From wikien-l Thu Apr 27 03:20:25 2006 From: Elisabeth Bauer Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 03:20:25 +0000 To: wikien-l Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] 18 months Message-Id: <44503879.5050208 () djini ! de> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=wikien-l&m=114610805724835 Stan Shebs schrieb:> Pete Bartlett wrote:> >>Why is de: better than en: is a great question. They appear to have>>covered classic encyclopedic topics much better than en: and>>their proportion of Exzellente Artikeler is double that of our FAs, despite >>standards. How to learn from de would be a great thing to discuss.> > In a word: "Ordnung".> > The full range of connotation is not easily translated into English,> but the disambig for de:'s [[Ordnung]] connects to lots of telling> things, such as en:'s [[social structure]] and the like. At the risk> of playing amateur sociologist and offending everybody, I'll opine> that while the German cultural liking for "Ordnung" sounds to USians> and Brits an awful lot like a compulsion to "follow orders", in> the WP context I think it translates to a greater sense of duty to> help achieve communal goals. As a german Wikipedian, I would dispute this. It is definitely notOrdnung and a sense of duty which makes the difference between Englishand German Wikipedia. And even if this claim comes up again and again,I'm not even sure that German Wikipedia is really better than EnglishWikipedia. They are different and have different strengthes. Now...let me collect some differences, I leave it to the reader to drawhis own conclusions. On 2nd April 2006 the category:Living people on en contained 81.930entries while the number of _all_ german articles tagged withPersonendaten (=almost all wikified biographies) was 86.830. I wassurprised. When I compare RfA on en and de, I count support votes on en:31, 53, 45, 48, 61, 81, 28, 76, 50on de:72 (loosing candidate), 6 (loosing candidate), 93, 143 (loosingcandidate!), 92, 55It seems rather strange to me that the bigger community has lessparticipation on such an important topic as is "who should become admin".I didn't look at the criteria voters use on en, but they might be also abit different. On de candidates who really do a lot of useful cleanupwork are regularly turned down if they are not able to show that theyare also good authors. Other no-nos are bad behaviour, ignorance andespecially ignorance and wrong actions in image right questions. Social structure. The german wikipedia has a geographical advantage here because it covers a smaller area than the english. I may be a bitexceptional but my estimate is that I've met at least 150 wikipedians inperson. Those 150 wikipedians know others who know others... there is arather close network of personal relationships among german wikipedians(including of course the wikipedians from Austria and Switzerland). Thisbecomes especially important in case of conflicts: a good editor inwikistress, deleting his userpage and quitting? He'll be flooded withemails and maybe a calm discussion with one of his friends on the phonewill sort the problem out. Let's look at the structure of the IRC channels now. English wikipediahas the general channel #wikipedia with an extremely low signal to noise ratio, the a bit more quiet #wikipedia-en and - I may be mistaken onthe following: a closed admin channel, a bootcamp, mediation, probationand esperanza (whatever this is). German wikipedia has: the general channel #wikipedia-de for socializing,coordinating general work on the wiki, discussing events on wp, callingan admin for quick vandal bans etc. Rarely people who chat too much offtopic (=not wikipedia related) receive a friendly kick.Other channels: #hist.wikipedia where most historians hang out.#phil.wikipedia - meeting channel for the philosophers. #bio.wikipedia - home of the biologists. Some people frequent only the topic channelsand not the general one. The biology channel was the first topic channelset up and reflects the strength of the german wikipedia in biology. TheProjekt:Lebewesen (living beings) is the most active project on de andthey fill one whole column on featured articles alone (the historiansare catching up). General atmosphere. It's difficult to get hard data on this, but thething I hear most often is: atmosphere on the English Wikipedia is muchmore relaxed and people are friendlier and politer. There are even a fewusers who left the German Wikipedia with this reason and work only onen. So it might be true. This feeling is often connected to thebehaviour on AfD. Hurtful comments are frequent there, combined with amuch lower threshold for AfD: articles which are tagged as stub on enare usually proposed for deletion on de (and either expanded or deleted). One group of prominent editors sticks to the maxims on the page "Becruel" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sei_grausam ). This isnot meant literally, but in the sense of Larry Sanger: To attract and retain the participation of experts, there would have to be little patience for those who do not understand or agree with Wikipedia's mission, or even for those pretentious mediocrities who are not able to work with others constructively and recognize when there are holes in their knowledge (collectively, probably the most disruptive group of all). A less tolerant attitude toward disruption would make the project more polite, welcoming, and indeed open to the vast majority of intelligent, well-meaning people on the Internet. --Larry Sanger Refering to this "meme" (it's not a guideline), users have - undisputedby the community - been blocked for "disturbing good authors fromwriting articles". Leads to blocking and banning customs. The germanwikipedia has no arbitration committee. A poll to establish one has notreached a necessary majority, the community divided about the question.Long term bans are decided by a community vote, short term bans arepronounced at the individual admin's own discretion. If another adminsthinks a ban too harsh, he may shorten or lift it. Wheel wars about suchissues are rare, though. Wikipedia namespace. This topic probably comes closest to Stan'sassumption of "Ordnung". Personally, I love the Wikipedia namespace inthe English Wikipedia. There is so much to discover, so many obscure,interesting or funny pages. However, without counting, I have theimpression that en has many many more pages in this namespace than de. When I look inhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_style_guidelines I finda huge number of good advices, guides for almost everything (hey, even awhole page for how to set dashes). The number of german pages is muchlower. Pages in the Wikipedia namespace are routinely scrutinized ifthey are really necessary and often merged into existing ones ordeleted.http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Usability/Übersichtis a rather complete overview of all important documentation pages. Last point of this long mail: the impressive german projects like theprinted wikireaders, the DVD, the writing contest with big media echoetc. In my opinion, these are due to several factors:1) the independence of the german community from Jimbo and the WikimediaFoundation. The English Wikipedia is very much a monarchy, with peoplelooking to Jimbo for advice and guidance. The german wikipedia had andhas nobody with Jimbo's authority. People had to deal with the fact thatthere is no ultimate appeal. This has consequences for the socialstructure (which evolved to what I'd characterize as a meritocracy witha few prominent and influential editors) but also for the possibility torealize such projects. People had to act on their own, so they did it.2) Personal dedication and leadership of individual Wikipedians. Mostprojects were team work, but there was usually one person who investedmuch more work than the others. The driving force behind Wikipediaacademy in June is one editor, Frank. The driving force behind manysuccessful initiatives like the writing contest is Achim Raschka. Thedriving force behind the Wikipedia exhibition were Frank for theorganisation and me for the realization. The WikiReaders were producedby individuals. etc.3) For the DVD and WikiPress: the luck to find a good partner companywhich is crazy enough to take up the accompanying risks and whose bossesand employees "grok" the Wiki way. The first thing Vlado, one of theDirectmedians, did after the first CD was finally ready for productionwas to expand the article Reggae to double its size - at 3 o'clock atnight. Just to relax... So much for a comparison between English and German Wikipedia. I noticedthat I wrote much more about de, as I know the project much better.Maybe someone else could add more facts about en. I'm placing this textalso on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elian/comparison - feel freeto edit and add comments there (and of course fix my bad english ;-). greetings,elian_______________________________________________WikiEN-l mailing listWikiEN-l@Wikipedia.orgTo unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l