Re: [WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BB...
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 11:13 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: Steve, news articles *in general* are primary sources. Here is how you can tell: Is what I'm reading the first time someone has published what I'm reading? So and so was hit by a car today -- primary source, first time published. Oh, for some reason I thought primary source meant the subject themself had published it. Like a blog, autobiography, etc. I was just confused. Steve ___ 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] Rorchach foes strike back
On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 gwe...@gmail.com wrote: It would seem we need a maxim to cover cases where editors couldn't win online, so they switched to offline attacks - 'complaints are an extension of editing by other means'? The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the blots aren't harmful. After all, if the blots really are harmful, and posting them really is unethical, then complaining about that should be legitimate. Besides, in this case, the lack of objection from any professionals was used as an argument for keeping the blots (although with moving goalposts). Well, if the charges stick, you might not be able to do that any more... ___ 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] SmartWikiSearch, a similarity search engine for Wikipedia
wjhon...@aol.com wrote in message news://news.gmane.org/d55.57c09b43.37c33...@aol.com... In a message dated 8/23/2009 4:53:57 AM Pacific Daylight Time, brewh...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca writes: The search for bees and flowers suggests pollination. I do not see anything mindless about that. That is a human association - You're not understanding me. An article discussing bees and mentioning that they pollinate flowers IS a human association. I didn't say it wasn't. However the meta-network of *all* such associations to the nth degree of relatedness is not something a human can encompass in one bite. That's one thing. What I was stating is that this meta-network itself, is created by a computer algorithm, which ITSELF has no mind. It has no idea what the terms mean, or refer to, or imply. It only knows that they are associated in some way. It creates this meta-network and ranks the associations in a mindless way, i.e. without comprehension. That's what I meant. People maintain the database (or meta-network, as you call it)--a collection of data and pointers, of words and associations. It is not important that the machine has no comprehension of links (pointers) in the database or eigenvectors that it is calculating. As long as human input is reprezented in that database, there is a foundation. Yes, it is a mechanical process, like anything on computers, complete with errors and an incomplete understanding of idiom. The point is that it delivers the impression of a smart search. ___ Cat Zen Master: What is the sound of one paw slashing? ___ 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] Flagged Revisions
Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote in message news:b8ceeef70908230910h3466019cpcedf7ae0a2c0a...@mail.gmail.com... On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Bod Notbodbodnot...@gmail.com wrote: I'd really hate to go to [[curry]] and see recipes. The sorts of spices that are often included yes. But not cooking times. If I look up [[engine]] I want to know how it functions. But I don't want to see a tutorial on how to deal with specific problems. Although I suppose there's a possible claim of hypocrisy here. Many of our medical articles include a section on treatment, which I guess is a form of How To. And I just happened upon [[suicide methods]] which perhaps is the last word, almost literally, on How To do something. I think the difference is between instructions with the expectation that someone would actually follow them, and simply understanding common practice. Curry recipe: you don't need precise cooking times, sequences etc to understand common practice. Engine: You don't need troubleshooting instructions to understand common practice. Disease: A description of treatment *is* appropriate to understand common practice. I agree. Sometimes doctors do not hav time to describe exactly what they will do, because they're concentrating on minute details, like angiograms, and it is useful to hav a cursory description of a medical procedure, so patients can compare or deliver informed consent. Nobody will put a step by step process for a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commisurotomy into the encyclopedia. Suicide methods: It's a fine line, but there is probably information you can leave out without affecting the encyclopaedicness. For example, we could explain that people take certain kinds of pills without being too specific. We could mention that people jump off buildings without highlighting particular ones. Maybe. Steve ___ 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 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
Carcharoth wrote: On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 1:36 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: snip You silly goose. Don't you realize that when we all have brain implants that retain a quintabyte that the internet won't exist at all. We'll be in constant streaming twitter mode all the time. There won't be articles per se, and you won't get input from a single page, you'll get continuous input from a million sources simultaneously in twitt-bits. look of abject horror I wouldn't be so horrified if that didn't sound so plausible. Is it too late to try the 'Culture' route? (Iain M. Banks) Banks' is the utopian version. The dystopian/nihilist version is the One True multiverse of John Barnes. I really hate the fact that the author I love above all others wrote such a disgusting, horrifying, and inescapably compelling vision of the future. And yes, I know that 'Culture' is only utopian if you ignore the fnords. Abject apologies for contributing to the worrisome trend of this channel to descend to non-wikipedia related non sequiturs, but there are times when one simply has to let ones pop cult. erudition get the better of oneself. wide smirk Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ 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] SmartWikiSearch, a similarity search engine for Wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank This is an approximation of what David Gerard has arrived at with his own method, Mister Johnson.] ___ 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] Flagged Revisions
wjhon...@aol.com wrote in message news:cde.51a20c14.37c33...@aol.com... In a message dated 8/23/2009 6:07:11 AM Pacific Daylight Time, brewh...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca, I wrote of a common spam complaint that is either fraudulent or dangerous. It's a bit rough to complain about Wikihow in this regard. It's quite likely that any Ads of this sort come either from vandals or from some kind of affiliate network. Your link does not work for me. What you should do, if you want to produce evidence, is actually copy the URL for the exact link. Google searches change for different people, and over time. It turns out that the result I was looking at was not to the wikihow site, just a use of their name. Upon waking, I realized that the issue (now) is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spamdexing (page rank manipulation), where people put popular search terms into their title, description, or domain name and those words hav nothing to do with what someone is selling. Even though wikihow does host adsense, I do not think that means everything that adsense might entail. Nobody has a trademark on wiki, as far as I know, and it certainly did become synonymous with collaboration, while the how part of wikihow is clearly howto. The site I found is neither wiki nor howto, even though they hav wikihow in their title. I would ask google to down-rank wikihow in titles, except I see that sometimes wikihow does use its own name in titles. To a lawyer, it is a hard case of trademark infringement, involving the credibility of collaboration. To me, it is spamdexing. I should ask google to up-rank wikihow if it occurs in a domain name, and down-rank wikihow if it occurs in a title. They can do either, neither, or both; wikihow would benefit from either. They might say that would make their search engine less objective, and I think wikihow is naturally more objective, plus it is already a sponsored site. ___ Go deliver a dare, vile dog. Forrest Zen: I am one with the chocolate. ___ 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] Rorchach foes strike back
I think [http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/img/Bowser.jpg that fractal] looks like a dog. [http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/img/Tippy.jpg That one] looks like a cat. ___ 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] SmartWikiSearch, a similarity search engine for Wikipedia
2009/8/24 Jay Litwyn brewh...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank This is an approximation of what David Gerard has arrived at with his own method, Mister Johnson.] Not me, the guy who did the website :-) It did occur to me to wonder if he'd just reinvented PageRank from first mathematical principles ... - d. ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
2009/8/24 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com: On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 1:36 AM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: snip You silly goose. Don't you realize that when we all have brain implants that retain a quintabyte that the internet won't exist at all. We'll be in constant streaming twitter mode all the time. There won't be articles per se, and you won't get input from a single page, you'll get continuous input from a million sources simultaneously in twitt-bits. look of abject horror I wouldn't be so horrified if that didn't sound so plausible. Is it too late to try the 'Culture' route? (Iain M. Banks) Carcharoth That would be where they had several billion people vote on if cable cars should be installed in an area that was meant to be a wasteland. Preservationeers vs Pylonists was painfully familiar. In practice the end point of Natural language processing and large scale digitalisation is likely to be made to request computer generated custom articles. Wikipedia with it's surprisingly structured entries is likely to be used as a significant stepping stone in this direction. -- geni ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
2009/8/24 geni geni...@gmail.com: In practice the end point of Natural language processing and large scale digitalisation is likely to be made to request computer generated custom articles. Wikipedia with it's surprisingly structured entries is likely to be used as a significant stepping stone in this direction. Yes. Rather a lot of conversations I have with random geeks are along these lines. Basically, infoboxes = machine-readable data = good. So the way to go there would be to make template plumbing give data more amenable to chewing on. (Standardised names for template parameters, e.g. name, photo.) - d. ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
2009/8/24 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: Yes. Rather a lot of conversations I have with random geeks are along these lines. Basically, infoboxes = machine-readable data = good. So the way to go there would be to make template plumbing give data more amenable to chewing on. (Standardised names for template parameters, e.g. name, photo.) - d. Only in the short term. One of the things that makes wikipedia interesting is that it contains data with different levels of structure. Making a program that can read one infobox is easy. Making a program that can work out how to read related infoboxes is harder but far more interesting. -- geni ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 6:54 PM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/8/24 geni geni...@gmail.com: In practice the end point of Natural language processing and large scale digitalisation is likely to be made to request computer generated custom articles. Wikipedia with it's surprisingly structured entries is likely to be used as a significant stepping stone in this direction. Yes. Rather a lot of conversations I have with random geeks are along these lines. Basically, infoboxes = machine-readable data = good. So the way to go there would be to make template plumbing give data more amenable to chewing on. (Standardised names for template parameters, e.g. name, photo.) Surely the real information is in the semantic linkings? The concept of the wikilink is still in its infancy, I think. If linking can be optimised (by editors), it will be fascinating to see what relationships that throws up. Carcharoth ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
In a message dated 8/24/2009 10:47:15 AM Pacific Daylight Time, geni...@gmail.com writes: Wikipedia with it's surprisingly structured entries is likely to be used as a significant stepping stone in this direction. What is the name of every celebrity born in Nebraska on May 15th? Is that possible today without human intervention? W.J. ** A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222846709x1201493018/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072amp;hmpgID=115amp; bcd=JulystepsfooterNO115) ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
2009/8/24 wjhon...@aol.com: In a message dated 8/24/2009 10:47:15 AM Pacific Daylight Time, geni...@gmail.com writes: Wikipedia with it's surprisingly structured entries is likely to be used as a significant stepping stone in this direction. What is the name of every celebrity born in Nebraska on May 15th? Is that possible today without human intervention? W.J. Nope. The closest you could get would be What is the name of every person that wikipedia knows was born in Nebraska on May 15th? Birth dates and locations tend to be fairly structured within articles so are fairly easy to get. Dealing with a term as vauge as celebrity make the task impossible even with human intervention. -- geni ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
In a message dated 8/24/2009 12:23:07 PM Pacific Daylight Time, geni...@gmail.com writes: Birth dates and locations tend to be fairly structured within articles so are fairly easy to get. Dealing with a term as vauge as celebrity make the task impossible even with human intervention. Hmm I'm not sure I can agree with that. Is celebrity really that ambiguous. I make a list of 100 Nebraskans born on May 15th. I would think we could all agree on at least ten of them as celebrities and probably 10 or 20 as not. It's that grey-area where some local newscaster is a celebrity to some and not to others. What about movie stars ? That's not quite as vague. Can we do that today without human intervention? People who have been in a film? Or is that too vague ** A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222846709x1201493018/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072amp;hmpgID=115amp; bcd=JulystepsfooterNO115) ___ 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] Annoying exonyms (was: hatnotes)
2009/8/24 wjhon...@aol.com: What about movie stars ? That's not quite as vague. Can we do that today without human intervention? People who have been in a film? Or is that too vague It can be done with say actors and actresses. Fun area since apparently it has number of closely related infoboxes which makes a good test for the first step of dealing with unfamiliar infoboxes. -- geni ___ 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] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 73, Issue 95
On Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:40:23 +0100, wikien-l-Tony Sidaway wrote: Be bold and remove crap, Tell that to all the people on this list who insist on quoting back half a dozen copies of the list footer, untrimmed. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ ___ 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] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 73, Issue 95
2009/8/25 Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name: On Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:40:23 +0100, wikien-l-Tony Sidaway wrote: Be bold and remove crap, Tell that to all the people on this list who insist on quoting back half a dozen copies of the list footer, untrimmed. While we are on the subject of mailing list etiquette, it is preferable to change the subject line to something descriptive when replying to a digest. ___ 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] And other observations...
A success Wikipedia has thus far been, though issues there are still. Observations, on these issues I will make. 1) Wikipedia is a collaborative website that tries to be an encyclopedia. Wikipedia's got a funny name: It was named by the founders after the technology it was based on, rather than the philosophy it was based on - openness, egalitarianism, honest and honorable conduct, etc. 2) Thus the name wiki itself is misapplied to en.w.pedia Wiki is a technological concept. Wikipedia is an egalitarian one. Though people have for years tried to turn wiki into a larger, more philosophical term, it just doesn't want to go there - wiki ultimately doesn't mean anything more than quick. We want Wikipedia to be more than just a quickie resource. 3) Wiki facilitates easy editing, but then not everything we do is editing. In fact the main thing Wikipedia does is just exist - existing in a digital form at a free/open-access online database for ease of reading/viewing. Wiki makes lots of things easy - some of which are conducive to making an encyclopedia. The wiki made vandalism easy too, but we learned that collaboration itself could deal with that. ( 3b) (It's the infrastructure/databases/operatingsystems/browsers themselves that facilitate this ease - not just wiki. Still, we don't call ourselves the inter...pedia or the web..pedia for a reason: Those domain names were already taken. ;-) ) -Stevertigo ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
