User:Kurt Jansson/questions

About the community

 * 1. conflict resolution: Which mechanisms do exist to settle or mediate disputes or conflicts?

Procedures for resolving content disputes are listed at Resolving disputes. The first step suggested is discussion with third parties. Following that, formal or informal mediation and conducting polls are other possible options, with arbitration as a final resort.
 * 2. dealing with problematic behavior: Which kinds of problematic or destructive behavior do you often find yourself confronted with? Which actions are taken to meet these?

Common problems include vandalism, personal attacks and failure to work towards a neutral point of view. Guidelines such as "Wikiquette" aim to make it clear which behaviours are constructive and desirable.

Vandalism is sufficiently common that there are standard procedures for dealing with it, including asking at WP:AIV that an account be blocked. Other types of problematical behavior, if serious enough, are typically posted at WP:AN/I.


 * 3. working climate and culture of discussion: How would you describe the working climate in your community? How do you characterize its culture of discussion? Are working tasks and roles assigned specifically, or do you handle this rather flexibly?

Numerous venues for discussion exist, including the talk pages of articles, WikiProjects and noticeboards. While these facilitate the construction of articles, some Wikipedians do tire of having to repeatedly defend their input to editors they feel are less knowledgeable about a subject than themselves.

Most working tasks and roles are flexible; almost all articles are available for any contributor to edit, and editors can join any WikiProject. Editors often choose to specialize - for example, vandal-fighting or fixing disambiguation problems, but such decisions are solely by individual editors; there is no commitment as to level of activity or duration. A few administrative roles, the most common being that of administrators, require community action (voting or rough consensus) in order for an editor to play such roles.


 * 4. self-assessment of the community: How do you assess yourself as a community? Where do you spot strengths and weaknesses, also in comparison to other Wikipedia communities? Are there communities on which you orientate yourselves? (This question refers to the community itself, not the created articles; see item 8.)

The English edition of Wikipedia has the largest community of any Wikimedia project, and as a result has the most complex structures. One strength of this is that contributors can discuss almost any article with other editors who have knowledge on the subject. A weakness is that it can take some time for new contributors to find their feet and become accustomed to all the procedures and structure of the project. Also, the English Wikipedia is the first to run into issues of scale in areas such as the discussion process for the making of administrators.

About the created product

 * 5. definition as an encyclopedia / role models: What do you demand from the texts of your encyclopedia? How do you conceive your encyclopedic product: More as a pragmatic knowledge and information database or rather as standing in the tradition of classical encyclopedias? Are there reference works from past and present which serve as role models?

Over time, the requirement for articles to be accurate and to have appropriate references has increased in importance. Initially, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had influence on some editors' conceptualisation of an encyclopaedia project, and many articles incorporated information from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Others have noted similarities between the amateur contributors to Wikipedia and the process of creating the Oxford English Dictionary.

While a long held aim of the project has been to construct an initial stable version - Wikipedia 1.0 - progress toward this goal has been slow, and it is now widely known that Wikipedia's English edition is rapidly updated, but not always in an accurate manner.

The English Wikipedia has been significantly shaped by the policy on what Wikipedia is not; for example, that it is not a dictionary, and that it is not a place for instructions (how-to).


 * 6. article quality: How important is the quality of the articles for you? Which actions do you take in your community to raise the level of quality and improve the articles? (Examples could be the election of featured and good articles, writing contests and time or theme oriented quality initiatives.) Which exclusion criteria are there to enforce low level demands about article quality?

Various quality-related initiatives exist. Many articles are rated by WikiProjects; articles can gain featured status and appear on the front page, or can more readily gain good article status. Other media, such as images and sounds, can also become featured. While writing contests and quality initiatives also exist, these play less of a role in the English edition than in many other editions of Wikipedia.

A range of criteria exist allowing the speedy deletion of new articles which do not meet a very basic standard. Five core policies (neutral point of view, Verifiability, what Wikipedia is not, no original research and biographies of living persons exist to guide the standards which each article is expected to meet.


 * 7. neutrality: How important is the idea of a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) when new articles are created? How do you describe the concept of a Neutral Point of View?

A Neutral Point of View is described as a "fundamental Wikipedia principle". In our project page on the topic, it is described as:

"The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting views. The policy requires that, where there are or have been conflicting views, these should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being the truth, and all significant published points of view are to be presented, not just the most popular one. It should also not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions.

As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. It is a point of view that is neutral – that is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject.

Debates are described, represented, and characterized, but not engaged in. Background is provided on who believes what and why, and which view is more popular. Detailed articles might also contain the mutual evaluations of each viewpoint, but studiously refrain from stating which is better. One can think of unbiased writing as the fair, analytical description of all relevant sides of a debate. When bias towards one particular point of view can be detected, the article needs to be fixed."

NPOV is non-negotiable. Depending on their subject, new articles which do not comply with the policy but are otherwise valuable may be tagged until the issue is addressed.


 * 8. assessment of the product: How do you judge the general condition of your encyclopedia? Where do you see strengths and weaknesses?

The English edition of Wikipedia sees steadily climbing usage and a continual flow of new articles. The general perception is that articles are becoming increasingly useful and accurate. Due to Wikipedia's increased visibility, various inaccuracies, and in particular occasional errors introduced by unaddressed vandalism, have increasingly become the subject of media attention.

A relatively recent policy change — that negative unsourced information in biographies of living people should be deleted on sight — has been implemented to mitigate the impact of one weakness, that so much information in Wikipedia is unsourced (so much so that it is impractical to adopt a policy that only sourced information be allowed).

A major part of Wikipedia's success - that anyone can edit it, without registering or any other barrier, so that hundreds of thousands of people have contributed constructively - is also acknowledged as a major weakness, because articles are open to vandalism. Thus, a weakness of Wikipedia's current articles is the presence of vandalism. However, in most cases vandalism is short-lived. There have been discussions of a "stable version" that might perhaps be what non-logged in users would see, thus hiding potential vandalizing edits until reviewed, but this has yet to be tested on the German Wikipedia or discussed widely on the English Wikipedia.

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia's greatest strength is probably depth. Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in history, and articles can be found on nearly any topic, while articles on core topics generally document the most important aspects of a subject.