User:Kurt Jansson/questions

Dear Mr Jansson,

If you cannot find the finalized answers below, please go to the village pump and ask a Wikipedian to translate the discussion page for you.

Apart from the summarized, finalized answers, you can also find translated discussions which contain additionals details on the discussion page.

yours, Computor

請注意：請到討論頁進行回答喔！中英文皆可。

致翻譯者：下列英文答案可能已過時，未能準確反映討論頁已更新之共識性答覆。請留意討論頁的改動，並按需要將新內容翻譯。

About the community 關於社群

1. conflict resolution （衝突的解決）: Which mechanisms do exist to settle or mediate disputes or conflicts?（翻譯：有甚麼機制存在以解決或調停爭端及衝突？）

Internal disagreements and conflicts inevitably arise sometimes in communities grown to a certain level of scale, and the Chinese Wikipedia community (hereafter noted as "the community") is no exception to that. When disagreements or conflicts are encountered, the community generally takes the following methods (or steps) to solve them:

Encourage communication, and solve disputes in a civil way: Most disputes initially arise from conflicts in articles editing. Experienced users commonly use the discussion page to sort out their disagreements.

Note: Apart from articles discussion pages, the "articles for deletion" page is another hotbed for disputes. This is because users frequently nominate pages which contain contents they don't agree with or believe to violate policies for deletion. How administrators decide the outcome of voting is another subject of high concern.

Policies to handle edit wars: When conflicts step up further, edit wars are nearly unavoidable. The Chinese Wikipedia has a page for reporting edit wars to the administrators. The community has introduced the 3RR rule from the English Wikipedia to handle edit wars. When dealing with edit wars, administrators are authorized to take actions such as page protection and account blocking.
Submission to the community for wider discussion: Some disputes or conflicts will subsequently find their way to the Village Pump, which is effectively the hub of the community and the focus of its attention. Discussions are held, sometimes rounds of them, heated, even fierce. It is not uncommon for users to be blocked because of their use of strong language. After a while, someone may take the role of mediator temporarily, but the Chinese Wikipedia has no formally established mediation or arbitration processes.
Submission to the community for voting: When the matters in question involve interpretation of policies or guidelines, or even creating new ones, they are often put to votes which are open to the whole community, in the hope of obtaining a consensus-backed resolution. However a number of these "elections" turned out to be fruitless for a variety of reasons, like failure to catch attention of the community, poorly stated rules or choices, the MediaWiki software's incapability of carrying out such a function, or simply nobody is interested anymore.

The Chinese Wikipedia has no formally established mediation or arbitration procedures. It also lack authoritative users trusted by a majority, such as Jimbo Wales in English Wikipedia. There is only one steward in the community, but it is uncommon for him to mediate the disputes.

2. dealing with problematic behavior （處理可能構成問題的行為）: Which kinds of problematic or destructive behavior do you often find yourself confronted with? Which actions are taken to meet these?（翻譯：請問有甚麼破壞性或可能帶來問題的行為是閣下經常面對的？閣下以甚麼行動來處理？）

Related to editing

Accuracy and reliability of contents

Insertion of unverified statements.
Failure to indicate a source of information, or the use of unreliable ones, such as blogs and forums.

Biased point of views

Removal of statements conflicting with personal beliefs
Submission of contents showing unconcealed sympathies or preferences, personal judgment or emotions.

Copyright violations

Submission of copyright-protected materials, such text from other websites (which are copyrighted, or they are also breaching copyrights). A large number of newcomers left due to the strict copyright policy.
Uploading copyrighted images without observing the fair use policy.

Related to articles management

In "Articles for Deletion" voting: Lots of users nominate articles for deletion lightly. Intense discussions often follow, and the final decision of administrators is frequently a subject of debate.
Experienced Wikipedians (especially administrators) are more active in locating copyrighted materials. They tend to deliver them directly to the deletion page for copyrighted materials, rather than actively providing detailed explanation for their actions to the uploaders. On the other hand, the uploaders seem to have difficulties in understanding the "open content" nature of Wikipedia, so they often fail to provide sufficient reason to keep their edits or uploaded files. For a number of times, this has led to a local meltdown within the community, the peaceful climate for writing articles was disrupted, and everyone involved was unhappy.
Users build articles by translating from Wikipedias of other languages excessively. However the quality and standard of their translation is sometimes questionable, and many gave up before the article was fully translated, without ever resuming their work. This creates a large number of articles with untranslated text here and there. Actually, the community has a consensus that articles containing an abundance of untranslated text should be deleted within 2 weeks of their creation, but this consensus is not well known (especially among newcomers), and there are particularly stubborn users removing identification templates themselves without improving the contents, creating difficulties in management and lowering the overall quality of the encyclopedia.

Differences in understanding ideas or concepts

Modifying the articles to suit a personal understanding of one or more ideas or concepts, especially articles of religions (like Christianity and Falun Gong), cross-strait relations, definition of political concepts, history, politics, governments, and current affairs related to Chinese people. From time to time some Wikipedians effectively rewrite articles according to their personal ideas, which often lead to edit wars.
Comments aiming at Wikipedians of specific locations (or other characteristics), or campaigning for (or against) specific ideas, religion and political views.

Irrational and uncivil users

Harassing, insulting or threatening comments. Female Wikipedians are frequently targeted.
Vandalism with specific objectives, such as moving the others' user page, insisting the correctness of one's own edits, and refusing to discuss and cooperate with the others.
Personal attacks. Some users used the Internet to uncover personal information of some administrators, and create accounts with names containing these personal information. As accounts cannot be deleted, they can only be blocked in accordance with the "inappropriate user name" policy", and hide the vandalism they have done using article deletion and reverting.

Ways to handle

For obvious behaviors of vandalism, usually the changes will be reverted, the article(s) may be protected, and accounts carrying out these actions can be blocked straightaway.
Newcomers are not familiar with the policies and guidelines, so they constantly cause problems in the community, and are in need of guidance of experienced users. The community has enthusiasts attending to these requests, but feedbacks complaining that administrators are not friendly enough never seem to cease.

3. working climate and culture of discussion （作業環境和討論文化）: 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?（翻譯：閣下如何描述貴社群的作業環境？其討論文化又有甚麼特性？與作業有關的的任務和崗位是專門、明確指派的，抑或彈性處理的？）

Wiki is a tool to encourage cooperation and cultural sharing. People contributing to a Wiki are taking part in a form of cooperation. The Chinese Wikipedia has numerous approaches to achieve cooperation, but the attendance of these collaboration schemes vary from time to time. Sometime there is high participation, but sometime hardly anybody gives them a damn. Recently there were sharp criticisms on the general declining of communal spirit.

These are some examples of where collaborations are carried out:

Writing articles: A significant number of articles rely heavily on literally a couple of enthusiasts for contents enrichments. The rest of the contributors merely carry out minor tasks such as content reformatting and wikifying.
Voting for deletion: Its proper functioning is the bottom line of a free-contented Wikipedia's survival. This cannot be possible without the constant labor of a handful of experienced contributors.
Sorting into Categories: Writers often take their responsibility to categorize the articles they wrote. But their work is often far from perfect. Some participants who are highly interested in bibliography contribute by improving the categorization of articles.
The Article Quality Improvement Scheme (introduced from "Collaboration of the week" of the English Wikipedia).
Nomination of new articles to the "recent additions" section of the Main Page.
WikiProjects
Portals

The community's culture of collaboration:

Mission: Some people are in Wikipedia to promote the culture of free (with the meaning of freedom) contents, but the majority is here to "work themselves out", or to play with their interests.
Experiences: Those who are more experienced in contributing to Wikipedia are generally easier to cooperate. This is mostly because they get to know each other by observing each other's contributions, understand each other's working style, and have established a relation of trust. They also have a fairly deep knowledge of policies, guidelines, and how to maintain civility. So they are less likely to have heated debates or open conflicts. Vandalisms or problematic behaviors are almost exclusively carried out by anonymous users, inexperienced users, or users with an obvious political propaganda.
Prizes and titles: Members of the community are generally fond of prizes and titles, such as "Editor General", "Editor Assistant", "Master of Photography", "Master of Translation". They may be obtained by consensus of community, or achieving a measurable level of contribution (such as no. of edits). Pages to apply for them are often some of the busiest ones.
Decline of spirit: The community's ability to cooperate appears to be on decline: Collaboration schemes are receiving less and less attention, and eventually disappeared from the Main Page. The collaboration scheme of Hong Kong related articles is changing its target from "an article per week" to "two articles per month". The number of articles improved through these collaborations is very limited.

The community's culture of discussion:

Controversial topics: When some controversial topics are brought up, or discussions involve political or regional disputes, the village pump will become a de facto forum. More than a hundred lines of text can appear on these pages, and it can take ages to to read through and write a response. This has hindered the growth of articles. Debates are often harsh, the majority of participants usually have a desire to push through their arguments, but few are aware of relevant policies and guidelines thus trying to reach consensus. Personal attacks are quite common.
Healthy discussions: However, there are warm-hearted wikipedians present in the village pump to assist the others on any problems they might face when editing. These wikipedians seem to be more disciplined and less likely to take part in the debates mentioned above.

Problems of the current discussion mechanism

There is a profound weakness in the current discussion mechanism. Discussions regarding a single issue can be scattered in a number of venues, and fail to receive much attention of those who are involved. This can actually be improved by bringing the talk pages of articles belong to the same subject (e.g. Physics) together under a portal, but technical changes are required.

The Chinese Wikipedia community is a loosely formed group of volunteers. Roles are naturally (or self) assigned. Tasks are generally carried out individually, flexibly and obligatorily.

4. self-assessment of the community （社群的自我評測）: 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.)（翻譯：閣下〔或諸位，下同〕對自己作為一社群有甚麼看法？閣下在自身何處及與其他維基百科社群的比較中，發現了甚麼優點和缺點？閣下有另外自行定位〔或自發組織〕的社群嗎？〔此問題是關於社群的，而非所建之條目。請見問題八〕）

The community's view towards itself is divided. But an undeniable fact is, online platforms bringing people of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese together to cooperate are scarce. The Chinese Wikipedia is one of such platform, and can be seen as its major distinguishing feature.

To some participants, the phrase "Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia" does not only imply "freely licensed", but also "freedom of expression". Therefore, in the Chinese world where censorship from the Government of Mainland China has a profound influence, the Chinese Wikipedia has a special mission to gather uncensored facts and views suppressed by the Communist party. This is the main reason of it being blocked in Mainland China.

Other specifications of the Chinese Wikipedia include:

Small scale: Judging by both the number of participants and the ratio of Chinese Wikipedians to all Chinese speakers.
Local: More than half of the participants come from 2 places (Hong Kong and Taiwan). It is far from a global community.
Political: The development and collaboration of the Chinese Wikipedia Community are heavily influenced by the political situation of Greater China. Political disputes are often sparked, and heated debates even conflicts often follow.
Underdeveloped policies and guidelines: The Chinese Wikipedia lack a significant amount of policies and guidelines already present on English and other sizable Wikipedias. Authoritative bodies such as Arbitration Committee are absent.
Problems specific to the Chinese Language: Difficulties to communicate orally (Written Chinese is highly united, but spoken Chinese varies enormously with geographical location), the vague definition of Chinese phrases, usage of simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and region-specific idioms.

About the created product 關於產品

5. definition as an encyclopedia / role models（百科全書的定義與範例）: 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?（翻譯：閣下對所編的百科全書裡面的文字有甚麼要求？對於所編的百科全書產品，閣下是如何構思的：是一個實用主義的知識性、信息性資料庫，還是捍衛古典百科全書的傳統？有使用甚麼以往及現行的參考作品作為範例嗎？）

(Summarized answer unavailable. Please refer to the talk page for details of discussions.)

6. article quality（條目的質量）: 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?（翻譯：對閣下來說條目的質量有多重要？閣下會在社群內有甚麼行動以提升質量、改善條目？（例如優良及特色條目選舉、寫作比賽、時間或主題性質量提升計劃）有甚麼排除準則（即刪除標準）去確保條目質量的最低要求？）

(Summarized answer unavailable. Please refer to the talk page for details of discussions.)

7. neutrality（中立性）: 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?（翻譯：建立新條目的時候，「中立的觀點」（NPOV）這個思想有多重要？閣下如何描述「中立的觀點」此一概念？）

The neutral point of view (NPOV) is a fundamental policy of Wikipedia.

NPOV is a natural outcome of the Wiki-process. Wiki systems opening to the public will inevitably face the problem of dealing with divided views. Holding reason and mutual-respect in high regard, and the willingness to cooperate with each other, can give every involving party an equitable space to express their views, this is the goal of NPOV. Therefore, NPOV is inseparable from "assuming good faith", "civility" and "consensus" policies. Assuming good faith is mutual respect, while consensus protects the opinion of minorities, preventing Wikipedia from falling down the abyss of majority dictatorship, making real neutrality possible.

NPOV does not imply that Wikipedia should become a stew of personal criticisms. Materials able to find a place in an encyclopedia must abide by policies such as "no original research" and "verifiability". So the neutrality here actually requires attributable to reliable sources, the inclusion of views of supporters, opposition and possible third opinions, and not to include only indisputable facts or invite everyone to insert their own opinions, in the hope that they will be "neutralized" (or digested) in the final product. NPOV is Wikipedia's assurance of improved quality as an encyclopedia.

NPOV is the foundational policy enabling the cooperation of contributors in the Greater China area, regardless of profound and complex political disagreements. For some participants (especially those from Mainland China), NPOV is not only the assurance of quality for an encyclopedia, but also a powerful weapon against the censorship and propaganda of any totalitarian government.

8. assessment of the product（產品評估）: How do you judge the general condition of your encyclopedia? Where do you see strengths and weaknesses?（翻譯：閣下如何評定所編的百科全書的總體情況？閣下在甚麼地方發現優點和弱點？）

According to statistics, the Chinese Wikipedia ranks third in quality of articles among Wikipedias of all languages. However, there remains a significant amount of partially translated articles, and the situation is not quite optimistic. Certain articles of little importance prosper because of a few dedicated contributors, while lots of fundamental articles are lacking. There is stark contrast in quality of articles.

The climate of discussions depends on the topics put forward. Topics involving politics are likely to ignite edit wars or fierce debates. The idea of copyright (and how to respect it) is poorly received by a number of contributors. This is a major factor hindering the healthy development of Chinese Wikipedia.