Forum:RW's direction and revisiting editorial policy

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::Bloody hell, ye olde project whitewash! You're probably right though... maybe I should follow my own dictum of "if you want anything done on a wiki, do it yourself." [[User:Sophie Wilder|<span style="color:#008080">'''Sophie'''</span>]][[User_talk:Sophie Wilder|<span style="color#FF9933"><sup>''Wilder''</sup></span>]] 22:25, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
 
::Bloody hell, ye olde project whitewash! You're probably right though... maybe I should follow my own dictum of "if you want anything done on a wiki, do it yourself." [[User:Sophie Wilder|<span style="color:#008080">'''Sophie'''</span>]][[User_talk:Sophie Wilder|<span style="color#FF9933"><sup>''Wilder''</sup></span>]] 22:25, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
 
:::That's basically it.  It's easy to nominate articles that need work (& we already have various categories for this) but much more effort to actually do it, and most users would rather put the effort into subjects they choose to edit than working through a list of nominated content.  {{User:Weaseloid/sig|}} 22:33, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
 
:::That's basically it.  It's easy to nominate articles that need work (& we already have various categories for this) but much more effort to actually do it, and most users would rather put the effort into subjects they choose to edit than working through a list of nominated content.  {{User:Weaseloid/sig|}} 22:33, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
 +
::::That would be great, Sophie. I want to warn warn warn warn against this starting (and ending) with another namespace purge. They end being nothing but divisive wankery. We need updated core articles. Purging garbage is a priority but it's way behind making sure there's cream to rise to the top.  [[file:Nuttysig.svg|68px|link=User:Nutty Roux|Nutty Roux]][[File:100x100 anarchy symbol.svg|12px|link=User_talk:Nutty Roux]] 22:45, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Revision as of 22:45, 25 March 2013

Contents

Introduction/Caveats

I'd like to start a dialog about how we as a "community" wish for RW to be regarded as a resource to the skeptical community and public at large. I think it's time to grow up and very seriously examine what SPOV means, what tone we wish to convey, what quality of material we want to present, and how we wish to treat new editors. We've only had short discussions of these topics that have gone nowhere over the last few years. We are failing our mission if we're neglecting our core material. Agree with me or not, RW increasingly strikes me as a haven for groupthink and increasingly off-mission material.

As a caveat, I'm not writing this in any official capacity because I'm not entitled to take an official position on editorial matters. I would if I could. My personal opinion is that RW is getting so far from what I still believe is its core mission that it's on the verge of requiring an itervention.

If you want to tu quoke or attack me (as has actually happened in the last several days - fucking pathetic - "I thought this was RationalWiki), go somewhere else. I fully admit I'm to blame for inserting ridiculously intemperate and unhelpful edits into articles here and there.

If you want to pop in with a "yep," "sounds good," or "me too," get back to templating and catting.

New editors

I've seen new editors attempt to add good material only to be reflexively rolled back without consideration of preserving good parts of edits and a message on their talk page referring to How to Write a RationalWiki Article and SPOV. It works when any of us do it, but I've seen editors actually tell people to put their proposed edits on the talk page and then mock me for pointing out our open editing policy. Try it. Start a sock puppet account and go attempt to flesh out a creationist or christian apologist's argument before we try cutting it apart. You'll fail. I could comment on why I think it happens, but the only real question is whether anyone else sees it as a problem, and if so, wants to do something about it. If not, I'm just a dick with too many opinions.

Core mission material, what we're presenting to the world, and snark

My particular interests are creationism and counter-apologetics. In my opinion, some of our creationism material isn't very good. It's also woefully out of date. As an example, we're a year and a half late responding to CMI's last round of "rebuttals" to various answers to the 15 questions, including some of ours. I spent hours formatting 3 pages full of their responses into side-by-sides that I, at least, think turned out nicely. I think something like 2 people took interest. Maybe 1 or 2 more. This is disappointing.

Putting aside solid scientific research for more complex topics, which is outside most people's ability, we ought to be able to give good responses to issues within our grasp. Some of our material is written with pointless "snark", which, whatever "snark" is, can be an excuse to be nasty and not cite critical truth claims. It seems to me that truth claims on this wiki end up being memetic to the point that people forget they do need to be adequately backed up (falsification, facile claims that ___ is pseudoscience).

I could have never imagined that templates and portals could have affected our public face so very much, but they have. Brainstars and article importance ratings on talk pages make me cringe. Portals that randomize within a category are pulling up articles I wouldn't want anyone to think is what we want to present as something we're proud of. We've got portals for everything. Portals that sometimes lead to shit.

SPOV is not an excuse to totally abdicate responsibility for asking the simple question: is this something I'd want to see pop to the top of Google results for a search for "rationalwiki"?

The skeptical community, RWF and $$, prestige, credibility, reputation, etc.

I'm deeply concerned about RW's critical reception in the skeptical community, and by extension our ability to consistently draw attention from notable skeptics (and obviously for the RWF to make $$ and move beyond RW). Sure, we occasionally get cited by prominent skeptics here and there, but we're not a go-to resource. We're not even attempting to engage the full range of participants in the pro-science and skeptical dialog.

I want the RWF to eventually stand shoulder to shoulder with and participate in events with the James Randi Foundation, RDF, New England Skeptical Society, Center for Skeptical Inquiry, etc. So far, RW is its only truly going concern so this is naturally where we're going to draw a lot of our energy. I want prominent RW editors and RWF officers or delegates on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. We've got real scientists with graduate degrees and real research or professional interests directly relevant to important skeptical issues. We're not going to get there if some of our articles here look like they were written by children or people with serious personal grudges to pick (fine, I've been part of that problem at times as well). And we're going to alienate donors if we don't recognize that skepticism is a bigger tent than atheism and anti-theism. We've got christian editors here, but they're not particularly open about it. They are RationalWikians. The point is to consider who we want to embrace and how we're going to do it.

I recently spoke a few older editors who are widely respected by nearly all on the site. One stated the problem as he sees it very elegantly in a way that I think answers a number of questions about how RW ought to move forward:

We're making far too many assumptions about who our readership is. The fact of the matter is that RW readers outnumber editors by orders of magnitude. They don't look at Recent Changes. They don't look at talk pages.They come here from Facebook or specific Google searches, or wherever looking for information. So we're not an encyclopedia. We are a resource people do and should turn to. They're not all liberals. They're not all atheists. Etc. Some of the assumptions RW makes and biases we express really do look like groupthink to (some of us and) outsiders. The criticism seems to get mocked, which is disappointing.

In closing

I'm not going to cite a bunch of examples to support the claims I'm making here, not just because I'm lazy. Likewise, I'm not going to make very many assumptions about where this discussion ought to go other than to predict that it will be nowhere. Older editors, who I reckon are the only ones with sufficient experience to comment, either agree that these are issues that need to be addressed or they don't. This is either obvious to people paying attention or I'm just wrong and I'll go on my way.

Is there a dialog to be had here? Nutty Roux100x100 anarchy symbol.svg (formerly Ghostface Editah) 16:42, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

____________________

Initial comments

I agree with a lot of the above, & have a few things to add.

As a starting point, I'd suggest taking fun, recipe & Conservapedia space articles off the map - i.e. out of the public-facing parts of the site: remove links to them from any portal/navigation pages, and as far as possible remove links to them from mainspace content. A few CP-space articles with broader appeal (e.g. the Conservative Bible Project) could be tidied up & moved to mainspace, & WIGO:CP should be in RW space with the other WIGOs. Most of the rest of CP space isn't really worthy of public attention.

There are some major holes in our coverage, e.g. our articles on some key scientists (Darwin or Einstein as obvious examples) are so weak they're almost deletable. Arguably, these should be core articles for our missions. But on the other hand, we're unlikely to ever be a go-to source for such well known subjects, so it's a matter of deciding what approach we want to take to subjects like this.

We also need to think about notability. While we certainly don't want to tie ourselves to Wikipedia-style sourcing/notability policies, the longstanding meme that "we have no notability criteria" is misleading and allows people to write articles on obscure blogs, terms they made up (aliensdidit, falldidit, flooddidit, satandidit) or self-promoting "internet laws" based on something somebody said somewhere at a forum sometime earlier that day.

Connected to notability is the level of attention we give to subjects and how we balance this. E.g. one of our longest articles is about YouTube user VenomFangX. Compared to the scant coverage of many major influential figures and movements in science, politics & religious, the detailed coverage of YouTube (& Conservapedia, LessWrong, Citizendium, etc.) seems somewhat amiss. But again, it's an issue over what people want to write about & read about.

Regarding rollbacks of edits to articles, this isn't a problem purely with new editors. When somebody makes major changes to an established article, not all of which are desirable, it can be exhausting to have to pick through it to separate the gold from the shit. In these situations, I do think suggesting that they discuss their proposed changes on the talkpage first is appropriate. That said, we don't seem very welcoming of new editors, and especially bad at engaging in constructive dialogue (part of our mission statement) with those who disagree with our articles' POV. Far too often, all they get is the {{RATIONALWiki}} template, which stopped being funny a long time ago and is really just shorthand for "fuck off", or else they just get told to fuck off. €₳$£ΘĪÐWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 00:33, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

I've been looking through Wikipedia's Guidelines recently, and I know we're not WP, but we definitely assume bad faith more often than good faith -any suppositions why this is so should be put elsewhere. Since we're so bad at discerning good faith edits, perhaps our default position should be "assume clueless". --TheLateGatsby (talk) 13:26, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
Wow, nice to see some of the best work on here get trashed so easily. Goddidit, Flooddidit, etc are excellent articles which neatly encapsulate positions widely held by various crowds of people. Sure, they don't refer to them as such, but these articles (and their titles) beautifully encapsulate the irrational thinking that goes on. Goddidit was the article which made me a fan of this site in the first place. VOXHUMANA 22:32, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Doing stuff

Our good stuff is great. I've been picking over it for the blog, and don't think I'll be running out any time soon. But I usually have to do a slight rewrite and definitely a references update.

I wouldn't go feral on the long tail of crusty articles. It's a wiki, it's going to have a long tail of articles. No-one will see this stuff unless they go looking. (This is the "inclusionist/deletionist" argument on Wikipedia.)

In general, the way to make RW better is to write better stuff, and visibly. Make our good stuff better, make it the go-to article on whatever it is. We do this alarmingly well in many cases (and NaturalNews is now almost-fully cited).

Volunteer effort is not fungible. Volunteers are here to do what they want, not what you want; you cannot direct volunteers to do things. (You can at best suggest.) If you go through with an axe deleting people's work, they won't go and do things you think are more productive - they will leave and not come back. And other people will see this and leave with them, which is probably not what you want.

I concur on being nicer to new contributors. Until proven utter wastes of space. Worst is an enthusiastic waste of space, which is actively damaging to the content. (Yes, after a contribution history consisting almost entirely of bad logic, bad references and bad English, I will happily tell Proxima to edit somewhere other than the article itself.) Beware the geek social fallacies.

It's all a tricky one because people are often fuckwits and nobody knows how the fuck this wiki shit works, but all think they do - David Gerard (talk) 12:51, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

BTW, I increasingly see people casually referring to our good stuff, e.g. we appear to be the go-to article on woo. I am quite comfortable to say to people "yeah, it's a wiki, so lots of it sucks, but our good stuff is great, look for the silver or gold." I need to do the awstats charts to work out what our most popular 100 or so articles are, so we have targets for improvement - David Gerard (talk) 21:11, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

SPOV

Regarding SPOV, I agree that it's often used as an excuse for shitty writing. The problem is keeping that balance between an over-reliance on humor (or "humor," as the case may be) and being overly dry. Getting rid of SPOV would lead to many of our articles being too much like carbon copies of The Skeptic's Dictionary. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 18:09, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

It would be lucky if we can reach event that level of quality. A more realistic result would be pages looking like bad Wikipedia articles.--ZooGuard (talk) 21:21, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
This is what I tried to convey in a recent partial rewrite of RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article?. Snark should be humour which helps to support points made by our articles, relating to the site missions, not humour which gets in the way of the missions by being used as a lazy alternative to analysing and refuting. ωεαşεζόίďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 12:41, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

agree with all of this

I agree with this. We really need to think about our core articles, particularly evolution vs. creationism, global warming denialism, vaccine denialism and perhaps homeopathy. What do we want from the articles? Both the pro side and the anti side? In the same article or different article? Are all the key players represented? Are all the key concepts dealt with? We haven't done that for ages.

I also agree about snark. There's a difference between humor an obnoxiousness. It's better from a rhetorical perspective not to be obnoxious. A little humor is apporpriate (especially as a rebuttal to reductio ad absurdum but whole articles are hard to take seriously. (Anyone who hasn't seen Phil Plait's [http://vimeo.com/13704095 "Don't be a Dick" video needs to go watch it.)

We have an audience, and we need to attend to it if we want to remain fo the long haul. Many wikis die over time. Sterilesig.svgtalk 12:09, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Groupthink

Groupthink and "being part of the cool gang" are RW's worst vices, and can be damaging to the site. There was an incident recently where I got into an argument somewhere, and another user took my side - because I am a major site user. See what happened there? SophieWilder 22:07, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Article improvement

WP once did had WP:ACID, where users could nominate articles for improvement. Perhaps something along those lines might help? SophieWilder 22:07, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Once upon a time RW had the unfortunately-named Project Whitewash. There've been various other well-meant but half-arsed article creation/improvement drives since. Try launching another one, but I can't see it catching on beyond a few dedicated editors. WėąṣėḷőįďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 22:21, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
Bloody hell, ye olde project whitewash! You're probably right though... maybe I should follow my own dictum of "if you want anything done on a wiki, do it yourself." SophieWilder 22:25, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
That's basically it. It's easy to nominate articles that need work (& we already have various categories for this) but much more effort to actually do it, and most users would rather put the effort into subjects they choose to edit than working through a list of nominated content. ωεαşεζόίďWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 22:33, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
That would be great, Sophie. I want to warn warn warn warn against this starting (and ending) with another namespace purge. They end being nothing but divisive wankery. We need updated core articles. Purging garbage is a priority but it's way behind making sure there's cream to rise to the top. Nutty Roux100x100 anarchy symbol.svg 22:45, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
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