Re: [WikiEN-l] Tools for repointing reference dead links to archive.org?
On 1/27/14, 1:10 AM, David Gerard wrote: What I need to do is (a) find all the links (b) add archiveurl= (something on archive.org, which seems to have captured the whole site) and archivedate= . This bot used to do something along those lines on en.wiki, but hasn't been active in some months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DASHBot/Dead_Links Perhaps it or something similar could be revived? -Mark ___ 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] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault
On 11/12/12 2:49 PM, David Gerard wrote: Yet another PR company busted: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9671471/Finsbury-edited-Alisher-Usmanovs-Wikipedia-page.html http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/telecoms/article3597035.ece (you can read the article text in View source) The industry response? An apparently unanimous our bad behaviour is totally Wikipedia's fault: http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1159206/pr-industry-blames-cumbersome-wikipedia-finsbury-editing-issue/ Guys, this really doesn't help your case. Lying somewhere between amusing and sad, The Times has an update to their article (linked above) noting that Alisher Usmanov is now suing them over that exposé. Will be interesting to see if any more facts come to light in that suit. -Mark ___ 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] Categorisation by gender
On 7/18/12 11:47 AM, Andrew Gray wrote: The English Wikipedia categorises biographies by gender in some circumstances (eg athletes), but not systematically in the way that German does - there are no supercategories of Men, Women, etc, designed to list all members of those groups, and plenty of biography articles have no gendered categories. There are, of course, good reasons to avoid this, and conversely good reasons to do it... but I'm wondering why we do it this way. I remember it being referred to many years ago as long-standing practice, but I've dug around a bit in the discussion archives and can't seem to pin it down. It's probably pre-2004, maybe even pre-2003 - anyone remember? My vaguely informed guess as to why is that English-Wikipedia categories have developed mainly as a folksonomy intended for navigation, as opposed to a rational, top-down taxonomy intended for sorting things into bins, which is closer to how the German Wikipedia does it. Not universally true, but it's their general flavor. Many of the Women in X categories, for example, are maintained by WikiProject Women's History. They can be useful for navigation in contexts related to the WikiProject or some of its goals. For example, students looking for a subject to write about during a Women's History Month assignment might find a category like [[Category:Women astronomers]] useful for navigation. From that perspective, why there aren't equivalent Men in X categories is related to why there isn't a WikiProject Men's History, or a Men's History Month: basically, men have not been as systematically left out of many professions and histories, so there is less interest in or need to focus specifically on Men astronomers in order to emphasize their overlooked contributions. For similar reasons, we have categories such as [[Category:African-American inventors]], but not [[Category:White American inventors]]. I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it, but I think that asymmetry in interest and navigational usefulness is why we have some asymmetries in the category structure. As for changing it, I think it'll have to be looked at on an area-by-area basis with involvement of relevant wikiprojects, because some of the category systems are fairly complex and/or brittle, and people have opinions about them. In sports, for example, many people are already categorized into the leagues they play in, and many leagues are single-gender, so that could provide an easy way of adding people indirectly to a category without going through an editing tens of thousands of articles. Alternately (or perhaps, additionally), there are increasingly more ways than the category system for encoding metadata, if the goal is to use it for external sorting rather than navigation. For example, perhaps Template:Infobox_person could have a gender field, which would then be picked up by DBPedia and similar projects that extract infobox data. -Mark ___ 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] English Wikipedia crossed 4 million articles milestone
On 7/13/12 5:31 PM, Carcharoth wrote: Does anyone have a listing of when the other million milestones were reached? 1 million, March 1, 2006 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_Publishes_Millionth_Article 2 million, September 9, 2007 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia_Reaches_2_Million_Articles 3 million, August 17, 2009 There doesn't seem to be an archived press release on wikimediafoundation.org for this one, but see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/aug/17/wikipedia-three-million -Mark ___ 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] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)
On 5/13/11 11:40 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote: That reminds me of the celebrated occasion when editors insisted that Gloria Gaynor was a former Scientologist, based solely on the fact that the Guardian had once published a piece called Listed Scientologists. The piece was on page G2, Diversions, next to the crossword puzzle and the TV programme. The piece was just a list of names, and it had an uncanny resemblance to Wikipedia's List of Scientologists at the time of publication (which also included Gaynor as a former member, based on a poor and misrepresented web source). [...] That's exactly the kind of discrimination and judgment that needs to be applied. But editors were unwilling to give up on their scoop, and barricaded themselves behind The Guardian is a reliable source, verifiability, not truth, and not whether editors think it is true. Isn't this just a failure to actually think through what verifying information with a reliable source means, rather than a problem with the principle? It's quite possible for the Guardian to be a good newspaper in general, but for a random list in the Diversions section, with no apparent investigative reporting involved, to *not* constitute reliable verification of that point. I guess I see that kind of critical source analysis as completely in line with the idea of verifiable information cited to reliable sources, though. At least as I read it, the WP:V/WP:RS combination asks: is this given citation sufficient to verify the fact it claims to verify? So I wholeheartedly agree that bright-line rules like everything in The Guardian is reliable are wrong, but I don't think that ought to require abandoning the WP:V/WP:RS view, at least as I've understood it. Isn't there even some text on WP:RS (there used to be, anyway) about how reliable sources may be context-specific, e.g. a newspaper may be a reliable source for some claims but not for others? -Mark ___ 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] Webypedia - another doomed alternative to Wikipedia
On 08/27/2010 04:12 AM, David Gerard wrote: It's not clear there's room for another general encyclopedia on the web. What they're describing Webypedia as sounds a bit like Knol, which was more like an unmoderated about.com than a Wikipedia competitor per se. (The notion that it was a Wikipedia competitor was entirely media-originated as they desperately cast about for something to say about it, and not from anything Google or Wikipedia said at any time.) This is actually an area I think there is some opening to compete with Wikipedia in a sense, by providing more essayish articles by a individuals giving their takes on a subject, which tend to be a bit more coherent, with more personality, stronger stands/opinions, etc. Of course, it's better if most of the articles are reasonably good. That idea actually predates Wikipedia, though, and imo it hasn't been much improved by these new entrants. I still find Everything2 and h2g2, both late-1990s projects, to be the most successful of the user-produced, non-wiki webs of knowledge, and I still refer to them now and then. Am I missing new innovations in this area? -Mark ___ 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] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
On 05/13/2010 12:29 AM, David Gerard wrote: On 13 May 2010 07:07, David Katzdkatz2...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, stagnation is far more accurate. Thing is, it used to be a source of pride to tell your real world associates that you're a wikipedia admin. You'd even put it on your resume. Now, it's a bit of an embarassing secret and you definitely would not raise it in a job interview. o_0 Citation needed. I've been amazed how it's become increasingly a talking point on my CV over the years. (I put it in other interests at the end.) People *like* Wikipedia. Same here. When I first became an admin in 2004, the usual reaction was, Wikipedia? Never heard of it, but now I put it on my CV when applying for academic jobs, and it usually becomes a talking point. I think being heavily involved in *the* main source of information for a large portion of the internet-using public is and should be an interesting sort of thing. At the very least, I've had lots of interesting conversations at academic conferences from academics who are very curious but very confused about Wikipedia, but relatively few who have unredeemably negative opinions (the few tend to be from the aristocratic academic sort of personality, shocked that anyone without a PhD is allowed to write things). -Mark ___ 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 on Commons
On 05/11/2010 02:43 PM, Steve Bennett wrote: Fwiw, I've long thought the presence of graphic sexual pictures on Commons, and certainly in Wikipedia, does more harm than good, because it means the site can't be trusted in the eyes of librarians, teachers, etc etc. What level of graphic-ness do you have in mind? At least in the U.S., the level that we'd have to stay below to avoid controversy with regard to school libraries in particular is quite stringent: there are still routinely controversies over the photographs and illustrations in standard biology and even art textbooks. I don't think it's the librarians themselves who are the problem, though; generally librarians have been at the forefront of opposing any censorship in libraries, and the pressure's come from outside forces that want libraries to impose requirements that they themselves don't want to impose. -Mark ___ 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] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles
On 04/19/2010 10:46 AM, Nathan wrote: I wonder if there might be a subtle bias playing into these reviews. Perhaps if reviewers begin with the assumption that the article was written by amateur hobbyists, that influences the outcome. If Lindsey went back to them and let them know that the articles had been written or comprehensively reviewed by recognized experts, would that alter the results? It's an interesting question, but I think it might influence their description more than their actual opinion, i.e. that if they knew it was written by a PhD in their field, they would phrase their disagreement differently, but might still not like the article. Some of these comments are almost exactly the comments a survey article will typically get in peer review! Almost nobody likes the survey article that someone else has written: it invariably over-emphasizes unimportant issues, under-emphasizes the key issues, is missing important results in the field, includes results of questionable reliability, etc. (Happens with textbooks, too; almost everyone has a gripe about how the standard textbook in their field misrepresents things.) -Mark ___ 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] Positives to publicity
Keegan Paul wrote: People truly do have no clue about how to edit or the community and how it functions. Actually, I don't think the functionality of the community can be described. Folks are amazed to be told that they can edit willy nilly, make an account and all that. For all our popularity worldwide the vast majority of the consumers have no idea (I realize I'm preaching to the choir) until these news stories invoke interest. So, what to do about it? How to not bite? It's a big topic, obviously, but this book written by a few Wikipedians is probably the best introduction I've found: http://howwikipediaworks.com/ Of course, not everyone will go off and read a book. But, I mean, it's a fairly large community, engaged in a fairly large project (one that's never been attempted at this scale, actually), so some amount of effort to fully understand what's going on is inevitable. What we really want is: a much shorter version of that book, that somehow covers an even larger breadth of information. ;-) It's tricky. I mean, we're not just teaching people about Wikipedia itself when we explain how to edit Wikipedia, but about many other fields of knowledge that they may or may not already have any grounding in, which we've adapted in our practices (and which many of us have learned as we go). The idea of tertiary-source summaries vs. original research; what constitutes original research in various areas; what a neutral tone sounds like; what scholarly citation looks like; how to evaluate the reliability of sources; how to spot surprising claims that need citations; how to write in a sort of fractal summary style; etc. Some of this is slowly seeping out into the wider culture, which may make the acculturation process easier if lots of people coming in already know certain things. The widespread outside-Wikipedia use of [citation needed], often in a way reasonably close to what we usually mean by it, is one example (and actually imo good for knowledge in general--- journalists in particular are increasingly getting the [citation needed] thrown at them when they make questionable-and-unsupported claims). -Mark ___ 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)
Durova wrote: With respect and appreciation extended toward Apoc2400, it's dubious that there would be a need for a separate policy to cover this rare situation. At most, a line or two in existing policy would articulate the matter. In practice this is dealt with on a case-by-case basis precisely because previous attempts to come up with any sort of actual policy have failed. The last major push was around an attempt to keep detailed information on the construction of nuclear bombs out of Wikipedia (which failed). -Mark ___ 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] RFC on paid editing
Carcharoth wrote: *One point I don't think has been raised is that paid editing mostly focuses on living people and contemporary organisations. I can't actually think of examples of paid editing that don't involve biographies of living people ([[WP:BLP]]) or corporate companies ([[WP:CORP]]), plus a side-serving of political and non-corporate organisations (e.g. non-governmental organisations and charities) and I'm sure that is an important point, but maybe someone else could articulate that? It depends partly on what you count as paid editing. If an organization assigns a staff member to edit Wikipedia in a particular area as part of their job responsibilities, is that paid editing? Or only if they offer some sort of bounty to external contract editors? If the former counts, there've been multiple examples of paid editing by cultural and non-profit organizations whose mission is to promote information in a particular area. We've had museums paying people to improve the articles on certain areas of art history, for example. -Mark ___ 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] Docs look to Wikipedia for condition info: Manhattan Research
Nathan wrote: A specialist encyclopedia of explosives and ordnance might include information on how such weapons are built, but we don't. Similarly, medical references include information on lethal dosages and dangerous applications for drugs, but we don't. We do include detailed information on how weapons are built, though. There was a big argument a few years back about whether we ought to tone down the amount of coverage we give to details of how various nuclear bomb designs work (or at least are alleged to work, based on public information), but it was decided that including it was encyclopedic. We don't include HOWTO style step-by-step instructions, of course, but we include all the details that are available, from assembly procedures to, sizes of various parts, quantity and purity of fuel required, machining requirements, etc. -Mark ___ 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] Docs look to Wikipedia for condition info: Manhattan Research
Charles Matthews wrote: Delirium wrote: As far as I understand, the main stumbling blocks have been that nobody can agree on who should make the database, what the process will be for verifying information, what access policies should be like, who would be responsible if there were errors in it, what constitutes evidence worth including, etc., etc. Seems doctors are voting with their feet and deciding that Wikipedia's attempt at tackling all those is at least better than nothing. This (medical info) case is certainly an interesting instance of WP undercutting what people would generally agree was a well-founded desire to have authoritative information. I agree the desire for authoritative information is well-founded, but you can go too far and have paralysis: since nobody's yet agreed on what the most perfect, most authoritative source of information would be, we shouldn't have one at all? Surely building *something* is better, which is basically what Wikipedia has done, with tentative and in-progress answers to all those tricky questions of authority and process. Maybe a medical organization can build something better than Wikipedia for their field, with more authoritative information and a better process. But they haven't, despite a decades-long headstart on us in the planning department. Rather than undercutting, maybe we'll actually stimulate a renewed sense of urgency to produce an alternative? -Mark ___ 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] Docs look to Wikipedia for condition info: Manhattan Research
Thomas Dalton wrote: Even if we aren't worried about the consequences of giving incorrect advice (which we should be), that guideline is still a good one for the reasons it gives - such information is not encyclopaedic. Someone using Wikipedia for its intended purpose should have no need for the dosage information. I agree with the first part (serious consequences of incorrect information), but I don't see how why dosage information is unencyclopedic. Information on typical quantities used for any chemical compound with practical applications is a perfectly expected thing to include in an article. I certainly find it a conceptually interesting distinction whether some industrial acid is usually used in 10 mL or 100 L quantities, and similarly whether some drug is usually used in 10 mg or 100 g quantities; that's especially true if different quantities of a chemical have different applications. -Mark ___ 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 in Wikipedia
David Gerard wrote: 2009/4/27 wjhon...@aol.com: I'm not saying that people should delete based on Google results in the first place. In fact I am the one who put that note on historical subjects into the policy in the first place a few years back. Subjects who are not necessarily currently talked-up might have been quite the popular rage back in 1920 or 1920 or 1420, and should not be deleted based on current Google searches. I must say, the blindness of some AFD participants to anything that happened before 1995 can be more than a little annoying ... I haven't found this to be a big problem in practice, but maybe I've been lucky? A handful of my edge-case biographies of 19th-century individuals have been nominated for AfD, but all survived. One was a translation from a famous 19th-century German encyclopedia (ADB), and nobody could find a single post-1900 source on the man, but it was kept nonetheless, with the justification that having once been included in ADB is sufficient to automatically establish notability. A pleasantly surprising result. -Mark ___ 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] Historian teaching with Wikipedia
Marc Riddell wrote: on 4/16/09 3:44 PM, David Gerard at dger...@gmail.com wrote: Academics learning how to massively collaborate effectively. We have been collaborating very effectively for a very long time. The results are the substance of this encyclopedia. It varies by field, but my experience (as an academic) isn't really along these lines. I've rarely seen successful collaborations between more than 2-3 professors, certainly not massive. I mean, you don't usually see an entire Computer Science department working together; often, the people in the same sub-area don't even work together, depending on how closely their visions and personalities match. Of course, many academics collaborate with large labs of grad students, but that's a more hierarchical form of collaboration. Of course you're right that the overall body of knowledge has come from a lot of people, so is collaboration of a sort. But it tends to more often be the form of big-chunk give and take, rather than pervasive massive collaboration. Someone will write a journal article; someone else will respond to it or build on it; and so on. But you won't often have 20 people working together to come up with a consensus journal article. -Mark ___ 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 isn't just a good idea - it's compulsory
doc wrote: So, replace all such specialist elected and accountable bodies (or bodies accountable to the elected) with a wiki? Replace the expert, who wrote the textbook, with the anarchy of the truth according to whoever made the last edit? I think I'll stay off the koolaid and stick with democracy, professionalism, and expertise - yes it can be, on some occasions, stupid, biased and myopic, but it is still the best system we've got. On average, I'd say it isn't the best system we've got, and that Wikipedia is a better system. That is, if we're discussing the fairly narrow issue of basic coverage of primary-level history, not detailed coverage of specialist topics. The basic Wikipedia coverage of the subject matter in a typical high-school history textbook is, as far as I can tell, generally better than the coverage in the textbooks themselves. This varies by area, and there are perhaps some jurisdictions that use very good textbooks, but I'd say on average the textbooks are worse. If you include the textbooks of non-western countries, the textbooks are so much worse as to not even be a fair comparison. Of course, I don't get most of my specialist, higher-level knowledge from Wikipedia in my field of research; I'll trust a book or survey article by a well-known specialist in the field first. But if I just want an overview of the US participation in World War II, you can bet I'll trust Wikipedia's article before I trust the Texas Board of Education's approved version; and if I want an article on the Thai monarchy, I'll trust Wikipedia's article before I trust the Thai government's approved version. -Mark ___ 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 short article is not a stub.
David Gerard wrote: 2009/2/24 Delirium delir...@hackish.org: David Gerard wrote: There was some coverage of this matter in WP:BLP - that only noteworthy details of a noteworthy person should be included. (The hypothetical example given is the subject having had a messy divorce - for a minorly notable physicist it's probably not relevant, for a politician it may have been a widely reported scandal.) I this more than by subject area, it varies especially by fame of the person. For famous people, all aspects of their professional and personal lives are interesting to historians, who attempt to construct a full picture of their lives, tease out possible influences and motivations, and so on. You would be hard-pressed to find a book-length biography of a physicist or mathematician that fails to discuss their personal lives, for example. For less-famous people, it's not notable because frankly nobody really cares about them: since nobody is interested in teasing out possible influences and motivations, we don't need to know any of that info. It has to be applied on a case-by-case basis. e.g. [[Mitchell Baker]] - her hobby is trapeze. Is this relevant to mention? Well, it may not be for most people, but quite a few biographical articles on her mention it because it's an interesting thing about her. Similarly, a biographical article not listing the subject's family would seem odd where that's uncontroversial public information. OTOH, there have been cases like one I dealt with where someone put this apparently uncontroversial info into an article, but it was actually something unsourced the subject worked hard to keep out of the public eye and had to be removed and the revs deleted unless and until a good public source came up. This seems to really be an issue specific to biographies of living or recently deceased people, for a variety of reasons. For non-recent people, say someone who died in the 19th century or earlier, just about everything that you can find in reliable sources is relevant. Certainly book-length biographies consider anything they can find relevant: the goal of a biography, properly speaking, is to try to give as full as possible an illustration of all facets of a person's life, figure out how they intertwined, etc. So something like a messy divorce would certainly be interesting in trying to determine why the career path and thought of a famous philosopher, physicist, politician, or mathematician took the path it did. It might turn out not to have had a big impact, but a biographer would at least mention it. Even somewhat shorter biographies consider this information relevant: if we recently discovered some personal drama in the life of a 14th-century archbishop, encyclopedia entries would be duly updated to mention it. I'd submit that in the cases where some of this information is considered *not* relevant, it's because we actually don't want a proper biography of the person at all. Either they aren't all that interesting, or the interestingness doesn't outweigh the privacy concerns. Instead, what we really want is something akin to an entry in a subject-specific biographical dictionary, like the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (to pick one at random I've been consulting lately). Sources like that don't purport to be full biographies of their subjects, but instead to more narrowly describe their academic careers, perhaps with brief mentions of very notable things outside those academic careers. Less a biography of [[Personname]], and more an article on [[Personname's academic career]]. In extreme cases we do actually do this renaming, e.g. people known for one event are usually rolled into an article on the event. I suppose it'd be impractical to actually change the titles in the rest, but I think it's worth considering that these articles are still something different than real biographies. -Mark ___ 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 short article is not a stub.
David Gerard wrote: There was some coverage of this matter in WP:BLP - that only noteworthy details of a noteworthy person should be included. (The hypothetical example given is the subject having had a messy divorce - for a minorly notable physicist it's probably not relevant, for a politician it may have been a widely reported scandal.) I this more than by subject area, it varies especially by fame of the person. For famous people, all aspects of their professional and personal lives are interesting to historians, who attempt to construct a full picture of their lives, tease out possible influences and motivations, and so on. You would be hard-pressed to find a book-length biography of a physicist or mathematician that fails to discuss their personal lives, for example. For less-famous people, it's not notable because frankly nobody really cares about them: since nobody is interested in teasing out possible influences and motivations, we don't need to know any of that info. -Mark ___ 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] Desysopping
Matthew Brown wrote: On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many seasoned editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles. Very true, and I suspect most people will get all protective of an article they've put a lot of time into. The other half of the problem is that edits from a new user who just happens along are often bad, stylistically at least, and thus easy to respond negatively to even if they have a good point inelegantly expressed. Yeah, it's sort of tricky, because both are clearly problems, but I think these are somewhat different problems from uncivil admins or senior/seasoned/whatever-you-call-it Wikipedians. I see more of the cabal of very active editors owning an article problem in controversial areas. I know I don't bother editing in Israel/Palestine space most of the time because I figure every article is probably owned by some group of people from one side or the other, and I don't want to expend the time to deal with figuring out how I'm allowed to contribute through that screen. There are a few other nationalism-related areas I stay out of for similar reasons (Poland-related articles seem to be tricky more often than you'd think, for example). But the problematic editors aren't always senior, but sometimes are just people who've managed to set up shop for long enough to be a problem, especially in a niche. One of the earliest ArbCom cases involved Mr Natural Health, someone who had been owning a bunch of health-related articles, and was a problematically active but not particularly senior or process-aware Wikipedian. And actually seasoned Wikipedians are often useful in fixing these situations if they crop up in isolated niches--- one of the most effective ways to break a cabal's hold over a particular group of articles is to bring them to the attention of a wider community of editors that can swoop in and impose the usual NPOV and WP:V and whatnot in place of that cabal's idiosyncratic take on the matter. But I'm not sure a general attempt to keep people from owning articles is a good solution, either. In many cases, probably a greater number numerically, there's the opposite problem. As has been widely noted even off-wiki, our very good articles have a tendency to revert towards the mean, and there's no particularly good mechanism to keep that from being the default without a lot of constant maintenance effort. That's not really a Wikipedia-insiders vs. outsiders issue, either, as many of the articles that started out good and later degenerated were written by newbies (often academics in a particular area). In fact, those are the ones that tend to degenerate the most, as occasional contributors write a great article but then don't stay around to protect it from junk being added. From that perspective, I'd say most good articles don't have *enough* protectors. As per Murphy's law, the protectors are all off protecting bad articles instead. ;-) But I might have a biased sample, since the areas I edit in seem to accumulate cruft. Good computer-science articles on general subjects invariably degrade with drive-by additions of pet language examples to the point where an article that might've once given a readable overview of a concept is an unreadable mess of well in Haskell, the syntax looks like this, and in Scala, it looks like this, and you can also do it in Smalltalk, but slightly differently, like this. History articles on subjects even remotely popular also have a tendency to revert towards a pastiche of pop-history junk (often with nationalist mythologizing), unless someone is actively trying to maintain them. But I think this is a much trickier and more subtle issue than admin-civility or seasoned-editors-vs-newbies. Some articles need fewer drive-by edits by newbies adding uncited content, repetition of urban legends, or degredation of what was previously a readable exposition; one way to get that is more watchlisting and beating back of unhelpful 'improvements'. Other articles need less attention from people with very strong opinions about the subject. -Mark ___ 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] Desysopping
Charles Matthews wrote: Andrew Gray wrote: Would it be useful at this point to have some idea of how other projects do it? I know some have a normal deadminning process, but I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system, some have regular reconfirmation, what? It's hardly going to be useful to adopt a doesn't scale type system - imagine reconfirming (or not) 1000 admins annually, and then ask what else could have been done with that investment of the community's time to improve the 'pedia. I think part of the answer lies here. If anything it seems like it'd make it worse. My impression is that RfA as currently constituted has a tendency to select for rules lawyers, because it's such a heavyweight process full of requirements to be familiar with, well, other Wikipedia processes. Idealists who're interested in writing a good encyclopedia, and see Process as a necessary evil to organize collaborative encyclopedia-writing (a means, not an end!), are often turned off by the whole thing and don't bother. Several of my Wikipedia-editing-professor acquaintances occasionally could use an admin bit to do things like merging histories or move-over-deletion, but they IM or email me asking me to do it on their behalf, and wouldn't even consider asking for adminship through some process that requires them to conduct a multi-stage interview proving their familiarity with dozens of arcane policy pages. If I were forced to reconfirm my admin status I'd probably decline, because the downside of not being an admin (loss of a few useful functions like being able to merge histories) is less than the downside of spending more of my Wikipedia time on things that aren't related to, you know, writing an encyclopedia. I'd just become one of those people who emails my Wikipedia-admin acquaintances pestering them to merge histories on my behalf. -Mark ___ 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] Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0
David Gerard wrote: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/22/1336241 I found this anonymous Slashdot comment interesting: === That's exactly the problem, and one which the Britannica guy doesn't get. I'm only minimally interested in what some expert at Britannica thinks is the right answer, and a bunch of citations back to the print version of their encyclopedia as justification is useless. [...] Well, to be fair, their previous model (ca. EB1911) was reasonably interesting: get some of the most well-known people in each area to write a broad overview of the area, suitable for general audiences. Opinionated, sure, but the opinion of someone with some claim to be worth reading, generally. The real problem is that they still have the authoritative voice and lack of citations, but no longer manage to recruit suitably authoritative authors to write (and sign) the articles. Even if they did, I'd find Wikipedia more useful for many things, such as getting overviews of fields that have multiple competing viewpoints, and pointers into the literature for further research. But I'd probably read Britannica, too, whereas currently I don't really. -Mark ___ 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] Reasons I care less about Wikipedia than I used to, No. 43
Ron Ritzman wrote: On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 8:29 AM, James Farrar james.far...@gmail.com wrote: Which brings up the question What is Wikipedia?. Is meta-content like User: space and Wikipedia: space actually part of Wikipedia? A question I thought of after reading [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angr this]. Is Wikipedia a free (libre) encyclopedia or a free (beer) encyclopedia that primarily uses a free (libre) license? You can view it lots of different ways, I suppose. I personally consider Wikipedia primarily important as a *project* to produce a free (libre) encyclopedia. From that perspective, our primary product is the downloadable dumps. Once they exist, then the rest (distribution, online hosting, repackaging of subsets, etc.) can be done by dozens of other organizations. But producing the encyclopedia is much harder, which we're the only ones really doing on this scale---even if you included non-free projects. That said, hosting said encyclopedia for free (gratis) public access does also happen to be quite useful for bolstering our primary role, in that it attracts editors, promotes our mission, attracts goodwill for providing a free (and ad-free) source of information, etc. -Mark ___ 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] Linking Dates
Delirium wrote: Andrew Gray wrote: The old link all dates is now deprecated, and we're advised to just write them in a standard form (14 November 2000 or November 14, 2000). It'll be interesting to see if this helps reduce overlinking The old system was laudable, but really only worked for a small minority of readers, usually active editors themselves. For everyone else, it just got confusing... The old system did, however, tend to reduce the number of tendentious editors going around mass-changing date formats to their preferred format, because such editors could just set their preferences and not have the wrong format grate on them henceforth. Anecdotally, there's been a big spike in the past few weeks of that sort of garbage editing. Reviving this thread, that does appear to be taking place (contrary to some more optimistic predictions that it wouldn't). The biggest offenders seem to be people whose hackles are raised by what they perceive as American provincialism, and who feel that an international encyclopedia ought to use the international date format, rather than follow the usual Wikipedia dialect practice, where we accept all the major variants, and strongly discourage edits that change one to another, unless the article's strongly associated with a specific English-speaking country where one dialect predominates. Previously, such folks could be accomodated by simply changing their date preferences, keeping them from ever having to see an odious Amerikkkan date, but now they're required to resort to a crusade to get rid of Americanist date formats, preferably entirely, or at least confine them to US-only articles. There's even some proposals to change the current MOS (which basically says don't change date formats unless it's a UK/US/Australian/etc. subject) to accomodate their views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)/Proposal_on_international_date_format -Mark ___ 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] Linking Dates
Skyring wrote: There's very little debate on which date format should be used for articles on U.S. or UK subjects, but for articles on (say) France or Brazil, there is a push to use U.S. date format, despite both of those nations using International format. There's no such push at all, and it's a bit disingenuous to claim so, as the only people making a push to convert date formats from one to another are those in favor of a day-month-year universal standard. The long-respected status quo is that if an article is on a subject that isn't strongly tied to a particular dialect of English, then it uses whatever the original author used, including for spellings, date formats, etc. Changing from one to another is discouraged, as it's a noise edit, and rather impolite to change one correct English dialect to another, especially as there are much more important things to work on. -Mark ___ 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] NOR contradicts NPOV
Carl Beckhorn wrote: On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:11:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research. That sort of research is usually known as writing and is what we are supposed to use talk pages to discuss. Mark already hits on the main point in his next quote: what is appicable to medical articles may not be applicable to mathematics articles (and physical science articles will have their own issues, and so on). One thing to keep in mind as we move forward in this discussion is that analysis of sources is only original reasearch in the sense of WP:NOR if the analysis is actually included in the text of the article, or is implicit in the arguments there. In order to assess the due weight and neutral point of view for various topics, we have to consider the historical and disciplinary context of our sources using our broader knowledge of the subject. This is research in some sense, but it is not prohibited in any way. I agree that *some* amount of original research is impossible in any sort of writing that involves synthesis, and I also agree with you that this varies by disciplines. I'd say most of the problems with directly citing journal articles to construct novel summaries of a topic have happened in medical, historical, and political articles, which has driven some of the policy developement. That's particularly problematic because in, say, history, synthesis of sources is basically what research in the field *is*. But I'd also be skeptical of a general mathematical article, on something like [[calculus]] or [[statistics]], which was constructed mostly from journal articles. Especially with overview articles, secondary or tertiary sources provide not only citations for specific facts, but citations that give evidence for something really being consensus in a field, or considered an important issue in a field. Just a bunch of primary source references isn't really verifiable in the sense that I can track down the references and thereby be confident in the article's accuracy, because I have no idea why these references were selected out of the thousands of journal papers written every year, whether they are representative of the field, whether they're a highly biased subset, etc. So I'd be skeptical if our [[calculus]] article had an impeccably cited section on a part of calculus that no textbook or widely cited survey saw fit to mention. I guess I tend to view it mostly pragmatically, looking to see if a particular use of sources jumps out at me as likely to be due to someone trying to push a novel theory or not. The skepticism goes up when there are in fact already a number of secondary or tertiary sources---then I wonder why the article author felt it necessary to write their own novel overview of the subject directly from the primary literature, rather than referring to any of the extant ones. -Mark ___ 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] NOR contradicts NPOV
Carl Beckhorn wrote: On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:07:37PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: Our policy was fashioned in a deliberate way to prevent the use of primary sources where there is no secondary source mention. That was deliberate. We have always permitted the use of academic research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. These are crucial both for the results they contain and for their link to the historical record. The difficulty is that these sources have to be considered secondary sources in order to mesh our best practices with the literal wording of NOR. But many people like to consider them primary sources. The idea that these sources should be avoided entirely would simply be silly. The idea that it's better to avoid primary sources entirely is more applicable when primary source means blog post. I think it's perfectly applicable to journal articles as well. I personally, at least, think it's usually inappropriate to directly cite a new-research result to the journal article, since evaluating journal articles, and placing them in proper historical and disciplinary context is itself a quite difficult bit of original research. That's what survey articles, textbooks, summary mentions in other papers, works like Mathematical Reviews, and so on are for---much better to cite those. To take an even more direct example, in the medical field, summarizing the results of all the studies that have been done on a particular subject is a meta-analysis, and a publishable, first-class research project in itself. If no prominent meta-analysis in an area exists, it would be original research for Wikipedia to attempt to directly crawl through the primary literature and write our own, beyond something simple and non-committal like studies have found both positive [1,2] and negative [3,4] results. An exception might be important but entirely uncontroversial results, which are not likely to ever get a whole lot of critical analysis. So if some mathematical theorem is proven, I don't have a problem with citing the paper that proves it. But if, say, an antidepressant was shown to be no better than placebo---now we're in a controversial, murky area, where anyone can cherry-pick primary sources to make an argument for all possible conclusions. -Mark ___ 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] OT: Peer review gone awry - The Case of M. S. El Naschie
phoebe ayers wrote: Maybe we need to put more emphasis on encyclopedia as a tertiary source -- let other people do the summarizing and the vetting and sorting out of what ideas are going to stick around for the long-term, and focus away from citing original research directly, which helps side-step the danger of representing obscure or untested theory as canonical truth. This might be particularly be true for new scientific discoveries or new ideas in the humanities. (Different perhaps for events in the news, articles about pop culture, etc). That's generally what I try to do, at least in cases where high-quality summary sources are already available. IMO, if there are well-regarded survey articles, specialist encyclopedias, etc., on a subject, then it's verging on original research to directly cite even secondary sources (e.g. journal articles with original research) to develop a new summary view. I only really resort to citing secondary sources directly on a pragmatic basis if: 1) no good tertiary sources already exist; and 2) the material is either not likely to be controversial, or I've checked that it's corroborated by multiple independent sources. -Mark ___ 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] OT: Peer review gone awry - The Case of M. S. El Naschie
phoebe ayers wrote: Of course, what's interesting and troubling for us is that this is a respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing Wikipedia is supposed to use as a reliable source. But (naturally, I suppose) the academic publishing process is as open to failure as any other publishing or reporting process.* And I can't help but think that in a more open process -- an open access journal, say, or even Wikipedia -- this would not have gone on for so long or played out in the same way. True, though I think the biggest (and long-standing) problem has actually been books, which in many fields (especially in the humanities) are both the canonical reliable source, and hugely problematic as sources. Academic presses have a peer-review process, but it isn't intended to make sure the book is representative of consensus in the field, unbiased, or otherwise a good source for writing an encyclopedia article. It's more of a minimal level of reviewing to ensure that the author is making a legitimate contribution to the academic debate, not plagiarizing anyone, etc.---even if the result is a highly polemical book contrary to consensus and accepted by nearly nobody, it may be worth publishing as a contribution to the overall discussion, especially if the author is already well known. This is all fine if books are read with full knowledge of their status in the field---that they represent the possibly idiosyncratic view of one particular writer. But if their claims are then entered into Wikipedia articles, with a citation to the book to justify them, that's more of a problem. This isn't as rare as people might think either; I'd say the *majority* of academic-press books make at least one significant claim that is controversial in its field, often without even admitting that the claim is controversial. -Mark ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
