Latest Wikipedia Uproar Over 'Superprotection'

metasonix writes: As if the problems brought up during the recent 2014 Wikimania conference weren't enough, now Wikipedia is having an outright battle between its editor and administrator communities, especially on the German-language Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, currently flush with cash from its donors, keeps trying to force flawed new software systems onto the editor community, who has repeatedly responded by disabling the software. This time, however, Foundation Deputy Director Erik Moeller had the bright idea to create a new level of page protection to prevent the new software from being disabled. "Superprotection" has resulted in an outright revolt on the German Wikipedia. There has been subsequent coverage in the German press, and people have issued demands that Moeller, one of Wikipedia's oldest insiders, be removed from his job. One English Wikipedia insider started a change.org petition demanding the removal of superprotection."

Comments

Mitre be a problem here

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Superprotection mandate

Call it Ex Cathedra and get it over with.

say it again

[slashmydots]

It's almost like the idea of letting everyone edit something actually does in fact turn into a crooked, biased shitstorm and wikipedia was wrong and everyone else in the world was right.

Re:say it again

[MikeBabcock]

Actually if you read a lot of Wikipedia articles and history on them, the world was wrong and the system usually works.

The rules are there for a reason, and contentious subjects have issues (cf. Abortion, Israel, Nazi, etc.) but for the most part articles grow and become better and more thoroughly fact-checked with time.

Part of this is the much-hated reference requirement -- all facts in a Wikipedia page must have an external source to back them up. This rule alone causes a huge amount of strife among those who don't understand, but it also creates the most harmony by requiring reputable citations.

Re:say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually if you read a lot of Wikipedia articles and history on them, the world was wrong and the system usually works.

[Citation needed]

The rules are there for a reason,

[Citation needed]

and contentious subjects have issues (cf. Abortion, Israel, Nazi, etc.) but for the most part articles grow and become better and more thoroughly fact-checked with time.

[Citation needed]

Part of this is the much-hated reference requirement -- all facts in a Wikipedia page must have an external source to back them up.

[Citation needed]

This rule alone causes a huge amount of strife among those who don't understand,

[Citation needed]

but it also creates the most harmony by requiring reputable citations.

[Citation needed]

Change.org is just another bulletin board

[Verdatum]

A petition with 13 signatures is not worth mentioning. Any idiot can set one up.

Re:Change.org is just another bulletin board

[Carewolf]

A petition with 13 signatures is not worth mentioning. Any idiot can set one up.

You mean any idiot with 12 idiot friends.

You make it sound like the new testamant.

TLDR

[Moses48]

The summary doesn't describe the "flawed system" or what superprotection means. Here it is from the change petition

The "superprotect" page status introduced to keep the Media Viewer enabled is even more extreme: for the first time, a software feature has been designed to take the ability to edit pages away from Wikimedia project communities, giving that ability exclusively to unelected Wikimedia staff members.

This sounds familiar

[istartedi]

The Wikimedia Foundation, currently flush with cash from its donors, keeps trying to force flawed new software systems onto the editor community, who has repeatedly responded by disabling the software.

Dice. Beta. Enough said.

Agile can fuck off.

[__Paul__]

FTFA: a little pain was just part of the “Agile” way of doing things

Agile is now infecting the open-source world? Fuck it, I'm out. It's bad enough having to put up with all the "agile" bullshit at work, from their utterly pointless daily stand-up meetings to their fucking little cards on the wall everywhere (managers of the world: WE USE ELECTRONIC TRACKING SYSTEMS NOW). Add to that the unbearable Friday "retrospective" meetings (yeah, the last fucking thing I want to do on a Friday is sit in another pointless meeting talking about our problems) and then the Monday three hour meetings where we waste time voting on how long it should take other people to do their job instead of just fucking doing it.

Agile has killed any enjoyment there was in the IT field. If people are trying to pollute the open-source world with it, they can fuck off.

Re:Agile can fuck off.

[The MAZZTer]

At work, we have to use little cards on the wall AND an electronic tracking system.

Re:Agile can fuck off.

[Mike Buddha]

Agile development is the fastest way to organically grow your shitstorm.

Re:Agile can fuck off.

[Just Some Guy]

To be fair, Agile can be freaking awesome. I worked at a devotedly Agile shop and it was a developerocratic utopia. After the few meetings we had, all participants walked away with legitimate action items. You didn't just get called in to listen to something that didn't concern you - if you were invited, it's because you were specifically needed.

I've also worked in places where Agile was a stultifying cover story for "actually waterfall but that doesn't sound as cool so we'll never admit it". That might be the kind of /dev/hell you found yourself stuck in. But that's not Agile Done Right, and shops that Do Agile Right really do exist.

Re:Agile can fuck off.

[Tom]

To be fair, Agile can be freaking awesome. I worked at a devotedly Agile shop and it was a developerocratic utopia.

Chances are this has nothing to do with Agile and everything to do with the people, company and culture.

If your culture sucks, Agile won't save you, or magically improve it. Managers love this "magic bullet you can buy and it'll solve all your problems" which is largely why they constantly re-organize something, completely ignoring 10, 20 or sometimes 100 years of re-organization experience that prove that nothing whatsoever changed after any of them.

Tackling the culture of a company or department is a lot more difficult, less flashy and less likely to give you short-term quantifiable results, which is why so few do it.

There's no such thing as "Agile Done Right". There is such thing as a right culture in which Agile (or, frankly speaking, any other methodology) will work and make everyone happy. If you live in a wrong culture, there's nothing Agile or anything else could do right to fix it.

Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

So I recently heard about a programming language called Nimrod. It's relatively new, but it's very capable and even the venerable Dr. Dobb's Journal featured it recently.

I wanted to get a broader overview of it, so I thought I'd check out Wikipedia's article about it. After all, it's a language I'd managed to hear about, and I don't keep up to date with developments in the field very much these days. It was even featured by a widely read publication. So that should make it notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, right? Nope.

I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination.

I tried reading some of their justification for deleting the article, but it made absolutely no sense. It's a perfectly good topic to cover, and clearly I and others want to read about it! Yet these totalitarian shitbags feel the need to censor, censor, censor and then censor some more.

The harm these monsters do by getting rid of useful articles far, far outweighs any harm that could ever be done by having allegedly "non-notable" articles exist uncensored. I'd totally rather than the article about Nimrod stay, and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off and visit some other web site.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination.

They've been doing this for years, and long ago burned out my interest in contributing. I've seen 3 pages I helped create/curate get deleted. Happily 2 of the three eventually were re-created by others a year or two later, but a lot of work was destroyed. Let them have their "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" slogan - I'll continue to be a parasite reading without contributing unless they clean up their practices to prevent the destruction of good articles.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[AthanasiusKircher]

I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination.

Yeah, this kind of stuff has been around a long time. I was somewhat active in the early days of Wikipedia, especially 2004-06 or so, and there would be these sorts of arguments all the time.

Back then, you'd have editors asserting that entire major academic subdisciplines didn't exist and try to go on a deletion spree. Thankfully, someone would eventually come along and be like, "Uh, I can cite a couple dozen journals that publish hundreds of pages on this stuff every year."

I've never understood the deletionist argument. It's one of many, many reasons I stopped trying to edit Wikipedia a long time ago. Somehow the world is a better place if we have a page on everyone's favorite episode of some obscure television show, but dare to include some other thing and it's "not notable." Notability is fundamentally broken on Wikipedia (as are a bunch of other things).

But think about it -- Wikipedia is a self-selecting bureaucratic community. The only people who stick around long are people used to arguing about nonsense policies, and thus it becomes self-reinforcing. Things like X aren't "notable" because the policy says they aren't notable, and the policy is arbitrated and modified by people like us, so... well, why not just say, "We don't want X here."

Of course, it's not that simple -- and I don't think most Wikipedia editors are actually trying to censor anything. But lots of important stuff can get caught in this weird feedback loop that "obviously it isn't notable" because, well nothing else like it is notable, because, well, our policies exclude those things, because, well, we designed the policies, because, well, people like us will always tend to write policies like that, but, well, we have to follow the policies.

The thing I've never quite understood is why deleted pages aren't archived. That tells you right away that the deletionist folks are obviously up to no good. Everything else is always archived on Wikipedia, and there are talk page debates that go on and on and on (if you want nerdy flame-worthy entertainment for an entire afternoon, someday go and read the talk page archive for "centrifugal force").

But for some reason we can't archive deleted pages. Why the heck not? Are we afraid that someone might come along again and argue that it shouldn't be deleted? Well, everybody else on Wikipedia argues continuously about sections of articles that have been reworded or links that were added or deleted or whatever -- and these arguments happen repeatedly. But for some reason, deletion is more-or-less final. There doesn't ever seem to be the idea that, "Hey, maybe we don't actually have enough qualified editors to FIND the notable stuff about this topic, and maybe we shouldn't permanently delete everything in case it turns out to have some good information, so people don't have to start over again and write the whole thing up again."

It's all weird. It's a weird place. And deletion policies are probably the most ridiculous thing they have.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[linuxrocks123]

Yes, deletionists are asshats.

One thing you can do is use the Wayback Machine to get the text of deleted articles. I learned about that trick on Wikipedia itself. Why can't they just include the page history of deleted pages well that's a really good question.

Deletionpedia is the protest response against deletionist asshats, but it's just getting started. It would be nice if an administrator leaked the text of all previously deleted articles to Deletionpedia. They actually KEEP THE DELETED ARTICLES ON WIKIPEDIA'S SERVERS and just DON'T LET ANYBODY LOOK AT THEM except the Anointed Ones. It's not even a disk space issue why they delete stuff. There's no justification at all; it's pure Vogonism.

So, come on, inclusionist administrators: which one of you would like to be the Internet's Prometheus? It wouldn't even be copyright infringement because the creators of the content licensed it CC to put it in Wikipedia to begin with. WE ALL own those deleted articles, not the tyrant bureaucrats at the Wikimedia Foundation. You'd be like Edward Snowden except you'd just be perma-banned from Wikipedia instead of your home country. Have some balls. Get 15 minutes of fame. BRING LIGHT TO THE WORLD.

If someone wants to kickstart a campaign to bribe an administrator into leaking all deleted articles to Deletionpedia, I'll put up $100. Maybe more. I'm not kidding. THIS IS THE GOOD FIGHT.

---linuxrocks123

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Randle_Revar]

I would say that Nimrod is very well know as a term for idiot. I think most everyone I know would think of "idiot" before they thought of "hunter". I don't think I learned the meaning "hunter" until I was in my 20's. That is in the US of course, might be different elsewhere, perhaps places where Loony Tunes was less well known (Bugs Bunny calling Elmer Fudd a "poor little Nimrod" is where it first picked up the "idiot" connotation). In any case it was widely understood when I was in elementary and high school (80's and 90's)

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[morethanapapercert]

For what it's worth, I *have* heard the term used that way. In fact it's the only usage I've ever heard. I had vaguely known there was some other historical use, but like cretin , imbecile and moron, it's become a common derogatory word.

I suspect that it is a regional thing. English speaking nations all have their unique slang terms after all. And many English speaking countries are also large enough to have regional differences within them. I'm not likely to ever call a person a drongo, wombat, poof (Australian), berk, bint, chav or pikey (British) or wigger, jagoff, ratchet or ho (American)

Despite being Canadian, I'd never call someone "b'y" (Newfoundland), skookum or siwash (British Columbia)

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Sarten-X]

Being Canadian, you'd apologize for the intrusion and occupation of their time, and ask them the name by which they prefer to be addressed, then apologize for not having known it beforehand, then apologize for having so many apologies.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Mr. Freeman]

People like to joke about how false information added to Wikipedia gets quoted in articles where are then used to justify the information in Wikipedia, but it's actually quite real. It happens amazingly often and no one seems to be taking any real steps to fix the problem. If you go to any article and start looking through the sources you'll find that most of the sources either provide nothing to back up their information, obviously quoted it from Wikipedia in the first place, or actually have the information in such a context that it contradicts what the Wikipedia article is saying.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[MikeBabcock]

Its pretty easy to figure out why the page was deleted:
"Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. Every source is WP:PRIMARY. Every one of them. Googling turned up posts to online discussion forums but nothing useful. Additionally, I note that the decision to delete at the previous AfD was unanimous for the same reasons. Msnicki (talk) 22:37, 23 August 2013 (UTC)"

Wikipedia is for documenting information found somewhere else authoritative... if the Wikipedia article *is* the authority, it gets deleted. Its very simple.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Mantrid42]

I don't get notability deletions at all. What, are they going to run out of digital pages?

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[donscarletti]

Notability is important for preventing a potentially slippery slope towards Wikipedia being expected to have an article on every shop, every street, every apartment complex, every popular teacher, and every creative work ever appreciated by more than 10 people.

However, there is something frankly awful about the way it is handled.

Deleting an article should be a grim and thankless task, carried out in the stoical way that a county bailiff would hang or brand a petty thief. Instead, it seems to be a matter of great pride and satisfaction to those who elect themselves to carry it out. These folks really seem to enjoy making up pedantic excuses to remove things, even when faced with strong opposition and enough evidence to at least raise reasonable doubt. When I have checked many of these editor's commit logs, I frequently find that they do little else but marking other articles for deletion, adding "citation needed" after junior highschool level facts and giving barnstars to other like minded nimrods.

If one has contributed in good faith to an article that has been marked for deletion or even appreciated reading one of these articles, it is hard to maintain one's passion for the project. Back when I was a regular contributor, I was creating articles for large international airlines and the like. Then when those were all finished, I made ones for well known video games, books, composers, etc. After those were done, there seemed like nothing remaining but the obscure. But at this time, it was so hard to be excited when one needs to justify each time why Wikipedia would not be better off if what you just wrote was erased, So for the last 7 years, I've pretty much just changed a comma or semicolon here and there.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[BradMajors]

Notability is important for preventing a potentially slippery slope towards Wikipedia being expected to have an article on every shop, every street, every apartment complex, every popular teacher, and every creative work ever appreciated by more than 10 people.

What is wrong with that?

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[GrahamCox]

Exactly. Originally Wikipedia had a statement that "wikipedia isn't paper", so anything and everything was fair game for inclusion. That was one of its great attractions. I have no idea if that still stands, but if so it seems at odds with the whole notability thing. What they *should* do, if notability is an issue, is to have a little +/- thing on each article that rates the article for notability. Over time that will end up indicating the relative 'notabilty score' of the article, without having to have it actually deleted. Brainless fucks the lot of 'em, it's been years since I've contributed to WP, the attitude was just not worth battling over.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Solandri]

The only thing wrong with it is that the self-anointed control-freak editors who consider Wikipedia their personal property can't possibly know or research information to that level of detail. They will have to (gasp!) rely on others to provide it. And they'll have to make objective editorial decisions to determine which articles are likely fake or likely true, instead of just flying by the seat of their pants and editing/deleting based on their personal opinion.

I'm shopping for a house right now. If Wikipedia had basic information about individual homeowners associations, townhouse developments, and condo complexes - like when it was built, who provides Internet service and what speeds you should expect, what type of and how many community facilities it has (pool, tennis courts, etc), nearby supermarkets and other resources - that would be incredibly useful information. I'm finding this sort of stuff is rarely mentioned in the housing listings, most developments and complexes don't have a website which states these things, and realtors aren't too fond of digging up this info for you if you're still in the stage of eliminating houses that don't fit your needs.

But as I said, that would require the control-freaks on Wikipedia to let the people who live there write the wiki article, and they just won't stand for giving up control like that. That's the slippery slope they're afraid of.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[BetterThanCaesar]

Notability is important for preventing a potentially slippery slope towards Wikipedia being expected to have an article on every shop, every street, every apartment complex, every popular teacher, and every creative work ever appreciated by more than 10 people.

What is wrong with that?

Sources. There are no secondary, independent sources about every shop, street, apartment complex, popular teacher, creative work, or the fact that there is a pencil lying on my desk right now. No matter how true it is, it is not verifiable in any reasonable sense of the word.

This is what people don't understand when they complain that things are deleted from Wikipedia. If Wikipedia's ambition is to create a credible encyclopaedia of all human knowledge, then it cannot be filled with speculation and half-truths. Even primary sources are suspect. I could easily create a blog or web site that claims something, then create a Wikipedia article that uses my web page as the main source. THAT is the slippery slope that is so often talked about.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Wootery]

Can't say I've seen an instance of this happening, but I admit I've not been keeping an eye out for it.

Anyway, the solution is quite obvious: to prove you're not a Wiki-vandal asshole, always link to a snapshot of the article from a couple of days ago. Wikipedia stores every (non-deleted) article's history in its entirety, after all.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Andreas Kolbe]

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Richy_T]

Perhaps they should just hide it and make it possible for registered users to view it (after jumping through a hoop or two maybe) and tag it for reconsideration.

Re:Germans

[xevioso]

I'm sure the Russians would be pretty irritated at first but would manage to take over the German Wikipedia after a while.

Media Viewer

[Mr 44]

I really don't get the uproar. The crux of the issue seems to be that an update to the software running all the various instances of Wikipedia enabled a new slideshow viewer by default, and removed the ability for site admins to disable it by default (but users still can individually choose their preference).

Tempest in a teapot?

Re:Media Viewer

[mysidia]

by default, and removed the ability for site admins to disable it by default

The problem is these "admins" are acting on behalf of the various Wikipedia communities as a whole. How WP is run, is supposed to be decided by the community.

If these "admins" actually administered the underlying infrastructure as well, this would be a non-issue, as they could simply refuse the software upgrade, or patch it.

The WMF is entrusted with this task, but the WMF is betraying the trust of the community. I think I might ask for my donations to be returned to me, since they are no longer acting according to their mission.

Re:Can someone explain what this is about?

[tepples]

A subject is "notable" if it is the subject of substantial coverage in three unaffiliated reliable sources. If a subject is not notable, then it's not possible to make any verifiable claims about the subject.

Re:WTF? Can someone summarize?

[tepples]

No, it's more like "Buck Feta".

MediaWiki has a tool called "common.js" to let an admin edit the sitewide JavaScript. Wikimedia Foundation staff are trying to push unpopular user interface changes onto Wikipedia. The admins are using common.js to override the changes and restore the previous behavior for anonymous visitors. So WMF staff have superprotected the pages to keep even local admins from editing them.

Sarcastically insightful? :)

[jopsen]

I'd totally rather than the article about Nimrod stay, and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off and visit some other web site.

I can't tell if the people who modded you insightful were being sarcastic... :)
Okay, joke aside... Statements like everybody else can just **** of because something you wanted to read about was marked for deletion. Is part of the problem.

Wikipedia editors and can't get every decision right... If nimrod (which btw, think I've heard about before) continues it's growth, then I'm sure it'll eventually be featured on wikipedia.
Note, I didn't say the current decision is right, but give them a break. But give it time, and bring up again (don't be an edit warrior)

Also drop the " censor, censor, censor" rhetoric... You are free to publish this anywhere else. Why don't you just make a site with rejected wikipedia articles, where people can work on them till wikipedia is ready to accept them.

change.org != change.gov

[pavon]

change.gov and change.org are two completely different sites. The .gov site is the official petition website for the US government. The .org site is like wordpress for petitions. Anyone can go an create a petition for any reason, and it has about as much weight as a wordpress blog does, which is to say most are completely meaningless, but on occasion once actually gets some momentum, and it is that momentum (not the petition itself) that matters.

WikiWand

[Andreas Kolbe]

What's become clear here (see also following section) is that the Wikimedia Foundation is afraid it will lose readers to sites like WikiWand that offer Wikipedia content as a pure consumable with a much more aesthetically pleasing interface. The moment Wikipedia page views go down, the Alexa rank will go down and donations will go down, as fewer people will see the fundraising banners. The problem is that the Foundation's own efforts to create a more pleasing interface have been unsuccessful; they have the money, but simply seem to lack the talent and experience. Partly they are also hampered by the underlying coding chaos of Wikipedia – underneath the Wikipedia text, there are thousands of ad-hoc templates created in a very inconsistent manner by volunteers over the years. This is the main reason the VisualEditor failed.

This story was also covered by The Register.

Is this unaffiliated substantial coverage?

[Camael]

Since no one answered this question, I did a simple google search which threw up these results :-

Nimrod: A New Systems Programming Language
Category:Nimrod
Consider the Nimrod Programming Language
What I like about the Nimrod programming language
Araq/Nimrod
Nimrod: A New Approach to Metaprogramming
Nimrod: A new statically typed, compiled programming language which supports metaprogramming

I am just a layman when it comes to Wikipedia editing, but it looks pretty substantial to me. It would appear that the complaint that notability requirements are too strict has just cause.

Re:Is this unaffiliated substantial coverage?

[gronofer]

Looks like a bunch of blogs and other unreliable content by various trolls and people who don't know much. You'll need to find something in one of Rupert Murdoch's publications, or wait until Fox News cover it.

Re:Most open communities get turned into cesspools

[edremy]

I'll give Slashdot some credit, it has actually managed to avoid crap like that comparatively well. Maybe it's the liberal use of anonymous posting here, or the more limited moderation system. Regardless, Slashdot is a clean and friendly place to have open discussion, at least compared to Hacker News, reddit, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow.

I find this comment amusing, since every time I mention Microsoft in any form of positive light I'm downmodded. I mentioned the MS Surface the other day and commented that it was proving a very nice tool for developing online learning materials. Downmodded instantly as "Troll"

Slashdot has serious groupthink issues and always has.

What is all this about?

[raarts]

There are too many people here not understanding what is happening here.

What is happening, is that a large community has done a lot of great work creating Wikipedia. The project has needed and attracted a lot of money, which caused an administrative office to be created. This office is now trying to make itself more important, and tries to lead the project into a 'grand future'.

The truth is, they may be well-intentioned, but they are terribly misguided, and incompetent. There are no capable leaders, and.or managers there, they seem to have no understanding of what the project is about, and have spent a lot of money on software projects that failed. They are misguided in that they think they should steer the project, while in fact they should be serving the community.

In short, they are incompetent, and should be replaced. If they aren't, they will kill Wikipedia.

Notability cannot decrease

[tepples]

the person from a century ago might not be as notable to people today

That's not how it works. Something becomes notable when unaffiliated reliable sources have covered it. This notability, if established, does not decrease over time. Such a decrease would require the existing reliable sources to stop existing. The reason Wikipedia has a notability requirement in the first place is that an article about a non-notable subject has no reliable sources that it can cite about anything.

Oh, really? ...

[Qbertino]

... so Agile can fuck off, yeah?

It's bad enough having to put up with all the "agile" bullshit at work, from their utterly pointless daily stand-up meetings to their fucking little cards on the wall everywhere (managers of the world: WE USE ELECTRONIC TRACKING SYSTEMS NOW). Add to that the unbearable Friday "retrospective" meetings (yeah, the last fucking thing I want to do on a Friday is sit in another pointless meeting talking about our problems) and then the Monday three hour meetings where we waste time voting on how long it should take other people to do their job instead of just fucking doing it.

I suppose you're talking about Scrum. As a Scrum Master, maybe I should give some hints.

Let me fill you in on some details:

1.) You're supposed to stand at dailies, so you are eager to finish them fast and so you're quick to move your cards on the board. That's why Scrums are timeboxed (with me it's 15mins max) and limitied to what you can discuss about. If the team doens't get through, no matter. Scrums over. Move your remaining cards and get coding. Be more brief tomorrow. It's that simple.

2.) After trying various electronic tracking systems we moved to cards on a wall. The crew gets away from their PCs and are forced to communicate with each other. And even the secretary and the sales team can use a pinboard without futher explaination, and when they join a Scrum they don't feel like standing in a room full of antisocial douchebags just typing away at their desks. Plus, when you are using it, everyone is watching, which helps you stick to the method. That's why I advocate pinboards for scrum tasking ever since. For huge amount of tasks managed in backlog software, printing the cards might be an option - we did that once - but a Pinboard it should be. People get their coffee or water and meet at the pinboard, not at the watercooler or the kitchen. Does wonders to project awareness and awareness of what others are doing.

3.) Backlog assembly meeting (BAM) - apparently your Monday 3 hour thing (makes me sleepy just thinking of it) - should be done by those who need to do it you don't need the entire team for BAM, especially if 300 tasks need to be judged. You do need the team for assigning complexitiy points, but that can be done if there's something the BAM team has no clue of. BAM task-complexity is temporary anyway, as is the setup of the team. If there's only editing and no programming to be done for the next 4 weeks, it's beyond pointless having a progger do BAM - unless you've got nobody else to do it and the programmer has some spare time. And only in Sprint Planning is complexity set in stone. And Sprint Planning / Sprint Assembly is a different meeting, also timeboxed (1 hour with me, Fridays (I've got weekly sprints)).

Complexity assignment should be done with planning poker, and shouldn't cover microtasking. It should only cover sellable features and one tasklayer below that. Also, BAMs should take place when you need them, not on a fixed date. That's a recipe for timewasting. That aside, planning poker is fun and lets you walk through droves of tasks in no time. You get to judge effort and requirements and *everybody* on the team has an impression of what's coming up in the next few weeks. That is *very* important. ... This should happen in sprint planning the latest. Very often people of a certain field notice things that have been forgotten by management, long before the task is even due. Also very helpful and a big plus of a formalised method such as scrum.

4.) Yes, Scrum has an overhead, just like any other method. Quit whining. The job of Scrum is to keep the overhead to an *absolute* minimum while keeping everything else tightly organised and flexible on a sprint to sprint basis at the same time. If that doesn't happen, you or your Scrum Master is doing it wrong.

5.) Scrum gives your Scrum Master the power to tell you boss "Leave my guy alone, we're full up with tasks, unless you want me to bust this sprint and push every