from:"Carcharoth"

The thread started on wikimedia-l here, if anyone here wants to read
the background to this:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-July/121418.html

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation

On 7/30/12, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 The thread started on wikimedia-l here, if anyone here wants to read
 the background to this:

 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-July/121418.html

PS. Here also:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimediauk-l] Mozilla teams up with Wikimedia UK for an Editathon - 18 August, London

My immediate thought (probably misplaced or a misunderstanding, so
please don't bite my head off if that is so) is that such editathons
should be more directed at a wider topic (such as free culture in
general) rather than Mozilla in particular. It feels like here's some
meeting space and here is some free food, now write/improve the
articles about us. Which is a subtle and important distinction from
the editathons I've been to where the hosting institutions provide
help and resources, but don't insist on or set the topic which is
being edited (though for obvious reasons of convenience and proximity
some of the editathons resulted in articles about objects housed in
the musuem/library hosting the event).

Maybe it should be made clear that WM-UK suggested the topic, not
Mozilla? Re-reading the e-mail, I see that this is very likely the
case, but the distinction is an important one. Having said that, the
British Library food is good, so I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to
compare that to the Mozilla food... :-) But sadly I'll not be around
in London that weekend.

Carcharoth

PS. I thought there was talk at some point of WM-UK providing space
directly for editathons, did that idea not work out?

PPS. It strikes me that what I said here is better said on the
wikimediauk-l mailing list. Is it possible to subscribe to that
without having joined WM-UK?

On 7/30/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 -- Forwarded message --
 From: Daria Cybulska daria.cybul...@wikimedia.org.uk
 Date: 30 July 2012 09:45
 Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] Mozilla teams up with Wikimedia UK for an
 Editathon - 18 August, London
 To: UK Wikimedia mailing list wikimediau...@lists.wikimedia.org


 Dear All,

 Mozilla UK has been supportive to Wikimedia UK and since they opened
 their Mozilla Spaces venue, they were keen that we use it needed for
 events. What we realised is that some of the articles relating to
 Mozilla, Firefox etc. in Wikipedia are not quite of the high standard
 they could be. And so we thought it would be a neighbourly thing to do
 to have a Mozilla-related Editahton - the aim would be to turn a
 list of about 15 Mozilla-related articles into content perhaps worthy
 of being a Good Article.

 The sprint will be on Saturday 18 August, starting at 12PM at the
 Mozilla offices (London WC2N 4AZ). Lunch and snacks will be provided,
 as will Mozilla people who can be consulted regarding good sources for
 information. Do come along and help our our free culture colleagues
 :-)

 For more info and to sign up please visit
 http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Editathon
 You can also email me with any questions.

 Many thanks,
 Daria

 --
 Daria Cybulska - Events Organiser, Wikimedia UK
 +44 (0) 207 065 0994
 +44 7803 505 170
 --
 Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal
 control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.

 Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company
 Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No.
 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor,
 Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United
 Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia
 movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation
 (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).



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[WikiEN-l] Other mailing lists

On 7/30/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 30 July 2012 14:49, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 PPS. It strikes me that what I said here is better said on the
 wikimediauk-l mailing list. Is it possible to subscribe to that
 without having joined WM-UK?


 Yeah, it's just an ordinary Wikimedia mailing list. For Wikimedians
 in the UK or interested in the UK, not necessarily WMUK members
 exclusively. Though for obvious reasons much of it is about WMUK
 stuff.

 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l

(changed the subject line)

Thanks. I have noticed (from browsing archives) that some other
mailing lists (the wikimedia-l one for example) are a lot more active.
That is part of the reason I've stayed out of such discussions, to be
honest, and just lurked and read archives of such lists. I suspect the
wikimediauk-l list is similar. I might be tempted to say too much too
often. But it's good to have the details.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Categorisation by gender

2012-07-18 Thread Carcharoth

On 7/18/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 July 2012 10:47, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:

I remember it being referred to many years ago as long-standing
practice, but I've dug around a bit in the discussion archives and
can't seem to pin it down. It's probably pre-2004, maybe even pre-2003
- anyone remember?

As with almost all our category system, it's basically ad hoc. I
suggest if you can propose something not insane to relevant
wikiprojects and are prepared to do the bot work yourself, you can
have endless fun clicking save in AWB for a few hours.

For 1,000,000 articles? I think it should be done, but it will take
more than a few hours. I think it could be done very quickly, if lots
of people got involved. And I don't think the cases where it is
unclear or a matter of privacy (a vanishingly small number) should
preclude the obvious cases being done. It doesn't seem quite right
that the potential for arguments over edge cases and how to handle
them sensitively, would preclude being able to search by gender.

For instance, the ODNB online allows you to search by gender: with the
options male, female and family/group. The latter is only 420
articles. For female you get 6,265 articles, and for male you get
51,940. It would be nice to do the same for Wikipedia's biographies,
distinguishing between groups and single articles, and between men and
women (and other genders).

Examples of discussions include this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2005_June_27

And this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality/Archive_1

But that is around 2005. Not looked earlier than that yet.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Categorisation by gender

2012-07-18 Thread Carcharoth

On 7/18/12, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 Funny you should mention DBpedia. DBpedia can only work based on the things
 in Wikipedia and given that we don't include gender in Wikipedia info boxes
 or category structures, there won't be anything in DBpedia.

 But, DBpedia links into Freebase, and Freebase has been running a game
 through the 'Freebase apps' platform called Genderizer. This allows people
 to select either from a queue of real or fictional people and set their
 gender based on the lead from their Wikipedia article. While this isn't a
 reliable source to integrate the information back into Wikipedia, for the
 purposes of doing a rough study into the gender ratios of Wikipedia articles
 about people (and fictional people), Freebase may do what you want.

Interesting. This could be documented somewhere in Wikipedia's
documentation - is it? And do they cover famous animals as well?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Olav

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia crossed 4 million articles milestone

2012-07-13 Thread Carcharoth

It does seem appropriate that this milestone was reached during
Wikimania. Does anyone have a listing of when the other million
milestones were reached?

There is also a discussion here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#4.2C000.2C000th_article

Carcharoth

On 7/13/12, Tanvir Rahman wikitan...@gmail.com wrote:
 Just a note, today, English Wikipedia crossed 4 million articles
 milestone. Stay up forever old buddy! :-D

 \\o
 o//
 \o/
 /o\

 And today is the second day of Wikimania! Surely they have something
 new to celebrate and brag about now! :-D

 Regards,
 Tanvir

 --
 Tanvir Rahman
 Wikitanvir

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Central location for article content queries and requests

2012-07-05 Thread Carcharoth

Encouraged by the response I got on en-Wikipedia after asking around
enough, I was encouraged to ask at the German Wikipedia page. See
here:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Georg_Andreas_B%C3%B6ckler#Birth_and_death_years

Goodness only knows if anyone will see that. Anyone know if there are
places on the German Wikipedia to draw attention to that sort of
thing?

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] Central location for article content queries and requests

Does anyone know of a central location for article content queries and
requests? I'm not necessarily talking about emergency fixes or
vandalism, but more subtle problems about content that may need
discussion but where it can be difficult to find people willing to
tackle the request. The reason I'm looking for something like this can
be seen in the discussion here (static page version):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Editor_assistance/Requestsoldid=500447721#Georg_Andreas_B.C3.B6ckler

The article talk page is almost certainly the first place to go,
followed by additional notes to the article editors and in other
locations in case no-one is watching the article. But even then, it
would be nice to have a location where such requests can be posted (or
automatically listed) to draw more attention to them and to allow
people to help answer them (similar to how the edit request template
works).

Would something like that have any chance of being useful?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Central location for article content queries and requests

On 7/3/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 3 July 2012 13:11, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

 I suppose there is some obscure section of OTRS that does that already.
 Not that even someone who has OTRS access could find the stovepipe.

 I thought there was a boilerplate response on content issues (other
 than legal or BLP) that said so fix it.

That is encountered on-wiki as well. As I said in the on-wiki
discussion, when looking things up on Wikipedia, I notice more things
that could be corrected than I have time to deal with, but (sometimes)
have enough time to jot a note down. Maybe something like twitter?
Notes of less than 140 characters, with pointers towards possible work
to do on an article?

Sometimes I get round to it later myself, one example was:

Paul Fischer: Add Paul Henri Fischer to dab page.

A note I left for myself on 13/01/2012 while looking up something on
this person, which led to this edit four days later (when I found time
to get back to this):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Fischerdiff=471800198oldid=387201005

Admittedly, that is an example where it is quicker to do the edit than
make a note about it. But there are other examples where a note can be
jotted down to be looked at later at leisure. Are there public notepad
facilities available? I suppose I could just continue jotting notes
down, dealing with simple stuff myself (per sofixit), and transferring
notes on more complicated stuff to a page in my userspace to ask
others about.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Central location for article content queries and requests

On 7/3/12, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote:
 Most articles belong to a Wikiproject (or can be given to one with a little
 tagging), and if a wikiproject is even semiactive it will have people with
 specialist knowledge. So I'd suggest if you need help on an article, post a
 query on the relevant WikiProject page. And if there isn't a Wikiproject
 tag already on the talkpage feel free to add one that seems relevant.

In the case of Georg Andreas Böckler I asked the article creator (only
two edits here in 2011 and none in 2012, probably more active on the
Dutch Wikipedia, where I may try and contact them). I could also ask
on the German Wikipedia. I have (only recently) asked on the
WikiProject Biography page, but am a bit stuck as to what other
WikiProjects to ask at (History of Science? Architecture?).

 Alternatively put a query on the talkpages of people who've edited the
 article or relevant related ones.

Hadn't thought of the 'relevant related ones' approach.

 SoFixIt doesn't always work, sometimes it helps to seek out experts, but in
 my experience such people appreciate a query that is relevant to their
 expertise. That's why IMHO the content noticeboard and similar
 overcentralised mechanisms won't work.

 Patience also helps, not every expert will be here every month.

Good point. Patience *is* a virtue. :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Central location for article content queries and requests

There has been some response now at the article talk page. It would be
nice to know exactly what caused it, hopefully it was the WP:Biography
note that drew more people towards this.

I have found a source from 1998 (i.e. pre-Wikipedia) that gives the
1617 and 1687 dates. So presumably there is some basis for that.
Though possibly this is one of those cases where earlier scholarship
was too precise, and later scholarship has made things vague again.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bizrMAAJq=B%C3%B6ckler+1687

That source is The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection: Northern
European books, sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Comprised of nearly 750 volumes housed at the National Gallery of
Art, the Millard Collection is one of the finest private collections
of rare illustrated books and bound series of prints on European
architecture, design, and topography. This series catalogues each of
these beautiful and influential books, carefully describing and
illustrating them.

That sounds reliable.

Carcharoth

On 7/3/12, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote:
 As long as the query is relevant to the Wiiproject I don't see a problem in
 asking more than one Wikiproject.

 Another method I use for non-obvious things is to put a note at the top of
 my guestbook -
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/guestbookWhich
 reminds me, I need to refresh that list as there is currently only
 one task available.

 WSC

 On 3 July 2012 14:14, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 On 7/3/12, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.com wrote:
  Most articles belong to a Wikiproject (or can be given to one with a
 little
  tagging), and if a wikiproject is even semiactive it will have people
 with
  specialist knowledge. So I'd suggest if you need help on an article,
 post a
  query on the relevant WikiProject page. And if there isn't a
  Wikiproject
  tag already on the talkpage feel free to add one that seems relevant.

 In the case of Georg Andreas Böckler I asked the article creator (only
 two edits here in 2011 and none in 2012, probably more active on the
 Dutch Wikipedia, where I may try and contact them). I could also ask
 on the German Wikipedia. I have (only recently) asked on the
 WikiProject Biography page, but am a bit stuck as to what other
 WikiProjects to ask at (History of Science? Architecture?).

  Alternatively put a query on the talkpages of people who've edited the
  article or relevant related ones.

 Hadn't thought of the 'relevant related ones' approach.

  SoFixIt doesn't always work, sometimes it helps to seek out experts,
  but
 in
  my experience such people appreciate a query that is relevant to their
  expertise. That's why IMHO the content noticeboard and similar
  overcentralised mechanisms won't work.
 
  Patience also helps, not every expert will be here every month.

 Good point. Patience *is* a virtue. :-)

 Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as part of a social media strategy for hotels

2012-07-02 Thread Carcharoth

On 7/2/12, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:
 On Sat, 30 Jun 2012, WereSpielChequers wrote:
 I'm not inclined to shed a tear for hotel articles, many of which are I
 suspect being created by spammers, but David makes an important point re
 cultural bias from our lack of sources in certain parts of the world.

 Wasn't there a probem where Jimbo wrote an article for a restaurant in
 South Africa and people tried to delete it for this reason?

That would be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mzoli%27s

Reading the AfD (available in the page history) is a bit of a trip
down memory lane!

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as part of a social media strategy for hotels

2012-07-02 Thread Carcharoth

On 7/3/12, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On 7/2/12, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:
 On Sat, 30 Jun 2012, WereSpielChequers wrote:
 I'm not inclined to shed a tear for hotel articles, many of which are I
 suspect being created by spammers, but David makes an important point re
 cultural bias from our lack of sources in certain parts of the world.

 Wasn't there a probem where Jimbo wrote an article for a restaurant in
 South Africa and people tried to delete it for this reason?

 That would be:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mzoli%27s

 Reading the AfD (available in the page history) is a bit of a trip
 down memory lane!

Forgot the link to the original AfD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mzoli%27s_Meats

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as part of a social media strategy for hotels

2012-06-25 Thread Carcharoth

On 6/25/12, Mike  Dupont jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote:

 it is hard to collect all this information for osm, so why not have
 people add it to wikpedia first?

Wouldn't it be more efficient to direct people to OSM and wikitravel
in the first place, rather than use Wikipedia as a staging ground? I
know people assume that Wikipedia is the place for everything, but if
people are going to get out of that mindset, you need to tell them
they were in the wrong place, and not just move stuff for them.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as part of a social media strategy for hotels

2012-06-25 Thread Carcharoth

On 6/25/12, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoeks...@gmail.com wrote:

 What's wrong with Hi, thanks for your stuff. It didn't belong here,
 so we put it there for you rather than Hi, you put stuff here that
 didn't belong here. Bad user. Find an admin that will email your stuff
 for you through a murky procedure, so you can put it there yourself?

I should have been clearer that if people want to spend their time
doing that, fine. But there are other things on Wikipedia that need
doing more urgently. Trans-wikiiing or moving stuff around is
laudable, but is a sideshow to the core aim of producing and improving
the quality of the online encyclopedia (as opposed to the online
travel guide or hotel guide or whatever). The problem is that this
sort of exhortation tends to fail when a volunteer workforce is
involved. And I am aware that it is possible for different online
freely licensed sites to work together in synergy, exchanging material
as needed, but it still feels like a distraction from the core
activities.

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] Duolingo and translating Wikipedia

2012-06-20 Thread Carcharoth

A claim made here about Duolingo and translating Wikipedia:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18367017

With 100,000 active users, von Ahn says Duolingo could translate
Wikipedia from English into Spanish in five weeks. With one million
users, it would take about 80 hours.

Our article on Duolingo is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Duolingo and translating Wikipedia

2012-06-20 Thread Carcharoth

PS. Forgot to say that this claim misses several points about how
different language Wikipedias often have very different articles on
the same topic (i.e. they are rarely direct translations if
independent editing of the articles is being done). Also, I'm not
clear if they are saying that this would be an improvement on machine
or human translation or not. I think the claim is merely being used as
an example of translating of a large amount of text relatively quickly
using a form of crowdsourcing, rather than any intention to actually
translate the articles, but maybe they do intend to do that?

What I did wonder was whether the gaming approach reflects how
things work on Wikipedia:

Points are offered for each translation attempted; completing a round
earns the user a shiny gold medal; and learners can follow each other,
adding a competitive edge.

Sound rather familiar...

Carcharoth

On 6/20/12, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 A claim made here about Duolingo and translating Wikipedia:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18367017

 With 100,000 active users, von Ahn says Duolingo could translate
 Wikipedia from English into Spanish in five weeks. With one million
 users, it would take about 80 hours.

 Our article on Duolingo is here:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

 Carcharoth


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Current consensus on PR editing?

2012-06-13 Thread Carcharoth

On 6/13/12, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 If instead of saying what do we think of PR people editing
 Wikipedia? we said under what circumstances should administrators
 act on the requests of PR people?, I think we might have a way out of
 the conundrum.

One small correction there. Administrators hold no special position
with regards to editing. All editors in good standing with a good
grasp of policies and guidelines and how to edit can help answer such
questions (such as questions or suggestions placed on the talk page of
an article, as is one suggested approach). Administrators are only
needed when you have deletions or undeletions taking place, and that
isn't always the case (though I realise you were referring to that in
your example).

Not that the public at large really get the distinction, though.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_

2012-06-01 Thread Carcharoth

On 5/31/12, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:

 On average, the articles concerned had less than 100 page views a day
 going off stats.grok.se, so by just a few days, most of the edits
 should have been reverted - if they were going to be, of course.

This assumes that page views correspond to people reading the pages. I
suspect that a lot of people viewing a page just scan briefly for what
they are looking for (I typically use Ctl+F to find something if I am
in a hurry), or realise they are in the wrong place and click away or
click onwards through another link. There is no way of measuring the
number of people that stop and carefully read a page as if they were
sitting down to do some bedtime or leisure reading, as opposed to just
looking up some factoid.

 And deletionists have no policy knowledge?

Deletionists are not the monolithic body of people that you seem to
think they are. Those with these tendencies (though I'm reluctant to
lump people under a label) vary widely in their knowledge of policy,
which should be no surprise.

I'm also puzzled by this view you have that removal of external links
is a form of deletionism. I've always understood deletionism to be the
removal of entire articles and restricting Wikipedia to a relatively
narrow set of articles. Removal of content within articles is a
completely different ballgame.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_

2012-05-31 Thread Carcharoth

On 5/31/12, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipe...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Separately, the median number of watchlisters for the 100 pages you
 edited is 5.

 Where is this figure coming from?

Possibly some variant of this:

http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/watcher/

That was limited to pages less than 30, though, after some objections
were raised. Possibly admins or others can see pages that have less
than 30 watchers. Can't remember.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_

2012-05-30 Thread Carcharoth

On 5/30/12, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Gwernoffset=limit=100target=Gwern

You can out a date limiter on that URL so it won't become outdated.

This one should work indefinitely (unless some of the edits get deleted):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Gwernoffset=201205301826limit=100target=Gwern

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_

2012-05-30 Thread Carcharoth

PS. You didn't have to spam links to your 'experiment' in the revert
edit summaries, you know. Some good-faith editors may get upset by
that. The edit summary was:

rv test of editors for this page; you failed. see
http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#sins-of-omission-experiment-2;

This is something else that could have benefitted from outside input.
Some of the attitude you have towards all this rolls off the page,
with phrases such as perhaps editors collectively know that putting a
link into a section named ‘External Links’ is painting a cross-hair on
its forehead. My view is that if such experiments are to be carried
out, it would be better if they were designed and conducted by those
able to restrain themselves from such snark.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimediauk-l] Lum Hats in Paradise

2012-05-22 Thread Carcharoth

On 5/22/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 Brian McNeil's productive work in Edinburgh. I particularly like the
 idea of recruiting newbies at libraries - with all those lovely old
 printed references right there to hand. Get those library computers
 being used for more than webmail. This could work anywhere.

You are not telling that this isn't a perennial proposal? It's
blindingly obvious. The issue is not recruiting newbies, but keeping
them and getting them to understand how Wikipedia works, and then to
be productive instead of getting sucked into the various drama-fests.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimediauk-l] Lum Hats in Paradise

2012-05-22 Thread Carcharoth

Insert me after telling below...

On 5/22/12, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On 5/22/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 Brian McNeil's productive work in Edinburgh. I particularly like the
 idea of recruiting newbies at libraries - with all those lovely old
 printed references right there to hand. Get those library computers
 being used for more than webmail. This could work anywhere.

 You are not telling that this isn't a perennial proposal? It's
 blindingly obvious. The issue is not recruiting newbies, but keeping
 them and getting them to understand how Wikipedia works, and then to
 be productive instead of getting sucked into the various drama-fests.

 Carcharoth


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Re: [WikiEN-l] How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, _The Atlantic_

2012-05-17 Thread Carcharoth

On 5/17/12, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:

 Incidentally, I have been finishing an experiment involving the
 removal of 100 random external links by an IP; I haven't analyzed it
 yet, so I don't know the outcome, but this gives us an opportunity!

I carried out another experiment (though I didn't realise it was one
until now, and it is not a breaching one as yours seems it might be -
your wording above is unclear).

About six months ago now, I stumbled on an article that wasn't in
great shape, added some text over a series of edits, and increased the
number of links in the 'external links' section from 5 to 22. Now,
admittedly I wasn't editing as an IP (I always edit logged in) and I
added the external links in such a way as to make clear why they were
useful, but still, I didn't arouse some huge storm of editors
demanding that I reduce the number of external links (they are all
still there). The number of external links will reduce as the article
is expanded, but if you format external links and arrange them
logically, they can function as a holding place for sources to be used
later to write/expand the article.

Maybe that means that the question of external links is more one of
quality, and your analysis is oversimplistic? I submit that
well-formatted and well-chosen external links tend to stick, while
drive-by additions (or removals) don't. Which is not entirely
surprising.

Carcharoth

PS. We have gone way off-topic.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] PLoS Comp Biol article on getting stuff intoWikipedia

2012-05-04 Thread Carcharoth

On 4/11/12, Dr Jacob F. de Wolff jfdwo...@doctors.org.uk wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
What I'm thinking in particular
is that some FACs would benefit from what is essentially an *external*
peer review process (as opposed to the internal peer review and other
review processes). i.e. Actively soliciting reviews from those holding
credentials (academic or otherwise) in the topic area. Historically,
given the anyone an edit and (mostly) pseudonymous nature of
editing, there hasn't been much interest in this model of reviewing,
but I'd be interested to see reactions to this.

Some medical FAs had the benefit of external peer review (coeliac disease,
subarachnoid hemorrhage), but as always it depends on someone outside
Wikipedia to take an interest. The quality, depth and timeliness of the peer
review is largely dependant on that.

Returning to this topic because something similar has come up at WT:FAC, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates#Subject_matter_experts_and_reviews

I completely forgot to go there (WT:FAC) earlier and point out the
PLoS Comp Biol review process. I'm away this weekend and might not be
able to post on-wiki about this until tonight or Tuesday. I know it is
a big ask, but would someone reading this be able to briefly post at
WT:FAC pointing out this mailing list thread and this talk page
review:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Circular_permutation_in_proteins#Open_Peer_Review

It might not be what is planned at WP:FAC, but I think that 'open peer
review' should be brought into that discussion as an example at least.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Notability of commercial organisations

2012-04-28 Thread Carcharoth

On 4/27/12, Alan Liefting alieft...@ihug.co.nz wrote:
 This is a bit of a straw poll.
 Is there a need to tighten up notability guidelines for commercial
 organisations?
 Yes/No/Maybe?

Some reasoning would help. i.e. Why tighten up, why loosen, why keep
as is? And what are the current notability requirements? Straw polls
should either follow discussion, or link to discussion/pages on the
topic.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

2012-04-18 Thread Carcharoth

The pending changes stuff should probably be restarted in a new thread
(or the subject line changed, whichever is best). I've never been
clear, though, how 'recent changes' works, let alone pending changes.
Take a recent edit I reverted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Madeleine_Astordiff=prevoldid=488083471

Some would revert or undo that without a second thought. I thought for
a bit longer and sort of realised what was meant by the edit, but
still couldn't be bothered to engage with the (IP) editor who made
that edit, so reverted it with a half-explanation. Others would do
different things. Some would see potential there for explaining to an
IP editor how to edit, other would hit rollback. If it was a named
account, and not an IP editor, I vaguely remember there are some
welcome templates that can be used.

So my question is: how would an edit like that have been handled under
pending changes? Most likely rejected due to being mis-spelt and no
source provided, but where is the line drawn?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

2012-04-16 Thread Carcharoth

On 4/17/12, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 The key problem here - IMHO - is not-sensitive editors interacting
 with sensitive BLP subjects.

That is not always the case.

What would *you* do if you cleaned up and expanded an article on a BLP
you had never heard of before (to 'do the right thing'), and did the
best job you could, but the subject of the article turned up on the
talk page of the article and objected to the rewrite and said they
didn't want an article on them (I'm talking in general here, not about
specific cases)?

To make it even harder, they are being reasonable about it, rather
than abusive, and you feel bad about how things turned out. What then?
You feel an obligation to keep an eye on an article that *you*
rewrote, but you know the subject objects to it. You are not getting
paid for this (you are 'only' a volunteer), yet you have found
yourself caught in this rather horrible situation that you would never
have found yourself in if you had been employed by a published
scholarly encyclopedia to write an article.

The conclusion I'm coming to is (as I've said, I've only seriously
edited 4-5 BLPs ever): only edit BLPs where there are sufficient
sources to write a proper article. Editing of borderline notable BLPs
is a thankless task that rewards no-one. Not the readers (they don't
get a proper article, only a stub), not the subjects (they mostly
don't want such articles or want to have inappropriate control), and
not the editors (they usually don't have the sources to write a proper
article).

That is largely why I've left my proposed rewrite on the radio
presenter on the talk page. I can't in good conscience put that in as
the actual article if the subject doesn't want an article at all.
There are far better things to do with my time than edit borderline
notable BLPs, which will all likely get deleted at some future point
anyway. Having huge numbers of BLPs is not a sustainable practice on
Wikipedia.

One more point. There was a Facebook thread and radio comments
mentioned at some point. I'm not on Facebook and I don't listen to the
radio. The question is, should I make myself aware of what is being
said in those media before editing such articles or their talk pages,
or not? If there is a need to follow 'responses' in other media, that
is not sustainable either.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

2012-04-16 Thread Carcharoth

On 4/17/12, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote:

 Why would you not find yourself in a similar situation if employed by
 a published scholarly encyclopedia and were told This guy is just
 notable enough, write a brief bio of him for the next version?

The difference is, there is (usually) an intermediary between the
article author and the article subject, such as an editorial board or
editor. On Wikipedia, the contact is more direct, and that isn't good,
IMO. If you wanted to complain to a newspaper about an article, would
you feel more comfortable talking to the journalist who wrote the
article, or to his or her boss? There is probably a case to be made
for article subjects who want to raise objections to be directed
*away* from article talk pages, and to be told to go to OTRS first.
Maybe they are told that, I'm not sure where the documentation is. But
direct interaction between the subject of an article and the authors
of an article just doesn't sit right with me.

Possibly you have to have actually had an article written about you to
understand that. That won't happen to me any time soon, but the people
to talk to are those with articles who object in principle. I'm
surprised no survey has actually been done along those lines yet.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] PLoS Comp Biol article on getting stuff into Wikipedia

2012-04-11 Thread Carcharoth

On 4/11/12, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 On 10 April 2012 14:33, Daniel Mietchen daniel.mietc...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 snip

 The process is not cast in stone, and suggestions on how to iron out
 some potential rough edges are more than welcome.

 It's a useful survey, clearly. The big diff pasting in the new version
 does offer (edit summary) some way of tracking what went on, which is
 welcome, though not really for the purists. The one striking thing is
 the lede, which is a bit impatient for the general reader. Comparing
 with the old lede, the meaning has shifted somewhat, also. It could do
 with some division of sentences, use of in other words, that sort of
 thing.

The review process here is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Circular_permutation_in_proteins#Open_Peer_Review

I'd be particularly interested in seeing that sort of review process
compared to the Good Article and Featured Article review processes,
and may drop a note off at both of those processes at some point
(unless someone else does so first). What I'm thinking in particular
is that some FACs would benefit from what is essentially an *external*
peer review process (as opposed to the internal peer review and other
review processes). i.e. Actively soliciting reviews from those holding
credentials (academic or otherwise) in the topic area. Historically,
given the anyone an edit and (mostly) pseudonymous nature of
editing, there hasn't been much interest in this model of reviewing,
but I'd be interested to see reactions to this.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

I noticed a thread on Jimbo's talk page that is partly related to this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#A_radical_idea.3B_BLP_opt-out_for_all

Tarc suggested:

Any living person, subject to identity verification via OTRS, may
request the deletion of their article. No discussion, no AfD, just
*poof*. In its place is a simple template explaining why there is no
longer an article there, and a pointer to where the reader can find
information on the subject, a link similar to Template:Find sources at
the top of every AfD.

What people there seem to be missing is that the template would
explicitly say article removed at subject's request. The point being
that this could well result in a big PR stink for either Wikipedia
(the article was rubbish and rightly removed) or for the subject
(they are (wrongly) trying to control what is said about them).

[This is why it relates to the topic of this thread]

This is why such a proposal might actually work.

I am rather surprised at why some people miss that this is about
living people though. BWilkins said:

You can't very well tear out Mussolini from every copy of EB ever
printed, can you?

Obviously, for those who are dead, this proposed policy would no
longer apply, and you default back to the usual arguments about
notability and so on. And I still maintain that notability cannot be
properly assessed until someone's life or career has finished. The
whole notability is not temporary thing needs serious
re-examination.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:47 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote:
 BLP is a good idea and we got it for good reasons.  These recent 
 developments, however, forget that we are *an encyclopedia*. It's into 
 barking mad territory.

 No. We will not go to removing bios on demand on my watch.

OK, but what do you call a bio. Compare these two articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Brain

[A random FA-level biographical article]

And any article from this category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnish_winter_sports_biography_stubs

[Those are *not* encyclopedic articles, they are placeholders that
might one day become encyclopedic articles - is that standard
acceptable for BLPs?]

Or indeed any article from this category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_stubs

We *should* have a category of BLP stubs, but I can't find it. Maybe
someone can cross-reference the BLP category and the people stub
category (and its sub-categories) and find out how many are BLPs.

The point being that some articles are *never* going to be more than
stubs. A stub is arguably not a biographical article, but only a
placeholder, waiting to see if any reliable source will ever bother
writing more about that person during the rest of their life. The
answer in most cases is no (nothing more gets written). Either that,
or it is a placeholder waiting for Wikipedians to get around to
expanding the article.

There is a good argument to be made that all BLPs should be kept out
of mainspace and kept as drafts until formally assessed at being
reasonably complete and reasonably well-written. At some point, merely
being referenced is not enough.

And then you have people trying (and failing, though they may not
realise they are failing) to write so-called biographical articles
about every example within a field. Mainly caused by overly lax
interpretation of the GNG (general notability guideline). To take a
specific example of radio (topical at the moment), have a look at
these halls of fame:

http://www.radioacademy.org/hall-of-fame/
http://www.radiohof.org/

It would be simple to incorporate something like that into a SNG
(specific notability guideline), but I doubt that will be possible in
the current climate.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 On 4 April 2012 15:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 We *should* have a category of BLP stubs, but I can't find it. Maybe
 someone can cross-reference the BLP category and the people stub
 category (and its sub-categories) and find out how many are BLPs.

 In principle that shouldn't be too hard to do, with Catscan 2.0 to
 intersect categories for you. In practice the toolserver can't be taken for
 granted. And it seems that the naive way of doing this produces a list that
 is just too big (I took sub-categories to depth 5 there). To get an idea,
 if you do 1950 births intersect people stubs you get something over 2000.
 Which suggests the magnitude of the problem might be around 100,000.

This presumes 2000 every year from 1950 to 2000? Might not be that,
but something of that order of magnitude. Thanks. I wish the
toolserver and tools like that wouldn't trip up or time out over large
stuff like that. The inability to get a true sense of the bigger
picture can lead to potential failure points.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

 I would prefer we limit content to encyclopedic content. Obviously
 aggregating news, especially about individuals, is incompatible with that
 purpose.

Large amounts of Wikipedia articles on recent topics are nothing more
than aggregating from news sources. There is a spectrum between that
and summarising from secondary sources that have had time to assess,
review, and come to a reasoned conclusion about a topic area. But too
much is at the 'news' and 'current affairs' end of the spectrum. It
*is* a problem, and it always has been.

I wonder, how much of the early editing (first 2-3 years), was on news
topics? How much was on historical topics? ANd has that changed over
time?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

2012-03-28 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

 No eventualism is one principle that I would like to see spelled out in
 BLP policy, in the Writing style section.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Writing_style

 People do tend to treat biographies like a research pad for all the things
 that an author might justifiably want to include in a five-volume,
 2,000-page biography.

 The problem is, the other 1,999 pages never turn up, leaving something –
 often something trivial, titillating, or unflattering – that might be
 worthy of mention on page 1,547 as the biography's main point.

That's a good point. I recently edited a BLP to help clean it up, and
was struck by two points:

1) It was difficult to know where to start and when to stop, as there
is a need to not leave a BLP in a half-finished state, even if you are
stubbing it down and slowly expanding, as even slow expansion can
still leave it somewhat skewed and looking 'unfinished' (even if
better than before). Those making subsequent additions need to bear
that in mind as well.

2) If no-one else has written substantially about that person, it is a
very uncomfortable feeling that you might be the first person to be
doing that, and you start to wonder what right *anyone* has to write
about a living person without working with that person to make sure it
is accurate.

This veers into the realm of discussing authorised and unauthorised
biographies. Doing an unauthorised biography of a famous person and
getting it published can make the author money, and most publishing
firms will only publish if it is accurate and non-libellous. But doing
short pages on non-notable or borderline notable people is something
entirely different, and the motivations are often entirely different.

Motivation is something that should be looked at as well. In my case,
the articles are people working in science and that interests me. But
is that enough of a reason? What about someone who wants to write
about the leader of some small obscure country on the other side of
the world? (And then you have the classic case of the motivation being
to do a hatchet job on someone). Sure, the mantra is to use reliable
sources and be faithful to the sources, but it is still very different
(and difficult) writing about a living person who can (in theory) turn
up and object to what has been written.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

2012-03-27 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 9:39 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
cimonav...@gmail.com wrote:

 My thinking is that a constructive and asymptotically approaching perfection
 (hopefully as rapidly as humanly possible) way of doing a good bit of easing
 of some of the tensions, would be to start compiling a list of criterions 
 which
 make someone absolutely 100% a chinch to need a wikipedia article about
 them, no matter what. Not a list of articles every wikipedia should have or
 anything like that, but a list of no-brainer wikipedia inclusion
 criteria

snip

The problem with such lists is that other publications and other
websites don't do it like that (unless they are specialist ones
attempting to cover their entire field, and that is what some people
see Wikipedia as, a collection of specialist areas, but there aren't
really encyclopedias of modern radio presenters, are there?). What
would be easier is to look at the field of biographical writing as a
whole, and ask what criteria other publications use to compile their
entries. Encyclopedia Britannica has (online) entries on living
people. Where do they draw the line? And so on. The critical thing,
though, is to look at the *length* of the sources used in the
biographies. Some are book-length sources, some are only a paragraph
or two. The critical difference is between:

i) Summarising book-length sources to produce a Wikipedia article
shorter than a book
ii) Replicating article-length sources to produce a Wikipedia article
of about the same length
iii) Aggregating shorter sources to produce a Wikipedia article that
is longer than its sources

[Summarising, replicating and aggregating, are deliberate word choices there.]

Those three approaches are all, to some extent, valid, and all have
their problems and advantages and disadvantages, but it is crucial to
be aware of the breadth and depth of the available sources to have an
idea what sort of coverage Wikipedia should have and how to condense
and/or aggregate the sources. I should also mention here that some
topics (even biographical ones) produce more than one Wikipedia
article. Some biographies are split into sub-articles. Not very often,
but some people have made that approach (sort of) work.

The main problem with writing about *living* people, is that approach
(i) is rare. Those who are living and have published book-length
biographies are clearly already notable by anyone's measure. Those who
are living and only have article-length sources it is usually possible
to write about. Those who are living and have only scraps of
information floating around in various places are practically
impossible to write about, other than to produce poorly maintained
stubs.

That is the entire BLP problem in a nutshell. If the sources aren't
there, the articles are placeholders that will only be short and
stubby until someone out there writes more about that person, and if
that never happens, then is it ultimately worth maintaining such
articles?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

 *We are currently lousy at judging ephemeral notability, and issues
 around it seem to be classic time-sinks. There is a bigger picture here,
 and digging around in older biographical dictionaries can help to explain
 what is going on.

This is an excellent point (along with the rest of the posts from
Charles and Andreas). I was thinking explicitly of the sense you get
of what constitutes a 'proper' biography when reading how it was done
in the past (especially the 19th-century Dictionary of National
Biography and the 2004 update/expansion/revision of that, the ODNB).
If you spend your time reading and looking at numerous biographies
across a wide range of subjects (as I do, both on Wikipedia and
elsewhere, and as Charles does), then you get a good sense of what
sources are used for a genuine biography, and what sources are
features of more ephemeral biographies.

Other biographical sources I'm familiar with include the Australian
and Canadian dictionaries of national biography, the Biographical
Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society journal, the similar
publication in the USA, produced by (I think) the National Academy of
Sciences for their members, and the Dictionary of Scientific
Biography.

The point about Wikipedia (for BLPs) being ahead of the proper sources
to use is another excellent one. There is a natural progression to
biographical sources that (for obvious reasons) parallels the
subject's life. People record their own lives at first (diaries,
letters, CVs and the like), and then gradually others start to write
about that person and you get short descriptions such as author and
contributor biographies, and short news items. Then, as someone
becomes more prominent, you get more considered material, such as
interviews, feature articles, and so on. Very prominent people get
official and official biographers that document that person's life
(e.g. US Presidents and some other politicians). Towards the end of
someone's career, you may get tribute articles and the like. Then,
when the person dies, you get obituaries, and then (possibly) entries
in the histories relevant to that person. Very prominent people get
entire books written about them. Others get less.

If Wikipedia jumps into that natural progression too early, and tries
to establish, or maintain, a biography before there are sources to
support one, the result can be a mess. Even if done carefully, it can
still be a problem. I mentioned the example of Robert E. M. Hedges,
who's article I've just been updating. If I hadn't updated that
article, it likely would have remained without an update until more
material was published. In all four cases I've given as examples of
BLPs that I've created or edited extensively, I've felt uncomfortable
at times that I was doing what should, properly, be left until the
right moment for those people's colleagues and peers to do - write
that person's life story (in some ways, the difference between an
authorised and unauthorised biography). That is why it is important to
have the foundation of a proper biographical source to build on, not
go too far, and to be clear that BLPs are always a work in progress,
waiting for the definitive accounts to be written by others (and then
summarised and incorporated into the Wikipedia article).

There are other examples, but I'll leave those for another time.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 11:37 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

 Zee problem with this standard is that it would preclude having an
 article on the person currently running mali (admittedly the article
 isn't up to much but I think it could be argued that we should at
 least try).

There is nothing wrong with having brief 'biographical notes' on the
person currently running Mali. The problem comes when people get the
idea that they need to turn such notes into fully fledged biographical
articles and start scraping around for material and 'running ahead of
the sources'. Sometimes this is done with the best of intentions (I'm
effectively doing this for the four examples I mentioned earlier). But
when this involves biographies of living people, the standard that
should apply is:

i) Have a *clear* way for the article subject to make contact and
raise concerns. Currently, this is OTRS, but I suspect many people who
are the subject of biographical articles are unaware of the articles.

ii) Be respectful of the article subject and be prepared to work with
them if they raise concerns, and don't needlessly antagonise them. For
some editors, who chose to remain anonymous, this will be problematic,
as some people (understandably) will want to work with a known person,
not some anonymous screen name.

iii) Use very high standards of sourcing and be aware that limited or
restricted coverage in sources almost certainly results in errors.
Better to keep the article short and precise, rather than write too
much (your 'we should at least try') and run into problems.

In almost all cases, a stub with the basic information is better than
a loose aggregation of factoids. The problem is that well-meaning
people (and sometime less well-meaning people) come along later and
try and 'expand' what is there. I'd be in favour of locking down BLPs
once they reach a certain stage of development and requiring a very
high standard of sourcing for new additions.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

I should add that on re-reading, I see the irony in suggesting working
with the article subject when that person is someone who has just
taken over a country. Handling stuff like that is more difficult, I
admit. And some people are famous enough that the question of working
'with them' is silly (US President, the Pope, stuff like that).

The famous people have lots of other stuff out there about them, so
are not that worried about their Wikipedia article. The borderline
notable people, though, have their Wikipedia article as they number
one resource about them on the internet. That is the problem in a
nutshell - which comes back again to running ahead of the sources. If
there is not one single source out there of comparable length and
type, then Wikipedia is 'getting there first' (by aggregating separate
sources to create the next level up) and that is nearly always a bad
thing.

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia not responding

Wikipedia seems to be down...

http://wikistatus.ezyang.com/

Anyone know what's happening?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose
 isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful
 information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that
 BLPs are useful to people.

For low-level BLPs, a large proportion of the views may be Wikipedia editors.

 As long as there are sufficient reliable
 sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why
 we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the
 General Notability Guideline says.

But what if that is all the reliable sources there are? And there are
no more and no more likely to be forthcoming? We are effectively
bequeathing to future generations a large number of stubby articles
that may never have any more sources written about them. Would you
like the job of (in 50 years time) sorting through these articles and
deciding which ones to try and ascertain year of death, and which ones
to expand from obituaries (if any exist), and which ones to delete
because they turned out to have sunk back into obscurity and only
dedicated research in primary documents (mostly not allowed under
WP:OR) will be of any use?

 I do think we have a problem with writing about things too soon, but
 it isn't so extreme that we should wait until people are retired or
 dead to write about them.

snip

It's not just writing about things too soon, but poor choices of what
to write on. There needs to be some judgement that goes something like
this: (1) The longest biographical coverage of the subject in sources
is of such-and-such a length. (2) Our article should not attempt to go
beyond that length until the next level of biographical coverage is
written. (3) If the subject has dropped out of the public eye and that
next level of biographical coverage is unlikely to be reached, then
delete.

If you don't follow something like those guidelines, you get people
pulling together different sources to create the next level of
biographical coverage, and being the first to do so. Wikipedia
shouldn't be in the business of attempting to write biographies of a
new type (aggregating existing sources) where nothing similar has been
done before.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Inclusionists vs deletionists

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 11:52 PM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 As an admin who closes a fair few AfDs, and as a human being who isn't a big 
 fan of loudmouthed ideological posturing, I have to say that I rather like 
 such topic areas.

Well, there is currently an AfD in progress that is looking a bit like
a train wreck, so some do still split the community. Though the issue
is more BLP than notability (though notability is borderline). I'm
tempted to actually formalise the proposal I've had floating around
for a while (in my head) to say that BLPs and (biographical articles
in general) should require published biographies during the person's
lifetime and/or obituaries after death. Would anyone on this mailing
list be willing to bounce ideas around about that? The sticking point
is what constitutes a 'published biography'?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Inclusionists vs deletionists

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

 Goes too far. A Procrustean Bed.

Really?

What about this proposal?

In light of such examples, I think it’s high time to start a
discussion on whether to amend Wikipedia’s BLP policy as follows:

*WP contributors will not start biographies on lesser-known living
people without their permission. The project is full of three-sentence
stubs on people of minor notability, more often than not started by
contributors eager to increase their number of “articles created”.

*If a lesser-known biographical subject wants their WP biography
deleted, their request will be honored. The biographical information
for this subject will be replaced with a template stating something
along the lines of: We regret that Ms/Mrs/Mr X decided not to have
his biography featured on WP. For further information, please consult
their website.

That was from User:DracoEssentialis (12:00, 23 March 2012 (UTC)).

I'm also going to post what I proposed at that AfD, but I'll do that
in another thread.

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

I'm posting here an argument I made in a recent AfD, explaining why I
think more stringent notability requirements are needed for
biographical articles:

The right point to assess someone's notability and write a definitive
article about them is at that point (or sometimes when they retire).
Any BLP is only a work in progress until that point is reached. [Some
say] Notability, once attained, does not diminish. That might seem
true, but what is being assessed is not the subject's true notability,
but a fluctuating 'notability during lifetime' that can wax and wane
over time, with the true level of notability not being established
until someone's career or life is over. Some people gain awards and
recognitions and have long and diverse careers and have glowing
obituaries written about them, and pass into the history of the field
they worked in. Others have more pedestrian careers.

The point is that it is rarely possible to make an accurate assessment
until the right point is reached. What you end up with if you have low
standards for allowing articles on BLPs is a huge number of borderline
BLPs all across Wikipedia (heavily weighted towards contemporary
coverage [...]), the vast majority of the subjects of which will not
have prominent (or any) obituaries published about them, and in 50
years time or so the articles will look a bit silly, cobbled together
from various scraps and items published during the subject's lifetime,
but with no proper, independent assessment of their place in history.

It has been said before, but that is why specialist biographical
dictionaries often have as one of their inclusion criteria that
someone has to be dead before having an article. I'm not saying we
should go that far, but there is a case for many BLPs of saying 'if
there is no current published biography, wait until this career/life
is over and make an assessment at that point', and until then either
delete or have a bland stub.

The above is why I rarely edit BLPs. It is far easier (and more
satisfying) to edit about a topic once it is reasonably 'complete',
not ongoing. The latter statements applies to more than BLPs
(biographies of living people), for example it applies to any 'news'
topic, but it does apply especially to BLPs as they are a minefield
because they require careful maintenance.

To give some examples of articles I've edited or created that are BLPs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Mestel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Lieberman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_W._Moore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._M._Hedges

Those aren't very good examples. What I'm really looking for is a way
to illustrate how some people become notable, and then fade into
obscurity, while others maintain notability and accumulate coverage in
reliable sources throughout their lives, rather than only briefly. The
latter are good topics for encyclopedia articles, but the latter tend
not to be. Is there a way to argue for more stringent notability
requirements that won't get shot down? Essentially, what I'm saying
Wikipedia needs to avoid is bequeathing a lot of stubby articles to
future generations of editors who will get stuck trying to find out
anything more about people who have faded back into obscurity and for
whom it is often difficult to ascertain if they are still living.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 4:48 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 23 March 2012 14:04, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 I'm posting here an argument I made in a recent AfD, explaining why I
 think more stringent notability requirements are needed for
 biographical articles:

 And I see that the specific example you're talking about is:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jim_Hawkins_%28radio_presenter%29

 This is a rather broad and (as I've noted) hideously vague proposed
 solution to a very specific problem, viz. someone who is apparently
 well within notability guidelines wanting an article deleted because
 he doesn't have control of it, and is abusive towards anyone who tries
 to help.

I've written on this topic before, well before this AfD. If you want,
I can dig up the diffs, but I'm looking at the general case here, not
this specific one (I'll post a response to your previous post that I
had been drafting). I should have made it clearer that this is a
proposal intended for all BLPs, not any specific one (but I thought
that was obvious). And yes, I know any concrete proposal will have to
be proposed on-wiki. I just wanted to bounce ideas around here.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 2:18 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 23 March 2012 14:04, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 It has been said before, but that is why specialist biographical
 dictionaries often have as one of their inclusion criteria that
 someone has to be dead before having an article. I'm not saying we
 should go that far, but there is a case for many BLPs of saying 'if
 there is no current published biography, wait until this career/life
 is over and make an assessment at that point', and until then either
 delete or have a bland stub.

 Define published biography. Two paragraphs? A page on a notable
 website? A news media article? A detailed criticism with life story
 mixed in? A whole book on them?

I know that this is the critical point, and I never said it was
cut-and-dried. It would need discussion, but let's actually discuss it
(with examples) instead of dismissing it. What I would say is that
Wikipedia biographies should have at least one source that

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Mestel

For Leon Mestel, the qualifying sources would be his entry in Who's
Who and in Debrett's People of Today. Those are UK-specific sources.
What would the equivalent be in the USA?

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Lieberman

For Philip Lieberman, you have brief biographical paragraphs in lists
of the contributors for volumes he has contributed to, plus the pages
published by his university that summarise his career. I haven't been
able to find anything else, but this will be the situation for a lot
of academics. While they are still actively engaged in research, you
often won't find anything beyond their university pages and brief
biographical summaries for conferences they speak at as invited guests
and in publications they contribute to. Ironically, his son has an
entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, but he doesn't:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1798503/Daniel-Lieberman

3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_W._Moore

For Norman W. Moore you have an entry in Who's Who, an entry in
Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, biographical information in books he
has published. The example of this in the article is now a dead link,
but it can be seen here:

http://www.nhbs.com/oaks_dragonflies_and_people_tefno_117959.htmltab_tag=bio

You also have the example of a festschrift (this is a form of tribute,
which would in most cases count as a solid biographical reference).

4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._M._Hedges

The final example, Robert Hedges, is more difficult. There will likely
be suitable material out there, but I haven't been able to find
anything that would really satisfy me yet.

By the way, having some suitable level of biographical material
published doesn't mean someone is automatically notable in terms of
Wikipedia inclusion criteria. But what I'm saying is that if someone
*doesn't* have some level of biographical material published, then
that (and the type of material it is) should weigh heavily in whether
to keep an article, how to treat deletion requests from the subject of
an article, and how to edit articles that are kept.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:16 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 23 March 2012 17:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 For Leon Mestel, the qualifying sources would be his entry in Who's
 Who and in Debrett's People of Today. Those are UK-specific sources.
 What would the equivalent be in the USA?

 Who's Who might say this guy is notable, but the actual content is
 completely self-sourced. It's effectively a sponsored blog entry.

You miss my point. What I'm saying is that if someone who *could* have
a Who's Who entry doesn't have one, then we should be asking why.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 What I would say is that Wikipedia biographies should have at least one 
 source that

I knew I should have finished the draft before posting it... That
sentence was meant to say something like should have at least one
source that is recognisably biographical. But really just delete that
unfinished sentence.

I also forgot to say that it would be simpler to just forbid the use
of news sources on BLPs that lack non-news sources. It is the
aggregation of factoids from various news sources to make a
biography that is really unprofessional. No reputable biographer would
do that. I'm trying to remember what I said in an earlier discussion
(years ago now): if no-one else has attempted to write a biography,
Wikipedia shouldn't be the one to attempt it first.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 6:25 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 23 March 2012 17:20, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:16 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 Who's Who might say this guy is notable, but the actual content is
 completely self-sourced. It's effectively a sponsored blog entry.

 You miss my point. What I'm saying is that if someone who *could* have
 a Who's Who entry doesn't have one, then we should be asking why.

 Oh yes, it's definitely missing articles list stuff. Agreed.

No, I'm not asking why those with Who's Who entries that lack
Wikipedia articles lack Wikipedia articles. I'm asking why those who
chose to opt out of Who's Who (by not sending in an entry) are not
allowed to opt out of Wikipedia. Sometimes the reasons for not wanting
to be publicly listed in a publication like Who's Who are the same as
for not wanting to be listed in Wikipedia.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] sad news

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 3:27 AM, Bob the Wikipedian
bobthewikiped...@gmail.com wrote:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deceased_Wikipedians

Oh dear. I see from reading that page that not only have we lost Ben
Yates, but also Slrubenstein.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rubenstein

The death of both these Wikipedians was mentioned briefly in the Signpost:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-03-12/News_and_notes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-03-19/News_and_notes

Very sad news in both cases. My condolences to those that knew them.

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] BLP sources updates following death of article subject

2012-03-12 Thread Carcharoth

Just read that US chemistry professor Sherwood Rowland had died, and
went to the Wikipedia page to see if it had been updated.

I was initially worried to see a BLP sources tag on the article, but I
was getting an old cached version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_Sherwood_Rowlandoldid=480712752

The current article has been tweaked and updated somewhat and the tag removed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_Sherwood_Rowlandoldid=481524901

Though the source we provide reporting his death is still only an external link.

It is a bit depressing to think that some tagged pages only get dealt
with when they become topical.

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] Ancient merge proposals

2012-02-08 Thread Carcharoth

I recently came across a very ancient merge proposal (from November 2009).

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heliotrop_Rotating_Houseoldid=467204628
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heliotrope_%28building%29oldid=467204633

I may try and fix that at some point, if no-one else gets there first,
but was wondering where very old merge proposals are listed. Is there
a tracking category somewhere that they are put in?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Ancient merge proposals

2012-02-08 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:

 The various merge templates drop articles into subcategories of

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_to_be_merged

 All are hidden, so they shouldn't display on the article pages.

Thanks. That's why I missed them (not logged in). I was looking at the
template source code, trying to see where the code putting them into
categories was, but presumably it is tucked away in one of the
templates contained within the template. I now see the template
document page would have told me this.

These templates will add tagged articles to Category:Articles to be
merged, while non-articles (files, templates, etc.) will be added to
Category:Items to be merged.

Doh! Thanks anyway.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedian asked to write for a paper encyclopedia

2012-01-20 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 11:34 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 http://savageminds.org/2012/01/19/wikipedia-encyclopedias/

Probably not the first and not the last. I don't find it that surprising.

What he says there is excellent, though. Well worth reading.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A Wikipedian asked to write for a paper encyclopedia

2012-01-20 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:

 The biggest difference was in the editorial process - deciding on the
 scope of the article, finding reviewers, proofreading, communicating
 with other writers etc. Since it's not over yet, i cannot write more
 about it, but the comparison between that and writing for Wikipedia
 would be hugely interesting.

I appreciate you can't say more right now, but can you say whether
deciding on the scope of the article, finding reviewers,
proofreading, communicating with other writers is referring to the
process on Wikipedia or the process for the encyclopedia you are
writing for? In my view, that process you describe is how writing on
Wikipedia *should* work. Whether it does in practice or not is another
matter.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and political statements

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 Now that we have taken the necessary first step to regard the English
 Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as high-profile platforms for
 political statements, we ought to consider what other critical humanitarian
 problems we could use our considerable visibility and reputation to
 address.

snip

considerable visibility and reputation is the key point here. The
visibility is unlikely to be much affected, but the blackout and
activism may well affect the reputation, or the mental image many
people have of Wikipedia, especially if it becomes a regular
occurrence. More comments below.

 Of course, there is no articulated reason to limit ourselves this way.
 Surely a large portion of our voting community would be against

snip

voting community is the key point there. This community changes and
will be greatly affected by these developments, especially if
black-outs become a regular event. Some will leave, others will
arrive. The make-up of the community will change. I also predict that
those who previously stayed silent will start to speak up, and more
than just those who are naturally activist and/or political will start
to speak up.

 The possibilities are, quite unfortunately, nearly endless. Obviously we
 can't keep Wikipedia offline and just rotate the protest message; perhaps
 we should consider creating a Campaign of the Week (or Month?) to highlight
 humanitarian problems. All we need are volunteers to set up a
 Wikipedia:CotW and get it rolling, and we can start to make a real
 difference.

I wasn't entirely sure if you were being sarcastic here and elsewhere
in the post.

A couple of objections.

(1) Many (hopefully most) Wikipedians are here to write an online
encyclopedia, not to be part of an activist community (though there
are elements of that in the parts of the free licensing movement who
actively promote copyleft and work to (legitimately) reduce as much as
possible the restrictions produced by copyright legislation, which is
pertinent given the SOPA element here).

(2) Many Wikipedians are quite happy to be activist elsewhere and to
make protests in person at demonstrations, and to sign petitions, and
help run activist and/or political organisations, but are happy to do
this as something completely separate from Wikipedia. It tends to be a
question of balancing different interests and not letting one dominate
the others, and keeping interests that might conflict apart. Some will
say you shouldn't keep things like this separate, others will say you
should. There are valid points for both arguments.

As I said above, the main result of all this, especially if it
continues, will be to shift the public perception of Wikipedia from a
user-edited resource that is moderately reliable if used with caution
(sometimes very unreliable if used without caution) to an activist
platform. That could be disastrous for its reputation. Consider if a
rival was started or was around that pledged it would never use its
visibility and reputation to make points like this.

A one-off black-out, yes. Repeated black-outs, no. I would hope most
Wikipedians would oppose anything like this happening again in the
near future, if only because this strategy becomes less effective the
more it is used.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia blackout

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 12:04 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 17 January 2012 11:29, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
 The one omission there other than the mailing list seems to have been
 the Village Pumps; the first RFC was hosted on VP/Proposals, but
 spamming a notice for the second RFC to the others might have been
 worthwhile. Something to add to the list for next time we have some
 mass short-notice discussion like this - though, hopefully, that won't
 be for another ten years!

 Really, if it's on Central Notice, it doesn't need to be anywhere
 else. It was a little difficult to miss.

The problem I have is with the timescale. I was away that weekend
(though I was briefly active on Commons, I didn't have time to check
much else). I had no time to look at the discussion when it opened on
Friday, and by the time I got back and had time on Monday evening to
look at the discussion, it had closed. A discussion like that should
have been started at least a week before the planned action. Anything
requiring action on a swifter timescale should have been delegated
following (at minimum) a week-long community discussion.

Ironically, I just tried to look up some comments made in one of the
earlier discussions, but was unable to do so. Shouldn't the
discussions leading up to the blackout have been omitted from the
blackout? I think some were, but not all. If there are some discussion
pages related to this that are still readable (even if not editable),
could someone list them here?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia blackout

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 9:09 AM, George Herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com wrote:

 I started a thread along these lines a few hours ago on foundation-l.

I may cross-post there (foundation-l) gently chiding those who were
discussing the blackout there with no cross-posting or announcement
here (wiki-en-l). That was a really bad omission, given that this
directly affected the English language version of Wikipedia. I would
also plead that more cross-posting be done. It may sometimes lead to
parallel discussions, but that is better than those only following one
list missing out on announcements. If someone else wants to cross-post
this, or post before I do, please do.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia blackout

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Jeraphine Gryphon jeraph...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wikipedia should do these complete edit locks more often, TBH. For the
 sake of Wikipediholics like me, and so admins can catch up with
 reports and backlogs in peace.

Point of order. This is not an edit-lock. You are thinking from the
perspective of an editor. This is a reader lock-out as well (though
really, those that know enough to use mirrors or caches or disable
javascript are not missing out on reading articles, and that may get
mis-reported in the press as those in the know not being
inconvenienced but everyone else being locked out from reading
Wikipedia).

 Not sure if it's a serious suggestion but it's just a thought I had.

It's a nice idea, but there are several problems with that. Firstly,
how to handle urgent edits that still need to be made. Secondly, how
to restrict editing disablement to just article namespace (which is
what would be needed to allow other stuff to carry on as normal). I
don't think it would ever really happen.

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] Reactions against the SOPA blackout

Starting a thread to collect some links to reactions against the SOPA
blackout of Wikipedia.

Here is one to start things off:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scott_MacDonald

And a link to that page as it currently stands:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scott_MacDonaldoldid=471993971

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] BBC articles related to Wikipedia blackout

Three BBC articles related to Wikipedia blackout:

1) Wikipedia joins blackout protest at US anti-piracy moves

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16590585

2) Wikipedia - what can it tell us about Sopa?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16609057

3) Without Wikipedia, where can you get your facts?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16601517

All BBC News, 18 January 2012.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC articles related to Wikipedia blackout