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Backlog drive; youth and confidence among Wikipedians, brief news

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By Mabeenot and Tilman Bayer

Wikimedia Foundation's "Contribution Team" calls for backlog drive

The Wikipedia Contribution Team, a group of editors who are part of the Wikimedia Foundation's outreach effort to the English Wikipedia community, calls for participation in a "Great Backlog Drive", to clear out Wikipedia's backlogs during the Foundation's 2010 fundraising period (which officially started on November 15, is envisaged to run until mid-January, and places special emphasis on community involvement this year, see Signpost coverage). Backlog elimination drives held earlier this year by the Guild of Copy Editors and WikiProject Wikify have substantially decreased their backlogs. WikiProject Unreferenced BLPs is always busy hacking away at their backlog. Other backlogs have not seen such a huge focus. Some small backlogs could be easily completed by any interested editors:

Some larger backlogs could use watchful eyes on a daily basis to reduce the backlog and/or help prevent it from growing larger:

Sue Gardner on very young and on very confident Wikipedians

The Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner recently traveled to Sweden, attending Wikimedia Sverige's third "Wikipedia Academy" in Stockholm, and on that occasion wrote two posts on her personal blog. In "Wikipedia Pattern: the very young editor", she described meeting a Swedish Wikipedian who had started to contribute at the age of 10, and observed generally: "It used to be that unusually smart kids were typically kind of isolated and lonely, until they met others as smart as them, either in university or later. I think that one of the unsung benefits of the internet, and Wikipedia in particular, is that it makes it possible for smart kids to connect with other people who are equally curious, who share their intellectual interests, and take them seriously, in a way that would’ve been completely unavailable to them 10 years earlier." Earlier this month, German magazine Der Spiegel had portrayed four teenage Wikipedians in an article titled "Wie Jugendliche uns die Welt erklären" ("How youngsters are explaining the world to us"). In another post titled "Länge leve Wikipettrar!", Sue Gardner reported learning from a journalist about the Swedish neologism "wikipetter", a pejorative for Wikipedians which is derived from the Swedish word "viktigpetter" (meaning "know-it-all" or "smart-ass"). On the Swedish Wikipedia, entries about the term have been deleted several times since 2007 (it has a page in the project namespace though, where it is related to the English Wikipedia's concept of wikilawyering). While acknowledging that Swedish Wikipedians might find it insulting, Gardner said "I think it’s charming that the Swedish people have developed a special word for smarty-pants Wikipedians", and also observed that "if I had to pick a single characteristic that’s common to all [Wikipedia] editors, I’d say it’s confidence. All Wikipedia editors share the belief that they know something worth sharing with others."

Briefly


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29 November 2010 (all comments)
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    • There are two types of young Wikipedia editors: The clueful and successful type, and the immature, annoying, less-than-clueful type that shouldn't be on here. I know of more than a few young users (12–14) in the latter category and I simply cannot believe that they don't understand how to maneuver the corporate nature and internal politics of Wikipedia. I'm not sure I've ever masked my disapproval of most young editors (90% waste time without much [quality] end result), but anyone who disagrees with me is invited to email me or discuss this issue on IRC. I don't wish to start a firestorm here. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 01:49, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Well, of course, 12-14 year olds are generally do not have much "real world" experience, so they are less able to understand why some parts of Wikipedia work in the way they do. Many of them also probably do not see the point in reading seemingly boring pages full of "policies", aka "rules". A young Wikipedian probably enters Wikipedia with the mindset that Wikipedia is an unstructured free-for-all. Not that I'm saying all young Wikipedians start out like this. Brambleclawx 02:47, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • When I started editing there were only four rules. And that's as it should be. Moreover the structure (and rules) should support ad-hoc editors. It's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" not the "encyclopedia anyone who can be bothered to read all the guidelines, polices, essays and precedent can edit". Rich Farmbrough, 19:34, 30 November 2010 (UTC).[reply]
    • From my experience, the clueful types have been roughly distributed amongst the age groups. I have found some contributors in the 12-14 group who are very mature & intelligent, as well as some 30+ who are clueless & very immature. Maybe there are fewer jerks amongst the 50+ groups because they would rather say "it's too hard to edit Wikipedia" & forgo doing so, than prove the problem is on their side of the keyboard. -- llywrch (talk) 20:50, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    Inforapid mindmaps

    The Inforapid mindmaps can't index articles with apostrophes in them. They don't appear in other articles' mindmaps and can't be searched for as the root of a map. Try, for instance, Macy's or Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Powers T 15:17, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    Cleanup suggestion

    I have suggested it before - but would it be possible to have a 'Random article with an action required tag' (or similar) linke on the side menu?

    Also - it might be useful to group some of the 'pages requiring care, consideration and attention' by subject rather than by type of action necessary. Jackiespeel (talk) 16:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    There are such lists, created by bot, on a project by project basis. The "Expert" tag also supports subject classification up to a point. It would be reasonably simple to extend the clean-up category system to cope with a set of generic subject clean-up categories, and it might forestall the incessant creation of subject-specific clean-up tags. If this would be considered useful, gain consensus and let me know and it can be implemented. Rich Farmbrough, 19:31, 30 November 2010 (UTC).[reply]
    Something quite close exists: lists of articles needing cleanup by WikiProject. Considering that most WikiProjects are based around some subject, this should give you what you want. Svick (talk) 20:41, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    SuggestBot is also worth a subscription, if you're not already on their list. 84.51.181.140 (talk) 21:55, 2 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    You can use the linkintersection tool as well. I use it to find Novels that are orphaned with this query. I like it because it doesn't just give me articles tagged by Novels WikiProject but also newly created ones in the category tree, Sadads (talk) 15:08, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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