Since we can’t vote ‘no’ on additions anymore, and reporting people for sloppy/duplicate additions doesn’t do anything, there’s a lot of cleanup to be done after some people.
I only have so much time, so I’ll add them here - perhaps those who are/were in favour of no votes on unlimited new additions can spend some time helping out?
[[Don’t hang out specific editors. It’s fine to point out structural problems or link to searches or reports that highlight an issue, but highlighting a specific editor for doing “bad” edits is not cool. Thanks. ️ —@Freso]]
Possibly someone (@Freso?) deleted my last thread on this? Please let me know if that’s what’s happening.
I did. I don’t want a place for people to publicly “hang out” other editors “to dry” or publicly shame them. That editor you refer to may have a lot of edits with missing info… but there are lots of releases in the db in general with missing info. That’s what e.g., reports are for. And they don’t hang out specific users. If there’s a report missing, then make a ticket with a description of the kind of search you would like to see added.
Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Esp. if you don’t click the «Reveal my email address» tickbox when reporting an editor (and looking at the last report I got from you, you didn’t/don’t), I will generally/usually not keep you updated when I deal with the report. If an editor keeps being irresponsible/unresponsive, then report them again or otherwise let me know that the situation hasn’t improved.
That said, the reporting system is very rudimentary and basic and could surely be improved upon. I have my own thoughts (that I really ought to write down (though, last time I did my suggestion was rejected)), but other suggestions on how it could be improved upon would also be good.
Thousands of edits from the same few prolific editors, that require hundreds of hours of cleanup or merging… (I’ve never had a problem with missing data, this is entirely different). And nothing I can do about it.
Asking for help from others is apparently “hanging them out to dry” no matter how politely I do it, and the only update I ever got from you on a report was basically “don’t worry about it, it’s not your problem”. If something else is happening behind the scenes, then great, but I have no idea what it is and it’s frustrating.
Editors are our biggest asset, and new editors need to be shown the ropes somehow. Teaching 1 new editor how to make good edits is potentially worth weeks or months of going through reports.
As editors aren’t required to make good additions anymore, and more new editors come through, playing catch up has gotten harder and harder, and I can’t keep up. There’s no community initiative around new users at all to pick up the slack, and I feel like I’m the only person who regularly subscribes to people asking for help in the forums to see if I can help out, and “don’t worry about it, ‘someone’ can fix it later” is apparently the current MB policy - but I’m only here because I care about good data, and if I don’t worry about it…
not much point in sticking around.
Your frustration is coming through loud and clear, so if it seems like nobody is getting it, well, at least I think I am.
I’m going to interpret your post as “akk, I’m trapped under an avalanche of new editors, please send a rescue team!” That does put us in a weird spot, since you can’t tell me exactly where you are buried without naming/shaming an editor.
I don’t know what the solution to that is, but this is a bright bunch. Somebody will come up with a solution.
In the meantime, I haven’t done any serious voting in ages, so I have a lot of penance to do. Yay for the newbie filter!
Apologies for bumping an old thread, but I’d like to check how the community/administrators’ thinking has evolved in the last 7 years?
I still find @aerozol’s point spot on and entirely unaddressed.
The activity of many auto-editors (myself included), when not structured around specific entities, largely revolves around spotting individual users and the shortcomings of their contributions (even if we don’t like to “hang out editors to dry”, people tend to make the same mistakes thousands of times, often even before anybody notices).
As a result, some brave editors embark on lonely, tedious and ungrateful cleanup efforts which take months of work. Unsurprisingly, many burn out under an ever-increasing backlog and leave.
Meanwhile, Discogs has a structured programme to deal with contributors who don’t meet certain standards. Is anything similar under consideration?
If there is no top-down initiative, how are fellow editors teaming up to be more effective in their cleanup efforts?
I can’t just leave a silent like. Agree with this too much. Too many of us quietly walk the corridors of this database doing these kinds of fixes. And I can see it is the kind of thing that will also eventually make me quit. I really don’t like having run ins with some new (or not so new) editor who refuses to read guidelines. Some editors can spend months\years getting artists tidied up and sorted only for someone to pile in and cause chaos.
MB has certainly lost some excellent editors due to this.
The closest I see to visible action is the “Need Votes” thread. That can be effective, but also can be quite a brutal pile-on argument some days. Ending up in too much a case of people locking horns in battle.
Does MB have a written guideline page that says what happens when an editor misbehaves? Is there some kind of naughty step? Can a misbehaving editor’s edits all be pushed to “need votes” while a dispute is settled?
The last time I saw it in action guess what happend? That editor just made a new account.
It was the infamous ban-evader (nicknamed by me as “Mr. ban evader”) who created hundreds (maybe thousand already) of accounts the last few years.
I have since given up keeping tabs on that one.
Exactly. The burden is simply too large to carry, both for administrators and for individual editors.
Discogs’s example is interesting as their programme is transparent and institutionalised - and not least because it puts the burden of improving past contributions on the original editors themselves, who have an incentive to do that and mentors available to support them.
This seems like an interesting topic / idea to raise at this year’s summit, and the way Discogs does this seems interesting, thanks (I had never heard of that). I guess a less-fancy version of it that could be implemented fast is limiting the amount of open edits an editor marked Untrusted can have, possibly renaming it to be somewhat less discouraging, and then using it more than we have so far.
FWIW since I made that post there have been some improvements - in particular that reports are replied to, rather than disappearing into the ether, which was the straw that broke the camels back for me.
But having a structured path for new and troublesome editors to work through would be a massive improvement! Very keen to at least brainstorm that during the summit. Maybe we can leverage that lovely new email template to give new editors some more guidance as well. Thank you for the Discogs example @salo.rock.
The other interesting thing to note is that I did take some time off a bit after that post (if I remember correctly). And when life got busy again recently I set up a filter to automatically mark subscriptions as read and archive them, so I could keep editing for fun, rather than burn out. Recently I’ve turned subscriptions back on, as life has quietened slightly. I guess I’d like to encourage the other committed editors to look after themselves, and that a “all or nothing” approach is what can lead to permanent burnout. It’s okay to slow down for a bit, or just do what you enjoy, as your time and motivation comes and goes
A problem is the fact that anyone can change any data in the database by just waiting 7 days (because edits are not going to be reviewed). This means reasonable people will lack confidence in the quality of the data at large unless they make reckless assumptions. It doesn’t help that there’s no button to click to just undo somebody’s bad edits - you have to manually do everything over, which often requires userscripts. There’s also no mechanism to prevent or warn a new user from making edits that have previously been voted down or reverted for cause.
When people don’t want to be associated with bad quality and their only logical conclusion is that there’s bad quality, why would they stick around?
I would be very wary of placing too many restrictions on new users or introducing “dunce cap” systems that too quickly restrict people after making mistakes. Our guidelines are nowhere clear and unambiguous enough to expect new contributors to religiously stick to them immediately. A lot of rules seem to only exist in the shared consensus between experienced editors, rather than in any written form (see e.g. the recent discussions about splitting or merging remix singles). Scaring off new editors is at least as big a problem as making auto-editors clean up after “bad” changes (see e.g. Wikipedias struggles with getting new authors).
An edit “Revert” button would also be very welcome.
A moderator applying such a “needs votes” flag in response to a report seems OK to me, provided people don’t overuse reports for this.
The ticket makes a good point about the wide variety of use cases that we currently try to fit in a rather rigid subscription system. Granted, if we want a more structured approach to the issue of following/helping editors, full customisability might not be the best solution, but I still find the whole idea worth considering (and perhaps discussing at the summit?).
️ —@Freso]]
