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Wikipedia Adds "WikiLove" For Newbie Editors
mikejuk writes "Wikipedia has a cunning plan to make wikipedians nicer to each other — its all about WikiLove. They can click on the Love button to make each other feel good about contributing anything from an article to an edit. The idea is that this will encourage newbie editors to stay and contribute rather than slink away into the rest of the web because their contributions get deleted and derided. Perhaps all we need for world peace is a big enough love button."
I'm waiting for the snickering to start on pushing people's love button to make them feel good.
*open hood of car*
>because their contributions get deleted and derided
Well, now, there's ya problem.
No, it's backed by the Ministry of Communism. When people post comments on Slashdot about inability to work with "established in-groups" on Wikipedia, it usually sounds to me like the in-group is violating the policy against acting like the owner of an article. The policy states that Wikipedia articles are owned in common, not as the "property" of specific cliques.
I wish slashdot had a +1 love button.
An important change for education.
I stopped editing Wikipedia a couple of years ago and haven't gone back. Why? Because the members of the established mafia occupying the articles appeared to have much much more time than me to keep reverting or discussing (i.e. repeating the arguments over and over ad nauseam) than me.
Any change I made was immediately (usually within 1-10 minutes) reverted. I have been living my life and working, while they have apparently been just squatting "their" articles. I don't feel sorry for them, however.
Much like the "like" button on Facebook, "love" will feel very awkward for things that are correct and worthwhile, but depressing. Say, amended figures for genocides.
I don't get the idea behind such features - where are dislike, -1, WikiHate?
Those one-click-feelgood buttons are not even a valid substitute for real feedback...
Then get rid of editors with more than 10 reverts.
Then get rid of editors who create articles that are not relevant.
Then get rid of editors who did not get enough wiki love points.
In the end there will be only one! and we will have to get rid of him too, because nobody read his article.
wikipedia is a social experiment after all, the fact that is happens to be a something like e encyclopedia as weel is a nice side effect.
PS, if you mod as funny, we will have to get rid of you as well ;)
I discovered recently just how petty and arrogant some Wikipedia contributors are. I attempted to clean up an article, nothing major, just fixing some awkward sentences that were poorly worded, confusing, or grammatically incorrect. Less than half an hour later it was changed back and I received a message from the author of the parts I corrected telling me that it was "his" article and that the sections I fixed were already perfect and needed no changes. I made my case for keeping my edits, explained that I made the article read better without changing any facts, and then changed them back. The next message I got was an angry post insulting me personally, and telling me that there was no way I was more of an expert on the subject ("or the English language" he actually said that) than he was. This is probably one of the worst examples but it can't be the only one.
You can't make people like that "love" each other. They are protective, bitter, autists who spend all day refreshing "their" articles and reverting the edits of anyone who attempts to change them.
until someone marks the "Love button" for speedy deletion?
With the problems I've had in the past I don't know if this is going to be nearly enough. Wikipedia's problems lies in the fact that many, if not most, of their long-time editors consider themselves the end-all be-all of Wikipedia. I've contributed to several pages, cited properly, and still get reverted because someone disagrees with the page for reasons other than factual accuracy. For example, when editing an article about Vince Lombardi and citing sources the changes were reverted for no given reason. When I asked why I was reverted I was not given a reasonable answer (and was trolled in the process). So I stopped contributing. I'm now content to let the self-appointed elites run the site.
That's the other reason I will never give a red cent to Wikipedia. So long as the Wikipedia mafia of editors continue to run things the way that they do I think the site will suffer and eventually wither out as it's last gasp of neutrality and openness disappear behind the power-hungry editors who run the site the way that they want to run it. If Jimmy wants Wikipedia to succeed he'll start with the cadre of idiots who currently run the place.
"This food is problematic."
Three years ago or so I decided to try to upload clips to classic rock songs that I had on CD that had their own pages on Wikipedia. They were constantly deleted. If a song had a page, I figured it'd be notable enough to have a fair use clip of it and so for about twenty songs I carefully selected the best 10% of the song (or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter) and turned it into the lowest quality ogg in Audacity. Two bots were particularly brutal (DASHBot and FileBot). Months later someone would seemingly voluntarily orphan the fair use examples I had uploaded and one by one they disappeared. Well screw that, I'm done investing my time into something that just gets deleted by a bot whose owner does not respond when I comment on their talk page asking for help and justification. It'd be one thing if someone would explain to me what I'm doing wrong but it appears what I'm doing wrong is volunteering my time to Wikipedia in the first place. It's not like my examples are being improved or adjusted -- just deleted. So forget it, I have better projects to invest my time in.
My work here is dung.
I personally would use a "FUCK YOU, YOU MORON" button a lot more often in Wikipedia than a "Have a kitten" button. Maybe it's the articles I edit attract more assholes (yes, I'm aware of the implication of that).
The WikiLove campaign has been around for ages, with the goal being simply to encourage friendliness and a positive learning/working environment. Various user scripts have been around for a while, this is just an implicit acceptance of that concept, as the feature will now be built-in instead of an option feature you have to search for.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
The problem with Wikipedia is the deletionists: those who destroy content rather than creating it. There should be a karma system where you have to add a certain amount of content before you can use the karma points to destroy content.
It's gotten to the point where specialized wikis are getting all the love -- I know people who stopped contributing 5 years ago and would never even consider going back.
You know, everyone on slashdot keeps saying stuff like this, but in my corner of the Wikipedia (palaeontology), most pages are under-edited. If anyone comes along and adds relevant, cited information, the edits are most certainly kept. If you cite a real paper that you've read and understood, we'll be pressing that love button!
There is a lot of reverting, but most of it is reverting popular misconceptions that have no citation, or ideologically driven edits (usually creationists, again with no citations).
Is this because people are going and trying to edit the Mohammed or Jesus pages or something? Because I really don't get what you're all on about. Maybe my interests are esoteric, but I've never had a real problem getting edits to stick on any subject, even on controversial fringe topics like cryptozoology.
You ruined a perfectly good opportunity for a "That's what she said!" joke. Well done, sour puss. -1 Dislike X-(
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
when I read the title. I pictured the Wikimedia Foundation getting into the dating site market with some sort of Wiki-dating site (www.wikimatch.com) where people could edit the profiles of those with whom they had dates to offer commentary/feedback/pictures/etc. Or maybe something a bit more NSFW.
I can picture so many ways this could be (and will be) abused; as a (perhaps mild but still cruel) example picture getting a group together to send Beer "love" to a recovering alcoholic.
Wikilove isn't; but WikiTrue, whose agents spend their days marking ideologically problematic material with a "citation needed", is.
A WikiProject with goals not unlike those you described actually exists on Wikipedia, and it goes by the unassuming name of WikiProject Citation cleanup. Wikipedia regulars are genre savvy enough to avoid names too similar to those mentioned in Orwell's famous novels.
So you're editing a page about a politician involved in child pornography charges with the complication of a legal embargo, and you're bitching that there was a long debate about it that went your way eventually? I'm shocked! SHOCKED I tells you! Cabals everywhere!
Less than half an hour later it was changed back and I received a message from the author of the parts I corrected telling me that it was "his" article
Could you offer us a link to this revert and the message that you received? From only your description, it sounds like a violation of the policy against ownership-like behavior.
If another Wikipedia editor behaved in a blatantly uncivil manner after your attempt to apply BRD, why didn't you take the issue to one of Wikipedia's numerous options for dispute resolution?
Probably because I was 1) unaware of that process and 2) thinking that a simple edit shouldn't necessarily require an appeals process. Even now that I am aware of it the time commitment behind adding any sort of information to an article (add & cite, have it reverted, appeal, talk, discuss more, re-edit, reverted again, repeat ad nauseum) is just too great now. I don't need Wikipedia that much and if that community is going to be resistant to change then so be it.
"This food is problematic."
You keep asking people to battle the wiki-trolls, after they've repeatedly said they don't want or have time to fight that out. They wanted to contribute a bit to public knowledge, got rebuffed, and went on their way. Asking them to slog through a lengthy discussion and appeals process just to add a few words to an article is absurd.
They wanted to commit 20 minutes or so and get on with their day. You are asking for several hours spread over days to weeks of diligent monitoring and arguing. Something they clearly indicated they don't want to do. Which is why the people willing to do that and spend the time on it, are winning AND lowering the overall value of Wikipedia.
Because people don't feel like wasting days and weeks of times going through a complicated bureaucracy just to make simple edits to wikipedia? Not all of us are so devoid of lives that we can waste on that time arguing with people.