Re: [WikiEN-l] Three cheers for Wikipedia's cancer info (or two and a half)
Bod Notbod wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:03 AM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: All that's happened is that the professionally produced material had some specific attention towards making it readable. The Wikipedia AFAIK doesn't have any formal processes to check that, so far as I know. Is it not a criterion used when judging articles C/B/A/GA/FA? Our processes are unlikely to pick up the most obvious difference (as I judge from an example), namely that where we would wikilink a technical word, the NCI would give a phrase of definition in parentheses beside it. We think people who need to know what the [[colon]] is will click and find out, they don't use indirection in that way. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers
David Lindsey wrote: What we need, then, is not a way to desysop more easily, but rather a way to delineate highly-charged and controversial administrator actions, and the administrators qualified to perform them, from uncontroversial administrator actions, and the administrators qualified to perform them. I will not presume to provide a full criteria for what separates controversial from uncontroversial administrator actions, but I would suggest something along the lines of the following. Controversial: Arbitration enforcement actions, blocks of established users for any reason other than suspicion of account compromise, close of AfDs where the consensus is not clear (this of course becomes itself a murky distinction, but could be well enough set apart), reversal of the actions of another administrator except when those actions are plainly abusive. Non-controversial: All others. In other words, a two-tier system of admins. Against that, I really think there is an area that should be thought through, just alluded to there. The criteria for reversing another admin's actions do matter, and it seems to me matter most. Admin actions that can be reversed (i.e. technical use of buttons, rather than interaction by dialogue) lack the sort of basic classification we need: into situations of urgency and situations that can wait; situations of key importance to the project (such as involve harassment, for example), and those that can be treated as routine; and into situations where consultation should be mandatory and those where a second admin can use judgement to override. The fact that some people might conflate those analyses illustrates the need to be more careful here. I think this is something to untangle. We need to get to the bottom of the community's fears about overpowerful admins, by talking through and delineating what a single admin can expect to face in awkward situations. I've never been in favour of restricting admin discretion, which is really what is being proposed. We can't anticipate the challenges the site will face (even though it may appear that there is little innovation from vandals and trolls). I do think admins can be held to account for their use of discretion. Right now it seems that a piece of the puzzle is missing: admins don't know clearly how they stand in relation to the actions of other admins. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: The Wikipedia community painted itself into a corner, and it's entirely unclear to me if it can find the exits, the paths to fix it. As this discussion illustrates rather well, the argument if you want to fix A, you'd have to start by fixing B (my pet gripe) first is routinely deployed, making for an infinite regress in some cases, and in others the generation of suggestions that are rather clearly counterproductive for fixing A, whatever they may do for B. In the real world, if you want people to do thankless and time-consuming tasks for you for no money, and much criticism, you have to rely on something more than be sure that you'll be told if we don't like you and what you do. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers
David Gerard wrote: On 31 May 2010 13:42, Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: Yes. And thank you, Charles. Once again this points out the fact that, with the Foundation, we are dealing with a group of persons who don't have a clue how to deal with people who they see as being out of their universe-of-one. In fact, they appear to regard the Wikipedia Community as a necessary evil. I urge you to go back and actually read the discussion, and you will see that you are the only person to mention the Foundation and we're actually talking about the Wikipedia community here. Then you will be less likely to post responses that look like keyword-triggered cut'n'paste. Actually, the Wikipedia community is in a sense a necessary evil. Without it, WP would be just another underpowered, well-meaning website. With it, people who are not natural collaborators work together effectively, if not without friction. But the reply I made was contra being painted into a corner (singular issue), and in favour of an analysis of the actual problem. I see [[Blind men and an elephant]] is an article. I won't go further in Marc's direction than saying that our discussions can seem sometimes like a post-mortem to that parable, with everyone saying, you know, I still think I was right along. But the remedies - for a bigger picture - have the disadvantages of requiring a great deal of investment of time. I believe I have tried a number of those, without yet getting a complete view of the elephant. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 02:43 AM 5/31/2010, Charles Matthews wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: The Wikipedia community painted itself into a corner, and it's entirely unclear to me if it can find the exits, the paths to fix it. As this discussion illustrates rather well, the argument if you want to fix A, you'd have to start by fixing B (my pet gripe) first is routinely deployed, making for an infinite regress in some cases, and in others the generation of suggestions that are rather clearly counterproductive for fixing A, whatever they may do for B. In the real world, if you want people to do thankless and time-consuming tasks for you for no money, and much criticism, you have to rely on something more than be sure that you'll be told if we don't like you and what you do. Eh? Is this coherent? Who is the you who wants people to do thankless tasks? What is the pet gripe in the discussion? What is being discussed is declining numbers of EN wiki admins, and how to address it. In that, surely it is appropriate and even necessary to examine the entire administrative structure, both how admin privileges are created and how they are removed. So A here would be declining numbers. B, then, must be the difficulty of removal, which leads to stronger standards for accepting admins in the first place, which leads to declining applications and denial of some applications that might have been just fine. There is no evidence that there are declining applications because of fear of being criticized as an adminstrator, and the numbers of admin removals are trivial, so Charles is expressing a fear that is imaginary. If it were easier to gain tools and still difficult to lose them unless you disregard guidelines and consensus, there would be no loss of applications, there would be a gain. A large gain. Actually, most people who don't apply as an admin just don't apply. They don't generate evidence one way or another. It is a perfectly sensible attitude for a well-adjusted Wikipedian getting on with article work not to want to be involved in admin work. There are editors on the site who make the lives of those who cross them miserable: and an admin has the choice of avoiding such editors, or getting in the way of abuse. My expressed fear is very far from imaginary. You put your head above the parapet, you may get shot at, precisely for acting in good faith and according to your own judgement in awkward situations. What follows that seems to be a non sequitur. It was not what I was arguing at all. What I'm seeing here, indeed, is an illustration of the problem. The attitude that Charles expresses is clearly part of the problem, and Charles is suggesting no solutions but perhaps one of ridiculing and rejecting all the suggestions for change. Ah, but this is in line: Charles's attitude becomes something that must be fixed before recruiting more people to stand for adminship. I was actually commenting on the thread, not the issue. We should examine this sort of solution, amongst others: identify WikiProjects with few admins relative to their activity, and suggest they should look for candidates. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 01:35 PM 5/31/2010, Charles Matthews wrote: Actually, most people who don't apply as an admin just don't apply. With ten million registered editors and a handful of RfAs, that's obvious. They don't generate evidence one way or another. It is a perfectly sensible attitude for a well-adjusted Wikipedian getting on with article work not to want to be involved in admin work. Sure. However, there is a minority who are *not* well-adjusted who would seek adminship for personal power. Yes, and the first required quality for being given such power is not to want it. Etc. But you were the one talking about getting painted into a corner. The problem, as I have defined it, is of negative voting. The sheer suspicion of those who apparently want the mop-and-bucket. (And anyway, I obviously was using well-adjusted in the sense of round peg in a round hole, not as a comment on anything else.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins Matt Jacobs
Michael Peel wrote: We block our precious new users at the drop of a hat, but an admin has to do something pretty damned horrific to even consider removing their status, and even then it takes months. This depends on what you define as 'pretty damned horrific. I'd say that it's currently more that they have to do something high-profile (e.g. vandalise the main page) or controversial. I think we should be clear that the problem with RfA is negative voting. The logic may be that there would be fewer opposes at RfA if desysopping were easier, but I wonder if that stands up. The fact is that there are not many rogue admins. Mostly admins do fine. It doesn't seem that the general standard for promotion is too low. There are a few people who can't handle the powers well once they have them, something that tends to show up in a few months. There are some admins who make too much of the status. There are indeed some who think it should give them some rights in content matters, which is dreadful. When it comes to desysopping, it's an ArbCom matter except in emergencies, and fairly obviously the approach is to point out to admins when they are doing it wrong, on the grounds that they will be smart enough to get the point. It's the not getting it that causes difficulties, and is laborious to establish. I suspect, though, that what would affect RfA more would be the idea that desysopping for being unpopular should be more prevalent. Some of the other wikis do confirm admins every year, but this is certainly not going to solve enWP's problem. I do think this is more about recruiting the right people to stand, than about accountability built into the system. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins
David Gerard wrote: On 28 May 2010 23:21, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: With new contributors, we can both improve the articles and gain new ones. It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material. The key hurdle is not persuading people to contribute usefully, but of persuading them to contribute at all. +1 Those who speak of trying to restrict contributions because we haven't got the admins have it completely arse-backwards. - - 1 Two negatives don't make a positive. Except sometimes. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins
Andrew Gray wrote: Regardless of what technically happens to that submitted junk, and how many boxes they tick in the process, we'll still fundamentally have a space people can put prospective article content into, and someone has to say no to it. Is that true? When was the family of deletion processes last reconsidered? If we had a good look at PROD-like mechanisms, which could be partially automated, and holding areas where marginal content could be placed in limbo, what would we come up with? What if stub-sorting (by topic) were more integrated with quality sorting? We have certainly not scaled any great heights of sophistication in dealing with the influx of articles. That may or may not be a good thing, but there is surely scope for innovation. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Updated new search interface on the prototype
David Goodman wrote: Not bad in terms of function, except for the small size of the search box, which should be twice the current size there. But it would still be better on the left side, under the logo. Ah, but it would be confusing to be out of step with other websites, wouldn't it? Never mind that Wikipedia is sui generis and well known in its own terms, it would be confusing not to conform to other sites in having design imposed, not bubbling up from the community of editors (who admittedly only make the site what it is). No matter how much you paid an established editor, the required level of ignorance could not be attained without re-education. It would also be confusing to have a search function that actually searched the site, rather than being based on assumptions about what people wanted when they tried to search the site. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Updated new search interface on the prototype
William Pietri wrote: The community of editors definitely make this place what it is, but our shared goal is to serve readers, and I think that should be paramount in our minds. Especially in situations like interface design, where a classic and incredibly common mistake is for internal stakeholders to make self-serving choices. I'm not against training wheels as default skin - who could be? I am against the New Coke presentation of such a skin as what we've all been waiting for. And if the intention is only to develop new features on Vector, then I see an actual problem. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Pedantry on privileges
Gregory Maxwell wrote: Probing the bounds of your actual authority in our environment is a necessary thing that all of us do with every BOLD action, it's a consequence of the generally non-hierarchical nature of the projects. So I don't think it's justified to flog someone forever when they cross a line that was apparently obvious to everyone except them, especially since these things tend to seem far more black and white after the fact. Of course if people can bring themselves to assume good faith, it all becomes somewhat easier. Much confusion, it seems to me, between two metrics or axes: one to do with fallibility (anyone can make mistakes relative to unfamiliar or even familiar situations on the wikis, particularly when implementation details are in the hands of self-selected groups and process wonks); and another to do with politicisation (in which the default assumption is of bad faith in those who would disturb a supposed equilibrium) which is a version of small-c conservatism. The BOLD editor has trouble on both fronts (you're doing it out of process and anyway change is only allowed after long debate). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these bab ies are ugly
Nathan wrote: Obviously it would be an impossible task to study all potential sources and make a proactive determination of reliability. We hope to some extent that folks citing academic sources have vetted them in some way as to their credibility, but with mainstream news sources even that expectation is set aside. So instead, perhaps we could have a reactive policy of reassessing the assumption of reliability for specific sources based on a history of errors. When Fox News articles are shown to be riddled with errors of basic fact, indicating that no effort was made to verify claims, we should stop granting it the same deference we extend to other institutions with more integrity. There are various WP articles that are in parts more explicit than WP:RS. And have the advantage of talking about broadly accepted approaches to reliability, rather than representing the status quo on an endlessly-edited wiki page. [[Historical method]] may be the most interesting; [[source criticism]] and [[source evaluation]] also have something to say. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these bab ies are ugly
Shmuel Weidberg wrote: On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Though he remains the president of the Wikimedia Foundation, ... 'He had the highest level of control, he was our leader,' a source told FoxNews.com. When asked who was in charge now, the source said, 'No one. It’s chaos.' I'm not sure what the issue with this news article is. It is essentially accurate. It sounds funny, but the fact is that Jimbo had the ability and the authority to make unilateral decisions before, and now he's given some of that up. We all have the authority to make unilateral decisions on a wiki we edit. That's not the point, never has been the point. Fundamentally wiki editing is about who has permission to do what (which could be described as to do with access, not authority). If Jimbo edits and gets reverted, this is a normal wiki situation. The trouble with in charge is that it postulates a notional power structure which has never actually existed. In fact under the heading of office actions there would be more of that around than before. Trying to analyse enWP in particular, which is not the same as the other 700-odd WMF wikis and has been anomalous for at least five years, in terms of its power structure, usually leads into garden-variety troll talk. If you like, it is an elementary blame game, and is the normal first move of some critics. The insight that it's the community, stupid is quite lacking in that analysis. Sure the news has a slant, is sensationalized, and bears the inaccuracy of being written by a non-community member for non-community members, but it remains as accurate as could be expected. It would be more accurate if it didn't rely on selective quotation to put forward, tendentiously, a bizarrely wrong version of what is true on the ground. It is not true that anyone can now run a bot on enWP, for example, which really would be chaos. It is not true that no one is now baby-sitting key policy pages. I don't suppose that admins are blocking people using very different criteria, this week. On these measures of control, which apply to reality on the site, what has changed? Look, the command and control idea of how to run a wiki encyclopedia is so bad a model of enWP as to constitute a classic straw man. So the argument put forward is a fairly basic fallacy. The purpose of requiring reliable sources is so that people can't make things up and put them in the articles. Using this as a source will show more or less the truth. Unfortunately it is a limitation of general news media that it always distorts whatever it reports and there is no good reason to consider any news reports as reliable, especially when it comes to details. Well, I agree with that, to the extent that the Fox report could be taken as professional at the level of not verbally mangling the quotes. Beyond that it doesn't constitute good, objective journalism. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babi es are ugly
David Gerard wrote: The article is basically not even wrong. And that's because they really don't care, and literally just made up some shit: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/jimmy-wales-fox-news-is-wrong-no-shakeup/ Sources of this type, even if owned by a large media company, need to be taken with an extra grain of salt. I would say the point of the Fox article is the subtext: no one rules the WMF, ergo they would have no way to comply with legal requirements such as a take-down order. NB the subtle solecism free reign (for free rein) that turns the wiki ideal on its head, and the wholely misleading suggestion that Jimbo could ever assign projects as man-management (other than to employees), rather than operate as a low-level administrator does, by building small teams. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babi es are ugly
David Gerard wrote: On his SharedKnowing list, Dr Sanger notes he's just joined Wikipedia Review and heartily recommends it to all. Yes, an ideal place to complain about getting blocked from enWP for editing [[Talk:History of Wikipedia]] on the assumption that Wikimedia Commons is part of the 'pedia. Still, it's after his time as editor, and they'll make him welcome on WR. Plenty of room in the [[Cave of Adullam]]. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these bab ies are ugly
AGK wrote: On 17 May 2010 20:45, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: when he plainly said in about as many words this was a symbolic gesture to diffuse and refocus criticism Mhrm, that's arguable. The flags that Jimbo relinquished meant that he could no longer do such things as delete Commons images. That's far from symbolic; in fact, it essentially is him resigning rights that the community had began to angrily demand be taken away from him. I think the symbolic part of Jimbo's place in the overall constitution (definitely scare quotes) is rather significant, though. There are three ways in which Jimbo interacts with the community: 1. direct editing or admin action; 2. exhortation and pulling strings, i.e. getting others to do the things under 1; 3. the business he not inaccurately compares with being a constitutional monarch. Of those (1) has been of minimal use in recent years, simply because it attracts so much attention. The current furore is perhaps the point at which it hits the buffers. Method (2) is how one expects a Board member to act. The point about (3) is that it is far from a dead letter on enWP, but its traction is much more tenuous elsewhere. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that we are talking about Commons, which is not disjoint from enWP in the way that other wikis are. Coming from a country without a written constitution, with a constitutional monarch, and where the monarch's role has been thoroughly debated over recent days, I may find this rather more intuitively accessible than those who assume constitutions are well-defined and leaders have to act. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these bab ies are ugly
Risker wrote: On 15 May 2010 21:40, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 9:28 PM, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: Emily Monroe bluecalioc...@me.com wrote: I think Charles was saying that admins aren't always good at dealing with the public. Well it's journalistically improper to use admins as sources. At the very least they would have to find an official cabal member. Can someone point me to the admins as sources bit? On IRC earlier today User:Ottava_Rima appeared to be claiming to be their source, though I could have been completely misunderstanding him. There were quotes from Foundation-L in the article, which is, I believe, what Charles was referring to. It's time to recognise that anyone, including reporters, can read those mailing lists; one doesn't even have to subscribe for some of them, I believe. So it is advisable that people think carefully about what they are saying, and to be aware that the audience is not limited to people who are active participants in the various communities. Obviously, with so many admins (maybe 1000 active and semi-active), a single admin's beefs don't count for that much. There is a whole spectrum of opinion on Jimbo (as on every other issue). Admins are not going to self-censor - it is not our way. But every opinion can be put in a measured manner: that is not, generally, our way either, but I think the advantages are apparent of _not_ using language like this: By rush-imposing his views and decisions on people who are not out of the debate yet, he is browbeating their inner self, ignoring their beliefs and opinions, discarding the value of the Other. This is classic WP-internal rhetoric, isn't it? It is designed to press buttons with those who, although notionally subscribing to WP isn't a democracy, basically believe there is no consensus that doesn't include me. It is quite possible to write there were plenty who disagreed, without covering in batter, frying in lard, sprinkling with onion rings and cheese, placing under the grill. and serving with sparklers and a side-salad of old grievances. Of course the story isn't a reliable source. Mainstream media reports are only sometimes reliable. We shouldn't be so doctrinaire, all round. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these bab ies are ugly
Carcharoth wrote: Next thing you know, journalists will be reporting from blogs by Wikipedians and Wikimedians, Wikimedia blogs (some of those are semi-official at least) and even (gasp) from Wikipedia or Commons discussion pages! Some of the attitude displayed on internal project pages is rather shocking to anyone not used to the culture there, and despite some people saying (this is a hypothetical quote, not an actual one) hey, maybe we could try and have a calm and reasonable debate without mud-slinging and personal insults? i.e. the level of internal debate sometimes degenerates badly, but that has always been the case. It has always been something of a luxury. We all know this stuff: Don't force the issue/treat other editors as colleagues/don't come across like the The Self-Righteous Brothers (see [[Harry Enfield's Television Programme]]). That's one-and-a-half reasons against executive decisions, plus one-and-a-half reasons for treating the decisions of others on their actual merits. Has never stopped anybody much from creating drama. Fodder for WR and ED becomes fodder for WR, ED and Fox. Why change the habits of a lifetime? Those who argue from abstract principles about our local governance will continue to do so. But it would be good if strongly-held opinions were relegated to blogs, in cases where the holder cannot help being divisive. Charles ** ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babi es are ugly
Gregory Maxwell wrote: I don't believe that this is, by any means, only a problem with Fox although they might be the most obvious and frequent example. To a first approximation, mainstream media reporting about Internet institutions is largely worthless. They mostly know what a webpage is, and look at institutions in terms derived from models they know (the newspaper with its mainly top-down management, the technology corporation). Such reporting can be redeemed by worthly journalism that investigates what actually goes on. The current rumpus being an example of WP being successfully trolled by Sanger with the cooperation of Fox, it is not really surprising that Fox's reporting is slanted. I think we can expect more of this: it is a position of honour, as far as taking the brunt of Rupert Murdoch's war recently declared on free content is concerned (with Google, of course, and the other search engine companies that dare take advantage of non-noindexed pages on the Web). I think the conclusion should be that admins (such as the one quoted) who mouth off about the doings in the usual hyperbolic terms that we get used to on mailing lists, might have to reconsider their approach to commenting so freely in public, given that this is going to be war of attrition against tabloid tactics. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] The New Look
Cameron and Clegg have got to WP already? No, I must be confused, but the new look has arrived on our pages. My first reaction is that the watchlist arrangements are cryptic. (I was always going to hate having to scroll to the top for the search box.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The New Look
Carcharoth wrote: sigh I'm used to typing the term for a page I know is there and hitting search (instead of go) because I want the results of a search rather than being take to the page (e.g. when searching for people not listed on a disambiguation page, though they should be). How do I do that now? Ah. I click the small microscope icon and type in the full search page instead. :-) Learning to find your way around a new interface is half the battle. The other half, presumably, being to get over the annoyance that searching the site takes an extra keystroke or click now. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The New Look
AGK wrote: Basically, us set-in-our-ways old-timers aren't the target audience for the Vector skin :-). Indeed. Going back to monobook is not quite enough, though. Best to hide the message speaking of We've made a few improvements to Wikipedia, too. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia Announcements] Public Policy Initiative
Steve Bennett wrote: On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: lobbying groups. A look through the articles in this category (if accurately placed there) may help UK readers of this mailing list to see what public policy means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_policy_in_the_United_Kingdom I haven't a clue what it is called in other countries. The term seems familiar to me (Australia). It's actually self-explanatory, no? Policy that affects the public... My view? This seems rather a US-centric project. Yeah. I for one find it very frustrating that you can read the entire announcement talking about a certain number of schools etc and they don't even mention what country it's taking place in, or whether it's international. Fair enough that the money is spent only in US universities. But they could say so explicitly. Ho hum. My first reaction, too, was that US-slanted systemic bias would be a problem with the project as framed. I then looked around a bit, and found that public policy as a masters-level course is certainly taught in the UK, that European public policy is something recognised, and comparative public policy is also an area with an academic basis. So all is not hopeless: we've all heard the arguments In Sweden they ..., and it is not hard to see that there is a WP-style job there in documenting such international comparisons. I would read this initiative, perhaps too narrowly, as a reaction to the US healthcare debate, and the fact that enWP articles on those public policy issues have been closely scrutinised. See for example http://www.universalhealthcare101.com/ . Basically NPOV and V applied to contentious debates are what you'd want; and WP's bland survey model is so different from others (talking heads, op-ed pieces) as to look like a potentially serious contribution. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia trumps Britannica
Keith Old wrote: Folks, According to John Graham-Cumming, Wikipedia is a better resource for researchers than Britannica. http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/wikipedia-trumps-britannia snip Initially, I’d find myself double-checking facts on Wikipedia by looking in Britannica. I’d read that Boltzmannhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann died on September 5, 1906 on Wikipedia and jump to Britannica to check the datehttp://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/72401/Ludwig-Eduard-Boltzmann/72401main/Article#toc=toc9080519 . After weeks of doing this I realized that Britannica wasn’t helping. Any errors I found on Wikipedia were because I was reading original source material (see for example this correctionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experimentdiff=248412125oldid=248347239 ). Yes, this is an interesting testimonial. For me the turning point was the realisation (this was in relation to history) that I was finding errors in academic writing, in compiling and using Wikipedia, about as often as finding errors in Wikipedia itself. Though that depends a bit where you look on the site. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Linking Dates
Is this an old thread or a new one that I missed? I'd like to read the rest of the thread if it is still available. Carcharoth Oops, I appear to have answered a mail of Marc Riddell's from 17 September 2008 - for reasons best known to my email client. It will of course all be online in the archives. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
Thomas Dalton wrote: Sorry, that bit in brackets wasn't meant to be a summary of the criteria for each class, it was a description of the difference between the classes. Each has lots of other criteria, but they are essentially the same for both. Getting back to one of the main points: I think we could have a clearer system, certainly, and I think clarity should be asked for on behalf of the readers, who outnumber the writers. It seems that there are basically two things that go on: material is found for an article on topic T; and then the way the article on T is written gets reviewed in a box-ticking kind of way, mostly for conformity to the Manual and referencing. Which is fair enough. The points at issue seem to be: - At what level of advancement of the article T should it actually be commended to the reader (implicitly) by the rating? - Beyond that level, should the number of rungs of the ladder be made small (fewer but more taxing reviews), or larger (more hurdles, each of which deals with a limited number of matters)? My vague suggestion for the first part is that rate on a scale of 1 to 10 is intuitive for just about anyone as reader, but our traditional labels seem more designed for writers. Thinking B+ = 5 and A = 6 at least puts a more normal complexion on what we are talking about. As for the second part, it is not particularly something that bothers me, given the way I have always worked. But making reviewing more modular (and predictable, removing the instruction creep that moves goalposts) would seem sensible, so I'm for more layers. After all, professional book production would tend to distinguish editorial input, subediting, and copy editing as phases. The thread is about outside review, which is yet another idea, but with a book would be tried for at an earlier stage, I think. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] IPA issues
Nathan wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Peter Jacobi peter_jac...@gmx.net wrote: You forget an important point. enWP has many readers and contributors with English as second language. They usually use IPA as reference how English is pronounced and have been taught English this way. So effectively IPA is more native to them than all these ugly English pronunciation guides. Regards, Peter I honestly find that hard to believe; nothing I've seen written about IPA on this list, or on the [[IPA]] article, suggests that it is widely used for any purpose outside academic linguistics. Oops, if the world contradicts the list and a WP article, the world is out of step? Anyway, not much googling on TEFL and IPA needed to find this quote: Pronunciation guidance is a major feature of leading EFL dictionaries such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), which are regularly revised and updated. These and authoritative pronunciation-only dictionaries such as Wells (2000) make use of IPA symbols to indicate pronunciation. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
Nihiltres wrote: snip I strongly believe that showing very prominently the level of review a given article—or even a given *revision* thereof—has received, and the perceived level of quality involved, is a good thing. The Wikipedia 1.0 assessment system (Stub, Start, C, B, A, GA, FA…) seems to serve as a decent start for that sort of thing. If we are honest with ourselves, we would admit that we really need levels 1 to 10 for articles. It seems already to be hard to get an A, fairly much impossible to get GA for an average topic, and as we know only 1 in 1000 is FA (in round terms). And expert review = FA+ is another quite defensible level. I think cutting to the chase, setting substub = 1 and reviewed FA = 10 might be a great timesaver, and help a process in which less mystique attached to the whole business. Rebooting with FA = 9 sounds quite fun. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
Thomas Dalton wrote: On 27 April 2010 21:33, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Well, the research I remember says the transition from B to A makes the most difference to the reader. So I would make that central to any system: from 5 to 6, say. I have seen perfectly decent articles labelled Start - I mean articles with say five paras of solid, verifiable factual information. I doubt standards are even across the wiki, but if those are Start there have to be a couple of rungs on the ladder below that.; or Start = 3. I see that mathematics uses B+ anyway, so that the lower side has five grades already. There does seem to be some problem with A right now, but abolishing it in such a fashion to reduce incentives to push articles up would really be a bad idea (whatever your anecdotal example says). But what is the difference between A and GA? Really, it's minimal (I think A-class requires the content to be essentially complete, GA just requires it to cover all the main points, which isn't much different). You talk about the transition from B to A - is most of that difference to readers between B and GA or between GA and A (I know the ordering isn't perfect, but any A-class article should be able to pass GA with only minimal changes)? I suspect it is between B and GA, so getting rid of A wouldn't have any significant impact. [[Talk:Go (game)/GA2]] is the only GA review I have ever looked at: it has many comments (measurements in both metric and imperial, for example) that ar far from your summary. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Expert feedback on Featured Articles
David Lindsey wrote: snip Finally, though this idea failed to gain any real traction on wiki, I would like to state my support for the idea of adding a fifth criterion to WP:WIAFA: 5. The article, if possible, has been reviewed by an external subject-matter expert. Even if no such criterion is added, though, I would like to emphasize that it will always, or nearly always, be productive to attempt to find an expert reviewer. It was interesting to see the Wertheim comments: they certainly appear fair, but none would seem to justify removing or holding up FA status. They are more like decent Talk page comments asking for clarifications. I would oppose this suggestion, though, on systemic bias grounds. I know that it can be argued that a FA can be on any topic, but I guess standard systemic bias slants towards topics popular with English-speakers readers are fairly obvious when the list is sorted. There is no reason to add hurdles that basically are going to make that worse. (Again, it can be argued that it need not do that, as it can be argued that requiring images need not, requiring dense referencing need not, and so on. But collectively these requirements are part of a slant towards topics that are in certain areas.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?
Marc Riddell wrote: And, on not-so-obscure websites, where there is a clear - and acute - academiphobia present. I can show you the academic mathematicians editing, if you like. It's worth analysing the black legend that Wikipedia hates academics, though. Fred's comment Serious academics are knocking down big bucks and writing books is partly wrong. It would apply to, say, [[Niall Ferguson]], though it must be said that his reputation has taken something of a hit recently. It would not apply to academics who are in academia because money is low on their list of priorities (yes, these guys are definitely not normal). It would not apply to academics who enjoy intellectual work, while writing books is mainly work work. It seems to me that we get many graduate students editing: now why would these people be at the same time academiphobic, and putting themselved into straitened circumstance to hammer on the door of an academic career? Having interacted with a couple of the more high-profile academics who have run into serious trouble on WP, I think I know the conditions that cause the trouble (roughly speaking, a lack of acceptance that a website is going to have policies and is entitled to have them, quite indepedently of the eminence of someone who would like to turn pages to other uses). I believe there must be many more cases of I think what you're doing is not that interesting from academics, than such trainwrecks. I believe the attitude we have to credentials is relatively sensible - typically a doctorate doesn't qualify anyone to pontificate over more than a small area. And the clear blue water between WP and CZ is not necessarily disadvantageous to us. They reportedly have some issues with fringe science being supported by their hierarchy, to the extent that it could be an embarassment to dislodge it. What WP certainly has is a disrespectfulness for the person set against a respect for the referencing of what they submit. I'm yet to be convinced that that is a wrong decision. It certainly beats the other way round. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?
Fred Bauder wrote: You can go back to the early history of the article reality a little article I created March 11, 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Realityoldid=27840 At a certain point Larry will chime in... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Realitydiff=356398oldid=356321 His comment is typical of him in arrogant mode, Start on an actual article on this subject, with further explanation as to why the former article didn't really concern the topic as he removes all prior content and substitutes his view. You see, what he taught sophomores in his Intro to Philosophy class trumps all other content. Note the complete absence of any reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Realityoldid=356398 At least the intro to the current article is not bad. Not an easy subject, but certainly one that concerns material outside the discipline of philosophy. Not long after this he wanted to ban me, but Jimbo vetoed him. [[User:Larry Sanger/Larry's Text]] was still causing trouble a year later. I think the distinction between serious and solemn is useful in dealing with serious academics. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?
Fred Bauder wrote: A lot of this sort of trouble results when an expert edits without citing good sources. Students often can edit more successfully because they have appropriate references at hand. Interesting. This all sounded like absolutely standard blog comment complaint: the kind of beefs you get whenever someone blogs about WP, and contributions to the debate are largely anecdotes I edited Wikipedia once and So I thought I'd try a Google on wikipedia is+blog. And the _very first hit_ contained two gems: - someone complaining in 2010 about a one-line unreferenced BLP speedied CSD A7 in 2006 (which is the kind of thing I meant); but also - the WMF's current CTO writing this: I've heard horror stories from many of my friends around the FOSS world who have tried to edit in areas where they are domain experts, only to give up because its too hard to get edits to stick. So which is it: Wikipedians are phobic about academics _and_ Free and open source software experts? Its own traditional demographic. Or there is the issue of user unfriendliness being read as hostility? The latter is an issue identified by the usability initiative, broadly speaking. It is perfectly reasonable to identify the edits sticking issue as troublesome. As with the first example, you would have to know more about the circumstances. Is this is the system working as it is intended to, or on the other hand some self-styled Linux wizard reverting from the hip? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] IPA issues
stevertigo wrote: Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: I think the prospect of a nice machine synthesizer in the future (with the ability to provide real recordings, of course) is probably sufficient justification for continuing to use IPA all by itself. Ah. The minimalist argument. :) Question. I looked at [[International Phonetic Alphabet]], and while it is clear that IPA is an international standard, I don't think the matter is really discussed there. I'm seeing arguments like too international (not so handy for English readers) and not international enough (too Anglo-centric). I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that there should be more IPA on the various Wikipedias and other projects. But I don't feel the foundations for that discussion have been laid. If for the example the WMF handed down some view on IPA, would it be endorsing a standard international standard like the SI system, or a standard such as some version of imperial units? All this affects attitudes, and the discussion on automation too. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] More about PR - top companies pages
Blog post from March, I think we missed it: http://kdpaine.blogs.com/kdpaines_pr_m/2010/03/wondering-about-wikipedia-you-should-be.html Depth rather than breadth, and some of the conclusions not easy to interpret. Perhaps more negative edits because more people are ticked off? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?
Thomas Dalton wrote: On 18 April 2010 22:25, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, we do know, because Citizendium is just a retread of Nupedia, which wasn't going anywhere. Nupedia was supposed to be experts writing articles. Citizendium is (in theory) anyone writing articles and experts resolving disputes and approving articles. That is a very different model. Different, not very different. Anyway wikis of a certain size and achievement (done some useful writing but not going to set the world on fire) tend, I guess, to have features in common because of the type and scale of the communities involved. It seems that social structure = the rut we're in is about right for these communities, including Citizendium. I don't think the English Wikipedia is immune from the rut, but we are the ones with the very different model. I think what Phil Sandifer was saying is not correct, but that is because I would argue that utility of a piece of hypertext shouldn't be measured as if the hyperlinks don't matter (we saw this when the big rush on [[Michael Jackson]] caused all that traffic to [[vitiligo]]): surf's up. And I would also argue that the policy and community superstructure is useful (though not all of it, and not all uniformly useful, of course). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?
Thomas Dalton wrote: You are aware that Nupedia wasn't a wiki, right? Certainly - I've even read the book I co-authored which mentions this fact. The point I was trying to make is more like if you bolt a community like a wiki onto Nupedia-like processes, you can expect a sort of social sclerosis which is not unlike a generic online community that works but with a rigidity about its hierarchy. Which turns a more standard MeatballWiki analysis like http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/CommunityMayNotScale on its head, actually. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles
Carcharoth wrote: On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: snip I would be much more interested in a system for expert refereeing than the present FA system. To some extent, the current peer review process can already be used for this, but I don't expect to see a real change in this direction until the successor to Wikipedia. snip 2) Sometimes the article will be savaged by external reviewers who will know more about the breadth and depth of available sources, and will (in many cases correctly) point out that the article (although superficially good at first glance) doesn't really use the right sources, or the existing sources in the right way. Yes, that seems plausible. Encyclopedia articles are not a form really designed for the rigours of serious peer review (the typical five years to a doctorate versus maybe 15 hours to write a long piece from scratch - it's not a fair fight). I wonder if it is quite the right point, though. Judging by problems I hit from time to time - [[tensor]] is a current problem child - the real shortage is article doctors rather than critics. The Holy Grail here is a topic expert who also knows enough about the (routine, I'd say) basic procedures of upgrading articles by restructuring and copyediting. It is so common for apparently serious problems to be lightly disguised writing issues - a small misconception mixed in with things that can be expressed much better. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles
William Pietri wrote: That reminds me of something I've been meaning to propose: topic-specific groups of subject-matter experts who serve as resources for article writers. snip I saw this mainly as an editor-pull system, rather than a expert-push system. Any such layer needs to take account of wikiprojects, naturally. And of the tendency of dispute resolution, wrongly set up, to invite escalation. Wikiprojects are a mixed bunch, most being small in terms of active members, I guess; but the first place to take a content dispute should be the wikiproject's main talk page. Only a small proportion of disputes or difficulties, in an editor-pull system, should be getting to the panel of experts stage, since most issues are best dealt with by informal mediation and/or someone digging up further references. There have been such suggestions before (2004 springs to mind) and none so far has filled the yawning gap of content dispute resolution. Which, looked at over historical time, seems somewhat remarkable - or more precisely it seem surprising that we have limped on to where we are (which is not a bad place to be, really) without an implementation of some sort of external refereeing. WP still has nothing to sell to academia, but per David Goodman we perhaps have a chance to parlay a bit, and get experts more interested. I don't quite see how we would do a serious scheme, and deal with the downside. The downside is obvious to academics or ex-academics like me (there is an inaccurate written account of my role in the fight between [[John H. Coates]] and [[Alan Baker (mathematician)]], but as it is in Japanese I have been spared having to read it and get annoyed). Importing more proxy wars into WP wouldn't be the best idea: we have one or two already. It wouldn't do to be naive about expert input as panacea. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?
David Gerard wrote: But, what of it? they then ask. That it has let itself become a project of no effective import. If it's not dead, it's moribund. Shrug. Sanger is no Wozniak. He did great things in the early days of WP. Subsequently he has seemed determined to prove that he has totally misunderstood the greatness of his pioneer work. Nupedia didn't need re-inventing, and experts have clay feet. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles
Andrew Gray wrote: On 16 April 2010 16:38, Amory Meltzer amorymelt...@gmail.com wrote: Three were on the fence so while the article may report a 55% success rate, it also is stating a 32% failure rate. It's hard to tell from their scoring system which the three borderline ones were, though. Interestingly, the seven clear failures exhibit a strong correlation between quality and time - the points get lower as they get older. For the other articles, there's little or no correlation between the time since they passed FAC (or FAR) and their quality. http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/quality-versus-age-of-wikipedias-featured-articles/ I suspect this points up a problem with maintenance more than initial quality, but we shall see. Doesn't have to be a single-factor explanation: the goalposts are undoubtedly moved as far as quality at time of assessment is concerned; some writers of FAs will continue to work on them while others will devote time to other articles; some past FAs will be neglected because the editors mainly concerned are no longer around. In terms of project management (not that we do any such thing) what conclusions to draw? We certainly have seen little cost-benefit analysis on the FA system as a whole. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] PR consultants: perhaps Wikipedia is not the ideal promotional medium
Fred Bauder wrote: Here's the question: If you can't tell it's PR, is there anything wrong with it? Dunno. Nothing wrong with it as PR, obviously, almost by definition. As we know, what we can enforce (pretty much) is that people edit within the rules; we cannot in any sense enforce the fairway mentality that makes for an article in Position A, squarely in the middle of what the facts support. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Carcharoth wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Samuel Klein wrote: A feature to improve the curating and presentation of these links might be handy. We have a few places were having a set of links as a first class member of the wikiverse would be useful * external links or further reading * a list of images related to an article (which may not all fit neatly in the article) * interlanguage and interproject links to a set of articles about the same topic On the final point, the poster style of interwiki link to sister projects begins to look dated, at least to me. It obviously doesn't scale well; or in other words it puts the onus on the project linked to, to organise the material relevant to one WP topic, in such a way that a single link can carry the whole weight. Innovation is at least possible. That's an interesting point. I presume you mean wikisource here. For Commons and Wikiquote (I'm unsure about the other projects) it is fairly easy to have a corresponding page or category or both. If the Wikipedia article is a person who is an author, then a wikisource page is possible, and if the Wikipedia page is about a book or other published work that could be on wikisource, then again a single link, page or category is usually possible. But there are some articles where this system does fall down. I presume the place to put links to editorially selected wikisource pages would be in the external links, or as a courtesy link in a citation. Yes, Wikisource is on my mind in particular, but there are a couple of points here. Some work could be done (perhaps I'm not up-to-date, though) with stacking those poster boxes more successfully: they are more eye-catching than really convenient. There are three kinds of template: poster, citation and attribution, and it is really more elegant to use the citation links in the external links section, if more than one is relevant. The Wikisource category system is not really developed enough to do the task right now; its dab system likewise (and it is supposed to disambiguate texts, really); and the Wikisource: namespace plays a surrogate role for a topic namespace (rather than being just project pages). But enough of our troubles. There does seem to be a possibility for a bit of lateral thinking here. If, say, the current external links and interwiki sections were done by transclusion from something separately maintained (a set of pages organised by both language and topic?), how could that be implemented, and how could it relate to efforts to make hard-copy bibliography more modular? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Michael Peel wrote: There does seem to be a possibility for a bit of lateral thinking here. If, say, the current external links and interwiki sections were done by transclusion from something separately maintained (a set of pages organised by both language and topic?), how could that be implemented, and how could it relate to efforts to make hard-copy bibliography more modular? That sounds like a way of adding confusion to those editing a page, when they find that part of the page is stored somewhere else completely. Interwiki (as in language) links seem to be dealt with well nowadays by robots; expanding that to include wikisource links might be good. External links are best done as project-specific ones IMO, though. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the undivided editing box and simplicity. I'm not also not really cut out to be a strategy wonk - too much to do right now, at least. But the second decade of WP is only around nine months off, and I hear various ideas circulating. Some of what is up in the air may be the future. If I start thinking about the data structure that would support a bot putting in language interwiki links, it seems that (although it might be a bit untidy in practical terms) it is close to being something with interesting potential. If it wasn't private to a bot, but a WMF project in itself: wouldn't it provide a focus for all sorts of metadata collection, as well as collection of a web directory (Wikipedia doesn't do that, but it could happen elsewhere), bibliographical data, no doubt other things? Magnus Manske talks to me about such things every time we meet. We have got close to a standard footer organisation for WP pages (such as Works/See also/References/Further reading/External links/Attribution/Categories/Interwiki). It would take a bit of thinking of matters the other way round, but having other views possible in which the main body of the article was presented with a footer according to some preference options, only References being standard, sounds fairly interesting to me. This thread started really because WP:EL seems now to want external links to be minimal, driving people to place relevant links in References (for which they'd have to develop the article to justify the link). I understand where that kind of thinking comes from, but all stick and no carrot makes Jack a dull boy. Hence my interest in other options. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Carcharoth wrote: That probably misses the flux. How many links are added and then almost immediately removed? That won't be picked up in something like that, I don't think. Anyway, the point is not that external links are systematically persecuted (they may be patchily persecuted); but that they now have few actual rights. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Matt Jacobs wrote: Anyway, the point is not that external links are systematically persecuted (they may be patchily persecuted); but that they now have few actual rights. Charles And why should links have any particular rights? External links should be justified in the same way as any addition to the article. They may not require the same verifiability standards, but they should be judged to be a recommended place for further reading. In some way or another, they should add content the editors judge to be useful, and not simply be about the subject. Considering that for every good link I've seen inserted, I've also seen one that was useless or even misleading or libelous, why would they need any special protection? The point would be no different from (say) unreferenced content: there the distinction between may be removed and must be removed is quite important. And there is the right, not of the link but the editor adding it, to have good faith assumed: other things being equal, assume that the link was added to help develop the encyclopedia. The onus is not always on the editor adding to an article to justify additions: that is a very unwiki-like attitude, if I may say so. I see no reason why we need additional policy and bureaucracy specifically for links. For one thing, the page WP:EL is very bureaucratic as it stands; the good part of it is the maintenance and review section, where templates for tagging links regarded as potential problems are mentioned. Also, this discussion thread reveals fairly clearly that there are differing views on the matter. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Matt Jacobs wrote: I see nothing unwiki-like in suggesting that a person should defend their additions to an article when disputes arise. That's a pretty standard expectation in any collaborative environment. There's no lack of assumption of good faith involved in an editor removing an addition if they have reason to believe it is not beneficial to the article. But if they remove it from a generally anti-spam ideological point of view, or on the grounds of conflict of interest, then there is such a problem of good faith being disregarded. Quiddity has now gone into this in greater detail, and WP:EL is _very clearly_ drafted from an anti-spam perspective. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: And further reading sections can point the way for future expansions of the article, or for the reader to go and find out more about the topic. Carcharoth That is why I despise the war on external links and further reading some editors seem to think is appropriate. I don't think I've seen much evidence of a war on external links ... what there is is, however, is pressure against an unfiltered flood of external links. Anyone capable of using Wikipedia is also capable of using Google, Bing, or any of a number of other search engines. Beyond a point adding links reduces the value that Wikpedia provides over these resources. Even if you held the position that the world needed another unselective source of links, Wikipedia isn't especially well structured to provide it: There is little to no automation to remove dead or no longer relevant things, no automation to find new worthwhile links, and a lot of vulnerability to manipulation by interested parties. I think that at its best Wikipedia should be directly including all the information available up to Wikipedia's coverage depth, linking only for citations, then it should have links to the most valuable external resources which go deeper into the subject than Wikipedia reasonably can. If you need a raw feed of sites related to some subject area this is what the search engines do well. Seems to me you are (precisely) rationalising a war on external links. Of your three points, I don't really find anything to agree with. Taking the attitide that External links is the name of a Further reading section for reading that happens to be online, what exactly _are_ you arguing? That trawling through the first hundred hits on well-known search engines will always produce those links? That is easy to refute. For many sites of high academic value, precisely no (zero) SEO is done. I can easily think of examples. Very good links can be very hard to find, unless you have a good reason to suspect they are there. Given your style of argument, which is that we should be relying on the utility of commercial entities over which we have no control at all, to help our readers find the further information that we know (because WP does not aim to give complete coverage) they will need, I would say that Fred's worries are amply justified. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?
Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Of your three points, I don't really find anything to agree with. Taking the attitide that External links is the name of a Further reading section for reading that happens to be online, what exactly _are_ you arguing? That trawling through the first hundred hits on well-known search engines will always produce those links? That is easy to refute. For many sites of high academic value, precisely no (zero) SEO is done. I can easily think of examples. Very good links can be very hard to find, unless you have a good reason to suspect they are there. High value links should always be provided. Can you provide an reference to a Wikimedian arguing that links to the most useful additional resources shouldn't be provided? I'll gladly go and disagree with them. I have had a look around WP:EL and its Talk, and I believe it is clearly not the case (given the 20 reasons not to include a link, starting with a catchall) that the guideline is in the hands of those who have that as credo. See below for more. But I do believe that a list of, say, 50 links tagged onto the end of an article typically has negative value for the following reasons: snip OK, reductio ad absurdum. Given your style of argument, which is that we should be relying on the utility of commercial entities over which we have no control at all, to help our readers find the further information that we know (because WP does not aim to give complete coverage) they will need, I would say that Fred's worries are amply justified. I bothered making the argument here because I believed that Fred was likely mischaracterizing the nuanced position people have taking in trying to balance the value of additional links vs their cost as a simple war on external links, when no one was likely carrying on any such war: Just because someone has decided on a different benefit trade-off than you doesn't make their activities a war on all X. But what I see around WP:EL is quite different. Basically it now stands, in relation to linkspam, as WP:N can be considered to stand in relation to cruft. But it has clearly gone further down the deletionist road, and (I presume, just as you jumped to sections of 50 extlinks) anyone who objects is supposed to love linkspam. It seems apparent that a working concept of justifiability has been introduced, analogous to notability; that the onus is on anyone adding an extlink is to show it is justifiable, and your third point is parodied (I hope it is only a parody) as Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article (WP:ELNO). What you wrote is I think that at its best Wikipedia should be directly including all the information available up to Wikipedia's coverage depth, linking only for citations, then it should have links to the most valuable external resources which go deeper into the subject than Wikipedia reasonably can. Obviously the word unique is just bad drafting - should be replaced by distinctive or something that doesn't mean if two web pages have the same essential content we can't have either as extlk. But deeper into the subject than Wikipedia reasonably can and what the article would contain if it became a featured article both make our criteria for justifiability be driven by a state of affairs that is not only hard to define, but actually in practical terms applies only to 1 out of 1000 articles, with no prospect of this proportion changing soon. In short, while no one can be for linkspam or including long lists of duplicative exlks, since Wikipedia is not a web directory, the guideline has gone over to necessary to inclusion by a general criterion (so worse than WP:N) and at the same time junked good sense and weaving the web at the basic, nodal level. Not good at all. I don't see the trade-off. What I see is that WP:EL is now a battery of arguments for winning arguments about what is linkspam, with complete disregard for the cost on the majority of topics, which are neither likely to be spammed seriously, nor enjoy the incorporation cycle whereby extlk content is written into the article in a timely fashion. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics
Ian Woollard wrote: * - there's been some new articles required since the Wikipedia started up in 2001; knowledge has been created! New knowledge is eventually going to set the level of continued growth of the Wikipedia, perhaps about 500 articles per day or something. If you look at the new article feed we're growing at about ~1200 articles per day, and perhaps about half of those likely to survive in the feed are now about topics that happened since the Wikipedia started and couldn't have been written in 2001. Basically, the Wikipedia has been playing catch-up on 2001 till now as well as dealing with new knowledge; but IMO it will probably be mostly dealing with new knowledge within the next year or so. I don't completely agree here, but I do think an analysis by various phases is probably helpful - more so than trying to attribute changes in the editing pattern to specific management decisions, though these do have an impact that is not negligible. For the future historian of enWP, I suspect, the end of the beginning will be a key point. This is what I'd refer to as we get the first draft; the point (maybe in 2008?) where it would make sense to say so in future the coverage is going to be something like this, except more so in some places. This is an approximate sort of concept, as is the demographic idea of saturation, where everybody likely to want to hear of Wikipedia has by now heard of it. Somewhere, in those concepts and the content/community matchup, is a basic truth about what we have been doing in the first nine years: collating information and recruiting editors, to the point where the nature of the project (as opposed to the nature of the mission, abstractly stated) has become reasonably clear. So in those terms, at least, the peak of sheer activity anticipates the first draft by a year or so. Plausible enough to me: before you get your first draft together there are placeholder parts where the author knows that what currrently stands there is sorely deficient, things just dashed down. Sounds familiar enough for the sort of content that has needed to be gradually eradicated. Doing that is something more like real work (the point made earlier in the thread about referencing). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Freedom Fighters?
David Gerard wrote: On 28 March 2010 17:18, William Pietri will...@scissor.com wrote: I just received an odd email suggesting I hand over my admin account to the Wikipedia Freedom Fighters. I see that they did something similar back in May. Whether this is an actual effort or just a way to stir up trouble, I dunno -- the content was ridiculous enough that I figure it's probably trolling -- but I figured I'd mention it. Indeed. Best filed with any other phishing or trolling. Goes like this: As an advanced user here at wikipedia, I am sure you are familiar with the corruption and bureaucracy that exists at every level, with the site effectively being run by a clique of editors who are only looking out for their own interests. Heck, maybe you are one of them! Hopefully though you are not, and would be willing to help us restore fairness and integrity to the project... We are currently expanding our portfolio of administrator accounts and perhaps you could consider sharing yours with us - to do so will take you only two minutes: change the password (if desired) and then reply to this email with your login details. We'll do the rest! Thank you for your time and consideration, and naturally do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. That's an onsite mail, from the account of User:Goldfishhunting who has been blocked. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
David Gerard wrote: On 25 March 2010 20:45, Kwan Ting Chan k...@ktchan.info wrote: Well, they're not dwindling since admin rights don't get taken away on inactivity. ;-) But to the general question, because the standard expected of a candidate for RfA has gone up over the years? And because going through a continuously ratcheted-up gauntlet is rather too demeaning for people to consider worth the effort? Given that WikiProjects generally will have a better idea of the character and contributions of participants (compared to those whose idea of RfA is an extended box-ticking process), I'd like to see projects look around and nominate some of their stalwarts who don't yet have the mop and bucket. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
David Gerard wrote: On 26 March 2010 08:57, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Given that WikiProjects generally will have a better idea of the character and contributions of participants (compared to those whose idea of RfA is an extended box-ticking process), I'd like to see projects look around and nominate some of their stalwarts who don't yet have the mop and bucket. Anecdotally, I see a lot of people decline the opportunity because the RFA gauntlet is so obnoxious. Looking around, reform of RfA seems to have been thought of seriously in 2006, but perhaps not since. [[Wikipedia:Admin coaching]] has offered one solution: is this not being productive? One thing that occurs to me is that a self-test page could be useful. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 05:25 AM 3/6/2010, Charles Matthews wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Wikipedia painted itself into this corner. Indeed, said corner being #5 website in the world according to recent Comscore figures. The onus is still on those who think the system is broken. Onus? No, I'm seeing masses of highly experienced editors leaving the project, with those replacing them being relatively clueless, as to the original vision, which was itself brilliant but incomplete. The biggest problem with the system is massive inefficiency, with huge amounts of editor labor necessary to make decisions and maintain them, long-term. A secondary problem is that the process does not reliably seek consensus, which is an essential element in the estimation of the degree of neutrality obtained. And the massive inefficiency compounds this problem. You can sail on, believing that it's working just fine. And, I suppose, you can believe that all the admins who have left, or who maintain comments that it's broken, are just, what? Sour grapes? There is a lot of criticism out there that is obviously ignorant. But that's not all there is. Yes, there is also stuff that is plainly directed against the project, from some of WR to the WSJ's reiteration of the discredited Ortega statistics (see the most recent Signpost). It doesn't take too much to distinguish legitimate beefs from troll-talk. Some of us who have been around for a while might think that a smaller, better-trained workforce could possibly get on faster with constructive work. It seems well-established that the big influx of 2006-7 has now sorted itself out into those who have learned the system and are supporting it substantially, and those who have moved on (fnding tweets more to their attention span, whatever). People do come and go anyway on a big site. But we were talking about notability. (Notability has always been a broken concept, but the real question is whether the system as a whole is broken, rather than whether individual subjective judgements always agree with the result of deletion processes.) The system is broken. It's obvious. But almost all of those who recognize this also believe that it's impossible to fix, and so they either leave in despair or they struggle on for a while. I'm unusual. I know it's broken, and I know why, and I know how to fix it. And what I'd suggest would take almost no effort. And it's been opposed at every turn, attempts were made to delete and salt a small piece of the proposal, years ago, a very modest experiment that would have changed no policy or guideline. I agree with unusual - the jury seems still to be out on the rest. What I'd propose is very simple, but it happens that it's also very difficult to understand without background; I happen to have the background. Few Wikipedia editors do. I could be wrong, but what I've seen is that the *very idea* arouses very strong reactions. Based on ... what? I could say, but it's really not up to me. I can do nothing by myself except set up structures that people can use or not. I proposed a change to the guideline, a special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member society of a notable international society would be notable. If you know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections. Notability is not inherited. Indeed, it isn't. Not normally. DGG has already addressed the substance. What's happening is that guidelines are being interpreted as fixed rules, instead of as ways of documenting how the community operates. If documentation of actual decision-making is pursued, then inconsistencies can be directly addressed, and can produce more refined -- and more accurate -- guidelines. This build-up of experience, documented, is what's normal with structures like that of Wikipedia, if they are to remain sustainable. That this is actively blocked, that attempts to document actual practice are strongly resisted, is part of the problem. Instruction creep. But that assumes that the guidelines are fixed rules, not simply documentation that can be read to understand how the community is likely to decide on an issue. Some of the more high-profile associated topics of notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't mean they are all worth a separate article. Where does the decision get made? There is notable topic, amateur radio. There is an international organization which reocognizes national societies, one per nation. It's the IARU, in the situation being discussed. It intrinsically creates 200 possible subtopics, organized by nation, by the nature of the situation. Each one of these *probably* has reliable sources that would justify a separate article, given a deep enough search, but suppose there were a couple of exceptions. If we start valuing editor time, a major oversight
Re: [WikiEN-l] Steven Walling: Why Wikipedians Are Weird
David Gerard wrote: This is beautiful and true, and you must watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEkF5o6KPNI (I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of Wikipedians didn't enter because it wouldn't be fair.) Thank God it doesn't reinforce any stereotypes. Oh, wait ... Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Steven Walling: Why Wikipedians Are Weird
Martijn Hoekstra wrote: To an extent this is true, but no more (or less) than saying all volunteers are weird. And they are. There are bound to be exceptions, but I find that with almost every single volunteer there is either something mentally wrong, or there is something seriously lacking in their social life. Even worse, some are actually librarians. You wouldn't be promoting the fallacy of normalcy, would you? Wiki-editing has a fraction of the popularity of video games, and is negligible compared to couch-potato TV watching, both of which might be considered normal; but are not to be considered as a social life. (Actually, I've often wondered about cinema-going, sitting in the dark not talking to anyone - participatory but not actually that social.) I can remember when doing your own thing was rather more valued. To pick up on Gerard's point: I have discovered that I'm no good at pub quizzes, at least those mainly based around TV presenters of programmes I don't watch. I did once use a fact from WP to impress a friend in a quiz (the Scoville scale). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Wikipedia painted itself into this corner. Indeed, said corner being #5 website in the world according to recent Comscore figures. The onus is still on those who think the system is broken. (Notability has always been a broken concept, but the real question is whether the system as a whole is broken, rather than whether individual subjective judgements always agree with the result of deletion processes.) snip I proposed a change to the guideline, a special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member society of a notable international society would be notable. If you know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections. Notability is not inherited. Indeed, it isn't. Some of the more high-profile associated topics of notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't mean they are all worth a separate article. Such decisions should go case-by-case, but in general terms they are about structuring of content, rather than permissible content. [[Mary Ball Washington]], mother of George Washington, gets an article (not very substantial); her mother doesn't. I don't see that recognized national is a very different attribute from notable, but certain office-holders might be considered worth an article ex officio (general notability doesn't recognise anything ex officio, I think, but arguably more special guidelines could.) snip Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Notability for FLOSS - the public's reaction
Ken Arromdee wrote: On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Charles Matthews wrote: Something that has a Rush Limbaugh episode dedicated to it is probably notable in any sane sense, even if Rush Limbaugh isn't a reliable source. Sorry, what if I say that I neither know nor care about anything Rush Limbaugh does or says (which is true), that I'm on the other side of the Atlantic from almost everyone who does care, and that puts me in the same position as about 90% of the world's population? The same thing that happens if it's in a newspaper (which counts as a reliable source) and you don't get the newspaper on the other side of the ocean, and the newspapers on your side won't even print it because nobody cares about it over where you are. The same thing that happens if there's some European town which gets an article even though nobody in America cares about it and its total population is smaller than the audience of Rush Limbaugh. You're just making an argument for European provincialism disguised as an argument against American provincialism. Notability, either in Wikipedia or in real life, doesn't require that everyone in the world care about something, just that enough people do. Enough people need not include you. You miss my point entirely. Which is what if I say something entirely subjective as a judgement of notability, in reply to your subjective argument for notability. _That_ is why Wikipedia tries to have _some_ objective criteria for inclusion of topics. I made this point to you in a previous thread on notability. Certainly if we didn't have the exclusion of most blogs, we would have a system that would be fantastically easy to game: how hard is to get some topic mentioned in a dozen blogs? Then you need to have criteria for blogs which are stricter than every blog but still looser than what we have now. OK, this is a more reasonable debate. If the astronomers say that a particular blog on recent astronomy has the sort of stature for announcements that would warrant its use as a reference, then its use shoudn't be ruled out entirely. But are there criteria that are workable? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Notability for FLOSS - the public's reaction
Gwern Branwen wrote: The [[dwm]] deletion discussion has caught the interest of some of the more nerdy online communities: - http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b8s29/the_wikipedia_deletionists_are_at_it_again_this/ - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163884 It's interesting to see the general levels of disgust and how few current editors there are in comparison to former, and read the dislike of WP:N. As usual, one has to sift the arguments. Why aren't blogs included under RS? That would be because they are generally unreliable? Why does a snowboarding slalom event not have its own article? That would be because no one has started one, I guess. Why does someone who left in 2006 still bring it up? Elephant's memory for grudges, I suppose. I certainly hope the usability initiatives bear fruit and entice regular people into becoming editors, because we're burning our bridges among our original techy contributor base. Yes, the logic should be that the encyclopedia during the next decade gets its priorities in line with the human race in general, or at least anglophone online members in general, rather than those of the geeky end of the spectrum. Whatever those are owed (which is much). Perhaps then we might get more of the perspective that writing off a database of three million articles because of the absence of the three of particular personal interest is a trifle blinkered. Though I'm not so sure about that ... Oh yes, and what Carcharoth said about FLOSS history needing the secondary sources: if they don't write the history, it isn't just WP coverage that suffers, but the whole documentation, especially if the primary sources are emails, perishable web pages, and suchlike. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Notability for FLOSS - the public's reaction
Ken Arromdee wrote: On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Charles Matthews wrote: As usual, one has to sift the arguments. Why aren't blogs included under RS? That would be because they are generally unreliable? One of the things that's bizarre about notability is that it requires reliable sources to establish notability. Thought we went into all that ... Something that has a Rush Limbaugh episode dedicated to it is probably notable in any sane sense, even if Rush Limbaugh isn't a reliable source. Sorry, what if I say that I neither know nor care about anything Rush Limbaugh does or says (which is true), that I'm on the other side of the Atlantic from almost everyone who does care, and that puts me in the same position as about 90% of the world's population? Likewise, whether blogs are reliable sources really shouldn't have anything to do with whether blogs indicate notability. Fundamentally, whether or not we had notability or not as a guiding principle, the following should be true: the topics on WP should be determined by pull not push. I mean thaty editors should be deciding what to include by what there is to edit. They should not be generated by what is crassly and in bad Latin called a media agenda. That is because this effort is an encyclopedia, not a Limbopedia. Half-baked topics should spend time in wiki purgatory, until their sins of unreferencedness are expurgated. Certainly if we didn't have the exclusion of most blogs, we would have a system that would be fantastically easy to game: how hard is to get some topic mentioned in a dozen blogs? It is true that the mainstream print media will run with stories that are basically a put-up job sometimes; but that doesn't prove we should be less critical, but more strict. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
George Herbert wrote: On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process Drafts for mainspace, a review debating unuserfying. The Bizarre Records solution to our problems - just what sthe world/s Wikipedia needs, another srecord label/s contentious process. Either namespace, or another independent namespace (Drafts). User namespace makes things harder to find; which is not necessarily appropriate. We want drafts to be communally findable - to encourage contributions, fixes, reviews, and eventual upgrades. This has floated before, in some variation, and not flown. But perhaps it's time to float it again and see if it flies now. Right. But doing things with aliases is not exactly out of reach. And I'm somewhat surprised, considering it all, that there isn't even an editorial guideline on moving drafts? Not that I would feel compelled to read it, but it seems an omission. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
George Herbert wrote: On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote: Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-) You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a page around when the notability rules could be fixed instead. Otherwise we're no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit. snip Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or services. If we fail to enforce ...The Encyclopedia... part of our mission statement, we're failing, too. Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them is, this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and review this article and ones like it. snip So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite? Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over time? In this context, I was interested to get an outside view of how knols are doing (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm occurring in the Signpost story on the Google donation). As we know, knols take inclusionism to one limit, and have wiki-like low barriers to entry, but dispense really with the community and notability. I happen to have had a knol turn up in a Google search for the first time in the past few days, too. It was written by a Wikipedian, was useful to me, was not on a topic Wikipedia would have included (it was a link farm and had little scope for being anything else) - and (as it turned out) was not really as good as another non-knol page I had more trouble finding. Several conclusions: - knols are inclusionist in so simple-minded a way that no one (not even Google) thinks they do the same job as Wikipedia; - the 99% figure for knols might be harsh, but it might not, and instead our intensive processes to upgrade content, there is only a very severe survival of the fittest that applies (most of the postings are simply going to be entirely ignored); - it is quite a good thing that our baroque model was launched well before knols. It would be trivial to adapt anything good in the knol model, clearly (just redefine the User: namespace slightly). Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process Drafts for mainspace, a review debating unuserfying. The Bizarre Records solution to our problems - just what sthe world/s Wikipedia needs, another srecord label/s contentious process. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Ken Arromdee wrote: On Tue, 23 Feb 2010, David Goodman wrote: The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR. I'm trying to figure out if you're arguing with me. You're right, of course, the rules are completely messed up. But I think it's fair to say that notability rules are only a sufficient condition and it's possible for something to not satisfy the rules and still be notable is a *very* unpopular position, to the point where it may as well not be true. It's the difference between never say never and never say never say never? This is after all what IAR is there for. Failure of the General Notability Guideline to give the right result may indicate that a special guideline might be more helpful. If the work of creating such special guidelines has gone about as far as people want, and if certain classes of information (such as what is happening on the street or in places where the usual media don't document them) are excluded by consensus, and if notability is applied as a generic test to topics that (for example) don't have a WikiProject interested in arguing in other ways, then what you say may represent the simplest broad generalisation. That's a few ifs and buts. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Bod Notbod wrote: On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:38 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: Since we have no really universally agreed vision of what the encyclopedia should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise [...] Personally, I think that's the worst way to find a solution. I hope I'm snipping in such a way as to not change your argument there, I have no doubt I'll be told if not. What is the *best* way to find a solution then? Solutions take the form of complicate the flowchart. Add preliminary steps before any deletion, review steps after deletions, and so on. The problem is ... many people active on the site don't have too clear a view of what the current flowchart is - or in other words current best practice isn't always followed, and therefore tweaking it doesn't have as much traction as it should. But I do recommend trying to get the overview of what the processes look like, certainly over reading the fine print in [[WP:N]]. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
David Goodman wrote: David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote: You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything. In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies: anyone who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins. Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect. Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were* interpreted as a necessary condition. Since the article failed to satisfy them, it was deleted for lack of notability. And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way. If you look at enough AfDs, you can find every possible interpretation and misinterpretation. A great many articles have been kept with less than full formal sourcing by the GNG guideline, and a great many have been deleted even though they had it. Such deletion is usually done under the provisions of WP:NOT, which rules out a great many types of articles. Although WP:NOT is policy, there are very few agreed guideline for interpreting any part of it, so the actual decision sometimes seem to come out only a little better than random. Other decisions are made on the technicalities of what should count as a reliable source for the purpose--and again, there is not very great consistency. The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR. Many of the inconsistencies exist only in the eye of the species known as the Lesser Horned Wikilawyer - they illustrate the proved that the Devil can cite Scripture. The phenomenon under discussion belongs really to the Illogical Positivist: the notability guidelines are a vast case analysis, and the General Notability Guideline is the default case, meant to catch the situations where no other guideline applies. As we have been saying, it is phrased as a sufficient condition: if it is not also a necessary condition, what happens? Well, the case analysis might not be complete: we might (gasp) have to use our own brains. Must it be complete? Only if you believe there is a hypostatised concept notability that really must be applicable in all cases. I think what is being said above is that there are many of those Illogical Positivists around, and they argue somewhat in the way I'm saying. Now that wouldn't surprise me at all, as a statement. People often enough do use any argument from quasi-policy in what is a rhetorical rather than a logical way. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Ken Arromdee wrote: On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote: I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway? Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. X is famous for being famous - we get round to deleting articles like that. No reliable sources *for notability* doesn't mean that nothing can be said in the article. The restrictions on reliable sources for notability are stricter than the restrictions on reliable sources for article content. Notability requires that each individual source has significant coverage, and is limited to secondary sources only. Article content allows you to take information from multiple sources each of which only has a small amount of coverage, and it is not limited to secondary sources (in fact, under some circumstances you can even use material written by the subject). You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything. Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. The nutshell says A topic that is suitable for inclusion and has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article. In other words certain topics pass. This criterion isn't saying for sure what is not notable. Admittedly the rest of the article is badly drafted enough so that the confusion is somewhat forgiveable. Anyway, recall what notability is for. We use it as a rather crude tool to prise people away from their initial view of what topics should be included, which is typically subjective. And then when they have taken the point that there should be something objective, we move to saying notability depends on available information. So really notability only functions as a stepping stone across the river: once an editor is on the side of developing content by referencing and thinking in those terms, we can talk to them as colleagues. (Well, doesn't always go that way.) But my point about logical positivism was based on that conception, to the extent that people who really believe that an abstract protocol could be used to replace dickering on about quite which RS might establish N are doomed to dickering, but at the level of abstract guidelines rather than at AfD. Sufficient conditions for inclusion are cleaner, but (for example) tend to reinforce systemic bias problems. To the extent that you phrased your comment in terms of necessity, you have an abstract point. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Ken Arromdee wrote: I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway? Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. X is famous for being famous - we get round to deleting articles like that. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Unreverted vandalism
It's not quite a simple issue. I think we know vandalism is a long tail phenomenon, i.e. statistics of average reversion time get dominated by some very long-lasting bad edits. So for example median and mean reversion times may be very different. The question is whether one reads that as soft security actually breaking down, or as the comment that flagged doodads are a bit late to the party or will effect a big improvement. And then there is the issue of people not blanking their watchlists if they stop using them, which would conceal the effectively unwatched pages from the admins who would otherwise watchlist them. The latter problem could be addressed by database searches looking at watchlists of those who edit little. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Virtual Revolution (BBC)
The first of four films has just been screened - this is a documentary series by Aleks Krotowski for 20 years of the Web. http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ is the website, with footage from the interviews. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Virtual Revolution (BBC)
Isabell Long wrote: On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 09:43:14PM +, Charles Matthews wrote: The first of four films has just been screened - this is a documentary series by Aleks Krotowski for 20 years of the Web. http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ is the website, with footage from the interviews. I put the TV on just as the bit about Wikipedia was finishing! The bit I saw looked very interesting, though! :) There was plenty about Wikipedia. And I guess you can see it all online. Sadly there was even more of Andrew Keen's opinions, but we live in an imperfect world ... Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Virtual Revolution (BBC)
geni wrote: 2010/1/30 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com: Isabell Long wrote: On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 09:43:14PM +, Charles Matthews wrote: The first of four films has just been screened - this is a documentary series by Aleks Krotowski for 20 years of the Web. http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/ is the website, with footage from the interviews. I put the TV on just as the bit about Wikipedia was finishing! The bit I saw looked very interesting, though! :) There was plenty about Wikipedia. And I guess you can see it all online. Sadly there was even more of Andrew Keen's opinions, but we live in an imperfect world ... Charles Does he have any new ones? I hadn't heard the one about Arianna Huffington being an interesting person, but not exactly a revolutionary. I suppose one caps that by saying Keen is an uninteresting person, but ... precisely because of that ... is a counter-revolutionary. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Virtual Revolution (BBC)
David Gerard wrote: On 30 January 2010 23:15, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: I hadn't heard the one about Arianna Huffington being an interesting person, but not exactly a revolutionary. I suppose one caps that by saying Keen is an uninteresting person, but ... precisely because of that ... is a counter-revolutionary. Did he troll for a book much? Not in what they have posted: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/10/rushes-sequences-andrew-keen-i.shtml A bit short on redeeming features. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Sarah Ewart wrote: On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:46 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.comwrote: Where was Robert Corell's article previously? Perhaps my search was inadequate but I didn't find it looking quickly... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Corell As of 28 September 2009 when an IP number tagged it for AfD, it was unreferenced and CV-like. It was untagged but no further work was done, despite it being an unreferenced BLP. The subsequent history doesn't show up an actual deletion? Am I supposed to be able to see that it has been deleted? Charles ** ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Gwern Branwen wrote: It is easier to attack than defend. If you want to justify high standards and removal, there are easy arguments: 'what if this could be another Seigenthaler?' 'what if this is fancruft Wikipedia will be criticized for including?' If you want to defend, you have... what? Even the mockery of _The New Yorker_ didn't convince several editors that [[Neil Gaiman]] should cover Scientology. There is no beacon example of deletionism's grievous errors. Deletions can be wrong, negative, thoughtless, whatever you want to call them. The whole inclusionism-deletionism row boils down, though, to the idea that _sometimes_ there is a tension between quality and quantity. Book authors know this. Non-paper hypertext authors probably have to learn it. You can attribute bad editing to bad faith, or to a bad wikiphilosophy, all you like. The discussion becomes sensible round about the point where the abstract ideas start to relate to the concrete realities of our production process. The more we understand that, the more intelligent a discussion we can have about it. The process does exhibit an asymmetry. The many, many thousands of cases where articles are wrongly deleted and then restored, or big cuts made and then reverted, are less damaging to Wikipedia's reputation than the specular examples where something was included wrongly? You bet. Ask [[Taner Akçam]]. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Carcharoth wrote: But this feeds into my point about whether such articles should be brought to a minimum standard, instead of roughly referenced along with a lot of others ones being worked on at the same time, and then the people doing this rough-and-ready referencing moving on to other articles? My standards would be to ensure minimum copyediting standards have been met, that the birth year has been found and securely referenced, and that a standalone biography (even if only a mini-biography from who they work for, or a conference biography, or some form of press release) is found and used as a reference. But I don't think the issue will be resolved by more guidelines. This is an interesting example where the web material is largely of the kind of self-validating, not really third-party stuff that can be problematic. (I don't think having the biography is problematic, but the critical approach is quite helpful here, in indicating what it should contain.) There is a great deal of point in being selective: much of academia has to be taken on similar terms, and I don't think we should slide too far into rejecting departmental home pages as references. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Carcharoth wrote: The interesting thing is noting at what point someone reaches some critical mass of *real* notability (i.e. not Wikipedia's definition of it) and they start to gain widespread recognition from their peers, and then start receiving awards and whatnot, and also how competent those writing biographies and obituaries are, and whether someone makes the cut for being included in Who's Who and things like the Dictionary of National Biography, or specialised biographies. As you say, not our definition, and more like an old-fashioned attempt to distill out distinction in a field. There are many people we have biographies for who will never reach that standard, and for which there will not be comprehensive biographical material unless some researcher goes and writes a biography (which does happen more often than you might think). It would easily be possible in some cases for Wikipedians to scrape together material, but there needs to be some verdict from history, from a reliable authority in the field, for such articles to be anything more than biographical newspaper clippings. The current situation, applying to say businesspeople, is that they may well be interviewed but are unlikely to be the subject of serious, archival research in real time - while they are in business. (Example of interest to me - I realised a few days ago I have may have met Sergey Brin of Google, when he was six years old, since I certainly met his father shortly after he left the USSR. I probably can't know whether the rest of the family was around at that date in 1979, until a biographer goes over the whole ground.) The final verdict on whether an article on someone is sustainable is sometimes not clear until several decades after they have died - or even longer - there are people publishing biographical material about World War I generals today (there were over 1000 of them in the British Army alone), but consider someone in 2050 considering who to write about from our time - unless material gets deposited in an archive and there are enough reasons for someone to study that person's life in detail, many of those we have articles on will have nothing more written about them. Ever. Most people get nothing written about them. Some only get a bit written about them, and an obituary. Only a very few get their lives pored over in great detail with multiple biographies published about them. We should draw the line somewhere, and in a way that is easy to assess. Well, your last sentence combined with the first one certainly sums up the problem: we operate with WP-notability, not (say) ODNB-distinction, and in our tradition notability is supposed, like everything else, to be defined in simple abstract terms. No matter how often one points out that the notability concept we have is actually broken, and always has been, the thing won't lie down and die. Because there is nothing slick to replace it with. And people want slick. The actual editorial process is not slick, and/or things go wrong on the site all the time. I don't find it helpful that WP:V is used as a sufficient as well as a necessary condition for inclusion, given WP:NOT, and I do sometimes wonder if the people I'm arguing with have even got that far. WP is supposed not to be an indiscriminate collection of information, but the line-drawing involved in being discriminating is not easy. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
The Cunctator wrote: Sometimes I don't understand people. Carcharoth goes to the trouble of finding his birth date, learning he received the Brazilian Order of Merit, and lists out some copy errors, but then doesn't fix the page? I mean, what's the point? Um, maybe email is OK in the working environment, but spending time editing WP not so? Just a thought. You seem a little impatient with someone who is not in your time zone. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Carcharoth wrote: On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: snip I would say the MilHist B-class criteria would be a good minimum standard). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Assessment/B-Class * B1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points have appropriate inline citations. * B2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies. * B3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or more sections of content. * B4. It is free from major grammatical errors. * B5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an infobox, images, or diagrams. Should all BLPs meet that standard? Simpler: they should be good stubs, not bad stubs. B5 is out-of-focus, anyway. B2 is almost impossible to assess (a case of a BDP, but I actually created two articles about the same person once, who had been a professor on both sides of the Channel, as was pointed out by someone looking over my shoulder from frWP). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Carcharoth wrote: Fascinating. Didn't they have the same name and birth and death year? You aren't going to make us guess which person this was, are you? I'm guessing 16th century and Huguenot. Not far off. [[Ralph Baines]] and [[Rudolphus Baynus]]. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Removing unsourced information
quiddity wrote:
What to do about someone who has lost the plot?
For example, this editor seems to be going from article to article,
deleting every prose paragraph that doesn't have a ref tag (usually
everything except the intro sentence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributionsoffset=20100125214401target=JBsupreme
Some of the content being removed is obviously not good (selfpromoting
peacockery etc), but much is perfectly fine, and this seems to be one
of the worst (most indiscriminate) ways to handle the hypothetical
problem.
Suggest that one can drive-by even faster in adding {{fact}}? I think
this is the first step, the suggestion that identifying unsourced facts
is a way of achieving a similar end, and that we can all applaud it when
properly done.
Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Ryan Delaney wrote: On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 3:05 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 January 2010 23:00, Ryan Delaney ryan.dela...@gmail.com wrote: Repeat after me: Pure Wiki Deletion. Last time the subject came up, I believe the advocates were asked for any examples, anywhere, of wikis that use Pure Wiki Deletion. I don't think they came up with any at all. Are there any? (Is it possible that the biggest and most popular wiki in the world might not be the best place to make the very first one?) Not that I know of. Lomax made some interesting points though, and I want to carry that reasoning forward. Choose your allies with care, though. I think there are two compelling reasons to adopt PWD: (1) we have substantial evidence that a wiki-style content editing process is a successful way to build an encyclopedia because every other content decision we make uses that basic format... and look at all the wild success we've had with it. (2) The current deletion system is a failure, as it creates intractable problems like this one. I was thinking that the meme that spreads like wildfire through a crowd of one person deserved a name, and of course it has one as Dickens knew: [[wikt: King Charles' head]] (no relation). There is certainly another perspective entirely on the current furore, which is that the absence of enough deletion has created the situation where people (David Goodman being an obviously honorable exception) volunteer the time of others by voting to keep articles, on the same rather anxious principle, that anything temporarily lost from Wikipedia is permanently lost from the world. Which is clearly absurd, stated in that way. The reason this matters, and maybe why this has come to a head now, is that we realise more clearly as time goes by that we have finite human resources to work with. The goose and the golden eggs has always been a good fable to quote against those (outsiders usually) who say Wikipedia would be great if only... and then suggest something that obviously isn't going to work. Perhaps cleaning up after the goose also deserves a mention. In other words the vibrant business of article creation cannot be decreed to be an unmixed blessing. That has to be proved in practice. If too many of our good people are trying to source obscure biographies, then they are not doing something else which might suit them and the encyclopedia better. Anyway I voted for the Jehochman RfC proposal, which has the mild sophistication of stealing one aspect of you want (I think). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Emily Monroe wrote: Can anybody explain what PWD is? Surely. But in another thread, I hope. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Removing unsourced information
Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
quiddity wrote:
What to do about someone who has lost the plot?
For example, this editor seems to be going from article to article,
deleting every prose paragraph that doesn't have a ref tag (usually
everything except the intro sentence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributionsoffset=20100125214401target=JBsupreme
Some of the content being removed is obviously not good (selfpromoting
peacockery etc), but much is perfectly fine, and this seems to be one
of the worst (most indiscriminate) ways to handle the hypothetical
problem.
Suggest that one can drive-by even faster in adding {{fact}}? I think
this is the first step, the suggestion that identifying unsourced facts
is a way of achieving a similar end, and that we can all applaud it when
properly done.
Charles
And where does the {{fact}}-bombing end?
[[Medici bank]] is as finely referenced an article as I have ever (or
likely will ever) written with 96 footnotes, multiple books papers
consulted, and extensive quoting - yet the overwhelming majority of
sentences lack ref tags and are presumably candidates for bombing.
Well, I think that in a well-written, well-sourced article people should
be still allowed to ask for further references. I foolishly copied the
basics of [[List of dissenting academies]] out of a book, thinking it
was a cheap article; and so far have added about 120 footnotes and
created around 50 articles at Wikisource to support it. Just shows where
these things can lead.
I actually had big problems with inline referencing style when it was a
hot potato, and I did start putting articles together sentence by
sentence. There were reassurances that it was not going to lead to
lame writing, and I think those were overdone (more precisely, in an
area where there is plenty of academic research at book length, you will
probably by OK, but that's quite a limitation). OTOH inline referenced
writing is now the house style, and actually there are worse things:
concision is good, and fact-checked encyclopedia articles are good, and
the fact that articles are never finished is a given.
Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Removing unsourced information
Apoc 2400 wrote: It is commonly said that anyone can remove unsourced information, and that the burden lies on the editor who wants to include information to provide a source. I have always taken this to mean that if I think something is wrong or otherwise does not belong in the article, then I can remove it at will if there is no source. You may removed unsourced information. There is no must about it, of course. This action of an editor is an example of using a permission that comes along with Wikipedia being a wiki. I did not take it to mean that I could go from article to article and remove any sentence without a source, for no other reason than being unsourced. The exception of course if contentious material about living people, which should be removed right away if unsourced. Am I correct here? Has the interpretation changed recently? Coming from the end that a wiki is a system of permisssions, while Wikipedia seems to be conceptualised as a collection of policies by many, we can see the problem (or absence of one). Using permissions on a wiki in a way that is a nuisance is not what the site is there for. I don't know how many policies there are on Wikipedia that forbid mucking around in this way, but the defence that you are allowed to do it is mere wikilawyering. Slap with fish, and I don't care whether frozen or not. Yah, so what I'm saying is that someone who tries to read policy legalistically and calls that interpretation can be accused of losing the plot. BLP is different, we know that, same policy framework but with the obligation to apply it with care. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Hungry for New Content, Google Tries to Grow Its Own in Africa
Gwern Branwen wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/technology/25link.html But Google can do something that cowboys can’t: create more real estate. The company is sponsoring a contest to encourage students in Tanzania and Kenya to create articles for the Swahili version of Wikipedia, mainly by translating them from the English Wikipedia. Interesting. Why not translations from English knols to Swahili knols? “Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the answer you are looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.” Ah, maybe that's why. Knols are about quantity and they forgot that allowing people to type into your site doesn't actually guarantee quality? Another finalist, Daniel Kimani, also 21, is studying for a degree in business information technology at Strathmore University in Kenya. He said that contests were an effective way to attract contributors but that “bribing,” or paying per article, “is not good at all because it will be very unfair to pay some people and others are not paid.” “I believe in Wikipedia,” he said, “since it is the only free source of information in this world.” Smart lad. Swahili, because it is a second language for as many as 100 million people in East Africa, is thought to be one of the only ways to reach a mass audience of readers and contributors in the region. The Swahili Wikipedia still has a long way to go, however, with only 16,000 articles and nearly 5,000 users. (Even a relatively obscure language like Albanian has 25,000 articles and more than 17,000 contributors.) Mr. Kimani and Mr. Kipkoech represent one of the challenges for creating material in African languages. The people best equipped to write in Swahili, or Kiswahili as it is sometimes known, are multilingual university students. And yet Mr. Kimani wrote that he used “the English version more than Kiswahili since most of my school work is in English.” Kiswahili as it is correctly known, but tell my publishers that. The thing is, not to be a wet blanket, that literate people in East Africa may well read English. They may need Kiswahili because if you travel 50 miles the local language can change. Translation could be the key to bringing more material to non-English speakers. It is the local knowledge that is vital from these Kenyan contributors, the thinking goes, assuming that Swahili-English translation tools improve. Mr. Kimani wrote one entry in English and Swahili about drug use in Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya. It says that the “youth in this area strongly believe that use of bhang or any other narcotic drug could prevent one from suffering from ghosts attacks.” Now the article lives in English and Swahili, although the English Wikipedia editors have asked for citations and threatened to remove it. This article has some point, doesn't it? Yes, I found this issue in discussing with Luganda-speaking friends: they saw exactly the troubles with sourcing the matters that they felt they would like to post. Our system favours what's already in print (we know it does, and the ethnological idea that we might record what can only be found out by field work was discarded quite some time ago). By the way, copyright notices on sites sometimes mean something. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] List of the deleted articles (was: Administrator coup / mass deletions)
geni wrote: unsourced BLPs are not however dangerous in a way that sourced BLPs are not. Face it, slogans haven't got us very far in this discussion. A BLP that no one responsible has looked at is certainly dangerous in a way that a BLP that some one responsible has looked at may not be. Your slogan would be less convincing in a situation where anyone responsible looking at an unsourced BLP took some action that included making it not totally unsourced. This is just a version of many eyeballs. In the form unsourced BLPs include some of the worst articles on the site it is hardly even controversial. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Nathan wrote: The new arbitration case is an utterly predictable outgrowth of the BLP mass deletions and their endorsement by the arbitration committee. snip What price reduction of arbitrators' terms, so that a January ArbCom might have even less collective memory and experience? Actually nothing much about all this is utterly predictable, except the volatility. As the title of the thread shows, some people do not assume good faith any more. As the events themselves show, be bold is not dead. As the proposal to request arbitation shows, there has grown up a culture of disregarding the RfC route, to get action rather than a structured discussion. (As for any reliance on AN for admin discussion, that is an unchartered institution.) What our history books show is that the ArbCom has to pick up the pieces after a wheel war, and that forcing the issue is the basic crime. Forcing the issue does not equate to be bold at all (you need to add a stubborn, self-righteous approach). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Nathan wrote: On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:45 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: And to disagree with Gwern: sourcing matters. snip -- phoebe I don't think Gwern was saying that sourcing is irrelevant, only thatunreferenced BLP is a blunt measurement that doesn't return much real information about the status of any given article. It's a blunt metric, to be sure, but Gwern's argument that some referencing looks like make-work (true) means that adding references to biographies is pointless (false) is pretty much flawed. Consider how one tests an article to see whether it is a hoax: one tries to verify this and that, and in the end nothing checks out, which is the now I'm suspicious moment. A proper reference in a BLP shows it isn't a hoax, and that is one criterion our articles should satisfy. I'm sure there are all sorts of other long backlogs of article problems, even on BLPs. This is also true. The people who worry about copyright are, well, worried. This is the most interesting comparison. Do we or do we not regard lack of sourcing in a BLP to be as serious as copyright violation? No consensus on that yet, clearly. One step is being taken in that direction, would be one way to explain what is currently going on. Even that much is not perhaps going to be accepted. But the two issues stand out from other things such as POV and writing problems because they have a legal dimension, or in other words could be threats to the whole project. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
David Goodman wrote: Arb Com at this point seems very willing to encourage arbitrary action by administrators, when we really need to be be moving in the opposite direction, of requiring greater admin responsibility and care. As far as I know, the principle remains that admins are personally responsible for their use of the tools, and (in effect) put their adminship on the line every time they make discretionary use of those buttons. The traditional principle is to give admins wide discretion, and hold those who make bad use of that discretion to account. Now this is a case where mistakes can be made; those mistakes can also be rectified easily enough by another admin. We'll have to see how it all works out. If my braglist started turning red, and I could see that a particular admin was acting unreasonably, I would discuss the matter (this is also traditional). So I don't really agree here: arbitrary can be the pejorative of discretionary, but we'll have to see to what extent this is for the worse. (I'm babysitting two troublesome BLPs myself, and have failed to get deletions, one via AfD and one via PROD, quite recently. Both have serious problems with reliable sources, and real world enmities. It had not occurrred to me to delete them out of hand. The post I'm replying to is a bit WP:BEANS, therefore.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Ryan Delaney wrote: snip But this is an argument that inclusionists always make to anyone who tries to delete an article that is missing something crucial -- they put the burden on other people, rather than themselves. snip Yes, there's something to this line of argument. Why are PRODs not being used to clean up very neglected BLPs? Presumably because (i) the PROD would fail, but (ii) the failure, either as a take-down of the tagging or an admin rejection, would not result in a clean-up of the article. So, while we are discussing processes and mechanisms, how to put the onus on someone who untags a BLP that has been prodded to make an improvement in sourcing (when the concern is poor referencing)? I think no one has yet mentioned that a bot is reminding some of us (no way to know how far this has got) that we have in the past created BLPs that have remained unreferenced. If this bot has now done a full pass, it would explain to some extent why these deletions are happening. (Could be a complete coincidence, but I doubt it.) It might be technically possible to have a BLP-PROD (one of the ideas being kicked around) such that the untaggers were logged, and prompted later in the case that there were still no references. In any case we do need to get off the OMG track to thinking about tweaking current methods. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions
Gwern Branwen wrote: I see a lot of mindless fetishism of sourcing here, Oh, and mindless fetishsim about content, too. Let's remember that there is a definite mission, which is to write a reference work. It is not a new idea that encyclopedic works should cite their sources. but suppose Cunctator resurrected an article and stuck in a random newspaper article for the claim 'Foo was married in 1967.' Nobody disputed that before; nobody disputed that after; no new information was added. How *exactly* is the article better? It is different. It is certainly not worse. The information about where to find the information has been added. There is a certain 'presentism' about the argument, even though you've chosen a date before most Wikipedians were born. It is (a) not obvious that information about marriages is undisputed (one of my problem BLPs had just this issue about whether someone was a wife or not, and (b) not obvious that you can always find a published source for births, deaths and marriages. Is it better because some hypothetical viewer might one day go, hm, I wonder if he really was married in 1967, and will look at the cite and be relieved? Speaking from personal experience on the _Evangelion_ articles: I have on multiple occasions spent hours or weeks tracking down some fact widely accepted amongst Eva fans academic commentators to its original source and found it. And then felt a sick hollow feeling as I realize that all I have done is waste my life satisfying RS standards, when the fans and professors knew it all along because they trust each other and their forebears and can see for themselves the consilience of all those commonly accepted facts. So you have made available to 300 million-odd readers of Wikipedia facts that were available to the cognoscenti, now in a way that does not involve trust. I would probably not spend time in such quantities fact-checking mathematics, where I have an idea of reputations in the first place; but I seem to be doing plenty of fact-checking right now in an area of history where I have little background and don't know whether the scholarship of what I'm working on is cast-iron. I believe scholars traditionally got these blues (as well as piles, perhaps not unconnected). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Google bows to censorship
James Alexander wrote: I think the biggest thing was that Google thought that if we were working with China and going along with their filtering they should be leaving us alone. So far, so standard for Western corporations in Asia. Oh, you mean we have to understand the culture as well as the market? The point being that the implied division makes more sense to one side than to the other. Well, fortunately, WP appears to be able to get away with its non-business model. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Fundraiser hits target
This is one of those small earthquake, not many dead stories. But the banner I read from Jimbo suggests the $7.5 m has been banked now, within the Twelve Days of Christmas. Anyway, we'll presumably still be discussing some of the same issues in 2011, whatever the Wall Street Journal thinks (and it is good to see that the media frenzy on WP over, it's official didn't leave a mark). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citing open reference works, was article about open access encyclopedias
Carcharoth wrote: Er, how about: how much do people here use wikisource. I think it is a great resource that gets under-used. Oh, Wikisource is coming. Be afraid, be very afraid. But Wikisource reminds me (not in a bad way) of Wikipedia five years ago: lot of potential, things not quite gelling yet particularly as far as navigation is concerned Or pick up one of the point Charles made above, for example, how to motivate and start a drive for standards in citing common external references (I'm not sure if Charles means templates to wikisource, templates to other online stuff, or templates producing a formatted reference to a book). I dislike what we have in the way of generic book and web templates. But there may be nothing much to be done at the generic end of the scale. What I'm suggesting is that the specific end of the scale be considered. There are numerous standard online sources; some standard book sources, e.g. EB 1911, are migrating to Wikisource. There are the twin points that citations to standard sources are much better packaged up in specific templates; and from our point of view a specific template that takes you to the Wikisource version is ideal (for example, a typo can be fixed on Wikisource). What would be very nice would be something analogous to the redesign of the tags for the tops of articles done a few years ago, where they all became coded by colour. Currently there are numerous such templates, but no uniformity. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor
David Gerard wrote: 2010/1/4 Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com: So lets not confuse the usability goals or making editing SIMPLE, NON-INTIMIDATING, and DISCOVERABLE all of which are very much wiki concepts, with the values of WYSIWYG which encourages increased but hidden complexity. And never mind the actual numbers from Wikia, which look very like having a WYSIWYG system for presentational markup was *the* key to having people actually complete a planned edit rather than click 'edit', go what on earth at the computer guacamole and go away? Obivously proper usability testing would be needed. But, y'know, there's nothing wrong with bad presentation in the edit. This is a wiki, someone will be around with a bot to fix it in about two minutes. The barrier is getting them to contribute at all and not run away screaming forever. I believe you posted something recently pointing out how easy it is to get someone to run away screaming forever. I think we need to define what problem it is we need to solve. In a previous thread on this I recall making a slightly weary comment, to the effect that we would probably get a WYSIWYG interface because it was the sort of project that sounded pretty good and would get funded. (Whether or not I sounded weary, I probably was.) If the fundamental issue here is that the existing wikitext syntax is unmanageable (in someone's sense) then that might be the actual bottleneck. Of course we need to recruit and retain good editors - always have done, always will do. I don't suppose there is any sort of definitive solution there, though. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The story of an article
Steve Bennett wrote: On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Apoc 2400 apoc2...@gmail.com wrote: Fascinating! I note how the article Celilo Falls was created a brought up to four long paragraphs by User:67.168.209.23. Today IPs are not allowed to create articles and some want to limit it to accounts that are four days old and have made 10 edits. Wait, we still have the 4 day limit? I thought we ditched that when it turned out it made no positive difference. Autoconfirmed status of accounts affects ability to move pages, but not ability to create articles. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] On never visiting a website twice, was Re: The story of an article
Gregory Maxwell wrote: I do know with absolute certainty that if some admin had blocked me in error early in my editing my response would have been to forget about the site and not attempt to edit it again for many years, if ever. This seems to be a big Web issue (no, I don't mean that some fool of an admin omitted to block Gregory Maxwell, and now we have to live with the consequences). I wondered what Google said on such phrases, i.e. what conventional wisdom was on people generally giving websites one chance only to impress them. How to ensure I never visit your site twice is here http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2006/11/a-guide-for-losing-visitors which is a web developer's view. In a sense, by now, Wikipedia should have put together a view on this issue. One excuse would be that it is only in the last couple of years that we have had the steady state position (millions of generic readers, of whom a small proportion are potential editors). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Climate change on Wikipedia
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: WMC lost his admin tools over his block of me during RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley, but that was not by any means an isolated incident. Mmmm, no. William's fuse is shorter than ideal. Obvious enough to many people, and over the years there has been much provocation over at the climate change articles. Now what was that word they use on the Internet for a provocateur? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Climate change on Wikipedia
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 12:04 PM 12/21/2009, David Gerard wrote: This is the one you were taken to arbitration over, and was the source of your proposal that experts be banned from editing articles on their expertise. Not at all, completely incorrect, even though asserted with succinct confidence. snip (3) I did propose, not that experts be banned from editing articles in their field of expertise, but that they be, on the one hand, considered to have a conflict of interest in general, and thus obligated to refrain from controversial editing *of articles*, but, on the other hand, generally protected as to expressing expert opinion on Talk pages. We should respect experts. WMC sometimes was quite reasonable when it came to actual facts and finding compromise text; the problem was when he used his administrative tools to enforce his position. We have moved from the smoke without fire assertions at the head of this thread to this distinction without a difference. It needs to be said, tirelessly, that we do not consider anyone to have a conflict of interest unless they are putting their other interests ahead of the encyclopedia's. (Strangely enough, in a part of the post I snipped, you were making some comments and claims about the misuse of technical language in climate change articles. You are doing precisely this shuffle in involving COI in a sense that has no necessary application to WP in this manner.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
