True; it functions if you take the time to read the documentation and appropriately go up the chain. But yeah, that whole confusion of how to edit in a manner that doesn't get your head bitten off is certainly a problem that scares away potential contributors. There absolutely are tons of instructions that you must wade through to find the information needed, and many new people don't want to be bothered with all of that. The appropriate thing that users are encouraged to do when they see a new users make an inappropriate edit is to revert the edit, and post a friendly template-message to the user's page, welcoming the new user while informing them of the reason why the edit wasn't appropriate.
Mods generally only step in if they happen to be monitoring the changelog of that page, or you go to another part of the website to request a moderator come take a look at something. And by default, mod users look exactly the same as regular users when they comment. You gotta add an extension to your browser for the moderator to show up with a highlighted username.
That's curious. Viologens tend to be substantially toxic. An example of a viologen is the herbicide paraquat. of which, it only takes 25mg/Kg to kill the average dog.
I agree that it'd only be a problem for a small subset of topics/articles. But a small subset of 5.3 million articles is still a heck of a lot of articles. Since Wikimedia is a nonprofit organization, I suspect they feel such a feature would be beyond the scope of their project.
That said, if you have a general question on a topic, you can often get it addressed by formatting comments as "I feel like the article should explain {insert question here}, but I'm unable to find an appropriate source. Could someone help with this improvement?" -~~~~
FWIW, anecdotally speaking, I've seen horrible cringetastic comments almost every time I've made the mistake to scroll down to the comment section on the IMDB page for nearly every popular television drama or comedy, nearly every film that has the potential for a sequel, and on nearly every actress who at any point in her career was considered attractive. So, pretty big subset.
Yes, I think they're two rather different breeds of trolls. Twitter is a free-for-all where you can find a trending target, and start attacking people you disagree with, or just don't like. Wikipedia is a place where everyone is trying to make articles the way they believe they should look. The personal attacks come as a result of disagreements or misunderstanding of the content guidelines or disputes over the merits of a source. Personal attacks are mostly on the order of "you're an idiot for including all this unimportant and unsourced information about your favorite character who showed up in only two poorly-selling Star Wars Expanded Universe novels!" and "You're a jerk, for deleting all the content that I worked so hard to type up!". The anger frequently comes from a common interest to contribute to a project that will have some sort of lasting legacy.
Nah. Article edits aren't moderation. Moderators are moderation. It's their job to step in when editors disagree about the state of an article. And if moderators get out of line, you can alert other moderators to get a second opinion. And if they inappropriately side with a moderator who is out of line, you can appeal to administration. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a decently thought out system (And if someone is able to come up with improvements, it's possible to get them put into effect). My point is that the moderators are volunteering their time and effort because they wish to maintain and improve the quality of an encyclopedia; and the same is true of the Wikimedia Foundation. They are not particularly interested babysitting some general discussion forum.
Yeah, it can be a pain to fight those situations, but there are at least mechanisms to put a stop to that for anyone who cares to put forth that sort of effort.
Are you trolling, or are you another person who doesn't understand the difference between Freedom of speech and the freedom of owners to moderate a private platform of their own, such as Wikipedia however they please?
I was under the impression that Spicer was aware of this and he was just doing his job to relay Donald's beliefs, no? Quick google search turned up nothing, got a link?
I don't think that many of them are literally the mother's-basement types. At most, these sort of editors would be the type that would have parents helping out with rent. Or they get to keep their dead relative's place or their parents house after mom and dad skipped off to a retirement condo in Arizona. They usually have a job, but it's a job they either actively hate, or a job from which they get no personal satisfaction.
Another common category I've found is the crazy old-guy. They'll be mid-60s or so, and is loaded up with conspiracy theories. Most are harmless and just bad at understanding what a reliable source is, but a handful edit like a whirlwind and bite the head off of anyone who disputes or reverts their edits.
Slashdot does track IPs. They just keep it to themselves. Sometimes people have brought up the idea of transforming ACs to a hash of the commenter's IP. But there's resistance to that. Personally, I'm fine with the existence of ACs. I just wish the level of moderation hiding the troll ACs would go back to the way it was a decade or so ago.
Those are not common occurrences. It is so rare that when they happen, the drama is great enough to overflow to other sites, like Slashdot and reddit. And there's a difference between meat puppetry where you actually recruit people, and the type where you just have other editors who happen to agree with the edits in question and restoring them. Getting to a level where people are threatening to withhold donations are either from people who donate so little that no one cares, or it's so rare that it has only happened once every couple years. Most problems are resolved via the regular arbitration committee process, which admittedly is clunky slow, and far from perfect, it does get things resolved.
I suspect the reason why this doesn't exist is that not enough people have an interest in moderating such a mechanism. As a result, if such a thing was in place, it would be as bad or worse than IMDB-forums and Yahoo Answers combined.
I can understand where you are coming from, but to give you some insight on how odd this situation gets: First of all, there are people who genuinely believe this sort of thing. Second, it's not _entirely_ without merit, since once or twice even the co-founder of WP, the great Jimbo Wales has gotten out of line and behaved inappropriately; although it's always related to boring administrative stuff like arbitration committee cases, and when it has happened he was either taken to task or noticed his mistaken and taken himself out of the matter. Third, there at least used to be a group of submitters from an anti-wikipedia activism site (yeah, that's a thing that exists) that would spam submissions to Slashdot. Many of them were ridiculously biased or entirely without merit, and more than one of those bad ones managed to get posted.
It's not a bad idea to slowly change that so that you do know a bit about the other platform, and can do a bit of work in that realm. It's a good thing to do both for the sake of growing your resume, and so that if your only iOS guy gets hit by a bus, your company isn't dead in the water on iOS for the months it takes to interview people, go through the hiring process, and get the new person ramped up on your codebase. Just something to ponder.
There's a couple reasons for knowing what the others are up to. You want to avoid specialization, so you want team members to be able to work on as many tickets as possible. By being roughly up to speed on things, you can take over the next story in the path. This means you don't have development held up as much. You might also hear about problems that you might be able to solve (offline after the meeting), or learn about something you didn't know. But yeah, it shouldn't take long at all. "I worked on this ticket, the bug turned out to be someone using a deprecated method. today I'm gonna figure out how to insta-ban the spam-bots via pattern recognition. Done." And then you might go, "oh wait, don't do that, I already started working on that ticket yesterday afternoon, but I forgot to put it into the started state! Sorry about that!" "Oh in that case, I'll do this other story. Also, I'm stuck on this other task because Active-Directory won't let me reach the folder." and before the manager has a chance to look into it, another team member says, "oh I bet I know why that is. I noticed we had active-directory on the machine, and that sucks, so I shut it down. I can fix that right after the meeting." "Oh splendid, i'm glad I brought it up." Sure, much of what gets said is redundant confirmation stuff, but it's useful often enough that it's worth having, just as long as it's kept down to a few minutes, and doesn't drift into some boring bullshit session, or two people discussing an issue, while everyone else has no idea what those two are talking about and are just zoning out until the subject finally changes.
An article that uses the false fact that a goldfish has an attention-span/memory of nine seconds complains that it's harder than ever to know what articles can be trusted. It's not even good irony. It's just aggravating irony. The attention span statistic is cited to an article from Time, which cites it to a "study" by Microsoft, which cites it to some source called "Statistic Brain", which doesn't cite SHIT.
A good manager on a software project is an amazing thing. And exactly, gauging a developer's performance is an important part of the job and no trivial task. The best managers have plenty of experience writing code, plenty of experience with higher level theory of software engineering and architecture, plenty of education in general management, and plenty of education in software project-management.
A bad manager is usually an electrical engineer who has many years of seniority, who got pushed into software by necessity, which he learned by reading "Learn to write C in 21 days!" and upper management finally pushed him up to project manager because of a combination of A) it's the next promotion after "Senior Engineer" on our tree, and B) The guys we've since hired, who are formally trained in software engineering tell us that while he's a responsible hard worker, the code he produces is inelegant, unreadable, and unmanageable.
This sounds like a classic case of doing Scrum wrong. The Scrum process has one informal meeting a day of only around 6 people that should never take longer than 10 minutes, one planning meeting at the start of every sprint (two or three weeks), and one demo/retrospective meeting at the end of every sprint. The entire point of Scrum is to kill off "hour long meetings that could've been done in minutes via email" and allow coders to code.
Standup is "Yesterday I did story 289, users will be able to customize the color of their bikeshed. Today I'll be Refactoring some unit tests for it. I'm blocked on story 290 because the Tomcat server is down. Done"
Planning meetings should be mostly prepared in advance by the scrummaster and PM. So the meeting is "here are 12 story points we wanna do next sprint. For each one, I'm gonna describe it briefly and we all come up with an estimate of how many days it should take. Then we work out the first task each person is going to start with, and talk about any potential problems. Let's keep it under an hour if at all possible."
Demo is: "Story 290: Before, the system did this: (click click click). Now, the system does this: (click click click). Stakeholder, is this what you expected? No? Dang, either explain in a few sentences or get together with me and the SM after this and we'll make a new story to add to the backlog. Moving on! Story 291..." With each demonstration, you have both the old build and the new build set up in advance on VMs so you don't waste any time loading things or doing unimportant lead-up steps.
And most of the retrospective IMHO is best done via email or app 1-on-1, except for the "we learned as a team that..." type stuff. Such as "Holy crap we take too long on those standups!" It's an attempt to strive towards making every sprint a bit better based on mistakes from previous ones.
The metrics you get out of Scrum mostly come out of the apps these days. And most of the metrics are only meaningful when viewed over many sprints. They show things like trends. "Each sprint, Developer-A finishing more story-points than the sprint before!" or "a story point for Developer-B tends to take half a day on average, while Developer-C takes 2-days per point." based on that, you can start to make predictions about how much can be accomplished both for each sprint, and for the months and years ahead.
Wow. Those guys were doing Scrum completely wrong. A daily standup is intentionally a "standup" because about the time you get tired of standing means the meeting should be long over. A daily standup should be down to about 10 minutes. If it takes longer, your team is either too larger for Scrum, or people are talking about stuff that should be taken offline. So when someone mentions a block, you don't try to fix it or squabble about it, the Scrummaster (yeah, I hate the term) makes a note of it, and you move on. And when the PM tries to fix the problem, it's the scrummaster's job to cut him off immediately. That's why the SM and the PM are two different people.
No, doing just what you're saying, asking questions and trying better to understand them. And not loaded questions either. They don't want to be "understood" They want to troll and confuse and be explicitly racist but only as a joke; except for the ones who don't get that it's supposed to be a joke, and they're actual racists, and we say we don't like them, but we don't ban them because it adds to the confusion.
Nope, they call you out on that. They say you are a false-fenceposter, pushing a liberal agenda, and start breaking out terms like "virtue signalling" and blah blah blah; then they ban you. It's really a very weird place.
Slashdot Mirror
The really smart dog says "I ain't eatin' that!" So yeah, they're fine.
Mods generally only step in if they happen to be monitoring the changelog of that page, or you go to another part of the website to request a moderator come take a look at something. And by default, mod users look exactly the same as regular users when they comment. You gotta add an extension to your browser for the moderator to show up with a highlighted username.
That's curious. Viologens tend to be substantially toxic. An example of a viologen is the herbicide paraquat. of which, it only takes 25mg/Kg to kill the average dog.
That said, if you have a general question on a topic, you can often get it addressed by formatting comments as "I feel like the article should explain {insert question here}, but I'm unable to find an appropriate source. Could someone help with this improvement?" -~~~~
FWIW, anecdotally speaking, I've seen horrible cringetastic comments almost every time I've made the mistake to scroll down to the comment section on the IMDB page for nearly every popular television drama or comedy, nearly every film that has the potential for a sequel, and on nearly every actress who at any point in her career was considered attractive. So, pretty big subset.
Yes, I think they're two rather different breeds of trolls. Twitter is a free-for-all where you can find a trending target, and start attacking people you disagree with, or just don't like. Wikipedia is a place where everyone is trying to make articles the way they believe they should look. The personal attacks come as a result of disagreements or misunderstanding of the content guidelines or disputes over the merits of a source. Personal attacks are mostly on the order of "you're an idiot for including all this unimportant and unsourced information about your favorite character who showed up in only two poorly-selling Star Wars Expanded Universe novels!" and "You're a jerk, for deleting all the content that I worked so hard to type up!". The anger frequently comes from a common interest to contribute to a project that will have some sort of lasting legacy.
Nah. Article edits aren't moderation. Moderators are moderation. It's their job to step in when editors disagree about the state of an article. And if moderators get out of line, you can alert other moderators to get a second opinion. And if they inappropriately side with a moderator who is out of line, you can appeal to administration. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a decently thought out system (And if someone is able to come up with improvements, it's possible to get them put into effect). My point is that the moderators are volunteering their time and effort because they wish to maintain and improve the quality of an encyclopedia; and the same is true of the Wikimedia Foundation. They are not particularly interested babysitting some general discussion forum.
Yeah, it can be a pain to fight those situations, but there are at least mechanisms to put a stop to that for anyone who cares to put forth that sort of effort.
Are you trolling, or are you another person who doesn't understand the difference between Freedom of speech and the freedom of owners to moderate a private platform of their own, such as Wikipedia however they please?
I was under the impression that Spicer was aware of this and he was just doing his job to relay Donald's beliefs, no? Quick google search turned up nothing, got a link?
Another common category I've found is the crazy old-guy. They'll be mid-60s or so, and is loaded up with conspiracy theories. Most are harmless and just bad at understanding what a reliable source is, but a handful edit like a whirlwind and bite the head off of anyone who disputes or reverts their edits.
Slashdot does track IPs. They just keep it to themselves. Sometimes people have brought up the idea of transforming ACs to a hash of the commenter's IP. But there's resistance to that. Personally, I'm fine with the existence of ACs. I just wish the level of moderation hiding the troll ACs would go back to the way it was a decade or so ago.
Those are not common occurrences. It is so rare that when they happen, the drama is great enough to overflow to other sites, like Slashdot and reddit. And there's a difference between meat puppetry where you actually recruit people, and the type where you just have other editors who happen to agree with the edits in question and restoring them. Getting to a level where people are threatening to withhold donations are either from people who donate so little that no one cares, or it's so rare that it has only happened once every couple years. Most problems are resolved via the regular arbitration committee process, which admittedly is clunky slow, and far from perfect, it does get things resolved.
I suspect the reason why this doesn't exist is that not enough people have an interest in moderating such a mechanism. As a result, if such a thing was in place, it would be as bad or worse than IMDB-forums and Yahoo Answers combined.
I can understand where you are coming from, but to give you some insight on how odd this situation gets: First of all, there are people who genuinely believe this sort of thing. Second, it's not _entirely_ without merit, since once or twice even the co-founder of WP, the great Jimbo Wales has gotten out of line and behaved inappropriately; although it's always related to boring administrative stuff like arbitration committee cases, and when it has happened he was either taken to task or noticed his mistaken and taken himself out of the matter. Third, there at least used to be a group of submitters from an anti-wikipedia activism site (yeah, that's a thing that exists) that would spam submissions to Slashdot. Many of them were ridiculously biased or entirely without merit, and more than one of those bad ones managed to get posted.
It's not a bad idea to slowly change that so that you do know a bit about the other platform, and can do a bit of work in that realm. It's a good thing to do both for the sake of growing your resume, and so that if your only iOS guy gets hit by a bus, your company isn't dead in the water on iOS for the months it takes to interview people, go through the hiring process, and get the new person ramped up on your codebase. Just something to ponder.
There's a couple reasons for knowing what the others are up to. You want to avoid specialization, so you want team members to be able to work on as many tickets as possible. By being roughly up to speed on things, you can take over the next story in the path. This means you don't have development held up as much. You might also hear about problems that you might be able to solve (offline after the meeting), or learn about something you didn't know. But yeah, it shouldn't take long at all. "I worked on this ticket, the bug turned out to be someone using a deprecated method. today I'm gonna figure out how to insta-ban the spam-bots via pattern recognition. Done." And then you might go, "oh wait, don't do that, I already started working on that ticket yesterday afternoon, but I forgot to put it into the started state! Sorry about that!" "Oh in that case, I'll do this other story. Also, I'm stuck on this other task because Active-Directory won't let me reach the folder." and before the manager has a chance to look into it, another team member says, "oh I bet I know why that is. I noticed we had active-directory on the machine, and that sucks, so I shut it down. I can fix that right after the meeting." "Oh splendid, i'm glad I brought it up." Sure, much of what gets said is redundant confirmation stuff, but it's useful often enough that it's worth having, just as long as it's kept down to a few minutes, and doesn't drift into some boring bullshit session, or two people discussing an issue, while everyone else has no idea what those two are talking about and are just zoning out until the subject finally changes.
Slashdot reported this story already....In 2007. https://slashdot.org/story/07/...
The generation before yours had grumpy old people who pitied your generation for all being glued to the television.
-Very loose paraphrase of Aristophanes, -The Clouds 423 BC.
An article that uses the false fact that a goldfish has an attention-span/memory of nine seconds complains that it's harder than ever to know what articles can be trusted. It's not even good irony. It's just aggravating irony. The attention span statistic is cited to an article from Time, which cites it to a "study" by Microsoft, which cites it to some source called "Statistic Brain", which doesn't cite SHIT.
A bad manager is usually an electrical engineer who has many years of seniority, who got pushed into software by necessity, which he learned by reading "Learn to write C in 21 days!" and upper management finally pushed him up to project manager because of a combination of A) it's the next promotion after "Senior Engineer" on our tree, and B) The guys we've since hired, who are formally trained in software engineering tell us that while he's a responsible hard worker, the code he produces is inelegant, unreadable, and unmanageable.
Standup is "Yesterday I did story 289, users will be able to customize the color of their bikeshed. Today I'll be Refactoring some unit tests for it. I'm blocked on story 290 because the Tomcat server is down. Done"
Planning meetings should be mostly prepared in advance by the scrummaster and PM. So the meeting is "here are 12 story points we wanna do next sprint. For each one, I'm gonna describe it briefly and we all come up with an estimate of how many days it should take. Then we work out the first task each person is going to start with, and talk about any potential problems. Let's keep it under an hour if at all possible."
Demo is: "Story 290: Before, the system did this: (click click click). Now, the system does this: (click click click). Stakeholder, is this what you expected? No? Dang, either explain in a few sentences or get together with me and the SM after this and we'll make a new story to add to the backlog. Moving on! Story 291..." With each demonstration, you have both the old build and the new build set up in advance on VMs so you don't waste any time loading things or doing unimportant lead-up steps.
And most of the retrospective IMHO is best done via email or app 1-on-1, except for the "we learned as a team that..." type stuff. Such as "Holy crap we take too long on those standups!" It's an attempt to strive towards making every sprint a bit better based on mistakes from previous ones.
The metrics you get out of Scrum mostly come out of the apps these days. And most of the metrics are only meaningful when viewed over many sprints. They show things like trends. "Each sprint, Developer-A finishing more story-points than the sprint before!" or "a story point for Developer-B tends to take half a day on average, while Developer-C takes 2-days per point." based on that, you can start to make predictions about how much can be accomplished both for each sprint, and for the months and years ahead.
Wow. Those guys were doing Scrum completely wrong. A daily standup is intentionally a "standup" because about the time you get tired of standing means the meeting should be long over. A daily standup should be down to about 10 minutes. If it takes longer, your team is either too larger for Scrum, or people are talking about stuff that should be taken offline. So when someone mentions a block, you don't try to fix it or squabble about it, the Scrummaster (yeah, I hate the term) makes a note of it, and you move on. And when the PM tries to fix the problem, it's the scrummaster's job to cut him off immediately. That's why the SM and the PM are two different people.
No, doing just what you're saying, asking questions and trying better to understand them. And not loaded questions either. They don't want to be "understood" They want to troll and confuse and be explicitly racist but only as a joke; except for the ones who don't get that it's supposed to be a joke, and they're actual racists, and we say we don't like them, but we don't ban them because it adds to the confusion.
Nope, they call you out on that. They say you are a false-fenceposter, pushing a liberal agenda, and start breaking out terms like "virtue signalling" and blah blah blah; then they ban you. It's really a very weird place.