Doom

Too much about me and my thoughts are available elsewhere:

  http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles   
  http://obsidianrook.com/map

Some more wikipedia-centric musings:

The act of writing is an attempt at communication between human beings.

It can not be done without making assumptions about what the audience is likely to know.

An encyclopedia article is a general introduction to a subject which necessarily glosses over some details.

Extreme detail places a cost on the reader: time and mental effort has to be expended. So every article should begin with some sort of summary of the subject, an explanation of why the reader might be interested in delving into the detail that follows.

(Example: don't begin an article about a person with straight, chronological biography. Whatever is of interest about this person, it's not likely it occured at the beginning of their life. First discuss the achievements, then back-up and do a biographical section, if that seems adviseable.)

An encyclopedia article can not be a simple compendium of facts: it's meant to be read by human beings, and it has to be of interest to the audience.

The facts that are presented must be selected and filtered.

(Consider the now common legal technique of attempting to drown the opposition with more data than they can possibly digest. "Disclosure" is required, but nothing prevents them from giving far more than is needed to make it as hard as possible to find anything of significance.)

But the manner of presentation also has to flow as readable prose. Terseness is not the only critereon for good factual writing.

Spend some time pondering the difference between trying to achieve a "neutral point of view" (the stated goal of wikipedia) and an objective one.

A quotation from Neutral_point_of_view

A special case is the expression of aesthetic opinions. Wikipedia articles about art, artists, and other creative topics (e.g., musicians, actors, books, etc.) have tended toward the effusive. This is out of place in an encyclopedia; we might not be able to agree that so-and-so is the greatest guitar player in history. But it is important indeed how some artist or some work has been received by the general public or by prominent experts. Providing an overview of the common interpretations of a creative work, preferably with citations or references to notable individuals holding that interpretation, is appropriate. For instance, that Shakespeare is one of the greatest authors of the English language is a bit of knowledge that one should learn from an encyclopedia.

Advocacy Disguised as Neutrality

I think we're agreed advocacy has no place in the Wikipedia, and that the tendency to disguise advocacy as neutrality is totally dishonest. In fact there are many articles in the Wikipedia Style Guide that are essentially attempts at rooting out disguised neutrality.

Unfortunately -- I think I'm required to say "ironically" -- the Style Guide itself, is largely an example of disguised neutrality. It is essentially a compendium of injunctions to writers and editors to encourage them to write in a particular way; but instead of just coming out and saying it that way, the authors pretend that they're making pronouncements about the nature of words, just like all those other "style guides" out there.

But we don't actually know all that much about the nature of words, so what you get in the "Style Guide" is a lot of strangely overbearing flat statements that then have to back up and admit are all actually just "rules of thumb".

If you'd like to test this theory some time, try writing something, anything, in the Style Guide as though you were giving advice to writers (and/or editors) -- my prediction is that it won't last long: people will think it sounds too "personal" and begin trying to give it a (totally false) objective tone.

A case in point, is this material that's still in my Sandbox, an attempt at writing a replacement for the "Peacock Terms" and "Weasel Words" style guides:

  Sandbox of Doom

Oh, and here's one of my early, naive attempts at fixing problems in the "Avoid weasel words" article (which lasted for around two seconds):

 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_words&oldid=2640250

names that inspire and mislead

In retrospect, the "-pedia" suffix in "wikipedia" and the tag "the free online encyclopedia" may have been a mistake: reports abound of clueless young students that think the wikipedia is just like any other encyclopedia.

But then, the name got across the goal much more quickly than a more neutral name would've, like say "neutropia".

(Or "everything2"?)

Similarly, I suspect that the Wikipedia "Style Guide" is not much like those other "Style Guides" (that specify rules for hyphenation and so on), and calling it something else might alleviate some confusion -- but on the other hand the existing name got the idea across quickly at the outset...

Using a recognizeable name for something that's in fact a quite new thing is something of a social hack: the existing connotations of the name gives people a mental handle to work with while the new paradigm develops; it immediately gets across a way of working to a large number of people: we write for wikipedia in a way that "sounds encyclopedic", we write in the Style Guide in a way that sounds like other style guides out there, and so on.

Then as time goes on, divergences evolve from that original, rough vision -- and then I suspect the connotations of the original naming scheme start to get in the way, but by then it's too late.

As an example, consider "passive voice". It sounds very official, very "encylopedic", but anyone who has thought about it knows there are problems with it -- it leads to convoluted phrasing, it can be used to evade responsibility, it dodges the problem of defining the actual subject.

(An experiment for another day: look up what it actually says about "passive voice" in a style guide like Strunk and White. I bet that either they (1) use passive voice while deriding it or perhaps more likely (2) they've invented some other even more awkward system of phrasing in a later edit, to avoid being accused of hypocrisy.)

Geoff Nunberg on the subject of passive voice: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/passive.html

wikipedia failure scenario: a problem with consensus

Wikipedia is at risk of going the way of all volunteer organizations that try to use "consensus" decision-making: the most stubborn people win. The reasonable people just walk... or force themselves to become stubborn.

wikipedia failure scenarios: a problem with anonymity

For now, I'm just quoting something I posted to slashdot:

And here's a nightmare scenario for you: wikipedia continues to increase in popularity, to the point where it's actually politically significant what gets said in wikipedia articles. A Karl Rove-type hires 100 people and tells them to each get five wikipedia accounts, and develop reputations as responsible contributors. A year later, he's got 500 accounts he can play with to do spin control.

Variation: substitute slashdot for wikipedia. The 500 accounts all mod each other up.

Conclusion: anonymity is only good for toy sites; it's not for serious use.

neutral style = boring style?

Well, it's taken as a given that I can't write wikipedia articles in my own voice, right? I've got other web pages for that.

So what voice do we all write in? Well, we're supposed to be neutral right? But while neutrality might dictate some elements of literary style, there's a whole host of other things that go into making something seem like "encylopedia" writing: We try to write in a vaguely stiff and formal way, imitating the encyclopedia articles we've seen elsewhere.

There is no implicit reason that neutral writing should have to be boring writing, but everyone acts as though this is so.

If an article drowns the reader in so many randomly presented facts no one can get through it, that's regarded as at least okay, if not exce:llent. If you do anything else, the odds are good that someone is going to drive by and play Neutrality Cop, until it's chopped up into something unreadable. Wikipedia style: a hundred disjointed pieces, with no sense of flow from one to the other.

"In fact the prose of Wikipedia is inexorably drawn to a corporate impersonality -- it's the way the English language would talk if it had no place to go home to at night." -- Geoffrey Nunberg, "A Wiki's as Good as a Nod", Fresh Air Commentary, 6/5/07, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/wikipedia.html

A peeve: appendicitis

A major peeve of mine with wikipidea edits is this tendency for people to look at a list of three examples and insist on adding a fourth, then a fifth, then why not six, seven, eight? And the reason why not, of course, is that you don't need to list every possible example to get a point across. If I say "some notable beat writers were: ... " and I happen to skip one that you know about there really is no particular reason you have to insert that one you've got on your mind. In fact, the one on your mind may be your absolute favorite beat writer, they may be the one beat writer that you first think of when you think "beat writer" and there would still be no compulsion to stick it in the list. The one possible justification for adding it would be if you know for a fact that experts in the field of beat writers regard your example as more prominent, more canoncial than my example. But even in that case instead of just adding your example, you should be thinking about replacing one of mine with it, because you can't say everything at once, and an english sentence with a list of more than about three items in it can be pretty unwieldly, and adding more facts at random to an article does not do anyone any good if they also make the article unreadable.

A related problem: someone comes along and reads a paragraph on some subject, and their first thought is "Ooooh! They missed something! I know something about this! I'll stick it on the end of this paragraph right here!". It's fine if you want to show off, it's great if you've got something interesting to say about it: but pick the right place. Think about where it should go. Create a new spot for it if there's no good existing one. Maybe you should even create a whole new article...

neutrality over truth?

What do you do when something that you know to be true is not common knowledge? Then speaking the truth is deviating from the consensus understanding of the truth, and you are not being "neutral", you're taking a side. Well, then, am I supposed to do some research to find other people's work that I can site to support the point? But what if there isn't any (or isn't very much)? What if it's just something that I know? Uh oh, now I'm in the realm of original research. I can make a case for this point, but because it's my case, and not a quote of someone else's, it doesn't belong in the realm of the wikipedia. I can publish elsewhere, and hope that the point eventually finds it's way into the consensus understanding, and from there into the wikipedia, but in the meantime, I'm expected to keep silent here... I might even be expected to write things that I know are wrong, to avoid presenting an original point.

Perhaps this is not an optimal situation, eh?

Could it be that there should be a "wikiresearch" companion to "wikipedia"?

show don't tell, right?

Why am I the only one who seems to think it's a good idea to quote some passages written by an author when discussing an author's work? What better way to get across what the author's work is like than to actually show some of it? (Everyone does know that short quotations are allowed under the "fair use" doctrine, right?).

how can you avoid biting the newbies?

"Don't bite the newbies" is one of the standard principles, but how is it possible to avoid it, given the way wikipedia is set-up? A new person wanders in and decides to try adding some material to an article, and there's invariably a problem with what they've done-- it's pretty typical for new contributors to slip into magazine writing, it's also often not source very well, doesn't fit where they tried to add it, and may actually be factually wrong. It's very likely that the only thing to do for the good of the article is to revert the changes, and how can that be experienced as anything but a "bite"? Given the set of customs that's evolved on wikipedia, you're not supposed to do the discussion on that page, it's supposed to be stashed in the background on the Talk page, but this being a newbie, they may not think to click on the label "Discussion". You can try leaving a message in the History log when you do the revert, but this being a newbie, they may not think to click on "History". You can leave a message on their own page, but newbies often don't have one, they make their first edits as a not-logged in individual that displays nothing but their IP address.

Thoughts: (1) Break the rules: Insert a temporary comment in the text with explicit instructions to look on the Talk page. Problems: the comment may be more temporary than you want it to be, instantly removed by someone else. (2) Salvage the new material: try to find something, anything to do with the new material. Will it fly with just a re-write? Can you say something else about this subject that makes it clear you at least agree it's an interesting direction? Problems: takes time and thought. Do you let the junk sit there until you can find time to deal with it? It might sit a long time.

A plea for changes to wikipedia: get rid of the not-logged-in edits, make people at least choose a handle where they can receive messages. If there's some grave privacy violation about revealing someone's IP address, why do we default to doing that? -- Doom (talk) 17:29, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Discussion vs. Talk and hypertext design

Someone, at some point, decided that the way to get into the "Talk" pages is by punching on a tab labeled "Discussion". So now we have two terms for the same thing. An experienced person typically uses the shorter and older term, but if you address a newbie, you have to remember to use the longer, less familiar jargon, or else they'll have no hope of finding their way in.

It's a very old principle of hypertext design (perhaps unfortunately, not followed with the web): the link label and the title of thing linked too should match each other. This gives the user immediate feedback that they just went to the place they intended to, it makes the users feel like they're in control.

assume good faith

A wikipedia contributor is required to assume good faith, but a wikipedia admin never does. We are required to take people at face value, but they are allowed to practice their mind-reading skills... now admittedly, they have very few other tools to work with, and it's not my complaint that they try to make insightful guesses (though I do wish their judgments were more insightful and not just kindergarten-teacher schtick like "I don't like your attitude, young man"); my real complaint is that it's ridiculous to expect us to refrain from making our own guesses.

What the rule "assume good faith" really means is "go through the motions of acting as though you believe your opponent is not a crazy bastard"... but sometimes your opponent really is a crazy bastard, and you would have to be a complete idiot to just ignore that possibility. This is a rule that demands a fundamentally insincere, feigned politeness, and that is not really acting in good faith.

("Assume good faith"? You wouldn't buy a pack of baseball cards based on this principle, why would you try to build a critical piece of information infrastructure based on it?)

-- Doom (talk) 17:29, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

inventing rules that aren't rules

• Tradition: This article has been like this for a year, what right have you to change it now?

• Ask first: Before you change this page you should discuss it on the Talk page!

• Homesteading: I wrote this page, you're not allowed to change it.

You talking to me?

If you'd like to talk to me, you can just use my talk page: User_talk:Doom. (I just moved some material over to there.)