Wikipedia:Simple News/Special Edition/Jonas Rand

The Simple News

 

Jonas Dalton Rand's Plans For Simple English Wikipedia

For The Community

This coming year, I hope for the community to achieve a better standard of simple language. The simple language on this site really must be improved. Many of our articles are not simple at all, and I am not very good at simplification. Simplification of text can be quite difficult, as there are many concepts that can not easily be explained in simple language without having the appearance of talking down to the reader, or using a description that does not have the full effect of the concept. This should be something that the community should focus more on, as it is a problem that may lead to the project not meeting its goals, becoming a Mini English Wikipedia, and/or being shut down. Of course, the shutdown would be justified and necessary if the project does not meet its goals.

We should also focus on the expansion of articles, as a very large amount of our articles are stubs. For example, a tenth of the articles here are under 534 bytes. [1] It seems that the creation of articles is considered higher in the priority scale than article expansion. This is a somewhat neglected task, so before we have 100,000 stubs, we should have longer, more informative articles. I hope to have at least 75 good or very good (featured) articles by the end of 2009.

Also, governance should be improved upon. I don't really care about how many bureaucrats we have, but by the end of '09, we as a community should have public logs of IRC. For the time that I have been on IRC, many administrative actions have been discussed. The issue with StaticFalcon (now known as User:FastReverter) was discussed heavily on IRC, with people even launching an attack on Static when he was absent. The logs are now deleted, but can be viewed by administrators at User:Jonas D. Rand/StaticFalcon. This type of inappropriate behavior exhibited by users such as SwirlBoy39 (who also launched two "prank" attacks on me, and in my opinion needs to be banned for immaturity and bad conduct) needs to be documented, in addition to coöperation between a group of editors to push their point of view. Simple IRC Channels, despite what many say, are used as a venue for things other than informal socializing. Administrative training, like when some users (I forgot whom) advised Kennedy as to how to do a deletion, is done on IRC, and though not bad in itself, should be documented in cases of misconduct by the trainer, such as conspiring on private chat. It should no longer be private.

Another governance measure should be to ensure that IP addresses should be shown in the histories of BLPs so that editors who repeatedly vandalize or deliberately add untrue information can be identified to their ISPs. Also, we should be much more flexible towards editors who happen to be different from us in a certain way, such as not being able to speak English fully, not being used to Wikipedia, etc. Specific cases of inflexibliity are those of User:Berserkerus and Pakistan Editor. Administrators should acknowledge their role as servants of the community, and should only act as enforcer of the community's will.

We should listen to critics of the model more, not ban them.

Finally, I wish people could spell the word "bureaucrat" around here properly. [2] [3] [4]

Personal

• To write at least two Good Articles for Wikipedia;
• To create articles on the major figures involved in the Mumia Abu-Jamal trial; and
• To have more article edits than anything else, whilst still contributing to community discussions