from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 25/01/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are large swaths of technical topics which are not computer-geek
> technical stuff which are covered extremely poorly, if at all.
>
> Engineering materials, for example - aluminum, steel, composite
> materials, others.  I went through and it seemed like doubled the
> structural and aerospace materials article count 2-3 months ago, and I
> haven't even gotten started properly...
>
> Structural design concepts that anyone in an industry knows from
> school and are common professional knowledge, and still have no WP
> coverage.
>
> This is just off the top of my head.  I've got a to-do list somewhere else.

Mmm. Could you put it on-wiki? The enormous redlink farms are
occasionally a decent incentive to do something, and if nothing else
they help give an idea of what's still out there.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

body:
--- Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pop onto AfD for a bit. Or to articles on popular culture. Or
> [[WP:FAC]]. Sourcing disputes are a more or less constant din - both
> with articles that are accurate being taken to task for not being
> well-sourced enough (This has become a pernicous flavor of
> deletionism in the past year or so) and with articles that are
> complete shit getting a pass because they have sources, even if the
> sources are bollocks.

Even for the best policies and guidelines, there'll always be some people who
try to abuse, wikilawyer, or generally twist them to their own ends. NPOV
disputes are more or less a constant din, too, but that's no reason to nuke
NPOV.

In cryptography, there's this rhetoric about people who view crypto as "magic
pixie dust" that somehow makes a system secure if you just sprinkle some about.
The same holds for RS and CITE: they don't magically guarantee quality by
themselves, but they are great tools for doing so if not abused.

By all means, let's discuss where we need to improve things, but let's not
throw the proverbial baby out with the, well, you know.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com

___________________________________________________________
What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship.
http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk


from_name: Omegatron

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is the fundamental goal of the project?

body:
In Jimbo's 2005 "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" post, he described the
purpose of the project:

    Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a
    free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single
    person on the planet in their own language.

Does this still hold true?  There have been a lot of major changes in
policy in the months since, which, we all hope, are supportive of our
fundamental goals.  I think almost everyone who contributes to the
project agrees completely with this mission and wants to maintain it.
But if you think about it, the statement actually contains several
goals:

* free
* (create an) encyclopedia
* of the highest possible quality
* (distribute) to every single person on the planet
* in their own language

In fact, these goals occasionally conflict.  For instance, machine
translations are considered "worse than nothing" because of their poor
quality, so it would seem that "of the highest possible quality" is
more important than "in their own language".

If Jimbo's statement is still valid, which objectives override the
others?  Can they be arranged (preferably by Jimbo) in order of
priority?

Can this statement or the principles it represents ever be repealed or
changed?  Who has the power to change it?  Is this simply a top-down
authoritarian mandate that can't be challenged, or do regular
Wikipedians have a say when changes are made to the ultimate goals and
priorities of the project?


list: foundation-l

from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough

body:
On the English Wikipedia (but this is coming on other  ones) we have a
large amount of articles about individual highschools, most of which
have nothing special and are just like the next highschool.

These articles tend:
* to lack perspective
** give name of personnel who are private persons, which is
unencyclopedic (ex: there's a teacher called foobar)
** devote inordinate length to individual, non notable incidents
(exemple: some incident because of drunk students at a party 2 years ago)

* to be a magnet for vandalism, from disgruntled or bored students
** this vandalism can give details about the personal life of some minors
** it often also is demeaning
** and sometimes contains outright libel (accusing teachers or
principals of being pedophiles etc.)

* not to be patrolled much
** they interest few people

* to lack sources
** unique source tends to be the school's own cite; in theory we should
be able to have multiple sources, including independent ones

In short, they have little encyclopedic interest, are a target for
underage vandals, create lots of work for the OTRS folks and the Foundation.

However, when OTRS folks delete such articles as "non notable", they
often face angry remarks, accusations of lack of democratic process, and
what else; often from people who apparently feel strongly enough to keep
the article, but not strongly enough to patrol it for abuse.

Other users, including admins, seem to entirely ignore
[[Wikipedia:Schools]] as applicable policy.

In fact, I'll also suggest altering the policy in a way: the simple fact
that two "celebrities" from a school have an article on WP should not be
cause to create an article about this school.

Tons of non notable schools have had a celebrity go through. That does
not make them notable.

What would be relevant is: if many celebrities have gone through it. For
instance, Eton in England is notable because many upper class British
men, in high positions, have passed through it.

In any case, I think the Foundation should issue a clear statement that
admins, especially from OTRS, can CSD:A7 school articles that do not
demonstrate notability. Otherwise it's not manageable.


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough


subject: [WikiEN-l] WIKIPEDIA CLUB OF NEW YORK - 31 January 2007 - UPDATE

body:
On 1/24/07, Christopher Thieme <cdthieme at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> One week from today, Wikipedia's own Jimmy Wales is giving a talk
> entitled *Free Culture, Transparency, and Search* for the Free Culture
> Club at New York University, from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. to be held at
> the Courant Institute,
> 251 Mercer Street, Room 109, in New York City. More details can be
> found at www.freeculturenyu.org.
>
> Regards,
> Christopher D. Thieme
> Wikipedia Club of New York - Unofficial Social Chair

I'll be in school :-(
First day of the second semester.
--Mets501


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] On Irish radio Today-FM today 12:15pm

body:
Apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinford had stories about
werewolves in the article, it got into the Irish edition of the Daily
Mail and so I'm on Irish radio again. Site at http://www.todayfm.com/
. Probably just a few minutes.

- d.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough

body:
2007/1/25, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr>:

> In any case, I think the Foundation should issue a clear statement that
> admins, especially from OTRS, can CSD:A7 school articles that do not
> demonstrate notability. Otherwise it's not manageable.

I don't think that's something for the Foundation to make a
statement/decision about. Either get some agreement within the English
Wikipedia itself, or accept that Wikipedia is something else than you and I
would like, and let the dirt overtake it if that's what they want.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> I'd be similarly shocked if one could write a good article on high
> temperature physics or group theory while being totally dependent on
> published reliable sources, because those sources were never written
> for the purpose of being used to explain the concept to novices.
>
The best sources for general topics are textbooks actually; reliable,
and written to explain concepts. I find the introductions to monographs
and papers as useful for WP as the bodies; at least the more articulate
writers manage to get in a few words intelligible to the nonspecialist. :-)

Although I think the formal policies may be overdoing it, we do need to
make some effort to change the culture. Can Susan be so certain of her
twenty-years-ago memory that she can just  starting typing away with
confidence? I would rather she make a library visit first, or simply
leave a note on the talk page - several times I've been able to use
somebody else's talk page note as a starting point  for doing a bit of
research of my own, or triggered somebody else's further research by
asking questions. We would also have a lot fewer edit wars if people
didn't just wade in and start adding/deleting based on their faulty
memory or understanding.

Stan


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [Wikitech-l] MD5 Password Encryption

body:
Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> Aw, come on, why is there so much contention about such a simple issue?
> And yes, I did slip when I started talking about birthday attacks. Sorry
> about that.
>

I find it interesting that you're advocating moving away from MD5 in a
situation where the known collision weaknesses aren't relevant, yet you
personally are still using SHA1 (which was broken about two years ago)
in a situation which *is* susceptible to collision - and your signature
didn't verify on that message (<ep65i0$496$1 at sea.gmane.org>).

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 1/25/07, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Jan 25, 2007, at 8:16 AM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> >
> > > If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be
> > > any
> > > abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with
> > > these
> > > policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think
> > > I'm going
> > > to reread those pages and think about rewriting them.
> >
> > But this is one of the problems. The burden of citing everything is
> > larger than our editors, especially our casual editors, are willing
> > to undertake. We will never reach a point where people will cite
> > their sources in the first place. Hence the prospect of eternally
> > playing catch-up.
>
> I disagree.  Citing is not as difficult as you seem to think it is; if
> you're in the middle of writing an article based on sources that are
> sitting in front of you, it really isn't that hard to note down where
> the facts came from as you write them down (lately I've become a fan
> of the <ref>Unless otherwise noted, all details regarding [Subtopic X]
> are drawn from [Source Y], pp. A-Z.</ref> style for citing basic facts
> with relative ease).

You're assuming here that most of us sit down with our references in
front of us when we start writing an article.  I mostly don't, though
there are exceptions - I come across a gap or a misstatement in an
article, or a missing article, where I know what the right content is
to answer the question, and I start inserting the right content right
there.  If I can quickly google up a reliable source while doing so
I'll cite it then.  If not, I try and find something in the library at
home, or at work, but I don't worry about it much.

>  It's true that casual editors tend not to cite
> their contributions, but nobody does at first, and I think that the
> reason for this has less to do with unwillingness to do so than with
> the idea simply not occuring to people.  Obviously, any statements
> about this are going to be speculative, but I can say that in my case
> I started out just writing stuff down from memory and then, after
> someone told me to cite sources, moved to doing that.  It will be very
> difficult to get Wikipedia into a condition where passerby editors
> feel that citing one's sources is an integral part of adding
> information to an article, but I don't think that's a reason to give
> up the fight.
>
> I think that what tends to get lost in these discussions is the
> incredibly good effect that citing as you go has on the accuracy of
> writing.  I don't know how many times I've flipped open a book to find
> a quick confirmation of some (seemingly very obvious) fact that I was
> about to add to an article, only to find the opposite in print and
> then, after checking a couple more books, to realize that my memory
> had deceived me.  No matter how well people know their subjects, they
> will make mistakes, and a writing practice that asks you to flip open
> a book and check what you're saying before you write it down is a good
> one.

Here's the problem.  Academic rigor - which I understand, having done
refereed papers for conferences and such - is all fine and good for
scholarly original research papers.

For an encyclopedia, the vast bulk of what we're trying to do is to
simply convey the top level survey of a field to the general public.
Textbooks are cited, but not nearly as well as research papers.
Encyclopedias are generally cited much worse than that, if at all.

It's also in conflict with the idea of a Wiki - that allowing rapid,
open growth will move in a focused random walk towards better and more
accurate articles over time.

I have no problem with people who want to write WP articles as
rigorously as they would an article for Nature or any professional
journal or conference.  But if you do that, you work much more slowly
than people willing to let it hang out a little.

If we look at Wikipedia as the process of getting to really good
articles on all the subjects which are notable in the world, rather
than the finished product, we need to be encouraging people who know
what they're talking about to fill in all the gaps first, and then
polish everything off with citations, extra fact checking, corrections
of minor goofs etc later.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has
> to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
> precious seconds of Susan's time.
But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a bunch
of random half-remembered bits.

Stan


body:
On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good.
>
> No, we're not good. That's the whole point. People's memories were
> reliable enough when Wikipedia first started and nobody actually used
> it for anything. That's no longer the case. If we want to be a
> credible encyclopedia, we need our facts to come from reliable sources
> (citing them isn't the important part, that's just a way to prove the
> important bit - that the fact came from a reliable source).
>
> There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of what "source" means. A
> source isn't somewhere people can go to verify the fact, it is where
> the fact came from. Citing sources is easy, because you will always
> have the source with you when you write the article (if you think you
> don't, then it means the source is your memory, in which case you
> aren't using a reliable source and shouldn't add the fact). The
> problem isn't that people aren't citing reliable sources, the problem
> is that they aren't *using* reliable sources.

If an expert can't write an accurate, if perhaps not precise, survey
artice on any notable topic in their field of study pretty much off
the top of their head from memory, they're not an expert.

Citations, fact checking, and minor corrections are EXCELLENT things
to leave for others, or for later review by yourself.

Wikipedia is not the fact-based encyclopedia project you're demanding.
 It can never be, because it's not structured that way in a semantic
or knowledge flow manner.  Attempting to force Wikipedia into that
model will blow up your mind and our project.  Please stop.

If you want to do a fact-based encyclopedia project, that's fine; I've
thought about that as a project.  I think it's possible to create a
knowledge database with cited/referenced facts, and semantic context,
such that one can then derive sets of facts for specific articles and
write an article which is 100% referenced and verifyable by nature,
and allows for easy context access.  Such a project is an interesting
computer knowledge theory project.

I predict that it will not see critical mass of crontributors within
the next decade, however.

Wikipedia is what it is, because of what it is - something that you
don't have to be an academic with a reference library right in front
of you as you type.  That we'd like to nail down all the important
stuff with such references over time doesn't mean that it's possible
to write an encyclopedia from scratch with all that information and
volunteer labor.  It probably isn't, here and now, and trying to force
that project model into the existing Wikipedia model is wrong,
foolish, and destructive to Wikipedia's success model.

Killing our project here and now by turning it into Nupedia makes no
sense.  If their model works, then perhaps we should all go work over
there.  If it doesn't then leave the WP model alone...

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Steve

subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
On 1/25/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:
>
> * to lack perspective
> ** give name of personnel who are private persons, which is
> unencyclopedic (ex: there's a teacher called foobar)
> ** devote inordinate length to individual, non notable incidents
> (exemple: some incident because of drunk students at a party 2 years ago)
>
> * to be a magnet for vandalism, from disgruntled or bored students
> ** this vandalism can give details about the personal life of some minors
> ** it often also is demeaning
> ** and sometimes contains outright libel (accusing teachers or
> principals of being pedophiles etc.)
>

Half of me says 'just delete'. The other half says, 'So... protect them from
anonymous/newly created accounts? I know its far from the traditional use of
the tag, but if it really is that rampant the method should be tried.'

-S


from_name: Jeff Raymond

body:
Bogdan Giusca wrote:
> We can't have two sets of rules: one for cruft and one for the rest.

This is hardly true.  There's no reason why an article on an independent
rock band should be held to the same sourcing standard as a European king
from the 1700s.  What's reliable in the humanities is stricter than what's
reliable in the entertainment world, and our reliable source guideline
fails to understand that.

-Jeff

--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] License status of MW screenshots.

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> I'm actually pushing it farther than that: I'm asserting that *even if
> the artist requested that I take his photo whilst he was showing off
> said painting* (which perhaps he just won an award for) that the
> appearance of the painting in the photograph is incidental and incurs
> me no derivation of his copyright.

You don't get it, do you?  You're trying to convince *us* on this
list, while in the real case you need to convince the *owner* of
the copyright of the painting and a *judge* in a court of law.

In order to convince anybody here, you need to point to legal
cases where your principle has prevailed.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


body:
On 1/25/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Thursday, January 25, 2007, 9:38:50 PM, George wrote:
>
> > Here's the problem.  Academic rigor - which I understand, having done
> > refereed papers for conferences and such - is all fine and good for
> > scholarly original research papers.
>
> > For an encyclopedia, the vast bulk of what we're trying to do is to
> > simply convey the top level survey of a field to the general public.
>
> You are arguing that for an encyclopedia, unlike for the academia,
> reliability and fact-checking are not important.

No, please.  That's not what I said at all.

> The academic rigor exists not just due to their elitism: that's how
> the Academia mentains their high standards of its publications.
>
> From my experience on Wikipedia, unsourced articles are very unreliable
> and may have plenty of wrong facts. Most of thse wrong facts are not
> added due to malice (though that is not uncommon), but they were
> added by people either from their (inevitable unreliable) memories,
> from blogs and forums, which, on average have an awful lack of
> accuracy or they are simply misinterpretations.


subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough

body:
On 25/01/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:

> In any case, I think the Foundation should issue a clear statement that
> admins, especially from OTRS, can CSD:A7 school articles that do not
> demonstrate notability. Otherwise it's not manageable.

The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make OTRS happy, any more than it
is to make Articles For Deletion happy.

- d.

cc'd to wikien-l - it's not entirely clear why you left the wiki
you're actually talking about out of the loop here.


subject: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] school articles : enough


subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough


from_name: Michael Hopcroft

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>
>> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>
>>> If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has
>>> to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
>>> precious seconds of Susan's time.
>>>
>> But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
>> time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
>> is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
>> enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a
>> bunch
>> of random half-remembered bits.
>>
>
> Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing
> to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing
> list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for
> you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is
> important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100%
> reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she
> wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good.
>
> The model is this: we have thousands of Susans. They do a lot of the
> heavy lifting on Wikipedia. Then we have a few hundred hardcore users
> who fix the problems left by the thousands of Susans - they check odd
> facts that don't seem to jibe, they deal with malicious users, they
> get involved with edit wars, they delete, they debate policy.
>
> Susan does 90% of the work. The hardcore do about 10% of the work, a
> lot of which is cleaning up after Susan. But that's still a massive
> net amount of work being done by Susan. Who does not show up on this
> mailing list to offer her viewpoint, which is why we need to take
> care to stop and think about Susan (and, of course, the other
> thousands of casual editors.)
>
It is probably time we recognized that the very concept of Wikipedia --
"An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that will become the best
encyclopedia in the world" is utterly self-contradictory and therefore
impossible to achieve.

To exclude "Susan" would defeat the purpose of Wikipedia. To NOT exclude
"Susan" would ALSO defeat the purpose of Wikipedia.

There is no way to use a rational means to achieve an irrational goal.


body:
On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You are advocating the complete abandonment of the principles that
> > underly Wikipedia.
> >
> > "You can edit this page right now." That's the mantra. That's the
> > key. That's what got us where we are. It's foolish to give up on the
> > thing that made us succeed where other things (Nupedia) failed.
>
> The key underlying principle is making a free encyclopedia available
> to everyone. "Anyone can edit" is simply a means to an end - it is
> secondary to the goal of making an encyclopedia.
>
> We should be working to make things better for the readers, not the
> contributors. Relaxing our rules on using reliable sources would be
> great for the contributors, but makes the website pretty much useless
> for the readers.

Not having any articles on subjects is not doing the readers any good
service at all.

Having unsourced but generally accurate articles is better.

Having sourced articles is better.  Having sourced articles which have
been fact checked is still better.

Having sourced articles which have been fact checked and written by
good writers with a feel for the field is best.

Wikipedia is an evolution along that series of steps.

Nupedia is an attempt to go straight to the last one, and has 20-ish
articles last I heard (not that recently).

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 25/01/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/25/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinford had stories about
> > werewolves in the article, it got into the Irish edition of the Daily
> > Mail and so I'm on Irish radio again. Site at http://www.todayfm.com/
> > . Probably just a few minutes.

> Assuming Ireland is on GMT time, that's in 15 minutes. Can someone catch an
> MP3?

It is indeed, and yes please!

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
On 25/01/07, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> In any written text (see [[en:Zipf's law]]), of all the words used
> (the vocabulary), about half of them will occurr only once.  If
> the same mathematical distribution is applicable to topics in an
> encyclopedia, about half of all articles in Wikipedia are at the
> very thinnest end of the tail.  If we were to use visitor
> statistics to cut away the least notable topics, we could easily
> cut away half of our stock.  And that's hardly what we want.
>
> So is there any other math we could do here?

The metric I would love to see is some way of identifying when

[amount of value gained to our readers by this article] << [amount of
hassle caused to our volunteers by having this article]

where "hassle" is deletions, cleanup, vandalism repair, mentoring
editwars, and the like, whilst "value" is... well, value. People
gaining useful information from it.

(Teenagers playing with the article to call their headmaster a child
molestor is not "value", even though it may seem the perfectly
sensible use to them, nor is using the article to promote a
business... "value" is pretty much a function of quality times
readers)

Unfortunately, it's almost entirely imopssible to calculate except by
gut feeling, and entirely impractical to implement. Ah, well.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject:
[WikiEN-l] [[Ecma Office Open XML]] and [[OpenDocument]] - good
	editors needed

body:
On 24/01/07, Rory Stolzenberg <rory096 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure if this will even end up getting us closer to NPOV. There are
> already people calling (at least on IRC) for the deletion of some Microsoft
> related articles, saying they're astroturfing (though of course they have no
> proof or even reason to think that MS is paying anybody besides Jelliffe,
> and they're not talking about XML related articles. I fear that we'll lose
> some good content in a backlash against Microsoft because of this.

This would be an instance of "arseclowns abound" and of "'the
community' is frequently on crack, particularly the bits making most
noise."

- d.


body:
On 25/01/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> The metric I would love to see is some way of identifying when
>
> [amount of value gained to our readers by this article] << [amount of
> hassle caused to our volunteers by having this article]

Come to think of it, it would be an even more effective tool to use to
test proposed policy with :-)

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 1/25/07, Michael Hopcroft <michael at mphpress.com> wrote:
> Phil Sandifer wrote:
> > On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Phil Sandifer wrote:
> >>
> >>> If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has
> >>> to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
> >>> precious seconds of Susan's time.
> >>>
> >> But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
> >> time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
> >> is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
> >> enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a
> >> bunch
> >> of random half-remembered bits.
> >>
> >
> > Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing
> > to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing
> > list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for
> > you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is
> > important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100%
> > reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she
> > wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good.
> >
> > The model is this: we have thousands of Susans. They do a lot of the
> > heavy lifting on Wikipedia. Then we have a few hundred hardcore users
> > who fix the problems left by the thousands of Susans - they check odd
> > facts that don't seem to jibe, they deal with malicious users, they
> > get involved with edit wars, they delete, they debate policy.
> >
> > Susan does 90% of the work. The hardcore do about 10% of the work, a
> > lot of which is cleaning up after Susan. But that's still a massive
> > net amount of work being done by Susan. Who does not show up on this
> > mailing list to offer her viewpoint, which is why we need to take
> > care to stop and think about Susan (and, of course, the other
> > thousands of casual editors.)
> >
> It is probably time we recognized that the very concept of Wikipedia --
> "An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that will become the best
> encyclopedia in the world" is utterly self-contradictory and therefore
> impossible to achieve.
>
> To exclude "Susan" would defeat the purpose of Wikipedia. To NOT exclude
> "Susan" would ALSO defeat the purpose of Wikipedia.
>
> There is no way to use a rational means to achieve an irrational goal.

It's not an irrational goal; we have goals that, under some
circumstances, conflict.

Adding things like stable article versions and the like will help
de-conflict those goals.  I don't recall any serious objections to
doing them, just objections that Mediawiki is far from being able to
support them.

At some point, an encyclopedia project might fork off Wikipedia,
enforcing some stricter editing and editor standards, and move more
efficiently towards the ultimate goal.  But so far, nobody seems
interested in doing that, without going as far as Nupedia, who I
believe are too far out in that direction.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>
>> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>
>>> If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has
>>> to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
>>> precious seconds of Susan's time.
>>>
>> But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
>> time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
>> is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
>> enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a
>> bunch
>> of random half-remembered bits.
>>
>
> Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing
> to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing
> list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for
> you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is
> important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100%
> reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she
> wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good.
>
In the areas I'm familiar with, that's not really how the numbers work.
There are lots of articles that I pass across, say "hmm, whole section
is probably bogus", but I don't have the time or energy to do anything
about it. In fact, it gets so tiresome I rarely even bother to note down
the need for factchecking anymore. My time isn't so worthless that I'm
willing to spend all of it perpetually cleaning up after the drivebys.

Stan


body:
On 1/25/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Thursday, January 25, 2007, 10:00:34 PM, George wrote:
>
> > Wikipedia is not the fact-based encyclopedia project you're demanding.
> >  It can never be, because it's not structured that way in a semantic
> > or knowledge flow manner.  Attempting to force Wikipedia into that
> > model will blow up your mind and our project.  Please stop.
>
> What's wrong with adding a reference after each sentence?
>
> Hoping that your mind won't blow, here's a very well-sourced example:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_general_election%2C_1946
>
> Wikipedia's purpose, as said by Jimbo, is not to be a wiki, not to be
> a community, but to simply create an encyclopedia. The rest are simply
> means towards a goal.

That's a terrible article.  It's not an encyclopedia article, it's a
scholarly paper on the topic.

It's not a bad scholarly paper, on first look, but it's not a good
encyclopedia article.

> > Killing our project here and now by turning it into Nupedia makes no
> > sense.  If their model works, then perhaps we should all go work over
> > there.  If it doesn't then leave the WP model alone...
>
> Maybe you are the one on the wrong encyclopedia: Wikipedia requires
> verifiability as an official policy.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

The third sentence is:
"Editors should provide a reliable source for material that is
challenged or likely to be challenged, or it may be removed."

That is not "cite every single fact", that is "provide a reliable
source for anything that people aren't likely to believe by
themselves".  Providing good references and citations for the rest of
it is covered elsewhere but less forcefully.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > From my experience on Wikipedia, unsourced articles are very unreliable
> > > and may have plenty of wrong facts. Most of thse wrong facts are not
> > > added due to malice (though that is not uncommon), but they were
> > > added by people either from their (inevitable unreliable) memories,
> > > from blogs and forums, which, on average have an awful lack of
> > > accuracy or they are simply misinterpretations.
> >
> > From my experience with Wikipedia, unsourced articles are generally
> > very accurate and moderately precise.  When I find them in areas for
> > which I'm familiar with the body of knowledge and reliable sources, I
> > will spend time to go find the appropriate citations and sources as
> > time allows, to "back up" the already existing content with
> > appropriate references.
>
> "Accurate" and "reliable" are not synonymous. Just because the article
> happens to have everything right does not make it reliable, because
> there is no way for you to know that it has everything right.

There are more citations per article in Wikipedia than in Brittanica.
Is Brittanica an unreliable source?

I already know that Wikipedia is not completely reliable.  Insisting
on source citations isn't going to fix that - someone could put in a
citation that's bogus, or put one in that says something other than
what they say, or put one in that they misinterpret, because they
aren't an expert on the field.  All three of these things have
happened to articles I have edited at one time or another.  I can't
trust the citations, because I can't trust the identity and accuracy
of the contributors who added them.  I'd have to go fact-check every
source for an article to be really sure, and that scales pretty
horribly.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough

body:
On 1/25/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:
>...
> Other users, including admins, seem to entirely ignore
> [[Wikipedia:Schools]] as applicable policy.

That's not policy.  It was rejected.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] school articles : enough


body:
On 1/25/07, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> I think you missed out a vital phrase, the term "effort to create and
> distribute".

I included it, actually.  It's right there.  "To create and distribute"
means nothing by itself.  "Create" is tied to "encyclopedia" and
"distribute" is tied to "every single person on the planet"...  as I said.
Feel free to break it up differently if you think it should be.

And I don't think the rest of the statement can be pulled
> apart.

Did you read my example of a case in which it conflicts with itself?  There
are many others.


body:
On 1/25/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/25/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make OTRS happy, any more than it
> > is to make Articles For Deletion happy.
>
> Every article on Wikipedia has a maintenance cost and a benefit to the
> project as a whole. It's reasonable for us to choose not to keep
> articles whose maintenance cost is greater than the benefit they
> provide.

Everyone is free to not contribute to the maintenance of some section of WP.

One lone editor willing to babysit a thousand articles nobody else
cares about is sufficient maintenance committment.

What we don't have is any way to currently know if there is someone
who cares about an article and is paying attention to it.  (Feature
request?  Beyond watchlist, add a new "Maintenance Watchlist" and make
that visible from the article side or some such?)

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 25/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/01/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/25/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > Apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinford had stories about
> > > werewolves in the article, it got into the Irish edition of the Daily
> > > Mail and so I'm on Irish radio again. Site at http://www.todayfm.com/
> > > . Probably just a few minutes.

> > Assuming Ireland is on GMT time, that's in 15 minutes. Can someone catch an
> > MP3?

> It is indeed, and yes please!

Ray Foley was pretty on side with Wikipedia and got the idea I think.
Hopefully I got across our level of unreliable reliability :-)

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WikiEN-l]  school articles : enough

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com>
Date: 25-Jan-2007 12:22
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] school articles : enough
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

David Gerard wrote:
> On 25/01/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:
>
>> In any case, I think the Foundation should issue a clear statement that
>> admins, especially from OTRS, can CSD:A7 school articles that do not
>> demonstrate notability. Otherwise it's not manageable.
>
>
> The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make OTRS happy, any more than it
> is to make Articles For Deletion happy.

A7's being abused enough already, thanks.

-Jeff

--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
        Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
        - Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

body:
The thing about high schools is that they have alumni. A particularly
large high school could have, I don't know, maybe 50,000 alumni? How
off am I?

Anyhow, just because not that many people go to it *right now* does
not mean it's not notable. Junior high schools, elementary schools,
sure, but larger-volume schools that have upwards of 1000 students at
any given time are certainly notable.

We may not have someone to maintain them, but that's because while we
have RamBot, we don't have SchoolBot. Maybe we should. (and unlike
city/town articles, we'd also need a SchoolAntiVandalBot to monitor
all the changes to those articles... the problem with high schools is
that those most interested in them tend to be their current students,
and their current students tend to include a large percentage of
dipshit vandals).

Mark

On 25/01/07, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> David Monniaux wrote:
>
> > But there's no reason we should have an article on my neighbouring
> > highschool, unless we also want articles on every company or organization...
>
> However, this "unless" is problematic.  A printed encyclopedia in
> 20 volumes can only contain so many articles, and has to cut off
> the long tail.  Wikipedia is far bigger and steadily growing.
> Small towns with 25,000 inhabitants in Sweden would never have an
> article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, but now have articles in the
> English Wikipedia, and everybody seem to agree that they *are*
> sufficiently notable.  So where is the limit drawn?  Should the
> three schools in that town also have articles? Maybe the answer
> is: Not now, when Wikipedia only has 1.6 million articles, because
> these schools are not among the 1.6 million most notable objects
> in this world.  But in five years time, when Wikipedia has 20
> million articles, this might be different.
>
> Maybe if the article is added now, and in five years time it is
> still one of the least used ones, ranking not 1.6M but 20M, then
> we know that now was not the right time to add this article? In
> that case, notability is not a property of the topic itself, but
> an issue in which order to add articles to Wikipedia.  But it is
> difficult to assess today if a topic has rank 20M when Wikipedia
> only has 1.6M articles.
>
> Can we compute a rank of how much each article is used now, and
> relate this to how many articles existed at the time when each
> article was created?  Then we would know how premature the
> addition of each article was.
>
> Again, my position is not that of judging what should be included
> now.  I'm only trying to understand the math behind this.
>
>
> --
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 04:03:55PM +1100, Stephen Bain wrote:
>> When you start mixing stuff you complicate things. If I were to take a
>> screenshot of a page on Wikipedia, for example, the text of the page
>> would be GFDL (unless there are some quotes or something in the text,
>> which would be fair use), the MediaWiki elements would be GPL, the
>> browser window could be anything (if you're in Firefox, for example,
>> then the picture of the browser interface is under the Mozilla Public
>> Licence). The skins that come with MediaWiki are GPL just like the
>> rest of MediaWiki.
>>
>> So unfortunately you can't get PD screenshots of MediaWiki. The best
>> you can do is GPL screenshots, but only if you show only GPL content
>> in it and either cut out the browser interface or use a GPL browser.
>
> Someone vastly misunderstands the nature of copyright law, I think.
>
> (Though, admittedly, IANAL, either.  I just play on on the net.)
>
> If I create a screenshot of a browser page on my computer displaying
> wikipedia, there is *one* copyright involved: *mine*.  The image is not
> a derivative work of the browser, the OS, or the website.  Therefore,
> none of those people's copyrights apply, and therefore by induction, no
> licenses are necessary.  I created an image, and I own its copyright.
>

Really? So, you can override any and all copyrights of anything, just by
taking your own picture of it? I find your ideas intriguing and wish to
subscribe to your newsletter.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
Assuming Ireland is on GMT time, that's in 15 minutes. Can someone catch an
MP3?

Mgm

On 1/25/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinford had stories about
> werewolves in the article, it got into the Irish edition of the Daily
> Mail and so I'm on Irish radio again. Site at http://www.todayfm.com/
> . Probably just a few minutes.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
David Monniaux wrote:

> On the English Wikipedia (but this is coming on other  ones) we have a
> large amount of articles about individual highschools, most of which
> have nothing special and are just like the next highschool.
>
> These articles tend: * to lack perspective
> [...]
> However, when OTRS folks delete such articles as "non notable", they
> often face angry remarks, accusations of lack of democratic process,

I'm not interested in schools or whether they are worthy of
articles, but I'm intrigued by the mathematical nature of this
problem.

The people who wrote the articles lack perspective (on other
schools than their own) and when the article is removed, they lack
perspective of having articles removed. Aren't these necessary
phenomena at the thin end of [[the long tail]]?

If we had complete visitor statistics from web logs (including
Squid caches and reusers such as Answers.com), then we could point
to numbers saying that this article has only been viewed so many
times in the last year, and therefore it is not notable.  But even
if this were practically achievable (which today it is not), would
that be a useful solution?

All classic reasoning about notability is focused on the fat end
of the tail.  Oscars are awarded to the best films, bookstores
list the best selling books, the winners get the prizes.  But how
can we achieve fairness, balance, equal coverage at the thin end?

In any written text (see [[en:Zipf's law]]), of all the words used
(the vocabulary), about half of them will occurr only once.  If
the same mathematical distribution is applicable to topics in an
encyclopedia, about half of all articles in Wikipedia are at the
very thinnest end of the tail.  If we were to use visitor
statistics to cut away the least notable topics, we could easily
cut away half of our stock.  And that's hardly what we want.

So is there any other math we could do here?

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough


subject: [WikiEN-l] Criteria of notability for web

body:
On 25/01/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:

> I have an issue with the third criterium of notability for web content,
> which IMO should not exist at all:
> from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(web)

The "notability" criteria are fundamentally subjective and arbitrary
rubbish written to appease definition obsessives from AFD.

- d.


from_name: Francis Tyers

body:
> The subject of the article should be notable BY ITSELF, not by
association.

Completely agree. A comic is not instantly notable because it was
published on Keenspace (note Keenspace is not Keenspot).

Fran


body:
On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 08:09 -0500, Omegatron wrote:
> On 1/25/07, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > The same holds for RS and CITE: they don't magically guarantee quality by
> > themselves, but they are great tools for doing so if not abused.
>
>
> But they are only used for abuse.  A simple sentence or two in WP:V and a
> dose of consensus is sufficient.

Only used for abuse?? How do you find that? I know that demanding decent
reliable sources for an /encyclopaedia/ is _controversial_ (sadly), but
its one of the things that (supposedly) makes us different from other
non-encyclopaedic volunteer run collections of information.

Fran

> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] New Test Templates

body:
geni wrote:
> On 1/24/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Of course, in the Good Old Days, they were SUPPOSED to look like
>> personal communication, for those of us too lazy to write custom
>> messages each time...
>>
>
> No even then there were people who disputed this. For example user:Fvw
> wouldn't subst them because he wanted people to understand that the
> messages were standadised and the vandel was doing nothing new.
>
>

Hmm, the inspiration for WP:DENY...

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
Lars Aronsson a ?crit :
> In any written text (see [[en:Zipf's law]]), of all the words used
> (the vocabulary), about half of them will occurr only once.  If
> the same mathematical distribution is applicable to topics in an
> encyclopedia, about half of all articles in Wikipedia are at the
> very thinnest end of the tail.  If we were to use visitor
> statistics to cut away the least notable topics, we could easily
> cut away half of our stock.  And that's hardly what we want.
>
> So is there any other math we could do here?
>
Perhaps a notion of service:

A Wikipedia article is interesting if it offers a service supplemental
to what is available, say, from the subject's official site. If the
article is just a copy of the information in the official site, with
unprovable anecdotes thrown in, then it does not offer a service.

Also, with respect to schools, the thing is that Wikipedia is not a
directory. It does not aim to index every company, individual etc. in
the world. So we have to resort to measurements of what makes somebody
or some institution "special".

*Some* highschools are special. Some have inordinate numbers of alumni
going into high positions. Some frequently appear in the press, in
novels, etc. Some have exceptional characteristics. These should have
articles.

But there's no reason we should have an article on my neighbouring
highschool, unless we also want articles on every company or organization...


subject: [Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough


body:
On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 14:16 +0100, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be any
> abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with these
> policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think I'm going
> to reread those pages and think about rewriting them.
>
> Mgm

Agree. If there is a problem with things being deleted, it isn't a
problem with policy, but with the people writing them without specifying
a source.

Fran

>
> On 1/25/07, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 08:09 -0500, Omegatron wrote:
> > > On 1/25/07, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > The same holds for RS and CITE: they don't magically guarantee quality
> > by
> > > > themselves, but they are great tools for doing so if not abused.
> > >
> > >
> > > But they are only used for abuse.  A simple sentence or two in WP:V and
> > a
> > > dose of consensus is sufficient.
> >
> > Only used for abuse?? How do you find that? I know that demanding decent
> > reliable sources for an /encyclopaedia/ is _controversial_ (sadly), but
> > its one of the things that (supposedly) makes us different from other
> > non-encyclopaedic volunteer run collections of information.
> >
> > Fran
> >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 08:21 -0500, Jeff Raymond wrote:
> Francis Tyers wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 14:16 +0100, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> >> If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be any
> >> abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with these
> >> policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think I'm going
> >> to reread those pages and think about rewriting them.
> >>
> >> Mgm
> >
> > Agree. If there is a problem with things being deleted, it isn't a
> > problem with policy, but with the people writing them without specifying
> > a source.
>
> It's more a little bit of both.

:)

Fran


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
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Jeff Raymond stated for the record:
> geni wrote:
>
>> False.
>>
>> It includes elements of law so beautifully complex in their
>> construction that a lifetime of study would hardly scratch the surface
>
> False.  Our fair use policy is rooted in copyright paranoia.
>
> -Jeff

False. It is rooted in free redistributability.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | Modern art is what happens when painters stop
 sean at epoptic.com | looking at girls and persuade themselves
                  | that they have a better idea. --John Ciardi
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from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mike Love's Geneaology of Influence

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> http://mike-love.net/
>
> This is awesome.
>
> However, I do believe it needs to be licensed under the GFDL, not a Creative
> Commons
> Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5  License.

NonCommercial is incompatible. However, we happily have
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 images on commons.


from_name: G L

body:
2007/1/25, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:
>
> David Monniaux wrote:
>
> > On the English Wikipedia (but this is coming on other  ones) we have a
> > large amount of articles about individual highschools, most of which
> > have nothing special and are just like the next highschool.
> >
> > These articles tend: * to lack perspective
> > [...]
> > However, when OTRS folks delete such articles as "non notable", they
> > often face angry remarks, accusations of lack of democratic process,
>
> [...]
> All classic reasoning about notability is focused on the fat end
> of the tail.  Oscars are awarded to the best films, bookstores
> list the best selling books, the winners get the prizes.  But how
> can we achieve fairness, balance, equal coverage at the thin end?
> [...]

Perhaps we can't and that's why these articles should be deleted. Isn't that
the whole idea behind the rules about verifiability, orignal research and
notability ?

GL


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Jan 25, 2007, at 9:42 AM, Steve Block wrote:

>
> In all honesty if that happens I will probably walk.  As someone who
> edits in an arena of pop culture, comics, I don't think I could
> stand it
> if these crutches were taken away.  Comics have been published for
> over
> 70 years and I would seriously have no other stick with which to beat
> the people who think Wikipedia can readily summarise the plot of every
> single character and adventure depicted.  Why does that matter?
> People
> need to ponder how maintainable six billion articles on comics
> would be.
>   Think I made that article up?  People quite reasonably believe the
> batarang deserves an article.  Extend that to Moon Knight's throwing
> arrows, which I could quite happily add an article on the basis of
> West
> Coast Avengers #18-24 or thereabouts.  The best stick we've got at the
> moment to cut away at this is reliable sources.

No. That's a crappy stick, because quite frankly, West Coast Avengers
#18-24 is a reliable source, and should remain a reliable source.
(Because otherwise we get into a whole host of other problems.
Primary source research like this is important.) The thing to tell
someone who wants an article on Moon Knight's throwing arrows is "No,
and stop being stupid." But we're doing a bad job of that, and so
we've contorted our sourcing policies to try to cover this, which is
a problem, because they do a very bad job of it.

> Now I know that there's
> a split in what Wikipedia is, and I know there are a lot of grey
> areas.
>   I will defend any article I believe is well written regardless of
> source issues, and if there are such articles at afd please give me a
> call, but I will more readily defend the ideal Wikipedia was
> founded on.
>   We need to focus on the general reader and focus on getting those
> books into the hands of those African kids that Jimmy often mentions.
> What value are those books going to be if they contain facts sourced
> from my webpage?  And if you abandon reliable sources and citing,
> why on
> earth do you think we'll have quality articles?  How are you going
> to do
> it.  Sorry, but I'm battling POV pushers on too many fronts to even
> entertain this idea humourously.

POV pushers are often insidiously good at sources - have a look at
[[2004 U.S. Presidential election controversy]] for why sourcing
doesn't really fix the problem (and if anything makes it worse
because POV pushers can resort to "But it's sourced!")
>
> Actually, that's a flawed argument.  We don't know if they haven't
> prevented more examples like Siegenthaler.
>

Nonsense. Siegenthaler would have been fixed without recourse to
sourcing had anybody looked at it. To try to solve a problem with a
solution irrelevant to the problem is silly.
>

> Ugh, no.  People doubt the validity of?  What on earth is validity?
> Well, it's stuff that people of note have said, or, well it's stuff
> that
> is of importance to the subject.  It's just more looseness, and
> it's too
> loose.  Wikipedia either has to have standards or throw of the
> pretence
> of being an encyclopedia and allow original research.  Hey, want your
> stuff in Wikipedia?  Chuck up a web page and then source it.  This
> applies to popular culture as much as it does any other field.
> Want to
> posit the idea that reading comics makes you gay?  Chuck up a website
> and then cite it in Wikipedia.  Well no, don't even cite it, just
> put it
> in and stick to your guns, because hey, it has validity.
>
You seem to be operating under the curious idea that [[WP:RS]] is the
source of common sense and judgment in the world, and should it ever
vanish everybody editing Wikipedia will become a dithering idiot. If
someone puts a claim that reading comics makes you gay into
[[comics]] we do not need any policy beyond "editors should exercise
good judgment" to go "Ummm, that's an interesting claim you've got
there, mate. I'm not so sure I believe it - you mind explaining where
you're coming from?" And when the editor points to their website, we
do not need a policy to say that they're being an idiot and that's
not going in the encyclopedia. Policy is not the source of our
ability to remove crap. Policy is an instruction manual for well-
meaning editors who don't really understand what we're doing. But
[[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] don't work as that - they're dense,
painfully confused texts that try to oversimplify sourcing and
research, which are both very complex topics. And they enshrine
rigidity where flexibility, discussion, common sense, and consensus
are necessary.
>

> Okay, I realise here I'm going to get shot at, but it is my
> understanding that it is not enough for information to be
> accurate.  It
> has to be relevant and it needs to be .  Wikipedia is simply too
> big now
> to be built like it was in the old days.  America doesn't operate the
> way it did in the Wild West, Wikipedia can't operate the way it did
> back
> then.  Enforce mob rule and then watch as we lose the battle to the
> mob.
>   We're walking a tight line as it is, at the outer edges like
> Siegenthaler.  I'd hate to see the centre go.
>
One of the most common misconceptions and false attacks on Wikipedia
has always been equating the consensus model with mob rule.
>

> Look, I agree that there are issues, but those issues aren't with the
> policies.  They are with the editors who can't seem to apply, what for
> better words I'll call common sense to the policies.  They can't
> seem to
> grasp that there is a need to compromise, a need to facilitate other
> opinions and a need to deal.  They can't grasp the concept of
> collaboration, they can't grasp the idea that life is not black and
> white.  They can't see the future is reached by groping about in the
> dark as much as it is reached by walking clear lit corridors.  Too
> many
> times an obvious decision is delayed due to one person in a far off
> field crying out "Process".  What we need is a way of enforcing the
> idea
> that it is the spirit of the rules that are observed, not the words.
> Too many people are invested in the fight, not the book in the
> hands of
> that African kid.
>

The solution is, in part, to get away from a system of rules and
towards a system of principles. [[WP:V]] is a good page. [[WP:NOR]]
is a good page. That's because they enshrine principles and goals.
[[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] enshrine a hopeless bureaucracy that we can
never hope to actually get working. If you want a model where people
look at the goal instead of the method, you need policies that are
principles and goals, not processes. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] are
the ugly processes we wrote to try to support [[WP:V]] and
[[WP:NOR]]. Cut out the process, leave the goal.

-Phil


body:
On 1/25/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> Thursday, January 25, 2007, 10:21:27 PM, George wrote:
>
> >> Hoping that your mind won't blow, here's a very well-sourced example:
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_general_election%2C_1946
> >>
> > That's a terrible article.  It's not an encyclopedia article, it's a
> > scholarly paper on the topic.
>
> > It's not a bad scholarly paper, on first look, but it's not a good
> > encyclopedia article.
>
> Do you have any reasons you think so? I don't think there's any policy
> claiming that Wikipedia articles should be dumbed down. For that,
> there's simple English Wikipedia. :-)

The point of the encyclopedia is to make an overview available and
accessible to non-experts.

The intro is fine, but there's an excess of detail that follows, and
the citations are overwhelming for normal readers.

I don't say that because I object personally ... in terms of quality
level and citations and such, it is good, the sort of work I'd expect
from grad students or academics doing an overview, including what
looks like good citations... It's not my topic area of interest, but
it's a good article from that perspective.

My concern is that "the average reader" will be overwhelmed by it.
There's a reason that there's a spectrum of writing, from informal
blogs, to popular magazines and newspapers, more formal magazines,
expert magazines, professional journals, and then things like PhD
thesies and the like.  Most normal people stop reading a paragraph or
less into the type of article that you see in professional journals.
The style and info density is not something they want to deal with.
Compare and contrast "Popular Science", "Scientific American" and
"Nature" (or worse, a less-overview specialist journal in any field).

Somewhere between PopSci and Scientific American tends to be at what I
suspect "the right level" is for Wikipedia, though the articles in the
latter are generally longer than ours should be.

This will vary wildly from field to field and topic to topic.  All
generalizations are false.  8-)

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On Jan 25, 2007, at 11:58 AM, Bogdan Giusca wrote:

> Thursday, January 25, 2007, 6:25:38 PM, Ken wrote:
>
>> WP:CITE and WP:RS are unreasonably easy to abuse
>
> What you call "abuse", others call improval of the sourcing and
> of the verifiability, and of therefore the credibility of Wikipedia.
>
> From my experience on Wikipedia, almost all the criticism on the
> Reliable Sources requirements comes from people who edit mostly
> articles on anime, webcomics, furry subculture, internet memes
> and the like.
>

This just isn't true. There are plenty of reliable sources issues to
be found about academic topics, particularly in the humanities. For
example, it is mind-wrenchingly difficult to write a sourced article
about [[Jacques Derrida]]. Why? Because one either has to frame his
thought in terms of mediocre primers on his work like _Derrida for
Beginners_, or one has to try to use the academic debate surrounding
Derrida, in which case all of one's sources are aimed at an expert
audience and there's no good foothold to explain the basics of
Derrida's thought. Furthermore, one is left in a position where
clueless political attacks on Derrida get disproportionate time,
because lots of people can understand Ann Coulter and thus can add
citations to her, but a lot fewer people can understand Julian
Wolfreys and add citations to him.

There's not a good solution to this from within a source-paranoid
culture, because the way to write a decent article on Derrida is to
have three or four people who work with Derridean thought write it
up, bash out compromises on wording among themselves, write brief
bits that explain major debates about Derrida's thought where they
can't agree on a generally applicable way of presenting something,
and then to have a references section that points to some major work
on Derrida. And if someone comes along and says "Dude, this article
is crap. Here's a bunch of citations that show that this article
totally misrepresents Derrida," we work from there.

But there is no good way to write an article on Jacques Derrida that
is both a good introduction for a layperson and sourced at every turn.

I'd be similarly shocked if one could write a good article on high
temperature physics or group theory while being totally dependent on
published reliable sources, because those sources were never written
for the purpose of being used to explain the concept to novices.
> Those areas are not the core of an encyclopedia and protecting those
> areas should should not result in the compromising the rest of
> Wikipedia.
>
> We can't have two sets of rules: one for cruft and one for the rest.

Nobody is proposing two sets of rules. What people have frequently
proposed is that the rule should be "everything must be sourced to
the recognized standards of reliability for that subject," and
understanding that the standards are somewhat less rigorous in
popular culture.

I'll also note that, contrary to popular rhetoric, [[WP:RS]] does
very little to help fix pokecruft, because nobody can make a serious
argument that Pokemon episodes are not reliable sources for
information about what happens in Pokemon episodes. (At least not one
that has ever gained any traction, and thank God for that, because
it's a damn silly argument that has nothing to do with reliability
and everything to do with frantically trying to build an idiot-proof
wall against pokecruft by any means necessary, without regard for
whether the wall makes sense.)

In fact, I suspect we'd have an easier time getting historical out-of-
universe information if we let people who knew stuff about the
history of Pokemon write articles without demanding they go back and
figure out where exactly they read every single fact they're trying
to include.

Put another way, the demand that every piece of information has a
source means that we get a preponderance of information that's low-
hanging fruit - that is, information that is easily found online and
easily understood by anybody. That does not coincide well with
information that is good.

Again, this is essentially a design problem. [[WP:RS]] and
[[WP:CITE]] fail to consider that they need to be implemented by
casual volunteers who are working out of good will. They'd be great
policy if Wikipedia were written by paid experts and people who
devote huge amounts of time to the project. (Which is who they were
written by) But they're crap for someone who finds a problem on a
page they're looking at and wants to fix it. Which is the vast
majority of our editors.

This is the key problem. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] were not written
with our actual userbase in mind. They are useful only to people like
us - that is, people who are obsessed enough with Wikipedia to join a
mailing list for discussion of it. That's not most of our editors.

Here's what we need. Picture Susan. Susan is a 40-year-old stay at
home mother who majored in English, and still has a fondness for Jane
Austen. Susan, one day, is browsing the Internet and reads our
article on [[Pride and Prejudice]]. She sees an error. In five
minutes, her kid is getting off the school bus.

We need a policy that lets Susan fix the problem and then go meet her
kid at the bus without having her change reverted.

-Phil


body:
Go with the first notability criterion. Just because Blogger or Keenspace
are hosting something doesn't make it notable. Their job is to host these
things and them publishing them has no bearing on their quality or
reliability. That criterion clearly needs to be reworded.

Mgm

On 1/25/07, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
>
> > The subject of the article should be notable BY ITSELF, not by
> association.
>
> Completely agree. A comic is not instantly notable because it was
> published on Keenspace (note Keenspace is not Keenspot).
>
> Fran
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 1/25/07, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Jeff Raymond stated for the record:
> > geni wrote:
> >
> >> False.
> >>
> >> It includes elements of law so beautifully complex in their
> >> construction that a lifetime of study would hardly scratch the surface
> >
> > False.  Our fair use policy is rooted in copyright paranoia.
> >
> > -Jeff
>
> False. It is rooted in free redistributability.

I think both are true.  The goal from the organizational point is both
to be able to redistribute the content without any concern for what's
in it, and avoid people filing complaints (or worse, suits) about
copyright violation.

The enforcement seems more rooted in copyright paranoia, from my
experience.  Not the "ok, you stole this image" part, where whapping
people over the head is appropriate, but "this is a fair use of the
image" is legally true (in the US at least) for a lot of things where
the current policy as enforced is removing them.  And would be true
for anyone else who downloaded and redistributed a copy of the WP
article and images.

Fair use is generally (but not always) transitive, and would generally
be to others who re-distribute WP content.  This is not generally
acknowledged in the debate or policy but remains true.

It's hard to avoid looking at the policy as enforced some days and see
an unholy alliance of the hyper-free-content freaks who demand that
everything in the world be GFDLed or die, and the copyright police.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 1/25/07, Omegatron <omegatron+wikienl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/25/07, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > The same holds for RS and CITE: they don't magically guarantee quality
> by
> > themselves, but they are great tools for doing so if not abused.
>
>
> But they are only used for abuse.  A simple sentence or two in WP:V and a
> dose of consensus is sufficient.

That's simply not true. I use them to show people how sources are important
to show information is accurate. Citing reliable sources is the only way to
show readers the content of an article is accurate and accuracy should be
our primary concern. If you know of other ways to verify content, I'm all
ears.

Mgm


from_name: Robth

body:
On 1/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Jan 25, 2007, at 8:16 AM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>
> > If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be
> > any
> > abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with
> > these
> > policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think
> > I'm going
> > to reread those pages and think about rewriting them.
>
> But this is one of the problems. The burden of citing everything is
> larger than our editors, especially our casual editors, are willing
> to undertake. We will never reach a point where people will cite
> their sources in the first place. Hence the prospect of eternally
> playing catch-up.

I disagree.  Citing is not as difficult as you seem to think it is; if
you're in the middle of writing an article based on sources that are
sitting in front of you, it really isn't that hard to note down where
the facts came from as you write them down (lately I've become a fan
of the <ref>Unless otherwise noted, all details regarding [Subtopic X]
are drawn from [Source Y], pp. A-Z.</ref> style for citing basic facts
with relative ease).  It's true that casual editors tend not to cite
their contributions, but nobody does at first, and I think that the
reason for this has less to do with unwillingness to do so than with
the idea simply not occuring to people.  Obviously, any statements
about this are going to be speculative, but I can say that in my case
I started out just writing stuff down from memory and then, after
someone told me to cite sources, moved to doing that.  It will be very
difficult to get Wikipedia into a condition where passerby editors
feel that citing one's sources is an integral part of adding
information to an article, but I don't think that's a reason to give
up the fight.

I think that what tends to get lost in these discussions is the
incredibly good effect that citing as you go has on the accuracy of
writing.  I don't know how many times I've flipped open a book to find
a quick confirmation of some (seemingly very obvious) fact that I was
about to add to an article, only to find the opposite in print and
then, after checking a couple more books, to realize that my memory
had deceived me.  No matter how well people know their subjects, they
will make mistakes, and a writing practice that asks you to flip open
a book and check what you're saying before you write it down is a good
one.

--
Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)


body:
If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be any
abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with these
policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think I'm going
to reread those pages and think about rewriting them.

Mgm

On 1/25/07, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 08:09 -0500, Omegatron wrote:
> > On 1/25/07, Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > > The same holds for RS and CITE: they don't magically guarantee quality
> by
> > > themselves, but they are great tools for doing so if not abused.
> >
> >
> > But they are only used for abuse.  A simple sentence or two in WP:V and
> a
> > dose of consensus is sufficient.
>
> Only used for abuse?? How do you find that? I know that demanding decent
> reliable sources for an /encyclopaedia/ is _controversial_ (sadly), but
> its one of the things that (supposedly) makes us different from other
> non-encyclopaedic volunteer run collections of information.
>
> Fran
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you want to fundamentally change the whole concept and policies of
> > the project, why not just start a fork?  Isn't that what Citizendium,
> > Wikinfo, Digital Universe, and so on are trying to do?
>
> He isn't trying to change the policies. WP:CITE and WP:RS are current
> policies - it's the people that want to relax those policies that are
> trying the change policies. Perhaps they should fork?

There is a world of difference between "Citing things is good" and
"Good articles should have citations and references" on the one hand,
and "Citing things is mandatory" and "Articles without citations and
references will be deleted" on the other.

Making an emphasis on it as a best practice is fine.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On Jan 25, 2007, at 11:53 AM, Francis Tyers wrote:

>
>> While all policies can be abused, some are easier to abuse than
>> others.
>> Some are even attractive nuisances.
>
> The only people who think that having to cite and verify articles with
> reliable sources is "abuse" are the kind of people who think "oh no my
> pokemans character studies are at risk again!"

This comment (which I will note is offensive, wrongheaded, and
appalling) is emblematic of the exact problem with [[WP:RS]] and
[[WP:CITE]]. Nobody sane ever thought that the problem with Pokecruft
was that it wasn't verifiable. We only started using [[WP:RS]] and
[[WP:CITE]] to deal with that problem because we were desperate to
come up with something that seemed sturdy that we could use to tell
people to go away.

But this was fundamentally an act of desperation, and it shows,
because the justifications for using [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] in
this way are so obviously flimsy. The deletions still go through
because we have a well-sized cult of people who will faithfully vote
delete, but anybody with an ounce of sense and knowledge about the
subject knows full well that this is a flimsy justification and that
the sources are reliable.

Deleting cruft articles with [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] is an ugly
kludge. If it's so vitally important that we do it, we need to come
up with a justification that isn't a joke.

-Phil


from_name: Steve Block

body:
Ken Arromdee wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, bbatsell wrote:
>> Those are *goals*.  Of course it's not feasible that every single
>> sentence in every single article across every localized Wikipedia be
>> sourced from reliable sources.  That's ridiculous.
>
> Instead we have "every single sentence in a random subset of articles must
> be sourced from reliable sources."  It sucks if a topic you're interested in
> is in one of that random subset.
>
> You also get subgroups of editors who absolutely refuse to accept some kinds
> of source.  [[Wikipedia:Attribution]] has stalled because it's impossible to
> tell some people that popular culture can't be sourced like science and
> history.

Is that still stalled?  That's getting silly.  When I tried to make it a
policy a while back I believe it was removed because someone wanted to
satisfy the concerns of one editor.  Now I may have that wrong, but I'm
worried if we've reached the point on Wikipedia where one editor can
prevent something happening. Do we really allow the filibuster? ~~~~

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.17.10/651 - Release Date: 24/01/07 18:48


body:
On 1/25/07, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> What we see here is a bit of a clash between two forms of quality; we
> are proverbially good at one, and proverbially bad at the other.  The
> first is size; we can tell you something about more topics than anyone
> else.  We got here through the work of casual contributors (although
> the five minute thing is nonsense--this model of articles improving in
> tiny partial edits doesn't gibe with a reality in which, while the
> bulk of our content is written by casual contributors, the casual
> contributors in question are people who sit down and spend half an
> hour or so adding a serious chunk of text).  The second form of
> quality, the one we're proverbially bad at, is reliability.  When we
> started out, we needed size, and our policies were designed
> accordingly.  Now, we got size, but we still need reliability.  If we
> can alter the system that's already made us big to focus on improving
> the stuff we have, we should do it.

I think that this is oversimplifying and polarizing the reality,
though it does have a lot of value as a model to explain a change that
WP is starting in to.

The level of completeness varys wildly from field to field, as does
the quality level of articles.

I disagree that we don't still need size; as I said earlier, there are
whole classes of topics for which articles are missing or sketchy.
Beyond poorly covered topic areas, we have whole fields full of stubs
for which content needs infilling.

I almost want to suggest a graduation system for articles; once it
reaches a "good enough" level, then a different set of rules kick in,
and changes are required to go through a more rigorous check system,
citations become required, etc.  This might make a good fork, or could
possibly be a change in how WP works.  Both reducing the vandalism and
raising the expectations for rigorousness in edits, if and only if an
article is at an appropriate level to start with.

What I very strongly don't want to see is cutting off the informal
editing ability which allows articles to reach that level to begin
with.  That's cutting off our roots and nourishment to spite
ourselves.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:15 PM, Robth wrote:

>
> I disagree.  Citing is not as difficult as you seem to think it is; if
> you're in the middle of writing an article based on sources that are
> sitting in front of you, it really isn't that hard to note down where
> the facts came from as you write them down (lately I've become a fan
> of the <ref>Unless otherwise noted, all details regarding [Subtopic X]
> are drawn from [Source Y], pp. A-Z.</ref> style for citing basic facts
> with relative ease).  It's true that casual editors tend not to cite
> their contributions, but nobody does at first, and I think that the
> reason for this has less to do with unwillingness to do so than with
> the idea simply not occuring to people.

It's not unwillingness as such. In an earlier post I used the
hypothetical example of Susan. I like this example, so I'll use it
again here.

Susan is a 40-year-old stay at home mother who majored in English.
While idly browsing, she has found an error in the article on [[Pride
and Prejudice]] and wants to fix it. Her son gets off the school bus
in five minutes.

Now my claim is that every policy and process on Wikipedia should be
usable by Susan. That is to say that there should not be any rules
that Susan cannot remember off the top of her head, there should not
be any code or processes that Susan would have to look up, there
should be no pages that Susan must check before she hits "Edit."
Susan should be able to complete the task of fixing an error and
still meet her son at the bus stop.

If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has
to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
precious seconds of Susan's time. (And beyond that, as I said
elsewhere, if we depend on the low-hanging fruit of sources, which is
what we do if we demand sourcing of people who don't have the time to
do it right, we get crap sourcing. Constant crap sourcing is lower
quality than we get if we trust people's memories some of the time.)
If she has to go dig up her undergrad English textbook, it's a lost
cause.

This is the problem. We conceived of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]]
without thinking of usability problems. And so we have policies that
can't be used by anyone other than us, the Wikipedia hardcore. Which
is a tiny minority of our userbase.

-Phil


from_name: Guettarda

body:
On 1/25/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/25/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/25/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make OTRS happy, any more than it
> > > is to make Articles For Deletion happy.
> >
> > Every article on Wikipedia has a maintenance cost and a benefit to the
> > project as a whole. It's reasonable for us to choose not to keep
> > articles whose maintenance cost is greater than the benefit they
> > provide.
>
> Everyone is free to not contribute to the maintenance of some section of
> WP.
>
> One lone editor willing to babysit a thousand articles nobody else
> cares about is sufficient maintenance committment.
>
> What we don't have is any way to currently know if there is someone
> who cares about an article and is paying attention to it.  (Feature
> request?  Beyond watchlist, add a new "Maintenance Watchlist" and make
> that visible from the article side or some such?)

Some people had (have?) public watchlists - a page that lists articles they
are watching, which others can also watch by clicking on [related changes].
That would serve this purpose.

--
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
>
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> WikiEN-l mailing list
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> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] The downside of creating perfect articles

body:
On 1/25/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/25/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There are large swaths of technical topics which are not computer-geek
> > technical stuff which are covered extremely poorly, if at all.
> >
> > Engineering materials, for example - aluminum, steel, composite
> > materials, others.  I went through and it seemed like doubled the
> > structural and aerospace materials article count 2-3 months ago, and I
> > haven't even gotten started properly...
>
> Yeah, that's true actually. On a slight sidetrack, I've also started
> to notice that while we have many articles about individual products
> in certain categories (cameras and phones, for example), in non-geeky
> fields such articles are often quickly designated "spam". This may be
> fair enough, if we think about sales volume, but I'm going to pay
> closer attention and see if it's actually reasonable.
>
> > Structural design concepts that anyone in an industry knows from
> > school and are common professional knowledge, and still have no WP
> > coverage.
>
> In IT as well...our articles on stuff like data warehousing, business
> intelligence, database design etc are pretty rudimentary and not very
> well organised. Even someone sitting down with a first year textbook
> and getting some basic, even coverage would be a great help. As
> opposed to the very evident biases (often just caused by particular
> interests of contributors) causing lopsided coverage atm.

I'll try and migrate the to-do onto my userpage or some such; I agree
that it would be useful.

I'd definitely second the data warehousing, business intelligence,
database design and architecture, etc.  We have the academic theory
side of some of that, and product *cough* not-marketing, but not the
"how does this work in practice" level stuff in the middle.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
>
> We should nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]. They are not working. They
> have never worked. It is not a feasible project to go and add sources
> to everything, and new contributors who are editing casually are
> never going to be willing to do the extra work of having sources. The
> result is a rule where we are always going to be playing catch-up.

In all honesty if that happens I will probably walk.  As someone who
edits in an arena of pop culture, comics, I don't think I could stand it
if these crutches were taken away.  Comics have been published for over
70 years and I would seriously have no other stick with which to beat
the people who think Wikipedia can readily summarise the plot of every
single character and adventure depicted.  Why does that matter?  People
need to ponder how maintainable six billion articles on comics would be.
  Think I made that article up?  People quite reasonably believe the
batarang deserves an article.  Extend that to Moon Knight's throwing
arrows, which I could quite happily add an article on the basis of West
Coast Avengers #18-24 or thereabouts.  The best stick we've got at the
moment to cut away at this is reliable sources.  Now I know that there's
a split in what Wikipedia is, and I know there are a lot of grey areas.
  I will defend any article I believe is well written regardless of
source issues, and if there are such articles at afd please give me a
call, but I will more readily defend the ideal Wikipedia was founded on.
  We need to focus on the general reader and focus on getting those
books into the hands of those African kids that Jimmy often mentions.
What value are those books going to be if they contain facts sourced
from my webpage?  And if you abandon reliable sources and citing, why on
earth do you think we'll have quality articles?  How are you going to do
it.  Sorry, but I'm battling POV pushers on too many fronts to even
entertain this idea humourously.

> Nor do the pages prevent incidents like Siegenthaler, which was a
> problem with exactly one cause, which is that nobody had ever
> actually looked at that page after it was created. No policy in the
> world will fix a page that nobody is editing.

Actually, that's a flawed argument.  We don't know if they haven't
prevented more examples like Siegenthaler.

> Yes, we need to ensure that people do not add crap information. This
> can be covered easily with "Information that people doubt the
> validity of should be sourced."

Ugh, no.  People doubt the validity of?  What on earth is validity?
Well, it's stuff that people of note have said, or, well it's stuff that
is of importance to the subject.  It's just more looseness, and it's too
loose.  Wikipedia either has to have standards or throw of the pretence
of being an encyclopedia and allow original research.  Hey, want your
stuff in Wikipedia?  Chuck up a web page and then source it.  This
applies to popular culture as much as it does any other field.  Want to
posit the idea that reading comics makes you gay?  Chuck up a website
and then cite it in Wikipedia.  Well no, don't even cite it, just put it
in and stick to your guns, because hey, it has validity.

  And we can then leave the community
> to deal with issues on a case by case basis with the direction that
> they should be careful to make sure that information is accurate. And
> we should shoot people who continue to add dubious information over
> the objections of other editors. Which is basically how we wrote an
> encyclopedia that has proven pretty trustworthy, and, more to the
> point, is how we actually operate now on the vast majority of our
> articles, since [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]] are not actually useful pages.

Okay, I realise here I'm going to get shot at, but it is my
understanding that it is not enough for information to be accurate.  It
has to be relevant and it needs to be .  Wikipedia is simply too big now
to be built like it was in the old days.  America doesn't operate the
way it did in the Wild West, Wikipedia can't operate the way it did back
then.  Enforce mob rule and then watch as we lose the battle to the mob.
  We're walking a tight line as it is, at the outer edges like
Siegenthaler.  I'd hate to see the centre go.

>
> But to have a pair of policies that cannot be honestly implemented
> serves only one purpose: causing debates among editors that waste
> time and good faith.

Look, I agree that there are issues, but those issues aren't with the
policies.  They are with the editors who can't seem to apply, what for
better words I'll call common sense to the policies.  They can't seem to
grasp that there is a need to compromise, a need to facilitate other
opinions and a need to deal.  They can't grasp the concept of
collaboration, they can't grasp the idea that life is not black and
white.  They can't see the future is reached by groping about in the
dark as much as it is reached by walking clear lit corridors.  Too many
times an obvious decision is delayed due to one person in a far off
field crying out "Process".  What we need is a way of enforcing the idea
that it is the spirit of the rules that are observed, not the words.
Too many people are invested in the fight, not the book in the hands of
that African kid.

What we need is perhaps better management.  Kelly used to talk of an
elected chamber which would debate issues.  I'm starting to see the
value.  But that's a whole nother can of worms.

--
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body:
On 1/25/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/01/07, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Mmm. Could you put it on-wiki? The enormous redlink farms are
> > > occasionally a decent incentive to do something, and if nothing else
> > > they help give an idea of what's still out there.
> >
> > You want a redlink farm?  Try
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TUF-KAT/Topics_by_country
>
> Cor, that's demoralising. (Though I think their name-syntax may be a
> little off in some cases)
>
> FWIW, the lists I was thinking of were on Charles Matthew's page: see
> the huge list of lists near the bottom of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews

Hey, I've learned about two great places to go to find things to do
just today on the mailing list...

Demoralizing if you think we're already complete.  Invigorating if you
think there's a lot more to be done and want to do it 8-)

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 1/25/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 25/01/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There are large swaths of technical topics which are not computer-geek
> > technical stuff which are covered extremely poorly, if at all.
> >
> > Engineering materials, for example - aluminum, steel, composite
> > materials, others.  I went through and it seemed like doubled the
> > structural and aerospace materials article count 2-3 months ago, and I
> > haven't even gotten started properly...
> >
> > Structural design concepts that anyone in an industry knows from
> > school and are common professional knowledge, and still have no WP
> > coverage.
> >
> > This is just off the top of my head.  I've got a to-do list somewhere
> else.
>
> Mmm. Could you put it on-wiki? The enormous redlink farms are
> occasionally a decent incentive to do something, and if nothing else
> they help give an idea of what's still out there.

You want a redlink farm?  Try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TUF-KAT/Topics_by_country

--
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
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> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>