Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/6/27 stevertigo stv...@gmail.com:
On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Thomas Dalton
thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote:
2009/6/27 stevertigo stv...@gmail.com:
Hm. Well, as for myself, I was striving for unanimity.
You won't get it. Dispute
stevertigo wrote:
Hm. I guess I may have been going all the way back to 2003-5. The days when
Jimbo sorted everything out and blasted everyone with wikilove.
Right. The old days, where there was some chance of coming up with right
answers by kicking ideas around. Before we actually
AGK wrote:
Interpersonal disputes? Again, how is a mailing list better? and
what happens when only one party joins the mailing list?
My understanding is that the list would not be a forum for dispute
resolution, but rather a forum for discussion of dispute resolution (and of
ongoing
stevertigo wrote:
CM: If it descends to X is a disruptive editor so something should
be done one can expect some fairly primitive knockabout.
Is primitive knockabout any worse or better than organized and
modernistic knockabout?
Here's a literary answer I bring out every few years:
AGK wrote:
Let's be proactive - rather than bicker and debate endlessly (in
the exhaustive yet courteous manner that only Wikipedians are able to).
You know, it doesn't actually help people to be thoughtful to label
discussion bickering because some comments are negative.
I happen to
Seth Finkelstein wrote:
Andrew Gray
(This has caused much elaborate conspiracy theory in the past
revolving around nofollow and favoured Wikia links, etc)
Well, in defense of critics, I think it's important to
acknowledge that there are many aspects of the situation which
Steve Bennett wrote:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2516472/Wikipedia-entries-slag-off-Palmerston-North
Maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but when I read that the local
council altered the Wikipedia article about their city to be more
favourable, my reaction was oh, good, that was the right
Hmm ... Google Michael Jackson and Wikipedia. Top two hits are enWP
pages - no surprise. The third hit is [[af:Michael Jackson]] - yes, the
Afrikaans Wikipedia page. One sentence and more interwikis than you can
shake a memory stick at. Google ... what were you thinking of?
Charles
Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Wednesday 24 June 2009, Charles Matthews wrote:
Somewhat cynical: they thought they could just cite, looked at the GFDL
and thought damn, doesn't work that way, and then just went ahead.
Particularly ironic given the title and perhaps subject of the book
Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Thursday 25 June 2009, Charles Matthews wrote:
My comment was written late at night. But I don't really understand why
the author thought (a) permalinks are uncool, but (b) paraphrasing this
WP stuff and passing it off as my own and copyright is clearly cool
Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Thursday 25 June 2009, Charles Matthews wrote:
[[TinyURL]], I would say. Do we take this into account in any advice
how to cite Wikipedia?
I would not make my references dependent upon a commercial service. (It's
fine for Twitter in the short term
William King wrote:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/editor-of-wired-apologizes-for-copying-from-wikipedia-in-new-book/
Chris Anderson, the author, summarized the situation in two words: Mea
culpa.
Somewhat cynical: they thought they could just cite, looked at the GFDL
I read that the project involves: a Django application running on Amazon
EC2.
Could someone technically minded explain how that differs from a wiki?
Carcharoth
See [[Hot Club de Brazil et Shoreditch]]. Basically it's a wiki with
more of a rhythm section and Latin feel.
Charles
Steve Bennett wrote:
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Charles As a consequence of various
sustained dirty tricks campaigns, no doubt
all intelligent people editing Wikipedia pseudonymously, and for whom
revelation of their real-life identity would be a disaster, simply
stopped doing
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Charles Matthews wrote:
Anyway, I commend the triangle: currency, comprehensiveness, quality.
Most people around the wiki can probably plot themselves somewhere in
the interior, and this gives a kind of map of pr[i]orities.
I wouldn't see it as a triangle
David Gerard wrote:
2009/6/22 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
DG, lighten up on Noam Cohen a bit - he seems more disposed to be fair
to us than when I met him in Taipei in 2007, and seemed surprised that
any Wikipedians were actually, like, serious. His point
Fred Bauder wrote:
Such awesome responsibility we have now...
The suggestion that there should be an onsite category for articles on
Google News is good (prefer a hidden category). As I was saying in
another thread, the journos' priority of getting the breaking news aand
getting it right
Nathan wrote
And it isn't so terribly unreasonable, the idea that news aggregators (who
collate content, rather than create it) should be asked to pay some portion
of their revenue to the folks who actually do the work. Our role is a bit
different, since we combine a broad range of references
Steve Summit wrote:
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
Cormac Lawler wrote:
I think what's interesting here is asking: how does Wikipedia harness
the energy of the public (for want of a better word) in a way that can
be more productive, useful (or at least less brain-sporkingly
nonsensical) than a newspaper open comment section does?
Of course
Daniel R. Tobias wrot. e:
On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:58:08 +1000, Steve Bennett wrote:
Is anonymity important to many Wikipedia contributors? I had sort of
assumed we provided anonymity as a sort of courtesy, not as any real
right.
You were apparently absent during the BADSITES Wars
Emily Monroe wrote:
Is there any kind of
mailing list etiquette I should be aware of?
It would be rather grouchy not to respond to your enthusiasm ... or to
come up with a rule book. I like it when people edit the mails they
reply to down to just the point they want to meet, and keep
I heard of WP, as of early 2003 I suppose, on MeatBall Wiki. This sort
of thing: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?EnglishWikipedia. Wow,
they deleted 100 pages a day. With their bare hands. StephenGilbert
talking about an IP number vandal, I do recall. I was on Meatball
because a BusStop
Giacomo M-Z wrote:
...and so your pattern of rubbishing dissenters continues, I see,
Charles. Oh well, some things never change. In spite of the fact
Blacketer, or whatever he is calling himself, was a little devious (I
don't blame him changing from his real name), his edits to David
Giacomo M-Z wrote:
Charles, please try and obtain some proportion, Wikipedia is one of
billions of internet sites, changing one's name and/or concealing
one's identity from the masses who surf the internet is not a major
breach of trust - swindling one's Granny in real life out of a
AGK wrote:
Gross inaccuracies that harm our public image? Not that I can see. Some of
the details are wrong - number of ArbCom cases for instance, but that's
pretty irrelevant to the story or indeed our reputation. Likewise with the
relationship between Wikimedia UK and the Foundation.
Harry Willis wrote:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191474/Labour-councillor-David-Boo
throyd-caught-altering-David-Camerons-Wikipedia-entry.html
(Not sure forced to resign is accurate, given the text of his resignation
letter.)
The story is bad news all round, for us. Here's
Durova wrote:
Tough situation. Even with David not talking, it's a little surprising that
the background got presented like that. It looks like the reporter didn't
fully understand.
The Mail understands well enough, I guess, that (a) editing under a
pseudonym is OK, and (b) editing [[David
David Gerard wrote:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5748748/
Of course, ideally Wikipedia wants secondary sources. But this will
still be of great use.
It's a directory, really. I see it has British History Online, which I
use constantly, and which has both primary and secondary source
It's always good to see external organisations making available to the
public material that would be more accessible to intellectual circles during
the pre-Internet era.
AGK
But from what I gather so far this is more like offering a custom Google
search tailored to the EHPS approved
Andrew Gray wrote:
Like Boiling a Frog, David Runciman.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/runc01_.html
From the last issue of the London Review of Books, a long and chewy
article about Wikipedia; generally positive, though it draws attention
to the problems of writing quality and recentism.
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/6/7 Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net:
Unfortunate but unsurprising. Not that long ago Google was telling
traditional media that they should construct their articles in a more
wikipedia like manner (ie continuously update a single article per
event rather than
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Calling Wikipedians
'cult-like' in the context of an article about Scientology, which is
often considered as the prime exemplar of such things these days? :)
It's a standard riff, in Wikicritic circles. Little evidence is
typically adduced, about on the level of how
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Why Wikipedia and Intellipedia (CIA's version of Wikipedia) can add Value
for Information Users
David Goodman wrote:
I notice that in several survey the information that most physicians
regret Wikipedia not having is information on standard dosage,
information that we have made the policy decision to omit.
I think this a particularly stupid decision. For current drugs, the
information
Delirium wrote:
As far as I understand, the main stumbling blocks have been that nobody
can agree on who should make the database, what the process will be for
verifying information, what access policies should be like, who would be
responsible if there were errors in it, what constitutes
Shriram Getc wrote:
Interesting blog post - research guys investigate how knowledge in Wikipedia
organizes itself as the effect of collaborative contributions:
http://mint.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/poster-analysis-of-community-structure-in-wikipedia-at-www2009.html
Yes, interesting. It is
Ken Arromdee wrote:
I'm afraid the proposal will work to the advantage of one side of the
dispute, to the detriment of the other. One side is generally well
educated and familiar with looking at both sides of an issue; the other
is not, with no meaningful access to either education or
Sam Korn wrote:
The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid
Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if
it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source, said the
Guardian's readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth.
That's about as good a piece of
Update on the farrago. Apparently they printed my letter in the 25 April
edition of The Spectator.
Liddle responds:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/the-week/3573521/part_2/letters.thtml
Spectator readers respond to recent articles
I did foul Ronaldo
Sir: Let me assure Charles
Follow-up letter I have emailed to the editor of The Spectator:
Sir,
An appeal to Rod Liddle’s better nature was indeed a long shot; he is
after all paid to dispense laddish rudeness. Your salaried jester of a
columnist has been given an opportunity to retract his fanciful account
of what he
Carcharoth wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia
Rather misses the points that (a) the sources metric for notability is
horribly bad, in that famous for being famous rates much higher than
made an obscure medical advance that only saves thousands of lives a
year,
geni wrote:
2009/4/27 doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com:
The sourcing issue on notability is silly. It seems to me to be the
brainchild of scientists who want to deny the fact that what's important
in human life is subjective and cannot be reduced to some arithmetical
formula: sources *n /
David Gerard wrote:
How do you tell an expert? They have credentials, of course. Er, maybe.
http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html
(Paul Graham is a computer scientist and dot-com winner who
pontificates on subjects he understands to a greater or lesser degree.
Interesting even when
Nathan wrote:
Plus, 350 probably way undercounts the number of copyviolations. There are
probably many more than that in Wikipedia articles alone. My own feeling is
that there should be a way to present wp articles on Knol that complies with
copyright (by not changing the copyright status,
David Goodman wrote:
and what part is nonsense: the list of estates os basic information in
historical geography, and I'm glad we 're including this. That
information is available for all Domesday landholders, and though
Domesday itself belongs on Wikisource, the material from it organized
in
wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
The Nonsense is that this article is completely swamped by citations to
land holdings.
That's not a balanced treatment of the man's life.
This article is not supposed to be about his Domesday holdings which are
completely insignificant historically, it is
wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 4/23/2009 1:34:55 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com writes:
Sorry, you hold what qualification in medieval history to make this
comment? What do you think the so-called feudal system was
about if
not the
George Herbert wrote:
Or perhaps we're being too harsh, time
and content will bring critical masses of readership.
When would exponential growth of readership occur? In a phase when Web
readership was growing exponentially (in the past now, it seems, and I
do know what the term means);
Seth Finkelstein wrote:
One reason I think projects such as _Citizendium_ are
important is that they provide at least some practical
counter-argument to the monopolistic tendencies of Wikipedia-hype.
Which comes back to the original question about the success of
_Citizendium_, and that being
Andrew Turvey wrote:
Criminal sanctions takes it a step higher of course, but it's a tool open to
us and I think we should consider using it when we can and when it's
appropriate. You're probably right that this isn't exactly the right case -
but I still think it's quite shocking and
Marc Riddell wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 4/16/09 3:44 PM, David Gerard at dger...@gmail.com wrote:
Academics learning how to massively collaborate effectively.
We have been collaborating very effectively for a very long time. The
results are the substance of this
David Gerard wrote:
2009/4/17 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
Basically we should (if anything) ask someone to write a polite letter
to the editor of the Spectator, pointing out a few things:
/me hands job to Charles, to write as a long-term editor
Durova wrote:
In the long run--ten and thirty years from now--the merit of Sanger's claim
to coufoundership of Wikipedia is likely to be measured by the success of
Citizendium.
A bit like Einstein, then: his claim to have founded quantum theory
(about which he was a skeptic, and in fact
Larry Sanger wrote:
It is not pointless to get the record corrected and to hold our leaders to
high standards of honesty. This may require courage, but it is essential to
having a truly open, transparent community that has any chance of deserving
the label democratic.
One thing about
Larry Sanger wrote:
Two more replies...
Charles Matthews wrote:
Seems to me you are letting off a fair amount of steam here.
That is a
traditional role of mailing lists, and in particular of wikien. Your
unsubtle flaming of Jimmy here isn't likely to change too many minds;
which
I ought to be used to this by now; but I have just found a 1911
Britannica article we have not imported or covered (see [[William
Stewart of Houston]]). These almost always crop up when the
disambiguation of common names, such as William Stewart, was not
exhaustive in the checking.
Anyway,
Andrew Gray wrote:
As a quick note, it's a little more easily available than it used to
be - if you have access to the current Oxford DNB, they've implemented
a system whereby each article is discreetly linked to a copy of the
original text. (I don't know how precise a copy, or if it's been at
I was checking out [[Template:Lifetime]], which seems to be in a state
of flux, and was surprised to read
Since Categories are preferred to be listed in most-common order, the
Lifetime template should generally be placed after the last Category tag
...
WP:CAT has:
The order in which
David Goodman wrote:
I would very much liketo take Wps redirect and disam system and
rationalize it. the first step would be to change the policy so the
full form of the name, including middle names, are always used when
available. The second is to add geographic designators for all local
Carcharoth wrote:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:31 AM, doc doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com wrote:
snip
The community hasn't really woken up to the fact that Wikipedia
is no longer only an open shelf needing to be stacked, but it is a
depository of a huge wealth of material that needs to be protected,
Sam Korn wrote:
Furthermore, there is the potential that teaching students to question
Wikipedia could lead to their being more disposed to question other
sources, which is obviously very useful in the study of any subject
(and supremely history).
Possibly more broadly. I was looking
geni wrote:
2009/3/10 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com:
http://gawker.com/5167585/right+wing-writer-invents-his-own-obama-wikipedia-scandal
- d.
Doesn't really matter. It's been picked up by larger and somewhat
respectable right wing sources (Telegraph) so the truth of the matter
Carcharoth wrote:
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
snip
What works is this:
snip some good points
Want to focus on one.
- people show respect for the policy by staying on the fairway, not
gaming it at the margins
wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
That is why we really have to allow the community to decide what *it*
finds interesting, important, salient and not try to impose too much
from the top down. The community should be creating from the
bottom-up and our rules should merely reflect what the community
wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
So if secondary sources mention her husband the plumber, and her five
children are named Marjory, Bruce, Wayne, Robin and Ambidextrous, then we
can.
If they don't, we shouldn't. That would be the first line of attack for
anyone who wants to remove these
Carcharoth wrote:
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
If there is only one noteworthy fact about the subject, the article
should probably be merged per BLP1E. If there isn't more than a
paragraph worth
wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an
article. It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
It is correct that you need different terminology: notability relates to
topics. There is a separate notion of salience, for facts.
David Gerard wrote:
2009/2/23 Ben Kovitz bkov...@acm.org:
I'm feeling pretty hot about salience at the moment. I'll take a crack
at a short essay tonight, incorporating what people have posted here.
Couldn't wait. List of topics is now here:
wjhon...@aol.com wrote:
The names of the subject's children are encyclopedia-worthy.
I'm sure you must have meant something else.
Why do you say that? In most cases we should not mention children by name.
Charles
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Gwern Branwen wrote:
User:MBisanz has charted the number of new accounts registered per
month, which tells a very similar story: March 2007 recorded the
largest number of new accounts, and the rate of new account creation
has fallen significantly since then. Declines in activity have also
Mark Nilrad wrote:
I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the numbers of ACTIVE
users slowed as well?
If you're talking about the demographics of editors - I think it is now
more three years since WP attracted a very large group of people,
arriving over a few months only, who
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
(I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
Does anyone know how many
Does anyone know the answer to the opposite question? How many
articles on the English Wikipedia lack interwiki links? It is possible
(but less likely) that the articles exist in both places, but haven't
been linked with an interwiki yet. I find examples of that fairly
regularly, but am not
K. Peachey wrote:
Just a Heads Up slashdot has new article about wikipedia up and it's
use of experts - The Role of Experts In Wikipedia
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/0210251
Sanger says the main reason that Wikipedia's articles are as good as
they are is that they are
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
quality.
2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
4. Aggressive people who won't
George Herbert wrote:
There are
whole fields of engineering and science that we have barely scratched the
surface of at the moment.
I think that's right. Engineering is not one of Wikipedia's strong
areas, I believe, though I hardly spend time on that.
I do spend time on history -
Sage Ross wrote:
I don't disagree. I'm just saying we should think of Citizendium as
another (small) place for people to produce free content similar to
the kind Wikipedia produces, as a potential collaborator with
Wikipedia rather than a competitor (which isn't realistic, if it ever
was).
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
potential as a comprehensive reference. My main hope is that life
around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done
geni wrote:
2009/2/12 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com:
Indeed. As I suggested, a small amount of enforcement of good
behaviour amongst the admins by the ArbCom will go a long way to
getting all admins to behave in a more fitting manner. As Lar pointed
out, the admin bit is so much of no
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/12 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
The
ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually
Is less than that, surely? 1% of the *active* admin body, maybe.
Ok, I've done the sums:
Special:Statistics says we have 1623 admins, 1
George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/9 wjhon...@aol.com:
Most of our editors enjoy marking up their user page with details about
themselves, and I see no harm to the project in that and it's my believe
that
George Herbert wrote:
What you're describing doesn't seem to me to be all that prevalent on
en.wp now. I am open to examples and discussion to demonstrate a
pattern requiring action. mailto:george.herb...@gmail.com
Well, I don't want to get into names. I recommend looking at subpage
usage
Article in the Signpost: [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia
Signpost/2009-01-31/Orphans]]. But in my view calling an article with
two respectable incoming links an orphan is quite misleading.
Charles
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To
Nathan wrote:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/is-wikipedia-cracking-up-1543527.html
An article that isn't half bad, for a change.
I wouldn't go that far. Stephen Foley also writes on financial stuff
(byline New York) and judging by a previous piece thinks
Peter Jacobi wrote:
OTOH, requiring references for each addition would solve the
problem in the other direction.
Every time I've discussed specifics of flags I have come away confused
(admittedly, that is not very often). But, as I understand it, it is
technically possible to have
Durova wrote:
Their main advantage in the current market is that their content is vetted.
Question is whether they can afford the staff to keep up with submissions,
and whether that value added is worth the price they charge for it. The
market seems to be saying no. And if they walk away
the wub wrote
Also fom the article:
He said the encyclopedia had set a benchmark of a 20-minute
turnaround to update the site with user-submitted edits to existing
articles
That'll probably be faster than us once flagged revisions is switched
on (compare with the German expeiment, where
Thomas Larsen wrote:
I think we can and will get exponential growth
(although perhaps I'm being too optimistic), but it won't be on
Wikipedia's scale unless something drastic happens.
Hmm, [[exponential growth]] used to contain the helpful remark that
growth may be exponential and also
Carcharoth wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Angela Anuszewski
angela.anuszew...@gmail.com wrote:
Excuse my ignorance, but excatly what is Private Eye?
I looked it up in a handy online encyclopedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye
Hmm, the article seems a
Steve Summit wrote:
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
Heebie wrote:
So it seems to me that Swartz's work backs-up Wikipedia as being a
truly crowd-sourced project, and only goes against Wales' original
remarks, which were a bit worrying in the first place. Or am I getting
the wrong end of the stick here?
A two-layer model of how content
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 11/17/08 12:32 PM, Charles Matthews at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
You must forgive David. The many years he has now spent in the UK have
undercut his natural Aussie frankness. He is saying you've become a
bore on the topic: start at date formats and end up
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