Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On 02/19/12 12:04 PM, Mike Godwin wrote: On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Mike Christiecoldchr...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps the policies can be improved, but they are written to stop bad editing rather than to encourage good editing. I don't think that can be changed. It's impossible to legislate good judgement, and it's judgement that was called for with the Haymarket article. If policies don't encourage good judgment, or discourage bad judgment, then what are policies for? It seems worth discussing whether it would be good to revise the existing policy to restore its original (presumed) functionality. More generally, I've believed for a long time that WP policies have been increased, modified, and subverted in ways that both create a higher barrier to entry for new editors and that discourage both new editors and existing ones. Policies in general tend to discourage judgement of any sort. Even when such policies are classified as guidelines there will always be those who seek their rigid application. In criminal law, when an accused is acquitted of a particularly heinous crime there will always be those who believe that it's because the law was not tough enough. They often succeed in making it tougher, and end up catching more fish than intended. I just passed my 10th Wiki Birthday, and I'm certainly discouraged from much substantial editing. I often leave material that I suspect to be wrong because the emotional cost of making the correction is much too high. If others do that too the reliability of the entire Wikipedia is put in question. As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886. When crowdsourcing it is dangerous to assume that the majority will always be right. That perpetuates errors, and makes correcting them very difficult. Whatever we think of Stalin we want to spell his name right. An English speaking majority in a Google ranking refers to him as Joseph even if a stricter or more scholarly transliteration gives Josef. Whatever spelling we choose alters the landscape; as a highly popular source that is often quoted and copied we set the standard for what is correct. Our errors will establish the norm. We become our own uncertainty principle. Ray ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On 02/19/12 7:31 PM, Fred Bauder wrote: Fred Bauder writes: I think it probably seems to climate change deniers that excluding political opinions from science-based articles on global warming is a violation of neutral point of view, and of basic fairness. That is just one example, but there are other similar situations. This analogy is breathtakingly unpersuasive. Apart from the fact that consensus about scientific theory is not analogous to consensus about the historical records of particular events, climate-change-denial theory is actually discussed quite thoroughly on Wikipedia. Plus, the author of the op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't seem at all like climate-change deniers. If there is something specific you want to suggest about the author -- that he's agenda-driven, that his work is unreliable, or that the journal in which he published the article is not a reliable source -- then I think equity requires that you declare why you doubt or dismiss his article. I read the article in the Chronicle pretty carefully. The author's experience struck me as an example of a pattern that may account for the flattening of the growth curve in new editors as well as for some other phenomena. As you may rememember, Andrew Lih conducted a presentation on the policy thicket at Wikimania almost five years ago. The wielding of policy by long-term editors, plus the rewriting of the policy so that it is used to undercut NPOV rather than preserve it, strikes me as worth talking about. Dismissing it out of hand, or analogizing it to climate-change denial, undercuts my trust in the Wikipedian process rather than reinforces it. We're talking past one another. It is obvious to me that the author of the Chronicle article should have been able to add his research without difficulty, at least after it was published. We have material about climate change denial, but do not give political viewpoints the status we give scientific opinion in articles on the science, nor should we. What we would be looking for, and will not be able to find, is substantial work showing that climate warming does not result from an increase in greenhouse gases and other products of human activity. We can't simply say, According to Rick Santorum, there is no scientific basis Yes, please, lets discuss. If we're ever going to get past these problems of Wiki epistemology it won't be done by starting with such a heavily argued contemporary problem as climate change. It has too many active vested interests. Too many people accept political statements as fact. NPOV started off as a great concept, but sometimes when we try to explain it we end up expanding beyond recognition. Reliable sources are fine but deciding on the reliability of a source itself requires a point of view. Calling something original research ends up more a weapon than a valid criticism. Ray ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 95, Issue 73
Fred Bauder writes: We're talking past one another. It is obvious to me that the author of the Chronicle article should have been able to add his research without difficulty, at least after it was published. You're right, Fred. We actually were talking past each other, and primary blame for that belongs to me: I read your posting standing alone without fully grasping the context. My apologies for my misreading it, Fred. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
I have initiated a discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Neutral_point_of_view#The_.27Undue_Weight.27_of_Truth_on_Wikipedia It is there that any refinement of the policy and how it is properly applied can possibly be resolved. I note that the article in question still does not contain information regarding the evidence presented at the trial. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886. I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. The fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several peers thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not necessarily that it's going to become the new majority view. I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. A paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a Roman fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up and suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But then some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that defended the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 paper is now considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be correct, or partially correct at best. But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? How do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a minority view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the article in 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been premature, because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. The only real answer seems to be wait a few years and let it percolate through the literature, and my only guess at a faster alternative is to have experts in the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to which revisionist proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think it's a hard problem in general. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Reminder: IRC office hours with the localization team tomorrow
Hi all! Just a quick reminder that you're invited to join the WMF localization team at 1800 UTC tomorrow. -- Forwarded message -- From: Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.org Date: Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:46 AM Subject: IRC office hours with the localization team, on International Mother Language Day To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Hi everyone, I just wanted to give some advance notice about IRC office hours with the localization team [1] at the Wikimedia Foundation, which will be aptly held on International Mother Language Day.[2] Date: 2011-02-21 Time: 18.00 UTC Venue: #wikimedia-office As usual, more logistical info and time conversion links are available on Meta.[3] For a taste of what the localization team has been up to, I highly recommend the blog posts they've been writing regularly.[4] Thanks, and we'll talk to you later this month! -- Steven Walling, Wikimedia Foundation 1. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Localisation_team 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mother_Language_Day 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours 4. http://blog.wikimedia.org/c/technology/features/internationalization-and-localization/ -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 8, Issue 08 -- 20 February 2012
Special report: The plight of the new page patrollers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/Special_report News and notes: Fundraiser row continues, new director of engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/News_and_notes Discussion report: Discussion on copyrighted files from non-US relation states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/Discussion_report WikiProject report: WikiProject Poland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/WikiProject_report Featured content: The best of the week http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/Featured_content Arbitration report: Civility enforcement closed, proposed decision in TimidGuy, two cases remain open http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/Arbitration_report Technology report: Major strands of development cycle coalesce as 1.19 is deployed to first wikis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20/Technology_report Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-02-20 http://identi.ca/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] EFE: Indigenous languages entering Wikipedia
Hi Samuel and Gerard, thanks for your answer
About UNESCO, we as WM-CL haven't been able to contact lately with the
representative of UNESCO in the country. UNESCO was one of the promoters of
the last Congress of the Chilean Indigenous Languages past November, but I
didn't have the chance to meet its representative (he was very hurried and
I was mostly dedicated to meet people from the communities). I hope this
year we can meet with them and see if they can support us, and also
probably with CONADI, the National Corporation for Indigenous Affairs. We
want to make a reality the idea of a Mapudungun Wikipedia that Jimmy and
former president Michelle Bachelet announced on 2008 when he was in
Santiago.[1]
We have some contacts with some indigenous organizations, mainly with the
Network for Inter-Cultural Education and the Federation of Mapuche Students
and we expect to have meetings with some universities in Southern Chile
dedicated to the studies of Mapudungun (Catholic University of Temuco,
University of La Frontera and the Southern University). They are all
committed for the preservation of the Mapudungun language. We also had some
conversations with people from the Rapanui Academy of the Language, the
official institution for the promotion of the language at Easter Island,
and we expect to work with them in the near future.
But there are several problems, especially with Mapudungun Wikipedia.
Currently, ISO code for Mapudungun is arn from Araucanian, an offensive
word used by the Spanish and Chilean conquerors till the past century. That
name is also used by Unicode for their translation (and so, it is used in
our {{#language}} magic word). The use of the code for the community is a
serious issue... nobody would like to work in a project with an offensive
word attached to it. We have been trying to contact the ISO authority and
also the US Library of the Congress (which is in charge of ISO 639-1) but
we didn't get an answer. I know that the Language Committee has an strict
rule about the use of ISO code but I think this is an exceptional case
where the use of that code is a really sensitive issue that could damage
any development.
We have been working in the meantime in the Incubator but it is really
difficult to engage new people there (it's not easy to use any link
[[Wp/arn/this|this]] [[Wp/arn/way|way]] for example) and without the
technical problems about the alphabet to be used solved. We have increased
the growth rate of the project in the past months but it is still slow.
Gerard, is there any goal of how many articles should we reach to apply
for the LangCom?
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BBzxiofuz4
Osmar Valdebenito Gaete
Presidente de Wikimedia Chile
http://www.wikimediachile.cl
2012/2/20 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com
Hoi,
This sounds like a great initiative. I am sure that the language committee
will aim to help you as much as possible.
The language policy is designed to ensure that new projects have an optimal
chance of success. There are a few things that we require from you. They
are that you localise the most used messages of MediaWiki. This ensures
that someone who knows only this language has a chance of understanding
what is asked in the user interface. The other part is to write a
substantial number of articles in the Incubator. This allows us to ask
experts to verify for us that the language is indeed the language it is
said to be.
These requirements can be quickly met and particularly when there is a
program supporting the new project it proves possible to get a project
created relatively quickly.
Thanks,
Gerard
On 18 February 2012 22:50, Osmar Valdebenito os...@wikimediachile.cl
wrote:
Hi everyone!
Yesterday, news agency EFE published a note about the work done mainly by
Wikimedia Argentina about the development of projects in Native American
languages like aymara, guarani and mapudungun. The news have been replied
in the largest newspapers and websites of Latin America and Spain.
The work to develop Wikimedia projects in Native American languages have
been taken as a priority for the chapters members of Iberocoop (Wikimedia
Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela) and we expect this year 2012 to
work in the development of those communities of users and editors. But we
expect also the support of the Language Committee and the Wikimedia
Foundation for this work.
http://www.que.es/201202171651-lenguas-indigenas-abren-paso-wikipedia-efe.html
Here is a fast translation to English of the article (sorry for my
English
btw):
Indigenous languages like Guaraní and Mapuche are making their way into
Wikipedia with the help offered by the editors of the colorful
encyclopedia
to teachers and students of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the
largest in Argentina.
These presentations for teachers and students of Guaraní and Mapuche in
the
Language Center of the UBA wants to promote the
Re: [Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions
The one thing experts in a field are not good at, is predicting the success of innovative material. If it were of predictable value, it wouldn't be revisionist. Experts can tell is something fits into the accepted paradigms; they can tell if something is so wrong with respect to soundly known facts that is is very unlikely to be true, they can even tell if they individually agree with a new proposal--but they cannot tell what is outside the current boundaries but the field as a whole will accept, or how many years or decades it will take for such acceptance, or how long the acceptance will last until the next reversal. To the extent experts can judge the new work, we do not need them to tell us on Wikipedia directly, overturning the principle that all editors are equal; a new work of any importance will have reviews and commentaries on it, and that's where the experts will have their say, and where any editor can find and cite them, as is the established practice. We do need to cover such reviews more than we currently do; if experts come to a talk page and indicate these to us, we can include them. Unfortunately, in the humanities such reviews can take several years to arrive--though sometimes there will be an immediate discussion in academic magazines,whether specialist ones or general sources such as the (UK) Times Higher Education or the (US) Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps we should even consider the use of some of the most accepted blogs for the purpose also. But we should at least give some mention to peer-reviewed materials published by a major academic publisher--so at least the readers can know of it and examine it for themselves. On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Delirium delir...@hackish.org wrote: On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886. I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. The fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several peers thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not necessarily that it's going to become the new majority view. I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. A paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a Roman fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up and suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But then some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that defended the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 paper is now considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be correct, or partially correct at best. But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? How do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a minority view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the article in 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been premature, because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. The only real answer seems to be wait a few years and let it percolate through the literature, and my only guess at a faster alternative is to have experts in the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to which revisionist proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think it's a hard problem in general. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
