Community Portal/Article vs Discussion Distinctions

Decision: Only talk pages and discussion pages should be signed. Created a Bylined Articles category to mark old tutorials and pages that had a byline before this decision.

Article vs Discussion Distinctions

While this Wiki, by its nature, has a lot more discussion than most, including in the Article space, there is a general problem here that far too many things are signed, as if someone's personal writing that cannot be edited. This is not acceptable on a Wiki - everything is open for editing unless specifically a discussion or in someone's user space. We need some discussion on exactly what we want this Wiki to be like, and how we can fix things as they are. --Dragoon Wraith TALK 00:12, 27 June 2007 (EDT)

I'm against signing anything but talk pages and discussion pages like this. Discussion should take place at the forums or the articles talk page. For questions about an article counts the same, talk page or the forums. If an article is in need of discussion put a link to a forum thread or the talk page at the bottom. Leaving your name will discourage others to edit the article and encourage discussion with only author instead of everyone on the Wiki. Signatures on existing pages should be removed. --Qazaaq 10:03, 27 June 2007 (EDT)

I'm not saying I won't comply with any rules set, but I don't fully agree. I just don't see any evidence that any of my tutorials have been edited by anyone other than me after the first week they were posted, whether signed or unsigned -and that was only to correct the capitalization of the NIF scripts. I now sign most of my tutorials so that people know whom to contact for questions, clarification, or help with their learning process. I really like to be able to assist people in a personal way with modeling and texturing, and how I can I do that if they can't find the original author of a tutorial no one else has touched in eight months? --SickleYield 11:09, 3 July 2007 (PST)

I agree with you completely, but to play devil's advocate and to repeat some ideas lost to the server crash: If people have questions they should leave them in the tutorial's discussion page, and if they really want to contact the original author then they can look at the page's history.

--Haama 04:38, 4 July 2007 (EDT)

The History page should be sufficient. By including your signature, you may be preventing others from editing the article. Further, it also breaks, I think, the cohesion of the Wiki - when one gets to your tutorial, one seems to leave the general, public, Wiki, and enter the private world of your tutorial. This kind of seam is something that web designers actively avoid in general, and it's especially important for something like this. The biggest flaws in the Wiki are that it's difficult to navigate and that too many articles ignore the rest of the Wiki.

Out of curiousity, how many people have contacted you by way of your tutorials? I realize this is a concern, especially with a tutorial entirely written by yourself. I think there may be situations where a signature could be appropriate, but it can't be seen as declaring ownership or rights to the article. Anytime there is something that says "This is mine", it detracts from the Wiki, in my opinion. On the other hand, if we could find a way to show that you are the primary contributor to a given article and that you are receptive to answering questions, that would be excellent. As I said earlier, the History page should be sufficient, but it's often not. Very few people actually look there.

Anyway, I often feel like these discussions are preaching to the choir a bit, so I'm glad to see another viewpoint. Please, Sickle, I'd love to hear what you have to say on the topic.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 13:22, 4 July 2007 (EDT)

I'm glad to see that this effort is continuing. As I posted earlier (before the Great Loss), no attributions on article page is absolutely the norm for this type of wiki. And it's an important norm for the reasons already mentioned (encouraging people to edit articles) -- that's absolutely core to wiki approach. Credit and contacts are not problems -- again the history and discussion pages serve those purposes quite well.

And this is not based just on theory -- this is my experience from writing quite a few articles on UESP and editing many, many others. When you write an article on a wiki, you're only the first person to write that article. As the text at the bottom of each editing page says: "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don't submit it here."

Along those lines... Something that should be done at some point is removal of attributions from article pages -- if it's a clear article (not a discussion), then chop out the attributions. This was one of the things that the we had to do at UESP a couple of years ago (and still have to do a little bit with some newbie edits).

--Wrye 16:36, 4 July 2007 (EDT)

I do have people contact me via PM at forums on a regular basis saying something like, "I read your tuturial but I don't understand this part," or "How do I do this over here," etc. Otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up to start with. That's okay, though. If I'm honest with myself, the bottom line is that if I'm going to spend six to eight hours writing, taking screens, editing and formatting a tutorial, I want my name on it. That's not a wiki-oriented goal, so I will take it elsewhere. I'll leave what I've done here, but I'm not going to give you ten more hours of work updating these tutorials for free for no credit at all. No one looks at History pages.

--SickleYield 11:09, 3 July 2007 (PST)

Sure they do. The history page is a normal aspect of the site, and so long as the attribution style is maintained, people quickly learn where to find such information. So let me show you a few history pages...

• UESP:Better Bodies. Took me about 4 hours to research, arrange, write the first version of the page. Several other people (esp. NioLiv) almost immediately grabbed the baton and quickly dumped a bunch of additional material on there. By two days after I posted it, I was already getting much more out of it than I originally put in.
• Tes3Mod:Leveled Lists a basic theory paper on leveled lists in Morrowind. It's fairly technical info, some of it known to other people, a lot of it knowledge that I figured out entirely by myself.
• Formids This is my original paper on formids. It covered a major point early in the lifetime of the game and provided modders a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of modding. Again, mostly my work with a few contributions by others.
• SI Reference Bug. This page was a crucial part of making the SI reference bug known. I wrote the first versions, summarizing Dateranoth's analysis, doing additional research, adding in a lot of my own knowledge, etc. A number of other people subsequently updated it (esp. Dateranoth and Nephele, who both put in a lot of work doing analysis). This page is a substantial part of why Bethesda actually fixed this bug. We documented it thoroughly and linked to it from front page of UESP. And with over 100k views, I think you can assume that it's part of the reason your copy of Oblivion is not hosed by this bug today.

These are just a few samples of my contributions at UESP (where I'm at #11 contributor with 1844 edits). And what do you notice about all this? I don't sign on the article pages. Now, I have no problem with ego and wanting credit for your contributions (my ego is certainly not small), but 1) credit is perfectly clear for those who have the wit to look for it, 2) you can see exactly what someone contributed by using the diff functions, 3) you'll often benefit from other people adding material to articles that you originally wrote, 4) you're already benefitting from the contributions of other people who have already seen the benefits of the wiki approach.

You can of course post your tutorials elsewhere. Other people who couldn't cool their ego down a little have done the same. What happens? They get lost, forgotten. They're there for a while, but then they quit updating, then they disappear. Or worse, they stay around, but get out of date and can't be updated by anybody. (Example: Felic became active late last Fall. He knew about the wikis, but decided to post his material on the forums anyway (ModFood). Great effort, but he's gone now so his posts can't be edited, updated or reorganized, and one day that topic is going to get wiped out by one of the periodic forum purges.)Wikis solve all these problems -- the information persists and gets updated as needed. The advantages to everyone are huge.

So, keep all that in mind before deciding that you can't handle having your authorial credit shifted restricted to the history tab. Frankly, if my justifiably huge ego can withstand it, so can yours. :lol:

--Wrye 22:57, 4 July 2007 (EDT)

Well, I work pretty hard on a few articles here. I keep them updated. I do minor cleanup on some others. When I fix problems in other folks stuff here, I don't remove their byline. I think it's extremely rude. If I haven't been around in a long while, I'm not active anymore, and my articles are way out of date, then I would expect other people to take over and do whatever they want. That's why I post stuff here. If you barge in and completely rewrite things that other folks have worked hard on while they are still active, remove their bylines, etc, then I consider that vandalism, no matter how well-intended you claim it is. Maybe it is better in the grand scheme, but you can count me out. If it becomes general policy here then I'll definitely be moving all of my articles to my private website.--Dev akm 00:22, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

One more point to consider. If there's an active "editorial staff" here cleaning up stuff, building cohesion among articles, etc., then that's a good thing, as long as they are active and organized. Historically that has not been the case, but perhaps it's time for a change. But that's not the context under which I started contributing, and I don't find it attractive. I think some other authors will feel the same way. So, while you'll perhaps be gaining some good organizational structure, cohesion, etc., you'll also be losing some fairly prolific and experienced contributors. If you guys want to make this sort of power-play, then I will wish you the best of luck with your efforts. --Dev akm 00:53, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

Outsetting because of depth. I'm responding to dev_akm immediately above...

First, a clarification, so that DragoonWraith is not "blamed" for this. I suggested it originally, then there was a bit of discussion, and general consensus to do it -- and then the server dropped dead and we lost the entire community page. At which point DW reconstituted topics as recalled. So there was an earlier discussion with general consensus which is now lost.

Second, the suggestion of a "power play" is ridiculous. All that's happening here is that the rules of the wiki are being followed more closely -- like they should have been from day one.

Third, there should be zero surprise that articles are completely editable by anyone -- that's been in the blurb at the bottom of every editing page since day one. Nor should there be any surprise about the "No attribution on article page." 1) it's a natural consequence of "anyone can edit", 2) original articles by developers were not attributed, nor are most pages on the site, and 3) attribution is covered precisely on the history page -- not only do you see who contributed, but you can check and see exactly what each person contributed (cur, last links for each contribution).

Fourth, will we lose a few contributors? Sure. But that's more than made up by the general health and integrity of the data. I've been active over at UESP for over two years and based on that experience, I know full well that these policies produce greater amounts of more accurate material than a bunch of people working in isolation would create. Check the UESP Recent Changes page. Pick almost any article on it and track back through changes to see how articles rapidly evolved and improved from different people making their edits and changes. Check the specific examples I gave in my 7/4/2007 comment. I think that any/all show off the advantages of wikis very well.

Cooling off a little... (Okay the "power play" ticked me off.) However, you do have a good point about the "no attributed articles" not being enforced early on. It should have been -- but it wasn't. So, here's what I suggest... Give it a few days. Poke around at UESP like I suggested above.

If, after a few days, you still don't like the "anyone can edit" or "no attributions on article page" rules -- then pull your articles. That's contrary to ordinary wiki policy, and should not be the norm, but you're right -- they were introduced during a period when the rules weren't being made clear.

Regards, --Wrye 03:53, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

Response. I'm not blaming anyone, least of all DW. And I agree with you that it's probably a good idea in general. For example, I'm very happy to see the growth in direct contributions to the Troubleshooting category I started. It makes sense there and probably in lots of other places as well. I'm not so sure it makes sense in the Tutorials section.

How many original tutorial submissions do you get at UESP? How many from people other than the editorial staff? Seems like there's a distinct lack of such material there, perhaps as a direct result of the "no bylines" policy.

I'm definitely not complaining that "wikis are wikis". I'm objecting to the change in policy related to bylines at such a late stage of the wiki's evolution. If there had always been a policy about not allowing bylined articles, that would be fine. We'd take it for granted and there would probably be a lot fewer original works there. That's not the case. It's a longstanding tradition here to allow bylines, even if it's not generally true for other wikis.

Many people have contributed tutorials and other large works here with the implicit understanding that -- within reason -- their wishes for the presentation of such original works would be respected by the community. Now that this "consensus" has changed, you're basically telling people who've contributed stuff:

"Thanks for that great tutorial you wrote a while back. BTW, we've decided to erase your byline so other people will feel free to contribute to it."

How does my disagreement about this heavy-handed policy change equate to my failing to understand the nature of wikis? You can claim "it's the wiki way" all day long, but that doesn't suddenly make plagiarism acceptable.

We don't accept this sort of behavior with mods. Why should we accept it on the wiki?

Would we think it okay for a mod-hosting site to suddenly make a policy change encouraging other people to alter your mods and upload such changes back into the original mod listing you created? I don't think so.

I wonder how many people who've written articles here are even aware of this new "consensus". I also wonder how many of them were invited to the discussion. I know I wasn't invited, despite the fact that I am active here and I am directly impacted by the decision. Are you familiar with the concept of a quorum?--Dev akm 12:50, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

As was made clear by the existence of this debate, the discussion held here clearly was not seen by very many members of the community. To that end, I have created a discussion for it on the ESF, here.

Dev, I understand your points. However, it may be worth pointing out that the Wiki very prominently states that "all contributions to The Elder Scrolls Construction Set Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don't submit it here." This appears above the Save Page button on every edit page. That pages are publicly editable has been the rule the entire time. That has not changed. What has changed was the use of "bylines" for the purpose of assigning credit. Bylines were never, in my mind, acceptable as a tool to "lock" a page to be edited by yourself only. I am well aware of the work you have put into your articles, as I assume you are aware of the work I have put into maintaining and improving the Wiki as a whole. The Wiki would be empty without the contributions of authors like you, but I know for a fact that my efforts have dramatically increased both user participation in this site and in the navigability and ease of use for this site.

As for the community's awareness of this page, that is something we have been trying to work on. However, this was not a matter of being "invited" - this page was created quite publicly. The link in my signature on the ESF directs here. I have added links to it in several locations throughout the Wiki. Everyone who is here found it on their own. It was not any attempt to hide it from you so that we could steal your rights, or any such thing. I apologize that it was not found by you and presumably many others, which is why I started the thread on the ESF. In the future, however, I do not plan on taking that step. This will be considered the place for such discussions, and members of the this community ought to be aware of it. I will take further steps to make sure that they are.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 16:39, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

Glad you started a thread about it. Thanks, man. It will be interesting to see what people think (other than the few around here). Why is it that everyone seems compelled to repeatedly point out the submissions disclaimer? It's got nothing to do with my point. I'm talking about decent behavior among peers. Anyway, I'll continue the discussion in the ESF thread.--Dev akm 17:39, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

I really need to transcript the thread onto the Wiki. Meh, not tonight. Tonight I've gone through all of the Tutorials and marked the ones with bylines that are not in accordance with the policy that was generally agreed upon in the thread. We should start by contacting Razorwing, Blade9722, and Darknel. They have like 75% of the bylined tutorials.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 23:56, 7 August 2007 (EDT)