from:"Carcharoth"

On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Phil Sandifer snowspin...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 So basically, we have a phrase that mandates the violation of NPOV on
 a host of articles, that was inserted without discussion, and that has
 been controversial in every subsequent discussion. But we keep it,
 because it's consensus.

Have you tried suggesting this change on the talk page and advertising
the discussion at various relevant noticeboards and other project talk
pages?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 6:51 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2008/12/28 Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net:

 Yeah, I'm still bitter about spoiler warnings, but perhaps they should be a
 lesson.  Wikipedia is a game of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic .


 Yes, because them being (a) clearly stupid in too many cases (b)
 clearly original research to declare as spoiler (c) having six
 different venues to tell you you're wrong and to go away must be
 because of clever politics on the part of those you disagree with, not
 because you're actually wrong or anything.

Can't see the word spoiler in the subject line here...

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 12:10 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2008/12/29 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:

 I can point to articles that source statements and claims to Tolkien's
 letters, or quotes from those letters. The articles should probably,
 more technically, point to secondary literature that uses those
 letters as a source, but there always seems to be exceptions where
 directly citing the letter seems the best way to allow verifiability.
 I can certainly attest that quoting a secondary source can give undue
 weight when the secondary source is giving only one interpretation of
 what a letter might mean. And the concern that quoting the letter
 directly is original research is also very real. Interpretation of the
 meaning of what someone has said can be very tricky.


 Please get to WT:NOR promptly.

Will you and Phil (and others) join me? :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 1:30 AM, The Cunctator cuncta...@gmail.com wrote:
 There is the problem that Derrida mostly wrote deliberately inscrutable
 nonsense.

What's that sound of ghostly laughter I hear?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Speedy deletion

2008-12-31 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Charlotte Webb
charlottethew...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 12/30/08, Wilhelm Schnotz wilh...@nixeagle.org wrote:
 Secondly there is the issue of google indexing our new pages very
 quickly. I have heard estimates that new articles are out on google
 anywhere from 1 hour to 5 hours. We do need to make sure attacks and
 spam are removed before google indexs them.

 If this is truly the root of all urgency we should turn on flaggedrevs.

 In the beginning we would want Google to index only an article's last
 stable version (if one exists).

 After a certain grace period (to keep known-good content from
 vanishing), we can begin instructing Google to stop indexing articles
 which have no flagged rev and to de-index existing unflagged revs.

 While I think this would be the best strategy to avoid the scenarios
 you describe, I don't think it has anything to do with the shelf-life
 of articles tagged for speedy deletion.

 Some users like to nuke every {{third-world-topic-stub}} from
 geostationary orbit because it is like a video game to them. Faster
 pussycat, kill, kill, and let no mayfly die of natural causes.

 Perhaps some of this energy can be channeled toward other tasks.

Depends. If those efforts are channelled towards difficult stuff, it
could make things worse. The trick is to find something else ongoing,
backlogged, interesting and simple and rewarding and useful (that last
one might be difficult), and directing the efforts towards that.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

2009-01-06 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 12:02 AM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:

 snip

 An object takes on increased significance, with the number of publications
 mentioning it.
 Do we want a work that has a list of the 3 billion known stars numbers each
 with their own articles showing their apparent brightness, density and
 distance  from the Earth?  It would swamp the entire project.  Random page 
  would
 become worthless.

 So we focus on what others have determined to be important, based on the
 number of citations to it.

 Have you seen the discussion about towns and village stubs on ANI?

Sorry, should have provided a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ANI#Editor_creates_100.2C000_or_more_non-notable_articles.21

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] NOR contradicts NPOV

2009-01-06 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 12:58 AM, Carl Beckhorn cbeckh...@fastmail.fm wrote:
 On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 07:44:58PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 It is *already* covered in a text.  In fact, I note, just on Google  Books,
 at least six print secondary sources which *mention* it, and a few go into
 details.

 A book which only mentions a theorem but doesn't go into depth is useless as
 a source. I would always cite the original paper in preference.

Why not both? Wikipedia requires editorial judgment for some things,
but selection of primary sources is one of the more tricky ones, and a
secondary source showing that you are not cherry-picking the primary
sources is a good safeguard.

 What I was suggesting is that an article with no secondary mentions (of any
 kind, whatsoever) is probably a good AfD candidate.

 Every topic I am intrested in having an article for will some sort of
 oblique secondary mentions - but I don't consider those to be sources for
 the article, and would not include them when I add material.

Consider those oblique secondary sources to be notability sources to
allow the use of the primary sources.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles

2009-01-06 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:20 AM, Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 We can use a 100 year old version of EB as a seed for hundreds or thousands
 of articles, but we cannot cite them as a source.

To change topic again...

Anyone interested in a version of this discussion on the mailing list?
Or even over there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Plagiarism#Another_view.2C_and_a_plea_for_guidance

Hmm. That talk page needs archiving.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles

2009-01-07 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:45 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 5:04 PM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 In a message dated 1/7/2009 12:08:33 PM Pacific Standard Time,
 dgoodma...@gmail.com writes:

 unless  the fame is very recent, there almost
 invariably will be peer-reviewed  articles discussing both his life and
 his specific career, and of course  they should be included.


 -
 I have serious doubts that this is the case.
 Hard-cover biographies are not peer-reviewed whatsoever.
 And, as in my last message, I would be interested in what journals can be
 found that are peer-reviewed that only submit biographies.

 Hard cover bios from academic publishers are invariably peer reviewed,
 usually by three consultants, as well as the usually expert editorial
 staff.
 As for the use of popular biographies, one can be guided by the
 reviews for them.

 I'm not aware of any peer-reviewed journals that publish only
 biographies, though most historical journals publish what amount to
 articles with major biographical content on individuals, some of t hem
 explicitly biographies.  Similarly, journals in other fields often
 publish at least a few biographies of major figures in that field.

What you tend to get in peer-reviewed science journals is the
obituaries (not that these are peer-reviewed in the sense that the
science papers are). There has also been a change in the last 25 years
or so from journals that included society matters, such as
obituaries of fellows of insert discipline national society, and
details of awards made by that society, and so on, to splitting the
journals into a proper journal (for the science papers) and a
bulletin for society news and obituaries and the like.

There are some journals that *do* specialise in biographical material,
but not much that I know of. One that I am aware of is the one where
the Royal Society publishes material on its fellows:

Official website is here:

http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/120177/

Our article is here:

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

More on this is here:

http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=1728

The online version is here:

http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=1724

An absolute goldmine for sourcing material in articles about Royal
Society fellows (well, the dead ones, that is).

Many other major scientific societies also have similar resources.

For example, the Royal College of Surgeons of England has the
following resource called Plarr's Lives of the Fellows Online:

http://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/home.htm

And for chemists, you have stuff like: Biographical Database of the
British Chemical Community, 1880-1970

http://www.open.ac.uk/ou5/Arts/chemists/index.htm

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Biographical material for
scientists is out there and normally fairly easy to find, especially
if an obituary was published in one of the leading journals, and
failing that, one of the biographical databases will help.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles

2009-01-07 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:08 AM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 The real question however is, are these peer reviewed in the proper and
 strict sense.

 There are also Who's Who's out there, some of them just accept and print
 whatever the subject sends in.  So the discovery of exactly what steps the
 publication goes through is pertinent.
 Just being the member news organ of an academic journal isn't a guarentee
 that the material is reviewed for veracity.

Agreed. But you also have to accept that there is a scale here. not
everyone has professional historians poring over every detail of their
lives. Some only have journalists or fellow colleagues or the like,
who may get their information from family or others, or if the subject
is still alive, from them directly.

The intelligent reader needs to realise this, and keep in the back of
their mind that only the really famous people have the details checked
out in great detail (and to be honest, not always even then - some
mistakes in biographical details for really famous people propagated
without correction for some time, so other mistakes may still be out
there). When reading the biographical details for a more obscure
person, you do need to look at the sources and question them, but that
doesn't necessarily mean remove the material. Just make clear that
only one source gives (for example) the middle name, and this is that
source. Other editors and readers need to use their own judgment from
that point on.

Or read about how to assess and judge and rank biographical sources
for reliability.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Low citation quality in BLP articles

2009-01-07 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Carl Beckhorn cbeckh...@fastmail.fm wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 04:58:01PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 Remembering that the thrust of this argument was specifically the use of
 Encyclopedia Brittanica, news magazines and newspapers.  That doesn't
 necessarily sound like a low standard to me.  Does it to you?

 It seems like a low standard to me:

 * Using encyclopedias for inline citations isn't a reliability problem,
  but it's a symptom of shallow research and generally bad scholarship.
  Citations should lead readers to sources that cover the cited
  topic in greater depth than the WP article, rather than to other
  encyclopedias which are unlikely to do so.

 * Building the majority of an article from newspaper sources is not
  a reliability problem at the level of the individually-sourced
  pieces of information. However, it's exactly the type of synthesis
  of primary sources that has been decried for academic articles.
  And, in many cases, it suffers from the bias of newsmedia to
  cover things that will sell papers in much greater depth than
  topics that are of less popular interest.

Maybe you could specifically contrast two biographies I mentioned earlier?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_(inventor)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace

Those are two very different types of articles in terms of the sources
they use and the way they are constructed from those sources and the
assumptions and inferences made by the editors of those articles.

Discuss! :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] From Private Eye

2009-01-08 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Angela Anuszewski
angela.anuszew...@gmail.com wrote:
 Excuse my ignorance, but excatly what is Private Eye?

I looked it up in a handy online encyclopedia...

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

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Rank hath its privileges

2009-01-08 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Sam Blacketer
sam.blacke...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Sam Korn smo...@gmail.com wrote:

 As far as I am concerned, this is a minor, if rather stupid, abuse of
 the tools.  Trout-slapping, rather than arbitration, seems in order.


 I agree; also the fact that it seems to have taken place nearly two years
 ago has some weight in persuading me that a heavy-handed response is not
 appropriate. The biggest part that concerns me is the dubious judgment in
 admitting doing it to a journalist from a major newspaper.

The initial posting of the information in question to Wikipedia (by an
IP) and the deletion of two revisions of the article in question, were
both done in February 2007. It is not clear when the use of tools to
view those deleted revisions, and the Facebook posting, took place
(the WSJ article doesn't say). There was also an OTRS ticket
associated with the deletions - though that was not stated in the
deletion log (it should have been). Like Sam Blacketer and Sam Korn,
it is the disrepute aspect and the judgment aspect that concerns me
here. I don't really want to say more, though, as an on-wiki ArbCom
venue would be more appropriate than here. And waiting for the user in
question to respond is also important.

There should, though, really be a place on Wikipedia itself for open
public discussion like this that doesn't require the formality of RFAR
or the non-transparency of the ArbCom mailing list, and is less
chaotic than ANI. At the moment, WT:RFAR is all there is for this is
there a problem here pre-RFAR query - see a post made there by Masem
on another issue that has garnered little response.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Rank hath its privileges

2009-01-08 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Joe Szilagyi szila...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Sam Korn smo...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Wilhelm Schnotz wilh...@nixeagle.org 
 wrote:
 To ray, you have a point, if it is a 3rd parties copyright, it is
 their fight. Generally though I don't like the thought of that ability
 being used to undelete stuff that is not helpful to this project and
 creates these sorts of distractions, but it is now his fight.

 I agree mostly with these sentiments.  If there was a case to be made,
 I would argue that it should be presented as using the admin tools in
 a way likely to bring the project into disrepute.

 There has been no breach of our copyright policy, as the content was
 not posted on Wikipedia.  I do not recall ever taking on-wiki actions
 against a user for breaching the GFDL on another website.

 As far as I am concerned, this is a minor, if rather stupid, abuse of
 the tools.  Trout-slapping, rather than arbitration, seems in order.

 As said on ANI...

 Sam, how is it minor? A comparable case is User:Everyking, where he
 was emergency desysopped for even suggesting that he might disclose
 deleted information on Wikipedia review--and that pales in comparison
 to this. This admin did disclose information that was apparently
 deleted for copyright purposes, posted it onto one of the busiest
 non-WMF websites in existence, and then had it splashed over one of
 the major media sources on the planet Earth that he did it with his
 WMF admin tools. This is minor how?

 Any admin can freely recover content deleted for copyright purposes
 and then repost it wherever and however they want?

There is a better place than this mailing list to debate whether there
has been a serious case of abuse of administrator tools. I know I've
posted in this thread myself, but please, let's not have the
discussions spread over several different venues. At the very least,
the sitting arbitrators should withdraw from this discussion (as they
may be required to arbitrate) and the former arbitrators who are privy
to the ArbCom mailing list discussions should probably also stay out
of the discussion here. As a sitting arbitrator, I'm going to do
exactly that and stop posting in this thread until the matter has been
resolved.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

2009-01-11 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 Slashdot has an interesting thing where they have ratings for
 postings, with different categories. They then permit you to consider
 certain categories to be more or less important to you (e.g. funny
 postings may be raised up in the rating meaning you're more likely to
 see them).

I think that has been proposed before and reejcted. Could be proposed
again, I suppose.

 In principle a similar thing could apply to the wikipedia, if we don't
 do a hard delete to articles (or only for the truly nasty vandalism
 stuff), but simply rate them along multiple axes then it could be
 possible for a user to indicate to the wikipedia what he or she
 values, and only articles that are highly enough rated for their own
 set of values would appear, (with a default set of values used for
 anonymous users.)

That would mess up linking between articles.

 Doing it that sort of way potentially avoids the either it's suitable
 for our glorious wikipedia; or it isn't dichotomy, and permits poor
 quality articles a chance to improve below the waterline before
 becoming full-fledged articles.

Userspace is generally used for article incubation in controversial
cases. Having a Wikipedia project place or namespace for this is not a
bad idea though.

 I'm not saying it would be a perfect system, but it would probably be
 better than what we have right now; in other words we would have far
 less deletionism, because we would have far fewer deletes.

You might get arguments over links and redirections to or from or not
(as the case may be) this namespace.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

2009-01-11 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/1/11 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:
 That would mess up linking between articles.

 No, it would create red links, which would help people find the
 sub-par article and encourage them to improve it.

 Red links are usually considered to be broadly positive.

I agree red links are positive, but people generally think redlinks
are the absence of an article. Clicking on a redlink normally gets a
screen asking if you want to create an article, not can you improve
this article. A different colour link leading to the incubation
namespace is probably what you are thinking of, and might work.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between 1923 and 1964

2009-01-12 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 10:03 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
 2009/1/12 geni geni...@gmail.com:

 I've just run across this article, which might be of use in helping
 those who work on the eternal problem of determining whether or not a
 given 20th-century work is in copyright in the US.

 We don't use the copyright not renewed clause stuff and commons'
 general support for Must be PD in the country of origin as well as the
 US means we mostly dodge the issue.

 I'm not so sure that we don't use it - I can't cite chapter and verse,
 but I've certainly seen it invoked here and there, usually with
 good-faith due diligence to find renewals.

 Sometimes it seems like what we need is a quasi-intelligent PD-old
 template - you plug in the known variables, date created and date
 published and author and country and so on, and it spits out is
 therefore public domain because X and Y, under provision Z. Be
 horrific to maintain, though.

We have fairly complex templates similar to that, though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-EU-no_author_disclosure

There was, a long time ago, a big debate about some images such as:

File:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg

There is a long history here, but none of it seems to have mattered
once it reached Commons. There seems to have been no attempt in the
Commons deletion debate to look at the previous discussions or
anything.

* 18:04, 1 August 2007 Nv8200p (Talk | contribs | block) deleted
File:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg ‎ (Remove image per WP:IFD)
(restore)
* 00:45, 7 August 2007 Xoloz (Talk | contribs | block) restored
File:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg ‎ (11 revision(s) and 1
file(s) restored: Restored by DRV, to be relisted at IfD at editorial
option)
* 03:50, 23 November 2007 Jennavecia (Talk | contribs | block) deleted
File:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg ‎ (Speedy deleted per (CSD
i8), was an image available as a bit-for-bit identical copy on the
Wikimedia Commons. using TW) (restore)

The debates at the time on en-Wikipedia were:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion/2007_July_18#Image:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2007_August_2

But a year later we have this:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Image:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg

Anyone here know what should be happening with this image?

Carcharoth
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion for its own sake (was MUD history)

2009-01-13 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Michel Vuijlsteke wikipe...@zog.org wrote:

snip

 Anyone any idea where I could find the original AfD? It seems to have
 disappeared:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Threshold_(online_game)oldid=263769784

 The edit summary just says oops.

The deletion log helps in cases like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Logpage=Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_deletion%2FThreshold_(online_game)

OTRS Courtesy blank

What probably happened is that someone who was unhappy with some of
the things said in the heat of the moment e-mailed the Wikipedia OTRS
service and asked for a courtesy deletion. Not quite ideal in some
ways, as this is a deletion, not a blanking (as the summary says), and
these two actions (deletion and blanking) are very different, but you
are best off asking the admin involved what happened there, though he
may be unable to tell you much more.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OTRS

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between...

2009-01-13 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 1:39 AM, Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 4:33 PM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 I see lots of stuff I know to be public domain in news media in  particular
 that credits it to Corbis, Getty, etc. This happens even in very  obvious
 cases, like US military photos of atomic  tests.

 Of course this is perfectly normal and in fact to do otherwise would be
 scandalous.
 IF you use my image, you had better give ME credit regardless of whether my
 image is of my toaster or the Taj Majal.  The image belongs to me, and I  
 give
 you permission to use it only if I'm credited, and not otherwise.

 That's S.O.P. in the image world.
 Nothing to do with copyright.  Seperate issue.

 We were, I thought, talking of photos that Corbis does not own the
 rights to and never did, and is certainly not the creator of.

Copy of a copy of a copy and so on Original is usually a
negative or print in some archive (the original original may be long
gone). Many copies are often made of a single photo or image. In the
case of photos from the early 20th century, you sometimes have many
copies from an original negative or plate being distributed to various
places and people, and various histories being recorded for each
separate copy. If the original provenance is lost, it can sometimes
appear that a single photo has several different claims of
ownership.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Consensus (was To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!)

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 7:29 PM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote:
 I am not too keen on a policy RFC. Not that I oppose it but I do not believe
 we had enough preliminary discussion to come up with a decent proposal. A
 policy RFC would get shot down almost instantly.
 As for the RFAR comment. Arbcom has proven themselves to be useless in this
 dispute. They went out of their way not to resolve the dispute. They are
 first class in establishing findings of fact but are dead last when it
 comes in doing something about those facts they found...

One of my reasons (not stated at the time) for recusing from that case
request that was ultimately not accepted was because I believe this
kind of issue is best handled at the article and policy level and that
work is needed on devising processes that work to bring large-scale
change to policies and guidelines slowly but surely through the
system, with the full input of the community throughout the process.

Just a few basic principles for all such discussions of proposed
changes would be:

1) Take things slowly - rushing will derail the process, moving slower
ensures long-term stability

2) Draft a set of changes that reflect changes in actual practice

3) Advertise the proposed changes properly - this is no longer trivial
on Wikipedia due to the project size

4) Provide a proposed overall timetable at the start, flexible enough
to get broad support

5) Allow input and changes and full discussion at each stage - discuss
and edit, do not vote

6) Judge the right times in the process to move from drafting to
polling and back

7) Be prepared to repeat each stage several times and endure lots of
hard work and false starts

8) Monitor the progress in terms of participation (growing numbers
after each stage is good, declining numbers is bad)

9) Final straw poll to determine acceptance must have widespread
advertisement and clear timetable for start and end

10) Neutral person or group of people need to be found to close the
whole process and declare a result

11) Celebrate or prepare to start a new round of editing the proposal

With many refinements from experiences other people have had of such processes.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:20 PM, Wilhelm Schnotz wilh...@nixeagle.org wrote:
 On 1/13/09, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote:
 AFDs cannot conclude as a merge. AFDs are meant to be a binary decision.
 Something will either end up getting deleted or not. AFDs shouldn't go any
 further.

 But they do and theyn have for quite some time. Other results from an
 AFD are cleanup, redirect, no consensus (default keep), keep, delete,
 I think there are a few others. It *is* widely accepted practice and
 has been for as long as I have been here.

snip

cleanup is not an AfD result I've ever seen. It has been a
long-standing axiom as far as I can remember that AfD is not cleanup.
What *can* happen is someone closes as keep or no consensus, and then
*adds* their opinion (or that of others) that cleanup is needed. But
that is not a close of cleanup.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Consensus (was To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!)

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 8:30 AM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote:
 Perhaps it would be better if we had a questionnaire out there. I think our
 approach is a bit wrong.
 How about we ask the readers what they want to see on the site. After all
 our policy decisions should be inline with what the readers want.

 I know this has not been done before... I am starting
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Questionnaire/2009

 I hope it will help with the decision making process.

 I hope to ask questions like:

 Are you happy with the amount of coverage of fiction related topics?
 Yes (why)
 No (why)
 No opinion.

 Better wording is of course welcome.

There is a fiction-related questionnaire already by Pixelface (not
everyone likes it though):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pixelface/Fiction_Survey_2008_draft

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 8:53 AM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 All it takes is the use of one extra word to eliminate nearly all fiction
 related topics. Naruto is among our top 20 most visited articles each month.
 Even so that doesn't get in the way if you are smart about it.

 So please tell me what exactly is the problem with fiction related articles
 as a whole?

Good point. I haven't seen this argument raised prominently before,
that fiction articles *don't* swamp our real-world coverage. It would
be worth trying to get more rigorous results from a wider survey like
this, and finding someone willing to help with some moderate form of
statistical analysis. The number of page views is also something that
should have more prominence in the debate, in my opinion.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between...

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:08 AM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:

 In a message dated 1/15/2009 9:56:34 PM Pacific Standard Time,
 mor...@gmail.com writes:

 You are  copying the formula.  There is no item itself to be  stolen.


 -

 And no one is stopping anyone, from taking an old Bible and scanning  it.
 But if you want to come to my bible.org website and copy off all my scans  of
 old bibles and then post them up on your website, that is quite a different
 thing.

 The simple fact that an underlying object is PD does not give carte blanche
 to rehost someone else's photographs.

What if someone turns up on your doorstep with a scanner and says
your old bible is public domain information - I demand you let me
scan it so I can set up a website to compete with your one. What
then?

The point here is that the availability of PD items (the actual items
themselves, not the scans or copies of them) varies. There are also
quality control and provenance issues as well. What would you prefer?
A quality scan from a respected museum that has confirmed the
provenance of an item and that it is genuine and not a fake, or a
poor-quality scan from Joe Blogs who has found stuff in a second-hand
bookshop and has no weight of authority behind him to confirm that the
scan or the object are genuine?

The usual solution to that is to point to the museum/library/archive
image as a way to verify the self-created image (similar to how people
point to Google Books now to verify books they are using as
references). But what if there is no museum/library/archive image?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between...

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 7:20 PM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 1/16/2009 4:27:00 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
 carcharot...@googlemail.com writes:

 The  usual solution to that is to point to the museum/library/archive
 image as a  way to verify the self-created image (similar to how people
 point to Google  Books now to verify books they are using as
 references). But what if there  is no museum/library/archive image?

 Point to versus take.  Two separate things.

I agree.

 I'm not disputing the right to link to an image on bible.org.  I'm  disputing
 the right to take that image and post it to flicker.com

Ditto.

But you do realise the reason why there is such a thing as public
domain in the first place, right? It's a balance between encouraging
free access to public domain material, and discouraging restriction of
access to public domain material.

 And what if there is no museum image only means that we are in the same
 position as what if we have no free image of Britney Spears eating a hot dog
 for our hot dog page??.  I.E. we're not worse off than we've been for five
 thousand years.

I preferred the bible example.

 The mere fact that an image now exists, doesn't mean we get the right to do
 whatever we want with it.

I agree. But you avoided my other question:

If the *object* is public domain, who has the right to access it?

If you buy an expensive first edition public domain book (hundreds of
years old and thousands of US dollars), what do you say to someone who
turns up on your doorstep saying that the book is part of the
collective heritage of humankind, and that they have a right to look
at it and scan it, and that you have no right to keep the item locked
up in a display cabinet for only you to look at?

This is private collections, not museums, but what distinctions should
be drawn? There *are* some private collections of very old material
that are not under government control and are not about to be released
to the public anytime soon. Is this a problem? What can be done about
it?

You talked about capitalism. That creates markets in old stuff. Which
leads to hoarding.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Announcing Epistemia, a new wiki encyclopedia

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Thomas Larsen
larsen.thoma...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 Epistemia aims to provide something better.

How did you come up with the name, and what does it mean? :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Announcing Epistemia, a new wiki encyclopedia

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:28 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/1/17 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:
 On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Thomas Larsen
 larsen.thoma...@gmail.com wrote:

 snip

 Epistemia aims to provide something better.

 How did you come up with the name, and what does it mean? :-)

 See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epistemology

I would have thought metaphysics and ontology are closer to the
philosophical underpinning of an encyclopedia, but I guess it is
harder to come up with names from those (Ontopedia??). The nature of
knowledge is a bit different from the actual knowledge itself. It did
get me wondering how catchy the various spin-off names are (I know,
some aren't spin offs):

Infopedia
Wikia
Veropedia
Epistemia
Wikinfo
Citizendium

Seems Wikipedia cornered the market with the most obvious name.

Anyway, best of luck with Epistemia. It is actually rather tempting to
see what it is like to be there on the ground floor constructing the
whole thing from the ground up. Many people missed that back in 2001-3

Carcharoth

PS. It seems I made up Infopedia!

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tracking spam for fun and profit

2009-01-18 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com wrote:

snip spam details

 This was on 15th December. And sure enough, if we look at the December
 statistics for that page, we find that about four hundred people
 followed the link over a couple of days:
 http://stats.grok.se/en/200811/Maria_das_Neves

 There's a second, smaller, spike at the end of the month; a second
 run? If we look back there's also one around November 24th, and one
 yesterday (January 17th).

 An entirely unexpected application of stats.grok.se, there!

snip

Indeed! Almost as unexpected as the application to track how many
people view deleted revisions of a deleted page. Just go to a deleted
page and plug the URL of the viewdeleted version for the page in
question into the stats.grok.se thingy. If non-admins can't work out
the URL, ask around and it should be simple to construct.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0

2009-01-22 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
the wub wrote
Also from the article:

Re-quoting link to article (more comments below):

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/battle-to-outgun-wikipedia-and-google/2009/01/22/1232471469973.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

He said the encyclopedia had set a benchmark of a 20-minute
turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing
articles

That'll probably be faster than us once flagged revisions is switched
on (compare with the German expeiment, where backlogs are up to 3
weeks) which should make for an interesting role reversal.
(I don't want to derail this thread into arguing about flaggedrevs,
just thought it was amusing)

Certainly that benchmark is impressive. I have a personal figure of
about ten minutes, for how long it takes to add a new researched fact
to enWP. Assuming only this is a fact-checking exercise based on
Google, it would be quite something for EB to sustain this 24/7. Of
course it may be deduced some other way, for example telling employees
that they are supposed to vet two dozen submissions in a working day,
and rather assuming a good match of employees to time zones. But in any
case there would be a question-mark over how things scale. Presumably
they are not intending a big expansion of coverage on current affairs?

There may also be a big presumption of rejecting most updates. Their
standards may be (almost certainly are) different to ours. Rather than
verifiability and sounds OK and has sources (I know, I know...),
they may intend to only accept the best updates and the ones that
really do improve the articles. They may also be looking for major
improvements and additions, rather than incremental improvements.
Though doing that in 20 minutes does sound optimistic. A 20-minute
turnaround does sound more like a can you copyedit and proofread our
articles for us? approach. I guess the only way to find out is to go
and suggest different sorts of changes and see what gets accepted.

And a fact checking exercise based on Google can be excellent in
some areas and useless in others, as we all know already. I really
hope EB aren't doing that. Hopefully their fact-checking would involve
access to various paid-for databases and a library of books as well.
If the book needed can be found quickly (in the same room), 20 minutes
is just about doable. If the update is large and books needed are in a
remote location, then you would be talking hours and days to update.

Would-be editors on the Britannica site will have to register using
their real names and addresses before they are allowed to modify or
write their own articles.

That sounds like an attempt to merge Wikipedia, Knol and Britannica.

On something else completely, the comparison isn't direct:

Founded in 1994, the Britannica.com's database contains articles
comprising more than 46 million words [...] Founded in 2001, Wikipedia
is now available in more than 250 languages and attracts about 700
million visitors annually. The English editon alone contains nearly
2.7 million articles.

Britannica is 46 million words.
Do we know how many *words* Wikipedia is?
How many *articles* Britannica is?

Carcharoth

PS. That's an *awful* picture of Jimmy! :-)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on Flagged Revisions

2009-01-26 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspin...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Jan 26, 2009, at 10:16 AM, William King wrote:

 The BBC has an article on the Flagged Revisions controversy:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7851400.stm

 I'm sure there's context for the photo, but I still have to wonder
 why, of all the photos of Jimbo that exist in the world, they picked
 the one of him in a dress.

I think it is a Chinese top.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on Flagged Revisions

2009-01-26 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 12:45 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/1/27 Philip Sandifer snowspin...@gmail.com:

 As I said, I'm sure there is context - I would assume it was from the
 Taipei Wikimania, etc. And that it is cropped so that it looks more
 feminine than it probably actually did.
 Still, the BBC picked a photo where he appears to be wearing a dress.
 And this was not for lack of other options.


 BBC journalists are actually very nice people, and (because they're
 not working for advertisers) do try very hard to do a good job.
 However, they've had so many ridiculous cutbacks that stuff is done
 very fast and semicompetently. This is why the writing on
 news.bbc.co.uk verges on the semiliterate these days. Thankfully
 they're willing to take corrections.

 But I would suggest assuming good faith, i.e. it really was the first
 picture they found in the pile.

Yeah, but it was a GETTY image! Why not a freely licensed image? :-)

A cropped version was used here:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/battle-to-outgun-wikipedia-and-google/2009/01/22/1232471469973.html

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on Flagged Revisions

2009-01-27 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 8:58 PM, Alvaro García  wrote:
 WHY ON EARTH is Jimbo wearing a Japanese dress?

 Excuse me. Jimbo wearing a 'Japanese dress' would look more like this:
 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/File:JimmyWales_wearing_Kimono.jpg

 In the BBC article, Jimbo is not wearing anything Japanese, but rather
 wearing a traditional - almost stereotypical - Chinese garment called
 a qipao (see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cheongsam).

Or maybe the male equivalent?

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

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on Flagged Revisions

2009-01-27 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:

[Chinese clothing]

 An easy mistake indeed. But didn't you know Jimbo always cross-dresses
 for major occasions to underline the subversiveness of Wikipedia and
 as a shout-out to its many LBGT editors?

 (But seriously, the Cheongsam article didn't make clear that it
 referred only to female garments. Time to go edit it...)

There are political overtones as well. Apparently this sort of
clothing is not common in mainland China since the Cultural
Revolution. Though places like Hong Kong and Taiwan presumably still
use it. But this is getting off-topic. Back to Flagged Revisions.

What is the latest news?

Carcharoth

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[WikiEN-l] New technology, new errors

2009-01-29 Thread Carcharoth

New technology, new ways to make errors, and hilarious edit summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitrationdiff=267165064

Sorry my error in that reversion (actually killing a bug on my HP
touchscreen).

I wonder if that's bad karma? Killing the bug, not the reversion.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Flagged Revisions: de:wp 99.5% reviewed

2009-02-02 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/2 Sam Korn smo...@gmail.com:
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
wrote:
I agree, that's definitely the most important statistic. A more useful
statistic would be the age of the oldest unreviewed revision.

17.8 days
http://toolserver.org/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=englishaction=outofdatereviewsproject=dewiki

Ask, and you shall receive! Thank you!

So that's 10570 articles that have been waiting over a day (out of
12667 articles with out of date reviews). That's pretty bad... I would
have expected a long tail type distribution. Any ideas why there are
so many very out-of-date article compared to slightly out-of-date
ones?

Might it be because they were looked at several times and each time
people went um, not sure about this and left it for someone else to
do? Flagged revisions is serious because the impression is that you
are verifying people's work to some standard. Now if someone quote an
obscure source, but you don't have or haven't heard of that source,
what do you do? Trust the editor? Let it go through anyway? Let
someone else deal with it and see a backlog build up?

What I'd like to see is a feature where you can click not sure and
bump the review up several levels of expertise, so the difficult stuff
gets naturally filtered to those with the expertise. Say, subject
matter or foreign language, or obscure book. Depending on how flexible
such a system is, it might make flagging revisions more efficient, not
less.

Training people to do rudimentary and moderate and advanced reviews
would be next.

Extremely dififcult to scale and harness the right levels of expertise
(from typo-spotting upwards), but very rewarding if done right. One
problem is edits that combine different sorts of things, and the
massive chunks of text added in one go.

I presume the current system is a rudimentary one only designed to
catch obvious vandalism? If that is the case, people need to be more
alert than before (not less) to subtle vandalism and good-faith
misrepresentation of sources by poor or skewed writing.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Flagged Revisions: de:wp 99.5% reviewed

2009-02-03 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 Peter Jacobi wrote:
 OTOH, requiring references for each addition would solve the
 problem in the other direction.


 Every time I've discussed specifics of flags I have come away confused

I'm hoping it will work in practice like wikisource, where there are
four levels of approval as a text goes through the various
transcription and proofreading stages. But I may be misunderstanding
the differences. To see flagged revisions in action, as far as I'm
aware, the best thing to do is go to the German Wikipedia or a test
wiki (is there one?).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit

2009-02-07 Thread Carcharoth

Trouble with that is that the vast majority of readers do not have
accounts with user preferences to set. They are unregistered readers
(some people create accounts purely to be able to set these
preferences). What unregistered readers see is a mish-mash of
different date formats, sometimes in the same article. Log out
occasionally and see what the majority of our readers see. It can be
quite a shock to have all the customised skins and user preferences
taken away. Ditto for DVD and print versions of articles.

Carcharoth

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 1:47 AM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hard coded in the context of my message is when dates are typed out. Like
 January, 20 1956 rather than soft coded [[1956-01-20]].
 Ideally all dates should always be soft coded and be modified by users
 preferences. In reality the exact opposite of this is done.

 On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.ukwrote:

 2009/2/6 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com:

  We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American
  Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in
  visiting let alone editing.

 (...)

  In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO
 dates
  (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their
 settings
  to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted
 as a
  compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard
  coded. You do not get to alter it.

 hard coded?  This is news to me and news to the Manual of Style.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSNUM#Full_date_formatting

 Perhaps you could provide some evidence to back up this assertion?

 --
 - Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Flagged revisions in The Sunday Times

2009-02-08 Thread Carcharoth

Please remember that the archives of this mailing list are available
for anyone to read.

Carcharoth

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Alvaro García alva...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hehe great one.

 On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 12:20, Giacomo M-Z solebaci...@googlemail.comwrote:

 I am giving him the bio he so deserves
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Hattersley please leap in fast if any
 of
 my famed spelling or grammatical errors occur!

 giano

 On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 12:36 AM, Alvaro García alva...@gmail.com wrote:

  Oh, I see.
 
  On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 21:31, Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk
  wrote:
 
   Alvaro García wrote:
Well maybe it said so here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Hattersley
  
   Well no, he says my entry, and a quick look at Roy Hattersley
 (which
   has
   fewer than 500 edits), shows nothing in the edit summaries for son,
   Giles, mistake or error. While this may not cover all, the
  impression
   I get is that this is little more than wishful thinking on his part.
  
  
  
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  --
  Alvaro
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Flagged revisions in The Sunday Times

2009-02-08 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 9:29 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/2/8  wjhon...@aol.com:

 I'm sick and tired of this back office wheeling and dealing.
 At our last meeting I am *certain* we had agreed to take over the island of
 Barbados.
 Now I hear this.  I'm completely miffed.


 Sorry, Bono has rights to islands in the Caribbean. Jimbo owns Florida
 (except Clearwater, which is owned by Scientology, and the Everglades,
 which are owned by Carl Hiaasen) and we have the Arbitration Committee
 yacht cruising between them.

Goodness. We should have invested in lifeboats.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit

2009-02-08 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 1:58 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote:
 All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to
 handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups
 available, including American-style ones.
 Thats not mark up, what your describing is style/layout. The markup
 would be the wikicode surronding it it.

 For example it would be nice if we had a custom markup for date that
 didn't link it, that could detect what was contained in it would be
 nice and used the users perfernece for formatting first then fell back
 to something else like the browser detection or a decided format (at
 the moment it would appear to be American Dates).
 I'm talking about something like DATE and then it would do
 autoformatting of the date and it would also assist in the metadata
 contained in the page as well, and also have the ability to force a
 certain style and define date names as well (eg:
 2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008))

2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008)

That is rather complex. Most editors are not going to want to type that.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit

2009-02-09 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Skyring skyr...@gmail.com wrote:
 So. Are we an international project, paying appropriate attention to
 internationalising our product, or are we a battleground of cultural
 imperialism?

 We're a battleground of cultural imperialism, of course … even if we
 shouldn't be.

 It does bother me, though, that one of the few, if imperfect, ways we
 had of presenting information in the way the reader preferred - I
 refer of course to our date formatting preferences - is being neutered
 because the implementation was poor, rather than improved.

 The problems with it were twofold; firstly, that for un-logged-in
 users, it displayed a mishmash of styles that often ended up the worst
 possible solution, and secondly that it required wikilinks, which
 offended people who have an aversion to excess links in articles.

 I have a strong feeling that it was actually the second reason that
 was the real driving force behind the delinking; I felt a sense of
 glee from partisans when they discovered that date preferences only
 worked for logged-in users and thus most of the readership didn't get
 pretty dates.  It gave them a nice big club to use in debate to get
 what they wanted, which was prettier articles from their point of
 view.

To be fair, the date preferences-as-wikilinks situation *had* led to
overlinking. I'm fairly liberal in terms of linking and tend to
overlink from the view of many people, but even I see that many of the
date links were pointless. The trouble is, not all were pointless and
people argued over the details while the bots mostly ignored
restrictions and stripped date links regardless of objections.
Sometimes, in the most ridiculous cases, the bot operator talked to
the objectors, the links were restored with promises that the bot
would be changed, and then the next bot run removed the links again!
That's just inept.

 Better would have been fixing it to work better.  Not leaving links in
 the HTML.  Sensible defaults for non-logged-in users; most modern
 browsers send information on the user's language preference, including
 UK versus US; how much such preferences are accurately set I'm not
 sure, but it's there.

Agreed. Trouble is, there was foot-dragging going on and no-one really
working on it. Then, when date-delinking started and some people
started working (or resuming work) on a technical solution, there was
too much momentum and the speed of the bot operations almost certainly
discouraged those who had been working on technical solutions. Lots of
bad-faith assumptions and foot-dragging and forcing solutions
through.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to raise the tone of the wiki

2009-02-09 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:12 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/2/9 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:

 To pick another example. The reference desks (which I think are great)
 are technically a bit divorced from the encyclopedia building, but I
 think are a legitimate side operation, especially when article do
 (sometimes) get improved as a result. It's also legitimate because
 some people prefer to ask humans a question and have them look it up,
 rather than look things up themselves. The side effect is quite a lot
 of chatter around the questions and answers.


 It's definitely right in line with the mission. Also a chance for us
 to show off our erudition.

 (e.g. going down the pub, there's three Wikipedians at the table
 talking obscure military history they've picked up in the course of
 just hanging around and a fourth person looking slightly boggled.)

The person looking slightly boggled was you, right? :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another political alteration...

2009-02-11 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com wrote:
 ...but absurdly trivial this time.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7884121.stm

snip

Well, the news article has been updated as this incident was mentioned
on the Floor of the House:

Later, Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle asked the deputy Speaker of the House
of Commons: I wonder whether you could tell the House whether you
have had representations from the leader of the opposition so that he
might correct the comments that he made about Titian.

Or is it enough in this modern age for the leader of the opposition's
staff simply to alter Wikipedia?

Following several seconds of uproar, the deputy Speaker replied: The
honourable gentleman, as an experienced member of this House, knows
that is not a point of order for the chair but his comments are on
record. 

Hilarious! And now on the front page of the BBC news website, and
among the most popular stories:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Spoiler-driven plots on movies articles

2009-02-11 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:
On Sun, 8 Feb 2009, xaosflux wrote:
While YOU may use the
article as a movie review to see if you want to watch the movie,
other readers may use them for many other purposes.

This statement is trivially true no matter what phrase you substitute in.
*Any* purpose for using an article is one that only a minority of readers
will have. If it's wrong to put something in because only a minority of
readers will use or need it, then we shouldn't even have articles.

Besides, the reader who wishes to use the article for other purposes just has
to ignore the spoiler warning. It's not like it prevents other readers from
using the article the way they want.

Would you read
any of our other articles just to see if you want to read their
references?

This is about an article which has a work as a *subject*, and only secondarily
if at all as a reference. I wouldn't read our article about potatoes to
decide if I want to read a particular book about potatoes, but that's because
the book really is just a reference; the subject of the article is potatoes,
not potato books.

Though we do have articles on research areas and the books in them.
More usually categories, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shakespearean_scholarship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_Politics_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Shakespeare_criticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_by_topic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History_books

Some are very specific:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_about_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Holocaust_books

I couldn't rule out looking to see if a book had an article on
Wikipedia before buying it, or more likely, reading about the author.
But I would, admittedly, be more likely to read a review somewhere,
though I *might* come to Wikipedia to find a review through the
article.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

2009-02-11 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/2/11 David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com:
 It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
 AfD to be reconfirmed.

 You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
 principle of time immemorial and not worry about it.

Sometimes. I tend to think of the way articles that passed FAC
(featured articles candidate) years ago are brought up to today's
standards by FAR (featured article review). If there were reasons to
think an admin was operating as if it was still 2002, 2003 or 2004,
and was not aware of the standards of 2009, then maybe there would be
good reason to question whether a review was needed. Certainly many of
the admins from the mailing list period, if not all, would easily pass
a reconfirmation RfA. There is no practical reason why they should,
and many good reasons why they shouldn't, but I'd be impressed if
someone who had been around that long recognised that maybe there is
something in the idea, and did so anyway.

It's another of those perennial ideas that doesn't gain much ground.
But consider this. The number of admins (actually, looking at the
editors would be more interesting) remaining from very early on is not
that high. But in five years time, how many of the admins from 2005,
2006 and 2007 will still be around? Will things have changed even
more? Will there be 50+ admins from that era, or even more? How many
of them will have adapted and changed? Is adapting and changing a
requirement of admins (let alone editors)? I know 12-18 months (or
something) is considered the average time people spend in an online
community, but what about those who have been around for years, in a
few years time some will have been around for a whole decade.

That's quite frightening, actually. Is it really only two years until
Wikipedia has been around for 10 years? When are we projected to reach
3 million articles (currently 2,736,436), when can we get to 5000
featured articles (currently 2,420)? When is someone going to do
another statistical analysis or history of Wikipedia?

Sorry, got a bit off-topic there! :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

2009-02-13 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

 Well, active admins are the only ones likely to be the subject of an
 Arbitration case, no?

It's not common, but there are also the cases of admins (and editors)
who take a very long break, and then come back. I'm not talking months
here, but years. Or who are only sporadically active. Consider someone
who became an admin in 2003, then went inactive and resurfaces in
2009. It's not totally implausible. Or an admin who was very active
for two years, then only edited 20 times a year or so for the next
four years and then becomes very active again. There are real reasons
why people would do this (university, jobs, even some kinds of
enforced absences, or just wanting a very long break), but also
reasons for people to be concerned about whether trust and knowledge
of the norms (which change over time) have carried over from before
the break (let alone lingering concerns about compromised accounts).
The same applies to editors, though less so (or more so, YMMV).

Having said that, such cases are rare enough that they can be treated
on a case-by-case basis. In the general case, my feeling is that if
you take a long enough break (enough that the community, the
encyclopedia, the rules and the editor/admin themselves, may have
all changed), then such editors and admins are effectively starting
from scratch and need to rebuild knowledge and trust. The difference
is that admins carry over their bit. Ditto for other tools such as
checkuser and oversight.

Essentially, I'm saying that a certain minimum activity level should
be built in somewhere, but how to judge what that activity level
should be is difficult (different people have naturally different
activity levels). Some people will ease themselves back in gently.
Others will wade back in. In both cases, some will succeed, and some
will fail, in adapting to the changed environment.

There is also the case of long-term tool users failing to adapt to
changing times and acting in 2009 like they are in the encyclopedia of
2004 (for example), but the level and degree of the resulting problems
may vary (and the encyclopedia is so large today that the behaviour is
not always consistent across the whole anyway).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

2009-02-14 Thread Carcharoth

Agree 100% with David (DGG) here. On the other hand, a careful
combination of templates with personalised messages can also work. See
this essay here for more on this type of approach:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ArielGold/Etiquette2

Carcharoth

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 7:47 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote:
 Look again at those messages. The succeed in sounded cold, formal, and
 sent by a computer without human intervention--which is just what
 twinkle etc. make it so easy to do.  They talk too much about
 complicated rules, and they sound more defensive than helpful.

 I  almost never use them, except when I'm dealing with someone I
 suspect to be in bad faith.  And even there they don't send a true
 warning--people treat them as forms. a personal message to say that
 one is personally and specifically watching can be much more
 effective.

 They've gotten a little better over the last year or too, but most of
 them need to be thought out differently. when one starts off
 criticising, most people don't read to the bottom.

 and the reason people don't complain, is indeed because the
 unsophisticated editors move on. They move on out of Wikipedia and we
 lose them.

 But some people do complain: that's why we have the rule about not
 templating the regulars. the regulars get insulted. They're right to
 get insulted. Anyone would. But we only care about those who are
 already regulars.

 Don't  routinely direct people to our overlong, overcomplicated,
 inconsistent, and frequently ignored guidelines, explain it simply: A
 wording I sometimes use is  you need to become famous first,  then
 somebody will write about you . Now, that's not exact, but it's
 understood, and nobody gets insulted--they know perfectly well they're
 not famous, and it sort of makes a joke out of it.

 and for unsourced, you really need a published reference for that --
 they've heard that sort of thing in school, they'll understand.

 David


 On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk 
 wrote:

  creating good content through practice, the latter
 may need educating, and this is normally done through templated messages,
 the first level of which assumes good faith; however, it is often easier
 when time is short to revert with an edit summary of unsourced,
 irrelevant or something equally blunt.

Again, in my experience, very few
 unsophisticated (and this is not meant to be an insult) editors complain,
 because they edit and move on.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Short 3RR-like blocks for incivility

2009-02-15 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Patton 123 patton...@gmail.com wrote:
 I hate Ottava Rima (An editor) is clearly incivility

It was later changed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Backslash_Forwardslashdiff=270685498oldid=270684231

What now? Blocking someone doesn't give them the chance to retract
their comments...

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:
 Nathan wrote:
 I say, let them congregate on Citizendium. We should have a template
 {{trycitizendium}} that we can post on the pages of our more aggressive POV
 pushers.


 The template need not limit itself to Citizendium, though the symbolism
 of having it in the template name has a certain value.  If the posted
 list contains several other such approved projects, with a one-line
 blurb about what they are, the aggressive person may more easily and
 quietly find one to his liking without actually stumbling upon
 WikipediaReview.

It can include sister WMF projects as well. Though care should be
taken to not push malcontents on unsuspecting people. It is best to
have a mentor or guide that can introduce you. It all depends whether
the reason for the breakdown in editing relations is due to the
person, the topic, or the environment. Sometimes it is all three.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Is Copyrighted Freeware CCbySA?

2009-02-16 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:
 Carcharoth wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Sam Korn smo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 1:47 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com 
 wrote:

 2009/2/16 Alvaro García alva...@gmail.com:

 Doesn't the -ware suffix only show that the software isn't paid?

 No... the free part shows that. The ware part shows that it's 
 software...

 But, generally, yes: freeware means free-gratis, not free-libre.

 And the -ware suffix does show that it is a product.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ware

 That article's a bit rubbish, but gives you some idea.


 Treating ware as a suffix is what makes it rubbish as much as anything
 else.  Ware is the root noun in the word, and it would be more correct
 to treat free- or share- or soft- as attributive prefixes.

Interesting. I wouldn't disagree, and ware (usually plural) is a
word in its own right. How would *you* reorganise things relating to
ware on Wikipedia? There is Ware (disambiguation) and the town.
Where do you go from there?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-16 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:56 PM, George Herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Thomas Dalton 
 thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote:

 We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we
 want to include.

 This is orthogonal to the main conversation here, but this is not nearly the
 case.

 We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it.  Things
 which haven't been dealt with include [...]

snip

I wondered why this thread had exploded with activity. It's because it
turned into a low hanging fruit debate!

My approach to seeing how comprehensive Wikipedia's coverage is at the
moment is, while reading a book or watching a TV documentary, to
mentally make notes of things to look up on Wikipedia. I did that
yesterday while watching The Victorians (a BBC documentary presented
by Jeremy Paxman where he looked at the Victorians through their
paintings).

There was lots I could have looked up, including the program itself
(no article, understandably enough, as it wouldn't have met notability
guidelines), but the three things I made a mental note of were:

Gustave Dore:

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

Manchester Town Hall:

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

1888 International Exhibition in Glasgow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Festivals#Past_Festivals

The first two had articles, but the third one doesn't have its own
article. Turns out there are three big exhibitions that were held in
Glasgow, in 1888, 1901 and 1911 that we don't have articles on.

We do have one on the one in 1938:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Exhibition,_Scotland_1938

And the Garden Festival in 1988:

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

But it's the historical stuff that hasn't been written about yet (and
that's not even mentioning the art history - I should have noted the
titles of all the artworks and the artist's and seen which we had
articles on).

I was kind of hoping that an interesting set of murals in the
Manchester Town Hall hadn't had an article written on them yet, but it
has been fairly well covered already:

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

History is an almost boundless area for new articles.

Another way to assess how comprehensive Wikipedia is, is to take some
document (or even one of our unwikified articles) and wikify it in
some reasonably sensible way and see how many of the links are red.
This is a bit more exciting than wikifying some index or list of
entries in an old encyclopedia (though the latter is a more efficient
way to do this sort of thing).

One other thing that people sometimes forget to do is to check what
links here for said redlinks and see how popular they are. See how
many other people have been trying to link to it. Though you have to
remember to do a search as well and pick up the plain text examples of
the redlinked article that haven't been linked (some of which should
be, some shouldn't).

It's very satisfying to write a new article that has 10 or so incoming
links already! :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 Yes, but once you're using one source to find other sources and
 hunting for them, you're not really in the realms of low-hanging
 fruit.

Some of the so-called low-hanging fruit are articles that have never
been in that good condition, even now, or that still have great
potential for expansion or reorganisation (even if a lot of the detail
is in related articles, accessible via links). I'll try and find a few
examples.

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

Compare that to:

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

...which is quite good.

The surgery article is interesting:

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

...but quite why there are 15 templates at the bottom of the article,
I don't know.

Something that looks OK at first glance, but less so when you look closer, is:

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

Another article that is in a hodge-podge state is:

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

If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
experts tend to prefer to write more limited, specialised articles.
Sometimes the subsidiary articles need to be written to a good level
before the general article can be tackled. Sometimes it is the other
way round.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:39 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/2/17 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:

 If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
 but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
 general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
 experts tend to prefer to write more limited, specialised articles.
 Sometimes the subsidiary articles need to be written to a good level
 before the general article can be tackled. Sometimes it is the other
 way round.

 I've noticed that featured articles are rarely general topics - they
 tend to be specialised articles brought to FA status by one person
 interested in that specialist subtopic.

I've looked briefly through the list at WP:FA (briefly because there
are 2,419 of them), and some that strike me as particularly general
(and nearly all are common terms) are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welding

Less general, but still very broad, are ones like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_cuisine

I stopped at Food and drink as we have quite a lot of featured articles.

One that I had in mind as an example is now a former featured article:

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

Looking through the lists of former featured articles will probably
yield similar examples.

One thing I did discover is that reading through the list at WP:FA is
really quite difficult.

It is 29 sections, but each section is a wall of text and it is quite
hard to browse. I might try and do a personalised listing at some
point, bringing out the areas I'm interested in and slicing up the FA
cake in a different way. Such as identifying the more general ones
and the more niche ones, and the specific items such as games,
films, books, events, and paintings (as opposed to genres, histories
and stuff like that), and biographies and suchlike. But with so many
articles, it's difficult to do that.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-17 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/17 Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com:
That would be interesting. I wonder if this could be something that
could be integrated into the 1.0 rating scheme... another, parallel
rating for scope or generality. Naturally, any such
determinations will be subjective, but so are article ratings and yet
the semi-codified Stub-Start-C-B ratings tend to work out pretty well.
It would be great to have the breakdown of general vs. specific
articles not just for FAs, but for everything.

That might be good. It would also help when determining if an article
being an orphan is a problem. Very specific articles probably won't be
linked to much, more general articles will be. So, if a general
article is an orphan, we have a problem, if a specific article is, we
probably don't.

Rudimentary suggestions based on searches can probably generate
suggestions for links for practically any article. Humans could then
go through those lists working out if links are needed. If you are
just presented with an orphaned article, it can be a pain trying to
work out where it can be linked from.

To take an example, both of a low-hanging fruit and a relatively
orphaned article:

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

I was very surprised, back in October 2008, to discover that we didn't
have an article on this prestigious award made to surgeons. So I
created a list of those awarded the medal. Turns out the awarding
institute don't have a handy list on their website, so that was
probably the reason the article hadn't been created, but that's not
the point I'm making here. The point I'm making is that I failed to
link it from anywhere very much.

About 4 months later, it's still not linked from anywhere much:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Lister_Medalhideredirs=1namespace=0

* Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister (links)
* Manchester Mark 1 (links)
* Regius Professor of Surgery, Glasgow (links)

The first link, from Lister's article, was added by me in October 2008:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Lister,_1st_Baron_Listerdiff=247254203oldid=246064425

The other two links were added as follows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Regius_Professor_of_Surgery,_Glasgowoldid=260782369

That third link was added with the creation of that article in
December 2008 (on a side-note, that list of Regius Professors of
Surgery should be redlinks, not bare text, but the problem is that at
least four of them are blue links to the wrong articles - this is
where redlinks don't always work so well, unless the disambiguation
naming is obvious enough).

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Manchester_Mark_1diff=269866878oldid=269866509

The second link (diff above) was added in February 2009. It was piped,
though in fact a redirect from Lister Oration already existed.

But two links in four months seems pretty poor to me. Or is it?

What I should have done when I created the article, and what I will do
at some point (if no-one else does it first), is go through the
articles of the medallists linking back to the medal (and adding
sources), and do a search for the various terms (Lister Medal, Lister
Oration), and link them from various articles. In this case, there
isn't much mention of the medal in other articles, but for other
orphaned articles there can be.

And I should finish writing the article as well. It's still pretty stubby.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Short 3RR-like blocks for incivility

2009-02-18 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:37 AM, Thomas Larsen
larsen.thoma...@gmail.com wrote:
 Short blocks tend to be punitive, and are thus, in my opinion, in
 violation of the blocking policy. This is because (a) they cannot be
 intended for any purpose other than cooling down somebody (which never
 works) or (b) creating a permanent mark on a user. Neither of these
 purposes are effective or fair. Personally, I advocate for (a) no
 blocks, (b) long-term blocks, or (c) permanent blocks, depending on
 the seriousness of the situation.

Sometimes it's not so much marking a user, but that some admins feel
the need to have something there on a permanent record, not just in a
talk page history or archive. If justified, that can sometimes be
reasonable, but if not justified it can, as you say, be a mark of
shame. The way people react to their first block is interesting.
Either they accept it quietly, or they get incensed. Some people see
it as no big deal, even if incorrect, as long as the incorrectness is
acknowledged. Others get clase about being blocked, not realising that
as the block build up, they acquire a reputation (though you can get a
reputation without a lock log record).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-19 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
 Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
 forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
 (I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
 know I have often thought I should ask the question.)

 Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
 around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
 non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
 corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
 even a rough estimate be made?


 On the basis of clicking Zufälliger Artikel 50 times, it looks to me
 like around 50% of deWP articles do not have interwiki to enWP.  Only a
 small proportion of those without such interwiki look like they should
 have a corresponding article in enWP.  The proportion with interwiki but
 no English interwiki is not huge - say 25%?  This is not a very
 sophisticated technique from a statistical point of view, but it could
 be refined to get a better view by sampling of the overlapping of the
 Wikipedias.  It all suggests the answer to the question is around one
 million - not 50 (too low), not two million (maybe too high?).

Does anyone know the answer to the opposite question? How many
articles on the English Wikipedia lack interwiki links? It is possible
(but less likely) that the articles exist in both places, but haven't
been linked with an interwiki yet. I find examples of that fairly
regularly, but am not sure how common it is.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Slashdot] The Role of Experts In Wikipedia

2009-02-20 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

[outside views of Wikipedia among general public]

 One thing that is not at all obvious to me is that there is any really
 really credible reporting on this or other aspects of Wikipedia.  It's
 anecdotal at best - one or two incidents taken to stand for the site as
 a whole,  and its complexities. Plus people writing ignorant and
 inaccurate stuff, of course.

I agree, but there is probably a lot more unreported anecdotal stuff
where people hear from others what Wikipedia is like and gain a false
(or true, YMMV) impression of what Wikipedia is like and what it is
about. There are certainly a lot of misunderstandings around,
including the one that Wikipedia is some homogenous whole, when in
fact it is a lot larger, mixed ad varied than people realise. Though
there are uniformities and constants as well. But the treatment a
first-time editor gets depends on who they encounter, what they edit
and how good they are at adapting to the standards they encounter.
What everyone can do is try and take the time to encourage new editors
and not treat people as if they should know what to do (or not do).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A short article is not a stub.

2009-02-22 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 Thomas Dalton wrote:
 If there is only one noteworthy fact about the subject, the article
 should probably be merged per BLP1E. If there isn't more than a
 paragraph worth of stuff to say about a subject, you need to think
 long and hard about whether there should be an article. In some cases,
 there probably should, but I think it most cases such a lack of
 information is a sign that the article should be deleted or merged.

 This is certainly not the case in, for example, medieval history.  It's
 all relative to a background: what expectation is there of ample factual
 material?

 And another thing - I'd resist this in all cases where there was a place
 for a person in a line of succession boxes. It is really no good merging
 an article if it messes up some useful navigation.

Succession boxes are useful navigation? :-) In some places, and for
some things, yes, but succession boxes can be misused and overused,
like anything else. In particular, I hate those articles where someone
held multiple offices and titles and you see 5 or 6 succession boxes
(or those big list templates) crammed in at the bottom of the article.
Sure, I use them sometimes to find other articles, but they *look*
horrible and unprofessional.

Those big list or topic template (footer boxes?) are bad in other
ways as well. They mess up what links here. There was a time when
what links here for a random Nobel laureate would get you relevant
links to articles related to that person. Now you get all the other
Nobel laureates in the list as well, and when the footer bloat is bad
you get totally unrelated articles appearing in what links here
because those articles appear somewhere in some broad topic template
that's been stuck on the bottom of 50 or so articles. Really annoying
- categories was (is!) meant to avoid that.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A short article is not a stub.

2009-02-22 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Ben Kovitz bkov...@acm.org wrote:
 On Feb 22, 2009, at 7:50 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote:

 I disagree.  Our obligation should be to report what is  reported.
 Not to
 obscure merely for the sake of some rather ill-defined  notion of
 privacy or
 some such thing.

 Do you think we should not report the names of the children of Edward
 III
 who died as infants?
 I think it's interesting to see what he and his wife named each of his
 children.
 In addition, if a biography subject had no children, one child, or 12
 children, is very important to presenting a full picture of the person.

 Children have a great impact on parents.  If our sources discuss the
 children, then we should as well.
 If they don't, then we shouldn't either.

 This worries me.  As Charles Matthews said, it would terrible to make a
 rigid, general rule about this, but most mentions of subjects' children
 strike me as unnotable.  That is, they clutter the bandwidth.  Sources
 tell much, much more than is suitable for an encyclopedia.  We are
 summarizing the highlights, not attempting to report every fact.

For contemporary and living people, I agree. Family details can be
irrelevant and intrusive (though in some articles it sounds like the
family details have been added by the subject of the article, or
copied from some official website).

Historical stuff is less certain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_I_of_England#Children

The strange thing is, we have an *article* on the 4-month-old, but not
the 2-year old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stuart,_Duke_of_Kintyre

The template at the bottom of that article seems overkill.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A short article is not a stub.

2009-02-23 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 Carcharoth wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

 And another thing - I'd resist this in all cases where there was a place
 for a person in a line of succession boxes. It is really no good merging
 an article if it messes up some useful navigation.


 Succession boxes are useful navigation? :-) In some places, and for
 some things, yes, but succession boxes can be misused and overused,
 like anything else. In particular, I hate those articles where someone
 held multiple offices and titles and you see 5 or 6 succession boxes
 (or those big list templates) crammed in at the bottom of the article.
 Sure, I use them sometimes to find other articles, but they *look*
 horrible and unprofessional.

 Oops - you'd better stay away from [[Pope Julius II]], then.  I'd argue
 that it is exactly in such cases, where someone has a career with
 numerous spells holding different offices, that succession boxes show
 their greatest value.  It is much more clumsy to express such careers in
 full detail in the main text. Climbing the greasy pole does belong in
 displayed form, I'd say, since those who don't want the details should
 be able to ignore them.

15 succession boxes? That must be some kind of record. Personally, I'd
find a good timeline there easier to read than trying to work out
which bits overlap where from the succession boxes. And its the
timeline I want, really, not who came before and after (though that
information should still be present if salient and accessible even if
not).

When you click open the templates at the bottom of Pope Julius II,
only about 60% of the article's screenspace is actually the article
itself. The other 40% is the succession boxes and templates. Maybe I
need to switch to a skin that puts categories somewhere more visible?

I wonder if there is also a record for the number of navbox footer
templates shoehorned in at the bottom of an article? I found five
here:

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

But I'm sure I've seen more. And there is invariably massive
redundancy between the template listings, the succession boxes, and
the categories (different ways of presenting the same, or nearly the
same, information). A better-designed system would give the reader the
option to switch on and off the bits they want to see - in a more
permanent fashion than show/hide.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as therapy

2009-02-23 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Ben Kovitz bkov...@acm.org wrote:
 Say, does anyone else here edit Wikipedia as therapy?

 I'm in grad school now, and my head has been spinning from the frequent
 context-switching: jumping between one in-depth class and another and
 another, without finishing one thing before starting another, and
 without having time to dig in enough depth to satisfy the need to get
 to the bottom of it.  Until a few days ago, the noise in my head (a
 rhythm of non-stop interruption--cogitus interruptus, you could call
 it) had gotten so intense, it was becoming hard to function.

 At times like these, I've occasionally turned to Wikipedia.  Hmm,
 something needs doing.  Let's just do it.  I can work it over until I'm
 content.  Each little editing project is short: from a few minutes to
 an hour.  There are no deadlines.  I just follow my inspiration for
 what to work on as it comes.  If I get stuck on something, like not
 being able to find a fact, I just leave the article in better condition
 than I found it and call my little project done.

 Saturday morning, I started an article about a topic in one of my
 classes.  Just summarized what was in the book.  And then spent the
 weekend merrily editing whatever I felt like editing.  It's now Monday
 morning, and my head is clear.  There is no more noise in my head!

 Who needs drugs or doctors when you've got edit this page? ;)

Well, that's not really therapy. And I know you don't mean that. But I
can't think of the right word either.

What might be happening is that when you have a lot to learn or
absorb, and your brain is full, you need a period to consolidate the
learning in your brain (laying down the neural pathways and so on),
and similar to the way this happens in sleep (sleep on it isn't just
a saying) you are clearing your mind while doing (relatively)
mundane tasks. Some people go and take a walk, others play sport, or
clean the house, or sleep, while some edit Wikipedia. :-)

The closest I can find is:

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

Though this category has some interesting stuff:

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

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Anyone know a good mirror with indexed talk pages?

2009-02-25 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Andrew Cates and...@soschildren.org wrote:
 Suddenly am finding it kind of tough to find talk content. There must
 be at least one mirror with indexed talk?

 Of course now the internal searches are much better. As a test of how
 good the internal searches are, try using them to find the discussion
 about de-indexing the talk pages.

I would use prefix:wikipedia: (the trailing colon seems to be
needed) to find discussion in the wikipedia namespace. From memory,
it was on the village pump and other pages like that, not in the
Wikipedia talk namespace. That does raise a relevant point though -
it would be good to be able to search a namespace plus the
corresponding talk namespace, and not just one or the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearchns0=1ns9=1ns11=1ns12=1search=noindex+talk+page+prefix%3Awikipedia%3Afulltext=Advanced+search

That is one search. I did another and found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_59#NOINDEX_of_all_non-content_namespaces

Was that the discussion you were thinking of?

This page might help as well:

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

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A short article is not a stub.

2009-02-26 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote

  2009/2/23 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bowen
 It's a great example of maudlinism run rampant.  Why this 2-year old,
 and not another who died of cancer?

 Just pure random luck.

luck was probably not the right word there, in this context.

Someone mentioned John Travolta's son, and another public figure
(David Cameron) recently had a similar tragedy befall them. The other
example I've been following (someone likened it to a car crash) is
Jade Goody. Lots of editing activity at those articles, but seems to
turn out OK in the end.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Start an Epidemic

2009-02-26 Thread Carcharoth

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Marc Riddell
michaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote:
 Civility, like courtesy, is contagious - it begins with you.

If it has a shorter lifespan, might need more effort to successfully
inoculate. But you are right, the effects of being polite and civil do
spread. But there will always be some level of incivility. How do you
know when the levels are acceptable once again? When more articles are
being written? My theory is that the articles still get written, just
slower, and some article writers are lost for good (or never arrive).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Start an Epidemic

2009-03-02 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

 What works is this:

snip some good points

Want to focus on one.

 - people show respect for the policy by staying on the fairway, not
 gaming it at the margins;

This only works if the policy is written sufficiently well to allow
for the existence of a broad fairway as opposed to a narrow one. There
will always be those who want to narrow the fairway and constrain
people into a set definition. If the margins are brought in too close,
it becomes too easy to accuse people of gaming the margins. If the
fairway is too broad, then too much slips through. Even if people
agree on where the central point should be, what should be done when
people disagree on how broad the fairway should be?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes

2009-03-03 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
 2009/3/3 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com:
 By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:

 http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/

 What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make
 infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?

 Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of
 our audience would not be happy...

 On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our
 infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs
 ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for proportion of area
 which is water, the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it
 uses?

Probably yes, but not in a box but in a separate article. I think I
saw one once, a separate article on stats for a country, but I can't
remember where I saw that. When some infoboxes are longer than a small
article, you know something has bloated somewhere.

I looked at United States:

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

And the number of sub-articles is mind-numbingly large. Many of those
have sub-infoboxes, so maybe too much is being put in the main country
infoboxes?

Here we go:

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

The weather articles are similarly stats- and table-heavy.

I'm sure they are useful, but do people really use them?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes

2009-03-03 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 8:09 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
 2009/3/3 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com:
 By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:

 http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/

 What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make
 infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?

 Youch, that's messy in IE7. Lovely though it may be, that 30-50% of
 our audience would not be happy...

 On another note, wow. I hadn't realised how much stuff was in our
 infoboxes. The five lines of government I can understand, the two GDPs
 ditto, but do we really need a quick-reference for proportion of area
 which is water, the Gini coefficient, or the side of the road it
 uses?

 All of those are pretty interesting things - what side of the road
 tells you both historical information, and also is terribly practical
 if you're there*; Gini coefficient is an excellent concise indicator
 of economic  political development; and water-proportion affects
 recreation, economic focuses, and historical course. Given the minimal
 space they take up and their subordinate position, I don't see much
 ground for complaining.

I think the point is that some people find them distracting, so the
information could be organised better. A good infobox acts as a
summary for the most-needed and salient information. Other data
should, technically, be relegated to other infoboxes on subarticles,
while still retaining some way of presenting all the data in one place
for those who want that as well.

It's not easy to work out what the balance should be, nor to organise
the mass of available data on a country. When wanting examples of
bloated infoboxes, I tend to look at chemical elements and planets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

Though actually, the thing that annoys me most about infoboxes is that
if there is one bit of data I'm looking for, it invariably isn't
there. I then Google it (though I should really find the time to add
it to the Wikipedia article).

Here is a test. Imagine you are looking for a rough value for the
diameter of the Earth. Try finding it quickly in our article on the
Earth. How long does it take you to find the value you want, and what
distracts you along the way? Did you find what you wanted in the
infobox or in the text of the article?

Do the same to find a rough value for the Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon distances.

Is this information easy to find? Is it presented in an accessible way?

Try using out Earth article to find out that a rough value for the
Earth-Sun distance is. It's roughly 150 million km as any bright
schoolchild will tell you, but in our Wikipedia article, that is
buried deep in the article and in the infobox it is presented as three
orbital characteristics (aphelion, perihelion, semi-major axis).

Maybe the answer is that Wikipedia doesn't do rough answers, but I
know other websites that present such data in more accessible ways.
Try finding, on Wikipedia, a table showing the distances of the
planets from the Sun. It seems to be here:

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

Incidentally, the Earth-Moon distance is in the first sentence of Moon:

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

And wonders of wonders, it includes about thirty times the diameter
of the Earth - which makes the data accessible and informative. :-)

[Both Moon and Earth are featured articles, btw.]

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] History started in 1995

2009-03-04 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
 Oldak Quill wrote:
 2009/3/4 Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com:
 Two words: interlibrary loan.

 -Durova

 That gives me an idea. Some users live in rural areas far away from
 large book repositories, with little capacity to check off-line
 resources, while other users live in metropolitan centres with dozens
 of vast libraries a bus ride away.

 To my eternal regret, I watched my local news programme the other night, to
 find that a book warehouse in Bristol had closed down and rather than skip
 or burn its contents, the public had been invited to come along and help
 themselves. If I'd been aware of it, I would have been there, because it
 appears that about 250,000 books were available. By  the time the TV crew
 got there, there was very little left. Shame. There should be a way of
 finding out about these things, and perhaps some sort of give us your old
 books drive would be worth trying.

I picked up a couple of big biographies while rummaging through some
charity shops. They now sit on a bookshelf making me feel guilty that
I haven't done anything with them. I got as far as checking one
Wikipedia article and finding that it was heavily referenced to the
book I had, which made some sort of sense, but as for actually
comparing the refs and article content to the book itself, that taks
defeated me. But it is a task that both needs doing and there needs to
be a way to record that x number of people have checked any particular
reference and agreed with it, regardless of whether it is offline or
online.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on vandalism

2009-03-06 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:

snip

 I was delighted, the other day, to note we appear to have managed the
 unthinkable and *found* a pleasant-looking picture of Brown, rather
 than one where he's glowering or grimacing or staring blankly into
 space...

LOL! It *is* a nice picture.

Talking of other things, I've been counting footer templates,
succession boxes and categories on articles like this one, and this
one seems to be some sort of record, or approaching it:

Gordon Brown:

11 succession boxes
11 footer templates
30 categories

The question I'm wondering is how many of the succession boxes, footer
templates and categories duplicate each other's functions? Chancellor
of the Exchequer and Prime Minister are two at least that have all
three (succession box, template and category). Question is, is that a
bug or a feature?

On Barack Obama, the succession boxes are inside a footer template!

Barack Obama:

8 succession boxes
16 footer templates
46 categories

I'm sure there is record somewhere for the most categories on an article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MostCategories

That's out-of-date though.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on vandalism

2009-03-06 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/3/6 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com:
 2009/3/6 Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com:
 The BBC, presumably worrying about a slow news day, have an article on
 Wikipedia vandalism, focusing on UK politicians:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7921985.stm

 The Lib Dem advisor quoted, incidentally, comes up with a fairly clear
 rendering of the undue weight/jumbled collection of facts BLP
 problem.

 I've just commented on the article correcting a couple of
 mistakes/misleading statements. Otherwise it is a very good article
 and accurately describes some of the problems we face without being
 sensationalistic.

 And they've fixed them within about 20 minutes - good stuff!

Of course, without a history tab, we can't see what got changed...

I've refreshed it, but can't remember what it said before.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Automatic death flagging?

2009-03-06 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 2:04 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/3/5 Andrew Gray shimg...@gmail.com:

 A month or two ago, someone wrote to OTRS asking if we had any way of
 displaying a list of people who'd just been listed as dead by
 Wikipedia. It strikes me that this is quite an interesting idea - on
 the one hand, there's some interest from reusers about a ticker of
 recent obituaries, and on the other hand, it's useful for *us* so we
 can keep an eye on subtle vandalism and ensure we have cast-iron
 confirmation of any reported death... it being, of course, quite
 embarrasing to report someone's dead when they aren't.


 For confirmed recent deaths: {{Recent death}} is routinely put on
 confirmed recent deaths. No time expiry, but the doc notes The
 template should be removed once editing has been resumed to a normal
 level.

 Would I be right in guessing that vandalism usually just adds claims
 of a death and doesn't add the template or remove [[Category:Living
 people]]?

I would guess so. Vandal edits probably also fail to add the year of
death category.

The simplest and most comprehensive way, IMO, would be to pick up all
edits that include the word death and died, and maybe euphemisms
like passed away as well, and common causes of death (murder,
killed, heart attack, cancer, accident). That would pick up
most of the changes (and a lot of noise), except the ones where
someone silently adds in a year of death and nothing else
(unfortunately, these would be the problematic ones, so look for edits
that add in a four digit number to the article that looks like a year
- not just the current year, though special focus should be on those
edits).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemisms_for_death

...dysphemisms such as worm food, or dead meat...

Only on Wikipedia would you find something like that!

My favourite was assumed room temperature.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The sharpest criticism of a protein-only or genetics hypothesis regarding [[prion]]

2009-03-10 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/3/10 Michael Bimmler mbimm...@gmail.com:
 Am I the only one for whom this is highly to specific a discussion
 topic for this general mailinglist? To be honest, I'm not sure whether
 I completely understood one single sentence of the below, although I
 do grasp the single words...

 I'm in a similar position - I think this should be on the talk page
 where people that have the faintest idea what jenetiks is might be
 around.

It appears to be an alternative spelling for genetics.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Plagiarism

2009-03-10 Thread Carcharoth

It is possible to discuss plagiarism without naming individuals.

Durova referred to a proposed guideline, and that is here:

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

Closely related is the concept of close paraphrasing:

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

From July 2005 to June 2008, Wikipedia:Plagiarism was a redirect (the
destination has varied). Since June 2008, is has been a proposed
guideline, with people either of the opinion that it is not needed at
all because the relevant stuff is covered elsewhere (with at least one
attempt to turn the page back into a redirect), or people agreeing
that something separate is needed to address the complexities of such
matters.

Carcharoth

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote:
 That becomes a bit difficult without naming individuals who may not
 subscribe to this list.  There have been problems, though, particularly at
 DYK.  Not everyone understands what plagiarism is, or agrees that avoiding
 it is important.

 -Durova

 On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:55 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote:

 It's possible your mention was conditioned by some specific example,
 but maybe Durova you could address a bit more directly what you mean by
 saying that we need a plagiariam policy.  Wouldn't that policy be
 something like Don't do that?

 How are you seeing the situation in a more complex way?

 Will Johnson




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Re: [WikiEN-l] Interesting remark in Guardian blog

2009-03-16 Thread Carcharoth

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Sam Blacketer
sam.blacke...@googlemail.com wrote:

snip

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet

Thanks for bringing up that old article from 2008. Some lovely bits there:

It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone
was called a groundsman. Some brought very fancy professional metal
rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just
kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls
in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought
to the pile were appreciated.

And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it, having a
wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf
pile anyone had ever seen, a world wonder.

And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and
deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake
their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or
too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The
people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called deletionists.

But that came later. First it was just fun. 

Rather a nice analogy, I think.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Plagiarism

2009-03-22 Thread Carcharoth

I have sometimes used quote marks to quote myself hypothetically
replying to someone when trying to illustrate a point, or when
paraphrasing someone. However, this can get confusing if people think
you are quoting what someone actually said.

i.e. Will, when you said using expressions tongue-in-cheek or with
sarcasm I thought of replying well, there are other ways of saying
that, but I decided not to.

In the above bit, it looks like I've quoted Will and myself saying
things, but in fact I've paraphrased Will (from memory, for example)
and got the quote wrong, and I never actually said what I've used
quote marks for for my hypothetical comment.

A better way to write the above would be:

i.e. Will, when you said using expressions tongue-in-cheek or with
sarcasm (paraphrasing from memory) I thought of replying well, there
are other ways of saying that (unstated comment), but I decided not
to.

Unfortunately, if you remove the quote marks, it becomes difficult to
see where the different levels of narration begin and end (in that
sentence I am switching between narrative voices, from the main
author-reader one to a paraphrasing voice to one voicing my unspoken
thoughts.

Some I use single quote marks to make it clear it is something
separate, but not a direct quote:

i.e. Will, when you said 'using expressions tongue-in-cheek or with
sarcasm' (paraphrasing from memory) I thought of replying 'well, there
are other ways of saying that' (unstated comment), but I decided not
to.

But as long as the context makes clear what is happening, it should be OK.

In a similar way, some really strange literature uses this as a device
to messes with readers' minds, leaving them confused as to who is
speaking, and when, to whom.

Carcharoth

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 7:56 PM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 Enquoted text can mean (in my book):
 1. You are quoting verbatim some source; or
 2. You are using an expression tongue-in-cheek or with implied sarcasm,
 hostility or a questioning stance (i.e. John and Pat are good friends; Mr  
 Smith
 is in his private compartment; I appreciate your delightful  conversation)

 Will Johnson

 p.s. Sometimes I have use * for this purpose and I've seen other's do it
 as well.  It's much easier than trying to underline or bold some  phrase.


 **Feeling the pinch at the grocery store?  Make dinner for $10 or
 less. (http://food.aol.com/frugal-feasts?ncid=emlcntusfood0001)
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia isn't just a good idea - it's compulsory

2009-03-25 Thread Carcharoth

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/3/25 Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk:
 I don't see much of a problem with this, as a comparison implies some sort
 of value-judgement.

 UK primary school history does tend to focus on people a lot, rather
 than details of historical events.

Maybe I went to the wrong sort of primary school (this was over 20
years ago now - me looks shocked) but we learnt about history by
drawing pretty pictures and writing very short, childish essays and
having them stuck on the wall for parents to read. The age range for
the school was 4-11, which I think is still typical for UK primary
school education (even if the teaching methods may have changed).

Remembering *what* I learnt is a bit harder!

Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar is the only history I remember
learning about, though there was more, I'm sure. But most lessons were
on maths and English. The lessons that really stick in the mind are
cookery lessons, art and pottery lessons, and PE and sports. All the
hands on stuff. I guess everything else was boring at that age!

Once in secondary school, there were regular history lessons and a
curriculum. Battle of Hastings, WW1, WW2, that sort of stuff. Then I
never really looked at history again until university, and that was
only briefly.

Really, Wikipedia re-awakened an interest in history for me.

But I am surprised that someone thought primary school kids would
benefit from Wikipedia. The younger pupils will still be learning to
read, and even the older pupils would probably benefit more from texts
aimed at their level. I would have thought the first few years at
secondary school (ages 11 to 13) would be more useful for Wikipedia to
be used as background reading. By the time you get to GCSE and
A-level, you would want students to be aware of how to use sources
properly (and how to use Wikipedia properly, though that should still
be taught from an early age).

And blogging and Twitter? Primary school education certainly has changed! :-)

Ah: Every child would learn two key periods of British history -
that sounds about right.

Of course pupils in primary school will learn about major periods
including the Romans, the Tudors and the Victorians and will be taught
to understand a broad chronology of major events in this country and
the wider world. - that is an improvement on 20 years ago. I am
almost certain I left primary school not knowing anything about the
Romans, Victorians or Tudors. Actually, I left secondary school
knowing nothing of British history between 1066 and 1900, but that is
a different story.

The strange thing is, I picked up knowledge about the Romans and
Victorians from *somewhere*. Maybe it was a form of osmosis from
popular culture and museums and references in other books and from TV?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia isn't just a good idea - it's compulsory

2009-03-27 Thread Carcharoth

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 10:14 PM, doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

 The idea of wikipedia anywhere near a school curriculum, except perhaps
 in a brief IT lesson, horrifies me. The idea of children using wikipedia
 to challenge the official truth of a qualified teacher with but sir,
 it says on wikipedia, is laughable.

Presumably, they would actually go: but sir, I read the Wikipedia
article, and while checking the sources provided there, I did some
background reading and research, and the history presented in those
other sources is different to what you are teaching us.

i.e. Hopefully this hypothetical kid would credit the source behind
Wikipedia, and credit Wikipedia only in-so-far as it provided an entry
point into reading about the topic.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia isn't just a good idea - it's compulsory

2009-03-28 Thread Carcharoth

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Charlotte Webb
charlottethew...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:
 Nationalism is a major factor in school social studies curricula, and a
 great medium for indoctrinating the child with official truth.  Access to
 Wikipedia and other on-line sources helps him to formulate the
 questions that needed to challenge the teachers of those truths.

 History textbooks tend to lie by omission but the board of education
 will be loathe to approve anything that explicitly encourages students
 to look elsewhere for the director's cut. They don't want to deal with
 the fallout when students report back to class asking why their
 curriculum bears no mention of the Mỹ Lai massacre, the bombing of
 Dresden, Operation Northwoods, the Bonus Army, the School of the
 Americas handbook, Martin Luther King's FBI fan-mail, Jonestown, or
 the Tuskegee Study, etc. Indeed, who would?

Does that make the board of education part of the problem?

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia isn't just a good idea - it's compulsory

2009-03-28 Thread Carcharoth

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 1:32 PM, doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 Carcharoth wrote:
 [Correcting previous post - can't Wikipedia have editable posts?]

 On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Carcharoth
 carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Charlotte Webb
 charlottethew...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:
 Nationalism is a major factor in school social studies curricula, and a
 great medium for indoctrinating the child with official truth.  Access to
 Wikipedia and other on-line sources helps him to formulate the
 questions that needed to challenge the teachers of those truths.
 History textbooks tend to lie by omission but the board of education
 will be loathe to approve anything that explicitly encourages students
 to look elsewhere for the director's cut. They don't want to deal with
 the fallout when students report back to class asking why their
 curriculum bears no mention of the Mỹ Lai massacre, the bombing of
 Dresden, Operation Northwoods, the Bonus Army, the School of the
 Americas handbook, Martin Luther King's FBI fan-mail, Jonestown, or
 the Tuskegee Study, etc. Indeed, who would?

 Doesn't that make the board of education part of the problem?

 So, replace all such specialist elected and accountable bodies (or
 bodies accountable to the elected) with a wiki?

Not sure such bodies are accountable (at least not in the UK).
Definitely not elected in the UK.

 Replace the expert, who wrote the textbook, with the anarchy of the truth 
 according to
 whoever made the last edit?

 I think I'll stay off the koolaid and stick with democracy,
 professionalism, and expertise - yes it can be, on some occasions,
 stupid, biased and myopic, but it is still the best system we've got.

Yes, and Wikipedia should reflect that. The problem is people thinking
that Wikipedia is authoritative. If the editing is true to the
sources, Wikipedia works well. If it isn't, then Wikipedia doesn't
work well. The disclaimer should read: please check everything
written here against the sources provided - if there are no sources,
the article cannot be relied upon. The trick is to harness the
editing power of skilled (and trained?) volunteers to write the
articles, and combine that with the expertise needed to independently
fact-check, review, verify and sign off on an article.

The former (anyone can edit) doesn't involve any selection for
skills or training (though some natural self-selection and
community-driven selection takes place), and the latter (review by
experts) doesn't scale.

The result is reader beware. And it's always been like that. If
someone using Wikipedia only learns that they need to check and assess
the sources of information - any information - then they have learnt
something invaluable.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Legal examination

2009-03-28 Thread Carcharoth

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 8:23 PM, doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

 Students should now write an essay on one of the following:

 1) In terms of personal jurisdiction, analyze whether an allegedly
 defamatory Wikipedia page edit can establish jurisdiction over the user
 in an unforeseeable state, so long as the defamation created harm in
 that state.

 Or

 2) Discuss why this particular Wikipedia article is bullshit.

Pass.

I'm actually going through a list of unmarked BLPs (a small list of
300 articles, part of a much bigger selection). It would be
interesting to see what I'm seeing there is representative of the
whole, or not.

See the following:

AN discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive187#Putting_biographies_in_Category:Living_people

Worklists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nixeagle/BLPPotential

The 300 I'm working through:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carcharoth/Sandbox3

Further thoughts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carcharoth/Biographical_and_new_articles_checklist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Carcharoth/Biographical_and_new_articles_checklist

Old proposal I made:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Biographies_of_living_persons/Archive_20#Workflow_and_project_management_proposal

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Flagged revs poll take 2

2009-03-29 Thread Carcharoth

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Carcharoth
carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Alex Sawczynec glasscobr...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 With all due respect, this isn't exactly new: it's been open for almost
 two weeks now. Is there a particular reason it's being posted to the list at
 this point?

 I didn't hear of the new poll until well after it was open. Was there
 a watchlist notice?

Correction: I heard about it on 17th March. But it was through the
grapevine, not by seeing any official announcement.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:39 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 [spotted by Mathias Schindler]


 http://encarta.msn.com/guide_page_FAQ/FAQ.html

 Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be Discontinued
 On October 31, 2009, MSN® Encarta® Web sites worldwide will be
 discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be
 discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease
 to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products
 worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have
 questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of
 questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like
 more information about these changes to Encarta.

Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years.
However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference
material has changed. People today seek and consume information in
considerably different ways than in years past.

I wonder what different ways they could be talking about? :-)

we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve
accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology
solutions

So they might try making a comeback in another form?

I liked Encarta - it was the first real encyclopedia I used. So I feel
a bit torn here.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:15 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/3/30 doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com:
 You realise, someday the announcement will read:

 Wikipedia has been a popular product around the world for many years.
 However, the category of traditional wiki encyclopedias and reference
 material has changed. People today seek and consume information in
 considerably different ways than in years past.

 Civilisation proceeds obsolescence by obsolescence

 That would require whatever the replacement is to turn up before the
 cost of hosting wikipedia becomes trivial and software agents that can
 write the thing without human involvement have become widespread.

 In fact if I had to put a guess on what will replace wikipedia is will
 be made to order articles generated on the fly from a wide range of
 sources by software.

Hmm. Can you get $$$ from that?

me dreams about making fortune from this

Some Wikipedia mirrors seem to be trying to do this already.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Carcharoth
carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:15 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 In fact if I had to put a guess on what will replace wikipedia is will
 be made to order articles generated on the fly from a wide range of
 sources by software.

 Hmm. Can you get $$$ from that?

 me dreams about making fortune from this

 Some Wikipedia mirrors seem to be trying to do this already.

To clarify: I mean those sites that offer a range of articles on a topic.

Content aggregators, including Wikipedia articles and others (often better).

Answers.com is an example.

http://www.answers.com/Pope%20John%20Paul%20II

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia brief outage today

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Slakr/TPE

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:50 AM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 Kill the messenger!
 Does anyone have a mob of peasants with torches standing around handy?


 -Original Message-
 From: Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org
 To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org; English
 Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Sent: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 4:45 pm
 Subject: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia brief outage today

 An out-of-memory condition crashed the database master for English
 Wikipedia; we were down for about 25 minutes. All is restarted and
 recovered now (thanks Domas!); our other sites were not affected.

 http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/03/english-wikipedia-database-temporarily-down/

 -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
 CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
 San Francisco

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Re: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia brief outage today

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Riots

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 1:01 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Slakr/TPE

 On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:50 AM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 Kill the messenger!
 Does anyone have a mob of peasants with torches standing around handy?


 -Original Message-
 From: Brion Vibber br...@wikimedia.org
 To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org; English
 Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Sent: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 4:45 pm
 Subject: [WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia brief outage today

 An out-of-memory condition crashed the database master for English
 Wikipedia; we were down for about 25 minutes. All is restarted and
 recovered now (thanks Domas!); our other sites were not affected.

 http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/03/english-wikipedia-database-temporarily-down/

 -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
 CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
 San Francisco

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

2009-03-31 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:31 AM, doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

 Further, I'm no historian of technology.

Read up on it - it is fascinating.

 But the lesson surely is that
 not much lasts for long.

Some technologies endure, but just change. Telecommunications, for
example. People will always want to communicate, and the telephone
(for example) has changed a lot, but people will hopefully always want
to talk to each other. Ditto pictures. The big revolutions in the
future will likely be around the senses and how we feed input into
them. Not quite brains in a box, but moving in that direction.

 Few organisations have been able to dominate
 any field for more than a decade or so. (Microsoft is perhaps the
 (dis?)honourable exception - and even then.) Today's unassailable
 phenomena, which no one can see anyone displacing, is tomorrow's
 footnote. BASIC anyone? Sinclair? Plastic records?

Spotify?

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

I've read that streaming online games and music will replace gaming
consoles and iPods. Might well be true. But then the book has been
resilient.

 The other reason I suspect that Wikipedia's shelf-life will, in fact, be
 shorter than most imagine, is that in the fast-changing evolution that
 is the internet, the ability to adapt is critical to survival. The
 browser that doesn't update is history. Sadly, for a relatively young
 phenomenon, Wikipedia, and particularly en.wp has shown an enormous
 conservatism about adapting. An initial winning formula that gave the
 breakthrough is regarded as sacred dogma - and a demand for consensus
 before change gives the dinosaurs an advantage. At the moment it matters
 little, as there is no real competition. But if/when a competitor get
 the magic formula right, I doubt Wikipedia has the structures to
 compete.

Possibly there is no magic formula, only a lot of hard work.

 The community hasn't really woken up to the fact that Wikipedia
 is no longer only an open shelf needing to be stacked, but it is a
 depository of a huge wealth of material that needs to be protected,
 sorted and (urgently) sifted.

Agreed. Though is it annoying when you see people working on things to
address this, and then see critics, who inspired some people, carry on
criticising the meta-processes, instead of supporting efforts made to
improve those meta-processes. Cynicism on your part, maybe, but please
don't infect people trying to change things.

 Alexandria's library didn't fail because it stopped importing knowledge,
 it failed because it was unable to effectively protect the knowledge it
 had already acquired.

I thought it got ransacked?

Goodness, they aren't even sure when or how it was destroyed!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Destruction_of_the_Library

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

2009-03-31 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 4:45 AM, Carcharoth 
 carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote:

 Agreed. Though is it annoying when you see people working on things to
 address this, and then see critics, who inspired some people, carry on
 criticising the meta-processes, instead of supporting efforts made to
 improve those meta-processes. Cynicism on your part, maybe, but please
 don't infect people trying to change things.

 There's change, and then there is the seeming of change. I don't think its
 cynical to oppose processes that appear to be helpful, but may actually set
 progress back. On the particular issue I assume you refer to, that Scott of
 all people opposes it should be a major cause for reflection on the part of
 those who support it.

You mean the poll? I've heard about that but haven't looked yet. That
wasn't what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about the ideas I've
been floating that aren't getting much attention because everyone is
probably taking part in the debate surround that poll. I'm also very
interested in the potential use of the new abuse filter to catch a lot
of BLP-related vandalism. But it is remarkably difficult to centralise
all this.

I'm not going to repost the links I posted a few days ago, but one of
them pointed to a list I made of a range of BLP-related pages that
should be centralised and brought together. One of the reasons for
inertia sometimes is splitting and spreading a debate too widely, and
you end up with people repeating the same arguments and suggestions in
different places.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

2009-03-31 Thread Carcharoth

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 5:57 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

snip

 (In image search, Google and all other search engines still suck.
 Here's to tagging coming to Commons.)

Isn't that because people don't label, keyword or otherwise tag images
properly? If they did, then Google would be able to find them and
provide a good search facility. It might also be because lots of
images are locked up in websites that only allow internal searches
(though some are Google-able).

 It would take something really spectacular to eclipse it; machine
 summarisation might do it, but I suspect even the machines will be
 thumbing the wikipedia over to find out what's important and for a
 place to start their research ;-)

 Data on Wikipedia will tend to become more machine-readable. Templates
 are mostly a good idea.

The worry there is that overuse of templates raises the barrier for
humans to contribute. The trick is to harness the powers of both
humans and machines, and make sure they work together and don't get in
each other's way. But that's been the case all along, right from the
start of the Machine Age, and onwards into the Information Age. Leave
the grunt work to machines. Let humans do the clever stuff. Teach
machines to approximate what humans do, or run on data and input from
humans.

The other worry is that humans coupled with machines can work at a
rate that runs the human body into the ground. So you have to have
things set up so the human can take a break and recharge itself. Less
long sessions editing Wikipedia, and more targeted editing, adding
more value-per-click (ugh, I can't believe I just said that).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 9:07 AM, doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip

Our current vandalism RCP system regularly screws up with BLP. It
reverts people who blank libels - and seldom even casts a glance at the
current state of any article. You think giving these same people more
work will solve the subtler BLP problem?

Agreed. And even obvious problems are missed.

Have a look at the history of this article for examples where what I
presume are Recent Change Patrollers saving revisions of an article
that was clearly still in a vandalised state. Classic example of blind
reversion that only looked at the current vandalism being removed, not
the earlier history or the state the article is being reverted to.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Kate_Murray_-_article_history_and_uncaught_vandalism_.2B_massive_number_of_attack_edits_by_IPs

[Something about a lighthouse.]

In case anyone is interested, a filter has been set up to detect
removal of the category Living people. That was how I came across
the edit above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLogwpSearchFilter=117

Hopefully it can be tweaked to distinguish between removal and
replacement with a death category. And then people can check edits
made claiming someone has died, and make sure reliable sources have
been provided for such claims.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

Will, look at the example I provided earlier in this thread.
Established editors and admins were blindly reverting vandalism and
leaving an article in a state of previous vandalism. How do you begin
to address that problem?

I don't want to link to the revisions in question, as the attacks are
quite nasty (look at the revert I made and what it removed). Please do
go and look, and you will find a whole series of Huggle edits that
reverted the most recent vandalism, but still left the article in an
absolutely unacceptable state. Worse, this continued for a day or two
until I spotted what had been happening.

Carcharoth

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:54 AM,  wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 I did not suggest doc that anyone can review.
 Review what I said again.
 I said that established users can review, that it should be an
 automatic right at a certain point and that admins cannot remove that
 right.

 That is quite different from anyone.


 -Original Message-
 From: doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com
 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Sent: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 1:07 am
 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

 wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
 I'm in agreement with David here.
 I do not want to be a policeman on behaviour, but I would certainly
 be
 interested in, and already do, patrol content changes and pass or
 remove spurious details.  I think we all do that a bit.  Being a
 policeman is quite a different role.

 So a flagged rev backlog will only be addressed if we allow all
 established users to so address it, and deny the power to admins to
 unseat a member of the group.  It should probably be automatic at a
 certain edit count or length of stay or something of that nature.
 There is absolutely no need to create any additional powers for
 admins,
 and we already have process in place to handle people who are truly
 disruptive to the system even though long-term participants.  We
 don't
 need any more of that.

 Will Johnson


 This makes flagged no more than a tool to reduce obvious vandalism -
 and
  quite useless for protecting against real BLP harm (see my last post
 for reasoning).

 If we have anyone can review then we have any incompetent can
 review
   and if admins can't quickly remove the reviewing right without
 process
 and paperwork then any good-faith incompetent will continue to review.

 Our current vandalism RCP system regularly screws up with BLP. It
 reverts people who blank libels - and seldom even casts a glance at the
 current state of any article. You think giving these same people more
 work will solve the subtler BLP problem?

 Again, if the bad edit is immediately obvious to the reviewer, it is
 also obvious to the reader - so it is not particularly damaging to the
 subject.

 I am of the opinion that full flagging will make little or no
 difference
 to the BLP problem. (That said, it can't do much harm - so let's try
 it). However, the current idiotic proposal is utterly useless and
 conterproductive.

 For far to long the flagging white elephant has been throw up as chaff
 to avoid any real steps on BLP harm reduction. For once, let's listen
 to
 the Germans who seem to have some useful things to teach us.

 Erik, or someone who knows, can you outline all the things de.wp does
 differently from en.wp - and whether it has less of a problem with
 legitimate subject complaints?


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:24 AM, Sam Korn smo...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com 
 wrote:
 Hopefully it can be tweaked to distinguish between removal and
 replacement with a death category. And then people can check edits
 made claiming someone has died, and make sure reliable sources have
 been provided for such claims.

 I wrote this script a little while ago for this exact purpose:

 http://toolserver.org/~samkorn/scripts/recentdeaths.php

 Might be useful until you can get this filter running?

It would. Thanks. Though only if people can be found to work on the
output. Logs are not that helpful unless there is a way for people to
mark them (i.e. patrol them) and say I've looked at this, best if you
go and look at something that no-one has reviewed and marked as done.

Not sure if the abuse filter has been set up for patrolling or not.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] current events in Wikipedia