User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/EditorialTags

[In preparation]

Editorial tags are templates that generate editorial comments with special markup, such as

There is a long list of such tags, such as wikify, uncat, stub, expand, copyedit

These tags started appearing in Wikpedia articles (as opposed to talk pages) a few years ago, and have since been applied to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of articles. Like many other "features" of Wikipedia, they are a thoroughly bad idea that was implemented by a very small group of editors without a clear analysis of its costs and benefits, and then became widespread, not because of any virtue, or for being a consensus among editors (which they most definitely are not); but merely because the taggers have the tehnological upper hand, because the tags have a misleading air of officialness, and because Wikipedia lacks mechanisms to recognize and prevent such "well-meaning" abuses.

Editorial tags are just one more facet of the creeping vogonization of Wikipedia, and will probably be a significant conrtibuting factor for the death of Wikipedia. Worse than that, editorial tags are a form of vandalism, both in their psychological motivation and in their effect to the quality of Wikipedia.

Imagine a janitor who, instead of cleaning, goes around the building spray-painting "THIS ROOM LOOKS DIRTY" on the walls --- even in rooms that are actually quite clean --- and abuses anyone who tries to erase the signs. How could that possibly be considered "good work"? What is the difference between that janitor and a robot-assisted article tagger?

Why editorial tags are bad

Placement

One of the most basic rules of wikipedia says that any discussion or comments about an article should be carried out in the article's talk page, not on the article itself. Another basic rule says that the first sentence of an article should be a definiton of the topic. Unfortunately, the editors who apply those tags have become used to trample on both rules, as they routinely apply them to the article itself — often at the top, before the leading sentence.

Resolution of disputes

Another venerable and fundamental rule of Wikipedia says that, when two editors disagree on an article, they should discuss the matter on the talk page and try to reach a compromise. Article taggers routinely trample on that rule too. Any attempt to remove an editorial tag, or even to relocate it to the bottom of the page, is prompty undone with rude (even offensive) remarks; and many tagegers will not bother to discuss the issue in the talk page.

Aesthetics

Editorial tagging only make Wikipedia uglier. They deface the articles

Waste of other editors time

• Massive robot-assisted editing causes thousands of articles to show up on the watchlists of that many editors, and therefore wastes an inordinate fraction of those editors's time (even if only to chack what the edit was). Estimate that each article is in the watchliest of five editors. Then 10,000 tags will cause 10,000 watchlist checks.

About 3/4 of the entries in my watchlist today are purely "cosmetic" edits by robots, that do not change its contents but merely tweak the markup. The "cosmetic" is in quotes because many of those edits either do not improve the appearance article at all, or even make it worse.

For example, some robots out there are editing thousands of articles in order to replace plain dashes by en-dashes in number ranges (such as page ranges). Those edits make absolute *no* difference to the article's value for any reader. If anything, they increase the gap between the quality of Wikipedia's formatting and the quality of its contents, and so may increase that risk of readers thinking that Wikipedia is as reliable as a professionally edited encyclopedia. On the other hand, besides hogging the other editors's watchlists, those robots may lead them into believing that number ranges must use en-dashes.

Hostility to editors

• Article tagging is an arrogant act, because it implies that the tagger's opinion, even though it hardly required any thinking at all, is more important than that of the article's authors and of all other editors who commented in the talk page; and that his time is much more valuable than that of otehr editors, so he is excused from justifying his actions in the talk page.

• Drives good editors away.

The cluttering of article sources by templates, and the general hostily shown towards newbies — including the threatening disdain implied by tags like {{unreferenced}}.

Why robot-assisted tagging is bad

What is worse, some of those tags are applied en masse by robot-wielding users, typically based on purely formal criteria (such as lack of <ref> tags) rather than the actual quality of the article's contents.

• In fact, massive editorial tagging (and in fact almost all kinds of bot-assisted editing) is a form of vandalism, like ad-spamming and obscenity insertion — right down to its psychological motivations and its effects on Wikipedia.

Examples

The {{Orphan}} tag

The {{orphan}} tag has been applied to articles because "few or no articles" link to them. It is aplied semi-automatically with the help of a robot, from a list of presumed orphans articles, itself generated automatically.

A request of authorization for the robot's operation generated an extensive discussion between the robot's designer and a handful of self-selected editors, who presumbaly are all favorable to robots in principle. There was no clear consensus, even mong that limited and biased audience. Approval for the robot's operation was eventually granted by a single editor, who did not explain his reasons for the decision.

The tag starts from the assumption that any article that has only a couple of links are somehow "wrong" and that situation needs to be "fixed". This is a false assumption. Any encyclopedia, no matter how large and well conected, will have a large number of "peripheral" articles that are connected to only one or two other articles. This does not imply that the articles are somehow "non-notable" or "incomplete". The idea that such articles should be deleted is not only absurd, but in fact self-frustrating: when "peripheral" articles are deleted, some articles that formerly were well-connected will become orphans themselves.

Even articles which have zero *wikilinks* leading to them are still easily acessible by their title and through the search engine. Indeed, it is likely that a subtantial fraction of Wikipedia articles are accessed through those "primary handles" rather than through wikilinks. So, not even a truly "orphan" article can be rpesumed to be less useful to readers than a strongly linked article.

Moreover, even in the cases where the lack of incoming pointers is a defect that needs fixing, that is not a fault of the target article, but of those articles that should point to it. So the editorial comment belongs, at best, on those articles, not on the "orphan". Of course, to do the right thing the tagging editor would have to read the orphan article, find the relevant "parent" articles, read each parent to find where the link belongs, and insert it there, with the proper textual edits.

The {{unreferenced}} tag

It has been argued that the unreferenced tag is necessary to prevent Wikipedai from becoming swamped with "bad" articles unreferenced, incomplete, badly translated, POV pushing, mis-spelled and poorly laid out articles.

sticking an {{unreferenced}} tag at the top of such an article will solve those problems

If the criterion for tagging is the mere presence of <ref>s or a References section, then pov-pushers will easily evade it; and, conversely, the mere lack of references does not mean that the contents is unverifiable, unverified, or wrong. Most articles created before 2006 lack references simply because they were neither required nor supported; yet many of those articles were based on reliable sources,or are otherwise OK.

Many of the articles in question (mine and other people's) took *a lot* of work to create (*including* looking up references), and were only created because *one* editor choose to do it. Some stub-size articles that I created took me many hours to find the necessary sources. If all "unsourced" material was to be deleted, it would be years before someone would have the intiative to restore it; and that may never happen. Not because those articles are worthless or unimportant, but simply because the number of *important* articles and sections that are still missing is completely out of proportion to the number of active editors — and these are shrinking, not growing. (By my estimate, there are about 10,000 editors who make at least 2-3 edits a day on the average. Creation of a medium-size, medium-quality article requires hundreds of edits. Routine maintenance of a hundred articles probably requires another 10 edits per day. Can you tell me how many articles have got the "unreferenced" tag already?

Issues to expand

• Taggers should fix the problems, or at least explain what the problems are in the talk page. But that would take away all the fun of article tagging — whose point is getting one's mark on thousands of articles with as little work as possible.
• Every major city has graffiti on the walls. That does not mean that graffiti are accepted by the popultion, much less a consensus, even less that they are an official part of the city's policy. Like graffiti, editorial tags have spread only because it is much easier to tag a thousand articles than to keep an article free of tags.

• The numerical "success" of editorial tags (like stub tags) si the best proof of their fundamental idiocy. When half of the articles have tags saying "this article needs urgent work", it becomes obvious that the tags have throughly failed in their claimed purpose of getting that work done.

• Tagging seems a god idea only if one has not the foggiest idea of the numbers infvolved. With 3,000,000 articles in the English WP alone, and perhaps 10,000 regular editors, it is clear that any attempt to organize or priorize the work of those editors is a sheer waste of time.

• In any case no editor, even administrators, has the moral right to request that other editors do this or that. He may propose changes to an article, but his opinion carries no more weight than the opinion "it is OK" implicitly expressed by the editors who have previously worked on the artile, and by all readers who looked at the article but did not bother to fix the supposed problem. If an editor thinks that the article needs fixing, he should edit the article himself, or at least express his concerns on the talk page.

• robot-inserted editorial tags do not solve the claimed problems, nor make the problem more likely to be solved; and

• Editorial tags carry an implicit or explicit thread that the article may be deleted if it does not comply with the tagger's request. Will those threats get their authors to rush back and add references to them? Many have probably left Wikipedia; many of those who are still around do not keep those articles in their watch lists anymore; and many will rather work on new content than comply with bureaucratic requests. Given the current ratio of editors to articles, and the number of articles that have got editorial tags (including {{stub}}, {{cleanup}}, etc.), the vast majority of those tags will simply stay there forever.

It has been claimed that if all bad articles were deleted, they would undoubtedly be recreated in a couple of days, and most likely to an excellent standard.

 So deleting unsourced material just because it is unsourced is, more often than not, throwing away the hard and valuable work of other editors.

And even if the articles were recreated right away, the original work would still have been wasted.

It has been claimed that threatening tags like {{unreferenced}} actually save material from being destroyed. That is a very distorted logic: it is like saying that ransom notes are a good thing, because they save hostages from being killed. The way to avoid the waste of editors work is to stop deleting articles just because they are unsourced — not by posting threats to delete them.

• Tags that do require urgent attention like COI , unref, NPOV, BLP unref, copyvio should be handled immediately, not just tagged.

• Wikipedia is a work in progress.

The fact that it is "long-time convention" does not make it any less idiotic.

Nowhere in that template page it is said WHY the tag should go on the article side.

Nowhere there is an assessment of what good and bad the tag will do.

The tag (like many "consensus" rules in wikipedia) was apparently agreeed upon by half a dozen editors who collaborted on the template's creation.

Where does that leave the opinion of all the other 10,000 regular editors? Or the 100,000 minor editors? Or the 10,000,000 readers?

As it is now, a large fraction of the WP articles have that ridiculous tag on them.

What good will it do?

Why is the opinion of the tagger more correct than mine? Just because he wields a robot, and I don't?

In the straw poll on where the tag should be placed, I counted 9 votes for "top of article page", 10 votes for "bottom of article page", and 13 votes for "talk page".

• The tags serve to notify the reader that the article in unsourced, and invite him to help. If you disagree with the current consensus, you can start a discussion about that, rather than unilaterally acting against the current norm.

There is no correlation between presence of references and the reliability of the content — especially for articles created before 2005, which is the case.

As for the template placement being a consensus, the poll above show that is wasn't so, even among the template designers. But the minority view got implemented by force anyway.

So what would be the use of reopening the matter on that talk page again?

I just had another article tagged "orphan". It was a perfectly good article on an important subject, that had two pages linking to it, and that was more than enough. Now what can possibly the "orphan" tag warn the reader about? So why is that tag too being affixed to articles instead of talk pages?

The use of maintenance tags is probably not going to bring it down.

• The "unreferenced" tag is directed at editors (there is no danger that a reader will think that the article *has* references!), so it should go there.

• Placing the template at the *top* of the article violates another basic rule, namely that the first sentence of an article should be a short but precise definition of the article's topic.

• It seems that the custom of placing {{unreferenced}} at the top of the article is not really a "policy" but simply an abuse which became established only because the tag has been splattered all over the place with the help of a robot.

• I just found a straw poll on the proper placement of that template with 9 votes for "top of article", 10 for "bottom of article", and 13 for "talk page". And note that the voters were mostly people who aproved of the template and who collaborated on its creation.

• many articles that get labeled as unreferenced are about subjects that are common knowledge among people who work in the field. Those articles have been there for years, and the many minor edits they have suffered imply that many people with at least some knowledge of the field have read them and found most of it OK. It is hard to imagine Wikipedia being sued or chastized in the press because of anything that is written in basic articles. So, why is "adding references" so urgent that it justifies defacing the article with that silly tag?

• Some editors emphatically beleive that the tag belongs to the talk page. The tagger apparently believes that it should go at the top of the article. "Bottom of article" would normally be a fair compromise; but since the tagger drives a robot, and his opposers don't, somehow his opinion seems to be much more important than that of odrinary editors; and of course he is such an important person that he can's spare the time to defend his choice. Should the smitten adversary be happy about that?

• From looking at random articles, I have the impression that a large percentage of Wikipedia's articles have got that tag by now; I would guess something between 100,000 to 1,000,000 articles. What is the point of tagging so many articles with a generic request "somebody please do this particular work"? There are perhaps 10,000 regular editors, most of whom (thank God!) are still busy editing *contents* — rather than discussing policies, tagging other people's work, and otherwise Vogonizing this site.
  • Is there any chance that those tags will get the editors to do *more* work than what they are already doing?
  • Will the tags make their work more productive?
  • Will the tags at least redirect their efforts towards contributions that are more valuable to readers?

Like many things in Wikipedia, the {{unreferenced}} was a questionable idea that ws never a "consensus" in any sense of the word, and became an entrenched "de facto" rule before anyone could understand its consequences. The tags proliferate not because most editors agree to them, or because they respect the decisions of the taggers — but simply because "any resistance is pointless" in those cases.

• It has been claimed that readers should be warned as (or before) they read content about the lack of verifiability. This means they assess it in a different way - as a blog rather than as an encyclopedic entry. When you move the warning to the end of an article, some readers won't see it at all, and the remainder will have to re-read the article with a more critical mind set.

• Many editorial tags, such as {{merge-to}}, are strictly messages to editors and have no value to readers.

• Many other tags which pretend to be warnings to readers are pretty redundant. These include {{uneferenced}} (is there any danger that the reader will think that the article *has* references?), {{cleanup}}, {{globalize}}, etc.: in general, those tags merely state what the reader can see for himself.

The {{unreferenced}} tag, in particular, does not mean that the content is particularly dubious, unreliable, unverifiable or unverified, but merely that the tagger did not see any explicit references and did't bother to look for them himself. Note that robot-assisted taggers generally do not read the articles they tag, so the tag carries very little information about the article's quality. In most cases, the article is OK, and references exist and could be added; so, if the tag is to be seen as a seal of unreliability, in most cases the seal is unwarranted. Conversely, if an article lacks that tag, it only means that it contain explict refs, not that the references are reliable and/or support the content. In that case, the absence fo the tag may lead readers to put undeserved trust in the article. So, either way, this tag is more harmful that beneficial to readers; and is not even very useful to editors, if you think about it.

Other tags like {{npov}} merely express one editor's opinion, which should have the same weight as the author's opinion and be subject to the ordinary edit and discussion protocols; but by being expressed as a tag, instead of as a comment in the talk page, the tagger gets an undeserved superiority, and his opinion becomes somehow immune against the other person's edit. Instead of tagging an article or section as {{npov}} or wathever, the tagger should delete the material that he believes is biased, or move it to the talk page, and write down hs objections in the latter. Too much work? Indeed, but that is how it should be. When two editors disagree, they should argue on equal footing; if one is allowed to express his opinion by a flashy tag on the article, with a single mouse click, while the other must argue on the talk page, then the field is badly tilted. Indeed, it seems that the practice of article tagging became widespread not for being a consensus among editors, but merely because many editors think that taggers have superior authority, or because they were simply overwhelmed by the robot's efficiency — so that "resistence is useless". Indeed, it is quite useless to argue against the tag in the talk page, because the taggers won't even notice the complaints, much less bother to answer them. Mass article tagging is an abusive practice, that neither sought nor obtained general consensus (did I point you to the "poll" on tag placement?), runs against the most basic principles of wikipedia, and does far more harm than good.

The futilty of the tags is more obvious when one considers the numbers. Judging from random samples, I would guess that a sizable fraction of the 3,000,000 Wikipedia articles have the {{unreferenced}} tag already, and smackbot is still busily adding more. Cosidering how much work it takes to find and insert all necessary references in one article; that there are perhaps 10,000 moderately active editors and 1,600,000 stub articles today; and that the editor pool is steadily shrinking, it is obvious that the majority of those tags will remain on the articles forever.

Said another way, ordinary editors will never be able to catch up with the tagging robots.

This is not to mean that adding references is a waste of time, but only that, for most articles in wikipedia, fixing the content is much, much more urgent than entering references. Fixing the content would make the article more useful for readers, if not save them from learning wrong things. Adding references is mostly needed to appease the wikivogons: the readers who need references (such as students writing school assignments) often can find them on their own.

For most articles, even if this article contains some errors, it will not be the end of the world; this is not a journalist's biography or a primer on how to assemble a nuclear bomb. I am sure that, when finished, it will still be better and more accurate than 90% of all programming textbooks out there — even without a single reference.

Voynich mauscript got demoted from FA status, presumably after a straw poll among a small random (but not necessarily unbiased!) sample of editors — even before I had a chance to know about the review. Unfortunately that discussion itself has long been deleted, and of course it would be quite pointless to try to do anything about it now. May I only ask, what did Wikipedia gain, concretely, with all that action?

Sigh. It is sad to see such a wonderful idea like Wikipedia being slowly destroyed by creeping bureaucratization. I find myself spending an increasing amount of time reacting to the actions of a small army of self-appointed vigilantes whose "contributions" have been mainly to tag, classify, grade, downgrade, request, disparage, and ultimately delete other peoples careful and valuable contributions. As if that were not enough, many of those bureaucrats use robots to impose their views on thousands of articles. More often than not, a mindless click of the mouse by one of those people forces a plain editor to spend from several minutes to severa hours, just to restore the article to its original state.

I am not paid to help wikipedia; I do it because it feels good — or rather it felt good, now I am not so sure.

Please, if you run across an article that needs improvement, try to improve it, or at least explain in the article's talk page what you think is wrong, dubious, dangerous, etc.. If you can't do that, or don't have the time for it, just leave the article alone. Do not demand that someone else do work that you don't have the time to do yourself. Do not demand that authors defend their work immediately under pain of having it deleted. Do not force authors to read some central bulletin board, or tell them to read hundreds of pages of Wikipedia rules and discussions. They did their part of the work; they are under no obligation to do more, or even to defend it. Those who want more work should do it themselves, and be prepared to justify their actions, case by case, on the article's talk pages.

• It has been claimed that editorial tags are necessary in cases where the article failings would create a legal issue that would not be laughed out of court.

• It has been claimed that editorial tags serve to warn readers that an article is incomplete (in the sense that its active editors know it is incomplete, i.e. are adding stuff) beyond what readers should expect from Wikipedia not being complete or perfect. But there are many alternatives to that
  • If the article is just inclomplete, there is no need to tag.
  • If the article is unbalanced, e.g. one started an article on Brazilian soccer teams but has data only for the Esporte Clube Palmeiras. One can start the article by observing that there are many teams, and then put the Palmeiras-specific information in a subsection. Casual readers will notice that the coverage is unbalanced, even without a tag. Readers or editors who care about other teams will see that too and proveide the missing info.
  • If the article is biased (non-NPOV), any parts that try to pass one POV as the single truth should be immediately amended (or moved to the Talk page, or just deleted), so that the article will make it clear that there are other POVs. Then the informatin specific to one POV can be handled as above.

• It has been argued that tagging articles are necessary because many editors do not watch or care for the talk pages. But if an editor chooses to ignore talk page edits, it is his right. Adding a tag to the article in order to get the attention of those editors is arrogant and ultimately futile, because the editor may also ignore edits to the article, ignore the insertion of editorial tags (after muttering some nasty thing about the tagger's mother) or remove it from his watchlist, or stop working on Wikipedia for good.

Not a consensus

• Not a "consensus" in any sense of the term.

For other pages

• User:Jorge Stolfi/Please do not use citation tags

Converting plain <ref>...</ref> entries to <ref>{{cite ...}}</ref> templates is not only a waste of your time, but actually a significant *dis*improvement, as the reference became harder to read --- both in the wikisource and in the reader's view. The compact citation format 37(10):1-23 was invented by technical journal publishers *to save paper*. The extended format "volume 37, issue 10, pages 1-23" of the original citations is more suited to the medium and readership of Wikipedia. There are several other disadvantages of the cite templates, but that will do for now.
Like many (too many) other features in Wikipedia, the cite templates were created by a handful of enthusiastic editors without a clear analysis of cost/benefits, and posted by them as if they were a "consensus" --- which they most emphatically are *not*. Then editors started using them in the mistaken impression that they are somehow good for Wikipedia --- which they most emphatically are *not*. I used to do that myself until I realized the sheer idiocy of the templaets and what "consensus" usually means in the Wikipedia guidelines.
So my advice to all editors is: format the references by hand, and forget the "cite" templates. It will save you a lot of time and grief, and you will get better-looking refs. 11 Notability tagging

Plea to editors

Hi, I see that you have been tagging many articles for notability. Please rethink and reconsider, that activity is not very helpful.

To begin with, editorial comments belong in the talk page; that is what talk pages were created for. Placing an editorial comment in the article, besides defacing it, assumes implicitly that the tagger's opinion is a priori right and definitive, and far more weighty than the opinion of the "ordinary" editors who have to use the talk page. So it is a pretty arrogant, non-"Wikipedic" attitude.

Second, requesting that work be done is not a constructive action. Adding a tag to the effect "this article is in state 'A', it should be in state 'B'" does not improve the article by a millimeter; on the contrary, it takes the article from state 'A' to a state 'C' that is *further away* from 'B' than 'A' was. To bring the article from 'C' to 'B' requires *more* work from the Wikipedia corps of editors than it would take to move it from 'A' to 'C'.

Moreover, such requests (no matter where they are placed) are arrogant too: they implicitly say, "I am boss, you are slave", or "I think XX must be done, but I do not feel like doing it myself. *You* should do XX, because my opinion is more weighty than yours and my time is more valuable than yours."

Worse, those particular tags do not absolutely reflect "consensus", in any meaningful sense of the term. "Consensus" means "practically everybody agrees". Practically everybody agrees,for example, that contents must be true and verifiable, that malicious edits must be reverted, that personal or commercial promotion is not appropriate, that editorial comments belong to talk page, and so on. Those rules can rightfully be called "consensus": while editors may dispute their interpretation on specific articles, you don't see people contesting the rules themselves. Orphan-tagging, on the other hand, is not and never was a majority opinion, much less a consensus. Ditto for the "notability rule" (that biographies about "non-notable" people must be deleted), and especially for the definition of what "notable" means. Those decisions were taken by a microscopic minority of the editors (around 1 or 2%), were never approved by a wider audience, and are passionately contested every time the issue is discussed --- even among editors who *are* concerned about BLPs. Indeed, every bona-fide, verifiable BLP of a non-notable person is an emphatic "sweat vote" against the notability rule; and there have been probably hundreds of thousands of such BLPs, which is ten times more than the number of active Wikipedia editors.

If those tags are now all over wikipedia, it is not because they are a "consensus", but because Wikipedia is defenseless against such abuses. Like graffiti on city buildings, editoria tags multiply because slapping a tag on an article is much, much easier than improving it, or looking for sources; and because editors who dislike those tags quickly learn that arguing with taggers is about as useful as arguing with a kid who enjoys spray-painting other people's walls. Like cancerous cells, the tags multiply because they deceptively *look* and *claim* to be official; and therefore well-meaning but naive editors take up to tagging because they believe to be "doing the right thing".

Finally, tagging non-notable BLPs is often an extremely rude way to welcome a new editor. Take Rolv Petter Amdam, for example. At this time, the contents is everything anyone could ask for: encyclopedic, properly formatted, factual, verifiable, backed by a very reliable source, and relevant to the topic. Is he "notable"? I don't know, I don't care, and I cannot imagine why anyone would care. I do not know who created the article; perhaps Rolv himself, or one of his grad students. In either case, the creator would be the sort of editor that we desperately need to attract and keep around. Deleting his bio (especially with such a rude remark, "prove that you are worthy of a Wikipedia article") is hardly the way to do it.

The root of half of Wikipedia's problems is that the pool of regular editors has been shrinking since 2006, while the number of articles has been growing. In order to fix all the bad articles that already exist (of which BLPs are only a tiny and completely unimportant fraction) and write the millions of articles that are still sorely lacking, we need to continue attracting editors as we very successfully did until 2005. One regular editor can write a hundred good articles, and keep watch over a thousand others, over several years. Tolerating three-line biographies of a few "possibly-not-very-notable" academics is a very small price to pay for a chance of winning such a valuable asset.

More

That is the point, many rules that are labeled and claimed to be "consensus" by their authors are in fact minority opinions that were never submitted to community-wide evaluation. The RfC you cited is proof of that. The audience was largely self-limited to the small subset of editors who worry about BLPs, since the vast majority would not even understand the issue. Even so, the mere length of that page (over one megabyte) shows that there is no consensus on that issue. Reading the contributions, it is obvious that, even among that small biased sample of editors (perhaps 300 in total, out of a universe of 10,000 or so), there is a considerable number who disagree with the notability rule and other aspects of the *current* article deletion policy. On the other hand, I have seen no evidence in that long discussion (or any of several other similar debates) supporting the claim that the existence of unsourced BLPs are a problem. The few statistics mentioned, and my own experience, actually point to the opposite conclusion. The problem of "how do we identify and delete those thousands of non-notable BLPs" is an artificial problem: it was not created by the BLPs, but by the decision to delete them — and it is a problem only for those editors who want to delete non-notable BLPs. That problem can be solved trivially and permanently by scrapping the notability requirement. Besides, in the particular case of Rolv Petter Amdam, the {{tl:unreferenced}} tag is totally unwarranted: the article *has* a very reliable source (the university's official site) that supports all the essential facts stated in the article. By the way, I got to Rolv Petter Amdam while trying to do my share of the work of clearing the backlog of usourced BLPs. I have cleaned a dozen random BLPs over the last few days, and it is ironic that the only rude feedback I got was yours. Perhaps you can guess now why so few editors have joined the deletion crusade?

Essay on the BLP RfC: "Thoroughly disappointed"

When the {{unreferenced}} tag was developed, straw poll was held *among the editors who had designed it* about where it should be placed. There were about 30 votes cast (out of a universe of perhaps 10,000 regular editors). These comprised 9 votes for for "top of article page", 10 votes for "bottom of article page", and 13 votes for "talk page". Needless to say, the obvious fourth alternative "nowhere" was not even in the ballot.

So, if that tag is now showing at the top of hundred of thousands of articles, it is because nine editors wanted it there, twenty-three did *not* want it there, and 9,970 editors did not have a chance to give their opinion.

A similar story applies to the Wikipedia:Notability guidelines. I found a straw poll in the Notability talk page about a dozen or so specific questions. The questions were all in jargon (like "PROD" in this RfC) which I was unable to decipher, so presumably only the people who had been involved in the writing of the guidelines voted. There were less than 200 votes, and some of the items in the ballot passed with a tight majority — that is, less than 1% of the pool of active editors. Unfortunately I could not determine whether the final declared "consensus" honored these votes, or — as in the case of the {{unreferenced}} tag — the minority opinion prevailedanyway.

As for this RfC, I see that 400 editors took part in phase I, 40 took part in phase II. The honest thing to do would be to declare this RfC hopelessly bungled and start all all over, beginning with the basic questions — like "are unrefernced BLPs a real problem?". Instead, it seems that this RfC will follow the same path as the other straw polls: the proposers stubbornly insist with their thesis, ignoring all data and arguments to the contrary, until all oposers get tired and leave; and then they will declare the "consensus" to be whatever they like.

In the summary to Phase 1 it was stated that all participants were concenred with the welfare of WIkipedia. I beg to differ. People who really care about Wikipedia should want to know, first, whether the unsourced BLPs are a real problem, and second, whether the proposed solution will do more good than harm. I don't see this worry among the proposers of the RfC. Indeed, it seems that the surest way to end a thread in this discussion is to post concrete numbers and examples. Instead of debating that data and what it means, the proposers merely shift to other threads.

It is clear to me that the original purpose of this RfC was not to find the best way to deal with the "problem" (or to find out whether the "problem" was real), but merely to obtain some legitimacy for what was a predetermined decision, namely that unsourced BLPs are to be deleted. If there is one thing that is clear from this discussion, is that unsourced BLPs are harmless and deleting them solely for being unsourced is extremely harmful.

The only explanation that I can find for the persistent wish to delete unsourced BLPs is psychological, namely the "lust for power" of editors who are tired of being just "workers" and want to be "bosses". In academia, were I work, this sort of thing happens all the time: people get tired of being just ordinary professors or researchers, and try to move to a position where, insted of working, they direct and control the work of other people.

How can one rise to be a "boss" in Wikipedia? Certainly not by editing contents: even if you edit 10,000 articles over several years and create a handful of "featured" ones, you will be just a "worker" like any of the other 10,000 regular editors. The same applies to any work (such as sourcing) that requires reading each article and thinking about its contents: no one can do that on more that 50-100 articles per day, the same top rate as for contents editing. Moreover, in that sort of work you often have to justify your edits to other "workers", and that puts you in the same "social level" as them.

A "boss" must do something that affects hundreds of thousands of articles, and does not require interacting with "workers" at their same level. It must be something definitive that an ordinary "worker" cannot stop or undo. It must be something that clearly put the "boss" on a higher level than the "workers".

That is the only explanation I can find for why we got the editorial tags at the top of articles. Robot-assisted tagging does not require thinking, so one can easily tag 1000 articles a day. The tagger is clearly "boss" because the tags are not "work", but "comands": every editorial tag says "I want this to be done, so some worker had better do it". A tagger is clearly above ordinary editors, because (by definition) the only way these can remove a tag is by complying with the wish of the tagger. Article tags have also the "advantage" that they violate the basic rule, "all editorial comments must go in the talk page": that is an advantage because (as in real life) one's social status is measured by the rules one can violate impunely.

And that is also the only explanation I can think for this RfC and the way it was carried out. The real "problem" of the unsourced BLPs is that the "bosses, after sticking hundreds of thousands of {{unreferenced}} tags, realized that they had been largely ignored — that is, the "workers" did not rush out to comply to their commands. That was doubly frustrating: not only it negated the authority of the "bosses", but made them look silly for wasting all that tagging work for nothing.

Enter then the idea of deleting all unsourced BLPs. Like tagging, deleting is something that can be done very quickly en masse, without having to read the articles. Like tagging, deletinon cannot be undone by ordinary editors. Even if each deletion has to be voted in the AfD, the place and timing of the vote ensures that voters will be mostly "bosses", and the final decision is made by a "boss": if one or two "workers" happen to see the AfD all in time and cast their vote, they can be just ignored.

That explains why no one here seems interested in statistics that prove that unsourced BLPs are harmless, or in the damage that deleting them might do. That explains why the proposers adamantly refuse to allow an editor other than the tagger to remove a tag without complying with its command. That is why they adamantly refuse to extend the AfD voting period beyond 7 days: for, if more "workers" get a chance to vote, they may out-vote the "bosses". After all, a Master of a thousand Slaves is not a Master at all if he lets even one Slave disobey his commands, or lets Slaves vote on wether to obey them.

Five years ago, Wikipedia could be defined as "three milion encyclopedia articles which anyone can edit". I am afraid that today it has become "a decadent social networking site with 10,000 members who have three million articles to play with". One just has to look at the pages in the "User talk:", "Wikipedia talk:", and "Template talk:" to realize that most Wikipedia decisions are being made by a small minority of "bosses" who seem to derive more plasure out of social interaction (and, in particular, the sense of power that comes from "bossing" over other members) than on making real substantial contributions to Wikipedia.

At the root of the problem is that Wikipedia's decision-making mechanism is thoroughly broken. As we saw here, and in countless other cases, any clique of ten editors can write a rule or standard, vote it among themselves, and declare it "consensus". Almost every guideline in Wikipedia:* was decided in this way. No country could survive more than a few years with such a "randomcratic" government; and it seems that Wikipedia cannot either.

All the best (if still possible to hope), --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 22:43, 23 February 2010 (UTC)