Re: [WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault
Ken Arromdee wrote: When they say that Wikipedia's proces for fixing articles is opaque, time-consuming and cumbersome, they are *correct*. Well, yeah, but. Right (sorta) conclusion, wrong reason. It can always be improved, but I don't think our process for fixing articles is *that* bad. And, in any case, it wasn't at all so cumbersome that it kept Finsbury from whitewashing the article! ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] BBC article on Roth novel and Wikipedia article
Fred, you say Roth is an elderly man googling and I am wondering if there is an age at which people using Wikipedia in the estimation of this list become unfit to drive? Elderly or not, there is the issue of authentication. On the internet, famously, nobody know you're a dog -- but nobody knows if you're Phillip Roth, either. Does anyone know if OTRS became involved, here? If the admin (whoever it was) had referred him there, instead just accusing him of not being a credible source, this might have turned out differently. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] divining Wikipedia tea leaves for political pseudoprognostication
This may be old news, but it's quite the life-imitates-Wikipedia-imitates-art brouhaha, complete with Stephen-Colbert-instigating vandalism: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-possible-vp-picks-wikipedia-pages-locked-down-amid-editing-spree-20120808,0,6515256.story ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment
Gwern Branwen wrote: ...Academics may have to adopt such an imposture, but I do not. As long as my 'snark' does not change the results - as it does not - I do not care. Bully for you. My view is that if such experiments are to be carried out, it would be better if they were designed and conducted by those able to restrain themselves from such snark. Better how? Because, as a wise acquaintance recently told me, very simply: Delivery matters. There is a mainstream out there which, like it or not, adopts and prefers a certain demeanor different from yours. You may pride yourself on not caring, on imagining that only the literal truth of your argument matters, but to that mainstream, other aspects *do* matter. If they dislike your snarky attitude, they reflexively mistrust both you and your argument -- and, to some extent, the community you associate with. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Newt Gingrich
I saw that, too. Michele Dowd, in http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/dowd-the-great-mans-wife.html. Although there's evidence at [[Talk:Callista_Gingrich]] that COI policies are being observed. Nathan wrote: It was reported in the NY Times that the campaign manager has a habit of whitewashing the article on Callista Gingrich. On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 3:58 AM, Tony Sidaway tonysida...@gmail.com wrote: Some sources on my Wikipedia search are showing reports that prospective US Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's staff have become embroiled over edits they wanted made to his Wikipedia article. Given the prominence of the personage and the current point in the seemingly interminable US election cycle, the more eyes on this the better. Gingrich is probably more sympathetic to Wikipedia than most politicians but we probably wouldn't want to get into a fight needlessly, especially one in which we may appear to take a partisan position. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Demi Moore BLP name
Exactly right. And the issue is further confounded/compounded by the medium that the alleged new source was reported in. Even if Demi Moore is perfectly reliable on the truth surrounding her birth name, common sense tells you that a 140-character tweet (or two) is not the sort of place where you can make nuanced distinctions between I was born Demi, which is to say, that's what everyone always called me, even though it says 'Demetria' on my birth certificate versus I was born Demi, and it even says that on my birth certificate, but my parents always said it was short for 'Demetria', and I always believed that, and told the story in a People Magazine interview, too, and I only just recently learned the truth. (Common sense should also tell you that revisionist history is rampant when it comes to these sorts of aspects of the personal lives of celebrities.) The Cunctator wrote: Ummm... common sense says that if someone says what their birth name is, about 50 years after they were born, when decades of documentation -- including interviews -- says something different, that someone is making up the new info. Either Demi Moore was incorrect in 1996, or she is incorrect now. Either People Magazine, Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times, and the World Almanac are incorrect, or Demi Moore now is incorrect. Both common sense and Wikipedia policy should give weight to reliable sources, especially when Demi Moore has conflicting statements. On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Ken Arromdee arrom...@rahul.net wrote: On Sat, 3 Dec 2011, Steve Summit wrote: Summary: Demi Moore, in a tweet but verified as being her, says that her own birth name is Demi. Wikipedians do not want to use this statement because the reliable sources say otherwise. And, per that talk page, they've got some pretty darn good arguments. Except for common sense. Common sense says that if someone tells you what their birth name is, you believe them, not something that's probably misinformation but which has been multiply repeated. Someone on BLPN is actually arguing that WP:IAR *doesn't allow you to ignore sourcing policy*. Of course it does. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Demi Moore BLP name
Ken Arromdee: wrote: On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, Steve Summit wrote: Even if Demi Moore is perfectly reliable on the truth surrounding her birth name, common sense tells you that a 140-character tweet (or two) is not the sort of place where you can make nuanced distinctions... The trouble with this reasoning is that BLP subjects who are not specifically experienced with Wikipedia won't make statements with lawyer-like precision. That's true, and remains so if you generalize it to people who are not specifically experienced with formal reporting won't make statements with lawyer-like precision. If you reject the BLP subject's own statement on the grounds that there could be some nuance which makes it say other than what it seems to say, you end up with an excuse that pretty much lets you ignore all BLP subjects whenever you want. I think you've just proved that interpreting primary sources can be hard (and sometimes borders on OR), which is why when there's any doubt, it's correct for us to defer to secondary sources -- the more reliable and verifiable the better. So, yes, in this case, Encyclopaedia Britannica is more reliable than People magazine is more reliable than Demi Moore herself. (I agree with you that this is a surprising result, and that it seems to defy common sense at first. Truth has a way of doing that, sometimes. :-) ) But it's not whenever you want, it's when there's reasonable doubt, which there certainly is here. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Demi Moore BLP name
Ken Arromdee wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Demi_Moore Summary: Demi Moore, in a tweet but verified as being her, says that her own birth name is Demi. Wikipedians do not want to use this statement because the reliable sources say otherwise. And, per that talk page, they've got some pretty darn good arguments. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] [[Long Dong Silver]]
It's still in Google's cache. It doesn'tlook so very bad, that I can see. The last entry on the talk page indicates that the page was deleted (and, yes, supporessed) by Fred at 00:41. George Herbert wrote: Ok, A. The assertion that he fails PORNBIO seems rather flat on the face of it, based on my moderate familiarity with 70s/80s porn, and B. WTF happened with the article history? It seems to have been hard deleted rather than normal deleted. I can't even go back and check the version diffs to see what was actually there previously. I can't even tell who deleted the revs, as far as I can see. Bad, bad form. -george On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Phil Nash phn...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote: Fred Bauder wrote: This article needs to be put out of its misery; it's been tagged for additional citations for 21 months, and still does not meet the [[WP:PORNBIO]] criteria. It also appears to contain unsourced BLP vandalism (Liam McBride?) . All citations refer to one incident in which he was referred to in passing, which does not confer notability. As for His head is also pictured in an episode of the show Futurama entitled A Head in the Polls., as far as I am aware about this performer, his head is the least notable part of his anatomy. I'd do it myself, but. Thanks. Seems like a close question to me, but I think Thomas was referring to himself, not some obscure porn star. Fred Even so, LDS fails [[WP:GNG]] per [[WP:ONEVENT]] on that basis, and his notability should be judged by [[WP:PORNBIO]] and not otherwise, since the thrust (sorry!) of the article is that he is notable as a porn star and not as a bit-player in the machinations of US politics. The article, as it stands, is a disgrace to Wikipedia's standards, if it still claims to have any. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] WP:RSs
Ken Arromdee wrote: On Fri, 12 Aug 2011, David Gerard wrote: This is false. Print sources do not require a legal scan to be available. If you try using an illegal scan of a print source, you'll be told that you have no reason to believe the copy accurately represents the source. I think David meant there's no rule that says there must be a scan (legal or illegal) at all. I think your point is that there's some precedent for rejecting (or at least complaining about) sources that are only available off-line. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a dictionary (was: Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered)
Anthony wrote: The failures of Wikinews and Wiktionary are probably due in large part to imposition of too much structure - in Wiktionary the formatting requirements... Not sure I'd call Wiktionary a failure. But if it is, it's arguably a failure of Mediawiki to adequately support that structure, which is necessary for a dictionary (especially a multilingual one). ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] About tl;dr
Abd wrote: [400+ words that I didn't read all of and so won't bother to quote] As a grave sufferer of logorrhea myself, it's tempting to write several hundred words here myself, but I'll settle for fifty. It doesn't matter how you justify a too-long screed; if its length prevents people from reading it (and it will), your message is lost. It's as simple as that. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] full-text searching since the Vector switch in en.wikipedia
Carcharoth wrote: I suppose the idea is that most people using that search box want go functionality, Many tech-savvy editors, perhaps, but certainly not most readers. 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.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2721/2482 I found three quotes quite interesting: David Archer [...] remarked that he could tell [the article on global warming] was not written by professional climate scientists[.] Among the articles that did not score as well, several of the expert reviewers compared the articles to the work of high school students or university undergraduates. Several others also noted the problems associated with non-expert authors, noting that the sources used were poorly selected and not representative of the broader literature. All three of these criticisms, of course, are the almost inevitable result of some of our most strongly-held policies: * We have no requirement that articles be written by experts in the field; indeed we tend to discourage experts. * Even if you deny the existence of an anti-expert bias, the fact that we're the encyclopedia that anyone can edit virtually guarantees a certain mediocrity -- an article's quality does not increase monotonically until it is near-perfect, but rather, oscillates around a mean quality which is determined by all the editors who contribute to it over time (many of whom, yes, will be high school students or university undergraduates). * Our vociferous insistence on sources guarantees that some (if not many) of them will be poorly selected. (And, of course, these policies of ours are cherished for some pretty good reasons; I'm not trying to criticize either us or this critic.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Invitation for review
stevertigo wrote: George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: This dispute looks either like some combination of original research, disruption, or possibly active but intellectual support of holocaust denialists. I think its great George how you can just throw out an accusation like some combination of original research, disruption, or possibly active but intellectual support of holocaust denialists (its deniers by the way) and then say well even it ifs just a a matter of AGF. And I think it's astonishing, Stever, that someone who is as fond of wordplay and intellectual arguments as you seem to be could so blatantly miss the distinction between looks like and is. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Invitation for review
Stevertigo wrote: Steve Summit s...@eskimo.com wrote: And I think it's astonishing, Stever, that someone who is as fond of wordplay and intellectual arguments as you seem to be could so blatantly miss the distinction between looks like and is. ...I don't do wordplay. I do something quite.. different. Yes, we've noticed. I couldn't think of a word for it just then, either. George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: You threw the question of your disruption block out here on wikien-L for comment. You cannot reasonably object that people have responded with their impressions of the situation. Well, Steve (above) thinks I should have taken you literally, or perhaps seriously. Indeed I do. George did you the courtesy of, rather than accusing you of actually being something objectionable, mentioning that that's the impression you were giving. The underlying presumption, of course, is that you'll be interested in changing your behavior so as to avoid the (putatively incorrect) impression in future. Now, the overwhelming body of evidence suggests that you have no such interest, and therefore that we are all quite wasting our time by letting you engage us in elaborate discussions like this. Someone on-wiki recently accused you of being a troll. I wouldn't accuse you of that, but it is certainly the impression you are giving. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikimedian image restorations exploited on eBay
Durova wrote: David's posts really looked like a bizarre attempt to bait me into a flame war just as the thread had reached its natural end. As in: 'No no, you can't walk away. You started this thread and I don't like what I think I understand and I'm angry at you about that.' I'd characterize the reaction as exasperated, not angry. I saw several people who really seemed to want to help you, but they either honestly weren't sure what you wanted help with, or they wanted to more carefully explore the actual legality/illegality of that eBay seller's actions. Lots of people here have a sort of I'm from Missouri, show me attitude. They're not going to blindly take your word for it that (say) a certain eBay seller is evil and should be loathed; they want to weight the evidence first. (And this isn't a bad thing -- it helps prevent lynch mobs.) They're happy to help you, but they're not willing to let you dictate the terms under which they'll help you. I certainly didn't see any flamebaiting. That's kind of a serious accusation. (I confess I've seen what to me looked a lot like drama, but I'm certainly not going to accuse anyone of that.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia approaches its limits - Technology Guardian
Carcharoth wrote: ...I've seen cases of HUGGLE and TWINKLE users reverting a vandalised page to a still-vandalised state, and no-one else checking, and such vandalised pages (now with the legitimacy of a revert from an approved user) staying in that state for months. Indeed. And I've seen canny vandals instigate a deliberate chain of contradictory vandalism (perhaps involving sockpuppets) with the apparent intent of goading well-meaning but careless vandalism patrollers into doing precisely this. (It's an annoyingly effective technique.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist
Carcharoth wrote: I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as Famous animals and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name, dates of birth and death, and other biographical data. That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of how the system is currently set up. Absolutely true, but delete the word biographical. The potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive database, period. And I don't think it would be too hard. Just extract all the key/value pairs that are currently residing in infobox template invocations, and dump them into a nice, flexible, free-form database. Then arrange to invoke the infobox templates out of that database. Then provide a simple key/value editor on the edit page, to edit this metadata. Then provide a user-friendly query wizard. Hey presto, the complaints about editability of infobox template invocations go way down, *and* we've got cool new search functionality, and a whole bunch of strange and tedious-to-maintain categories can go away, and we don't need to worry about category intersection any more, and... ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist
Charles wrote: The argument worth having is that reliable sources are a necessary condition for the inclusion of a topic, rather than a sufficient condition. (This is quite obvious, I believe, but one can go blue in the face saying it with no effect.) No way is the presidential pooch going to get deleted, in practical terms. But that only proves once more voting is evil, really. My own take on the deletionist/inclusionist divide (which, admittedly, has little if anything to do with Wikipedia's inclusion policies as currently prescribed) is to ask: would anyone, anywhere in the world (other than the author) ever be interested in reading an encyclopedic treatment of this topic? (And in the case of Bo the first dog, the answer is pretty clearly yes.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist
fl wrote: On Saturday, 25 July 2009 8:21 pm, David Gerard wrote: Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29 The current introduction raised my eyebrows. Bo Obama (born October 9, 2008) is the Obama family dog. Barack Obama is the head of the household and President of the United States. and is a neutered male Portuguese Water Dog, or Portie. If we cut off the first sentence, we learn some interesting facts about Mr. Obama ;) Fixed. (No pun intended.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NYT: Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos
Carcharoth wrote: On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Matthew Brownmor...@gmail.com wrote: Currently a user can upload a photograph themselves to the Commons, claim they are the author, and no proof is needed. Yes, you are right. So how did we get to OTRS instead of directing people to the Upload button? I'm no expert on this, but the impression I get is that mechanical upload does not handle, and manual OTRS intervention is needed for, situations like: * I am the uploader but not the author, but the author told me I could. * I, the author, hereby grant Wikipedia permission to use this copyrighted image under these specific circumstances. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NYT: Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos
The Cunctator wrote: Yeah, the article is kind of premised on a lie. Was it? It rang perfectly true to me. Our de-facto policy is that we utterly prefer having no photo at all to having an improperly licensed one, and we utterly reject any of the opportunities that fair-use law would easily grant us. Corollary 1: most living celebrities will have amateur snapshots. Corollary 2: most dead celebrities will have no photo at all. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] NYT: Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos
Durova wrote: The default action that people take when they discover Wikipedia would publish their photos is to offer permission. When we try to answer 'that doesn't work, you need to go to OTRS and...' nine times out of ten their eyes glaze over and they wander away. They simply don't comprehend. We need to stop being defeatist and get serious about commuincating on a broader scale that yes, these things are possible. Or we could do the unthinkable and change our policies to better mesh with the way nine out of ten people actually think. (Or, yeah, I know, pigs could fly. But still.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:News suppression (was: News agencies are not RSs)
WJhonson wrote: Suppressing the news can't be said to improve Wikipedia in any reasonable way. But we suppress news *all the time*. If I added to our [[Shawarma]] article the news that I had one for lunch today, that fact would be suppressed in a heartbeat, and rightly so. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs
Sam Blacketer wrote: This case is more about basic common sense... Well, no. This case is about whether an editor at (in this case) The New York Times can successfully collude with editors of other major media outlets, for the best of reasons, to keep a certain fact out of the media for N months. And can this still be done when one of the other media outlets has 1,000,000 cats as editors, who actively resist herding, and especially when someone's trying to suppress some information that wants to be free. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site
So, in essence, many Wikipedia articles are another way that the work of news publications is quickly condensed and reused without compensation. What the fuck. Is there a journalist in the last four years who hasn't used Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder? Journalists use each other's work all the time without, as far as I know, paying each other anything. It's a completely ridiculous complaint. I didn't read it as a complaint; more of a rueful acknowledgement. (As Charles Matthews has already pointed out, it's factually quite accurate.) Rightly or wrongly, journalism is widely viewed as being a dying industry if not a downright dinosaur. And if the journalists (and the journals) all disappear, we're going to be hurting for reliable sources, so if it's a problem, it's our problem, too. I'm not saying we're doing anything wrong, any more than Google News is doing anything wrong. But as Zachary Seward has described [1], we're viewed (by Google itself) as one of the web-2.0-ey things that will displace conventional journalism. This isn't the place to debate how conventional journalism can rescue itself (or where the new niche for investigative journalists will be), but it's a pretty interesting question. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/google-news-experimenting-with-links-to-wikipedia-on-its-homepage/ ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] citing Wikipedia responsibly, redux
Here's the New York Times in an article about Nikola Tesla: Today, his work tends to be poorly known among scientists, though some call him an intuitive genius far ahead of his peers. Socially, his popularity has soared, elevating him to cult status. Books and Web sites abound. Wikipedia says the inventor obtained at least 700 patents. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tesla.html] Everyone knows how reliable Wikipedia is, and cited this way, the journalist doesn't even have to do any absolute verification of the at least 700 patents figure. (And if it's inflated, well, that's understandable enough, since the inventor has been elevated to cult status, and everyone knows that Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia
dgerard wrote: Indeed. People speak of de:wp as more encyclopedia-like, better-written, etc. than en:wp, but I've asked a couple of German speakers about this and they tend to actually *use* en:wp as a reference ... because it seems that in practice, breadth counts more for usefulness than does looking like someone's ideal of an encyclopedia. Indeed, indeed, indeed. And yet, en:wp has backslid quite a bit there, too. A few years ago, in what I now think of as its heyday, Wikipedia was a useful one-stop-shopping place to look up *anything*. Today, it's still darn good, but you can only be sure of finding something if it's relatively mainstream. Deletionism (enabled, of course, by WP:RS) seems to have won out. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Spoiler-driven plots on movies articles
Nathan wrote: On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Alvaro Garcia alva...@gmail.com wrote: Man, I'd never think everyone would be against me and insult me for a simple question! The argument over spoilers on Wikipedia is commonly referred to as the spoiler wars - drawn out, contentious, with a bunch of radicalized people on both sides. Since its settled, people are understandably not interested in seeing it come up again. Not interested, sure. But we probably shouldn't jump vigorously down the throats of people who come along and just ask, lest we give the impression that the radicalized people who got the quasiconsensus rammed through are afraid of having anything requestioned. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
[WikiEN-l] Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?
A recent recycling of Aaron Swartz's analysis of the difference between who-makes-the-most-edits, versus who-contributes-the-most-content: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway I think we all know the real story, but it's fascinating how much traction the bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks meme still gets (including, for example, the referenced blog post http://www.collegeotr.com/college_otr/734_percent_of_all_ wikipedia_edits_are_made_by_roughly_1400_people_17499 from last week). Yet another reason to Shun Any Reliance On Raw Edit Counts. (But boy, is it easy to depend on them, since they're so easy to get your hands on. And did Jimbo really once assert that Wikipedia was actually written by 'a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers' where 'I know all of them and they all know each other'?) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?
Phil wrote: This should be required reading... The sense that our inclusion and notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who delete them are nearly exclusive. You're right, but it's a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, there's nothing *necessarily* wrong with having policy set by a relatively small number of insiders -- a consistent policy, like a consistent look and feel or editorial tone or categorization scheme, is something better realized by the dedicated few than the madding crowd. The problem, of course, is that we confront the second of Wikipedia's great contradictions, the first being that anyone can edit, including people (namely vandals) we don't like. Vandals we can deal with pretty well, but the the second contradiction, which I'm not at all sure we've figured out a way to cope with, is that anyone can set policy, including people (like narrow-visioned tiny-minded wonks) who do it spectacularly badly. (And this is not at all a new observation, of course; it's at the core of Clay Shirky's classic essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which should also be required reading.) Another complication is that it's not just people who write articles versus people who delete them. What really matters -- or ought to -- is the people who *read* them. Like the Lorax who speaks for the trees, Wikipedia desperately needs some verifiable, NPOV channel through which we could learn the wants and needs of our readers. Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems notable or encyclopedic, but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism
Michel wrote: Diffs or it didn't happen! :) I see the smiley, so perhaps I shouldn't come back with a serious response, but this interests me. It is very, very difficult to discuss a general issue on this list. If you (1) provide a specific example, people immediately dive in on the specifics of the example, and conclude either that it wasn't a problem after all, or that you (who brought it up) were overly emotionally involved and need to take a step back. But if you (2) try to leave the specific example out, to force the discussion to remain on the more interesting general issue, people don't want to think about it at all, except to insist on a specific example, at which point goto (1). ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Ayn Rand and Wikipedia
Will Johnson wrote: In a message dated 11/12/2008 12:47:23 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In what way is the history tab unusable? Are you saying you would prefer an alternate view which lists users in descending order by number of edits to the page (rather than listing edits by user and timestamp)? There's something on the toolserver which does just that.. That could fit the bill. If WP would make something like that an official part of the system. Then we could see at a glance, that an article was 90% by myself or only 2% or whatever. I'm late to this thread, so pardon me if I'm repeating, but I'm *glad* that it's not obvious who wrote an article. I like to think of Wikipedia as being written by some large number of anonymous contributors, one of whom happens to be me. Even asking whether an article was written 90% by me or 2% or whatever -- to me, that sounds perilously close to WP:OWN. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
