Would you contribute more if the wiki were blank?

[David Goodman]

In starting articles, I ignore the WP version on CZ and use the current one. I could do this just as well if there were no WP version. Selected ones could be brought in by putting them iin CZ live, just as we are doing now with   many hundred articles.

Perhaps the WP sitting there has a psychological effect, but I do not think that is the primary problem. The primary problem is that there are many WP articles we might choose to consider out of scope--everyone will have heir own list, but I would start with high schools, radio stations, and subway stations. It would be easy enough  to say, for these topics, go to WP instead of having the WP articles appear under our banner--no matter how distinctive we made the headings, they would be taken for ours.

There is one major problem. If they were all removed, we would have an immense number of red links in our articles, unless there were some way to redirect them to the current WP--I think this might be technically possible. If this cannot be done, or some other solution to this found, then the WP articles have to stay in.

I am also

[Nancy Sculerati]

I don't agree, David. As a matter of fact, those red links would prompt the new articles we need and spur work! The author of the new article can always open a second browser window and pull up the Wikipedia version to refer to, if stuck. Eventually, we would have a full palette of working links  (Unless, of course, they refer to high schools, subway stations etc.)

[Stephen Ewen]

The only trade-off I'd go for is, if blanked, then the Project should be CC-nc.

[Scott Young]

I prefer the flexibility of using the WP article as a starting point if I so desire. In many cases, I had contributed to them in the past and only eliminated some of the "fluff" once moved to the CZ.  In others, I am accumulating ideas and will probably extensively rewrite (essentially blanking the WP article), hopefully in a pre-planned collaboration with others with similar interests.

[Nereo Preto]

No matter how good the content on Wikipedia is, if people were significantly more motivated to work on our project if they were always encouraged to start from scratch, then why shouldn't they start from scratch?

Hy Larry,
I see your point, is about the psychological effect of having the pages blank (am I right?). It might work in fact.

How would it look like? All pages now in WP but without the contents, only the title? Or not even the titles? Which means only live articles will exist. I'd like the second one, titles in WP are sometimes odd and I still have to learn how to change titles!

A way to save the good (good?) effects of having the page blank and take advantage of the good contents in WP might be to have blank pages, and an easy-to-use "Retrieve article in WP with the same title" button.
I would agree with a solution as this one, and probably would contribute some more, but I am just speaking for myself. Perhaps people will like to start over from scratch. Or, maybe, they will see a CZ with so much empty spaces, that they will set a "CZ is not important" mode in their minds. Hard to tell for me.

[Larry Sanger]

The only trade-off I'd go for is, if blanked, then the Project should be CC-nc.

I agree.  That's an advantage.

I prefer the flexibility of using the WP article as a starting point if I so desire. In many cases, I had contributed to them in the past and only eliminated some of the "fluff" once moved to the CZ.  In others, I am accumulating ideas and will probably extensively rewrite (essentially blanking the WP article), hopefully in a pre-planned collaboration with others with similar interests.

There's a way to finesse this.  Nancy got it above.  If someone goes to edit a blank page, above the text box, we place a link to the Wikipedia edit page: _View or import the Wikipedia article on this topic_

[Nereo Preto]

There is one major problem. If they were all removed, we would have an immense number of red links in our articles, unless there were some way to redirect them to the current WP--I think this might be technically possible. If this cannot be done, or some other solution to this found, then the WP articles have to stay in.

Right.
Let's admit we decide to blank WP articles. Would it be possible to have blue links (to CZ), red links (broken) and, say, purple links (to WP)? That would made it, I suppose.
However, red links is a real problem in my view. Besides more substantial facts, a page full or red writings is ugly...

[Ori Redler]

Larry, First to answer your question: yes, I would do more with a blank CZ (this is what I thought we should have done in the first place) but I'm not sure that is what we should have. Instead of a 'blank' CZ we should have a clear view of what we want to have in CZ.

I think that the lack of activity by most authors and editors is understandable: they simply have neither the authority nor the ability to do anything useful, and there are too many distractions.

Celia Chazelle is quite right to point that most of the articles in her field of expertise, medieval studies, "are not bad." They are indeed not bad because they are almost invariably stuff copied or summarised from good books, good online content or a good encyclopaedias. They should be at least "not bad."

The articles that require some more knowledge, the BIG articles, are very bad for the same reason: they are compilations of such summaries.

But those "not bad" and bad articles are a distinct minority. About 80 percent of the articles are simply not encyclopaedic articles in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a vast universe of lists, almanac items, trivia, more lists, copyright violations, semi-copyright violations, more trivia, stuff copied from IMDB, some more trivia, and so on.

As I see it, CZ has three options:

A. Peel off the non-encyclopaedic articles and create a more traditional encyclopaedia with about 200,000 articles. This will attract many of the people who came here initially to do just that, but will deter using CZ as a jack of all trades and deter many who want to be with jack.

B.  Peel off the non-encyclopaedic articles selectively by merging articles and creating sub-encyclopaedias for the less traditional stuff, with a less restricting approach to contributing to those (e.g., a "films repository" or "Albums and Music"). This will help many 'live' with the non-encyclopaedic stuff more easily, but still keep the stuff within CZ.

C.  Keep the non-encyclopaedic articles but label them as "data articles". This will enable writers to safely state that this and that article is not an encyclopaedic article, but still keep it within CZ for its content value.

D. Do nothing (i.e., keep it all, don't change status of anything) and hope that 1,500,000 articles will somehow be edited and "encyclopaedised" by 500 authors.


The effort, it seems to me, was to frame a reasonable framework of policies, procedures and standards within which those 500 would be able to work. This is a good thing, but it doesn't work so well if while working out those policies, procedures and standards people are basically 'on hold' and cannot do much, because doing involves working according to some agreed upon principles with regards to this major issue of what to do with the WP stuff.

For myself, I felt a bit discouraged, because after editing about 120 articles I felt unable to do anything useful with the stuff I've edited: I could neither delete it, nor label it as "data", neither relegate it to somewhere else -- those are undecided matters, and remain undecided.

In other words: we should have a clear picture of what we want to have at the end, with specific reference to what we should do with what we have.

[Larry Sanger]

No matter how good the content on Wikipedia is, if people were significantly more motivated to work on our project if they were always encouraged to start from scratch, then why shouldn't they start from scratch?

Hy Larry,
I see your point, is about the psychological effect of having the pages blank (am I right?). It might work in fact.

Exactly.  Thank you

I'm composing a long (ugh ) explanation of the psychology of it.

How would it look like? All pages now in WP but without the contents, only the title? Or not even the titles? Which means only live articles will exist. I'd like the second one, titles in WP are sometimes odd and I still have to learn how to change titles!

A way to save the good (good?) effects of having the page blank and take advantage of the good contents in WP might be to have blank pages, and an easy-to-use "Retrieve article in WP with the same title" button.
I would agree with a solution as this one, and probably would contribute some more, but I am just speaking for myself. Perhaps people will like to start over from scratch. Or, maybe, they will see a CZ with so much empty spaces, that they will set a "CZ is not important" mode in their minds. Hard to tell for me.

It is always hard to tell and I must remind myself of my ignorance of these matters, and that I am merely speculating.  It's true, because we are in unchartered waters.

How would it look?  No titles, no nothing.  A blank wiki that we can fill up and make our own.  Of course, we'll save all the CZ Live articles.

[Tim McKenzie]

One thing that no-one seems to have (directly) addressed yet is the usefulness to the general public. As much as I would like to, I don't currently have the spare time to work on CZ. However, I was planning to make it my Online General Reference of Choice as soon as it was publicly launched. This would involve not only using it for my own benefit, but I would inevitably end up referring other people to its articles, too. This will be much more difficult if there aren't many articles. I think that as a consequence, fewer people will hear about CZ, and the community won't grow as much, so the content won't grow as fast, so it won't be so useful ... you know the story.

I think it might be beneficial to keep quite separate in your minds the parts of CZ that editors see, and the parts that the rest of the general public sees. You could, for example, leave the WP articles there at first, but when someone goes to make the first edit to one of those articles, have them edit a blank page by default. That way, the general public will immediately have a useful resource, but CZ editors will get to start from scratch. They can, of course, copy any WP content they think is worth having. You could even have logged-in editors see links in a different colour if they're linked to unmodified WP articles. This would be a psychological incentive for editors to work on all the articles and turn all those links blue, while casual readers will still have a seamless CZ experience.

Tim
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[Larry Sanger]

However, red links is a real problem in my view. Besides more substantial facts, a page full or red writings is ugly...

Yes, but that's one reason that people like to write articles from scratch--to turn the red links blue!

[Zachary Pruckowski]

Personally, I find starting a new page to be a bit intimidating.  In another wiki-based project I'm involved in, they started from scratch, and seem to have a hard time starting articles.  That may not apply to our contributors, or it may apply to future contributors.

I worry mostly that we'll lose potential readers (and thus potential authors) if we have to start from scratch.  Right now, people just link to WP whenever they want more information on a topic.  I think our goal needs to be to get people from using WP as their default to using CZ as their default.  That's not going to happen if we can't cover more than 1% of WP's articles.

[Versuri]

Personally, I find starting a new page to be a bit intimidating. 

I think the opposite. Many people enjoy starting articles.

[Larry Sanger]

Personally, I find starting a new page to be a bit intimidating.  In another wiki-based project I'm involved in, they started from scratch, and seem to have a hard time starting articles.  That may not apply to our contributors, or it may apply to future contributors.

Well, I'd have to know more about your project to know if the analogy extended properly.

One good analogy is the origin of Wikipedia itself.  Tasked with writing an encyclopedia on wiki, people started articles willy-nilly.

I worry mostly that we'll lose potential readers (and thus potential authors) if we have to start from scratch.  Right now, people just link to WP whenever they want more information on a topic.  I think our goal needs to be to get people from using WP as their default to using CZ as their default.  That's not going to happen if we can't cover more than 1% of WP's articles.

But surely people are only going to link to the articles that are live on CZ.  The copies of WP articles that we host will not be the most recent.  Indeed, if you're worried about people linking to us, consider the fact that a lot of articles that begin life as copies of WP and are edited only a little here and there will not be trusted by non-CZers as the best versions of those articles.  By contrast, the articles that we start will always be the most recent versions of those articles.

Generally, people will start linking to our content when our content deserves to be linked to.

I also have to say I doubt we'll lose that many readers.  Speaking for myself, I doubt I'll be reading many non-live Wikipedia articles on CZ; I'd go to WP for the latest version.  Arguably, having only live versions of articles on CZ will make browsing a more interesting experience for people...

[Joe Quick]

Well, I slept on it and then went back to check out the WP articles that I visit most often and checked out the threads related to other topics that have been brought up here.  My thoughts have changed.

When I was thinking only about encouraging more activity, a complete blank didn't seem worthwhile, but a few other items seem important too:

1)  On the issue of CC, I feel good about donating my time to public learning but not about donating my time to someone else's wallet.  I like the idea of the non-commercial CC license and I gather that a rewrite would help make this easier to implement.

2)  Mediocre articles from WP deserve to be improved, but the attitude that I expressed earlier, that mediocre content is better than nothing definitely makes me less likely to go back and turn it into good content.  If something is already there, then I will be much less likely to contribute to it than if I feel that an important topic is missing altogether.

3) Number 2 implies that my answer to the original question is "yes, I would contribute more if we started from scratch." There are a dozen articles that I can think of off the top of my head that I would contribute to writing anew but would be unlikely to edit in their current form.

4) Many WP articles should be combined or cut entirely.  Starting from scratch makes the task of doing this much less daunting.

5) It is important for us to remember that our blanking of our content will not make the WP content disappear.  If we don't have an article ready to go yet, then people can still turn to Wikipedia.  We can start by offering an alternative in a few areas and work to offer an alternative in as many areas as possible.