User talk:SandyGeorgia/ArbVotes

On the importance of featured content

Hi Sandy, it is great to see you are putting a guide together. You have a different and important perspective, and it is one that I know I will not score very well in, ... *gulp*

One suggested correction is that since I have only two edits prior to March 2006, my duration on this project is more like 2 and half years as opposed to four (regrettably).

Also, as I know how much you value FA contributions and this isn't my strongest point, I would like to draw your attention to my comments on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Samuel Johnson, where my small visible participation belies how much work was involved. I became involved in this one at the request of Ottava Rima who was having difficulties pushing his first FA across the line. On the personal side, I assisting him grapple with the process a little, and assisted him learn the ropes of Wikisource so he could de-stress a little and let the FA run its course. He asked me to set up transcription projects for a few works that he was interested in, such as s:Index:Prometheus Unbound - Shelley.djvu, and I've fulfilled about half of those requests. In regards to the content of this FA, I uploaded 2,000+ pages of public domain text about the subject onto Wikisource, in order to proofread p. 168 of Johnsonian Miscellanies Vol.II because it was used prominently as a primary source on the article, and I identified a problem with the referencing - it was not so much an amazing eye as meticulous verification that every source was still in use by an inline cite, and when I found one that wasnt, I uploaded the text onto Wikisource to verify that it wasnt needed either.

More importantly, perhaps you could be generous (*beg*) and take a few moments to review some my Wikisource work: that is where I have been doing most of my serious content work over the last year and a half.

I have been heavily active in their featured text process since August last year, when someone else nominated a page that I had created: s:Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration. I dug around to find all of the printing information I could access, and wrote the neutral paragraph that is found at the top of the page. We featured it the following month, and then there were no more quality texts in the queue that had community approval. I was stunned. Wikisource has only one featured per month, but we were going months without any featured text on the main page. Obviously something needed to be fixed. Inspection of the previous featured texts left a lot to be desired; these texts often were not accompanied by pagescans. So I started adding pagescans for every text I could find, and nominating interesting texts. In January this year the drought was broken with The Black Cat by Poe being pushed through to featured status, and again with no pagescans provided so we were relying on the proofreading done by contributors (in this case two 'crats had approved it, but how does the reader know that it can be trusted?). Pagescans on Wikisource are like references on Wikipedia - German Wikisource has long ago removed any text that didnt have a pagescan. Since January, a good number of the texts I worked on have been featured, and it is now customary to reject featured candidates that are not accompanied by pagescans. i.e. I undertook to improve the quality of the featured text process, and have achieved that goal. Here are a few examples of featured text where my involvement is easy to see:

s:The Times/The Late Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S.

s:United States patent X1

s:Index:GeorgeTCoker.djvu

Another example of my involvement is a bit more difficult to explain, but the results were far more rewarding. The text s:The Wind in the Willows was nominated by Quadell back in January[1] when it had no pagescans. It obtained a bit of community support, so in April I uploaded a public domain edition *, and started a proofreading project for it: s:Index:Wind in the Willows (1913).djvu. It was very slow going. In July we set up a "Proofread of the Month" project with WitW as the first project,[2] we finished it within the month (a few of us were very busy on August 31), and it was featured in September. This was the first and only time that a big book has been featured on Wikisource, and we had pagescans for it, with two people verifying that every page of text is accurate to the orthography on the accompanying scan, and I am quite proud of the work we did.

I realise that this is still not the same as a Featured article on en.wp, as the community participation and standards are much higher here, but I did want to point out that I am very committed to contributing high quality content, on all of the Wikimedia projects. If nothing else, maybe I have sparked your interest in Wikisource and its Featured Text system. I'd better go answer some more questions *groan* :-)

In closing, English Wikisource was once mostly a big dumping ground that the French and German projects wished would clean up its act. The graph on the right shows the level of inertia that has been injected into the English Wikisource transcription projects over the last year, bring it into line with the other language projects. These stats shows the English Wikisource catching up to the French and German project in terms of quality.

Regards, John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:15, 30 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How to judge the relative qualities of the proof reading ....? Tony (talk) 13:40, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Funny you should ask ... new stats have just been created, and I am on top of the moon right now.

Quality is much harder to judge. Each page should be "correct" on the first pass (the page goes "yellow"), and verified to be correct by a second person on the second pass (the page goes "green"). The software doesnt easily allow the same account to do both passes, so at least two sets of eyes should have reviewed it, and it should be correct. We then have three other aspects that Distributed Proofreaders do not: 1) the social fabric of users who are constantly reviewing each others work - this promotes a sense of ethics to work together to "get it right", 2) we use revision patrolling (see s:Help:Patrolling) so each pass is not only committed by different people, but two different people also need to approve the edits, and 3) we published to the web immediately, so if someone wants to only do one page, and do it well, there is instant gratification in doing so - DP holds the whole book up until it is completed, which means that people get very frustrated, and push it through quicker by reducing the quality of their work, which means it then gets held up in the latter rounds, and still doesnt get published anyway, but only the senior DPers can work on texts in the higher rounds, so it gets stuck. So at worst we have two sets of eyes (if the same two people patrol each others changes) and at best we have four - all dictated by software.

However, English Wikisource has a lot of "newbies" working on this - the French and German projects have been using this extension for a lot longer than we have, and they have a tighter knit community - there is no doubt that the majority of their proofread and validated pages will be of a higher quality than the English pages.

But I think the English project is catching up in regards to quality as well, because we have had a few really meticulous people doing exceptional work ... s:Page:Life and journals of Kah-ke-wa-quo-na-by.djvu/9 is one that User:WilyD and I were discussing on #wikisource ^connect half an hour ago, and s:Page:A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force.djvu/4 is an example of User:Struthious Bandersnatch going a bit overboard. :-) (take a look at the history of each page) The result is that these pages become canonical examples of how to do the more finicky presentation tricks, and the German and French are importing a lot of our innovations. For example, WilyD is using Struthious Bandersnatch's trick over at s:Page:Life and journals of Kah-ke-wa-quo-na-by.djvu/13 - they are nuts to go to such lengths, but these are "featured texts" in the making - tens of hundreds of hours per book. s:Index:Life and journals of Kah-ke-wa-quo-na-by.djvu is a sea of green - this is WilyD's first and only project, started in April this year for the sole purpose of being an accessible reference for Peter Jones (missionary), which WilyD hopes to being up to FA level here - he is getting there.

The Italians are now also getting into the game, and doing some rather neat things that the other projects hadn't thought of. User:Alex brollo is learning python in order to build Wikisource bots - and he is getting up to speed too - all because he loves old books about horses. s:Index:Equitation.djvu was his first, and s:Index:Notes on equitation and horse training.djvu is his second, awaiting verification from someone else. (probably me, because I owe him for the work he did on s:Index:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism - Volume 1.djvu)

I imagine that this is what Wikipedia was like back in 2001/2 - it is quite fun to be involved in.

So, at this stage quality can't be measured - it is just a gut feeling, but that is good enough for the moment. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 15:34, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Possible pointers

Hi Sandy. I've been following the various user election voting guides with interest, including your one. I'm wary of jumping into talk pages like this, as it might be seen to be trying to unduly influence things, but (in the spirit of John's section above) I hope it is OK to give some pointers to possibly help you in your assessment? I noticed that you had next to my name a link to East's election guide. I'm currently asking East a question about his comment about me, see here. He hasn't responded yet (I left it 24 hours, and his only edit has been the robot move-protection of today's featured article). I'm unsure why he is concerned about what I said at the badlydrawnjeff case (which wasn't very much), so I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that. I'm also preparing some summaries on my article contributions and other things that may (or may not) address your concerns about knowing what it is like "in the trenches", including something about my AN and ANI contributions (and why they have dropped off in the last three months). I also have a list of FAC and FAR and Peer Review contributions as a reviewer (not much, but it might be the sort of thing you are looking for). Finally, some of the articles I've worked on have out-of-date or missing assessments, so I am trying to find someone to assess them and bring that up-to-date (sadly, nothing of FA-quality yet). I may not get that done until close to midnight UTC (I'm running right up against that deadline), but I wanted to let you know that I have some notes here that I've made, and I will be saying something about such things at some point. It will probably be here at my "longer statement" expanding on the points I made in my initial statement. Carcharoth (talk) 12:24, 30 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My 2 cents

Thanks for the detailed rationale. I find it most useful. Steven Walling (talk) 00:51, 1 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Me and mainspace

You have voted now, but it's kind of an odd comment about me and mainspace. Did you total up the candidates' number of mainspace edits and look at what proportion were mine? I believe it is over 40% to me. It is true that I don't work on the FA end of the spectrum. I do other stuff, namely a great deal of starting articles, hypertext work like redirects and so on. I have respect for those who work on FA, naturally, but there are literally millions of other articles. I don't see that my commitment to grunt work is really much to do with Arbitration, either way. Perhaps you could scan my braglists some time, too. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:52, 1 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please see discussions at the talk page of User:SandyGeorgia/ArbStats (Franamax reworked several times to correctly reflect your edits, and to my knowledge, he thought he had gotten them all). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:01, 1 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the efforts towards numerical fairness. I simply don't understand why you think I'm not "engaged" with mainspace, in your comments. (I would say that I do plenty to move B class up to A, by gradual improvement and referencing.) Others have read those, and in providing a "guide" you are entitled to make judgements, but I think not to misrepresent the vast bulk of my editing. I don't ask for a medal for my current editing of John Milton, for example, but you don't seem to have a broad-based system for recognition. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:49, 3 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd certainly agree with this, as I come across Charles's very useful edits all the time, in an incredible variety of articles. It doesn't seem to be the main issue in these elections though. Johnbod (talk) 15:20, 13 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Concerns?

I was wondering what concerns you had about my candidacy, and if I could possibly address them or help clear them up? --Hemlock Martinis (talk) 18:43, 1 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Responded on my talk. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:38, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Response from Carcharoth

Sandy, as one of those who provided a detailed userspace rationale for your oppose vote on my ArbCom candidacy, I'm posting here to let you know that I've made a general statement here to address some of the concerns raised by my opposers. That statement doesn't address the specific concerns you raised here. As a number of people (11 so far, I think) have cited your rationale as a reason for opposing me, I'm responding to your points here. Please feel free to move this post somewhere else if you think it would be more appropriate.

AN participation

In your rationale you mentioned ratio of AN to mainspace editing. While I agree that this is high, my view is that the ratio alone doesn't say much unless you look at the actual contributions made to AN and to mainspace. I have said in the statement I linked above that I'm looking for constructive criticism and ways to learn from this. Would you be able to suggest what I should do in this case (noting that I've already scaled back my AN and ANI participation and have done so for several months now)? If it is merely making sure the ratio improves, that should be no problem, but were there specific concerns about the type of threads I was getting involved in, or any particular approach I was taking? If you found examples when examining my AN edits, I'd be grateful if you could point them out to me.

Top content contributions

You also said I have "no significant top content contributions". I can't really contest this either, though I have been working on a few pages here and there. Unfortunately, nothing is ready as yet. I do want to say that I have taken your comments about FA-level contributions very much to heart, and regardless of whether I'm elected or not, I do intend to work more on that side of things in the months to come, both at FAC and FAR and on working on and bringing articles, lists and images to featured status, and helping others to do so.

Time and energy

Your point about undue focus I've acknowledged in the statement I linked above. You did also quote what someone else said: "he doesn't seem to value other people's time and energy". I can understand that it might look like that, but this is more me being overly keen and eager when something interests me. If someone tells me they are busy, I do drop the matter and leave it. – sometimes I mistake people turning up and replying to me as meaning they are interested in what I've said, or that they have time to spare. I'm actually used to posting on rather obscure Wikipedia talk pages and waiting days or weeks for a reply, so getting a reply the same evening is the exception rather than the rule for me. I hope that explains why I sometimes appear to be buzzing around posting everywhere - it is usually because I've forgotten that those pages are more heavily watched.

Transparency and sleuthing

Your final two points have me puzzled.
"I have other concerns about transparency, having seen Carcharoth appear in the midst of discussions on forums that he rarely frequents"
If this is a reference to off-wiki communications, I can state plainly that I don't use IRC. The times when I may have come to a discussion from an off-wiki source is the wiki-en-l mailing list. Most times though, when I pop up in a discussion, it will be because I arrived there via my watchlist (which is very large). Either directly, or from seeing a discussion pop up on someone's talk page. In future, when I contribute on a talk page I've not edited before or have not edited in a while, I will try and state how I reached the page when I post, though I'm not sure how widespread such a practice is (i.e. whether others do this or not).
"I'm always concerned when someone appears to be sleuthing to come up with conclusions in areas where they just don't have the background to be drawing conclusions."
And here, I have no idea what you are talking about. Can you go into more detail?

One-year terms

One final point, seeing as the election is now mostly about the sixth and seventh seats, is that those seats are for one-year terms, so the point you made in your ArbVotes document ("Three years on ArbCom is a very long time in internet years") doesn't apply for those seats. Whether this would affect who you would be prepared to see elected to those two seats I don't know, but I thought it might be helpful to point this out. I can say that if I was appointed to one of those seats, I wouldn’t accept a term extension at the end of the year, but would stand down and run for re-election based on my record during that year.

Given all the above (and I apologise for the length), I hope you don’t mind if I ask you whether your mind is set on this, or whether you will consider looking again at what I have said, and in particular what my supporters have said, and seeing if this would change your mind? Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 05:41, 13 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]