Re: [WikiEN-l] Fram en.wp office yearlock block

[Charles Matthews]

Old-style drama around a high-profile admin. A decade ago we used to assume 
those things went together.

> On 11 June 2019 at 02:54 George Herbert  wrote:

> A high profile investigation target is most unusual but
> not unheard of.

Right.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Ray Saintonge has died

[Charles Matthews]

> 
> On 13 September 2016 at 17:34 benoit_lan...@hotmail.com wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> For those who may be wondering, the username was User:Eclecticology
> 
> 
> ~Benoit / Salvidrim
> 
> Sent from Outlook Mobile on Nexus 6P
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 12:29 PM -0400, "David Gerard" 
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Milos Rancic 
> Date: 13 September 2016 at 17:00
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Ray Saintonge has died
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> 
> 
> He died yesterday. As he was an important member of our community, I
> think we should make something appropriate so he would be remembered.
> 
> 

Ray had been running the Wikilivres site, for the last four years:

http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/User:Eclecticology

It covers (inter alia) material that can be hosted under Canadian law, and
cannot on Wikisource. 

News on what is happening at Wikilivres would be welcome.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Future of this mailing list

[Charles Matthews]

On 13 August 2015 at 15:08, Brian J Mingus brian.min...@colorado.edu
wrote:

 Leave the list open! There are lots of important people subscribed, and you
 never know when an interesting conversation will pop up.


Sounds as if we need a moderator willing to take over from David G.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Keith Ablow

[Charles Matthews]

On 22 December 2013 00:24, Ali Norris georgiagirl9...@gmail.com wrote:

 I have given you a small amount of money to your site.  This will never
 happen again if you do not change your article on Keith
 Ablow.  I am his patient and I am deeply offended on the new added
 professional ethics part of your page on him.  Keith has never ever been
 texting anyone he is my doctor, cares deeply about me, listens, helps me
 like no one in my life and there is zero reason to say on your website
 attacks on him in the professional contact section newly added.  I am
 deeply offended as this is not based on facts but opinion of someone that
 may or may have not been treated by him.  He is a wonderful physician and
 healer.  That section about him should be removed immediately as it is
 based on opinion not on fact.  Your website should be about facts not
 opinion.  Not a dime from me further until that opinion is removed.  That
 is opinion (and it is not even true) and not fact.  Makes me furious.


Thank you for this mail. The appropriate forum to get some attention to the
article on Keith Ablow is at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP_noticeboard

I see there has been some recent edit warring at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ablow

so that the current version may not reflect the concerns you raise.
Obviously Wikipedia wants to have its biographies factual and neutral.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Signpost and basic journalistic integrity

[Charles Matthews]

On 5 November 2013 07:42, Tony Souter to...@iinet.net.au wrote:

 Nathan, it's a pity you've decided to smear me on a public list without
 even informing me. I was alerted to this by an existing subscriber and have
 since subscribed myself so that I can respond.


Tony, welcome to this list. Wikien-l is not so much used these days, and it
sometimes reminds me of the British House of Lords. The subscribers tend to
be people who still remember the old English Wikipedia days of up to a
decade ago, and it's a talking shop that can at times be insightful, but
has little or no influence.

The journalism in the Signpost these days is subject to much comment, as
you are probably aware. I don't imagine you are concerned, as long as
people read it (I do). Doings on Wikivoyage aren't really on-topic for this
list, but the Signpost is. The phrase yellow press is one I have seen
applied. It might be appropriate for you to explain what you are trying to
do with the Signpost, now you have made a rebuttal.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Signpost and basic journalistic integrity

[Charles Matthews]

On 5 November 2013 10:55, Tony Souter to...@iinet.net.au wrote:

snip

 If the Signpost  is sometimes provocative, that's part of the deal and
why we have talk pages. I believe the movement is better off having
coverage that is independent of the WMF and of any particular community (we
have narrowly avoided too close an association with the establishment on
several counts).

snip

Tony, it is valuable to have your views, and we should certainly let you
get back to work.

 Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why writing biographies (e.g. on WIkipedia) is hard

[Charles Matthews]

On 24 September 2013 10:06, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:


  There are risks to preferring published sources while condemning
 original research.



And vice versa.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why writing biographies (e.g. on WIkipedia) is hard

[Charles Matthews]

On 23 September 2013 16:35, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:


 http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/09/writing-biography-in-the-age-of-wikipedia-removing-a-shadow-from-the-life-of-justice-tom-clark/


A. B said A. C wrote that B said A. These are all different, and we should
bear that in mind.

My favourite example is Queen Elizabeth's famous speech at Tilbury. We have
a decent article on that. There are actually two sources for it, and they
aren't compatible. The more probable one is hearsay, from a guy who used to
do the speech she made as a kind of party piece. Most raconteurs embroider.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] bizarre: Women Novelists Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 26 April 2013 05:19, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:


 Obviously we need to quit arguing and change it. Either a man or a woman
 mystery writer would be in both a gender category and a genre category,
 if we are to have gender categories.


The German Wikipedia does these things differently, and I once met a German
who thought our approach is plain wrong. I.e. we should have categories
like Male, Female, and presumably XYY and so on (let's not not be
pedantic). Then, and this is the killer, if you want to research American
female novelists all you have to do is intersect the category Female with
the category American novelists (or the categories American and Novelist,
who cares, Venn diagrams are good). To do that, run the Catscan 2.0 tool on
the toolserver...

Sadly the toolserver these days is down more often that it should be. But
wait, the cavalry is coming. Real soon now Wikimedia Labs will be available.

I suggest, seriously, that the tech side could be taken into account here
as driving what people can get out of the category system, and so what we
want to put into it. It is part of a research resource, not a place for
attitudes.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] bizarre: Women Novelists Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 26 April 2013 15:24, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 If only there were some kind of editable data store project being worked
 on that could store this kind of metadata in a centralised location… grin


Quite a good if cryptic comment about Wikidata. I suppose it is encouraging
to think that the system as a whole is far from optimised yet.

I have read a couple of blogs now by experienced women Wikipedians advising
a sense of proportion here.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] incivility consciously as a tactic.

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 April 2013 02:07, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Incivility is difficult to deal with.

That may be the case; but it's not for the reasons usually given.

 One of the reasons is because there is a school of thought that a
 certain level of frankness and brusqueness is necessary in a place
 like Wikipedia. The trouble with that is that people draw the line in
 different places, partly due to cultural differences, partly due to
 personal levels of what they will accept.

Yes, well, one of the differences is between people who think that
what they find acceptable should constitute a universal standard; and
those who realise this is no way to set universal standards.

 Some people also treat this as a matter of principle, rather than as
 one of being nice. The way I would describe it (though you really need
 to find an exponent of this view to describe it properly, as I don't
 support this view myself) is that it is more honest to say what you
 really think in simple language, than to dissemble and use careful and
 diplomatic language to essentially say the same thing. I favour the
 latter approach until a certain tipping point is reached, and will
 then be more frank myself.

Excessive frankness usually does nothing for relationships. To be
frank usually prefaces something that can usefully be omitted.

 I can see the point people are making when they say that being more
 forthright earlier on and consistently on a matter of principle is
 better, but the end result tends to be the same. Hurt feelings all
 round for those who don't get that viewpoint, and those who have a
 tendency towards the more brusque approach sometimes (not always)
 being baited by those who like winding people up. The other effect,
 most damagingly of all, is that the 'community' (which is a localised,
 nebulous entity that is in flux at the best of times and varies
 depending on location and timing) ends up polarised over the issue.

 So you get periodic flare-ups, exacerbated by the nature of online
 communications (the lack of body language to and verbal tone) and the
 lack of empathy for others that some who are drawn to Wikipedia
 exhibit.

The point being that those who actually use incivility as a wedge to
divide the community are quite well aware of that, and this is what
needs to be stamped out as disruption, not intermittent breakdowns of
the civility code.

I saw a recent study suggesting, alarmingly, that online many people
find angry language and comment relatively persuasive; presumably
because they assume it is sincere, and assume that sincerity has
something to do with being right. I find this much more worrying than
the traditional lack of affect argument, because you'd assume over
time people would adapt to that (have we not adapted to the phone?)

I think there are probably a couple of serious fallacies being allowed
to dominate this discussion, still.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] serious fallacies

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 April 2013 14:20, Kathleen McCook klmcc...@gmail.com wrote

 I agree with you, Charles. These fallacies are quite transparent. And it is
 too bad that much good effort and input to the Wikipedia initiative can be
 lost due to those who feel it is their  to be forthright  (wiggle word)
 rather than helpful.  There is nothing wrong with being helpful. There
 is everything wrong with a nasty officious edge.

To be clear, I don't engage in these debates to diminish the
community. I come in as a policy wonk if I feel the policy involved
is being misread, too close to the letter. That's not the trouble
here.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] incivility consciously as a tactic.

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 April 2013 20:37, Matthew Jacobs sxeptoman...@gmail.com wrote:
 The problem I've consistently seen with incivility as a tactic is that, the
 longer someone is around, the more of it they can get away with.

Indeed. See four example this

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harris%27s_List_of_Covent_Garden_Ladiesdiff=nextoldid=528383888

directed towards someone who has a total of four edits. And who
apparently doesn't feel accountable. Then work out the common factor
with Tony1.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] en.wiki gross incivility intoxicates Wikimedia projects

[Charles Matthews]

On 15 April 2013 16:14, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 I don't think what you're seeing is anything particularly peculiar to
 en.wp - I've encountered rude or socially awkward people from all
 projects.

But see discussion on
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tony1]]. Some of my
unfavourite people there, for sure. And the comment What I'll do is
to keep swearing at you.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Psychological correlates of deletionism/inclusionism?

[Charles Matthews]

On 15 April 2013 16:43, Hex . h...@downlode.org wrote:
 On 14 April 2013 14:29, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 Pretty much everything that's fucked up about Wikipedia is emergent
 behaviour of people being a problem


 I think you mean failure of management.

Well, it is an unsolved problem how to assign anyone to do anything in
a system where everyone self-assigns their tasks. If there were any
management, it would be unfair to label this failure, I think. It is
a bit like dividing 0 by 0 and announcing the answer: not easy to
argue with, but the problem is rather with the question.

Actually a more accurate answer might be that WP clearly needs a
measure of contrarianism in its workforce, because otherwise everyone
would be working on the same, overmanned tasks. It would be remarkably
good luck if we just happened to have exactly the right amount of
contrariness.

To get back on topic, maybe, if one has a single-person writing
project, the psychological correlate of inclusionism is a complete
lack of self-criticism, and of deletionism is a kind of writer's
block. Which is sort of why the question is a crock. Any competent
writer avoids both: bins some stuff and gets on with something else if
a particular bit is being awkward.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] en.wiki gross incivility intoxicates Wikimedia projects

[Charles Matthews]

On 15 April 2013 18:39, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:
 You're an idiot, and you're damaging the project. It's not about
 copyright, or understanding it. What I'll do is to keep swearing at
 you, and I'll be uploading tons of files onto en.WP, not Commons. That
 will just disadvantage other users, and will cause Commons admins more
 work eventually in having to go through the process of transferring
 them to Commons. I will refuse to categorise. And I will encourage all
 other editors to do the same. Continue your personal vendetta against
 me—fine. Again, you and your thug friends on Commons are idiots and
 deserve no respect. Tony (talk) 15:15, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

 That's the comment Charles refers to. Oops! I can see why some
 frustration on Tony1's part is legit; a Commons admin deleted the
 image illustrating the Signpost article on the attempt by the DCRI to
 have a French Wikipedia article deleted, and then failed to explain it
 in a way that would make sense to a non-expert. You won't see me argue
 against accusations that Commons is dysfunctional, but the response is
 clearly way out of proportion.

 But the point that I made, and that probably hundreds of people have
 made before me, is that there isn't much we can do without altering
 the fundamental architecture of the community.

Actually, that is defeatist talk, and we can.

It is completely clear that some editors use incivility consciously as
a tactic. (The cited conversation is a smoking gun, if one were
needed.) Such people should be sanctioned. Many more people have a
temper (come to think of it, just about everyone does), and the point
needs to be made that sanctioning those who use incivility
systematically and disruptively does not mean sanctioning everyone on
the planet.

Then perhaps we could deal more rationally with the issue that
discussions on enWP are often conducted in the wrong register.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Psychological correlates of deletionism/inclusionism?

[Charles Matthews]

On 13 April 2013 22:12, Gwern Branwen gw...@gwern.net wrote:

 My basic observation here is that inclusionism/deletionism debates
 seem intractable [...]

Indeed. As is characteristic of false dichotomies.

I was once asked by a prominent journalist where I stood on this. I
replied that it was a boring question. And that once I had defined
myself as deletionist on science topics, where we don't want cruft and
pseudo, and inclusionist on humanities topics, where we really cannot
always know what the academics will turn to next.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Psychological correlates of deletionism/inclusionism?

[Charles Matthews]

On 14 April 2013 11:59, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 14 April 2013 11:44, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

 Indeed. As is characteristic of false dichotomies.
 I was once asked by a prominent journalist where I stood on this. I
 replied that it was a boring question. And that once I had defined
 myself as deletionist on science topics, where we don't want cruft and
 pseudo, and inclusionist on humanities topics, where we really cannot
 always know what the academics will turn to next.


 When people from TV come asking for a (quote) passionate deletionist -

 http://www.mail-archive.com/wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg01448.html

 - we're well past the time of being able to talk sensibly in such polar terms.

Mmm, I remember that mail and whom I suggested ...

I'm still quite deletionist on BLPs because of examples where our
rules are too easy to game. I'm certainly not an anti-stub
deletionist because that I see as destructive of future growth, and I
improve many stubs these days. If passionate means nuance-free,
which is a fair cop much of the time, then I agree with you.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Psychological correlates of deletionism/inclusionism?

[Charles Matthews]

On 14 April 2013 13:28, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 14 April 2013 12:24, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

 Mmm, I remember that mail and whom I suggested ...


 I didn't see you in that thread ... who were you thinking of?

It was a private reply and explanation about a well-known critic of
our BLPs. Water under the bridge.

 I'm still quite deletionist on BLPs because of examples where our
 rules are too easy to game. I'm certainly not an anti-stub
 deletionist because that I see as destructive of future growth, and I
 improve many stubs these days. If passionate means nuance-free,
 which is a fair cop much of the time, then I agree with you.


 I favour James Forrester and Thomas Dalton's arguments here:

 http://www.mail-archive.com/wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg01454.html

 - that Wikipedia started as anything-goes, this was severely cut back
 and we're now closer to a nuanced equilibrium.

Almost all attempts at writing enWP's history are good (I except the
one at Wikimania in DC which was a multi-dimensional trainwreck).

I had my pet theory for a few years, that there was too little
disruption - which I kept quiet about for several reasons, not the
least of which was that I'm unsure of the spelling of Nietzsche at the
best of times, but am sure I don't want to be associated with him.
Also from a wonkish point of view saying that makes for no useful
policy point arising. It mostly harks back to good old days that are
really very fictional.

We're not yet at a healthy equilibrium. I've used the history in a
workshop once, and the editor retention graph shows the need to be
thoughtful.

It is clear that we moved away from the old-style What I Know Is
criterion for inclusion quite sharply in 2007. What needs to be
explained more clearly is what took its place. I remember saying to
Brianna Laugher at the time - she raised the point in Taipei, so was
ahead of many of us - that people who like rules were displacing the
old-school guys. Five years on I'm still hoping for the one-liner that
says it better. I produced one for JISC when I was talking to them
with Martin Poulter. Either it wasn't really memorable, or I'm having
a senior moment and it'll come back to me.

Charles

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[WikiEN-l] Dodgy diplomacy articles - COI nest?

[Charles Matthews]

[Resending - I believe the first time I was using an old addess for the list.]

A blog post by Benjamin Mako Hill

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy-and-wikipedia

alerted me to some COI editing that has been going on, rather
blatantly. The deletion debate associated with the [[Institute for
Cultural Diplomacy]] speaks for itself, and I see some cleanup going
on now. But how far does the issue stretch?

For example [[Colin Evans]] links to [[Freelance Diplomacy]], which is
questionably referenced; and itself is questionably referenced, with
links that look to me as if they are gaming our notability criteria.
(Easy to do with enough money ...)

Looking around at some of the accounts involved suggested to me that
some problem editors may be active in this whole area. I think we
should be concerned.

Charles

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[WikiEN-l] Dodgy diplomacy articles - COI nest?

[Charles Matthews]

A blog post by Benjamin Mako Hill

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy-and-wikipedia

alerted me to some COI editing that has been going on, rather
blatantly. The deletion debate associated with the [[Institute for
Cultural Diplomacy]] speaks for itself, and I see some cleanup going
on now. But how far does the issue stretch?

For example [[Colin Evans]] links to [[Freelance Diplomacy]], which is
questionably referenced; and itself is questionably referenced, with
links that look to me as if they are gaming our notability criteria.
(Easy to do with enough money ...)

Looking around at some of the accounts involved suggested to me that
some problem editors may be active in this whole area. I think we
should be concerned.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Larry Sanger's new project

[Charles Matthews]

On 13 March 2013 18:15, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:


 The problem he apparently trying to solve is that sites like Wikipedia
 and YouTube are kind of noisy. As problem statements go, it lacks a
 certain specificity...

 I know what he means though. The snarling nonsense we sometimes encounter
 on mailing lists or during editing disputes could fairly be characterized
 as noise. The question is whether this project will be any better.

For the editor, or for the reader, one does ask.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to write about things that were once notable?

[Charles Matthews]

On 6 February 2013 09:07, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 Pownce is an interesting example of why we need to keep these kinds of
 articles around: every time a new social network comes along, people
 jump on to it like it's the best thing since sliced bread. Showing them the
 many failures and closed services may prompt them into reconsidering
 their actions.

Not only an interesting case study for technology, but also a case
study for Wikipedia, especially as we now know that mid-2007 was
mid-mayhem as far as our editor numbers were concerned. I want to get
some decent case studies written as material for the Wikimedia UK VLE,
by hook or by crook.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to write about things that were once notable?

[Charles Matthews]

On 6 February 2013 13:06, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On 2/6/13, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 Notability is *supposed* to be timeless, not perishable, let's recall.

 Yeah. But that is a bit of a canard in some cases. It is a question of
 whether coverage endures and continues or peters out. i.e. Whether
 people/sources (the right sort) write about something over time, and
 in what manner. Coverage of something when it starts is very different
 to coverage after it is gone. The former is news, the latter starts to
 become history (whether a footnote or not).

Yes, the point about reducing notability to reliable sources is that
making GNG depend on RS assumes we know what we are talking about in
RS. Which is questionable. So I cordially hate GNG. Precisely because
it takes more to write history of lasting value,, than journalism that
informs and sells, reducing things to RS is basically a bust. But,
absent a catchy replacement, it is what we are stuck with. Which is
exactly the status of notability, anyway.


 Pownce is clearly a footnote by now. One of WP's purposes is to host
 such footnotes. So the writing issue boils down to reducing froth to
 footnote coverage.

 Ultimately everything becomes a footnote if you take the long view.
 With some things being more a footnote than others. Getting the
 balance right as something goes from having lots of coverage at
 inception, to either increasing or decreasing coverage thereafter is
 tricky, but an important consideration.

 It is something that I don't think those engaged in debates about
 notability consider enough, especially when considering that living
 people get coverage because they are living. Whether they get coverage
 when or after they are dead (which we won't know until that happens)
 *should* be a consideration, but often isn't.

 Sometimes when something comes to en end, new coverage will prompt
 updates here, but sometimes even that doesn't happen. It all results
 in a large mass of articles that are poorly maintained and look
 increasingly out of date as time goes by.

Nothing at all wrong with footnotes, though. I once had a project to
go through the footnotes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. I had an
interesting hour with the first, on Jordanes, but got no further,
though it produced an article.

Articles from 6 or 7 years ago are often essentially unimproved from
their early days. Now with much better online resources I often find
I'm improving a very stubby one from 2007. There isn't an actual
problem, though. in that I feel motivated now to do that improvement.
I think the right attitude is that it has taken longer than we thought
to start eating our tail and upgrade old stubs. To get back on
topic, if a stub really is on a notable topic, then there isn't much
of a problem. I'll agree that a certain kind of transience isn't
well expressed in basic policy.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to write about things that were once notable?

[Charles Matthews]

On 6 February 2013 14:04, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote:
 I think you are all dancing around the real subject.
 Is wikipedia meant to help people have access to
 knowledge, to apportion access to knowledge, or
 to be a gate-keeper on which knowledge and at
 which rates do people have access to it?

Gate-keeping is one of a trio of concepts that are still interesting
to discuss, along with conflict of interest, and bias (as in systemic
bias). Still interesting as neither purely involving content policy,
nor purely about community interactions, but having both snarled up
together.

Anyway Wikipedia is meant to help people have access to knowledge, per
the mission, and to do gatekeeping per WP:NOT.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to write about things that were once notable?

[Charles Matthews]

On 6 February 2013 15:14, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

 However, we do need a mechanism for weeding out information which is no
 longer of interest to readers or editors. Perhaps this could be one
 criteria justifying deletion, or perhaps some other form of archiving. We
 could maintain an archive of deprecated subjects separate from the main
 body of articles. Libraries do this, and call it weeding.

There's a reasonable point in here. We have a quite weak grasp of the
(absolute) concept of salience of information relative to a topic,
probably because a relative form - disproportionate coverage of an
aspect - is more eye-catching. We only really want salient information
in an article. and the thesis that salience or its perception begins
to look tenable. At the gossip-column extreme the salience of
information can look very perishable (cf. Pippa Middleton). We don't
really have a concept of salience to match the historians, not that (I
imagine) they have a consensus view, thus making history more
interesting than reference material.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to write about things that were once notable?

[Charles Matthews]

Oops -

the thesis that salience or its perception changes over time begins
to look tenable

is the point I was hoping to make.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 November 2012 01:34, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

 Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they
 assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like
 whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated to
 the community.

In a couple of misleading senses you could argue this. The legal buck
stops with the WMF. (You clearly want to look further than the legal
position, but in the context of PR editing it has been argued that the
law is the standard, not ethics). What software is in operation is
handled by the developers employed by the WMF. It has indeed been
contentious whether the WMF should impose its view on the software, so
it has backed off at present.

It does seem you want to target a blame game at the community,
whatever bad actors do who are certainly not within the community by
any reasonable standard of compliance with norms.

snip examples of things that can go wrong

 But the community generally is not aware of that responsibility, or denies
 it, and certainly lacks any efficient organ to exercise it.

The first is basically untrue. The second, I think, only represents
fairly the attitude of a few free speech extremists on enWP (I'm not
familiar enough with other Wikipedias to comment on their
communities). I think they are fewer than they used to be.

The third is about on-site politics, which I don't think is in a very
satisfactory state, but about which I have adopted a less is more
line in my own comments for a few years (for reasons that are obvious,
at least to me). It is not closely connected in any case with dealing
properly with complaints, which is the problem-solving approach to
things going wrong on WP, as opposed to looking round for someone to
blame.

So can we discuss points arising in some other thread, please? All of
the above may be worth talking about, but conventionally off-topic
matters get a new subject line. Such as If only the enWP community
got its act together we would never have to worry about PR editing
because it would be a Brave New World, perhaps.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 November 2012 16:10, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Charles Matthews 
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

 On 17 November 2012 01:34, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

  Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they
  assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like
  whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated
 to
  the community.


 In a couple of misleading senses you could argue this. The legal buck
 stops with the WMF.



 No it does not, except in very limited circumstances: if the Foundation
 receives a DMCA takedown notice and don't respond to it, they become
 liable, as in the recent Loriot case. And if they are advised of child
 pornography and fail to remove it from servers, they become liable. But
 beyond such limited cases, they do not have legal responsibility for the
 content of Wikipedia articles, the Wikipedia main page, or Commons
 categories or Wikiversity courses. That editorial responsitility is fully
 delegated to the community. If you believe otherwise, you are wrong.

What you have written doesn't contradict what I wrote.

 (You clearly want to look further than the legal
 position, but in the context of PR editing it has been argued that the
 law is the standard, not ethics). What software is in operation is
 handled by the developers employed by the WMF. It has indeed been
 contentious whether the WMF should impose its view on the software, so
 it has backed off at present.

 In cases of software features that affect fundamental editorial policy,
 like pending changes/flagged revisions or the image filter, we have seen
 very clearly that the decision to implement or not rests with the
 community. And as a mere host for the projects, the Foundation is not
 legally liable for the consequences of editorial community decisions.

We could discuss the image filter, but let's not. I was of course
alluding to it.

 It does seem you want to target a blame game at the community,
 whatever bad actors do who are certainly not within the community by
 any reasonable standard of compliance with norms.



 I am not talking about blame, but about recognising that the community has
 a responsibility, and that there is no point in waiting for the Foundation
 to come up with ways to deal with what you correctly call bad actors.

We're all in this. The bad actors who happen to be paid PR folks are
not to be excused just because they are not the only bad actors. That
would be the point of this thread.

  snip



 The third is about on-site politics, which I don't think is in a very
 satisfactory state, but about which I have adopted a less is more
 line in my own comments for a few years (for reasons that are obvious,
 at least to me). It is not closely connected in any case with dealing
 properly with complaints, which is the problem-solving approach to
 things going wrong on WP, as opposed to looking round for someone to
 blame.



 I am talking about problem prevention rather than problem solving. That
 does not require apportioning blame, but assuming responsibility.

 The community needs to think further than saying those bad actors are not
 part of us. It needs to think about ways to minimise the impact bad actors
 can have on the project's content and on subjects' reputations.

As far as I know, huge numbers of words have been typed into Wikipedia
on these very subjects.

 So can we discuss points arising in some other thread, please? All of
 the above may be worth talking about, but conventionally off-topic
 matters get a new subject line. Such as If only the enWP community
 got its act together we would never have to worry about PR editing
 because it would be a Brave New World, perhaps.



 Look, Charles, this thread is called, in part, ...apparently it's all our
 fault. Can't we have a good-faith investigation of what things the
 community might indeed do better to prevent justified complaints? The
 Foundation will not manage what you called bad actors: how to do that is
 the community's job to figure out. Right now, as SmartSE demonstrated, one
 guy and another guy who hates him can spend months reverting each other
 without anyone else taking an interest, even if the wronged party asks for
 help repeatedly. Flagged revisions would prevent this sort of slow edit
 war, with improperly sourced reputation-damaging material being deleted and
 inserted again and again.

We do have dispute resolution on the site, you know. I happen to
support some sort of revision control, but simply expanding your
definition of bad actor to include parties who should be in
low-level dispute resolution doesn't forward your point, as far as I
can see. (Dispute Resolution 101 says people are going to imply the
other party is a vandal, which gets us nowhere.)

 In my opinion, the following are all things the community could do better:

 1. We don't put enough obstacles

Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 November 2012 14:38, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 2:28 PM, David Goodman dgge...@gmail.com wrote:

 There is a  fundamental difference between our inefficient and
 sometimes unsuccessful attempts to do things right, and their
 deliberate attempts to do things wrong.

 Yes, but we must not forget that PR people are not the only people who use
 Wikipedia to do things wrong. By operating the completely open system we
 do, we enable *anyone* to do wrong, be they PR or staff working for a
 company, or a company's detractors.

 The community is responsible for managing Wikipedia. And whether Wikipedia
 is easy or difficult to abuse is the community's responsibility.

I suppose this line of argument might be of some interest to someone
looking for a dissertation topic in moral philosophy (as has been
noted, it is off-topic). What happens to the notion of agency
online?

Still, I can't accept that it makes sense of some putative connection
inherent in wiki technology, collective responsibility, and mere
participation as an editor. Talking about the community as a way of
avoiding talking about the intentions of the actors here is a neat
trick. I think the meaning of wrong is being slurred here. I
certainly don't think one should talk about enabling when editing is
always a conditional permission rather than any kind of right, and the
permission is given for a definite reason. And so on. The usual
approach would surely be to look first at who is hosting the site when
you seek to assign responsibility.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 12 November 2012 13:54, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:
 We won't win a moral argument; they are breaking the social contract of a
 website. We regularly defame people.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/report-usmanov-pr-firm-tweaked-wikipedia-entry/471315.html
is interesting to read in this context. The moral side of whitewashing
a biography ahead of a stock market flotation is fairly elusive.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 12 November 2012 15:26, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:
 You misunderstand.

 As I mentioned: we simply have no moral high ground to criticise their
 actions. Our controls are shoddy and we defame people all over the place.
 They massage biographies etc. to cast things in a better light.

 Who is the good guy?

On the grounds that two hypothetical wrongs don't make a hypothetical
right, there need not be an answer to your question. On the grounds
that someone who claims to be able to fix your house or car and then
charges yo u money despite being incompetent is traditionally called a
cowboy, the idea that WP's procedures _in cases that are not
removing defamation_ can be called cumbersome by PR pros rebounds on
them.

The right answer is in terms of the hourly rate PR pros can ask for.
If they need to be trained to operate properly on WP, that is what
should happen. The bar for people's reputations should be set at least
as high as for plumbing.

Note, in other words, that the defence of the PR editing here is
entirely deflection.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 12 November 2012 15:46, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

 It occurs to me that biographies can be malicious without being defamatory.
 It would be wise to check what exactly went on in the biography before
 passing judgment.

Actually, I agree. Treating each instance of a general problem as a
case study is better. But our discussions do not always favour that
approach.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] The new narrowed focus by WMF

[Charles Matthews]

So Sue sees the need for some sort of clearer mission statement, I
suppose. A natural reaction on coming up to five years as Executive
Director, would be one way to look at it.

Charles

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[WikiEN-l] Pedants welcome

[Charles Matthews]

Catchphrase from

http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/09/10/eduwiki/

which in itself is an interesting roundup from the EduWiki conference last
week. Does pedants welcome imply experts unwelcome? Please have your
essays in by the end of the weekend.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment

[Charles Matthews]

On 12 September 2012 16:50, Matthew Jacobs sxeptoman...@gmail.com wrote:

 
 
  Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:34:26 +0100
  From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
   Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
 
  On 11 September 2012 17:29, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:
   It seems I have not posed this as a question. The question is how could
   we better handle VIP subjects who give us feedback, attempt to edit
   either themselves or through an agent, or contact OTRS?
  
   For example, could we assign some diplomatic people to handle such
   situations, I've noticed CBS does that. It's a skill.
 
  We have assigned diplomatic people to handle such situations - they're
  the OTRS volunteers. The problem is how we make sure people get
  directed to OTRS.
 
 
 One problem with that approach is that OTRS is not seen as representative
 of WP; the administrators are. If the admins are widely perceived as being
 dicks (probably because way to many of them behave like dicks a large
 portion of the time), then OTRS is going to continue to be ineffective at
 changing the perception of WP as unfriendly and more concerned with
 protecting territory than having accurate information.


It's certainly easy to draw conclusions if you include them in the premises
of the argument.


 Even more fundamentally, WP admins are not accountable for doing a good
 job, only avoiding doing a bad one. Until that changes, most admins have
 little incentive to be anything beyond mediocre. Sure, I believe they
 generally mean well, but if they think they're right, why shouldn't they be
 rude and drive off the annoying editor who says they're wrong, rather than
 waste a bunch of time trying to be helpful and diplomatic. They can be as
 rude and territorial as they want, provided they don't cross the line into
 abusing the tools, and no-one will punish them, so why should they bother
 politely pointing someone to OTRS, much less spend time and effort trying
 to be diplomatic themselves?


Ditto.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment

[Charles Matthews]

On 12 September 2012 18:32, Jim Redmond j...@scrubnugget.com wrote:

 On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net
 wrote:

  VIPs expect to deal with another VIP, with authority to get things fixed,
  with a word, even if the rules have to be bent a bit. That is the way of
  the world. We, particularly a random community member they are
  interacting with, often do not have authority to do what has to be done.
  They do not understand or appreciate discussions with the community about
  their problem.


 For what it's worth, this is not just a VIP behavior. Most people assume
 that Wikipedia has centralized control over content, and they want Someone
 In Charge to fix things for them. (cf. all the people who e-mail Jimbo
 asking him to make changes, or the people who volunteer for OTRS because
 they want to fix errors on pages) It's difficult to correct these
 assumptions, even after pointing out the big edit tab at the top of
 nearly every page.


And most people don't read instructions. And I suppose people who follow
the Contact Wikipedia link take no notice of the content of the page

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

which says these things. There is nothing on that page about VIP treatment,
and I don't think there should be. If something gets into OTRS and is from
a household name, it would be sensible to have it passed to someone with a
lot of experience, but I don't know if that is part of the system.

(I do find a certain irony that Fred started this thread, given his
previous comments about monarchy. The whole celebrities expect to be
treated like royalty thing strikes me as mainly a Hollywood invention.
Actual royalty - bred to it - are the last to kick up a fuss in this
fashion. So arriviste.)

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] NPR on Roth-Library Link of the Day

[Charles Matthews]

On 11 September 2012 10:11, Kathleen McCook klmcc...@gmail.com wrote:

 The link is to the NPR article and the comment below is worth reviewing.
 How can this perception typical among the NPR commentators  be over-turned?

  Boe D (Dajoe) wrote:
 People: If you are knowledgable enough to find a fault in Wikipedia--Go
 fix it!

 Boe, are you kidding? it's because of the hubris and tenacity of the
 ignorant that we cannot fix it. we have only finite energy and time, and
 the self-appointed editors who elect among themselves the
 administrators (who wield the real power), will just revert any fix that
 doesn't fit with their POV.

 That's kind of not the case. An admin who reverts well-referenced edits as
a POV pusher is riding for a fall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-09-10/In_the_media

has a sane discussion of what actually did go on in the Roth business. You
can get this other kind of explanation any day of the week from the troll
boards, naturally. But the agenda there is to make WP unmanageable on any
terms.

The Roth situation was WP between a rock (celeb culture with its ohmigod
you dissed X) and a hard place (academic credibility requires that, yes,
you do require verifiable additions and don't accept argument from
authority). It would tend to illustrate that celeb power can potentially be
deployed against serious discourse. Countervailing admin power is always
a questionable analysis.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] NPR on Roth-Library Link of the Day

[Charles Matthews]

On 11 September 2012 16:14, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:

 On Tue, 11 Sep 2012, Charles Matthews wrote:

 The Roth situation was WP between a rock (celeb culture with its ohmigod
 you dissed X) and a hard place (academic credibility requires that, yes,
 you do require verifiable additions and don't accept argument from
 authority). It would tend to illustrate that celeb power can potentially
 be
 deployed against serious discourse. Countervailing admin power is always
 a questionable analysis.


 If someone who could reasonably be seen as speaking for Wikipedia told him
 that Wikipedia needed secondary sources for his claim, they are wrong, and
 Wikipedia failed.


That is what I have described before as the point of failure, if the
inference is correct. There has been plenty of discussion on the premise
that there was a failure of courtesy, which I don't see.


 It completely misses the point to explain how Wikipedia's actual policies
 are
 reasonable.  The policy that Roth was told about is not reasonable; if it
 doesn't match Wikipedia's actual policy, he shouldn't be expected to figure
 that out.

 It has nothing to do with celebrity power, except that when celebrities run
 into bad admins, people learn about it.



Without the whole mail being made public, I don't see how we can conclude
bad. Selective quotation is what we have in the New Yorker letter,
together with some over-interpretation. Which is rhetoric. But the bulk of
Roth's letter is much more interesting than that rather scanty intro.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Roth is an elderly man googling

[Charles Matthews]

On 10 September 2012 17:04, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:

 On Sat, 8 Sep 2012, Charles Matthews wrote:

 You might be justified in saying this if he was really told he wasn't
 credible. If he was told that he wasn't a reliable source in WP's
 terms, that is a different kettle of fish.


 How's he supposed to know the difference?


Oh, I don't know, they keep saying he should get a Nobel Prize as a
novelist, so perhaps his command of the English language is above average.
There is a nuance.


 Besides, once he is verified to be himself, he is a reliable source.  The
 issue was that he was a primary source and the secondary sources had
 preference.


The issue appears to be something different. Roth's biographer wanted the
existing secondary sources zapped from the article as simply worthless, and
we couldn't accept that. Roth's unpublished view as funnelled through his
biographer might have had to have waited until the biography was published,
in which case we would have cited it without trouble. Via what appears to
be an OTRS mail Roth was given what appears to be the wrong advice, phrased
in terms of secondary sources. As
WP:ABOUTSELFhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ABOUTSELF tells
us, Roth simply had to get his view published; which he did. The caveat in
the article by 20 August was actually enough to cast great doubt on the
other story about his inspiration, at least for any attentive reader.

It is traditional to hang all sorts of other considerations on these
incidents, but from the point of view of getting the case study straight,
it isn't that helpful.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Only on WP is the victim a bully

[Charles Matthews]

On 10 September 2012 17:26, Matthew Jacobs sxeptoman...@gmail.com wrote:

 Only on WP. This kind of crap is why I've essentially given up on the site.
 The man wants an article on HIS OWN WORK to be accurate, and was frustrated
 by the apparently quite unhelpful people he met there. That's just plain
 ridiculous, but it's beyond absurd that he would then be called a bully
 for trying to get it fixed when no-one apparently seemed to interested in
 helping him.

 That is a very poor description of what went on here. Roth could have
called out critics who made misleading statements about his work quite some
time ago. He got a direct reply from us.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Roth is an elderly man googling

[Charles Matthews]

On 8 September 2012 16:55, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.comwrote:

 No it doesn't.

 I'll give you good odds on me being right.

 Because I see the same thing week after week.


You mean leading author almost synonymous with rare interview assumes his
word is good enough for WP? Complaining that people make up stuff about
your inspiration is fair enough: bookchat, as Gore Vidal called it, has a
percentage of drivel. But The Human Stain was published 12 years ago.
Really, nothing on the record?

(I know that isn't what you mean. But Wikipedians in this kind of situation
do have to explain policy to those who don't get it, and act on it, even if
dealing with someone famous.)

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Articles for Creation broken

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 August 2012 12:36, Steven Zhang cro0...@gmail.com wrote:
 So, I had a look at articles for creation today, and there was nearly 1,000 
 pending article submissions. Articles for creation has changed a lot since 
 2008 - it was of a similar structure to XFD - all submissions for a 
 particular day were on one page, and people could come along and approve or 
 reject based in certain criteria.

 I think that system worked well. True, we have a lot more article creations, 
 but I think it gave more visibility than the current system where everything 
 is subpaged.

 Some may think that the bar at AFC is set too high but this high bar 
 discourages new users, especially when their submissions stay unreviewed for 
 weeks at a time. And since editor retention is something we are trying to 
 focus on, it seems a worthy project since many new users have their first 
 experiences in AFC. The lack of volunteers in wikiprojects like AFC is not a 
 new thing, so it's not that volunteers have reduced. I think we need to 
 consider if AFC is something we still want to have, and if so, how can we 
 improve it?

You are saying that there is a backlog (a problem of success), so the
thing is broken? I know attention-seeking rhetoric is normal in our
discussions, but what exactly is your logic? You preferred the older
system. I don't know what you are saying about the high bar.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Categorisation by gender

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 July 2012 10:47, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
 Hi all,

 The English Wikipedia categorises biographies by gender in some
 circumstances (eg athletes), but not systematically in the way that
 German does - there are no supercategories of Men, Women, etc,
 designed to list all members of those groups, and plenty of biography
 articles have no gendered categories. There are, of course, good
 reasons to avoid this, and conversely good reasons to do it... but I'm
 wondering why we do it this way.

Hmm, you really want to go there? What is ultimately verifiable has to
take account of [[Category:Sex chromosome aneuploidies]]. Not to speak
of other intrusions.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Categorisation by gender

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 July 2012 12:32,  james.far...@gmail.com wrote:
 Actress is certainly not obsolescent in common usage, and I would suggest 
 it is not the role of Wikipedia to redefine the English language.

The point here is whether occupation is gendered, though, in this
case. Cf. firefighter, seafarer and so on.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 21 June 2012 11:53, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 (God I look my age. The ponytail is going!)

Mmm ... with Gemma Griffiths ... yes she beats you on hairdo.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 21 June 2012 12:35, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoeks...@gmail.com wrote:
 Not bad David!

 I tend to take a bit more of a liberal guideline on fixing obvious
 blatant vandalism: Google CEO Larry Page is a great big poopyhead
 should be reverted no matter what, even if you have a conflict of
 interest, or are Larry Page himself, and would have thought this is
 generally accepted in the community.

We are wedded to consensus; yet David had to walk a thin line. We are
not really used to giving prudential advice. In concrete situations I
hold myself to giving correct advice. The thing is that I am
probably using contextual cues that are hard to describe. (I'd better
stop here since I feel a go metaphor coming on.)

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 13 June 2012 14:14, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 They're also interested in
 https://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Draft_best_practice_guidelines_for_PR
 which is a how-not-to-foul-up guide put together by WMUK. But of
 course that's descriptive and not normative.

I think a line you could take is like this: there is that guide, which
starts with chat and what Lord Bell and Jimbo say, and ends up with a
list of Don'ts. It's all perfectly fine except that the order is
completely back-to-front. Don't share your password with anyone?
Merely a violation of terms of use of the site when there is megaphone
diplomacy to do. Who is likely to share passwords? The classic
solitary-geek-in-bedroom stereotype, or a busy person who would like
his/her deputy to update something while he/she goes to a client
meeting?

Metaphor time: some people think there should be a litmus test for who
is allowed to edit, some think there should be a duck test, and some
people think no test (just AGF until you can't, in other words). Duck
test is closer to the truth for COI, and perceived COI should be a
reason for switching to another test: no amount of good edits outweigh
the bad. All sins are then mortal.

Good paid editors who have an actual COI are basically like poker
players, aren't they? If they are smart they are only occasionally
bluffing. That is why we hate the idea. Either we have to check all
their edits, or we have to know more than they do about tells.

HTH

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 1 June 2012 11:19, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 And deletionists have no policy knowledge?

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

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

Gah. WP really needs the tension between quality and quantity to be
expressed by a two-party system like it needs a hole in the head. And
it needs deletion debates whose length is greatest where the outcome
matters least (i.e. the indifference point for inclusion) like several
more.  Further, people who think knowledge of policy amounts to
knowing the letter of the law are a menace, as are people who think
detailed policies are there to help them win arguments, rather than
for the general good of the project (it being easier to prove your
point if you assume what you want to prove at the outset).

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 30 May 2012 20:41, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:

 My view is that if such experiments are to be carried
 out, it would be better if they were designed and conducted by those
 able to restrain themselves from such snark.

 Better how?

I'll add this to my list of If you have to ask, you may never know topics.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 22 May 2012 17:48, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
 On 5/22/12, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 Brian McNeil's productive work in Edinburgh. I particularly like the
 idea of recruiting newbies at libraries - with all those lovely old
 printed references right there to hand. Get those library computers
 being used for more than webmail. This could work anywhere.

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

Would be time to discuss the how, not just the what, then. How to
get newcomers over initial hurdles. Just as with the issue of article
quality, there is a bit more to it than may seem at first sight.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 May 2012 19:41, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 And why haven't they taken those who generalise broadly from a single
 example with them?

 Are you denying the general decline in editors, even as Internet usage
 continues to increase?

Are you perpetrating a straw man fallacy? I'll happily assert that I
find fewer hoax articles than I used to (in fact none I think for a
couple of years). One crafted to get past New Pages Patrol doesn't
mean much.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 May 2012 17:32, Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote:

 That conclusion would be far more convincing if you weren't who you are.

That's [[ad hominem]] against Carcharoth, and you really need either
to withdraw it, or back it up. The former option is much preferable.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 May 2012 20:37, Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Charles Matthews 
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

 On 17 May 2012 17:32, Durova nadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote:

  That conclusion would be far more convincing if you weren't who you are.

 That's [[ad hominem]] against Carcharoth, and you really need either
 to withdraw it, or back it up. The former option is much preferable.

 Charles


 That reaction certainly comes as a surprise.  Why would you construe an
 attack or a fallacy?

 In any meaningful experiment the researcher attempts to reduce the
 variables to a single factor.  Surely you'll agree that an established
 registered editor's contributions might encounter a different degree of
 scrutiny from an unregistered IP's edits.  Carcharoth himself concedes the
 possibility.  What need could there be to apologize for agreeing?

Thank you for the clarification.

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 May 2012 16:49, Gwern Branwen gwe...@gmail.com wrote:

 Indeed. Why *are* the skeptical geeks now on Reddit and not Wikipedia?

And why haven't they taken those who generalise broadly from a single
example with them?

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] UK hospital doctors using WIkipedia sensibly

[Charles Matthews]

On 25 April 2012 13:30, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

I suspect our medical articles are pretty much
 written by the medical community.

The clinical medicine WikiProject is all doctors, I believe, in
practical terms. In a talk I heard given by one of them,  it was
pretty clear that the core group of around 20 knew each other as
professionals.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 April 2012 15:22, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:


 Rules can cause trouble, but they have one benefit: at least ideally, it's
 clear when you have or haven't violated them.  (Many Wikipedia rules are
 not
 ideal, but that's a discussion for another day.)  It's a lot harder to
 inject personal prejudice to the issue when the rule spells out what you're
 allowed to do.


 I was thinking about this graphically, with an x-axis measuring
involvement in, commitment to, or  responsibility for Wikipedia. The y-axis
representing the value attached to detailed policies, in enWP's sense, as a
definition of what the site is or should be. I'm pretty sure that in a
notional plot the spread of views would go north-west to south-east. Jimbo
is somewhere asymptotically off to the right, for sure. I'm quite sure that
when x goes negative you get people whose view is that policy should be
drafted in entirely legalistic terms. Those people, who do not have WP's
best interests at heart, are always arguing for a disconnect between the
letter and spirit of policy, because they have no interest at all in the
spirit.

There are probably some outliers: why wouldn't there be, in a diverse
community? But roughly speaking most editors who could get near the ArbCom
are interested in making the site work a bit better, rather than pacifying
the ghost of Jeremy Bentham.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 April 2012 14:03, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:41 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

  On 19 April 2012 12:31, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:
   On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Charles Matthews 
   charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 
   Continuation of conversation:
   Look, we're all impressed with Wikipedia. But you seem to be saying
  that
   to edit I have to put your project ahead of my day job; and so I think
  you
   guys are just a bit crazed.
 
   Well, in reality the discussion may be more like this:
 
 
  No, Charles has rendered the conversations I've had on the subject
  pretty accurately (if skeletally).



 I'm sure both scenarios occur. I don't know what the solution is.

 Ah, the Socratic moment.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 April 2012 15:38, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 19 April 2012 15:34, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

  Those people, who do not have WP's
  best interests at heart, are always arguing for a disconnect between the
  letter and spirit of policy, because they have no interest at all in the
  spirit.


 Well, yes. The entire point of this paper is to demand a more gameable
 system.


 So the nuanced point would be that my model might need revision, if a
credible group of Benthamites (sorry, I'm stuck in about 1820 here)
emerged who could make the case for a new codification of policy. This
week's Signpost article on paid editing is at least a straw in the wind.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 April 2012 16:01, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote:


 I liked Andreas's way of putting this earlier:

  Positive bias and advertorials *can* be odious, but activist editing with a
  negative bent has traditionally been the greater problem in Wikipedia, in
  my view, and is the type of bias the Wikipedia system has traditionally
  favoured. Not doing harm is, in my view, more important than preventing
  the opposite.

[[Primum non nocere]] is worth reading, but of course it is about
medicine, and is only an aspiration, and does not mean physicians have
to treat conservatively. It means they have justify medical
intervention.

Assuming that do no harm in the sense of journalism is supposed to
be applied to WP, it does fall under WP:NOT to some extent.
Indiscriminate information ought to be a reason to delete. We do
have to justify intervening in people's lives by hosting an article
about them. On the other hand, we very often can give that
justification. It doesn't have to be in the terms an investigative
journalist would use.

Charles

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 April 2012 12:48, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 PR people who edited Wikipedia get crucified. Counterattack: reduce
 trust in Wikipedia.

 snip


 Paper: http://www.prsa.org/Intelligence/PRJournal/

 When the talk pages were used to request edits, it was found to typically
take days for a response and 24% never received one.

Some spin? So responses were days rather than hours. And there was a
response in 76% of cases.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 April 2012 13:38, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  They say you have to wait 2-5 days for a response after requesting
 changes
  as though that is a bad thing. I'm very impressed with that response
 time.
  How many commercial encyclopaedias can do better?

 I hope you're joking here. :)

 Just in case you weren't: commercial encyclopedias have a sophisticated
 editorial and legal process in place to ensure they do not print defamatory
 content. Sometimes subjects are sent a draft before publication, and are
 given an opportunity to make an input.

 Wikipedia has none of that. What it does have is a history of articles
 littered with malice, bias and inaccuracy (witness its history of
 arbitration cases).


Yes, but note that PR folk are not just employed to deal with defamatory
material. In fact in the case of defamation it's more probably a lawyer's
work. They are professionals in verbal massage of material. This is what
they can charge money for.


 I was struck by the following passage in the paper:

 ---o0o---

 Although another one of the five pillars is that Wikipedia does not have
 firm rules – Wales recently stated, “This is not complicated. There is a
 very simple “bright
 line” rule that constitutes best practice: do not edit Wikipedia directly
 if you are a paid
 advocate. Respect the community by interacting with us appropriately”
 (Wales, 2012a,
 para 2).

 This directly conflicts with the Wikipedia FAQ/Article subjects (2012) page
 that specifically
 asks public relations professionals to remove vandalism, fix minor errors
 in spelling,
 grammar, usage or facts, provide references for existing content, and add
 or update facts
 with references such as number of employees or event details.

 ---o0o---

 On that, at least, they're correct.


Yes indeed. Jimbo neither makes policy nor enforces it, of course. What we
have here is an ongoing loop in being able to read WP:COI properly. I
believe the guideline on COI to be the best available take on this issue.
However - and it's a big however - we are learning that the limitation on
COI to a universal statement makes it harder for those with particular
types of COI to understand. This applies both to paid editing, and to
activist editing (I think you will have no trouble understanding this,
Andreas ...), as well as autobiography.

The COI guideline is supposed to be best advice, and in a nutshell it
says really don't edit in certain ways when you are too close to a topic.
Now, in the non-nutshell, discursive version it of course says that who you
are and what you believe and how you might be rewarded for editing are not
the issue: if you are a POV pusher that is the problem we have with you,
not anything else. It is not illegal in our terms to do certain things
when you have a _potential_ conflict of interest.

But the real-life situation is that someone paid to edit has a boss and/or
paymaster. Jimbo knows what he is doing here with sending out a soundbite,
rather than citing the page. The boss can understand the soundbite, and is
almost certainly not going to bother to understand the page.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 April 2012 13:53, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:

 snip

 My specific experience was while consulting on another matter for a firm;
 they were surprised to find their name had been noted in connection with
 some years-before legal action (quite a disturbing one) in a prominent
 printed encyclopaedia.


snip




 So all in all it took about 18 months for a correction to be published.


Interesting, indeed.

To be fair about the time-criticality: it does matter in that mirror sites
will refresh their WP dumps on some basis that probably isn't daily. OTOH
we do offer the OTRS route also for complaints, and that presumably offers
a better triage.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 18 April 2012 15:26, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:

  This directly conflicts with the Wikipedia FAQ/Article subjects (2012)
 page
  that specifically
  asks public relations professionals to remove vandalism, fix minor
 errors
  in spelling,
  grammar, usage or facts, provide references for existing content, and
 add
  or update facts
  with references such as number of employees or event details.
 But the real-life situation is that someone paid to edit has a boss and/or
 paymaster. Jimbo knows what he is doing here with sending out a soundbite,
 rather than citing the page. The boss can understand the soundbite, and is
 almost certainly not going to bother to understand the page.

 Let me get this straight.  You are arguing It is okay to for Jimbo to tell
 the company something which contradicts policy because it's more likely
 the company will understand the non-policy than the actual policy.


The COI guideline is not an official policy. That is the kind of
distinction lost on many people, it seems.

Jimbo is accountable in some rarefied sense for whatever he says. To whom,
it is not quite clear. But, assuming he is speaking in what you could call
his ambassadorial role, which is one of his hats, his job is to act as
diplomats do. What he says is perfectly fine as a clarification of the
community's position (which is what he states it to be). The
counter-argument runs like this: we showed your guideline to our legal
department, and we are told it doesn't say that. To which the answer is:
show legal documents to your legal department, and you'll get good sense.
Show documents drafted by our community, who aren't lawyers, to your legal
department, and you'll get crud. We know what to make of wikilawyers. If we
make it quite clear to ordinary folk what we really mean, and you go after
weaknesses in the drafting by calling in your hired legal guns who are paid
infinitely more an hour than our volunteers, just to prove we don't know
what we are saying, then you are not respecting us, are you?

So Jimbo says that in a more punchy way.


 Yes indeed. Jimbo neither makes policy nor enforces it, of course.

 Besides, it's their own fault for listening to Jimbo anyway.  They should
 know enough about Wikipedia to understand that he doesn't make policy.  I
 mean, he's just the public face of Wikipedia, why would anyone who needs to
 know about Wikipedia policy listen to him?

 To any normal person, this is simply a case of Wikipedia contradicting
 itself.  The fact that it's not because Jimbo doesn't make policy is a
 piece of Wiki-arcana that the outsider really can't be expected to
 understand.  The fact that we're deliberately trying to get the people to
 listen to Jimbo and ignore the actual policy just makes it worse.

 See above. Jimbo can leverage his celebrity status to communicate to
people who only read business magazines and books. The fact is that there
is a published literature on Wikipedia, and people who really have an
interest in the site can read that, not the five-second version.

All policies and guidelines come with a context, you know.

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 16 April 2012 14:12, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

 The problem arises in the cases of articles which are libelous,
 malicious, or manifestly unfair. Other instances, other than people who
 are clearly notable, are not relevant; it doesn't matter whether we have
 articles or not, promotional or critical, so it doesn't matter if the
 subject has the power to delete. I realize that sentence is hard to
 understand. Basically it means that except for the famous or maligned, it
 doesn't matter whether there is an article or not or what its content is.


That certainly accords with my long-held view, that the whole business of
making inclusionist-deletionist a two-party system breaks down to the
extent that it involves long discussions on points of principle when the
particular case makes only the most marginal difference. (This, naturally,
is an argument that is like to offend both sides.) In starker terms, if we
concede, now or later, that we don't have an unlimited supply of editor
time, then it would be better if it were spent in more productive ways.

But in any case the overarching argument on how worthwhile it is to work on
a given area, such as BLP, doesn't have traction, given that editors will
self-assign as usual. At the indifference point we should use PROD-like
deletion, and expanding its scope would seem to be the answer. Perhaps
relaxing the rule that PROD nominations can only be used once in the
lifetime of an article, for BLPs, offers a way forward.

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 10 April 2012 14:33, Daniel Mietchen daniel.mietc...@googlemail.com wrote:

snip

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

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

Charles

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 4 April 2012 15:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:



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

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

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 4 April 2012 16:24, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:
snip

 I would suggest as a modest proposal that we do away with Wikipedia is an
 encyclopedia.  I've already suggested that we do away with the IAR
 clause to improve the encyclopedia.


Oh, I don't know, it still has explanatory value. Comprehensive
topic-based tertiary source has twice as many syllables.


 Wikipedia is an encyclopedia constantly gets misinterpreted to mean we
 may never allow other concerns to take precedence over being
 encyclopediac.  This is wrong.


Mmm. There is a certain rather blinkered singlemindedness that can set in
with some people, so perhaps I know what you are driving at. But why do you
think such people would be better at interpreting other attempts to define
the scope of the mission? The problem is surely not so much in the wording,
as in the approach.

In fact I'm in favour of the rearguard action that regards the pressure to
define key concepts ever more precisely as the expulsion of common sense.

Charles



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

[Charles Matthews]

On 4 April 2012 20:16, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote:


 Putting these together, I would make a wild stab at saying that it is
 unlikely more than half our BLPs - about a quarter of a million
 entries - are stubs. I'm not sure I'd go as low as 100,000, but it's
 interesting how divergent the estimates from different sources are...

 100,000 is definitely on the low side: the point is that it is six figures.

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 27 March 2012 15:52, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:

 On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, Charles Matthews wrote:

 Reading what you have written above, and then

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Biographies_of_**
 living_persons/Noticeboard#**Chrishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#Chris
 Butler_(private investigator)

 and other serious discussions on that page, I'm unconvinced that you
 actually have a point here.


 Why?

 I clarified what I didn't think worked: BLP rules which say do what you
 are
 required to do anyway according to other rules, but try really hard this
 time.  How exactly can such a rule ever being a benefit, and how did it
 bring any benefits in this case?


 So you have been arguing that without the BLP policy, and without the
noticeboard set up to help compliance with the policy, just the same close
investigations of the actual reliability of sources that nominally fall
within RS would be going on?  I don't agree, and I wonder if anyone else
does. I'm not the biggest fan of noticeboards, qua unchartered processes;
but in this case it seems to be working, and having WP:BLP there fairly
clearly has something to do with it.

I note we had a silly onsite discussion on WP:COI recently, based on a
similar and quite fallacious style of argument that the COI guideline was
in effect vacuous. It isn't, and BLP policy isn't, and it seems to me that
to argue that these things make no odds at all fundamentally misunderstands
two things: (i) that pages that express a single and clear idea in the
policy area really are needed; and (ii) the way enforcement actually works
is by decentralisation. We have to do things in a way that scales, and
looking at (for example) NPOV in different places in different ways makes
sense. Or putting it another way, unpacking our ideas is worthwhile, and we
have gone a long way since saying five pillars was enough.

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 27 March 2012 18:05, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:

 On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, David Gerard wrote:

 The key point to remember about BLPs is: no eventualism. If an article
 about someone dead 200 years says something nasty and wrong, that's
 not great, but it's not urgent. If an article about a living person
 says something nasty and wrong, that is urgent, and we can't just
 assume the wiki process will on balance fix it in the fullness of
 time. It's the simplest possible way of doing it and it's a vast
 improvement over the previous situation. It's not perfection, but
 calling it a failure is hyperbolic.


 Anything which is *different* between BLP and policies for other articles,
 such as a no-eventualism policy, could conceivably be a benefit.

 My complaint is about BLP rules that do not do this.


I'm reminded of a story told me by a friend who used to work in PC support,
back in the day. He was once called out by a guy who'd deleted all the
files whose purpose he didn't understand, and wondered why his machine
didn't work. Please don't try this at home.

Charles



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

[Charles Matthews]

On 26 March 2012 16:17, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:

 On Sat, 24 Mar 2012, Andreas Kolbe wrote:

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

 These sound like sensible ideas.


 Doesn't work.  Since we already require a high standard for sourcing for
 everything, this doesn't actually put any additional requirements on BLPs.

 For some reason a lot of BLP policy is like that: here we have the same
 policy we use for everything else, but we really mean it this time.  This
 never works, of course.


That's an overstatement, of course. In several ways.

Anyone would think that we have no BLPs that are respectable. I know of
some that aren't - there are a couple of troublesome ones I have babysat
like that - but the issues there do seem to come from setting the bar too
low for sourcing (either of laundered gossip that is negative, or dubious
positive stuff, do come up).  If we set an academic type of standard,
rather than a mainstream media, some of the problems would go away.

Of course a proportion of the BLPs would also go away also. So it's no good
pretending it's not a trade-off; and the community still decides whether
the bar should be raised.

Charles



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

[Charles Matthews]

On 23 March 2012 15:06, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote:

snip


 - We need fewer biographies.

 - We need to give borderline-notable people (people like Hawkins; not MPs)
 an easy opt-out.

 - We could probably benefit from making real-life name registration
 mandatory for BLP editing, and hosting them on a different project, or at
 the very least introducing flagged revisions for BLPs, and making the right
 to approve BLP changes one that requires familiarity with BLP policy, and a
 commitment to uphold it.

 - We need to abandon ADAM and make sure, somehow, that biographies are fair
 and balanced. We can't do that with the amount of biographies we currently
 have.


I think a serious position paper on BLP is possible.  There are several
aspects:

* We are currently not very good at recognising when biographical
information is indiscriminate (see
[[WP:INDISCRIMINATEhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:INDISCRIMINATE]]).
We could get better at that, as a way of addressing what Andreas is calling
ADAM.

*We can certainly look at special notability guidelines for classes of
individuals (e.g. politicians, employees of the media, entertainers,
sportspeople, reality TV stars). Some divide-and-conquer to understand the
more problematic areas in their own terms would be good.

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

*Certainly extending control of revisions to all BLP pages is an option to
consider; naturally this is a major step requiring wide community support,
and that in turn probably requires a reasonable amount of preparation, not
phrased in too much immoderate language.

*Tools and techniques. I'm a fan of the idea of using Related changes  on
chunks of BLP, so that patrolling say 1% at a time becomes easier. Hiving
off BLP into its own community isn't a solution that is clearly going to
work, let's say. Technical concentration on the material, on the other
hand, might do quite a lot to highlight the difficult cases.

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 24 March 2012 11:37, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 24 March 2012 11:25, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 snip

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


snip



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


Oh, there's definitely a knack to this business. Imagine that we wanted to
hive off the Internet meme etc. stuff from WP to some hypothetical sister
project (there is a genuine argument along the lines that historians of
the future will be grateful to have at least some of this stuff on
record); and leave the material of which it could be said this guy is
just a footnote now ... but it's a footnote we should have. Now try to
translate what that means into the kind of language our policy documents
tend to use (all universals and epistemology). Doesn't work easily (cf. the
GNG).

We'd have to get a bit sophistimacated about our content, in terms at least
of current versus permanent interest.

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 24 March 2012 16:23, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:

 I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose
 isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful
 information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that
 BLPs are useful to people. As long as there are sufficient reliable
 sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why
 we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the
 General Notability Guideline says.

 One of the more obvious problems with WP:NOTE is that it has been fairly
unclear whether it is a necessary or a sufficient condition for notability.
As currently written it is phrased as a sufficient condition, which
somewhat surprises me.

(Not the confusion itself, which explains why a thread like this can
contain diametrically opposite opinions.)

But for reasons internal to what we think guidelines are there for.
Guidelines, after all, function best when they give editors a clear idea of
what Wikipedia expects of them, personally. Like it says ,a generally
accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow.  Editors should
attempt only to create articles on notable topics, in other words.

Reading the guideline the other way round is obviously possible; and the
way the main text is phrased might suggest it. But, and here's the point of
the thread in fact, it is perfectly possible to argue that reading the GNG
as a sufficient condition for anything is flawed. Wikipedia is a wiki, and
wikis do give you permission to edit. Saying that verifiability from enough
reliable sources is a sufficient condition that an article can exist
carries its own assumptions.

In particular the salience condition for biographical facts gets lost. I
see that whatever we used to have written about this concept has become
hard to find onsite, which is troubling. Non-salient facts from dodgy
sources added to biographies is almost a definition of tabloid writing, so
I think we should be concerned.

Charles
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[WikiEN-l] Article dabs and category dabs

[Charles Matthews]

There are reasons to disambiguate article titles, and reasons to
disambiguate categories. But should the category system simply mimic what
the articles do? I was surprised to find at a current CfD discussion (on
Category:Matrices) that there are supporters of this idea, which I don't
see mentioned on [[Wikipedia:Category names]].

We don't disambiguate article titles until we have to, as a general rule.
It seems to me a major shift in thinking that we should not apply the same
logic to categories.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on

[Charles Matthews]

On 11 March 2012 03:37, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote:
snip

  The reason we're starting off by seeing
 if we can improve quality and inform newbies with Special:NewPages rather
 than Special:RecentChanges is, firstly, because it's a lot easier to trial
 there (less stuff going on), and secondly because we'd been led to believe
 that in the eyes of the community, new pages can be a serious problem. One
 of the most vocal editors telling us this was an issue was you.

 To clarify, it might be a help to state what it is that is apparently
broken that you are trying to fix. If it is the existing low barrier to
article creation by one-and-all, it is worth pointing out that wiki systems
were designed to have such low barriers. If it is grumbling, it is worth
pointing out that grumbling is always with us. (And understanding what it
is you are trying to fix is surely a precondition to assessing any
prototype. No one owes it to you to do that rather than anything else with
their time.)

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on

[Charles Matthews]

On 11 March 2012 08:56, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote:


 A low barrier to contribution is not a problem. What we are trying to fix
 is the overwork of patrollers and the fact that new editors go into the
 article creation process unaware of what to expect and ignorant of policy,
 which understandably ends up leading to disappointment.

 Still not happy with this formulation. I think the sentences contradict
each other. You are trying to fix, you say,

*potential disappointment of new editors;
*overwork of patrollers.

Unless you discourage some contributors, the volume of contributions would
be the same? The nature of the contributions would not necessarily be the
same. I would certainly be leading off with To avoid disappointment at the
outcome of our process, please take a moment 

But in any case what you are apparently trying is to fix is the _nature of
contributions of inexperienced editors_. There is a may/must distinction in
how you go about it, which seems to me to be key.

Charles


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[WikiEN-l] Digital inclusion

[Charles Matthews]

I suppose we're in favour of it. I note that [[digital inclusion]] is a
redlink, for the reason that it was a redirect to [[e-inclusion]]; which
went down under a PROD in October of last year, as  [[WP:OR|Original
research]] about a [[WP:NEO|non-notable neologism]]. Something of a
disaster, given that digital inclusion is a notable neologism.

Anyone prepared to revive? A good cause.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on

[Charles Matthews]

On 10 March 2012 11:16, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 snip

Currently, when a registered newbie clicks on a redlink, they get
 automatically taken to an edit page where they can create the article, but
 without any context as to what is actually happening.  With the proposed
 system,  instead of seeing a blank edit window devoid of context, they'll
 see a new page that gives them various options.[3] They can create an
 article there, go through the article wizard, or go back to wherever they
 were before if they didn't mean to end up at that URL.


What sensible newbies really would need is (i) a place to draft, and (ii)
advice on drafting.

If a new editor
 tries to create the article, they'll be informed that they need a
 familiarity with policy, an absence of a COI and several references
 (amongst other things) before the tool recommends they create it.[4] If
 they don't have those things, they'll be directed to the Article Creation
 Wizard.

 I.e. you put the barriers to entry before anything else. This could be
detrimental, you know.


 This is an experiment. Our hypothesis is that this could help increase the
 quality of new articles and reduce patrollers’ workload, while making the
 process more welcoming at the same time.


What is this hypothesis based on?

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on

[Charles Matthews]

On 10 March 2012 12:55, Oliver Keyes oke...@wikimedia.org wrote:


  If a new editor
   tries to create the article, they'll be informed that they need a
   familiarity with policy, an absence of a COI and several references
   (amongst other things) before the tool recommends they create it.[4] If
   they don't have those things, they'll be directed to the Article
 Creation
   Wizard.
  
   I.e. you put the barriers to entry before anything else. This could be
  detrimental, you know.
 
  Quite possibly; that's why, as said below, it's an experiment. It may be
 that it reduces the number of incoming articles without any substantial
 increase in quality. It may be it reduces the number, but increases the
 quality. It may be that by providing clearer guidance and making people
 aware that they can contribute, it increases one or the other or both
 without detriment. We simply don't know: but we want to find out :).

 I'm particularly concerned that ham-fisted reference to the COI guideline
could put off good and conscientious people we do want editing, while
having no effect on those who are motivated in such a way as to have an
actual COI.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Undue weight

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 February 2012 13:31, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote:

  http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
 

 Subject of a thread on foundation-l


 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-February/subject.html


But a suitable topic for this list. I have to say that with this kind of
thing, treated as an anecdote, my first reaction is that triage helps: is
this (a) both sides at fault (common enough), (b) one side at fault, or (c)
the system working as intended? If (c), of course, it is possible to argue
that our policies are so miraculous that the intended result is always
also the optimal result. But I don't suppose we always sincerely believe
that.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Ancient merge proposals

[Charles Matthews]

On 8 February 2012 12:26, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

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


 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heliotrop_Rotating_Houseoldid=467204628

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

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


[[Category:Articles to be merged]].

Charles


 Carcharoth

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

[Charles Matthews]

On 20 January 2012 13:18, wiki doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:

snip


 Yes, but.

 Ultimately, a paper encyclopedia says This article is written by a
 qualified person (you can see his name) he has been chosen by an expert
 panel (here are their names) and his work will be reviewed by them. All of
 the above named people, and this encyclopedia, are willing to stake their
 professional reputations on the accuracy of this work and that we have
 credible quality control - whether that's enough for you, is up to you


This is the interesting (if now quite old) debate about traditional
encyclopedias. Yes, Britannica or any other old-style commercial
encyclopedia is keen to tell you about expert authors. Less keen, for
example, to tell you when the article was written, as opposed to who wrote
it; the expert not having a crystal ball rather affects the value of an
article (say in science or technology). This was the starting point of
Harvey Einbinder's The Myth of the Britannica (1964), which even
Wikipedians might find rather unfair to EB (though the detail is
fascinating - seems Einstein got the same $80 as anyone else for an article
which allowed them to promote the work using his name ... wonder how hard
he worked to write it).

One should note that the market works to favour encyclopedias with a
business model that allows later editions in which revision is kept to
essentials. That's how it is: initiating a new high-quality print
encyclopedia requires money up front, and the investment is paid off by
having later editions that require substantially less writing bought in,
rather than done in-house. I don't know this for a fact, but I doubt
encyclopedia writers get a contract in which they are guaranteed the right
to revise their work for each edition - implausible given the way
publishers' minds works.

Anyway we know that (for English speakers at least) market forces, given
the barriers to entry, did not really drive quality right up. Einbinder
pretty much gets that correct, as I recall.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Error at Special:CongressLookup

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 January 2012 09:55, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote:

 [crossposted to Foundation-l and WikiEN-l]

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

 Can someone please change zip code to ZIP code again?  (This error
 was corrected in the blackout notice yesterday.)  I haven't managed to
 get anyone's attention via the IRC channels.  Thanks!

 Probably should be everyone's highest priority, once the lost 24 hours of
editing enWP has been caught up.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Managing knowledge

[Charles Matthews]

On 8 January 2012 15:56, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Thought some here might be interested in this:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16443825

 It's about the history of managing knowledge and information.


It's [[Lisa Jardine]], so the history will be OK ...  the main point seems
to be about navigation to a book versus search via an engine. But it's
a bit ironic that the example involving WP is about a how to example on
darning, when we aren't supposed to be writing such articles.

Charles


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[WikiEN-l] Rules on WP, was Re: Talk pages Considered Harmful (for references)

[Charles Matthews]

On 22 December 2011 18:10, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote:


 And for the general problem is something I've often noted: Wikipedia is set
 up to force people to follow the rules.


Interesting debating point, but I think the comment is ahistorical. It is
more accurate, IMO, to note that slavish rule-following on enWP is a
characteristic of non-old school editors. It may well be that the
community as a whole has shifted its centre of gravity on this issue. (The
point covers both the curatorial and disciplinary functions on the site, so
I'd make the case for parsing it further.)


 And the more you use it's in the
 rules as a club to hit bad users with, the more others can use it as a
 club
 to force bad ideas through; there's just no defense to what I want
 follows the
 rules.  You see this all the time for BLPs: Don't you have any empathy?
 We're hurting a real person.  You're just trying to distract us from this
 rule.  Your own personal feelings aren't an excuse to ignore our
 policies...


We have IAR, and slavishness might be called IIAR, so it should be
ignored as a guideline (IIIAR should trump IIAR). This could all get silly
but according to some logical stuff, that has been known since about 1920,
 I^4AR is probably no different from I^2AR.

In other words, if the writ of ignore all rules no longer runs because
the community thinks of it as too retro, there can still be some
meta-principle about not following the wrong path just because rules
indicate it. Rule-bound is like muscle-bound, a pejorative, and rightly
so.

BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be hardest to argue that
rules should be ignored.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] A reader's experience with The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 11 December 2011 14:13, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote:

 Our own internal discussions have long reflected on the unfriendliness and
 undue bureaucracy of Wikipedia. Generally we're good at the trade-off but
 if we start claiming with a straight face that it's benign rather than a
 necessary evil we'll have lost something important.

 While the complainant here might not have prevailed on the merits, his
 complaints about the spikiness of the interface were legitimate and should
 not have been met with defensive comments that sought to reflect the
 criticism back onto him.

 I would agree that it is well worth pondering the nature of the interface
between the administrative pages (in the Wikipedia: namespace) and the
general public who may wish to access them. I don't know any single
onsite explanation of processes and noticeboards which would be a good
starting point. Then I haven't looked for such a thing. A main page
explaining the whole namespace looks like an inherently good idea (whether
or not those who need it would find it).

That said, I deprecate getting design issues mixed up with others. The
use of emotive terms such as cold and unfriendly implies things about
intention and fault that aren't exactly helpful. I don't know whether
arguing that WP is sui generis is defensive or not. I can think of
several issues where it allows a reply like you'd have more of a case if
WP were ..., to fill in to taste with staffed  by paid workers/for
profit/offering a different service/run on a billion dollar
budget/Facebook, etc. These answers seem to me to offer analytical
insight.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Guidelines on how much we take from a source?

[Charles Matthews]

On 9 December 2011 14:13, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 2:52 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

  So you have to pick the right level and get a source that suits the
  article you are working on. For an article on a major battle, you
  would need several books on that battle. For an article on a major
  general, you would need several biographies of that general. And so
  on.

 I suppose that depends on what you're intending to do.

 I intend to improve WWI articles with the resources I can find the
 time to get through in the next 18 months or so and they will fall
 rather short of your recommendations, I'm afraid. It is vanishingly
 unlikely I will purchase three books on a single battle or general
 unless some burning passion is aroused as I go.

 More probably I will add sentences and citations, scattered about,
 from the few resources I get hold of.

 I'd strongly recommend, for a topic as big as WWI, that you get access to
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online (access is free with a
UK library card). The point is to use the full text search, which covers
over 50,000 biographies.

I've just tried this: First World War is over 4,000 hits. Ypres is over
200 (one is Anne Boleyn); second battle of Ypres is more like the right
size of search. It led me shortly to [[Mir Dast]] VC; whose article could
easily be improved from the ODNB. (Handy template for refs is {{ODNBweb}}.)

I'm a fan, true, but I think as a starting point for topics the ODNB is
great.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] A reader's experience with The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 5 December 2011 22:08, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
 snip
 
  I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia Byzantine, which is the
  basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse
  the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem
 to
  me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind
  that more and better written  manual pages would only work better if
  people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the
 context
  of complex systems they don't understand.
 
  Charles

 You're making the argument that some complex systems (bureaucracy) are
 necessary and intrinsic to the success of the project. I think most
 people would agree. People are not challenging the existence of any
 bureaucracy; they're saying there is too much, that it's too difficult
 for the average person, and that we hallow bureaucracy and its mastery
 above more important considerations.


Bureaucracy may have a neutral meaning, but most people take it as a
pejorative for complex system of administration. They assume the literary
models that spring to mind (the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit,
Kafka, Catch-22). They assume also analogies with complaints procedures or
form-filling applications that we all meet from time to time.

The fairest comparison in the case in hand is the Circumlocution Office.
I'm saying it's not too fair: there is a dedicated forum for deletion
review, and it isn't impossibly hard to navigate to it. Compared to being
able to ask the deleting admin to think again, it is bureaucratic, and
possibly process-bound. But it is also more likely to get to the real point
of such requests, I think: outcomes that are better documented. We could
tweak this or any other aspect of the system as a whole, but as of right
now I don't see any proposals to fold separate pages into a more
centralised place.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Lobbyists and Wikipedia (again)

[Charles Matthews]

On 6 December 2011 16:08, Sam Blacketer sam.blacke...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 3:24 PM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote:

 
  This sounds like a splendid idea. Perhaps we could supplement it by
  informing criminals that they can avoid a life of crime by getting an
  education and a job, or maybe we could tell politicians to tell the
  truth. Or maybe News of the World journalists could be informed of the
  many story-gathering opportunities that don't involve hacking into
  people's voicemail systems.
 

 I don't know, but do any of the examples you cite involve the use of
 Wikipedia, you know that website where they assume good faith?


I think the NOTW journalists are now looking for jobs that don't involve a
lifetime of crime.

Nearer to home, I have had a few contacts/discussions involving points
material to how a spin-doctor/lobbyist should operate within the Wikipedia
framework. But anyone who really understands what Wikipedia is after should
be able to provide the right advice.

AGF goes with assume complete ignorance as the baseline. The problem with
PR types is that the approach is typically in line with the proverb about a
little knowledge being a dangerous thing. I was sitting in a pub on a
family occasion when, oops, up comes the COI guideline, with someone
telling me that they'd had the company lawyer look over what they were
doing. I had to make the point back that our guidelines are not legal
documents. That sort of thing. We might make our expectations, in the case
of companies, clearer along the lines that we want the kind of article a
business school academic might write as background for a case study, not
the type a flack would put together.

The trouble is that the Web world is populated by autodidacts; in fact the
whole thrust of the personal computing revolution is that we all assume
nothing should need any training any more. The market is supposed to match
supply of training to demand, but if there is a point to this thread it
would that that proposition looks a bit suspect in this context.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] A reader's experience with The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 5 December 2011 09:52, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:

 On 12/04/11 1:10 PM, Will Beback wrote:


snip


  I've noticed that a lot of critics of Wikipedia began by trying to
 promote
  some non-notable cause only to be rebuffed.
 

 Do we get anywhere when we approach a problem with such an attitude of
 defensiveness?


I don't know. Will's comment seems to be  empirically accurate. It's an ad
hominem argument (as yours is); and ad hominem is sometimes a fallacy.  We
do tend to hear in the blogosphere about the cases where someone is vested
in some way in having Wikipedia cover something; we tend to hear on this
list about the principle of the thing. Either way, I prefer analyses that
start from premises that are the mission's own.


 Instead of trying to figure out why this happens so often, this response
 merely seeks to justify the status quo.  Whether somebody is notable
 depends entirely on one's Point of View, yet the entire premise of the
 argument is the subject's notability. How is the subject any less
 notable than [[Cy Vorhees]]?


AfD can get it wrong: I suppose that is common ground.  Notability as a
concept is broken, always has been, always will be (my view, not
necessarily the majority view given the status given to the GNG by some).
In some cases it is really not a big deal whether a topic is included or
not: there obviously is a level at which quite a number of reasonable
people are pretty much indifferent to the outcome. The same people would
not, presumably, be indifferent to the decision not being by due process.
There is an appeal against AfD's process aspect. Anyone can navigate there.

I think we first need to analyse whether this is a manual page problem or
a complaint procedure problem. (Actually I'm going to put in a plug for
How Wikipedia Works at this point: look in the index under deletion,
deletion review is on p. 226 and the page tells you what to do. If the
guy really wanted to impress his colleague he could have done that.) If
he'd mailed OTRS and got an unhelpful answer, I really would worry.

Look, the whole point of HWW or any other serious explanation about how we
got this far that people are so bothered about our content is that you have
to admit that: (a) the system does work, and is fit for the main purpose
for which it was set up (contra Tony's view); and (b) it's complicated.
There are no doubt people out there, in millions, who don't realise that
you probably can't have (a) without (b). You surely could have (a) if you
had enough paid staff, a skyscraper full of them (well, maybe 5000
graduates); and if you paid yet more you could give an impression that (b)
didn't apply. The service would not be free at the point of use unless a
large charitable foundation was picking up the bill. The complication in
(b) is to do with decentralisation: multiple processes running in different
places, as the only solution that is known to scale.

I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia Byzantine, which is the
basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse
the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to
me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind
that more and better written  manual pages would only work better if
people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context
of complex systems they don't understand.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] A reader's experience with The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 4 December 2011 03:56, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote:

 http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853

 Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about
 the unfriendliness of the environment.


Well covered in The Signpost, in fact. But I came away thinking that there
is a misconception behind the complaint. Put it this way: who is the
customer? That turns out to be a rhetorical question: the customer is the
reader. If the customer was the writer, or the person who feels he/she
should have a Wikipedia page about them, the tone of the complaint would be
more justified.


 It isn't so much that we've
 gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to
 interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the
 purpose.


Considering that Wikipedia is the killer app for wikis, the comment seems
a bit off-beam. What we have done is to stress-test the wiki concept by
making a wiki at least two orders of magnitude larger than would have been
been thought reasonable in the year 2000.


 Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have
 built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to
 help us to make it better.

 AGF is good, but the issue here is just as much whether the problems with
the learning curve are correctly described in the article. My first
thought in finding Deletion Review on enWP is to type

site:en.wikipedia.org deletion review

into Google. So the top hit is the talk page of [[WP:DRV]]. If I omit the
quotes I get the same thing.  Not all related searches are so helpful but
if you put in

site:en.wikipedia.org deletion

then (today for me) hit number three is [[WP:AFD]] and the template to the
right has a link to the deletion review page.

OK, I happen to know that the way to search enWP is a Google custom search,
not futz around navigating on the site. That's a generic procedure that is
presumably quite accessible to technical people everywhere.

I get frustrating experiences regularly, in searching the websites of
financial institutions for the quite opposite reason: I expect to get
almost instant results from using Google to search the site for keywords,
and the design seems to think the world wants menu-driven plodding
navigation from an overcrowded front page full of irrelevant stuff, images
and things in tiny print. Maybe if the WMF paid enough it could get
Wikipedia to look the same.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Charles Matthews]

On 3 November 2011 17:56, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Charles Matthews
 charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:

  The thing is that with a better classified backlog you'd get some easier
  progress. If you Google the topic of these older articles, you tend to
 get
  mirror material back, so I don't know that it is fair to ask newbies to
 sue
  their own unsupported initiative.

 Sue? Was that meant to be use? I agree, some backlogs are better
 dealt with by more experienced editors. How can such slicing and
 dicing be done? And if there were manageable chunks, I'd do bits as
 well.


I think quite a lot could be done with Catscan 2.0, searching high-level
categories for pages carrying the {{unreferenced}} template. Something like
[[Category:Places]] or [[Category:American people stubs]] to some
subcategory depth. It's a sophisticated gadget, and the toolserver is said
to be sickly right now. But I imagine a determined operative could come up
with useful listings that would be better for the purpose of chipping 1%
off unreferenced articles.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Charles Matthews]

On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:07 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php
 
  Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it
  would be hard to get really wrong.
 
  What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
  the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
  problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the
  use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting
  edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion.
  What else?)

 Responding more to the opinion piece published in the Signpost, than
 what you are saying, my experience of looking through such backlogs is
 large amounts of mis-labelling, or outdated labelling. Is it very
 discouraging to think you are working on a backlog to find that the
 article either never had the alleged problem, or that it was fixed but
 no-one bothered to remove the tag identifying the problem. So I think
 those numbers quoted in that opinion piece are worthless (i.e.
 over-inflated through poor tagging practices). Random sampling,
 tailored to specific areas, would give a better idea of the extent of
 any problems, IMO.

 My reaction was somewhat different. I went into the list of categories or
{{unreferenced}} tagging (by month) just to have a look. Well, it's pretty
miscellaneous. I did a few, including some of my own articles
(embarrassing, but except for one there was nothing that was really out of
hand).

The normal reaction is to slice and dice. Doing it by oldest goes back five
years, which is certainly not excellent; but the old ones didn't seem more
worrying than others, really. How many  are also tagged as orphans? This
seems more likely to be where really mucky stuff might lurk. Articles of
the type [[1853 in Canada]] are basically lists, and unreferenced lists are
really another issue. Priorities seem clearer when you get involved. Small
town in Slovakia: easy to check it exists.

The thing is that with a better classified backlog you'd get some easier
progress. If you Google the topic of these older articles, you tend to get
mirror material back, so I don't know that it is fair to ask newbies to sue
their own unsupported initiative.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] a formal, structured full-oversight body was Facepalm

[Charles Matthews]

On 30 October 2011 11:30, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.comwrote:

 I'm not a big fan of abstract calls for strong leadership, and I genuinely
 don't see Arbcom as being a disaster - though there could be things it has
 done that I'm not aware of. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to changes that
 would make the pedia a healthy, collaborative and fair creative
 community, just not convinced that reforming or replacing Arbcom is the
 place to start.

 Without knowing which aspects of the pedia Marc and Phil  diagnose as
 unfair or unhealthy it is difficult to know if your diagnosis is the same
 or the reverse of mine. Though our preferred solutions are certainly
 dissimilar.  I'm not convinced that lack of a formal, structured
 full-oversight body this is the fatal flaw in the entire Wikipedia
 Project. Remember the wiki is at its strongest as a self organising
 community where people don't have to file requests in triplicate with some
 commissar. I like the flexibility of being able to launch things like the
 death anomaly project without having to seek approval from some central
 authority. To me a formal, structured full-oversight body isn't a way to
 achieve a healthy, collaborative and fair creative community, if anything
 its the reverse.

 That said we are a community in a longterm decline, which isn't in itself
 healthy; But we are a large and committed community that is still getting a
 lot done, so one shouldn't exaggerate the unhealthiness.  We are still in
 large parts an astonishingly collaborative community, despite the
 unfortunate shift from fixing things to tagging them for others to fix. As
 for the fairness, I'd be interest in knowing which specific aspects you
 consider unfair. If there are any current or potential Arbs who you
 consider unfair then the time to say so is during the election for Arbcom.
 A well constructed case demonstrating that a candidate  had a tendency to
 unfairness would probably tank any candidate for Arbcom.

 That's a reasonable overall analysis, though I might want to pick up
specifics.

Bear in mind, though, the multiplicity of points of view with which people
approach these themes.  One can single out:

(a) Management consultant: Breezy views from outside the community that
ignore the fundamental difficulty of implementing anything.
(b) Doomwatch: Extrapolation to the point of radical failure (usually of
enWP to the exclusion of all the other projects) based on some
one-dimensional view and ignoring trends that favour the work (e.g. new
stuff that is helpful coming online all the time).
(c) Constitutional theorist: A better written constitution would be, well,
better. Ignoring therefore the WP works only in practice, not in theory
riff.
(d) Golden Ager: Thinks things used to be better, against most experience
of what things really used to be like.
(e) Backlogs will kill us ecologically: A Doomwatch theory that ignores the
way that editors reassign themselves.
(f) Jimbo is dead: As with Paul McCartney, not true, just better known for
other roles these days. This seems to be a Golden Ager theory based on the
idea that it was all much better once, when Jimmy Wales had to do 14 hours
a day reading emails to keep things on track (with a few phone calls and
some IRC).
(g) ArbCom doesn't do what it might: This gets a bit closer, ignoring the
fact that the community view is skewed toward ArbCom not doing what it
might, at least among enWP's political activists.
(h) More central control: Given community views on ArbCom, this is one of
the least likely solutions to anything, I believe. This a recurring
debating point, both on content and on behaviour. Any further elected body
is likely to have just the same issues with interfacing with the community.
Perhaps there is some mileage in the concept of a deliberative body that
gets round doing everything by direct democracy.
(i) The whole system is bent: See a few vocal Wikipedia critics, passim.
But that is clearly neither true, nor even arguable except on the basis of
selective use of anecdotal evidence (of which of course there is an
overwhelming supply by now).

That is probably nearly enough from me, but a potted version of my
solutions: (i) Discuss the history in a more informed and conceptual way;
(ii) Divide out community roles where the WMF could step in, from those
where they really can't; (iii) Get to the point where the management
consultant approach on civility and newbie-biting is replaced by a more
concerted community effort to tell rude folk on the site that they are
problem editors, no matter what they write. In particular I have felt for
quite some time that the Marc Riddell diagnosis really falls at all three
of these hurdles.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] So ...

[Charles Matthews]

On 11 October 2011 16:41, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 ... written anything good on the encyclopedia lately?


 [[Jacobus Verheiden]] turned out to be much more rewarding than it promised
to, when I just had a name. Spinoff from [[List of participants in the Synod
of Dort]], which is a tough piece of reference-finding; but I liked the way
it turned out to illuminate a whole series of engravings (on Commons) and to
link in with [[Hendrik Hondius I]], and the Bodleian.

I came across the idea of cigarette card collections of portraits on
[[List of legendary kings of Scotland]], and here it is again, earlier and
in another form.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Readers clicking through to talk pages

[Charles Matthews]

On 12 October 2011 18:11, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 12 October 2011 06:56, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:

  I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be
  used far more than they are.


 Nah.

 As in yes, but there's an entire noticeboard on Wikipedia devoted entirely
 to systematically stamping out external links, whether they're useful or
 not.

 Reminds me - we should at some stage do something about noticeboards. Not
that they all need stamping out, but as unchartered processes, the more
useful ones should graduate to having some sort of charter.

Charles
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Academic study: Wikipedia cancer information accurate but hard to read

[Charles Matthews]

On 16/09/2011 03:26, Tony Sidaway wrote:
 It appears that a study by a team at the Medical School at Thomas Jefferson
 University has found Wikipedia's cancer information to be very accurate and
 updated more frequently than other sources. Compared to professional sources
 such as PDQ, however, it's a bit of a trudge to read.

 http://www.doctorslounge.com/index.php/news/hd/23109
They used standard algorithms based on word and sentence length to 
calculate the information's readability. Fair enough, except that it 
doesn't actually tell you about readability. The previous cancer-related 
study we heard about indicated to me that WP articles used less inline 
paraphrase (renal failure - i.e. your kidney start shutting down), 
because putting [[renal failure]] allows concision. If we did more of 
that paraphrasing, which comes naturally to doctors addressing patients, 
the sentences would get longer ...

Anyway it is reassuring that the difference between us and other sources 
is more about house style than content.

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] JSTOR Early Journal Content access

[Charles Matthews]

On 13/09/2011 16:25, Carcharoth wrote:

 I have bought expensive academic books in the past, but never actual
 published PhD theses. I would expect someone to rewrite, extend and
 expand on their PhD thesis to make it suitable for a wider readership
 before publishing it and expecting people to buy it.
In the UK PhD theses, as submitted, are theoretically free to download 
from EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) of the British Museum - as 
I discovered really not very long ago. But I'd like to know more. If the 
PhD is not already digitised, or from an institution that pays for that 
to happen, you may have to pay. Anyone know more?

Charles

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