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.

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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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: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.

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.

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