of Style, WP:Article titles, WP:Identifying reliable sources, and WP:Notability (other than jealously-guarded topic-specific subpages thereof) – i.e., the policies and guidelines that actually most determine what shape our content takes. While some stage-1 hold outs are long-term admins whose approach has failed to adapt to changing community norms, as well as frequent participants in more "destructive" processes like the XfDs, more often they're "sovereign city-state"-mentality "leaders" of topical wikiprojects who foment organized discord against any regularizing process that evolves when it does something they're not used to or in favor of. Their frequent indignant outbursts along the lines of "these articles have always done it this way", "this wikiproject came to its own consensus to do it differently", and "you outsiders have no business telling us how to write our articles", is clear evidence of this, as is their dogged adherence to some "vision" of how "their" project should do things, arrived at several years ago, when the rest of the encyclopedia isn't with them on that any longer or never was. It's happening constantly with regard to MOS, WP:AT, WP:N and its sub-guidelines, WP:RS and what qualifies, WP:CONSENSUS and how it applies, you name it – these disputes are everywhere, and almost invariably coming from some entrenched topical wikiproject with self-appointed "leadership" claiming to speak for all participants, and pretending that WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and WP:OWN policies don't exist. (NB: I say this as the founder of more than one wikiproject, and one who arguably was an over-controller of this sort, several years ago. I adapted, but former regulars at, say, WP:CFD and WP:SFD will remember what a pain I was with regard to WP:WikiProject Cue sports back in the day.)
I've said it before and will say it again that we need to rethink the entire wikiproject system, which acts far too much like departments or regiments or counties to be useful any longer. We badly need to get away from anything so skeumorphically territorial as "projects". They're increasingly turning into hotbeds of disruption that pursue their own independent agendas above those of the encyclopedia.
The real concern for Wikipedia is not stopping these people from leaving, it's attracting replacements who have outlooks and expectations more compatible with a long-term strategy and process for building (and administering) the encyclopedia than with an anarchic free-for-all like there used to be in the 2000s. To use a geographical metaphor, Wikipedia today is more like a unified, modern Italy, instead of the independent medieval city-states some of our older and larger wikiprojects (and other fiefdoms) try to still act like. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 21:51, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- Considering that Wikipedia appears to be constitutionally incapable of recognizing professional language or conventions that happen to apply to some academic disciplines, I'd say that many projects work as a good reality check in this regard. MOS is in some cases a misguided attempt to create and impose standards on disciplines that already have them. So far I have yet to see a good answer for this aside from some of the projects, which are positioned to attract real subject matter experts. It seems more like OWN of MOS is coming into conflict with other areas, and getting rid of the experts isn't really a solution to me. Intothatdarkness 22:03, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- I appreciate the response, and and don't want to sound contrary just to be contrary. There's actually a lot to get at here, and it's not clear yet how to squish this all down into a concise essay, so this is kind of a just a caffeinated brain dump. Anyway, precisely the opposite of what you outline can be said to be what's actually happening, from my view. MOS and its subpages (especially MOS:NUM) consist almost entirely of concessions to professional conventions, arrived at by consensus. Meanwhile, specialists who openly tell our process for this assimilation to just go screw itself, people who simply prefer particular stylistic peccadilloes in their professional specialist-to-specialist writing in topical journals, but know full well that mainstream publishing (newspapers, encyclopedias, etc. do not use these quirks) are attempting to impose them on "their" articles, mandatorily for anyone editing in them, regardless what the rest of the editors and more importantly the readers, expect, prefer or can even understand. MOS adopts (doesn't magically create) standards for Wikipedia, and prevents outside bodies (many of which are not the standards authorities their supporters claim) from imposing their own, though it may adopt those, too, after deliberation and consensus. MOS begins with general mainstream usage, and then bows to specialist concerns when they do not create problems and when they're actually real standards. E.g., we have no problem requiring a space between a measurement and the unit symbol and not putting a dot after it (25 ft, not 25ft.), because this is how ANSI, ISO, yadda yadda, do it officially, it's clear and precise (with the sole exception, in English, of "in" for inches, which is usually avoidable with a rewrite), and it doesn't conflict with standard English (at least not in ways that cause the reader to stop and think "WTF?"). WP:SSF's and MOS's problems with wikiprojects have almost entirely been over cases where some specialist use does cause conflict with standard usage and thus with both editing and reader comprehension. Not "standard usage" as some prescriptivist curmudgeon with an opinion insists it is, but standard usage as actually researched by us in mainstream publications and in other style guides (i.e. guides to how to write such publications).
Some of these bird editors (to keep using that example because it's timely) love to say things to the effect of "anti-bird people are forcing us to write bird articles wrong!" but it's not really the case. Some may really feel that it is, but there's something not quite right here. Every single ornithologist on this planet is well aware that only orn. publications (and not even all of them, much less with the exact same rules) accept the capitalization scheme they tend to prefer), and is entirely comfortable using lower case for publications/audiences that expect it. Like Wikipedia. Similarly, every single birder (birdwatcher, bird pet keeper, etc., i.e. non-ornithologist bird fans) is also immediately familiar and comfortable with "southern boobook" vs. Southern Boobook being how nearly all non-bird-specialty sources, like newspapers, render it. Meanwhile, virtually no one who is not a bird person of either type is familiar with this capitalization scheme, and has no idea what they're looking at. It it a place? The name of someone's specific pet? An esoteric royal title? All reading comprehension stops dead while they try to figure out "why on earth is this capitalized?", and if they're editorially inclined they're now liable to edit to fix the "typo" instead of doing the reading they came for. Or worse yet, they go to mammal articles and start capitalizing them. This actually happened to thousands and thousands of articles; people assumed it was a "Wikipedia standard" to capitalize animal names, and so they did. This anti-MOS melodrama plays out again and again in various cases (military/government people from some countries insisting that ranks and even civil servant job titles must be capitalized even when not attached to names, rock/mountain climbers insisting that climbing routes must be italicized, etc., etc., etc. - see the talk page WT:SSF for various cases. It's always the exact same failure to recognize that it's the specialists who are trying to impose their house-organ "standard" on everyone else in a universal encyclopedia written largely by and for a general audience. It's like trying to impose Nature's in-house style guide on every publisher in the world who ever writes something about the natural sciences. These wikiprojects do not own/control the articles they decide are within their scope, and all such articles are within others' scope. Every New Zealand bird article is not just a bird article, it's also a New Zealand article, an ecology article, an evolution article, etc., etc., and New Zealand journalism, and the field of ecology and evolution )etc.) do not capitalize. Even if WP were to get stupid and decide wikiprojects got to make up their own rules, willy-nilly, WP:BIRDS would still be outvoted on capitalization by other projects with scope over the same articles! To these birders (and others SFFers), it's perfectly fine to quite nastily demonize everyone who disagrees with them as ignorant, stupid, hateful, etc., when really, yes, we do understand, we're just not buying in, and have sound reasons for not doing so. The most obvious of which is that there are easily tens of thousands of vocational and avocational specialties, most of them with their own jargon, and its simply impossible for them to all get all their nit-picky style demands, so most specialist style has to be rejected. MOS and WP do not need a "reality check" as to what style quirks various fields prefer and even standardize on internally; we're browbeaten with this stuff constantly, by people would never take such an attitude with any more formal publisher, but simply obey their style guide or not get published. No one is trying to "get rid" of experts. No one (sane) dislikes experts categorically and their valuable contributions here. But we all know that expert editors come loaded with their own set of baggage that has to be dealt with. It's not just the "give me my style nitpicks or give me death" outbursts, it's the frequent attitude that the editor him/herself is a reliable source (i.e. that NOR and V/RS do not apply to them); that they can remove or add any information, with a source, as they like based on their professional experience regardless of any existing or still-forming consensus on how reliable that assessment/approach/detail is (often a consensus process informed by other experts); that no style rules, even for citation formatting, heading capitalization, naming conventions, etc., apply to them; that articles should be written for other specialists, not a lay audience; that when a jargon term or a plain English will both convey the same meaning that the jargon term should always be used even when doing to adds not precision or disambiguation; and on and on. All of these are real issues and they all have practical approaches to working around them. Some people like to denigrate the practical approach to dealing with attempts to impose external style, which is to fall back on the KISS principle and stick with standard English absent a clear showing that the desired variance is a standard in the field and does not cause problems for other readers and editors. I think this one area of dealing with expert gets short shrift simply because it's about style and the average editor thinks style is trivial. Until they see something they don't like and then want to come to WT:MOS to pick fights about it for six months. >;-) There are actually other wikiproject-arising problems with guideline and policy compliance that have nothing to do with imposition of external style rules, but simply "this project has been around X year and we do it this way and everyone else can screw off if they don't like it" attitudes, about everyhting from how to disambiguate to how to format tables, but they're perhaps less severe and entrenched problems. Finally, WP is plenty aware of "professional language"; most of what we do as editors is translate that language in reliable sources into laypeople's terms for the encyclopedia. One way to compromise between writing stuff that's too jargon dense for WP and stuff that too dumbed down and repetitively spelled out for anyone with an IQ above 100 to tolerate, is to take the approach that WP:WikiProject Cue sports did, which was to developed a very comprehensive Glossary of cue sports terms, and then go head and use the jargon but religiously link terms to their glossary definitions on first use in an article. It's a lot of work, but it's quite effect (see any major billiards article like nine-ball and snooker.) There is the separate problem that many enthusiastic Wikipedians are terrible writers, but this is also true of professionals in most specialties when called upon to write. The third problem of this sort is that some editors are not very intelligent and/or are poorly educated, and mangle what they read into something incorrectly summarized on Wikipedia. None of these are areally related to the wikiprojects and and style-and-retention issues I'm trying to get at here. PS: Real subject matter experts are not running away from any other topic areas, only those few in which highly angsty, argumentative parties are making an anti-MOS "war" over some style issue. E.g., it's quite common in herpetology sources to capitalize the way so many bird sources do, but there is no "MOS can go @%#* itself, I'm quitting in a huff and telling everyone to never come to Wikipedia!" WP:BATTLEGROUND nonsense coming from reptile and amphibian editors. It requires an entrenched, charismatic, combative cadre actively riling people up, or "topic nationalism", as it were. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 02:39, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Interesting points, but it's also worth pointing out that specialist publishers develop their own MOS guidelines to fit their academic discipline's requirements. Wikipedia is attempting (unrealistically in my view) to impose a "one size fits all" set of guidelines, and many of those who support the MOS are (again in my view) unnecessarily antagonistic over things like dashes. Given the fact that Wikipedia does not cap articles in any realistic way (in terms of both length and level of detail), it's only natural that sections of it will become more specialized and diverge greatly from a general encyclopedia model. That divergence makes a universal MOS even more difficult to apply (again, in my view). If we were talking about articles limited by word count and a more comprehensive review process, a general MOS would make sense; but that's not the environment we have. Intothatdarkness 14:15, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Some good points above. One way I think to more effectively equalize all topics and sub-topics (and I think by extension WikiProjects), would be to as much as possible put them on the same footing. One way to get closer to doing that is to try to give as many as practicable the same level of infrastructure development - available reference sources, periodicals, useful websites, etc. I actually have around 30 pages of text of reference sources to be added to Bibliography of encyclopedias and related right now. While they probably won't be as useful for topics about current events and topics, they could help in dealing with some topics which fall in the scope of multiple "camps" of editors (or WikiProjects). John Carter (talk) 22:18, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
- About Wikiprojects: A lot of Wikiprojects have processes in place that attract experienced editors to pages created by new editors, and that leads to a lot of subject-specific help which leads to improved articles and a positive experience for the new editors. If Wikiproject activity is de-emphasized, something equally effective in this regard would need to be developed. This would be a lot of work. Also, Wikiprojects do evolve, through migrating membership and activities, and if some are active it is likely because they are fulfilling a positive role (like this one). —Anne Delong (talk) 00:26, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- It might be as simple as renaming them to something less inspiring of territorialism, though. One idea would be changing "project" to a verb, like "writing" or "working". I of course agree that the good aspects of wikiprojects must be preserved, and hopefully not even disrupted. My goal is, in short, to curtail this growing "our WikiProject has our own consensus to do it this way on all articles in our scope, and the rest of WP can go soak their heads" attitude. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:39, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- About the MOS: It's important to keep in mind that Wikipedia is intended to be a general encyclopedia; yes, many of the disciplines have their own specialized vocabulary and conventions, but if these become the basis of article about these subjects, no one outside the specialties will be able to read them. Perhaps some articles could have a horizontal dividing line somewhere half way through, above which text would adhere to the general MOS, and below which, with a suitable Gobbledygook Ahead warning, text could be written for a more specific and knowledgeable audience. However, there are already many specialized publications for these readers, and it may be unwise for a single publication, even a large one, to try to be all things to all people. —Anne Delong (talk) 00:26, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- I wish it were that simple! — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:20, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- Many real-world organizations have a style guide with an editorial committee that sets standards, and everyone in the organization understands that reasonable compliance with the style guide is a condition of employment. That model does not apply to Wikipedia because articles are built and maintained only if the editors concerned want to spend hours working on them. A style guide is important here, but good contributors are more important and there should be a balance between consistency and collaboration. While the MOS discussions on bird names were about normal for that page, the extraordinary walls of text with extraneous links and commentary present an overwhelming barrier for participation by standard editors. This discussion has already passed a point whereby any information can be exchanged, and all that remains is for those with the loudest voices to assert their victory. Johnuniq (talk) 11:02, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- I don't see how that comparison fits at all. This is much more like when someone submits something they've written to a journal, or a newspaper, or anything in between. Every academic in the world, and every writer beyond the most inexperienced, understands that these publications have their own in-house style guides and they either have to comply with them upon submission to be considered at all, or at least an editor on that end will change the text to comply before publication. That's how the entire publishing world works, online and offline, professional and avocational. Nothing to do with one's employer's or any lose-your-job threat. I agree that the RfC was a sprawling mess, and that many extraneous links were added. It's notable that much of that junk was added by people from WP:BIRDS. Most of it was redundant piles of links to the same kinds of publications (field guides and ornithology journals) that a single example would have sufficed for, just to make their list of real-world support look more substantial than it was. The RfC should not have been written or launched the way it was. It was wrong in timing, in wording, in scope, in administration, in every way, but almost all of these faults favored the pro-caps camp. Even the close, by a pro-caps admin, decided lower-case based on the sources and various other arguments, but studiously avoided the two strongest policy-based arguments for lower case. If the RfC were re-done properly, the outcome would be even more certain to be not in favor of the jargonistic capitalization scheme. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:20, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- SMcCandlish says above "it's the specialists who are trying to impose their house-organ "standard" on everyone else in a universal encyclopedia written largely by and for a general audience" which imo points to a wider problem with WP which is that the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" does not place a higher value on editors who have some idea what they are writing about than it does on anyone who turns up with zero knowledge of the subject. Editors with expertise get fed up with having to continually combat others who have picked up wacky ideas from Hollywood movies or some fringe website, and leave, I have seen this happen in the field of early Christianity with editor History2007, Biblical studies with user PiCo (seems to have returned now) and the most valuable editor in the field of ancient Roman history and society, Cynwolfe, who responded on her talk page to people leaving messages missing her contributions by saying she got tired of the ineffectiveness of dispute resolution and "The MOS straitjacket had started to feel like a drag." I think hassling experts about trivia to do with capitalisation is ridiculous, it reminds me of the infobox wars which went on for years when expert editors in the field of historic buildings and classical music were bullied mercilessly by others who had no interest in those subjects to include infoboxes which the knowledgeable editors did not want in the articles (some of them left because of that, I didn't even edit in classical music until that absurd fuss seemed to be over as I did not want to get involved). "Fine, so-called 'experts', go ahead and sod off to your specialist websites, we don't need you" (which is how I read "The real concern for Wikipedia is not stopping these people from leaving, it's attracting replacements who have outlooks and expectations more compatible with a long-term strategy") is not a collaborative attitude, it is just going to mean WP is being dumbed down and since this is now the number one source of information worldwide I don't think that's a good thing. There should definitely be more effort by admins and others to protect the most valuable editors in their fields.Smeat75 (talk) 12:16, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Much of this is already covered in detail at WP:SSF. It does not place a lower value on expert contributors or specialist sources to prefer mainstream English-writing sources about how to write English for a mainstream audience. This is not some case of WP making up some "rule" out of nowhere; it's based on what virtually all sources but ornithology journals do. If a preponderance of model railroading magazines capitalized "Glue" and "Model" and "Paint" and "Airbrush", WP would not do so in articles about model building, no matter how many model-focused editors threatened to walk out if they didn't get their way. Another way to put it is that ornithologists and birdwatchers are experts about birds (their biology, mating, range, calls, feather patterns, classification, etc.) They are not experts in writing. The kinds of people who regularly "staff" MOS, however, more often are - professional writers and editors, published non-fiction authors, English professors, people with lingustics degrees. It's SSF-pushing wikiproject editors who are denigrating the professional experitise of these editors when they try to push some jargon style from their field's journals onto the whole encyclopedia, in ways that interfere with the general readership's use and understanding of the material, and that cause editorial conflict with everyone else on the system any time that faction's articles are touched by someone else. Absolutely, expert editors get fed up over things like "wacky ideas from Hollywood movies or some fringe website", but this isn't like that. Or to the extent it is, it's the specialists who're being wacky to the vast majority of readers and other editors. It's not that MOS and other people "don't understand" or "are ignornant of" their standards, it's that they conflict with what WP needs, and so the encyclopedia doesn't, and for practical purposes cannot adopt them. There are tens of thousands of specialties, all with their own jargon, and one publication cannot permit all of their style quirks at once or no one could edit anything without starting style fights between warring specialist camps. You're also sorely mischaracterizing the "infobox wars" (which, yes, where lame and sad). The music and architecture projects were wrong as a matter of clear policy on this. They kept asserting a "right" to prevent the addition of infoboxes on bio articles about composers and architects, ignoring the fact that every article on a Spanish architect or composer is not just within the scope of the composers or architect project, respectively, but also the biography wikiproject, the Spain wikiproject, and usually others. This "others who had no interest in those subjects" claim is patently false. It would be off-kilter anyway, under WP:OWN and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. An editorial interest is standardizing bio article formats (or whatever) for our readers is at least a valid one as an interest in preveting addition of an infobox others are certain will be useful just because your project has decided it doesn't like infoboxes. The overall point being, for every complaint you have here, there is an equal but opposite complaint. Try "topic experts hassling everyone else on the system about trivia to do with capitalisation is ridiculous." And that's precisely what WP:BIRDS was doing, with regard to any article that had anything to do with birds, from the perspective of geography, biology, ecology, evolution, etc., editors who have 100% as much editorial right to care about and work on these articles. If I start a wikiproject on notable people who are also wikipedians, I don't get to declare a new standard that all of their bio articles will have black backgrounds and white text, and force everyone else to go along with this. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:20, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- I mentioned it elsewhere recently, but it bears repeating here ... I found an infamous quote from Rick Wakeman ([1]) where he says: " It’s well known I loathe Wikipedia (I have given up correcting it as complete nutcases just change it back to a pack of inaccurate rubbish within minutes). I actually tell journalists not to go anywhere near Wikipedia". Now, we can probably guess that in this case an IP added unsourced content and was reverted. That's our point of view and as far as we're concerned, we're acting within policy, fine and good. But that's not the impression he comes away with at all. I really do think everyone must take a step back and remember that Wikipedia is in the real world and that our policies and guidelines are meaningless to a significant section of our readers, who may well dismiss them as "nutcases" like Rick did here. And you won't find their complaints logged on WP. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:26, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Defnitely. The WP:Expert retention page goes into some of this. There's a serious problem, intractable but hopefully not fatal, that WP can be edited by anyone, but that no such edits will stick if they don't comply with basic policies like WP:V and WP:NOR, and core content guidelines like WP:N and WP:RS. But if anyone gets *additions of well-sourced, relevant material* reverted because they weren't styled per MOS, than that reversion is tatamount to vandalism. It not a norm, and it really hardly ever happens. The issues Wakeman seems to simultaneously be bringing up are very different from this; they are a) people who really are knowledgeable but are totally new to WP are likely to add stuff without proper sourcing, neutrality, or whatever, and get reverted despite getting their facts right, and b) people who know how to "work" WP can often add totally nonsense that seems well sourced but is not and get away with it for extensive periods of time in poorly-watched articles. If there were easy solutions to these problems, we would have had them a decade ago before WP was "in the real world". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:20, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- The issue of the value of Wikiprojects seems to have got mixed up with the history of "style wars", which is a pity. I see Wikiprojects as necessary to enable editors who work in a particular area to learn from each other and to assist new editors in that area. Clearly Wikiprojects should not, and do not, have exclusive ownership of articles, whether in terms of content or style. On the other hand, the community at large ought to pay careful attention to consensus views formed within Wikiprojects, views based on expert knowledge and on practical experience gained through collective editing of many articles. Wikiprojects are places where specialist guidance can be developed and located. Sometimes this guidance is sufficiently general to be moved into the general WP space (e.g. WP:NCFLORA began life within the WP:PLANTS pages). Often it will be far to specialized to be of any interest outside a particular community (e.g. what "year of description" means in categorizing plant articles or what counts as a synonym to be included in a plant taxobox). "Special interest groups" are an essential part of an enterprise as diverse as Wikipedia, whether or not they are called "Wikiprojects". Peter coxhead (talk) 20:36, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
- Re: The pitiable mixing up – Noted! I did say this was a brain dump. :-) Having slept on it, I see this as three essays or project pages or proposals or whatever: anti-MOS-ism, how to fix the wikiproject system, and editor churn being part of the organization's life cycle. MOS does "pay careful attention to consensus views formed within Wikiprojects"; that's where almost everything specific in it came from in the first place. MOS defers to such judgments in virtually ever case, and only does not when doing so would or did already cause more problems for more readers that not doing so, almost always by conflicting with everyday usage in a way that confuses people. Something like wikiprojects – pages for topical collaboration and expertise pooling – are certainly necessary. I have no beef with a single reason that "wikiprojects are good" that's been raised here or anywhere else I can think of. But this doesn't mean we have to perpetually accept the problems they're causing, which are notably worsening, to the point of calls for organized editorial walk-outs and reversion-war blockades. It's beyond WP:BATTLEGROUND and well into WP:NOTHERE in some cases. My idea is that calling them "projects" or anything else that can be perceived as territorial, an "us", something to belong to, any kind of organization unto itself, is where the problem lies (it's the main reason we got ride of WP:Esperanza, but we failed to learn from that). Special interest groups bring their own, external agendas here, and this has to be short-circuited and rewired so we get their energy and knowledge without their politics and power-hunger. Without dismantling anything, renaming wikiprojects to something verbal (WikiWriting Birds? I dunno) instead of nouny might help, but it's hard to say without actually trying it.
What we have now, though, is a road built with the best intentions, leading closer and closer to Hell. This is way more important than "WP:LAME style arguments" as some of them seem on the surface. This is really about whether, as WP becomes more real-world vital, special interests just damned well take it over, or it continues to operate on a general-editorship consensus basis. Over the coming decade there's going to very intense pressure toward the former, especially as professional editing really takes off, whether allowed by the rules or not. There are already paid intelligence agents, corporate PR people, political activists, etc., in the hundreds at least, working diligently to not just massage content subtly in various articles, but to seize control of the entire enterprise, bit by bit. There are two non-mutually-exclusive paths to that goal: stacking the adminship with their people, and having them dominate wikiprojects and expand their influence. A couple of people are probably going to laugh at me for this post. Five years from now they're going to blush and apologize when they realize how right I was. Anwyay, obviously ornithologists aren't a threat in this regard, but increasing the power of wikiprojects and undermining the site-wide authority of general policies and guidelines is, even if we only start doing that to mollify a few academics and birdwatchers; the change will be ruthlessly, programmatically exploited by PoV-pushers of the worst sort. As I posted with WP's own stats elsewhere in this discussion, the idea that WP is hemorrhaging editors is a myth; it's actually at a rather stable plateau, which is to be expected after the "gee whiz" novelty of editing wears off, and we already have most of the non-trivial and not ultra-obscure articles we need, at least in stub form. In this stage of the organization, it's just lots and lots and lots of work, much of it less "sexy" than being the first one to create the article on Ishtar or Playstation 3 or Errol Flynn. Now it's loads of details and sourcing improvement and updating. Expert editors who cause more trouble than they solve are ones we can afford to let wander off, especially given that plenty of them will be back later with a different attitude. Wikipedia is not House, M.D., and we have too much work to do for us to put up with diva experts who dump abusively on everyone they argue with. There is no academic who doesn't know how to adapt for the style guide of the publication they're submitting work to, and that's what WP is, it's not a private club or their blog, and the few who are acting this way need to stop pretending this is a roleplaying game they can win by being indignant, haughty and activistic. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 00:20, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- @SMcCandlish: once it's accepted (as you obviously have) that some kinds of "special interest groups" are both essential and valuable, it doesn't matter what they are called. They are bound to develop their own identity and preferences, which may sometimes conflict with Wikipedia as a whole. The issue is how to manage disputes originating from such conflicts in a way that doesn't lead to valuable editors leaving. The current system clearly doesn't work:
- The sheer volume of text created in discussions deters the majority of editors from getting involved. "Tl;dr" rules. (You and I are guilty in this respect, although perhaps not quite to the same degree!)
- The absence of active monitors allows the level of aggression to creep upwards, with each "side" reacting to escalation by the other. Sharp intervention by an admin did reduce the level of invective for a time, but brought its own problems – a group of active monitors would be better.
- The result is that decisions are taken by tiny minorities of active editors. Noetica was fond of saying that the MOS policy on dashes/hyphens was based on a "60 editor consensus" – agreed an unusually large number for such issues. However, there are 6000+ editors who've made at least 10,000 edits, so it seems to me hard to claim consensus across Wikipedia for any of the MOS, and this matters, since it contributes to a feeling of being ruled by a dictatorial minority rather than going along with the rules of the community as a whole.
- Peter coxhead (talk) 07:42, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
- That's true of all guidelines and policies, though. Everything on WP is edited by a self-selecting pool of editors, and it's always a small fraction of the overall active editing pool (which is much, much smaller than the 6K who have *ever* had 10K edits, of course). Every guideline and policy has detractors as to various points in it. It's notable that, as in this very case, the detractors are invariably those who want to do something contraindicated by the policypage in question, virtually never, ever by some neutral observer who doesn't have a bone to pick, a pet peeve to vent about. This really has nothing to do with MOS in particular, other than that these disputes arise frequently about this or that rule in MOS fairly often, due to the factors outlined at the WP:SSF essay. It's simply more common for one speciality or another to have some weird style shenanigan it uses in internal literature and which some people from that field want to push on WP in an activistic manner, than it is for some field to have an expectation that conflicts with, say, WP:V and WP:NOR policies (such fields certainly exist, e.g. every religious and political group on the planet, for starters). Don't confuse the incidental statistical correlation of the MOS dispute frequency for causal evidence of some fatal flaw in WP:MOS itself or its editing pool. By such reasoning, WP:N would have to be abandoned, since it's far and away the most often and most vociferously controverted of all such policypages, by the widest variety and largest number of users, while it has had only a very small number of editors who worked on drafting and refining it, yet it is the core dispute behind about 95% of WP:AFD listings and other deletion actions, far more destructive and drama-generating on a daily basis than all style debates ever. In reality, of course, we depend heavily on it for WP not falling apart. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 11:47, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
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