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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/23/13 11:10 AM, David Gerard wrote:

I wasn't thinking so much in terms of Wikipedia itself, as the article
being about one of the big problems with bios anywhere, including on
Wikipedia. And particularly living bios.


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


Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Progress...

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/26/13 4:48 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:

"As with other inventions that produced an inferior product at a much
lower price, from the printing press to the steam-driven loom to
Wikipedia, what happens now is largely in the hands of the people
experimenting with the new tools, rather than defending themselves from
them."

http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/07/08/moocs-and-economic-reality/

Fred


The institutions are slow to recognize this apocalypse, among them 
Wikipedia's institutional arm. Students and prospective students are 
only beginning to appreciate that the costs of education do not 
correlate with their personal economic prospects. Employers maintain 
illusions about the value of credentialization, as though it would 
absolve them from establishing their own training programs.


Ray

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/12/12 2:32 AM, Thomas Morton wrote:

However; it's a bad hack because in many fields you need to be an expert to
be able to properly write about the subject.

I have a deep interest in religious history; you couldn't call me an
expert, but I have studied the subject to undergraduate level in my spare
time. I look at the editors working on religious history topics on
Wikipedia and they are, often, incapable of scholarly authorship, or driven
by their own viewpoints.

This is just one data point.

The "all editors created equal" thing is a misnomer; being an admin people
*do* defer to me, even though I try to avoid it. I see many admins using
their authority.

So perhaps it is time to allow experts to be seen as such.


I think a lot of what happens on Wikipedia is a result of the computer 
science mindset where everything can be reduced to a series of zeros and 
ones.  In the humanities young editors too easily fall into the trap of 
a the first year university student who has taken a Psychology course 
and is ready to analyze everyone around him.


Ec

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/11/12 8:23 AM, Nathan wrote:

That comment sounds like it was written by Peter Damian. Not everyone,
even Wikipedians, recognize or keep in mind the fact that there is a
subversive principle (or really, many) underlying the Wikipedia model.
It intentionally does not offer deference to editors with credentials
in the fields they might choose to edit. There are obvious practical
reasons for this, but there's also an element of democratizing
information and the curation of knowledge.

This strikes many self-defined experts as wrongheaded; they expect to
be treated as authorities, and are often upset when they are not.
While unfortunate, that doesn't turn this feature of Wikipedia into a
bug. If anything it suggests we need to do a better job educating
potential editors and readers about the principles of the
encyclopedia.

The subversive principle lies in making reality a victim of group-think. 
This subjects truth to a wholly flawed mechanism of verification that is 
immune to any kind of reality check. Wikipedia has a perverse history 
when it comes to dealing with expertise. It substitutes it's own 
bureaucracy for recognized experts in a field. These admins are the 
wrongheaded self-defined experts that expect to be treated as 
authorities. In circumstances of law they are quite willing to evade 
responsibility with a strategic "IANAL" while they run to the 
acknowledged experts in that field. Understanding and good judgement are 
not the product of rules.


If we note the wording, "There’s no way Roth could have tackled this 
subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard," It doesn't state Broyard's 
influence it speculates about it. The innuendo works for all but the 
most careful readers. In the underlying incident instead of treating the 
word "spook" in its ordinary meaning of a ghost, the crowd willfully 
mischaracterizes the word in a more obscure sense. In the famed 
Seigenthaler incident the writer did not make a blunt claim that 
Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy assassination, he merely 
stated that he had been cleared of any such charges. That claim may have 
been outright vandalism, but, judging by the reaction, it was effective. 
How we fail to read accurately is frequently a big problem.


I tend to be very critical of experts in any field. I still like to give 
them the prima facie benefit of the doubt in the absence of evidence to 
the contrary, or other basis of conflict. Similarly, I also read 
"reliable sources" with the same criticality.


Needing "to do a better job educating potential editors" sounds to much 
like the politician who thinks that the only reason the public hasn't 
agreed with views is that he hasn't explained them well enough. It 
doesn't occur to him that there might be something wrong with his views, 
nor to us that our epistemology might be flawed.


Ray

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/18/12 7:26 AM, Ken Arromdee wrote:


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

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



Notwithstanding scientific developments, there are still people who 
prefer to believe in God.


Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses: Britannica to stop printing books

[Ray Saintonge]

On 03/13/12 5:22 PM, phoebe ayers wrote:

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 3:49 PM, Samuel Klein  wrote:

2010's 32-volume set will be its last.  (Now I want to get one, to
replace my old set!)  Future versions will be digital only.

I don't use it in print, haven't for years, and have been expecting
something like this for a while, but am still surprisingly saddened by
it too; there's something about the shelf of volumes that encapsulates
the world's knowledge that sort of symbolizes the whole idea of a
library to me.

I've been asked to write a short editorial about this development from
a Wikipedian's perspective and am curious about (and would love to
include) other Wikimedian experiences -- did you use print
encyclopedias as a kid? Was a love of print encyclopedias part of your
motivation or interest in becoming a Wikipedian? Is there any value in
them still? Will you miss it?

cheers,
-- phoebe



I've always been a bookish person, even growing up in an environment 
where books were not featured. I do remember having a two-volume 
(perhaps the Columbia-Viking) when I was young, and still in primary 
school.  I cherished it, and looked up a lot of different things in it.


I don't think that my love of encyclopedias was a factor in becoming a 
Wikipedian.  I think it was mostly a feeling that with all the books 
that I had already accumulated by 2002 I would be able to contribute 
something.  It was much easier to contribute then. It was fun.


I now have maybe a dozen encyclopedias, all acquired since 2002. My 
latest such addition was 7 volumes from the first American edition of 
The Edinburgh Encyclopædia from 1832.  These older volumes remain 
important because of the depth they give to knowledge.  Fully grasping a 
subject includes grasping its evolution unencumbered by the static 
snapshot verified in Wikipedia.  This is much as described in the 
opening paragraphs of Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers". What 
these older volumes say will often be obsolete, and sometimes absurd, 
but that information remains a part of a subject's history. They include 
the mistakes which enable us to measure our success.


The extent to which Wikipedia has burrowed into the modern psyche 
carries a responsibility that is both awesome and awful. Britannica, 
with all the faults we have acknowledged and through a couple 
bankruptcies, remained the prima facie source of information for 10 
English-speaking generations. We have unseated them, and not only in 
English.


Ray

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 03/11/12 3:36 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:

Yes my criticism of your requiring new authors of new articles to have  "a
familiarity with policy" and "several references" was about what you said
you intend this new software to do, not on how close the current prototype
is to achieving that. If your intent is other than you said then please
clarify your intent, don't expect me to disregard your stated intent simply
because the current prototype doesn't fully implement it yet.


"Familiarity with policy" here is akin to inspecting the wheels of a 
moving bus without falling under them.  Often one reference should be 
more than satisfactory.  I have material in 200 year old books that may 
or may not be mentioned elsewhere.



I'm well aware of last year's studies which showed that despite an
increasing proportion being spammers and far more being vandals than in our
early years, most new editors are still editing in good faith. But that
doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, a large proportion of them do, much
of my editing is fixing mistakes made by new editors. One of the divides in
the community is between those who think that newbies need to be accepted
indeed welcomed, their mistakes corrected without criticism and their good
stuff celebrated;


A kind word and understanding go a long way.

As opposed to the majority who supported the idea of
stopping editors creating articles until they'd been autoconfirmed, and who
believe in template bombing newbies articles or simply reverting their
edits as "unsourced".


It's unfortunate that idiots with this kind of attitude have taken over 
the asylum.  These negativists who do this without ever making positive 
contributions to the project deserve a similar treatment.


Ray


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and political statements

[Ray Saintonge]

On 01/18/12 12:54 AM, David Gerard wrote:

On 18 January 2012 08:15, Carcharoth  wrote:

A one-off black-out, yes. Repeated black-outs, no. I would hope most
Wikipedians would oppose anything like this happening again in the
near future, if only because this strategy becomes less effective the
more it is used.

Yep. Personally, I'd like this to be really rare.



Saying "Fuck off" is always more effective when expressed by someone who 
very rarely speaks so bluntly.


Ray

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/23/11 7:27 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
> On 22 December 2011 18:10, Ken Arromdee  wrote:
>
>> And the more you use "it's in the
>> rules" as a club to hit bad users with, the more others can use it as a
>> club to force bad ideas through; there's just no defense to "what I want
>> follows the rules".

Given the jungle of Wiki rules there is likely a rule somewhere that 
says the opposite. Tracking it down is the stuff of lawyers, or at least 
can waste a lot of time.  Rules work well when it's truly a question of 
bad users. For others they generate chaos.

>> You see this all the time for BLPs: "Don't you have any empathy?
>> We're hurting a real person."  "You're just trying to distract us from this
>> rule.  Your own personal feelings aren't an excuse to ignore our
>> policies..."

Just like Assange was hurting real people with Wikileaks.

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

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

Follow the Tao of Wiki.
> BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be hardest to argue that
> rules should be ignored.
BLPs need to be treated as the exception to the general rule.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Demi Moore BLP name

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/05/11 11:33 AM, Nathan wrote:
> Having worked for several newspapers and, as a regular reader,
> witnessed a mind-boggling array of errors in even the best and most
> prestigious news outlets, I have a pretty healthy doubt for the
> accuracy of any interview or news report.  If you never read anything
> other than Wikipedia coverage, it would still make any reasonable
> person question whether journalists are capable of getting even the
> most basic information right most of the time.

I think that many Wikipedians still believe in the myth that every 
question has a correct answer. Never mind Demi Moore, the birther 
controversy about Obama lasted much longer than it should have among 
people who certainly had the resources to track down the correct 
information. Asking for a birth certificate rather than a photocopy of 
the birth registration no doubt added to the confusion.

My inclination when somebody who should know contradicts usually 
reliable sources would be to add a note to that effect directly quoting 
what she says. Let the reader choose what he wants to believe.

Another factor that a reader should consider is that she was very young 
at the time of her birth.

Ec

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/03/11 7:56 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
> http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
>
> Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about
> the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've
> gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to
> interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the
> purpose.
>
> Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have
> built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to
> help us to make it better.
>
+1

Ec

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/04/11 1:10 PM, Will Beback wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Tony Sidaway  wrote:
>> http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
>>
>> Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about
>> the unfriendliness of the environment. It isn't so much that we've
>> gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to
>> interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the
>> purpose.
>>
>> Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have
>> built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to
>> help us to make it better.
> In this case, Sullivan wasn't a reader. He was a would-be editor trying to
> maintain an article about a barely notable SEO expert.
>
> I've noticed that a lot of critics of Wikipedia began by trying to promote
> some non-notable cause only to be rebuffed.
>

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

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

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikisource-l] unz.org - new digitization/archiving effort

[Ray Saintonge]

This is an interesting and useful site, but prohibiting the electronic 
reproduction of the content, even as it applies to material that is 
indisputably in the public domain is not on the spirit of open software.

Ray

On 12/01/11 5:15 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Ron Unz, a long-time Wikimedia supporter, alerted me to this personal
> project that he's been working on for a long time:
>
> http://www.unz.org/
>
> It's an archive of periodicals, books, and videos, some of which
> hosted there, some externally.
>
> Examples:
>
> http://www.unz.org/Publication/SaturdayRev
> http://www.unz.org/Publication/Century
>
> Timeslice from the outbreak of WWI:
>
> http://www.unz.org/Publication/AllArticles?Period=1914aug
>
> According to Ron, the system contains almost 400,000 authors and their
> writings. A couple of examples of author pages:
>
> http://www.unz.org/Author/MenckenHL
> http://www.unz.org/Author/WhartonEdith
>
> Ron believes that the copyright situation is clear -- that either it's
> PD due to age, due to lack of copyright renewal, or that he has
> permission in some cases via licensing agreements. In any case,
> there's quite a bit of unambiguously public domain stuff there that I
> haven't seen digitized elsewhere, and it should be useful as a
> research library for Wikipedians as well.
>
> Cheers,
> Erik
>


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why Wikipedia Is Important.

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/26/11 5:41 PM, K. Peachey wrote:
> Even with Wikipedia around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
>
>

And I thought that it was caused by disorder at rock concerts or when a 
neighbour complains that one's music is too loud.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nobel prizewinning chemist: "in my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than textbooks"

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/04/11 8:45 AM, geni wrote:
> On 4 November 2011 14:24, Tony Sidaway  wrote:
>> Harry Kroto.
>>
>> 'Kroto shared his views on what he calls the "GooYouWiki-Revolution"
>> and spoke highly of Wikipedia as a resource.
>> "In my field," said Kroto, "it's more reliable than the textbooks."'
>>
>> http://www.reflector-online.com/life/wikipedia-not-all-bad-even-sexy-1.2665094
> In fairness his field is chemistry which has issues with its
> textbooks. Most of the best chemists are more interested in publishing
> in journals rather than text books and all but the most fundamental
> areas (and Atkins Physical Chemistry has rather a lot of that area
> locked down) move so fast that books are outdated within a year or so.
>
> Throw in the academic publishing sector wishing to push out new
> editions of their organic and inorganic chemistry books each year and
> errors in proof reading are also an issue.
>
>
Writing a long textbook may not be financially rewarding for the 
author.  But I would also think that with undergraduate science there is 
not much incentive to investigate alternative approaches.  That 
certainly keeps the textbook publishers happy.

If a student uses Wikipedia for an essay it's dishonest not to say so, 
so the present state of things only drives users into the closet. The 
real issue should not be about using Wikipedia as a source, but using it 
as the only source for the key concepts of the essay.

Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nobel prizewinning chemist: "in my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than textbooks"

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/04/11 11:24 PM, Carcharoth wrote:
> Thanks for that. And for looking into the history of that. The fact
> that the tag stayed there for so long doesn't surprise me at all. Most
> casual editors, if they don't know how the system works, will assume
> that someone else will deal with the tag and eventually remove it.
> This is one reason backlogs got so big, because only a small
> proportion of editors actually use the tags and their workflows in a
> systematic manner, and this doesn't include the vast majority of
> casual editors.

I suppose this also has some relationship to the bystander phenomenon, 
where a victim will more likely be helped if there is only one witness 
to an accident than many.

> One other thing has struck me about the reliability of tagging, and
> that is the fact that most of the articles I use to look up stuff most
> days (from high-traffic articles to relatively obscure stuff) tends
> not to have tags (though some do). I think this is an indication in
> same way that stuff that people look at and care about gets edited and
> improved enough that they don't get tagged (or the tags are removed),
> but that stuff that is tagged but not fixed may tend to be the stuff
> that readers and editors don't really care about enough (again, stats
> of article traffic for the backlogs would help immensely here). The
> few times I've dipped into the backlog, I've recoiled at the stuff
> being written about and then tagged as they are mostly borderline
> notable and I just can't bring myself to help out with stuff that
> frankly arouses no interest in me and I'm never likely to need to
> refer to as a reader.

When I look at an article as an ordinary reader looking for information 
I mostly don't notice if it has been referenced, and I've learned to 
ignore the tags that are there.  I sometimes wish that they were at the 
bottom of the page where they are less visible.  The information already 
there will usually satisfy me. Unless I want to look more deeply into 
the matter, or something sounds suspicious I have no need to look at the 
references.

> The backlog I dipped into was:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections

Sectioning is a kind of fix that can be done without seeking outside 
information. Those people who add this tag could just as easily fix it 
themselves.

> Selecting:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections_from_October_2009
>
> And the articles I looked at were:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Pace
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Palackal
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palamaneri
>
> In all three cases, I struggled to convince myself that editing these
> articles would be a good use of my time.

One possible test for notability is to ask whether they are more or less 
notable than our many articles on second string sports figures and 
entertainers.

Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Tag removals by readers (was: Newbie recruitment: referencing)

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/03/11 5:31 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth  wrote:
>
>> safe and then move on". And then someone else, later, might fix the
>> article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and
>> not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no,
>> really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others
>> to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you
>> should come back and assess whether it is still needed).
> There's also a widespread belief that "I shouldn't/can't remove them".
> I regularly see emails in OTRS saying "I've fixed X page, but the tags
> are still there, can you check it out"; I've seen it occasionally on
> talkpages as well, though it's less common.
>
> This may be because people believe -
>
> a) the tags are "official",&  need third party review before they can
> be removed (to confirm the problem's gone); or
> b) tags are automatically generated, and that since they're still
> there after they've made changes, the articles obviously not fixed
> "enough" yet.
>
> Both beliefs are helped by the fact that a lot of people honestly
> don't realise the lead section can be edited - they use section edit
> links, and don't realise that editing the page is how you get at the
> "zeroth section" of the article. If you don't see the template when
> you edit, you're less likely to realise it's a template to be removed.
> - and even if you know about templates, if you can't figure out how to
> get to it, you're stuck!

Even if you can get past this technical hurdle, the social/intellectual 
one will still be there.  I certainly don't want to spend a lot of time 
trying to second guess the individual who put up the banner. Perhaps 
I've only fixed the problem in the one part of the article where I can 
help, and left the rest for others without seriously looking at the rest 
of the article. Completely resolving the problems is a often an 
accumulation of multiple efforts. If I'm not editing in response to the 
tag I'll more likely ignore it completely,  It's fair enough to believe 
that the people who put up the tags are the best ones to remove them. 
Adding tags should accomplish more than generating work for other people.

Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/03/11 7:36 PM, Alan Liefting wrote:
> On 3/11/2011 10:45 p.m., Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> On 11/02/11 3:38 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
>>> I'm thinking that the problem here is inline references. An inline
>>> reference is one where you plonk the reference in the middle of the text
>>> lots of stuff. The problem with those is that they break up the
>>> flow of the text, making it very hard to maintain.
>> Inline references are a problem even for newbies wanting to make a
>> simple correction.  In a reference rich article the error may be easily
>> visible in article space, but becomes difficult to find in edit space
>> when one needs to wade through a lot of references.
> WikEd has syntax highlighting to make editing easier.
>
That just introduces another geekish piece of software. In a random page 
in need of help there is no link to this software, If I want to fix an 
obvious typo with one or two keystrokes I don't want to spend an hour 
tracking down and learning some new tool.  That just makes the cure more 
onerous than leaving the error in place. Non-technical people are 
quickly turned off by the fairy world of additional software.

Ray


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/02/11 3:38 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
>
> I'm thinking that the problem here is inline references. An inline
> reference is one where you plonk the reference in the middle of the text
> lots of stuff. The problem with those is that they break up the
> flow of the text, making it very hard to maintain.

Inline references are a problem even for newbies wanting to make a 
simple correction.  In a reference rich article the error may be easily 
visible in article space, but becomes difficult to find in edit space 
when one needs to wade through a lot of references.

Ray

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 10/12/11 4:50 AM, Angela Anuszewski wrote:
> Personally, I've given up on talk pages.   The reason is many of them don't 
> have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there 
> is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if 
> that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
>

I think I raised this point several years ago, to no avail. Perhaps 
something like a meta page. When I look at a talk page I'm really 
looking for other opinions on some of the material about which I have 
uncertainties.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Facepalm?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 10/04/11 3:51 AM, Tom Morris wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:04, Scott MacDonald
>   wrote:
>> Unfortunately, I think this is what happens when kewl teenagers who like
>> memes started (apparently) by star-trek, meet adults who value actual
>> communication in the language of Shakespeare.
> Oh, please. I'd call you a flap-mouthed miscreant, but instead I shall
> risk accusations of incivility and just facepalm quietly to myself.
>

Pedantry is no more communicative than the memes of pop culture.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Facepalm?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 10/03/11 8:22 PM, Risker wrote:
> On 3 October 2011 16:06, Ken Arromdee  wrote:
>> On Mon, 3 Oct 2011, Scott MacDonald wrote:
>>> I've never understood people's problem with WP:DICK.
>> Because invokin g it is equivalent to calling the other person a dick.
> Every day, I see perfectly civil people facepalming.  I have yet to see a
> civil person turn to someone in public and say "Don't be a dick."
>
> I think perhaps some peoples' civility radar is somewhat out of tune.
>
>
I was unaware of the term "facepalm" until I read this thread. If 
someone had tagged me with this symbol, I wouldn't have had a clue about 
what he was trying to say. It seems that geekish. If somebody is being a 
jerk isn't it better to bluntly tell him directly instead of drawing 
upon an unfamiliar term from geekdom.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/19/11 11:35 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> Doesn't this approach assume that people all interact with Wikipedia
> in the same way? Many people only participate in a vanishingly small
> part of Wikipedia and you can have some areas that are deserted and
> others that are very active. This isn't found by looking at global
> statistics, but by looking at the actual editing and histories out
> there "on the ground".
>

Most don't just interact in different ways, but at different times.  I 
may have been interested in a topic a year ago, When the topic seemed 
stable I would have gone on to something very different several times 
over the course of the year. Now, when the year-old topic bursts into 
flames, giving it due consideration requires that  I put aside my 
current interests to defend the old topic from people who show no 
evidence of having put any serious study.  They may just be applying 
some new rule on a policy page whose changes I would have had no reason 
to monitor. If my previous work was referenced with borrowed books I may 
no longer have access to those books to support my case.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/19/11 12:19 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Fred Bauderwrote:
>
>> Sounds like an interesting project which might answer a few perennial
>> questions such as to what extent Larry Sanger shaped basic Wikipedia
>> policies. However, please keep in mind that this mailing list and the
>> Wikipedia-l mailing lists were much more active in those days, contained
>> significant discussions of substantive issues, and that policy was
>> sometimes made on those lists, and only memorialized in policy pages.
>>
>> Fred
>>
> Definitely a good point, especially if we want to fold in NS5 contributions
> into any study.
>
>
"NS5" is another cryptic acronym.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/19/11 12:03 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 19 September 2011 18:38, Steven Walling  wrote:
>>   Research on the amount of bytes added to different namespaces suggests it
>> is true that the project namespace is stagnant.[1] The largest period of
>> growth in the bytes added to the project namespace began roughly in 2003 and
>> tapered off to a smaller, steady proportion of all content added by 2006.
> STAGNANT?
>
> Think of the children, get them out of Wikipedia immediately! They could
> catch something!
>
>
Most dangerously, they could catch a clue.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/17/11 6:04 PM, MuZemike wrote:
> I think that certainly does happen, mainly because some don't like
> change. Many RfCs and proposals contain oppose reasons such as "solution
> in search of a problem" or "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Other than
> what Alan mentioned, this has also applied to any technical changes to
> the system.
>
> Other proposals get so bogged down in endless stalemate and
> filibustering (like with Pending Changes), nothing ever gets done or
> moves forward. That's where the "consensus-based model" fails miserably.
>
> On the other hand, a straight "vote" may not also be desirable,
> especially if the results may be close to 50-50, because you then
> alienate too much of the community that way.
Resistance to change is a chronic disease.  At the same time voting is 
evil for the very reason that you state. That is made worse by framing 
questions in a win/lose context.  I have consistently believed that no 
vote should ever be closed completely.  Action thresholds can be 
defined, but that should not close a vote. People should be allowed to 
continue voting indefinitely, or even change their original vote, until 
a change threshold is reached. That change may never become a reality, 
but even the right to support the obvious gives a feeling of participation.

Ec

> On 9/17/2011 3:54 PM, Alan Liefting wrote:
>> Is it just me or do others find it difficult to instigate any sort of
>> changes to policies, guidelines, layout, Manual of Style and related
>> matters regardless of how minor they are?
>> Could it be that WP is a reflection of human behaviour and has become a
>> talkfest where nothing changes because of our inherently conservative
>> nature?
>> Or am I trying to satisfy the readers of WP rather than editors and
>> readers? Since readers do not edit they never get to have a say so the
>> editors get what they want (yes I know - editors are readers as well).
>>
>>
>>


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/17/11 11:48 PM, Ev. Jorgen. wrote:
> People should making negative insinuations about the majority or claims of
> mythical idiots that "oppose nearly any sensible idea". Perhaps if you have
> proposed or supported a change that has not been implemented it was just a
> poor idea.

Maybe they are just discouraged by the bureaucratic process.  Even when 
only a small number of unrepresentative people oppose a sensible idea 
the task of bringing about changes becomes onerous.  Rather than trying 
to debate the rules it is simpler to just go ahead and make the changes 
on the affected mainspace pages despite the rules. IAR is one of our 
greatest rules.

Ec

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/17/11 5:48 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> On Sep 16, 2011 6:35 PM, "Fred Bauder"  wrote:
>>> It is difficult to balance the needs of the general public, which reads
>>> more at a 5th grade level than a 9th grade level, with the need to
>>> present comprehensive information that would be of use to an
>>> oncologist.
>>>
>>> If we addressed this problem in a systemic way we would present
>>> alternate
>>> articles at differing levels of comprehensiveness and readability.
>>>
>>> Perhaps in the future.
>> If most people that have completed the ninth grade can't read at the
>> ninth
>> grade level, you need to recalibrate your scale... Either that, or give
>> up
>> on this nonsense that readability can be determined by word and sentence
>> length. It has far more to do with how engaging it is and how much prior
>> knowledge it assumes than how long the sentences are.
>>
>> If people want something that doesn't require much language skill, we do
>> have Simple English Wikipedia. I haven't visited it in a while, so I'm
>> not sure how good it is these days.
>>
> It doesn't have much detailed information on cancer.
>
> Simple English serves those learning English who have a limited
> vocabulary, not the general English speaking public, who are literate but
> not skilled readers. Reaching that population, the masses, if you will,
> requires specialized writing and editorial skills. Governmental and
> medical organizations use those skills while crafting public information
> documents. We could also learn and apply those skills in an appropriate
> format.
>
I look at Simple more broadly to include adult native English  speakers 
with generally poor reading skills for whatever reason.  Depending on 
how you define "literate" your comment could be self-contradictory.

I just looked at the first sentence of [[en:Cancer]] which reads:
> *Cancer* /ˈkænsər/ 
> (
>  
> listen 
> ) 
> (medical term: malignant  
> neoplasm ) is a large, 
> heterogeneous class of diseases  
> in which a group of cells 
>  display uncontrolled 
> growth, invasion that intrudes upon and destroys adjacent tissues, and 
> often metastasizes , wherein 
> the tumor cells spread to other locations in the body via the 
> lymphatic system  or through the 
> bloodstream .

and the first few sentences of [[simple:Cancer]] which read:
> *Cancer* is a class of diseases 
>  or disorders. It is when 
> the body has no control over cells that begin to split. In cancer 
> , body 
> cells copy their contents. They then make new cells with these copies. 
> These cells are able to go into other tissues 
> . They go into 
> other tissues by growing into them. They can also go into other 
> tissues by putting themselves into far away places by metastasis 
> .

I don't find either satisfactory. Both have grammatical problems.  I had 
to pause to determine how "invasion" related to the beginning, and after 
figuring that out came to the conclusion that "metastasizes" should 
really have been a noun.

In the Simple version "is when..." is an incorrect introduction of an 
adverb clause. Addressing an audience with limited language skills is no 
excuse for our own bad grammar.  I don't know what is intended by "body 
cells copy their contents." A few individual words need further 
explanation, or, at least, links.

Both of these need serious help.

Ray

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

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/16/11 10:35 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> Nice to know we are as accurate and more up-to-date than the competition.
>> I'd love to see further work done on the 2% of information where we
>> currently differ from the textbooks, hopefully most of that will just be
>> that the textbooks are out of date. But it would be good to have that
>> confirmed and any errors fixed.
>>
>> As for "The study authors recommend that patients use the PDQ site first
>> so
>> they are not inundated by complex information and hyperlinks". I'm not
>> sure
>> how dumbed down things have to be for ninth graders - but if I'm right in
>> assuming that ninth graders is American English for early teens
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_grade then I'm surprised they think
>> hyperlinks might be beyond them. Is it just possible that someone in the
>> medical profession is being patronising to the public here?
> It is difficult to balance the needs of the general public, which reads
> more at a 5th grade level than a 9th grade level, with the need to
> present comprehensive information that would be of use to an oncologist.
>
> If we addressed this problem in a systemic way we would present alternate
> articles at differing levels of comprehensiveness and readability.
>
> Perhaps in the future.
>
>
That could be a project for simple-wp to undertake.

Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Editing anonymously though having an account and other moral dilemmas.

[Ray Saintonge]

On 08/24/11 3:30 PM, Nathan wrote:
> Fourth, it's hard to say without understanding more exactly what kind
> of threat you are under. Probably I'd do it myself anyway, but that's
> a purely personal decision. Failing that, you could provide the
> referencing information to someone else and have them do it (if you'd
> prefer this method, send me the information and I'll do it myself).

In my opinion this is the key issue.  The other questions are about what 
keeps you within the rules; this one is about judgement.  To refer to 
current events, Gadhafi's opposition in Tripoli would have been morally 
justified to express their views about him, but only at the risk of 
becoming very dead.

As long as there are others concerned about the situation, but who are 
less in harm's way, it's just as well to let them carry the torch.  
Judgement includes being able to back off even when the rules support 
your position.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/27/11 2:42 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
> On 27/07/2011 08:49, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> On 07/26/11 3:13 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
>>> On 20/07/2011 10:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>>> I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of
>>>> what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
>>>> high.
>>> Yes, that is one area where the material seems available to do much
>>> more.
>>>
>>>> An estimate of 20,000,000 English
>>>> Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work
>>>> to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
>>>> police.
>>> On the other hand, the number of active Wikipedians who know where their
>>> next 1000 articles are coming from is quite small, IMX. The emphasis on
>>> enWP is hardly on being prolific: quality is more highly rated than
>>> quantity. That may not be wrong, of course, but to some extent these
>>> things are a matter of personal taste, and should remain so. We could do
>>> with better support of the "good stub" concept, I think: probably an
>>> example of "tacit knowledge" about the site, in that editors who have
>>> been around for a while know what that means, while the manual pages
>>> have a different slant.
>>>
>>> All discussions of the "notability" concept we use seem to end up with
>>> the generally broken nature of the thing. It is just that there is no
>>> snappy replacement. WP:GNG is a bit objectionable in the insistence on
>>> "secondary sources"; it is not completely silly but is not that helpful
>>> either when you start pushing the limits.
>> Perhaps this requires a clearer description of what is essential to a
>> good stub.
> I think a discussion of the nature of "good stubs", in relation though
> to what we know (or rather guess) about the "long tail" of reference
> material that is "out there" in some form, sounds like an interesting
> one to have, and not one I recall having before. Basically there are
> things that (a) people could want to look up, (b) for which
> "footnote"-style answers exist and are verifiable, and (c) could appear
> at that sort of length in WP, where they would be an asset rather than
> an embarrassment. And we still don't know that much about the whole
> population of such things.

In the shorter obituary notices of Gentleman's  Magazine the information 
often follows a predictable pattern.  To the extent that it is within 
predefined parameters it could fit well in a "List of ..." article.  If 
a particular entry goes beyond that there is a strong argument that it 
warrants a stub article of its own.  The notion that a second source be 
provided is often unsound. While there is always the possibility of hoax 
entries in these old magazines, such entries would still be a tiny 
segment of the overall content. The majority of contributors, then as 
now, do so in good faith. A stub from one of these broadly based 
national publications, will often only be mirrored in a local history 
that had a very small circulation.  Those who complain about these 
stubs, are often unwilling to track down even relatively common references.

>> The WP:GNG is opaque and bureaucratic. It is not suitable to much of
>> the 19th century material that I have.  "Notes and Queries is a
>> fascinating publication where the readership answered questions posed
>> by others. Providing other sources for this could be extremely
>> difficult, and none of it comes close to being subject to BLP
>> requirements
>
Ec


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/26/11 3:13 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
> On 20/07/2011 10:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of
>> what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
>> high.
> Yes, that is one area where the material seems available to do much more.
>
>   >An estimate of 20,000,000 English
>> Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work
>> to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
>> police.
> On the other hand, the number of active Wikipedians who know where their
> next 1000 articles are coming from is quite small, IMX. The emphasis on
> enWP is hardly on being prolific: quality is more highly rated than
> quantity. That may not be wrong, of course, but to some extent these
> things are a matter of personal taste, and should remain so. We could do
> with better support of the "good stub" concept, I think: probably an
> example of "tacit knowledge" about the site, in that editors who have
> been around for a while know what that means, while the manual pages
> have a different slant.
>
> All discussions of the "notability" concept we use seem to end up with
> the generally broken nature of the thing. It is just that there is no
> snappy replacement. WP:GNG is a bit objectionable in the insistence on
> "secondary sources"; it is not completely silly but is not that helpful
> either when you start pushing the limits.
>
>
Perhaps this requires a clearer description of what is essential to a 
good stub.

The WP:GNG is opaque and bureaucratic. It is not suitable to much of the 
19th century material that I have.  "Notes and Queries is a fascinating 
publication where the readership answered questions posed by others. 
Providing other sources for this could be extremely difficult, and none 
of it comes close to being subject to BLP requirements.

People who rate quality as more important than quantity fail to see the 
negative aspects of their condition. A simple "caveat lector" can be 
more reliable than any guarantee of accuracy.

Ec


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/16/11 4:42 PM, Dan Dascalescu wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 02:28, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
>> On 07/14/11 5:56 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>>> Do we have stats yet that measure whether this is encouraging editing,
>>> or diverting even more people from improving the pedia to critiquing
>>> it?
>> It's difficult to see any logical connection between an article rating
>> system, and encouraging new editors.
> After rating an article, there is this link asking "Did you know you
> could edit this page".
>
Just saying that is not enough to inspire people to edit.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/20/11 4:23 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
>> I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of
>> what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
>> high.
> I agree, but some level of selectivity is needed. I now try and
> maintain a list of articles I failed to find when looking for
> information, and also of articles that are on other language
> Wikipedias but not the English one. I'll post some of those at the
> end.

"Level of selectivity" too easily becomes an excuse for exclusion. Some 
of us feel that comprehensiveness is closer to the core values of 
Wikipedia.
>> For most of its 177 years of publication "The Gentleman's
>> Magazine". provided a steady diet of obituaries. If it averaged 1000
>> pages a year that's well over 170,000 pages of material.
> A good start would be a listing along with how long the obituaries
> are. You might find some are very short. The obvious thing to focus on
> is ones where other sources exist, and keep the others as a project
> list for now.

Some are indeed too short to warrant individual articles.  Perhaps the 
entire content of an issue's obituary (The publication uses the singular 
to refer to the entire collection of death notices in an issue.) needs 
to be added to Wikisource.  I am looking at the October 1801 issue where 
there are many such stubs, as with an entry for August 16: "A poor old 
man, named Threadaway belonging to the workhouse at Newington, Surrey, 
employed in brewing beer for the use of the house, by some accident fell 
into the boiling liquor, and was scalded to death."  This one is not 
likely to ever be expanded, but others easily have more useful information.
>> What do we do with such things
>> as the drawings of the proposed new gaol at Bury-St. Edmonds in the
>> August 1801 issue of "The Gentleman's Magazine"? (Does it even still
>> exist?)
> You would first look for it in other sources, and then add it to the
> history section or article for Bury-St. Edmonds. Not all material will
> lend itself to a new article, and corroboration with other sources is
> important.

Corroboration from other sources should not always be such a necessity. 
When we are dealing with 200-year old information that corroboration is 
not such an easy task.  Even when it exists it is not easily accessible, 
or will take a great deal of effort to track down.  Sometimes you just 
need to trust your single source on the basis of your experience with 
the reliability of the source. Corroboration can wait for some other 
day, though our one source still needs to be fully identified.

>> Then there's the endless stream of books that were reviewed in
>> a wide range of 19th century periodicals.  The reviews themselves are as
>> worth reading as the books, because they often contrasted a number of
>> publications around a chosen theme.
> Eh. I'm less enthusiastic about book reviews. I'd transcribe them into
> Wikisource and link them from the books they review (if the books have
> articles, and if not, then move on).

I would be less interested in the reviews than the books themselves.  It 
is the books themselves that need articles.

>> An estimate of 20,000,000 English
>> Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work
>> to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
>> police.
> Sometimes other sites are better suited to some material. I would
> start with Wikisource for some of the material you have mentioned.
>
> Anyway, a few examples of missing articles:
>
> Gunnarea capensis (marine polychaete worm)
> Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit (LSBB, French research )
> Giovanni da Vigo (1450-1525, Italian surgeon)
>
> The latter two have articles on the French (fr) and Italian (it)
> Wikipedia, so could be dealt with by translation efforts, but nothing
> on the first example. Some of the more obscure branches of the tree of
> life are replete with redlinks.
>
Absolutely! We can always easily find missing articles on an individual 
basis. It's the scope that's overwhelming.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 02/17/11 2:54 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
> Even if the online resources didn't improve, and we could really do
> with a big improvement in parts of the developing world, as long as
> the Internet continues to be updated we can expect a steady flow of
> new articles. Sports, Politics, popular culture and science are all
> going to generate new articles for the foreseeable future.  We
> currently have half a million biographies of living people, assuming
> we keep our current notability standards and coverage levels, then to
> keep that number stable  we can expect at least ten thousand more each
> year. So even without filling in the historical gaps there will be a
> steady increase in the total number of biographies on the pedia.
> Large gaps in our coverage of people who retired pre-Internet are
> slowly being filled in from the obituary pages, and that could
> continue for decades. Every year there will be new films, books,
> natural disasters and sports events.  So if we still have an editor
> community to write them, we can expect a steady flow of new articles.
>
I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of 
what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite 
high.  For most of its 177 years of publication "The Gentleman's 
Magazine". provided a steady diet of obituaries. If it averaged 1000 
pages a year that's well over 170,000 pages of material.I now also have 
the first 60 years of "Notes and Queries"; it was the kind of 
publication that a 19th century Wikipedian would have loved to work on. 
It includes all sorts of fascinating oddball material.  "Who's Who" was 
followed by "Who Was Who" for deceased persons, but there were also more 
narrowly focused versions for different places, and different subject 
areas. Out of curiosity I looked up one surname in the Spanish language 
"Enciclopedia universal illustrada" Of the 30 persons with that surname 
enwp only had articles on 2, eswp only 1. What do we do with such things 
as the drawings of the proposed new gaol at Bury-St. Edmonds in the 
August 1801 issue of "The Gentleman's Magazine"? (Does it even still 
exist?)  Then there's the endless stream of books that were reviewed in 
a wide range of 19th century periodicals.  The reviews themselves are as 
worth reading as the books, because they often contrasted a number of 
publications around a chosen theme.  An estimate of 20,000,000 English 
Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work 
to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability 
police.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/14/11 10:01 AM, MuZemike wrote:
> However, you've made a good point there about "gaming the system" and
> intentionally trying to garner high ratings. For example, one could
> create a horrid piece of crap article which would have no chance of
> staying on Wikipedia and canvass his/her buddies to flood said piece of
> crap with 5.0's across the board. This thing precisely happens from time
> to time on YouTube. I don't know how this could be prevented,
  Such an abomination on an article would stick out like a sore thumb, 
begging to be corrected.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/14/11 5:56 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
> Do we have stats yet that measure whether this is encouraging editing,
> or diverting even more people from improving the pedia to critiquing
> it?

It's difficult to see any logical connection between an article rating 
system, and encouraging new editors.
> Remember there is a risk that this could exacerbate the templating
> trend. Just as we need to value edits that fix problems and remove
> templates above edits that add to the hundreds of thousands of
> maintenance templates on the pedia;

If templates were subject to a similar rating system as articles we 
would soon see which are being ignored by users, and are thus of no value.

> So we need to value a talkpage
> comment that explains why someone has a specific concern about an
> article over a bunch of "feedback" that says people like or dislike an
> article without indicating why. Better still we should be encouraging
> readers to improve articles that they see as flawed.

This dream has been around since the stone age.

> So we need to
> measure this tool in terms of its success at getting readers to edit,
> not in terms of its success at getting readers to rate articles. I
> hope it is successful, and I'm happy to take the long view and measure
> a trial over months to see how effectively we convert article raters
> into article editors.

I seriously doubt that it will head in that direction.
> But we do need to be prepared to remove this if
> it has a net effect of diverting potential editors into merely rating
> articles for others to fix.

It's not a problem if they do. If many readers do this for a single 
article it's worth paying attention to these articles. A claim from a 
single person can be suspected eccentric.
> We also need to be careful how we compare this 374k to the other
> "90%", not least because with 3,682,158 articles on En wiki as I
> write, 374k is about 6k more than a random 10% sample would be.

It's all a matter of statistical trends, and for this a 100-point scale 
would have been more useful than a 5-point scale. I actually suggested a 
10-point scale many years ago. The first statistical measure that should 
develop is a cumulative rating for all articles. The mean in that will 
be the measure of the average article, and any article falling within a 
certain deviation from that could be judged average.  As overall quality 
of WP increases so too will the average rating, but only extremely 
slowly. Other measures could be developed from there.
> We also need to learn from one of the lessons of the Strategy wiki
> where we had a similar rating system. Many of the proposals there had
> so few ratings that they were close to being individual views and few
> had sufficient responses to be genuinely collective to the point where
> one maverick couldn't skew them - even without sockpuppetry. On
> average our articles get one or two edits a month, many get far less.
> I would not be surprised if 100,000 of the 374k in the trial had less
> than ten ratings even if trialled for a couple of months.

This isn't a problem either.  The number of ratings given is just as 
important as what those ratings are.  It should be reported right along 
with the rating on the article page  Users could then be reminded that a 
small number of ratings is just not statistically significant; they 
could even be color-coded to that effect. Short samples are also more 
volatile.  They would easily be driven into the top or bottom decile of 
the data, and that alone would bring attention to them.
> Lastly we need to be prepared for sockpuppetry, especially as these
> are random unsigned votes with no rationale. Can we have assurances
> that something is being built into the scheme to combat this?

This FUD gives undue weight to sockpuppetry or other hostile editing. 
Ideally such practices should be marginalised to a point where they 
don't matter. Mounting a successful campaign to influence the rating of 
an article would take a tremendous amount of sustained effort. I played 
with trying to affect the page views of one of the Bomis girl articles 
in the early days by going repeatedly to that page; the effects were 
minimal. Now, with a much bigger encyclopedic corpus this would be 
proportionally more difficult. "Random unsigned votes" are perfectly 
consistent with wikiness, and will also trend toward statistical norms. 
Building safeguards against agenda based ratings would be a waste of 
time and effort.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/08/11 3:09 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
> We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and
> among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are
> unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having
> their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the
> small print that says their words now belong to the website they've
> written them on.
>
> ...
>
> Other options would be for a site that ended the
> inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
> concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
> seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
> specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
> one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
> somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
> pigs.
>

I'd like to see a Wikisource type project that accepts orphan works 
(subject to definition) that are supposedly still protected. They could 
easily be taken down if a legitimate owner materializes, but otherwise 
could accelerate the freeing of these works.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/08/11 5:55 PM, Mike Dupont wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:17 AM, Ray Saintonge  wrote
>> A fork could
>> easily start with copied material which from that moment would evolve
>> differently. They may choose to abandon NPOV.  Having several sites that
>> freely and independently do this would in fact put our own NPOV in a
>> broader perspective.
> What do you think about having multiple consistent points of view on tricky
> subjects, on some things, for example my favorite kosovo topic, it is very
> very hard to find any neutral point of view and the articles on that subject
> are widely separated. Some like the main article are vaguely neutral, and
> most of the smaller articles are really not. There are not even any
> consistent policing of them or manpower to do it.
> I would like to see some way to identify and isolate fragments of things
> that are not neutral, but clearly mark on what point of view they represent.
> That would allow for a clear separation of the one side, "Kosovo is serbia"
> and marking and clearly giving them a say on the matter, and also another
> point of view, "Kosovo is free" with equal rights in speaking, at least that
> would give a way to manage the discussion. Right now you have a big mess
> where the two sides are just mixed up and each side is basically fighting on
> wikipedia.
>
I like the idea, but even there you'll find varying degrees of support 
for each side with the moderates unable to accept any more extreme views.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/08/11 4:08 PM, Sarah wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 15:57, Bob the Wikipedian
>   wrote:
>> Already been done, Conservapedia. The most disgusting mockery of
>> conservatives I've ever seen. Then again, isn't this one of the sites
>> Jimbo runs?
> Definitely not.
>
  Conservapedia is not my cup of tea.  Nevertheless, since I have a free 
speech and civil liberties frame of mind, I must support the right of 
conservatives to have such a site.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/07/11 9:05 PM, Stephanie Daugherty wrote:
> IMO, the "next best thing" will be whatever can come along and solve
> our social and community problems technologically, while being easier
> to edit.

Social and community problems cannot be solved technologically.

> Treat assholes like bugs in the software - code around them, figure
> out how you can make the experience downright painful for them while
> making it easier for the sort of people that you really want to
> attract. Build the software to guide people in the direction of
> correct behavior, and to inherently track sourcing, etc.

If you approach an asshole directly you just get shit on your face.  We 
do better by encouraging good behaviour than by spending time dealing 
with a handful if problem people.

> Do this right, and wikipedia will be pretty much dead, do it wrong,
> and we'll be laughing at you here in 6 months. :P

Sure enough,

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/07/11 5:03 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
> You should be careful what you wish for. It's not hard to make a
> 'viable competitor' encyclopedia that would be so corrupt and
> inaccurate it would make the Fox News network... look like a news
> network. And if it was glossy and facile enough, plenty of people
> would probably be dumb enough to use it.
>
That would be great!  Maybe Fox News itself can pick up the idea. Their 
accuracy and corruption is not our responsibility. If they're bad 
enough, that will make us look better.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/07/11 4:13 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> On 7 April 2011 21:56, MuZemike  wrote:
>>> Perhaps I'm missing the point, but isn't that what we have been doing
>>> so
>>> far (i.e. with all the other sister Wikimedia projects)?
>> Yes, but also other niches Wikipedia leaves. Wikia, for example,
>> started to form wikis of any sort, but has rapidly taken over the
>> niche of fansite wikis.
> That's what draws a crowd. A lesson there. I still think we should eat
> their lunch; I was never a deletionist.
>

I confess that when my wife and I are sitting in front of the TV, and a 
question arises from whatever we are watching, Wikipedia's relevant 
articles become a first source of information on our laptops while we're 
watching. When we do that we seldom feel the need to follow the sources.

Ec

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/07/11 2:29 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 7 April 2011 21:56, MuZemike  wrote:
>> Perhaps I'm missing the point, but isn't that what we have been doing so
>> far (i.e. with all the other sister Wikimedia projects)?
> Yes, but also other niches Wikipedia leaves. Wikia, for example,
> started to form wikis of any sort, but has rapidly taken over the
> niche of fansite wikis.
>
An who can complain about that?

The sister projects began by filling in important niches. The first, 
Meta, provided a way in which we discuss activities and ideas about 
ourselves and policy that was not inherently encyclopedic.  Wiktionary 
was a response to "Wikipedia is not a dictionary." etc. A fork could 
easily start with copied material which from that moment would evolve 
differently. They may choose to abandon NPOV.  Having several sites that 
freely and independently do this would in fact put our own NPOV in a 
broader perspective.  Another may choose to be more aggressive in the 
treatment of copyright.  They would assume the risks at a level which 
makes them comfortable, but in the longer term we too would benefit from 
their efforts to free data.

They need to be willing limit the growth of their projects to match 
their funding. A project that tries to duplicate everything on Wikipedia 
is dooming itself to starvation. Subject specialization is the most 
evident criterion for this. From the Wikipedia side we need to link to 
these projects for alternative views. They are not our enemies.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 04/07/11 11:37 AM, Sarah wrote:
> One of the key skills that Jimbo brought to Wikipedia was knowing when
> to be hands on, and when not. If you look through the early mailing
> lists -- not just the very early ones, but the first few years --
> that's the thing that shines through again and again. If I had to
> point to one issue that made Wikipedia successful it was this ability
> to steer without micromanaging.
>
  This is an important observation.  It contrasts with some of his later 
efforts at wading into controversial issues.  These have often seemed as 
drive-by efforts by someone who was not completely up-to-date with the 
matter at hand.  These would generate more controversy in an already 
dirfficult issue that just needed time to be worked through.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nationality on the lead of articles

[Ray Saintonge]

On 03/31/11 12:44 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
> For example, I've been looking at another article, Astrology, where half
> a dozen astrology advocates have been banned. Looking at their editing,
> all the attention was on the presence or absence of the label,
> "pseudoscience", supposedly based on an arbitration committee ruling.

"Pseudoscience" is one of those labels that exists for the sole purpose 
of being tendentious. A perfectly good and neutral article can be 
written about astrology without resorting to that word. It would make 
clear that there is considerable doubt about the subject's validity 
without leaving the impression that the article is nagging about it.

> So, instead of working on the article, and adding something about
> astrology, there has been a sterile POV conflict. Meanwhile the article
> is piss poor with one of the POV warriors, now he's gotten rid of the
> opposition, re-writing it and making it even worse.

It has been a long time since I even looked at the article. I have since 
graduated to become a grumpy old man. The presence of idiotic POV 
pushers on both sides of the argument means it's less strenuous to keep 
the article in a perpetual state of error.

> So big fight over nothing, while substantial work remains undone.
>
> "WikiProject Rational Skepticism High-importance)" Really?
>
It's the kind of true-believer syndrome that turns Rational Skepticism 
into a religious cult.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nationality in the lead of articles

[Ray Saintonge]

On 03/31/11 1:56 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> One thing that annoys me about some Wikipedia articles is the tendency
> for editors to argue over the nationality of a person in the biography
> article about them. The classic example is Copernicus, which has some
> justification in that there is sourced discussion of the history of an
> actual dispute (though the dispute was long after Copernicus).

Copernicus makes one nostalgic for the days when Hilda was editing.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nationality on the lead of articles

[Ray Saintonge]

On 03/31/11 3:24 PM, Ken Arromdee wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> So, instead of working on the article, and adding something about
>> astrology, there has been a sterile POV conflict. Meanwhile the article
>> is piss poor with one of the POV warriors, now he's gotten rid of the
>> opposition, re-writing it and making it even worse.
>>
>> So big fight over nothing, while substantial work remains undone.
>>
>> "WikiProject Rational Skepticism High-importance)" Really?
> I don't think the article is skeptical enough.
>
> For instance, it says "In February, 2001, the science of vedic astrology,
> Jyotir Vigyan, was introduced into the curriculum of Indian universities".
> The reference shows the government of India saying that, but the government
> of India is not a reliable source for the claim that vedic astrology is a
> science or is being treated scientifically.  The words "the science of"
> should be removed, or described solely as someone else's words without
> implying that they are true, for instance "vedic astrology, described as a
> science by the Government of India, was"

The Skeptics are notorious for using the term "reliable source" to mean 
anything that supports their Religious Point of View. Why shouldn't the 
government be treated as a reliable source?  Why should residents of 
Western countries be so arrogant as to hijack a word like "science" to 
their own purposes? Traditionally, science  always referred to any area 
of study; it could be gnostic as well as epistemic.  It did not depend 
on following a predetermined and restrictive set of rules, or even the 
ultimate truth of what was being studied.  Your proposed distortion is 
disrespectful of the Indian tradition..

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/27/10 9:04 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Ray Saintonge
>> wrote:
>>> On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
>>>> I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many
>>>> others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good
>>>> and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
>>> I can't agree more.  To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging
>>> forks,
>>> encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn
>>> could edit them into something consistent with the new site's
>>> philosophies.  Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very
>>> un-neutral results.  Where other sites have been copying and developing
>>> articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these
>>> other sites.
>> 
>>
>>> The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites.
>> Indeed. Just out of interest, how many people here would consider
>> devoting the time and energy and resources into setting up a Wikipedia
>> fork? I know some active Wikipedians have done so, but sustaining such
>> forks can be very difficult. What practical steps can be taken to
>> encourage a diversity of useful and sustainable forks that demonstrate
>> what is and is not possible? Or is th etime better spent improving WMF
>> projects?
>>
>> Carcharoth
> I'm not available for serious sustained work on any fork but Wikinfo, but
> I can help people get set up. There has to be a vision though, of
> something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy,
> rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into.

Absolutely.  It comes down to two issues: What Wikimedia *can* provide, 
and what the new project *must* provide.  In addition to funding the new 
project must indeed provide a vision. A working WYSIWYG is indeed one 
such possibility, but the mediawiki software may not be so helpful to them.

My idea was somewhat more modest in that it was content based.  Although 
it would not reflect my personal philosophy something like Conservapedia 
is something to be encouraged.  It's vision would likely only allow a 
limited and manageable subset of Wikipedia articles.  Interwiki links 
from Wikipedia to that project could be given for those who would like 
an alternative view of the subject with the understanding that the other 
project may not be bound by NPOV.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/23/10 1:31 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>
> The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but
> one that all western society members who are modern communications
> literate are fundamentally equipped to handle.  Some will fail at it
> but you really just need to be good at electronic communications,
> functionally literate, and social enough to handle basic give and take
> discussions.
This seems to beg the question: How do you define "modern communications 
literate"?

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/23/10 12:41 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 23 December 2010 02:37, Tony Sidaway  wrote:
>> I have to disagree strongly with the calls for WYSIWYG editing, not
>> that it's likely to materialize anytime soon. Wikipedia needs to
>> encourage people to concentrate on meaningful content, not dick around
>> with cosmetic matters.
> I think our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation.
>
> I don't have WMF numbers, but one contributor on mediawiki-l, who runs
> an intranet covering a large public service organisation in the US,
> reported a remarkable uptake in wiki participation just by going to
> FCKeditor. The users are smart, capable and competent people in their
> fields, but were seriously put off by wikitext.

Wasn't the whole idea of wiki markup to have something simple that 
anybody can learn?  It should continue to be the case that the essential 
wiki markup can fit onto a single page that an editor can print ans pin 
to the wall beside his computer as a cheat-sheet.  What doesn't fit on 
that page isn't basic.

Templates are only useful if you know which are there if you need them, 
and have the advanced skills needed to manipulate them to desired effect.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/22/10 11:36 PM, Carcharoth wrote:
> I tend to try and not leave the public-facing page incomplete, but
> sometimes that is inevitable (not enough sources or an incomplete
> list), but put requests for help and suggestions for further editing
> on the talk page. A plea to future readers and Wikipedians that pass
> by. Though, sadly, I get the impression not many people actually read
> the talk page notes I leave behind, and they end up being more notes
> for myself to refer back to months or years later.

True enough about the prognosis for talk page notes.  A discrete help 
marker on the public page would still be worthwhile.  It could perhaps 
link directly to an explanation of the problem.  An ordinary reader is 
unlikely to view the talk page otherwise.  An effective way to lose 
volunteers is to leave them sitting around with nothing to do.  If you 
want help from new blood make it obvious where the help is needed, and 
abandon this notion of polished articles written to impossible standards.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/22/10 3:02 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> I had an interesting discussion a year or two ago with someone about
> the absence of redlinks in "high-quality" articles - in the past few
> years, there's been a definite trend to arguing that redlinks are
> detrimental to a finished article, and should be removed even when an
> article is pretty much guaranteed to be created eventually. Net
> result, of course, is that the article is more polished-looking - to
> us, at least, even if not to a reader unclear on the red/blue
> distinction - but has marginally less reminders of its editability.

The polished look is a mere superficiality.  We should be doing more to 
encourage editors to wikify articles by creating links to what might be 
wanted.  The red links let it be known that there is still work to be 
done, and that alone may draw new editors.  I find that if I make edits 
somewhere it is just as easy to create links at the same time.
> I suspect this is part of a similar trend!
>
> It reminds me of the spirit of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Always_leave_something_undone
>
> "Whenever you write a page, never finish it. Always leave something
> obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a question in the text (with a
> not-too-obscure answer someone can supply), wikied links that are of
> interest, requests for help from specific other Wikipedians, the
> beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply must fill in,
> etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage others to keep working
> on the wiki."
>
This too continues to be an important principle, but I would not take it 
to the extent of compulsory stupidity,  Still there is no shame in 
letting it be obvious that more work and help is needed on an article by 
someone who has better access to the needed information.

Ec


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/22/10 2:55 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
> The single best way to improve usability of Wikipedia would be to
> scale back the use of jargon.
>
> if you look at early discussions in those days they were usually held
> in plain English, with very little jargon.  I've tried to keep up that
> style, but it is now quite rare.
>
> I don't see why this should be. Our policies have perfectly good
> English language names, "Neutral point of view", "What Wikipedia is
> Not", "Verifiability", and so on.  There's absolutely no need to
> replace these English phrases with gobbledygook.
>
> We have no strictures against this exclusive practice, mainly because
> it was seen as obviously undesirable in the early days.  But
> communities inevitably acquire exclusive practices as they
> develop--it's seen as one way to identify yourself to other people as
> a member of the "in" group. And so now when I discuss matters on
> Wikipedia talk pages even I, an editor since 2004, find myself
> shuddering inwardly at the impact of all the alphabet soup. If the
> damage this practice does to the openness of the community were more
> widely recognised it would be possible for us to agree to scale it
> back, but it just isn't on the map.

Jargon and alphabet soup has always been undesirable. A more plausible 
explanation for its absence in the early days is that most of it didn't 
yet exist.  Those addicted to jargon are just plain lazy, just like 
those who find it easier to delete something instead of improving it.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/22/10 1:53 AM, Peter Coombe wrote:
>
> I do think there are fewer opportunities for such "easy" edits on
> Wikipedia now. Typos seem to be far less common thanks to
> semi-automated tools such as AWB, and most articles are generally more
> mature. Plus the wikicode of articles grows ever more intimidating.
>

You can still find them by reading. The tools may very well catch 
non-words or common misuses, but will it catch a plurals when there 
should be a singular, or wrong verb tenses?  Excessive wikicode for 
templates or in-line references is a problem for simple edits.  If one 
sees an error in the normal text, it can be a chore to find it again in 
edit mode when it is buried in the code.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/21/10 4:17 PM, Carcharoth wrote:
> Has anyone ever suggested a way for people to highlight a mistake and
> click to bring it to someone else's attention? But without logging any
> IP address. I suppose that sort of system would get overwhelmed by
> trolls very quickly. Maybe an off-wiki system to allow people using
> Wikipedia to generate a note for themselves on corrections to make
> later on?

That seems more complex than fixing a simple typo.  If I can go in and 
make a simple spelling correction it's done very quickly.  On the other 
hand if I need to explain what needs fixing and where it is in a site 
it's just not worth my while.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
>
> I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many
> others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good
> and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.

I can't agree more.  To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, 
encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn 
could edit them into something consistent with the new site's 
philosophies.  Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very 
un-neutral results.  Where other sites have been copying and developing 
articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these 
other sites.
> The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably
> public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the
> *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials.

I don't see licensing as a big barrier.
> Because
> that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement -
>
> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
> the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
>
> - without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission
> statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and
> expected*, and everyone else joins in.

The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites.  
Perhaps Sanger could have succeeded if he had put more chips in his site 
than on his shoulder.  For many, seeing the kind of budget that the WMF 
finds necessary can also be an intimidating factor. They could start 
with a narrower topic-specific project, but all still need to come to 
terms with the realities of financing their own site.
> Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us.
> Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular
> website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely "famous", beyond
> merely "mainstream", to being part of the assumed background. We're an
> institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the
> last eight years a very special "wtf" moment technically. It means we
> can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and
> need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is
> actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity.
>
> (I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago
> that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or
> something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case,
> and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.)

It's in the nature of institutions to seek uninhibited growth without 
the need to say so. Business strives for a bigger market share as an 
indicator of success.  Since the total market share is always 100% that 
can only come at the expense of others.

> So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's
> happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of
> our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc
> materials. We can't change the world all on our own.
>
> The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling
> Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation
> of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive
> than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though
> they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our
> mission, for example.

One of the most vibrant things that still happens is the independent 
development of other language Wikipedias without the need to have an 
exact copy of what appears in a dominant language.

Media-wiki software is fully available to these other sites.

Instructions on "How to start your wiki" could also be helpful.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 12/22/10 3:49 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> On jargon, I still think "Neutral point of view" was a terrible name
> that confused neutrality with lack of bias. You cannot sum up a policy
> like NPOV in a single phrase,
That last fact is precisely why it was such a good choice.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/29/10 5:46 PM, MuZemike wrote:
> And that's another problem that I am seeing more and more of. Call it
> simply being lazy, unable to write actual prose, or a combination
> thereof; but there are so many articles that get created that have only
> one (likely unsourced) sentence, a pretty infobox, a pretty navbox, a
> table, categories, and what other (stub) templates there.
>
> I would claim that infoboxes are the biggest culprit in that they are
> being substituted for "actual prose". If an article creator only has one
> actual sentence of prose to put forth, that is not much, and I would
> claim sheer laziness in the article creator's part.
>
> Especially with these stubs on locations, when you cannot provide any
> more information on a location than what would normally be presented in
> an organized list or even an atlas or map, one wonders if writing about
> a location in the form of an encyclopedia article is the most efficient
> way to go.
>

So fix it if it bothers you.  The French language article on Lanarce is 
much longer, and some of the material there could be translated.  I am 
not at all concerned about whether an article is a stub, but I realize 
that some people get very passionate about absences.  If half the stubs 
in a given category are expanded in a given block of articles within a 
year that's very good progress.

I can agree that having proper prose can be a positive feature, but if 
all the information that a reader might want is in the info box little 
is accomplished by turning that information into fine prose. The 
structured format may indeed be more efficient.

All articles start as stubs, and grow over time.  This does not happen 
evenly, but there is no need for some to whine about it.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the Internet dooms universities

[Ray Saintonge]

  On 10/12/10 1:16 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 12/10/2010, David Gerard  wrote:
>> His agenda is to cut his wages bill. (Vice-chancellors are not picked
>> for their fluffy goodwill to all humanity.) But this is the guy who
>> runs the business saying "holy crap we're fucked."
> The thing is that free sources of information have been available for
> practically forever; they're called 'libraries'.
These are not universally available or accessible.  Rural areas and 
third world countries have virtually no access. Maintaining a 
comprehensive collection is frightfully expensive both in terms of 
acquisition and storage.  Funding libraries is not always seen as a 
government priority.  Many libraries need to divest themselves of much 
older material just to make space.


> They didn't replace the need for people known as
> teachers/lecturers/tutors either, nor the need for examinations to
> prove that people could actually do stuff, both of which are functions
> provided by universities.

Lecturers in particular keep alive the bankrupt notion that you can 
teach people by talking at them.  One of the principles of education is 
that learning requires the active participation of the learner.  The 
process of examination is a secondary one, and universities would be 
well served if they could find a way to get rid of it.  The master who 
work with the students soon know which "actually do stuff."
> So I suspect, at the moment, that he's being pessimistic.
>
> Still, in theory, a really good automated educational computer based
> learning system could change all that I suppose, but I've never heard
> of one that good.
>

I suppose that "automated educational computer based learning system" 
form a major part of Geeks' unrealistic dreams. It's unfortunate that 
universities have been overrun by the rampant philistinism of those who 
see them solely as an avenue toward a better job. That would make them 
no better than glorified trade schools with a pompous name.


The crucial role of the university is the expansion and preservation of 
knowledge.  This is not just the passing on of knowledge; it is the 
provision of a forum for the evaluation and criticism of that 
knowledge.  To an extent that can be done among peers in the absence of 
a recognized master.  Masters are still valuable, but not 
pontificators.  Universities need to redefine themselves in response to 
the threat posed on them by the internet, and that requires a serious 
review of their economics.

Ec


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Why the Internet dooms universities

[Ray Saintonge]

  On 10/12/10 12:24 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/stand-and-deliver-on-its-last-legs/story-e6frgcko-1225937823844
>
> This reads like a radical anti-egalitarian manifesto by some young
> Internet-based firebrand ... then I got to the end and my jaw dropped
> at the author's job.

At least he respects the importance of drinking beer and hanging out 
with friends.  This is in contrast with the impo[r]tence of the 
established order.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] 'Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups'

[Ray Saintonge]

  On 09/14/10 10:02 PM, stevertigo wrote:
> Gwern Branwen  wrote:
>>> The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a 
>>> competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air 
>>> balloon trip over Israel.
> Is that a balloon ride over Eretz Israel or just Israel?
>

That depends on how hard they can blow. :-)

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Webypedia - another doomed alternative to Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 27/08/2010, David Gerard  wrote:
>   
>> Wikipedia needs competitors.
>> 
> Realistically, the space that Wikipedia occupies seems to be a more or
> less a natural monopoly.
>   

What makes any monopoly "natural"?

> And Wikipedia doesn't even make money per se, so why would anyone even
> want to be a competitor to it? There's no market. A market is where
> people pay for stuff.
>   

That seems to reflect the fundamental error of economists: that anything 
that cannot be monetized is by definition worthless.

> It's not like Wikipedia is abusing its monopoly power. Is it?
>   

How can you know? Without competition there is no way of evaluating that 
statement.  NPOV cannot be evaluated when there are no POV sites for 
comparison.  Even when there are other sites supporting the ideal of 
NPOV about a given subject they can reach different results. Abuse of 
monopoly power does not come from any willful intent, but from the 
zealous belief that the monopoly is right.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Webypedia - another doomed alternative to Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

David Gerard wrote:
> On 29 August 2010 17:27, Carl (CBM)  wrote:
>   
>> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 9:51 AM, David Gerard  wrote:
>> 
>>> Aaron Swartz found that most of the text is written by IPs, with the 
>>> regulars then formatting the heck out of it.
>>>   
>> Like I was saying, that does not match my experience with mathematics
>> articles. I very rarely see significant amounts of content (say, a new
>> paragraph) added by an anonymous user.
>> 
> Yeah, it's eminently plausible it may not work that way on specialist
> topics. And it appears your data bears that out. Data is good ;-)
> Would be interesting to test this for other specialist areas.
>
>   

Mathematics is an a atypical subject area.  Even those who are most 
prolific in their output of wrong opinions will admit that they are 
clueless when it comes to mathematics.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Webypedia - another doomed alternative to Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

David Gerard wrote:
> That said, there's already a Citizendium fork in progress, Argopedia
> http://www.argopaedia.org/ - though they appear not to understand CC
> licensing.
>   

That would be consistent with a search for the Golden Fleece. :-)
> Wikipedia needs competitors. The trouble is working out how one could be 
> viable.
>
>   
+++ 1

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:WikiProject >> Project

[Ray Saintonge]

stevertigo wrote:
> I propose (again) a change to the "Wikipedia:WikiProject [Name]"
> namespace of the form:
>
>  "Wikipedia:WikiProject [Name]" >> "Project:Name"
>   

One problem: The major wikis are already known as "Projects".  IIRC 
"Wikiproject" is a product of disambiguation. Perhaps a different name 
might work.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] FBI vs. Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Carcharoth wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
>   
>> On 8 August 2010 01:29, Carcharoth  wrote:
>> 
>>> There are some 11 posts to that thread, none of which seem to actually
>>> say anything substantive. I would have thought that a serious debate
>>> would have been better than having "fun" over this clash with an
>>> authority figure organisation. The FBI may have been wrong this time,
>>> but that doesn't mean they won't try again with another argument, and
>>> it doesn't mean that some of the concerns raised shouldn't be
>>> considered in this or other contexts.
>>>   
>> You were expecting something substantive from foundation-l?
>>
>> If the FBI try something else, we'll deal with it then. We can't do
>> anything about it without knowing what they'll try, and it doesn't
>> seem wise to speculate about what they could try on the public list -
>> we might give them ideas! I considered the concerns raised and
>> rejected them. If you think there is actually something worth
>> discussing, please speak up.
>> 
> I thought the bit about high-resolution imagery possibly being
> problematic was a reasonable point. Most other organisations would
> agree to use a low-resolution version, but that can be a difficult or
> impossible approach for Commons to take for various reasons.
There is an important point in what Thomas said.  When one is talking 
about the potential legal argument, however remote, it is wise to avoid 
speculating what might be the basis for an opponent's argument.  
High/low resolution is an arguable point, but why make it for the other 
side. 

A lot of people who have never seen the inside of a courtroom tend to 
interpret a statutory provision in the worst possible light, then apply 
that unfortunate interpretations to their own detriment, and even look 
for ways to apply it against themselves.  By doing that they don't give 
themselves a leg to stand on if it ever comes to a court fight; the 
other, more experienced opponent is less likely to do that.

I don't think that the FBI has a valid point in this matter of the logo, 
so let's not try to convince ourselves that they do.

Ray

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Re: [WikiEN-l] ZOMG Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!1!1!!!!

[Ray Saintonge]

Bod Notbod wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Thomas Dalton  
> wrote:
>   
>> That's great fun! If I had more faith in humanity, I'd assume it was
>> somebody's idea of a joke... (a joke which wastes the court's time, at
>> that).
>> 
> The petition states that the Foundation cannot be traced to a physical
> address. That can't be right, can it? And then he signs at the bottom
> which warns that - if he knowingly states a falsehood - he commits
> perjury; so if he *is* aware that the Foundation has an address he has
> perjured himself.
>
> Googling "Wikimedia Foundation" gives you as top hit the site you
> would expect and as soon as you click "contact us" you are given the
> Foundation's address.
Is idiocy a defence to perjury? If one assumes good faith one is left 
with the conclusion that he did not have enough lights on to look and 
see the address.

In any event, the action is against Homeland Security, and WMF is 
specifically excluded as a defendant.  I think that it is reasonable to 
speculate the Homeland Security (and other departments like the FBI) has 
considerable experience in dealing with such extraterrestrials.

Ray



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: modern foundations of scientific consensus

[Ray Saintonge]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> Some motivation for a proper WikiCite project. --sj
>   
This blurs the line between episteme and gnosis.

Any article that includes 321 citations must be right. ;-)

I would certainly not be in a position to comment on the medical issues 
involved, but it would be difficult to imagine a field of knowledge 
where such processes do not prevail.

Wikipedia is not exempt from these processes, and may be even more 
vulnerable to them.  Our own notion of "reliable sources" can easily 
work to reinforce biases.  It presumes that we have mechanisms in place 
for determining when a source is reliable. If such a "reliable source" 
is cited there is very little inclination to dispute it.  For 
independent researchers the tools needed to investigate citations may 
only be available with great difficulty.

In a quest to adapt knowledge to orderliness it is too easy to 
underestimate the vastness of available knowledge.

Ray


>
> === Begin forwarded message ==
> "How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a
> citation network"
>http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/jul20_3/b2680
>
>
> Abstract:
>
> Objective -To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by
> studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it.
>
> Design - A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed
> indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that \u03b2
> amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer\u2019s
> disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with
> inclusion body myositis. Social network theory and graph theory were
> used to analyse this network.
>
> Main outcome measures - Citation bias, amplification, and invention,
> and their effects on determining authority.
>
> Results:
> The network contained 242 papers and 675 citations addressing the
> belief, with 220 553 citation paths supporting it. Unfounded authority
> was established by citation bias against papers that refuted or
> weakened the belief; amplification, the marked expansion of the belief
> system by papers presenting no data addressing it; and forms of
> invention such as the conversion of hypothesis into fact through
> citation alone. Extension of this network into text within grants
> funded by the National Institutes of Health
> and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed the same
> phenomena present and sometimes used to justify requests for funding.
>
> Conclusion:
> Citation is both an impartial scholarly method and a powerful form of
> social communication. Through distortions in its social use that
> include bias, amplification, and invention, citation can be used to
> generate
> information cascades resulting in unfounded authority of claims.
> Construction and analysis of a claim specific citation network may
> clarify the nature of a published belief system and expose distorted
> methods of social citation.
>
>
>
>
>   


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Three cheers for Wikipedia's cancer info (or two and a half)

[Ray Saintonge]

Keith Old wrote:
> The researchers write in their study's abstract, to be presented at the
> current annual meeting of theAmerican Society of Clinical
> Oncology:
> "Although the Wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth to the
> professionally edited database, it was significantly less readable. Further
> research is required to assess how this influences patients' understanding
> and retention."
>
>   
So instead of getting an overall bird's eye view of a subject, we end up 
with a nerd's eye view.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babi es are ugly

[Ray Saintonge]

Philip Sandifer wrote:
> On May 15, 2010, at 10:12 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>   
>> But I can't say that these points really apply in many cases that we
>> appear to be applying them: We would reject as reliable sources many
>> hobbyist blogs (or even webcomics) with a stronger reputation to
>> preserve, less obviously-compromised motivations, and _significantly_
>> greater circulation than some obscure corner of Fox News's online
>> product.  What can be the explanation for this discrepancy?
>> 
> Two reasons. 1) Egregious anti-expert bias. 2) A fundamental misunderstanding 
> of the nature of the written record of humanity.
>
> 1) Our policies are explicitly and deliberately written to try to allow 
> content decisions to be made without any actual knowledge of the subject. 
> That is, we have actively tried to write policy that rejects any thinking 
> about sources beyond the surface level readings, and that take as a premise 
> that, given a large enough pile of books, anybody can adequately write or 
> edit an article on any topic. This premise is dubious at best.
>   

I don't believe that there is such a thing as a reliable source. Most 
people will believe exactly what they want to believe, with a remarkable 
preference for not having their beliefs encumbered by facts. Data from 
the corporate world is presumed to be biased in all of its details.  
While corporations will indeed spin information to their own advantage, 
it's still important to recognize what comes from their own 
documentation as proof of what they say about themselves. If a 
corporation claims that its product is "Made in the U.S.A." that needs 
to be noted, but so too must it be shown if its claim is based solely on 
legal technicalities.
> 2) We also make the actively false assumption that all significant knowledge 
> is written down, and that the written record is simply a transcription of 
> human knowledge. Neither statement is true - in virtually every field of 
> knowledge, because fields of knowledge organize around communities, there is 
> a substantial oral tradition of disseminated knowledge that is often crucial 
> to understanding the overall subject. The contents of this oral tradition may 
> be written down, but not in a systemic and organized way, while in practice 
> the oral tradition often is fairly systemic. At its most basic level, this 
> translates to "There are things in any field that everybody knows, and since 
> everybody knows them nobody has bothered to write them down."

It takes a certain degree of sophistication and wisdom to grasp that.  
As a society we manage to support a fallacy of certainty that rejects 
any information that has not been rigorously proven. In Lilla's article, 
"The Tea Party Jacobins" 
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false
 
), he observes:
> Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question 
> the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess 
> their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people 
> in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem 
> hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the 
> general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect. 
In theory the skepticism protects us from quacks and scammers, but not 
without a cost.  In medicine innovative treatments are often rejected 
solely because they have not received rigorous testing, never mind that 
funding for such testing is unavailable because no-one wants to fund 
research into unproven technologies. In areas that are less 
life-critical, such as history, premises are even less likely to be 
questioned. 

There is more to this than simple unwritten information. Expressions 
become idiomatic and remain so long after the underlying context and 
zeitgeist have disappeared. A "tight rein" becomes a "tight reign" to 
those whose buggies are all automotive.

In the preface to "The Annotated Lolita" Alfred Appel brings our 
attention to a point where Valeria, Humbert's first wife, was "deep in 
'Paris-Soir'." If you don't know that this newspaper was a part of the 
sensationalist press of the time, you will certainly be more 
disadvantaged in understanding the situation.  Notwithstanding, the 
story would become laborious if the author had to explain every detail 
in remembrance of lost allusions.

Ec



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Re: [WikiEN-l] full-text searching since the Vector switch in en.wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 17:40, Steve Summit  wrote:
>   
>> Carcharoth wrote:
>> 
>>> not "search" functionality, but seeing as Google's default is
>>> "search" not "go", I suspect more people are used to getting a list
>>> of search results and clicking the top one than might be realised.
>>>   
>> Indeed.  If there's to be one box, clearly it should be "Search",
>> not "Go".  (And the search results page already has a "Wikipedia has
>> an article on %s" link right at the top, if there's an exact match.
>> So, retconned, "Go" is/was kinda like the Google "I'm feeling lucky"
>> button.)
>> 
> ... Yes, it makes a lot of sense that there would be such a button in
> Wikipedia, because quite a lot of the people who type "obama" probably
> just want the article about the president (but someone should research
> how many exactly). Forcing them to see a list of results and have them
> click on the first one wastes some time.
>
> But it also makes sense to be able to run a full-text search as easily
> as possible.
>
>   
I rarely "feel lucky" with Google.

The search function should also make clear what Boolean options are 
available.

The importance of beta systems can be misleading.  Most of us who are 
not techno-geeks feel clueless about what is being done there, and are 
satisfied with a system that is familiar and works without any 
surprises.  Even editing ".js" files is beyond us.

The Classic skin was the standard when I first joined, and I'm happy to 
stick with it.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babi es are ugly

[Ray Saintonge]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> I think the conclusion should be that admins (such as the one quoted) 
> who mouth off about the doings in the usual hyperbolic terms that we get 
> used to on mailing lists, might have to reconsider their approach to 
> commenting so freely in public, given that this is going to be war of 
> attrition against tabloid tactics.

A simpler representation: Don't feed the tabloids.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] infobox growth

[Ray Saintonge]

Carcharoth wrote:
> Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
>   
>> The oldest infoboxes predate [[T:Infobox]], and even templates
>> themselves; they will be very hard to count. The earliest infobox I
>> found was at [[Beryllium]], on 2 Feb 2002. It wasn't called "Infobox"
>> then, of course, but it certainly was one.
>> 
> Wow. Hard-coded into the wikitext, I presume? The questioner might be
> asking when the first templates were created, and might not realised
> that the same thing can be done direct with using templates. When did
> the template namespace start, anyway?
>
>   
Yep, this was Maverick149's good work.  I even confess to adapting his 
model to battles and biological taxa. The hard-coding made things much 
easier to follow than transclusions.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?

[Ray Saintonge]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> The point would be no different from (say) unreferenced content: there 
> the distinction between "may be removed" and "must be removed" is quite 
> important. And there is the "right", not of the link but the editor 
> adding it, to have "good faith assumed": other things being equal, 
> assume that the link was added to help develop the encyclopedia.
The problem with a phrase like "may be removed" is its implicit 
ambiguity. Those of us who read "may" in a potential sense expressing a 
possibility are offset by others who read "may" in a permissive sense.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 80, Issue 14

[Ray Saintonge]

WereSpielChequers wrote:
> But kudos for raising the issue, one thing I realised during the
> recent BLP deletion spree and its aftermath is that either having a
> wikipedia article dramatically increases your life expectancy, or we
> are not very good at sourcing the deaths of people who retire and
> don't die whilst they are in the public spotlight (I suspect a
> statistical analysis of Wikipedia articles would give solid evidence
> for the  "and they all lived happily ever after" nursery story ending
> ).
>
>   
Perhaps that should read "and they all lived happily *forever* after"  ;-)

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Ray Saintonge]

Carcharoth wrote:
> Can you remember which French encyclopedias did that elaborate scheme.
> It sounds interesting.
>
> The difference with Wikipedia is the possibilities of linkage and
> transclusions and differing formats available in a digital
> encyclopedia, but the downside is the inconsistency in the solutions
> devised and discarded and reinvented over the years in an encyclopedia
> anyone can edit - it is sometimes difficult for consistency to emerge.
>
> I agree that something driven by reader choice would be good, but
> still with editorial guidance.
>   

I don't know about full volume length articles, but it's a plausible 
notion. More realistically, traditional encyclopedias took advantage of 
alphabetical order without regard to article size. Thus in the 
Espasa-Calpe "versión" is a 46 page article with all but the first three 
pages being about versions of the Bible. It is immediately preceded by a 
3-line article about Versiola (a village in Italy with population 600), 
and followed by a two line dictionary definition of "versista". In the 
first edition of the EB 30 pages about "navigation" is preceded by two 
lines about the Mexican town of Navidad, and followed by "NAUMACHIA, in 
antiquity, a shew or spectacle among the ancient Romans, representing a 
sea-fight." The 12-volume "Smithsonian Scientific Series of the 1920s 
and 1930s does not call itself an encyclopedia and is not alphabetical, 
yet is encyclopedic in its coverage of science. Jeremy Collier's 
"Dictionary" from 1686 used an alphabetical arrangement, but is really 
encyclopedic in content. The long/short article volumes in the EB is 
very recent since it only started with the 15th edition.

"Wiki is not paper" is a great advantage for linking, and building other 
fantastic connections between articles, but does not handle stubs very 
well. Knowing when to merge a stub into a list is an art that must 
necessarily remain flexible. I don't believe that we should attach too 
much weight to consistency; that too easily becomes an obsession. I have 
no interest in working to make any article "good" or "featured"; if 
others want to take on that challenge they are welcome to do so.  The 
vast majority of articles will still never make it there.  That's fine! 
Consistency is the enemy of creative solutions. In the simplest case 
there may be two equally good ways of presenting a topic. Do we really 
need to insist that one way is better than the other for the sake of 
consistency.  Perhaps in the distant future one may prove better than 
the other, but we cannot now prejudge that.

The readers' choice principle is fine as long as it does not impose 
reader's choice. The big drawback here is that a reader cannot choose 
what he does not know about.  Personal experience has shown that I am in 
a minority when it comes to liking black jellybeans, though I find it 
annoying that the majority who selectively exclude black jellybeans deny 
me the experience of variety when they leave only the black jellybeans 
in the bowl. Some may want that black jellybeans be banned from 
assortments on the grounds that they are forced to pay for something 
they don't want. If that were to happen the people who buy assortments 
may never even know that black jellybeans exist.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Ray Saintonge]

David Gerard wrote:
> On 8 February 2010 00:16, Ian Woollard wrote:
>   
>> My understanding is that the Wikipedia doesn't really have any risk
>> under the law.
>> Provided the strictures of the DMCA are followed, any uploaded
>> copyrighted material simply has to be removed promptly if they receive
>> a copyright violation notice. If the strictures of the DMCA aren't
>> followed then the Wikipedia/media could be in big trouble.
>> 
> The problem for Commons is also reusability - Wikimedia could get away
> with just about anything, but reusers may not.
>   

I sometimes wonder whether reusability is the rope with which the 
free-culture movement hangs itself.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Ray Saintonge]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 07/02/2010, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>   
>> In examining this one needs to distinguish between Wikipedia policy and
>> copyright law.  Wikipedia can establish its own policies, which largely,
>> but not exclusively, tend to be more stringent than copyright law.  In
>> that it can be authoritative; it chooses what level of risk to accept.
>> 
> My understanding is that the Wikipedia doesn't really have any risk
> under the law.
>
> Provided the strictures of the DMCA are followed, any uploaded
> copyrighted material simply has to be removed promptly if they receive
> a copyright violation notice. If the strictures of the DMCA aren't
> followed then the Wikipedia/media could be in big trouble.
>   
True enough, and none of us is supporting flagrantly infringing acts. 
But I don't think that Wikipedia gets many such take down orders. A most 
important requirement of those orders is that the claimant show that he 
has some legal interest in the material. If the claims could be made by 
third-party do-gooders a lot of people would be wasting a lot of time 
spinning their wheels.

Perhaps the risk is that such a notice might be received.  We often seem 
to be guided by a pervasive naïveté about such things; it's never so 
simple as drawing a go-to-jail card in a Monopoly game. There are 
numerous things that must happen before some acts can be penalized, and 
always opportunities to jump away before it all gets out of hand.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Ray Saintonge]

Durova wrote:

>> In summary, it's up to Wikipedia to adopt its own policies. Personally,
>> I would avoid too doctrinaire an approach; I would more tend to assume
>> that if one takes a fair-minded approach to including material with
>> uncertain copyright status the worst that can happen is that some
>> ghostly obscure heir will emerge from the woodwork to make his claims.
>> More likely, he will thank us for reviving the memory of his dead 
>> ancestor.
>>
>> Ec
>>   
With due respect toward Ray's very thoughtful analysis, I can't agree with 
that conclusion.

Wikimedia Commons currently has 276 administrators and over 6 million
images.  Compare that against en:wiki's 1,714 administrators and 3 million
articles and you'll get an idea how thinly things are spread.  Commons has a
serious deletion request backlog.

Experienced contributors--particularly at the featured content level--have
an obligation to set the example and put the best foot forward.  Yes, it can
be frustrating to research copyright.  It would be considerably more
frustrating if a copyright owner who didn't thank us for the appropriation
complained to the press.

About two years ago the featured picture program had an editor who was
nominating copyright violations and running a vote stacking sockfarm.  He
had actually gotten a copyvio promoted to featured picture before we
realized it; fortunately we caught onto the problem before it ran on the
main page.  Afterward a single administrator undid his siteban without
discussion.  Last fall he was banned again when he actually threatened
another editor.  During the noticeboard thread it turned out that he had
gone over to the DYK program and had resumed submitting copyvios
there--which apparently site culture was not doctrinaire enough about
addressing.

If a fellow who had already been sitebanned for copyvio can return and
continue copyvios for a year at a venue which runs on the main page, then
perhaps a more doctrinaire approach is exactly what we need.

-Lise

  

These are important consequences, but mostly begin to stray from the real issue.

Yes, lack of good administrators is a big problem, but the policies that they 
administer would remain the same without regard to the number of 
administrators. A simpler formulation of the rules could ease the 
administrators' burdens. Alternatively, the solution is more administrators.

I agree that experienced contributors need to set an example, but that too is 
within the rules as defined. Thus they too suffer from a lack of clear 
definition.  I don't see complaints to the press as a big cause for worry. 
Remember that we are dealing with works whose copyright status is debatable, 
and not just last year's pop trivia whose rights are very clear. If we 
rediscover something that hasn't seen the light of day for fifty years, the 
owner's beginning his complaints with the press would ring a little hollow if 
in all those fifty years he took no other steps to protect those rights.

The story of the badly-behaved editor doesn't help us either. What we do about 
such behaviour is about the application of policy, not about determining what 
that copyright policy in fact is. I would even venture to guess that the 
individual in question would have as enthusiastically violated a liberal 
copyright policy as a stringent one. I'm sorry if my use of the word 
"doctrinaire" misled you in that direction. I was really referring to deciding 
the edge cases where the existence of a valid copyright is debatable.

Ec



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Ray Saintonge]

SlimVirgin wrote:
> As you say, it's up to Wikipedia to formulate its own policy, so I'm
> wondering if that's being done anywhere, if there's an effort
> somewhere to clarify this.
>
>   
The fact is that copyright issues have been a perpetual topic of debate 
throughout my eight years of participation. It all gets caught up in the 
confusion of the policy making process. That process tends to be too 
adversarial, sometimes with too little practical understanding of legal 
realities. At some point someone has to be trusted and respected enough 
to say "These are our limits," and have it stick. This is a big 
challenge that extends well beyond the narrow topic of copyrights. 

This is more about the elusive qualities of leadership. As a society we 
have all been disillusioned by the actions of those in power at any and 
all levels. Our era of rapid communications has made those actions more 
difficult to hide. We find ourselves unable to trust anyone. At the same 
time most find it difficult to function without leadership, and crave 
the certainties which that leadership brings.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Images that are PD in their country of origin

[Ray Saintonge]

SlimVirgin wrote:
> Can anyone help with an authoritative opinion about this? The doubts about
> it are causing problems on a number of articles, including during featured
> article reviews.
>
> Where an image is in the public domain in its country of origin, and that
> country is not the U.S., I believe we still have to show that it is PD in
> the U.S. before we can use it, because the Foundation's servers are in the
> U.S.. There seem to be widely differing views on this, even among
> Wikipedians who seem knowledgeable about images. Some people say that if the
> image was not copyrighted in its country of origin on January 1, 1996, it is
> regarded as PD in the U.S., and may be uploaded to the Commons and used on
> Wikipedia as PD. This is according to the [[Uruguay Round Agreements Act]].
> Others are saying no, this *may* mean they are in the public domain, but
> their status as such is not secure.
>
> So my first question is: if an image was regarded as in the public domain on
> January 1, 1996 in its (non-U.S.) country of origin, is there a consensus as
> to whether we are allowed to use it on Wikipedia as a PD image? If so, what
> is the correct tag to use?
>
> My second question: for images that are in the public domain in their
> (non-U.S.) country of origin, but were not PD in that country as of January
> 1, 1996, is there any way we can use them apart from claiming fair use?
>   
In examining this one needs to distinguish between Wikipedia policy and 
copyright law.  Wikipedia can establish its own policies, which largely, 
but not exclusively, tend to be more stringent that copyright law.  In 
that it can be authoritative; it chooses what level of risk to accept.

As long as you depend only on copyright law there can be no 
authoritative answer. The failure of the United States to adopt the rule 
of the shorter term throws everything into a muddle. Every situation 
needs to be studied on its own merits. The case is still working through 
the legal system challenging, on first amendment grounds, whether that 
law would operate to re-protect works that had already gone into the 
public domain. It seems clear that UK authors who died in 1923, 1924 or 
1925 would not have been captured by the URAA. In other cases much 
depends on how the law of some other country transitioned the extension 
of copyright from life plus fifty to seventy.  There are many possible 
permutations of that problem.

Canada still uses life plus fifty, and it's anybody's guess whether it 
will adopt the extension. The last couple controversial efforts to add 
DRMs did not include term extension language. Stephen Leacock died in 
1945 so his works would have gone into the public domain in Canada at 
the end of 1995; nevertheless some later works were published in the US, 
and the copyrights duly renewed at the appropriate time.

Images present additional problems about who owns the copyright.  The 
simple fact that an image was included in a book does not automatically 
mean that the book's author owned the copyrights for the images.  For 
the Winnie the Pooh books Shepherd, the illustrator, outlived Milne by a 
considerable margin so in a life plus system the copyrights on the 
images would last much longer than those on the texts.

In summary, it's up to Wikipedia to adopt its own policies. Personally, 
I would avoid too doctrinaire an approach; I would more tend to assume 
that if one takes a fair-minded approach to including material with 
uncertain copyright status the worst that can happen is that some 
ghostly obscure heir will emerge from the woodwork to make his claims. 
More likely, he will thank us for reviving the memory of his dead ancestor.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] How smart people fail to share

[Ray Saintonge]

Keegan Paul wrote:
>> Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
>>
>> - d.
>> 
> Ah, well, that's the advantage of a wiki.  If you know what to do and can't
> explain it, you can {{sofixit}} yourself with others to review and figure
> things out on their own.
>
> Instruction creep: The dumbing down of the world.
>   

It's dumbing down, but that too derives from the premise that everything 
has an origin.  Computer geeks tend to be fanatically logical, and that 
does not leave much room for alternative explanations or sources.  In 
many subjects we can fill in the blanks later when someone has the time 
to spend tracing things, but that approach is not shared with those who 
believe in the immediacy of  a deletion debate.  The older ones among 
us, and seniors in general, have an enormous amount of background 
thinking built up. Nevertheless, we may no longer have access to the 
references that we used to build this up 40 years ago.  A mathematician 
working through an explanation of a complex theorem should not need to 
reference why a + b = b +a unless the contrary would be meaningful in 
that context.

When sourcing and original research rules start to exemplify a phobia 
about being wrong the system has come around to bite us in the ass.  The 
trickster/raven has come home to roost.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Climate change on Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> The Trolls of mythology, however, totally got the shaft.
> In internet terms. "Trolling" was always a verb, originally,
> and never a pronoun; and it referred to techniques of fishing.
>
>   
Thank you. I have often despaired of finding anyone on the net who 
understood that.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC blog on WSJ study

[Ray Saintonge]

Bod Notbod wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>   
>> Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably
>> that you can't copyright information.  You can copyright expression, but
>> Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news
>> reports.
>> 
> I wonder how true that is, though. I'm sure people on Wikinews do
> sometimes cut 'n' paste, but I feel there's more to it than that.
>   

Indeed there is, but I suppose that I envisioned the ideal Wikimedian. 
The information/expression distinction is often blurred. When it comes 
to derivative works it can be difficult to determine whether something 
is derived from the information or from the expression.
> It actually takes quite a bit of work to read an entire article and
> process it in your mind then put out a purely self-made version. And,
> let's take the *most* optimistic view of editors: you're still
> reporting a report. Some guy went out there, said what he saw, got
> money for it, funded by advertising.
>
> At best, all we can do is say "this guy saw what he saw and now I'm
> repeating it".
>   

Yes, and if more funded reporters went there and came back with 
different reports of what happened, the aggregator tries to synthesize a 
single neutral story. It is dangerous to truth to base one's knowledge 
on a single view when the situation could be as in Akutagawa's [[In a 
Grove]], or in the Fuller/Suber [[The Case of the Speluncean Explorers]].

I wouldn't draw the conclusion that all these reporters are necessarily 
funded by advertising, though a significant portion is.

> Don't misunderstand me... I'm still on Wikipedia/Wikinews's side on
> this. But that's as a reader and editor, not as someone running a
> business.
>
> Surely it must be true to say that Wikinews would be nothing without
> paid journalists from whom we aggregate content?

Perhaps, but as long as Wikinews is doing little more than aggregating 
professional sources it will be stuck in an unimaginative rut. There 
must be some reason why the Serbian Wikinews has been so much more 
successful than the others. What can we learn from that?

The perspective of the reader/editor needs to be reconciled with that of 
the business person. That can only come when each side understands and 
appreciates the efforts and values of the other.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC blog on WSJ study

[Ray Saintonge]

Durova wrote:
> Mr. Murdoch wants to shift to a paid access model for online the online
> versions of his news holdings.  He's negotiating a deal with Microsoft's
> search engine toward that purpose.
>
> It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those
> plans.  If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles
> would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old
> articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would
> otherwise be valueless.
>
> If he's right about paid access being the most profitable model, then his
> self interest would be best served by fencing new content within a paid
> access only for a brief time: a week at most.  By that time it becomes old
> news and there's more money to be made through advertising.  Successive
> release to different venues is standard practice within the entertainment
> industry: a film starts with theatrical release, and once that exhausts
> itself it goes to cable, DVD and network television in descending order of
> profitability.
>
> If this is his plan and it becomes the news industry standard then it could
> make breaking news less burdensome upon Wikipedia's administrators: fewer
> people will read the news immediately and edit Wikipedia.  Of course
> Wikipedia might also be the wrench in his plans because he can't prevent his
> readers from updating Wikipedia, significant news readership would shift to
> Wikipedia, and we have no reason to stop being a free venue.  

The news "industry" is in as much a quandary  as the music and film 
industries. It's a model that depends heavily on news as entertainment. 
That's the only model that seems to justify the /ad nauseam/ treatment 
of such topics as Anna Nicole Smith's death or the Balloon Boy of 
Colorado.  If a Florida mother kills her infant daughter it's a tragic 
personal event, but it should have no real effect on the lives of 
persons away from the immediate situation. Yet another boring speech by 
a politician is not going to sell much news. Those who would critically 
read through such speeches are also likely to be just as critical of 
advertising, or to simply dismiss the ads as background noise.

Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably 
that you can't copyright information.  You can copyright expression, but 
Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news 
reports. News services at one time relied on the patronage of small town 
media who were delighted to receive anything from the outside world; 
they could in turn easily edit that news to suit the pleasure of their 
local advertisers. Now, readers have more access to other 
interpretations of the same information.  If Murdoch charges for 
information, I can often go to another competing site and get it for 
free. If he is the only source for the information, someone with access 
can with impunity repeat that information on another site as long as he 
does so in different words.  Conditions of use that treat public 
information as proprietary may very well be beyond the legal capacity of 
the commercial sites.

I don't dispute that it's expensive to have newsworthy items properly 
covered by enough reporters for credibly objective treatment.  A single 
embedded reporter is too vulnerable to infection from the tunnel-vision 
of those who embed him. At the same time, is an organisation like 
Wikinews in any position to send its own reporters to cover a difficult 
story?  The cost of news coverage and the funding of those costs are 
headed in opposing directions. I have yet to see anyone with the vision 
to resolve that divergence.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] New site for meta-discussion

[Ray Saintonge]

Bod Notbod wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 10:39 PM, Jake Wartenberg wrote
>> I can.  I want to promote a relaxed atmosphere without allowing outing or
>> trolling.  It should be a place where editors can chatter idly and
>> brainstorm new ideas.  I hope that gives you an idea of what I am going for
>> here.
>> 
> If there's a problem with "outing" (I don't even know what that means)
> and "trolling" they should be dealt with within the community.
>
>   

"Outing" is the public release of private information about an 
individual without his consent, particularly the public release of the 
real identity of someone who has chosen to be known only by a 
pseudonym.  I would consider it a far more serious offence than trolling 
which is merely fishing for arguments.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Lesson Plan

[Ray Saintonge]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> The article you posted seemed to
> take the epistemology as the basic "lesson": if you tell me we "know" 
> that, what do you mean by "know"? It's a reasonable assumption that 
> being analytical about how something in an encyclopedia article can be 
> described as "known" would prove educational, say in the early teenage 
> years. The article was on the first poetry anthology published in 
> English, and the question I would have is more about general relevance 
> of content. Just one statement: the first edition had many poems 
> containing religious commentary that were taken out in later editions. 
> OK, fine, if you know the publication date was 1557, the year before 
> Mary Tudor died, you are going to ask more and different questions, not 
> just "how do we know that?" which can probably be established by putting 
> two books side by side. (This is about [[Tottel's Miscellany]], by the way.)
>
>   

There is an unfortunate tendency for current day editors to view the 
history of past centuries in a more compressed manner than warranted. 
The article in question includes the sentence: "It is generally included 
with Elizabethan era literature even if it was, in fact, published in 
1557, a year before Elizabeth I took the throne." That doesn't mention 
Mary at all. It ignores the effect of the less than Catholic Elizabeth's 
rule in comparison to that of her sister.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA FOREVER

[Ray Saintonge]

Oleg Alexandrov wrote:
> I have been a Wikipedian for five years. I am an administrator, I have
> written tens of articles, created hundreds of pictures, and made tens
> of thousands of edits. I love Wikipedia and all that it represents.
>
> I find the current "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" banner to be creepy. I don't
> have good words to express it, but it does not feel the right way of
> soliciting donations.
>
> I would call upon the Wikipedians responsible for the banner to give
> it a deep thought about what  message they want to convey to the
> millions of visitors to the site. Thank you.
I understand your sentiments perfectly, I have been at it for nearly 
eight years. Those of us who have been doing this a long time are more 
committed to the idea than to the organization. It's the difference 
between amateur and professional sports. In amateur sports the important 
thing is participation and having fun at it without worrying too much 
about making mistakes. In professional sports image and conformity 
become more important, and the kind of boosterism that you criticize 
becomes the norm. When we start to believe that something is "forever" 
we lose our ability to renew.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] fictional categories

[Ray Saintonge]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> On 04/11/2009, Steve Bennett wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
>> 
>>> Schroedinger's cat very definitely is fictitious; it's not an
>>> experiment you can actually do and get an alive/dead cat that you can
>>> actually see, you would get either an alive cat, or a dead cat.
>>>   
>> I agree with the statement that it should not be in that category.
>> Essentially, because schrodinger's cat is not a cat.
>> 
> Schrodinger's cat is a fictitious cat that is in the Schrodinger's cat
> thought experiment.
>
> It is fictitious because it is not a factual cat; it is countrafactual.
>   
>> There is no notable fiction in which
>> Schrodinger's cat features heavily, for example.
>> 
> It is notably in "Schroedinger's cat" thought experiment.
>
> That's what a thought experiment is; it's a made up story about what
> would happen if you did X,Y,Z which is used to illuminate aspects of
> physics.
>
>   
I would be inclined toward keeping it in the category, but mostly 
because of subsequent references in works of science fiction.  In common 
usage there is a tendency to ignore the difference between "fictitious" 
and "fictional".  With reference to the original concept of 
Schrodinger's cat it is fictitious because it is imaginary; it is not 
fictional because it is not part of a work of fiction.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.

[Ray Saintonge]

Carcharoth wrote:
> The best articles, unsurprisingly, are where a good team of editors
> and writers (and not too large a team either) work together to produce
> a great article. It would be great if that sort of teamwork happened
> on some of the messy articles, but the very existence of
> highly-charged emotions puts off some of the people that could help
> fix things. And some people are happy to just argue incessantly,
> rather than move forward and end up with a better article.
It's not uncommon for a wrong article to be viewed as a lesser evil than 
engaging idiots in persistent drama.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.

[Ray Saintonge]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/10/22 Surreptitiousness:
>   
>> stevertigo wrote:
>> 
>>> So the question is, how do we aggregate and sort arguments such that
>>> we can apply a meta process for quickly discerning good, valid,
>>> arguments, from those that aren't? Other than "IAR" that is?
>>>   
>> Didn't we used to reformat discussions? Maybe we need to re-integrate
>> that into our tool-box.
>> 
> You mean refactoring? Refactoring an ongoing discussion is usually
> very controversial and not worth the drama. Refactoring a closed
> discussion might make a more useful archive, particularly I'm not sure
> archives get read enough to be worth the effort.

Ooops! You're right; it should have been "refactoring", and I should 
have responded accordingly.

Ec



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.

[Ray Saintonge]

Surreptitiousness wrote:
> stevertigo wrote:
>   
>> So the question is, how do we aggregate and sort arguments such that
>> we can apply a meta process for quickly discerning good, valid,
>> arguments, from those that aren't? Other than "IAR" that is?
>> 
> Didn't we used to reformat discussions? Maybe we need to re-integrate 
> that into our tool-box.
>
>   
Yes, we did use to reformat discussions. I tried it a long time ago when 
en-wp still had less than 100k articles.  It was more work than it was 
worth, especially if you are trying to deal with all comments fairly.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] strategy.wikimedia.org - slightly overwhelmed by discrepancy between "interactive" proposals and wikimedia goals

[Ray Saintonge]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> i'm in need of some help.  there are a number of proposals which
> recommend the use of java and flash, and, unfortunately, the java
> applet advocates are alarmingly unreasonable and vocal.
>   

> overall: the goal is to open up wikipedia to a wider audience, and if
> that can be achieved whilst at the same time taking advantage of what
> technology has to offer (such as the new WikiReader), _great_.  i
> trust that anyone reading this shares that same view and will help
> weed out wikipedia proposals that are contrary to that goal.
>   

The making of these proposals represents the brainstorming level of the 
discussion.  Effective brainstorming should not be limited to ideas that 
have been pre-judged to be within the rules.  Proposals that are beyond 
the rules likely have very little chance of succeeding, but occasionally 
good ones will come along.  That's what  gives rise to innovation.  If 
the analysis of a proposal shows the idea to be good we should be 
prepared to change the rules accordingly.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WP and Deep Web, was Re: Age fabrication and original research

[Ray Saintonge]

stevertigo wrote:
> David Goodman  wrote:
>   
>> neutrality does not exist.
>> 
> [[WP:NPOV]]??
>   

Just because one strives for neutrality does not mean that one ever 
achieves it.

>> it is impossible to work intelligently on a subject without
>> developing a view about the disputed questions.
>> 
> Well, Sourcewallas don't need to work intelligently, really. We
> already have lots of functions that similarly avoid the use of
> unnecessary intelligence - speedy deletion of subspace drafts, for
> example.  So it's not an editorial concept as much as it is a
> gathering concept, and the role is not so much an editorial role but
> one of interface.
>   

Subspace drafts are usually associated with Star Trek or a poorly 
insulated crawl space under one's house. ;-)

Am I interpreting your neologism "sourcewallahs" /(sp!)/ correctly?  I'm 
reading it as individuals who randomly attach sources for material 
without regard to its relevance.

>> One has to be aware of ones biases and know the devices for
>> overcoming them.
>> 
> I understand both bias and device, but I don't think these are really
> all that relevant if we can still AGF a little bit. Roles help keep
> things simple, and applying concepts of principle to simple roles
> means that any deviations can be detected without much subjectivity
> involved.
>
> Redundancy can work too - there is no need to rely on just one
> sourcewalla. And in any case good people can keep each other honest if
> their collective mode of function is one of openness.
One assumes good faith by recognizing that the other may not be aware if 
his own biases. Being too vigorous about shaking the tree of his biases 
may only serve to expose one's own biases.  In the myth of Adam and Eve 
Adam would have been unable to move forward if Eve had not shaken down 
that one fruit.  Shaking the tree too vigorously could have brought a 
rain of fruit to drive Adam away ... this is the same effect as going 
all-in prematurely with a good poker hand.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] International Olympic Committee tells Flickr user to change license

[Ray Saintonge]

Sage Ross wrote:
> What are the legal implications here?  Does the contract (private use
> only for photos) implicitly agreed to by Giles when he bought a ticket
> to the Olympics invalidate the CC-BY-SA license, despite that
> downstream re-users (like us) weren't a party to the original
> contract?

Can anyone produce a copy of the actual text on the back of the ticket?  
I  nevertheless see no basis for enforcing this against a third party.

Here in BC we also have the provincial government, at the behest of the 
IOC, trying to pass legislation to allow officials to remove signs from 
the windows of people's homes without a warrant if those signs offend 
the IOC.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Ray Saintonge]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> I gave up. Eventually I came across a controversial topic that 
> particularly interested me, where I had the background to understand 
> the sources and where my research radically changed my mind. So I 
> started working on it, I even bought a pile of books about it (on all 
> sides of the controversy), and a major recent and very expensive 
> mainstream work on it was donated to me, and I became much more 
> vulnerable as a result, since I now had an opinion and a POV, based 
> on reading the sources, and I started asserting content based on the 
> most reliable of the sources, especially peer-reviewed secondary source.
>
> The information necessary for my major shift of POV is much more than 
> most editors could absorb with some light reading. There exist 
> secondary sources that cover the field that, if editors would trust 
> them, would make it easy, but  they don't trust these sources, 
> even when published by independent, non-fringe publishers, since what 
> they say contradicts the easy positions of ignorance. After all, 
> doesn't everybody with a background in science know? Reliable 
> source guidelines, if followed, would address the problem, but are 
> useless against entrenched opinion, because editors will invent this 
> or that excuse for disregarding them, so that the article doesn't 
> fall into their view of undue weight.
>
> So ... I'm no longer a Wikipedia editor, I'm now working off-wiki, 
> with real knowledge and research in the field that interested me, 
> and, as well, on the kind of voluntary structure that I see as the 
> only way out of trap that Wikipedia has fallen into. It's much 
> easier, though, of course, it all takes time. I still have an 
> account, and the block will expire, and I'm not burning any bridges, 
> but  once I realize that a wall definitely exists, I don't butt 
> my head against it. I walk around it or dig under it or climb over 
> it, if I actually want to get to the other side, or I do something else.
>   
So rather than address the problems inherent in this narrative so as to 
retain editors, we have a "Bookshelf project" to recruit cannon fodder.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WP and Deep Web, was Re: Age fabrication and original research

[Ray Saintonge]

stevertigo wrote:
>> The philosophic roots of this view make sense, but how do we resolve the
>> opposing tendencies of bottlenecks on one side and dispersion of ideas
>> on the other?
>> 
> Instead of fixing a hole, or not doing something for fear of creating
> new holes (or just for fear of holes in general), we 'apply good
> faith' -- understanding how we can help others be helpful to...
> others.
>
> It's called "empowerment." I think. "Facilitation," maybe? Hm: "The
> facilitation of empowerment and the empowerment of facilitation?"  Heh
> - needs work.
>
>   
I don't know if you understood my point.  Good faith is not a factor 
here since we assume it is present in both paths.  In bottlenecks we get 
people digging in their heels and defending certain perceptions of an 
idea. Dispersion happens when someone abandons the bottlenecked sandbox 
and starts his own brand-new sandbox; with enough of these it becomes 
difficult for the new kid on the playground to choose which sandbox to 
play in.

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WP and Deep Web, was Re: Age fabrication and original research

[Ray Saintonge]

stevertigo wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>   
>> WP:SOHE being the page that you wrote recently:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sourcehelpers
>> Did you not think of trying to make Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource
>> Exchange more active, rather than starting a new page and a new
>> proposal?
>> 
> I thought about it. Different concept though, and with too many
> bottlenecks. "Near identical" may have been overstated. Newer ideas
> will have to avoid those same bottlenecks, and that's why I wrote up a
> draft for a new idea. In certain ways we have to be open and openly
> helpful about not just collaborative writing, but collaborative
> source-finding. To some that seems to mean swinging from the
> Britannica ideal toward the Google/PirateBay direction. I little bit
> perhaps, but not all the way.
>   

The philosophic roots of this view make sense, but how do we resolve the 
opposing tendencies of bottlenecks on one side and dispersion of ideas 
on the other?

> And the "encyclopedia" (WP:ENC) characterization is way overstated
> anyway. Wikipedia's philosophy is entirely different from Britannica's
> -- which doesn't even have articles about 'paid erection maintainers'
> and 'stand-by penis alternates.'  We on the other hand, do.
>
> -Stevertigo
> "Nothing we can't shake...
>   
I really don't care whether Wikipedia has articles about what we can't 
shake on the other hand. ;-)

Ec

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WP and Deep Web, was Re: Age fabrication and original research

[Ray Saintonge]

Carcharoth wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:37 AM, stevertigo  wrote:
>   
>> Well the WP:SOHE idea to me seems a reasonable compromise -- one that
>> makes small parts of copyright texts open to our research needs, while
>> still respecting the needs of authors to keep whole works marketable.
>> 
> WP:SOHE being the page that you wrote recently:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sourcehelpers
>
> "A nearly identical concept at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange
> (consisting of shared resources and resource requests) while
> expansive, is fairly inactive."
>
> Did you not think of trying to make Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource
> Exchange more active, rather than starting a new page and a new
> proposal?
>
>   
Indeed!  Without commenting for or against the content of that page, I 
am disturbed by the acronymic profligacy that this represents.  Gracing 
the page with an acronym as though it's something that everyone should 
know about does not help with communication.  When I encounter an 
acronym like that my instinct tells me to ignore it.

Ec

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