Re: [WikiEN-l] Well known
Steve Bennett wrote: Most well known or best known? Whichever one is currently in the article. Focus your efforts elsewhere. Hey, this is an amusing topic ... Example for a beer-tasting FAQ (about American lagers): *Budweiser, Coors, and Miller are the most well-known bad examples of this style. ... There is almost no difference in taste from brand to brand, especially after five or six. And our own MoS says to avoid expressions like: *Among the most well-known members of the fraternity include ... But sadly it is objecting to the two subset terms. I still think it is a potential good indicator of poor style. Anyway, pursuing it got me into an area needing attention, including what is now [[first date (meeting)]]. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies
Apoc 2400 wrote: On a more general note, PROD is relatively drama-free, but I wonder about the accuracy. Is it really good to let the hard work an editor that has since left Wikipedia be deleted based on 5 seconds of consideration and no discussion? Is it really good to propose the deletion of a deletion method that has been found useful over quite a period, based on 50 words of discussion? Since PROD deletions are easy to reverse if review is necessary, mistakes can be fixed. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies
Carcharoth wrote: I have seen some PRODs deleted not as PRODs but as CSDs (and inaccurate CSDs as well). That sometimes gets me confused. PRODs can be undeleted, but I've never been 100% sure about CSDs. Do you need to ask the deleting administrator about those first? I think an admin undeleting a speedy should always leave a note to the deleting admin, explaining why. The usual reason would be that a mistake of some kind (e.g. on copyright) has been made in applying CSD. If there is an issue of a judgement call on notability it might be better to discuss with the deleting admin first. Of course there is common sense to apply: if the deletion was for nonsense content, and I'm recreating the topic with sensible content, that is hardly reversing an admin action. But where it is a case of reversing a considered action of another admin, not just sorting out a mistake, our code of admin conduct suggests strongly that you consult first (if the urgency is low). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies
David Gerard wrote: So making a drama-free clean up afterwards procedure was considered the least worst way of dealing with things. Hope you're right, David, since I'm over at CAT:CSD right now and revived a notable-seeming Indian politican lady from the dead. If the 10 ton weight drops on me, I'll say he told me ... Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies
Andrew Turvey wrote: However, many editors think that neutral unreferenced articles shouldn't be PRODed or AFDed unless the proposer has first made an effort to find sources themselves (see guideline [[WP:BEFORE]]). But PROD is good for this. If you want a systematic sweep, PRODs on older completely unreferenced (short) BLPs (of marginal apparent notability) would seem to be the least controversial way of handling it. This is done for articles generally, I think, that have been unreferenced for three years or so. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies
Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/9/8 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com: Thomas Dalton wrote: Is there a problem with unreferenced BLPs? Potentially harmful information in a BLP should always be referenced, but if there isn't anything potentially harmful then what is the problem? I would remove potentially harmful unreferenced material per WP:BLP and leave it at that. It is of course handy to know that the article refers to a real, existing person, not a hoax. Everything in WP is supposed to be verifiable, and that applies to BLPs too. True, but that isn't a BLP issue, it is a general article issue. You can't use that argument to support deleting unreferenced BLPs on sight unless you argue for deleting all unreferenced articles on sight. (I might an actually support that argument - the sources in an article should be the actual source of the information and only the author knows that so they should be the one citing the source.) Now, now. I'm in favour of using PRODs in such cases, as a soft method that is nothing like deleting on sight. You asked what is the problem?, and part of the problem is evidently that if none of the article checks out then it might be a hoax. I would think badly of someone who put forward an article for PROD deletion for, say, an academic on these grounds, since typically an academic will have an institutional home page and it shouldn't be at all hard to find it and add it to the page. I did add a PROD to a BLP recently for someone claiming to be a historian (not an academic): in other words someone who had written a book and that was about it. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies
Thomas Dalton wrote: Is there a problem with unreferenced BLPs? Potentially harmful information in a BLP should always be referenced, but if there isn't anything potentially harmful then what is the problem? I would remove potentially harmful unreferenced material per WP:BLP and leave it at that. It is of course handy to know that the article refers to a real, existing person, not a hoax. Everything in WP is supposed to be verifiable, and that applies to BLPs too. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Well known
For a change, something on English usage. A trawl through some usage books tells me nothing much about most well known, which I'm convinced is a solecism, and should be best-known. The hyphenation I think is standard anyway. Sadly Google believes there are 11,000 instances for most well known on enWP, and I'd prefer none to be in article space. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Well known
Eugene van der Pijll wrote: Charles Matthews schreef: Sadly Google believes there are 11,000 instances for most well known on enWP, and I'd prefer none to be in article space. Yes... I guess there must be a few style guides that allow that phrase, but most well known style guides agree with you. Touché. I should of course have been more specific. The adjective well-known has, IMO, the comparative better-known and superlative best-known. So, John F. Kennedy was the better-known brother of Ted Kennedy, not the more well known brother, and the best known of the children of Joe Kennedy. The hyphens actually are discussed in style guides. Interesting, given the number of possible cases, to challenge bot programmers to automate this one. Examples: From [[Shinto]]: Of the many and diverse Shinto shrines in existence, some are more well known: - not so sure From [[chart]]: Some of the more well known named charts are: - changed to better-known From [[Ayad Allawi]]: Allawi established links and worked with the [[CIA]] in 1992 as a counterpoint to the more well-known CIA asset [[Ahmed Chalabi]] - changed to better-known From [[gunfighter]]: This respect for one another is why most famous gunfights were rarely two or more well-known gunmen matched up against one another - this is correct From [[György Ligeti]]: In more recent years, his three books of Études for piano have become more well-known - changed to better known From [[Instant messaging]]: The more well-known of these include the [[Sarbanes-Oxley Act]], [[HIPAA]], and SEC 17a-3 - changed to better-known From [[Gibson Guitar Corporation]]: Pete Townshend of The Who, Angus Young of AC/DC, Frank Zappa of Mothers of Invention, Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath are some of the more well-known SG players - changed to better-known In general, pursuing grammar points can lead you to articles with other issues, which is one reason I find it interesting ... but here that doesn't seem to apply so obviously. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Googley comments
Bod Notbod wrote: One of the proposals on the strategy wiki has recommended an adjustment to talk pages. I added that perhaps the tab should be called discussion/feedback to encourage people who are primarily readers to let us know what they thought of an article without it necessarily sounding like they had to be knowledgeable. I'm afraid I can't link to the proposal cos I can't remember the name or whether I watchlisted it. But I imagine this kind of proposal is fairly common: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13573 The introduction of Talk pages was, it should not be forgotten, one of the most brilliant innovations of the early days of Wikipedia. The idea that the Talk page is specifically for discussions aimed at improving the article in its current state is actually a pillar of how we work. Feedback of the like it/hate it kind (which is what voting would be) cuts across all that: I think that is obvious based on experience of how people (readers - most of the world doesn't edit) react to articles. A single annoying aspect is likely to get negative votes, and whether voting is commented or not, there are going to be problems. So before some strategy genius decides that whole namespace is for something other than its traditional role, I think there should be a pause for reflection. Perhaps there could be a way of encouraging comments which were general (not specific to an existing thread or starting a new topic), and simply filed in a dedicated general comment archive, running in parallel with the traditional slug-it-out editing-related comments. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Putting some perspective on the end of Wikipedia
Risker wrote: There are some opportunities to improve practices here, and to really take a look and decide which articles (and rarely, article talk pages) need this indefinite protection. At the same time, I really do believe that if an admin is going to reduce protection on a page with an extensive history of problems, he or she has a responsibility to keep an eye on the page for at least a couple of weeks afterward to ensure there isn't a fresh outbreak of inappropriate behaviour. Agree with both points, naturally. But the discussion as a whole seems to indicate that protection has become one of our more Byzantine concepts. Some work ought to go on, simplifying it from a hypertext stance (categorisation and tagging), so that what happens is more transparent. Anyone interested in reviewing the system and writing an on-site essay? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Putting some perspective on the end of Wikipedia
I was away and missed the FR discussions, but I have to say this: the vanishing point is nowhere in sight! Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Putting some perspective on the end of Wikipedia
Tony Sidaway wrote: On 9/5/09, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: I was away and missed the FR discussions, but I have to say this: the vanishing point is nowhere in sight! FR? (Racks brains). I assume you mean flagged revisions? Got it in one! Oh, and vanishing point is a term in perspective drawing. Just ignore me if the opacity get unbearable, though. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Google Books class action lawsuit
Gwern Branwen wrote: On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/9/5 wjhon...@aol.com: Charles a few things. You do not need to be in the US to read a Google Book. There is a thing called proxy or super proxy or something of that sort, which will mask where you are, and thus allow anyone to read a book as if they were in the US. That is probably illegal, though. Or at least a violation of the Terms of Service. I dislike such advice that takes the form of 'oh, that's not a problem, just do technically involved thing to bypass an issue'. Yup, there is a reason the wjhon...@aol.com mails still have a killfile chez moi. Managing to miss the point that if a link appears broken to anyone in the world it might simply get removed seems a fundamental error. It wasn't about whether I'm deprived of the info, but what form of citation is good to have on Wikipedia for this patchy service. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Knnol hooks up with PLoS for rapid science publishing
So Google Knol moves into hosting? Will there be ads? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article
Carcharoth wrote: How do Google Books and libraries and Project Gutenberg and others do mass scanning and OCR of books? Do they use lots of money and funding to pay lots of people to do lots of scanning on lots of machines, or do they automate it in some way? Google apparently pays peanuts and they certainly didn't automate in the past - I spend an unconscionable amount of time gettimg round bad Google scans, very many of which have parts of the page obscured by a person's hand. I'm stunned that they don't ask for repeat scans of some unusable pages. (They may have been on a learning curve.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
Carcharoth wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1911_Encyclopedia_topics The only remaining task on Variation and selection is integrating references, probably to their own authors' pages. That page is still up for historical interest and to finish small amounts, but for all intents and purposes, this article is merged. I'm taking it off the 1911 list, and thus declaring the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica to be, at first draft level, merged into Wikipedia. Ladies, gentlemen, and algorithms, it's been an honor. Alba 15:24, 27 February 2006 (UTC) Impressive! How long did that take, I wonder? It was of course a grossly overconfident statement. My latest EB1911 find was [[William Mure (writer)]], all of nine days ago. We have learned (I hope) that the dab factor - i.e. false-positive bluelinks in your list of articles - is something that has to be made more central to the merging effort. Compare the DNB missing articles project and how it is set up . (OK, OK, I know I have mentioned this before.) As for verifying EB1911 text, it can and should be done piecemeal. I found a case today where A. F. Pollard, a very respectable historian, seemingly made a slip in the DNB that transmitted to the EB1911; and I only noticed it by comparison with another DNB article. My over-checking theory says: - Yes, you should try to provide inline references where possible, for chunky copy-paste jobs; - but you should approach this as building up the article with further, verifiable facts; - and what usually happens is that you find errors and inconsistencies either because unverifiable facts eventually look like islands in a see of footnoted facts, or because the sources for the new facts indicate that something strange is going on. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Gary North: Wikipedia and Google Will Bring Down Establishments All Over the World
David Gerard wrote: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north747.html Blog post by a Mises fan. He calls Wikipedia wiki all the way through and thought Wikipedia supplied Google's translation service. But it's an interesting essay suggesting that just having information available does a lot to fight evil. It's certainly interesting. I never knew you couldn't do historical research without a rental car, for example. Or that decade meant period of a dozen years or so (Google did exist 10 years ago, to be dully pedantic). It is certainly on the money in suggesting Google's book-scanning project might change a great deal. But not, I think, on how. (Large accessible collections of information tend to give an edge to those who already know what to do with them.) The cost of writing history will fall. As Hexter wrote, bad history is not hard to write, anyway. The gatekeepers can no longer control the flow of information. Hah, but WP admins can. Hahahar. We be the maysters now. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article
Ray Saintonge wrote: Does my memory deceive me? Or is it true that 2 of the 3 millionth articles related to soap operas? A Scottish railway station, and the Spanish TV comedy programme [[El Hormiguero]], were what you were thinking of. If you regard Europe as one big historical soap opera, you were correct. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
Cathy Edwards wrote: This is all so interesting - thanks. I think I have a good idea why BLP are a hot topic of debate in this area, but why do you think fiction is contentious - because it's in danger of unbalancing the encyclopedia? [[Wikipedia:Notability (fiction)]] indicates some of the sore points. It is not about whether Pride or Prejudice is notable: there is no problem establishing that to everyone's satisfaction. We do have an article [[Fitzwilliam Darcy]]. The kinds of problems that arise in general are: *What if the article on Mr. Darcy were written in an in-universe view, in other words not offering the perspective with the fourth wall removed? *What if [[Category:Jane Austen characters]] got out of hand, with very minor characters featuring? *What if there were not enough critical literature to make articles (yet), and people ended up improvising their own theories? Only the second of these is likely to matter with Janeite Wikipedians. We would then say merge the info back into [[Pride and Prejudice]]. That could get too long (it's actually only a sensible 36K). For fiction articles that are very long, we are supposed to apply [[Wikipedia:Summary style]], in other words put subtopics on separate pages. But the notability guide says notability is not inherited. This is where some people get stuck. Minor characters or lesser topics in a fictional universe get merged into a page, and can't get moved out again unless the subtopic itself is inherently notable. So (as I understand it, and I'm no expert on this) fiction in general can have problems with all three of the bullets; and only for the first is there necessarily a decent editorial solution that would satisfy all inclusionist views. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
Thomas Dalton wrote: Well said. That debate was resolved back in the days when we actually reached consensus occasionally! There are too many people for that to work, these days. However hard you try, you never find a solution that everyone will accept. Hmmm, that seems to assume consensus = no yelling, rather than 80% support or whatever. As if special interest groups can always block change. (Now that rings a bell, but we need to be careful about the retrospective history.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1917002,00.html Time magazine ... can't get excited about the whole business really. But why is Wales not James if Sanger is Lawrence? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia approaches its limits - Technology Guardian
Steve Bennett wrote: The 1% reversion rate for experienced editors was also interesting. I doubt my edits get reverted at anything like that high a rate. Yes, the mean here might tell less than the median. (I.e. you'd expect to see very different figures for controversial and non-controversial articles, and lumping all articles and frequent editors together and averaging isn't going to be that helpful.) As http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/ admits, they (the PARC people) have basically done a press release on a conference paper that won't be produced until WikiSym in October. This would account for the rather sensationalised tone of it all. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] An expert's perspective - Tim Bray on editing the XML article
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: I'm chary of experts determining what sources are reliable, as Carcharoth suggests. There are two meanings for reliability. Reliability in RS, I claim, depends solely on the publisher, and reliability in this sense is about notability, and certainly not about reliability in the ordinary sense, that we could assume that the material is true. If it's in independently published source, it's reliably sourced. Sure, there are gray areas. That would appear to be wrong. Unreliability is screened out of published material in various ways, none of them completely effective: for example (a) publisher has a reputation to lose in the academic sphere, (b) reviewing processes initiated by the publisher catch actual errors, (c) the editorial process actually forces the author onto areas where what is said can be backed up. This is quite a bit like what we do internally with content policy, deletion, and detailed editing of articles. I don't see that it's about notability. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Jimbo Wales For Speaker Of House Of Representatives 2012!
Soxred93 wrote: Despite the fact that this guy has many of his facts are wrong, he does have some element of truth. Not only Technically Incorrect, but actually incorrect, and sloppy too. It would be a pernicious meme, that you can't contribute successfully to Wikipedia by getting an account, reading the instructions, and doing your best. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Complaint - Re: Drafting - was Re: Civility poll results
Hmmm ... a mail with seven unedited wikien-l footers, and two contra-flow top posts on top of around four going down the page. What is more, the content includes two replies by people who provided wrong info off the top of their heads. I'm going to sound grumpy, but this list can do better with the editing (was I really being criticised for snipping?), thoughtfulness, and thread discipline (talking about drafting in a civility thread is a meandering notion of how to debate a serious issue). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Surreptitiousness wrote: I don't disagree at al', but the arbitration committee have tended to take the view that incivility alone is not a reason to remove the admin toolbox and flag. Well, in my view, if incivility in an admin is a sign of other problems (in the spectrum of stress to burnout to overestimation of own ability to handle awkward people) it is indicative of something serious about suitability to the role. If it is the result of a long campaign of trolling that has finally got an answer in kind, then it is a sign just of human fallibility. Despite a few cases of high profile, the ArbCom of my time was certainly sympathetic with admins, and wary of people who were not obviously working for the good of the project saying I was disrespected. That said, it's a grey area, and has probably become more murky over time. We don't want and never have wanted cussing admins. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia approaches its limits - Technology Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist Much familiar argument from threads here. Some of the usual suspects commenting, and everyone putting in their two cents. Somewhere in the middle is a debate struggling to get out: is the volume of reversions indicative of good gatekeeping (poor edits to popular and well-developed articles have little chance of sticking), or bad gatekeeping (established editors assert ownership)? Stats from 2007 and 2009 show a step-change of some sort, as we know, but don't really prove that there is a current trend (we could be going sideways). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Surreptitiousness wrote: I'd offer the view that an admin who gets involved as one party in a long series of trolling may not be suited to the role either. It could be taken to suggest the admin has an issue with knowing when to step back, or possibly even too much self-belief in their own righteousness to be bordering on arrogance. Both of these would indicate an unsuitability to the role. I'd agree to the extent that there is a point at which any admin should be looking for the right kind of help (outside admin assistance, from people who are clearly uninvolved neutrals). It is not a good sign if an admin ploughs on unaided, in a difficult situation. snip Any admin who thinks their solution is the only way is wrong, and any arbitration committee that thinks Wikipedia would be worse off losing an admin is wrong. We all live in the real world, we all acknowledge there are times we get chewed out even though we did everything right, just because sometimes that's the way the cookie crumbles. Sometimes you take one on the chin to keep up appearances. Life is full of hard decisions, and Wikipedia isn't going to be any different. We need people on the arbitration committee who are aware that justice can't only be done, it needs to be seen to be done. The last part is the harder part, and the committee has to my mind often failed in that sense by being, as you say, sympathetic with admins. I can't go into private discussions I know about, obviously. I've several times made public my view that we should give admins plenty of discretion, and balance that by a small number of de-sysops. So I agree pretty much with what you say. Sympathy needs to be in the way of a full understanding of the job description, not in continuing admins who really don't match that description. The counter-argument, though, is that the community will not accept certain tough decisions; in other words there will be some adverse comment. Sometimes there is much more to these situations than meets the eye. Charles Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Surreptitiousness wrote: Thinking of teh community as a community, it suddenly makes me realise I have no idea who the community leaders are. snip The episodes and characters arbitration cases were instances crying out for facilitation, not arbitration, and the arbitration that resulted really solved nothing anyway. It's not necessarily going to be helpful to import a lot of jargon into the discussion; but I note that a great deal of current debate can be summed up, not unfairly, as the English Wikipedia faces an 'adaptive challenge' or three, and blaming the ArbCom has become a 'work avoidance mechanism'. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Surreptitiousness wrote: At some point the arbitration committee is going to have to make tough decisions, if only to see exactly where the chips fall. If the arbitration committee is sometimes afraid of acting, what hope have we got? David brought up the idea of forking again, and maybe that's what we need to explore once again, maybe we do need to investigate a fork of the project. Ah, the Golgafrincham solution (see [[Places_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Golgafrincham]]). Sort of, anyway. The pious hope of a fork in which those who really, really hate currrent dispute resolution processes are invited to work on a WP clone, licensed in the same way as the original, and so to take their dramatics somewhere else. Without the cryogenics, though. This of course is what Citizendium should have been, but they ducked cloning the material and editing it down. I think this is just a science-fiction or desert-island fable, but I could be wrong. It could be Lord of the Flies or a brave new world - who knows? I think DG is astutely putting this forward as a reply to people with no contructive suggestions as to how to move forward from where we are now. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Surreptitiousness wrote: I'm not actually blaming the arbitration committee so much as I'm trying to work out a solution for the problems I perceive, hence me going on to talk about facilitators. I can't work out if you snipped that because you felt it was too much jargon. No - I felt you had a couple of points (who are the leaders anyway? and facilitation might be appropriate technology in some cases) which deserved the highlighter. We don't seem to have Wikipedia entries on the jargon I was citing on my side. Perhaps we should have? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Drafting - was Re: Civility poll results
Carcharoth wrote: On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 1:02 PM, FT2ft2.w...@gmail.com wrote: I'd be in favor of a Draft: namespace, which users could use for drafting articles. Content to be non-spidered. That way we can tell a user to see if some other user has started work on a draft already. This would possibly help collaboration, ensure only credible articles get mainspaced, yet retain anyone can edit and the gradual development of stubs without pressure to delete. Thoughts? It's been suggested before. What it needs is someone to drive the idea forward. Notice that if you now try to start the page [[dummydummy]], you get offered the chance to draft it at [[Special:MyPage/Dummydummy http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/Dummydummyaction=edit]]. I'm not entirely clear what the preferred route is from there. But I imagine suggestions for drafting as more systematically encouraged should be grafted onto this use of special pages. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia approaches its limits - Technology Guardian
Sage Ross wrote: On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:58 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist Much familiar argument from threads here. Some of the usual suspects commenting, and everyone putting in their two cents. Somewhere in the middle is a debate struggling to get out: is the volume of reversions indicative of good gatekeeping (poor edits to popular and well-developed articles have little chance of sticking), or bad gatekeeping (established editors assert ownership)? Stats from 2007 and 2009 show a step-change of some sort, as we know, but don't really prove that there is a current trend (we could be going sideways). Charles Regarding the familiar arguments related to this... should the Signpost be a venue for discussing thing stuff? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#.22Wikipedia_enters_a_new_chapter.22 I think you're right to suspect that this would be hard to cover _properly_ in the Signpost's usual and gratefully concise style. Just picking out the different strands of deletionism looks like several pages of philosophy tutorial to me. Stats are interesting, but stats on reversions without a proper indication of their distribution (are they largely in the top 1000 articles by readers?) seem fairly inconclusive. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Marc Riddell wrote: The bottom line here is: what can we passengers do about it when we aren't the ones driving? Well, I co-wrote a book of 500 pages expressly designed to help newbies participate and understand the culture. You? Do you blog, at least? I'd like to know who you think is at the wheel, because for all my time on Wikipedia, it's not a question I can answer. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Carcharoth wrote: On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Marc Riddellmichaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: 2009/8/12 Marc Riddell michaeldavi...@comcast.net: Try evasive. on 8/12/09 5:02 AM, David Gerard at dger...@gmail.com wrote: It's good to see you assuming good faith and setting an example. Assume good faith in this Project has come to mean Don't ask questions. That era is finally over. That era never existed. There have always been people prepared to ask difficult questions and demand answers. See for example the RfCs that come up, related to civility and harassment. I, for one, would like to see Marc and those who think like him actively participating whenever there is a chance to pin admins down as to why they are shielding those who are uncivil or engage in harassment (for which we have an adequately broad definition). These points do come up, the forums for dispute resolution are open and free, and those who sit on their hands are definitely not part of the solution. I could say more, but that would be at the risk of autobiography. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Ken Arromdee wrote: There's a reason why zero tolerance policies are considered unjust in real life by just about everyone who's thought about them. Maybe so. There is also a reason or two why appeasement is considered short-sighted by people who have seen it tried. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Emily Monroe wrote: I sincerely believe that civility blocks are necessary. Not as a punishment, or a chance to cool down, but as a way to say Your attitude is disrupting Wikipedia, and preventing it from improving. Come back in [12/24 hours/a week/a month/whatever] and we'll give you another chance, and not many more. You'd have thought that would be the argument: Wikipedia is a working environment, and those who cause the environment to deteriorate are on a warning. That's where things had got to a couple of years ago, and no progress has been made since then. In fact there are brownie points to be had in some cases by people who completely disregard all of that. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Emily Monroe wrote: Mostly his habit of complaining on mailing lists and actively refusing to engage on the wiki itself, where decisions about the wiki are actually made. They aren't made here. Oh, sorry, I didn't know his history. You can be fairly sure that the people on whom civility enforcement should devolve, namely admins (given that most offences against WP:CIVIL should not require elaborate discussion), and who either think so what or actively obstruct enforcement, will take absolutely no notice of exhortations on wikien-l. The dynamic is that people who take part in onwiki discussions count for that. Lamentably, it's who has the posse. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Marc Riddell wrote: Two words in your message state what is the main, insidious problem with the Project's culture: It varies. To be fully productive, to reach its greatest potential and to achieve its stated goals a workplace's culture cannot vary. That seems to be twaddle. I work, largely, on mathematics, poetry and history. There is no obvious homogeneity in the people I meet; there are no obvious shared assumptions. The English Wikipedia draws on a particularly diverse population (many speaking English as a second language). It's not insidious that wikis don't select who works on them or how they work. It's part of the idea - a highly successful idea in our case - that the barriers to entry should be low. You'd get a more predictable culture if you said Ph.D.s and native speakers of English only. And no teenagers, ever. I had a talk page message four days ago starting That is just silly and ending Be serious. Lack of shared assumptions, in this case about a navigational template, is something I feel I ought to be able to rise above. To work, to create, at their full potential, a person must be able to focus on that: the work. They cannot be constantly looking over their shoulder, or live with the anxiety that an unstable, unpredictable workplace can produce. And the old party-liners - those who have led by insinuation and not consensus - can blow all the smoke they want at the messengers, but the message is still there loud an clear. I think you'll find a more informed, and, yes, more nuanced discussion going on in parts of this thread not dominated by generalities. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
David Gerard wrote: snip Great - now my turn - David, cool it. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Marc Riddell wrote: On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Marc Riddellmichaeldavi...@comcast.net wrote: snip To be fully productive, to reach its greatest potential and to achieve its stated goals a workplace's culture cannot vary. To work, to create, at their full potential, a person must be able to focus on that: the work. They cannot be constantly looking over their shoulder, or live with the anxiety that an unstable, unpredictable workplace can produce. on 8/12/09 1:09 PM, Carcharoth at carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: I think it is a balance. Have too uniform a culture and the variety of our output will suffer, both in terms of those willing to edit here (imagine the people who edit Wikipedia trying to get along in a normal workplace) and the diversity of the articles. There is also an argument that a homogenous workplace would work against 'neutral point of view'. Once again, Carcharoth, I am not speaking about points of view regarding specific subjects. We can disagree to hell and gone about something and still maintain a mutual courtesy and respect for each other as human beings. Not sure whether to cite Dilbert or the Beach Boys here. To stop people constantly looking over their shoulder it would certainly help to place them in a 360-degree cubicle. To wish oneself the best of all cultural worlds sounds a bit like dreaming that they all could be California girls. In any case the monoculture as an ideal does no favours to Wikipedia, whatever the pedigree of [[Taylorism]] and [[Fordism]] in the for-profit sector; dull but efficient is not really the way to go, either. For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool/By making his world a little colder. Think the Beatles win this one. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
Andrew Gray wrote: Well, here's an odd thought. If Wikipedia dies, something to do with our community will probably be the reason. Nearly a truism these days. BLP issues coming 100 at a time in a sort of class action suit could do it ... Odder thought - mailing lists and newsgroups look more vulnerable (to civility problems, that is). Wikis tend to become dull, churn rate slows, maintenance mode takes over. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Civility poll results
George Herbert wrote: I have found that in the case of admins behaving badly, the typical problem is more the backlash against the admin cabal getting in the way of focusing on the actual abuse, than admins or arbcom or anyone else standing in the way of warnings or sanctions against the initially offending admins. There's more than a germ of truth in that. The last refuge of the scoundrel used to be patriotism. For us it is wrapping yourself in the flag of you do realise that the whole power structure is fundamentally corrupt... spiel, denying that discrete violations of policy have occurred when they have. Charles PS. There is no cabal. Take it from an ex-member. Ooops ... ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] An expert's perspective - Tim Bray on editing the XML article
Bod Notbod wrote: On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomaxa...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: we might short-block [experts] quickly, if they do not respond to warnings, but we would explain that we respect their expertise and we want them to advise us. Nothing says we respect your expertise like a short-term block :o) Sadly, I think enthusiasm for accusations is likely to lead to COI being overused against experts. What is required to establish COI in our sense is a sustained demonstration that they have an agenda in editing that is clearly at odds with the encyclopedia's best interests. Not that they can't guess where lines someone else is drawing for the playing area run. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Steve Bennett wrote: I mean, all else aside, Jimbo contributed a huge amount to Wikipedia basically out of a desire to help the human race. Sanger made Citizendium out of a desire to piss off Jimbo. Debatable. But I think the way Sanger systematically misunderstands the virtues of WP, and has with CZ promoted some other deadly virtues like having credentialled people as a better class of 'citizen', is certainly telling. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist
Andrew Gray wrote: 2009/8/9 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com: So all the biographies of women could be tagged woman? That would work, but only if the woman tag wasn't applied to other things as well. Maybe you would have to have woman + biography? Even then, it might not be exact. And then you would have adult, boy, girl, child, male, female. Tags and categories are different. Ideally, you would have both, or a clear of idea of what would be primary tags (what we call categories) and what are descriptive tags. This is similar to what de.wp use, I believe: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman [[Kategorie:Literatur (20. Jahrhundert)]] [[Kategorie:Literatur (Englisch)]] [[Kategorie:Autor]] [[Kategorie:Pulitzer-Preisträger]] [[Kategorie:Journalist]] [[Kategorie:Person im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg]] [[Kategorie:US-Amerikaner]] [[Kategorie:Geboren 1912]] [[Kategorie:Gestorben 1989]] [[Kategorie:Frau]] Note that in English, we'd consider most of these very high-level categories, and indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman [[Category:1912 births]] [[Category:1989 deaths]] [[Category:American Jews]] [[Category:American military writers]] [[Category:Historians of the United States]] [[Category:German-American Jews]] [[Category:Jewish American historians]] [[Category:Morgenthau family|Barbara Tuchman]] [[Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners]] [[Category:Radcliffe College alumni]] [[Category:World War I historians]] Almost all of those are *much* more specific categories - you wouldn't get a Historians of the United States or American military writers category in German, and you wouldn't get Authors or Women in English. Though, that said, it's very interesting to note that they each reflect entirely different aspects. In German, being a writer is emphasised. In English, the writing is dealt with more by subject matter (...military writers / ...historians), and the Jewish background is emphasised as much if not more than the nationality. A German reader finds out about the Spanish Civil War; an English reader finds out about Radcliffe. Having had a conversation with a German Wikipedian who clearly thinks our way of doing it is broken, I'm interested in the arguments on the other side. In zoology, for example, following the Linnean classification in the category system just makes good sense: the experts have sorted through the various attributes of (say) a fish species for us, and come up with answers that make sense for classifying articles as well as species. In my own field of mathematics, good subcategorisation will be a great help to those who want to read around a subject, and I'm not very struck with [[de:K-Theorie]] as categorised by [[Kategorie:Algebra]] [[Kategorie:Topologie]] when [[en:K-theory]] is categorised as [[Category:Algebra]] [[Category:Algebraic topology]] [[Category:K-theory|*]] and [[Category:K-theory]] has over 20 specialised articles. Presumably one hopes to find those flopping around under the German system in algebra and topology categories. But the first example I found where there was an interwiki was [[de:Calkin-Algebra]] which lies in [[Kategorie:Funktionalanalysis]] [[Kategorie:Mathematischer Raum]]. Believe me on this: it looks like you'd have to search a big chunk of mathematical articles just to find those K-theory articles. Not so good. (Even if you could get algebraic topology by intersecting algebra and topology, which is a big stretch because topological algebra is not at all the same thing. Confusion of method and subject matter.) More comprehensibly (perhaps) [[Category:Puritanism]] was bugging me, as a fairly unverifiable concept in numerous cases. So I created 15 or more subcategories in the hope of having verifiable historical information the predominant factor in 17th century English religious history. I'd like to think I wasn't wasting my time on that. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model
Carcharoth wrote: And I shudder to think of the duplicated effort in checking references. It would be great if you could look through an article and see that 5 people you trusted had ticked off most of the references as verified. Hmm, in my experience the majority of finds of inaccuracy in articles come from correlation with another article, or at least from some outside view raising a that's odd response. This discussion does raise a suspicion that we still operate a somewhat naive generic fact-checking approach: any page that is thoughtful about what we mean when we say checking facts? Of course there is one aspect relating to the way a cited reference may not support a fact as stated. But we do want something a bit smarter than make-work solutions for a site with many millions of references. I was discussing over-checking at the Cambridge meetup, where you don't so much check a single fact as surround it with other related facts, from other sources, and assess for consistency, as a way of bearing down on unreferenced claims, and that of course goes for things where you don't have the exact reference handy. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist
Bryan Derksen wrote: David Gerard wrote: 2009/7/30 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com: sob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year That is ridiculous category use. Hey, someone thought it was useful ... Once upon a time I went through a whole bunch of famous animal articles and added birth and death year categories. Someone followed along behind me and dutifully removed them all as I went. I guess this is how that particular dispute wound up being settled. So those categories need to be animated, rather than populated? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia was founded for OR
gwe...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a little skeptical that this is any of the real reasons, given the fallibility of human memory, and never seeing anything like this mentioned in materials from the early days - but this would be a great reason, because this doctor is not described as publishing in an RS, so his knowledge is OR! The story about Kira fills in something Jimbo mentioned before, though. I gave up a while ago on thinking the early history of WP was something a historian could completely elucidate. This story adds another layer to the question of the motivations of one of the principal actors (something the historians will eventually have to deal with). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model
Bod Notbod wrote: On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Note the tension between you can edit this page right now, which is part of the credo, and you can verify this fact right now, which isn't... ...unless it's a BLP, right? You say that why? There isn't a different definition of verifiability on BLPs, as far as I know. There is a higher degree of attention to all aspects of policy in relation to BLPs. Seems to fit as difference of degree, not difference of kind. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model
David Goodman wrote: A much more serious problem is the availability of this material in the less-developed world, which includes a great many people who rely on the English Wikipedia--many of whom do not have practical access to any good library. Quite. But then the traditional solution has been ... compile an encyclopedia (since the 17th century). The cream of scholarly info without all the underlying scholarship. The fact that we have extremes of scepticism, often driven by divisive or ideological or partisan starting points, should not eclipse the fact that _we_ offer a solution to the inequities of access to basic information. As they say, if not us, who? Those of us who have been around here a while have seen the ultra-verificationist perspective spread out from the most vexed areas to appear as a problem all over the 'pedia. (Not without justification.) But let's keep things the right way round: if we post the facts, and they are verifiable, and the verifying sources are behind subscription walls, the readers are still better off than without the info. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance
Bod Notbod wrote: So you quite commonly see people attributing a musical genre to a band that other people disagree with, and some anonymous users have a fine old time changing 5 articles per minute to state their FAVOURITE genre simply *must* apply to every band they like, regardless of the facts of the matter. Edit warring happens. And that is bad. So now I've noticed that people are putting in citations pointing to the All Music Guide and suchlike, which one hopes will help. That indeed is the problem with giving people a form to fill in, which is what boxed-info often is, rather than making them responsible for writing prose with justifications. It gets even worse under the heading of influenced by, one of the hardest matters to prove responsibly. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance
Carcharoth wrote The annoying thing about some of these redlinks, is that when you go looking for other pages where they are linked from, you run into problems if they are linked from a template. Another thing which is rather more than annoying is that plenty of quite unreferenced information is now placed in WP using these big templates-as-surrogate-lists. To be fair, many lists are somewhat unreferenced. But of course you can add references to lists, and annotate them generally. There is no way such templates are ever going to offer verification. I think this may be a future consideration, even leaving aside the current and (I think) regrettable trend to place templates for each office held in a biography (which will collapse under its own weight one day). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance
Carcharoth wrote: snip I seem to have let my keyboard run away with me there. Sorry! :-) It is interesting, though, to speculate whether there is a mature dynamic that is or should be taking over. There would be a few different sides: - (focus on metrics) Article count - average length - (growth area) Turn redlinks blue - upgrade stub - (lists) Post many lists - maintain lists in the sense that has been discussed - (direction) Topics people come up with off the top of their heads - topics generated by reading the wiki - (hypertext network) negative curvature - flat - positive curvature (this means that new articles tend not to generate a new redlink when properly wikified, rather than tending to generate a couple). I think the interest of this sort of talk is that it is complementary to quality drives (zoomed out, rather than zoomed in). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance
Carcharoth wrote:
Anyway, what I wanted to know was whether there are places on
Wikipedia where such approaches to lists and checking links is
documented? I do remember something about various lists of entries
from places like the DNB.
Ah here we are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/DNB_lists_discussion
List maintenance, first pass. Add {{tick}}, {{dn}} and {{mnl}}
templates, respectively for correct bluelinks, bluelinks needing
disambiguation and bluelinks that are definitely wrong. [...] List
maintenance, second pass: redirecting redlinks. Go through creating
redirects and adding {{tick}} to new bluelinks.
That comes closest, I think, to what I was describing above.
Kind of you to mention the DNB project, which works at the unglamorous
end of the 'pedia. What you have cited was the result of a
commonsensical cutting-back of a complete series of maintenance
templates, alluded to in [[User:Charles Matthews/WikiProject DNBMerge]]
(a non-current page). I decided at the time that a good flowchart of the
various states of a list entry would be the thing to set up to clarify
this area; but in fact life proved too short and the preparation of
lists had to take priority or nothing would get done.
Charles
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance
Carcharoth wrote: Where is the current activity on the DNB project? It's something I had kept in mind and wouldn't mind getting involved with at some stage. It's supposedly organised around [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB]]. Being just a subproject of the missing articles project, it doesn't have more of a forum of its own. Plenty of work to go round, anyway, on WP and WS. Charkes ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance
Carcharoth wrote:
Picking a page from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:DNBFooter
I can't quite see which of the lists need work, but I'll just pick any
one with out the ticks and stuff on them, and start work there. Any
way to mark one of the 63 pages when it is finished?
{{DNBListingStatus}} is supposed to help keep track of the various
phases. Expand the template as needed.
I did notice that
page 42 of those 63 pages is a redlink. It also appears that some of
the links have been checked but not tagged with a tick - that makes it
difficult to know where to start.
I was anyway working on 42 (it was a sad story about adaptation from
Magnus Manske's pages, and some edits there didn't save properly, which
was disheartening - all done now). As for where to start - you may be
confusing this project with one of those that is actually organised in a
visible fashion. It's around 30,000 links to do, doesn't matter so much
where people plunge in (check page history to see if someone else is
active(.
But this is the sort of work that dismbiguators love. Have you thought
of getting people from the disambiguation projects involved?
No, but obviously you're going to be a great advocate for
empire-building ...
Charles
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Do experts have a moral obligation to contribute to Wikipedia?
David Gerard wrote: http://blog.k1v1n.com/2009/08/if-tree-falls-in-forest-part-1.html He thinks that experts have a moral obligation to contribute to Wikipedia, because it's the source people actually go to. So first you need to show that there is an obligation to do anything [[pro bono publico]] if you are an expert. (OK, declaring that you are doing something pro bono helps shore up a reputation as an expert, but that is not quite what we are discussing.) Then you need to prove that the effectiveness of what you so do should be measured in the sort of mass media terms implied here: discrimination about whom you inform is pretty much irrelevant. Then you need to show everyone uses Google and never gets down to the bottom of the first page. (These do seem to be getting easier.) How about the simpler comment that if you have expertise in an area of public interest, you should consider writing something freely licensed and putting it on the Web where someone can find it and help aggregate it? Those who compile WP tend to have more sophisticated search habits than putting a single keyword into Google and hoping for the best. (Someone please reassure me that this is true ...) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Health advice from the web
Ben Kovitz wrote:
The site's other major flaw is its incompleteness. Wikipedia was able
to answer only 40 per cent of the drug questions Clauson asked of it.
By contrast, the traditionally edited Medscape Drug Reference answered
82 per cent of questions. 'If there is missing safety information
about a drug, that can be really detrimental,' Clauson points out.
The good news is that the template {{missing}} exists. The bad news is
that it appears hardly to be used (backlinks for [[Template:Missing]]).
Could we do more to make clear to the public that there is such a
template to add? They have caught on quite well to {{fact}}.
Charles
___
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Where does en:wp need most help?
Bod Notbod wrote: If you can give me a link to a specific (project) page that you're thinking of with regard to unsourced claims, please do. [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Citation cleanup]] Also [[Category:Articles lacking sources]]. There are plenty of other places specialised to types of article. Charles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Unreferenced_Article_Cleanup ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l
stevertigo wrote: horse-trading and straw polls which are part of the proper work of a committee. In fact Arbitration cases generate acres of material showing how decisions are made; and in most cases (not all) what appears on the wiki is at least a fair record of how a decision was reached. Ah. Horse trading as in I will agree to ban Peter for one year, if you agree to ban Paul or two? In the context of Arbitration, the practice is actually quite a DBAD violation. No, you misunderstand. When a case is clearly not going to get closed with the current set of findings, someone has to initiate a phase of discussion that ends with a better set of proposed findings, incorporating modifications that have broader support. Try AGF. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l
stevertigo wrote: On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:06 PM, stevertigostv...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 8:18 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Given your announced intentions for it, I think it is reasonable to assume that it is ground of your own choosing for a battle with the Sith Lords of Arbitration. Ha. If those Sith lords did things more openly, they would be the beings of light and wisdom people thought they were when we voted for them. PS: Let's agree to refrain from even using Star Wars analogies again - its hard to find a more scientifically or morally useless paradigm. Not to mention it makes already dorkish people feel like they're twenty-five again. Right, strictly Doris Lessing, C.J. Cherryh and the less pulpy parts of Jack Vance in future. People will generally not know what we're talking about, but the high ground will be ours. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l
stevertigo wrote: And I am not really forcing the issue - just getting the road cleared is all. Oh, have it your own way, then. It just looked, superficially, as if you were dead set on alienating large numbers of people, spamming lists, creating personal frictions and all that. The thing is, if you are going to call up the old days precedents, then it will not do to invoke a partial and sepia-tinted version. There are several things we (I'm also an old-school Wikipedian) worked out then, including the idea that Wikipedia is not a battleground. There are certainly people who continue to act as if it is. It is all very well to get worked up about glasnost' issues - we saw a lot of that in the last election. A rolling manifesto of abusing anyone connected with Arbitration is not actually any kind of solution to anything. What you seek to do might very well be achieved by some forum unconnected to Wikipedia in any official sense. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l
stevertigo wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 11:46 PM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Oh, have it your own way, then. It just looked, superficially, as if you were dead set on alienating large numbers of people, spamming lists, creating personal frictions and all that. I understand that I have a created a special niche for myself here. I also understand exactly what most concerns and troubles the bureaucratic mindset. But note that none of this spamming would have been necessary back in Jimbo's day - when anything came up he did his best to give straight and insightful answers to almost anyone. Hmm, it might save time if you sent an email to Jimbo, so you could get his straight and insightful no to the idea of resolution-l. Or even his very direct and trenchany yes. The thing is, if you are going to call up the old days precedents, then it will not do to invoke a partial and sepia-tinted version. There are several things we (I'm also an old-school Wikipedian) worked out then, including the idea that Wikipedia is not a battleground. There are certainly people who continue to act as if it is. Excellent points, sir. But how would opening up and centralizing one small aspect of dispute resolution - dedicated discussion of DR itself - decrease the peace in any way? Given your announced intentions for it, I think it is reasonable to assume that it is ground of your own choosing for a battle with the Sith Lords of Arbitration. It is all very well to get worked up about glasnost' issues - we saw a lot of that in the last election. I know nothing of the last election - I only get involved in these things when I think that things have become too obviously warped for anyone else to deal with. If you could give us a little of your own project historian overview of what you are talking about - just for the record - that would be rather interesting too. So it turns out you don't vote for or against arbs? You are in the majority, since turnout hardly reaches 20%. But it rather undercuts your premise. The 2008 election (and you'll forgive me if I keep this at a general level) was rather Obamamatic, in that many people were voting for the general principle of change rather than specifics of how Arbitration could be improved, procedurally or at the level of what type of person should be an arb. The Gorbachev reference is therefore to try to get away from the idea that US politics is the only valid type of comparison. It is also slyly implying that you can end up with Putin, a KGB man, whatever the sloganising. I happen to think that requests for things to be more open can be queried: there is plenty of private mail that should remain private because it is either (a) about private life details that have no bearing on the encyclopedia, but come up because voluntary work tends to drag private matters into the workplace, or (b) horse-trading and straw polls which are part of the proper work of a committee. In fact Arbitration cases generate acres of material showing how decisions are made; and in most cases (not all) what appears on the wiki is at least a fair record of how a decision was reached. A rolling manifesto of abusing anyone connected with Arbitration is not actually any kind of solution to anything. The fact remains that dispute resolution functions need to be more open. If Arbcom and perhaps even Foundation (hm) actually functioned fully in accord with their own stated principles or values, then there would be no issue with concepts like transparency. That's it: sentence 1 says this is about glasnsost'. And sentence 2 appears just to be false, IMX. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l
stevertigo wrote: On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Can you not do this thing of bad-mouthing people who disagree with you? (See your attitude to Cary Bass.) How have I bad-mouthed anyone? *Splutter.* You had very definite opposition from me. You can call me sub-articulate all you like, but I don't think it will stick. I would never call you sub-articulate, Charles. In fact you are one of the most articulate people I've ever dealt with. However, with that said, as I recall in this case you just didn't have much of a point to make other than you didn't like it. You do not recall correctly, then. Why not review the thread? I would not say this means that you were sub-artculate, personally, but rather that your posting on the matter lacked the substantive and articulated argument we've generally come to expect from you. See my earlier comment(s). I understand that you were Arbcom for a while, and you might suspect that resolution-l would just be a forum by which I could lambaste Arbcom, inline with the points I have been making recently about its lack of openness and responsiveness - concepts made clear in the WP:RFAR/OAR case. Considering that Arbitrators regularly get hounded on their talk pages, and are subject to pile-ons in just about any forum, this is not my particular concern. The heat in the kitchen probably deters a fair number of likely candidates from coming forward to serve on the ArbCom; but this list wouldn't change that very much. I think you might suspect that three years of reading the Arbcom mail might convey some notions of the limitations of mailing lists, as well as the limitations of the ArbCom. The point, sir, is that your approach is very clearly one of escalation, and forcing the issue, while clad in personal attack. This is diametrically opposite to all sane versions of dispute resolution. It actually does do something to discredit your idea. (It is is shame that I used the joke about hiring [[Malcolm McLaren]] as a babysitter on another occasion. Perhaps I should just pretend it is freshly minted.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Comparing Wikipedia to other wikis
Carcharoth wrote: I recently came across this page, on another wiki, where they compare themselves to Wikipedia. Interesting or not? What good points do they make? http://groupprops.subwiki.org/wiki/Groupprops:Groupprops_versus_Wikipedia You realise that User:Vipul has contributed similarly to enWP? This person seems to be essentially the only contributor there. Such a wiki can serve a useful and more traditional purpose: documenting what a small group of specialists know about a well-defined area. I would take the claim to have a distinctive content policy with a pinch of salt, because it looks mainly like an old-style wiki and not a WP-style set-up with people arguing from general principles. In other words WP is not typical, which is an old chestnut. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Brand Republic: BBC Radio 4 launches Wikipedia parody
David Gerard wrote: http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/922216/BBC-Radio-4-launches-Wikipedia-parody/ LONDON - BBC Radio 4 is launching a broadwebcasting show parodying the internet by mocking pop-ups, search boxes and other aspects of online activity. Listening now - utterly realistic wiki-stuff with _dab pages not avoided_! Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] At last, a new stats run for en:wp!
Sage Ross wrote: To me, the data is really encouraging. Take a look at the charts for New Wikipedians vs. Active Wikipedians. We knew before that both of those peaked in early 2007. But now it seems that the decline has more or less stabilized, and the decline in active Wikipedians was less severe than new Wikipedians. Edits per month, and maybe new articles per month, look to be stabilizing as well. This also was my first impression: the last 12 months have not been so bad at all. I'd like to be able to combine this with a continuing thought of mine: WP's model is beginning to bite, in the sense that it has not proved really problematic to bring new areas of content along, and there has also been progress in upgrading lower-quality existing articles. I think both points are still somewhat debatable; but if both of these are granted in a general sense (dodging say round BLP and a few vexed areas where edit wars are still typical) there is scope for optimism. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
Steve Bennett wrote: On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Andrew Grayandrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: I have, interestingly, been noticing it moving in exactly the opposite direction; articles with a couple of paragraphs of text, a reference or two, an image or an infobox, being marked as stubs. There's standards inflation at both ends of the rating system... IMHO, this kind of thing is one of Wikipedia's greatest failings. We still can't even agree on a definition of things like stub, and it seems to be in everyone's interest not to. People like stuff like that being subjective. (FWIW, I think it's reasonable to have stub be relative to the expected content. Two paragraphs on a country would clearly be a stub. Two paragraphs on an obscure medieval scribe might be the most comprehensive resource possible.) The stub business goes back almost forever, though. And the affection for grey areas is not the dominant trend: there are people who seem to have the MoS and its pickier points as bedtime reading. There has always been an adequate definition of stub, which relates to the idea that the article as stands has serious missing information, so is incomplete in an essential way. So Steve's FWIW is correct (no, I haven't looked up to see whether some genius has changed the definition of stub). I've never taken much notice of what is and isn't denominated a stub. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Admin churn?
Steve Bennett wrote: RfA is supposed to be purely a risk management exercise: we subject prospective admins to a couple of tests to reduce our risk that they go feral. I thought it was mainly an exercise to see if you cared enough to look up the standard acceptable answers to the standard questions. Anyway it mostly selects people who are fine to have the tools. Some small proportion show up as not really suitable on a time scale of three months; and some others do go a bit strange after a longer period in the front line. I doubt these cases are the sort of things RfA as filter can catch, though - too formalistic and not based on interview techniques. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
David Gerard wrote: 2009/7/14 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com: I think you're probably right that a new departure needs to be made: we're at best mediocre at devising new recognition mechanisms. How about a project aimed (since we are coming up to three million articles) at shifting the balance of stubs and other really substandard articles before we get to four million? We'll get to the end of the first decade of WP in 2011 before that happens. And I think we need some kind of two-dimensional plot, not single scale: urgency assessment as well as quality assessment. I fear the first thing that would spring to the community's beautiful collective mind would be a mass deletion of all stubs. That's the issue with one-dimensional thinking, certainly. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
Ian Woollard wrote: It's looking to me like 3.5 million is about the plateau, since the curve is bang on that, but we might make 4 million *eventually*. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia%27s_growth#Logistic_model_for_growth_in_article_count_of_Wikipedia We'll know more around the beginning of 2010. In my view something is likely to change in the direction of people valuing lists of missing articles more, when it is clearer that drive-by creation is getting drossier by the month (which is what that model implies). Of course I can't quantify that: I know it is still easy to come up with sets of 1000 topics that we don't cover at all well, and the total of redlinks is still large. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
geni wrote: We'll know more around the beginning of 2010. In my view something is likely to change in the direction of people valuing lists of missing articles more, when it is clearer that drive-by creation is getting drossier by the month (which is what that model implies). Of course I can't quantify that: I know it is still easy to come up with sets of 1000 topics that we don't cover at all well, and the total of redlinks is still large. Charles Redlinks in general perhaps. Redlinks in articles a significant number of people actually read less so. Well, now we come to it: one reason there may be less growth is the the nature of database use (people's queries tend to have less of a long tail than our entries). OTOH: I started the [[Oxford Professor of Poetry]] article, and had no idea there would be a media frenzy about it (last time had been Yevtushenko). I also started [[Ruth Padel]] ... when said frenzy arose I did fill in the redlinks as I could, including [[Joseph Trapp]], first ever Oxford Professor of Poetry (a few interesting things there, but for another time). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
sineWAVE wrote: Redlinks are likely to be a poor estimate of numbers of missing articles anyway. Some will be to articles that would be non-notable, and redlinks tend to be removed - in other words links that would be present if we had the article aren't there as redlinks. Who are these people removing redlinks? They need a slap. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Featured churn
Ian Woollard wrote: If it does finally plateau half the days will be negative of course; and they'll become more common before we reach the plateau just due to randomness. But if we start having negative weeks, stick a fork in her, she's probably done! Do we have any plans for when we'll be taking the Wikipedia out of beta? ;-) I think we should do a bot run with census data from 2001 for every tiny place in India first, and get those articles cleaned up, before we announce that the project has got to where it's going. Actually 3,750,000 articles sounds like a consensus figure for a couple of years out ... it will be interesting to see what trends start looking significant as we get closer. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] admins blocking but refusing to justify which policy orguideline applies
R E Broadley wrote: The only link I've been given so far is the [[Wikipedia:Disruptive editing]] link. Have you seen any others, because I have certainly not. I think you can reasonably ask the ArbCom about this. Disruptive editing is only a behavioural guideline: it mentions This guideline concerns gross, obvious and repeated violations of fundamental policies, not subtle questions about which reasonable people may disagree. In other words there should be more to it than a vague assertion of disruption. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Grape Lane (euph.)
Tim Starling wrote: But whatever offends you about a feature article choice, regular Wikipedians probably know that there's not much point trying to convince Raul654 of anything. I did like the bit in the Signpost where he complained that Andrew Lih's book only mentioned FA twice. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Grape Lane (euph.)
Carcharoth wrote: On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Tim Starling wrote: But whatever offends you about a feature article choice, regular Wikipedians probably know that there's not much point trying to convince Raul654 of anything. I did like the bit in the Signpost where he complained that Andrew Lih's book only mentioned FA twice. Do you have a date or link for that? [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-04-20/Wikipedia Revolution]], just after he says Lih overstates the importance of Meatball Wiki. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The current purges in English Wikipedia (...and my personal case)
Fred Bauder wrote: And people with shared computers will continue to engage in these minor faults. So what! There is no general need to make such an exaggerated fuss about it. Ec The fuss is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Bad_news Essentially a lot of bad talk, but the user has not actually done anything improper with his account recently and is certainly aware of our expectations at this point. I unblocked him. Fuss is not required, but the business of keeping an account clean is effectively in our terms of service, and complaints that the terms are enforced are really misplaced. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The current purges in English Wikipedia (...and my personal case)
Nathan wrote: On the contrary, my guess is quite a few articles about individuals and companies of mid-level fame were created by fans, friends, associates, employees, etc. Perhaps a deep review with WikiScanner will allow us to identify some of these suspect articles, and delete them because they were created with impure motives. As far as I know, motivation is still a bad argument at AfD. The basic conflict of interest point is not that motives should be pure, whatever that means, but that outside motivation should not be playing a role so large that the interests of the encyclopedia are pushed to one side. There is a good debate to be had about paid editing, the reward board, content created with a conflict of interest, etc. I have an impression I have seen this film before. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The current purges in English Wikipedia (...and my personal case)
Nathan wrote: On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com mailto:charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com As far as I know, motivation is still a bad argument at AfD. The basic conflict of interest point is not that motives should be pure, whatever that means, but that outside motivation should not be playing a role so large that the interests of the encyclopedia are pushed to one side. And how should the role of outside motivation be determined? At the level of discussion trying to reach a consensus on content, it's the thumb on the scales applied when people are trying to balance up factors. But it really takes a dispute resolution process to deal with the consequences, for example to see if a topical ban is required. It was always intended that a COI guideline was mainly about preventing people blundering into the kind of edit wars that would be the worst for them; and not designed as such for enforcement. Personally, I think conflict of interest and outside motivation arguments should be completely verboten in deletion discussions - they are irrelevant and call for pure speculation by participants. I don't care why an article was created, what matters is the quality and value of the content itself. I agree, that is how it should be. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
Sheldon Rampton wrote: Twenty years ago there were similar debates about WYSIWYG with regard to word processors, just as there were debates about whether command- line DOS was better or worse than the GUI that Apple introduced with Macintosh computers. Interesting to think what one couldn't prove with some argument from the history of technology. Automatic transmission didn't replace the gear lever. As far as I can see (which may be household dependent) remote controls proliferate and get harder to use (sometimes there seem to be five to choose from), and the same might be true of phones. I think arguments from the period when the PC was moving onto every desk in the workplace are a little special. I imagine MediaWiki will get WYSIWYG simply because the project sounds like a good idea and will get funded. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] The current purges in English Wikipedia (...and my personal case)
Nathan wrote: I'm not sure how blocking someone for conduct admitted from some years ago, that doesn't appear to have hurt anyone or caused any disruption, is the right thing to do. The account is blocked, because the problem is with the account. There are obviously good grounds for an appeal. This is the sort of issue that needs to be worked out by some private discussion. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
stevertigo wrote: On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 6:50 PM, David Carsoncarson63...@gmail.com wrote: Did you actually read Charles' message, or just stop after the first sentence to fire off a reply? He wasn't saying why on earth would Wikipedia be citing the BIBLE?!, he was saying that you need to look at the reason for the citation because that may well affect your choice of which version to cite. Your right. His message though was quite characteristically sophisticated, and I of course knew that he did not mean to suggest that we *not quote the Bible. Still I sort of took the liberty of interpreting his first statement a bit literally, and maybe out of context too, just to make a tangential reference to the fact that ~65% percent of us are devoutly atheistic, and yet are dealing, somewhat accurately, with technical aspects that directly affect theological sourcing. You did. If I get trolled I usually hope for something wittier. It's always slightly ironic when atheists deal with theological topics, and myself being, by design, one of the other ~35%, I felt a bit compelled to bring that up in as flat and contrite a way as possible. No irony at all, I think. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit includes medical pages, legal pages and even theological pages anyone can edit. In fact I think the absence of a WikiProject Religious History to match the awesome WikiProject Military History is a big lack. (I'm not great at starting WikiProjects so don't sofixit me.) There is nothing ironic about people editing on military history in ways that belie nationalistic beliefs or their absence, is there? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
Carcharoth wrote: Since the rest of this thread is threatening to descend into a long discussion about theology, atheism and agnoticism, I'll chip in at this point where people are making theological jokes involving Wikipedia. I think Wikimedia needs a new deprogramming language, myself. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language
Matthew Brown wrote: It strikes me that in the current Wikipedia template-programming system that we've managed to create a perfect storm, a worse solution for everyone. We're in, at least, the easy situation in which almost any alternative would be better. To be fair, there are tens of thousands of template, they basically work, and one can usually make a new one by finding an old one and changing some text. This snafu is just that, the way WP works in practice not in theory. Not that the template issue shouldn't be addressed when the kludginess starts hitting home; but as they say Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien ([[:q:Voltaire]]). Fortunately your sentiments are compatible with mine. Charles // ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
stevertigo wrote: feed the corrupted ent? Do I understand this to be a personal invective directed at me? It's a Tolkien reference, but I suppose if Carcharoth didn't get it, it is fairly obscure. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
stevertigo wrote: On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: stevertigo wrote: Do I understand this to be a personal invective directed at me? It's a Tolkien reference, but I suppose if Carcharoth didn't get it, it is fairly obscure. Ah. So corrupted ent is just your sly way of calling me a troll, one that by mentioning Tolkien has the added benefit of making you look like a kind Tolkien-fan genius - even while making an undue personal attack. Sure. But not in a good way. I'll be on KGS as nako for a bit, if you want to understand what trolling really is So what's your KGS ranking? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
stevertigo wrote: On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Sure. But not in a good way. I graciously accept your apology. So what's your KGS ranking? It's a new account, but I can give you one stone. Well, settling it over the board would be good, but on the basis of http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=nako I kind of doubt that. Still, I'm rusty too. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
Magnus Manske wrote: On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 10:09 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/7/7 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: 2009/7/6 Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com: You're right. To atone for my sins, here the auto-comparing toolserver tool I hacked since my first mail: http://toolserver.org/~magnus/biblebay.php?bookname=Johnrange=3%3A16-3%3A18 :-O That would be more or less precisely what I was thinking of. Well done! Feature suggestion: original untranslated verse (Hebrew or Greek) at top. Do we have that (in the fame format) on wikisource? Following the Bible page on enWS leads quickly enough to http://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%AC_%CE%99%CF%89%CE%AC%CE%BD%CE%BD%CE%B7%CE%BD which is actually the Gospel of John marked out in verses. Now, whether that is the original Greek is another matter: it seems to be the standard version for the Patriarchate of Constantinople? I got well lost trying the heWS interwiki. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
David Gerard wrote: 2009/7/6 stevertigo stv...@gmail.com: Hm. Of course, Tim is right - if its public/open domain then wikisource should host it and we will then link to it. The issue with the hebtools site/script is that most of its links go to BibleGateway. Obviously the current script's sources need to be changed to include both other gateways like bible.cc and of course wikisource. A choice of gateways would be preferable. The current hosted translations/versions on wikisource are: * Bible (Wycliffe) (1380s) * Bible (Tyndale) (1526) * Douay-Rheims Bible (1610) * King James translation, or “Authorized Version” (1611) * King James translation, Oxford Standard (1769) * American Standard translation (1901) * Bible (Jewish Publication Society 1917) * World English translation (in progress since 1997) * Wikisource translation (in progress since 2006) Is there anything that will show the same verse in several translations at once? That would be ideal - highly educational. That would require something less like wiki pages and more like a database at the other end. Or someone laboriously compiling wiki pages of the form en.wiki---.org/wiki/John/3/16 . The use of transclusion by section on Wikisource would make it technically simple to bring the existing verses (or chapters) together on pages for parallel reading. Of course it would be a lot of work ... and I suppose it should be done chapter-wise. (Verses are at best a convenience - chapter divisions have I think a wider acceptance, and are at least historically older.) Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
stevertigo wrote: On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: The use of transclusion by section on Wikisource would make it technically simple to bring the existing verses (or chapters) together on pages for parallel reading. Of course it would be a lot of work ... and I suppose it should be done chapter-wise. (Verses are at best a convenience - chapter divisions have I think a wider acceptance, and are at least historically older.) Transwiki transclusion translation discrete-level differential interface? I think our techie lurkers just said kthxbye. It's as hard as pasting in markers like section begin=Genesis 1/ on pages translating Genesis 1, and creating a master page to marshall the bits. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Bible websites
Guettarda wrote: Most modern translations have known benefits and weaknesses, so the one you pick is largely a matter of taste, albeit with a bit of politics mixed in. The KJV, on the other hand, is perhaps the least accurate translation. So while I am hesitant to endorse an off-site script doing the picking, using the KJV because it's (arguably) PD is like using EB 1911. It's hard to read up on the Rwandan genocide when your source thinks that Kigali is in German East Africa. On the other hand, why is a Wikipedia article citing a Bible verse? In the case I had this morning, at [[Gangraena]] (title of a book), where the word itself is in the (Greek) New Testament at 2 Timothy 2:17 and is being used as a book title in 1646, the point is certainly to track the allusion as it would have had an impact on the readership in England (mostly). In other words the point of the link is to allow the reader of the article to see that Gangraena for a KJV reader renders as canker. And another interesting point is that (and I hadn't appreciated this) you are probably supposed to read in verse 16 as well: But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness./ And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus. There would have been a few English readers at the time who would have preferred the Geneva Bible or even the Tremellius translation (as Milton is supposed to have, but I suppose for the OT). Anyway I like, in principle, the idea, of having as default a link to a Wikisource page offering a menu of different translations or editions (free text). Which could presumably link to various commentaries. All done to an agreed template. I don't think this should be imposed, but available. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Notability and Fiction
Surreptitiousness wrote: As a result of the recent RFC on Notability and Fiction, I've drafted an essay at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_and_fiction. Feel free to edit and engage to reach a consensus on the issue, so that the current fractured state of play might be encouraged to heal itself. But please don't protect positions. We don;t need to restate [[WP:V]] for the umpteenth time, we already have it. We just need to say that there are bad articles and there are good articles, and mainly bad articles are bad due to style rather than substance. When there's no substance, it is usually easy to see and such articles with regards fiction are not a problem for notability to cure, they are a problem which is already cured by a number of other policies. Notability on Wikipedia has become too restricting and from my view it is time to roll it back and let each subject area define its own guidance, because we don't have a one size fits all approach, as evinced by [[WP:BLP]]. Every subject area is afflicted by different issues, and the solutions to those issues also differ. If Wikipedia is to continue, it needs to recognise that fact, and would that we had the leadership to recognise, reflect and build accordingly. Otherwise, I fear Wikipedia will stagnate. The greatest asset Wikipedia has is adaptability. That adaptability is in danger of becoming stifled. I don't really see what is going on there: but the essay seems to be saying that an article is acceptable if it meets fundamental content policy OR various other things, while I would think it acceptable if it meets fundamental content policy AND various things. Further, it doesn't do to mix up the status of an article and a topic. I wrote about this once (from a different angle): http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/149/charles-matthews-on-notability Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs
Ian Woollard wrote: Can I ask what policy this was done under? While I generally approve of the action here, it seems that the admins involved were not entirely following the letter or really entirely the spirit of Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. So how are they not technically rouge admins? What are policies for? We tend not to ask this often enough. I say that policies are generally there to create reasonable expectations, of editors contributing to Wikipedia, under what you could call normal circumstances. We have IAR because not all circumstances are normal, and application of policy can lead to the wrong answer. WP:BLP has as nutshell Biographical material must be written with the greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality and avoiding original research, which I agree with; together with stuff about ethical and legal responsibility (which I find somewhat surprising). Anyway, the greatest attention to verifiability means that high standards such as more than one source can be applied, even if news agencies were always reliable sources (which is very debatable, I think). Be very firm about the use of high quality references, it says. That's the letter. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs
Gwern Branwen wrote: On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Durovanadezhda.dur...@gmail.com wrote: Gwern: see the Ken Hechtman example above. In 2001 a Canadian journalist who was held by the Taliban did have his life endangered by news coverage. -Durova Yes, I read it. I don't think it comes *anywhere* near proving your sweeping proposition that this sort of censorship is justified. By calling it censorship you are of course assuming what you want to prove, that it was unjustified. Censor is the name of an official position. If there were a position within the WMF devoted to keeping _news_ out of Wikipedia when there are reliable sources, beyond a quibble, supporting it, just because someone was lobbying to have it suppressed, then you'd have a case. I'm not aware of that type of arrangement. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:News suppression (was: News agencies are not RSs)
Apoc 2400 wrote: Regarding the recent discussion, I have made a draft proposal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:News_suppression The purpose is to codify that Jimbo and other administrators did the right thing keeping the kidnapping of David Rohde out of his Wikipedia article. It also aims to define when something should be kept out of Wikipedia, even if it is covered in a few reliable sources. There can be no absolute rules for these situations, but some basic principles. Some would say that we need no rule for this as we have IAR. However, Wikipedia:Ignore all rules is about ignoring rules when they prevent you from improving the encyclopedia. The reason to suppress the news of David Rohde's kidnapping is not mainly to improve Wikipedia, but to protect Rohde. I like what IAR used to say: Being too wrapped up in rules can cause you to lose perspective, so there are times when it is best to ignore all rules ... including this one. I think peoplr who think that codification is the only way to deal with anomalous situation, precedents, apparent gaps in policy, and so on, should take this to heart. In particular the restriction of IAR so that it only sometimes applies amounts to saying that common sense is only of limited value by area of application (which is wrong), rather than by mode of application (which is correct). Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs
David Goodman wrote: would the news media have acted equally to protect someone kidnapped who was not part of the staff of one of their own organizations? preventing harm is the argument of all censors That may be the case; but saying that acting to prevent harm makes one a censor is not a valid deduction from that, but a trite fallacy. The truth of the matter is that the policy on BLP involves us in casuistry, in the technical sense. Your first comment illustrates that point. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Dispute resolution mailing list
AGK wrote: I would echo my suggestion (with the exception of bickering ;-)) that a proactive approach is needed to break what seems to be the intractability of this disagreement. Assessing whether this proposal is successful (i.e., whether it becomes a useful tool) would be most effectively undertaken by actually implementing it and setting it on a trial run. I do find your approach to be a paradox, if not necessarily worthy of Wilde. We are all entangled in threaded discussion, but some of us are thinking of setting up _a new mailing list_. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
