Experimentation in suffrage

What would happen if the entire Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees left the Foundation, ineligible for re-election, and all ten seats of the Board were to be elected by the people?

First of all, I find it interesting that I am interested in blogging on a Wikipedia-related topic ever since I have removed myself from quite a few IRC channels on Freenode in an attempt to cut me off from most on-wiki buzz. My decision to leave these channels is based on conversation I saw in #wikipedia-en-admins; that I was utterly disgusted by it (the topic itself was innocuous) was more than enough to drive me off from all but two IRC channels.

My plan has worked; I am not on any mailing lists (except for Toolserver-L), I have not regularly checked my watchlist since December, and so my only source of Wikipedi-drama are the blogs (All's Wool being my favorite) and the few times that Wikipolitics is actually mentioned in #wikipedia and #veropedia. I like this bliss; being on fewer IRC channels means less things distracting me from my project du jour, which would be my in-development website PERSIAM. It's like how Kelly Martin isolated herself from all things Wiki and changed the format from a Wikipedi-drama report to a Home Improvement ripoff. In honor of that, she has been removed from my blogroll.

Recently, I had this thought, that the entire Board of Trustees ought to be removed. The thing as a whole has been entirely dysfunctional, and I'd like to see what it would be like to have entirely new trustees. My question is primarily - what kind of people would be elected? I would assume that Americans would vote for mostly Americans, non-Americans would vote largely for non-Americans (for the sake of it; Americans are evil!), and some mOrOn who promises everything (and therefore would deliver nothing) would win with a large margin. Since ten seats would be up for election, hopefully, at least one man with competence would be elected.

Which makes the other nine incompetent, resulting in another dysfunctional board and more demands from ol' MessedRocker to have the entire Board of Trustees dismissed. There is no winning with Wikipedians, just classes of losing: reduced losing, regular losing, and really losing.

Information on the Internet

Since I decided in December to stop being so terribly involved with the workings of Wikipedia (I have not edited regularly since December 4), I have considered other activities. Something that has interested me in a while involves making research easier (stemming from my desire to make research for Wikipedia not require a subscription to Questia), yet what has eluded for the longest time is how exactly I should achieve this.

The way most research databases work is that they have some substantial amount of funding, and with this funding they pay outrageous licensing fees to copyright holders to host their content on their servers. They are recompensed when universities pay outrageous subscription fees to have access to this information. Since I do not have any passwords for university subscriptions, this left me out in the cold. Questia's great, but it really lacks in the area of journal articles. That's where JSTOR shines, but they insist on charging a minimum of about $5000 per institution (and that's for the smallest institution possible), based on calculations I have done based on their rates. (Note that I did those calculations a while ago, and their rates may have since changed).

I have come up with a few ideas on how to offer my own service to make research easier, and at one point, I came up with the thesis statement that best describes my belief: "There is plenty of information available on the Internet, yet it is not simple to find." That is my goal. At first, when I considered that goal I only considered authoritative websites, such as those that are offered courtesy of universities or the US federal government, yet in my quests to find websites I discovered something interesting: open-access journal articles. I am talking about peer-reviewed journal articles that have a distinct difference from the rest: they are licensed under some copyleft license that basically allows all re-use and re-publishing and all those things Wikipedia enthusiasts appreciate. I speak specifically of the Directory of Open-Access Journals and the Public Library of Science, the former indexing various open-access journals and the latter being a public access journal in itself. All the journals listed in DOAJ and PLoS have an academic peer review.

What does this mean? If I collect all these journal articles, I will be able to display them on my website without any outrageous fees and with impunity. Basically, because I do not have to pay licenses, I do not need recompense for them. If the original website goes offline, no problem, as their copyright license gives me permission to maintain a mirror for them. This achieves the goal I want: making information readily available without going through various hoops to look for it. The exact details I will need to smooth out, even though I have a very good idea on how it will all fit together.

My first target: PLoS Biology. Through some sleuthing (and thanks to their systematic URL scheme), I have prepared a list of URLs of PDFs of their articles. Slowly, I will download their PDFs and earn their disdain for my using much of their bandwidth.

A thought

When Wikipedia goes through an absurd amount of trouble in order to ban a troublemaker, does that actually restore peace to the land?

Wikipedia quality: Lemon

I am tired of waiting for Kelly Martin to come out with her next Wikipedia Quality article, so I decided to instead do one on my own. As if by fate, I decided to evaluate the article on lemons. Keeping in mind what an encyclopedia article on lemons ought to have, I proceeded to create a rubric. In summary, equal weight is given to style and grammar, how comprehensive the article is, citing sources, and a fourth category of "article-wide factors". These four categories have a total of 5 points, which add together for a total of 20 points.

As for the article: I have to say that except for some situations, the article was written well. For being only a short paragraph in length, the lead section does a decent job in summarizing what the lemon is and what it is used for, just as how the section on alternative lemons does a decent job in summarizing what can be used instead of lemons. Indeed, those two sections received the highest marks for writing.

One section that really stands out is the History section, which cites all of its sources, is well-written, and covers thousands of years of history without going into pointless babbling. If I were to rate only this section, it would get an A.

Yet the most comprehensive part of the article pertains to uses; there is a culinary uses section and a non-culinary uses section. While comprehension is a great strength here, the great weakness is writing style. The culinary section for the most part follows a logical paragraph structure, aside for some non-sequitur-like insertion of factoids here and there. The non-culinary section throws away the idea of prose for a bulleted listing, which is not good for something that is best written in prose -- you know, that thing with creatively sequenced thoughts linked together through proper use of transitions to create a piece of art with plain words.

Yet the writing in the two uses sections is brilliant compared to the amount of effort used in citing sources: none. If these two sections, as well as all the other sections, cited their sources perfectly, this article could have received a B grade. Citing sources is highly important to me, as most of the people reading the article will not be lemon experts, and neither are the writers. Furthermore, there is no formalized editorial process, articles are never collaborated upon in real time, and it is impossible to prove one is an expert. That is why sources are meticulously cited -- so that others can see where pieces of knowledge are from, and judge the accuracy based on the reliability of the source.

Grade: D

Viewed: 68 times an hour in February 2008

The Trial and Acquittal of Danny Wool

Sometime last week, #wikipedia-en-admins channel co-founder Danny Wool had his access revoked from said chat room, as a few people (read: the gatekeepers) lost trust in him. They may have been at least somewhat logical in their thinking, yet in the end they agreed to have a discussion over Wool and trustworthiness. I suppose this is better than refusing to hear Danny's case; he is very popular and many (including myself) considered his removal to be erroneous.

In the affiliated channel #wikipedia-en-admins-ops (why such a channel exists is beyond me), a discussion was scheduled. I was available only for the first few minutes, yet per the rules for the discussion, I was e-mailed a copy of the discussion post facto. As far as I know, anyone other than members of #wikipedia-en-admins are forbidden from seeing the transcript, so I will instead summarize it to the best of my abilities.

To begin, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I feel that accurately describes the effectiveness of the discussion, as well as its coordination and its ability to stay on task. The people putting Wool on trial were not even there, tipping the scale extremely towards Danny. Furthermore, he got bored in the middle and left, and in the end they held a straw poll where the remaining folks unanimously agreed to let Danny back in. What a damned waste of time.

The logic for removal was illogical to begin with, as Danny's gripe is with the Foundation, not the administrators, so it is not as though his interest is leaking logs. At least he achieved his political victory, because that's what this is -- it's not like he even goes there anymore.

We can only hope

that nothing like this happens over some Wikipedia blogger, or because of Wikipedia drama. Drama is stupid, and a waste of time, you know. I personally can't afford drama because I have enough internal turmoil.

Also of interest is this blog post by one of the play characters, the Blond German Lackey. It really shows how one can rush to aid their Captain and yet ignore anything bad. A rose-colöred view, I should say.

Meta-disillusion

In the beginning there was the great defender of Wikipedia, the accomplished lackey who laughed as people who retired out of frustration. He felt no frustration; he loved his job and he loved the country that he defended.

Over time, he saw the flaws in Wikipedia, in its people, and he became more compassionate as people felt it was necessary for them to get the hell away. He was more openly critical. He was not afraid to speak his mind.

Then he snapped, stopped editing, and hasn't really edited fulltime since. He was undoubtedly extremely critical, at points resorting to attacks on the community. He couldn't help it; he was absolutely tired of everyone. Three years will do that to someone.

And while I write this, after some time, I am now disillusioned towards the critics of Wikipedia. The Evil Proprietor Captain Jimbeard, the lackey the Blond German, the Good Princess Florence, the Bold Crusader for Good with Curly Hair, and the Imprudent Wench which the Captain engages in sexual congress with... this all reeks of a corny Victorian opera.