subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
geni wrote:

>On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 12/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>In all fairness Googling, then adding the information is a lot of work.
>>>
>>>
>>It's a couple of minutes.  And at the end of it you have a useful
>>article instead of a hole in the ground.
>>
>>
>Nocking out people on RC patrol for couple of minutes soon results in
>the loss of RC patrol as they are all of researching stuff.
>
For once I have to agree with you..  You may find it hard to believe
that I was the one who on Wiktionary was taking the most vocal stand for
riddding us of some of the nonsense vocabulary that was being proposed. :-)

Ec


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:

> G'day geni,
>
>> On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> In all fairness Googling, then adding the information is a lot of
>>>> work.
>>>
>>> It's a couple of minutes.  And at the end of it you have a useful
>>> article instead of a hole in the ground.
>>
>> Nocking out people on RC patrol for couple of minutes soon results in
>> the loss of RC patrol as they are all of researching stuff.
>
> We don't have to verify stuff while on RC patrol.  If something looks
> ... odd, do you know what I do?  Tag it {{cleanup-verify}} and let
> someone who isn't RC patrolling sort it out.
>
> We should not be AfDing something if we don't have time to do
> research.  Let someone else sort it out if you must.

That's reasonable enough.  It's rare for me to do RC patrol, but I might
learn something from doing it occasionally.  On Wiktionary I tend to
spend more time closing requests for deletion, some of which carry on
for a long time.  The oldest outstanding ones have been around for four
months, and they tend to be the most difficult.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
Justin Cormack wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 08:19 -0500, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>
>>C'mon, it's not like I'm asking for every single fact to be
>>referenced.  Adding a single reference to every single article is just
>>not a big deal.
>>
>>And yes, I myself have started articles without listing references.  I
>>did it because I'm lazy and there wasn't a rule against it.  We've
>>gotta stop lazy people like me.
>>
>>
>Its a worthwhile aim. I know there are articles I have created that
>still dont have references, guess I should fix them. Not sure that
>moving them into user space is the best solution - no one else will
>ever find them. I wrote a quick stub the other day (was redlinked
>from several places, clearly notable, but couldnt find any references.
>Within an hour someone else had found references, written a much
>longer article. This wouldnt have happened in my user space.
>
>
Congratulations!  It looks like the system was working correctly for you.

Ec


list: foundation-l

from_name: Brian

subject: [Foundation-l] Corrected results from Nature article

body:
Nature has a special report at
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html ,  detailing
the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the
Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's,
they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With Maveric149's
help, I did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F

Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1.4; Britannica: 3.6.

Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were
also 2 1/2 times longer on average.

It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark estimate.
Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text, and
removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other big
tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature article
was published.

brian0918


subject: [WikiEN-l] Corrected results from Nature article


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] reviewing edits by anons

body:
Hi,

>  The problem for users who see a long list of anon edits is
> that they don't know if they are perfectly OK edits that have
> been looked at by others and not thought to need correction
> (hence the absence of usernic edits) or if they simply have
> never been checked. All too often, faced with a massive list

In other words: an article last edited by an anon is ambiguous: either
it hasn't been checked, or it has been checked and accepted.  However,
an article last edited by a user is equally bad: either it was checked
and fixed (reverted), checked and improved further, or wasn't checked
but improved in some other area (eg, typo, interwiki link etc). In other
words, Wiki lacks a way of rating/checking articles/changes.  I've often
thought it would be good to be able to comment on changes in the
history. Say an anon changes a population figure. I would like to flag
it and say "can someone check this", while making some unrelated change.
My unrelated change can easily bury their possibly malicious change....

Steve


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nature compares science coverage of Wikipedia
	andEncyclopaedia Britannica

body:
>I also expect that, once the complete list of evaluated articles is
published by Nature, we will find that our articles are >longer, so that
the error rate *per sentence* might very well be lower in Wikipedia.

A few people seem to have missed this from the website:
"All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both
encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as
reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more
similar."

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>>
>>> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>>
>>>> Your statement that "the other ideas are normally all wrong" is a
>>>> POV.  If your criticism depends on a POV then it too is a POV.  A
>>>> scientific experiment that shows something to be wrong is not the
>>>> same as one that fails to show it right.  To say that something
>>>> which is not science is necessarily pseudoscience is a textbook
>>>> application of the fallacy of [[False dilemma]].
>>>
>>> I never made such an assertion (that all non-science is
>>> pseudoscience). I said that pseudoscience is often wrong. So could
>>> you give me an example of a pseudoscience which is actually 'right'?
>>
>> Your request is illogical.  It asks for something right  when it is
>> wrong by definition.  If I see something as "right" I would not call
>> it pseudoscience.
>
> Exactly - so how is it POV to demonstrate in an article why a
> pseudoscience is wrong?

Because you had to characterize it as pseudoscience in the first place.

Ec


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/15/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/14/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any
> > reasonable scale is not an option.
>
> It is better to have too few good admins than too many bad admins.
>
> Kelly

Define bad.

--
geni


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Foundation-l] comparison between Encyclopaedia Britannica and
	Wikipedia (German)

body:
--- Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> Well I suppose it is time to go "back to ordinary" functioning of
> Wikipedia (anonymous users can create articles - this is even easier to
> check to my opinion - just switch off all registered users and have
> special regard to anonymous page creations).

The Nature study looked at articles that Britannica and Wikipedia share. Those are much, much more
likely to be widely watched and linked. Articles on fringe subjects and semi-famous people and
places will not have as many eyeballs on them. Seigenthaler was one such semi-famous person. So
the Nature study proves nothing in regards to where we have our real problems.

-- mav

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
> >On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>On 12/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>In all fairness Googling, then adding the information is a lot of work.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>It's a couple of minutes.  And at the end of it you have a useful
> >>article instead of a hole in the ground.
> >>
> >>
> >Nocking out people on RC patrol for couple of minutes soon results in
> >the loss of RC patrol as they are all of researching stuff.
> >
> For once I have to agree with you..  You may find it hard to believe
> that I was the one who on Wiktionary was taking the most vocal stand for
> riddding us of some of the nonsense vocabulary that was being proposed. :-)
>
> Ec

That's why it needs to be a multi-step process.  RC patrol makes a
basic check, and others do the further research.  Task management
would probably be the perfect solution for organizing this process,
but a simple interface to quickly add something to the talk page
directly from the diff page would be easy to program and just about as
useful.

Let's add a one line text field at the top or bottom of the diff page:
you fill out a quick summary, and it automatically gets added to the
talk page, complete with a link to the diff.

A revert button for non-obvious vandalism would be nice too.  This
could be used by non-admins as well as admins, and you'd have to
describe the reason for your revert which would appear on the talk
page (with the diff) as well as the comments field of the history.

In fact, it'd be great if you could just check a box for any edit
which said "copy this edit summary to the talk page".  The whole three
step-process (edit, get diff, comment on talk page) of being bold and
making a change which you're not 100% sure of is too difficult.  Bonus
points if you can figure out how to thread multiple changes to the
same text under a single talk page section :).

But for starters, let's add that one line text field on the diff page.
 It'd be a really simple software change.

Anthony


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Next experiment: switch off AFD for a month. (was
	Guardian in defense of Wikipedia)

body:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an
> unreferenced article.  Is it deletion or improvement?  I would easily
> support improvement.  If an article is unreferenced that does not imply
> that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
>
There's no question over the endgame.  The question is over what to do
in the meantime.  If we don't know whether or not something is right,
it shouldn't be in an article.  Doesn't mean it can't be in user
space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted
articles history.  That's my interpretation of
[[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.

> Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes
> and needless stress.  In planning new strategies this should be
> considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress.
> Without that this will be no different from AfD.
>
> Ec

The endgame in either case is a well referenced article.  The question
is how do we get there.

Anthony


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Elections December 2005

body:
None, a distinction without a difference.

Fred

On Dec 14, 2005, at 9:47 AM, Taco Deposit wrote:

> What's the difference between publicly opposing a candidacy, and a
> "disendorsement"?
>
> TD


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Nature compares science coverage of Wikipedia and
	Encyclopaedia Britannica

body:
On 12/15/05, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   There is a general perception that we don't cover science well?  I thought we
> were a lot stronger in the sciences than we are in the humanities.  My first
> thought was that they had picked an area likely to flatter us.

WP's been pretty decent in the sciences, but the weakness has always
been in the medicine and anatomy-related articles.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
A better approach is for all of us in our regular editing start
gradually asking more often for a reference and do more deleting when
it is not provided.

When I do serious editing I am usually working from a book or
newspaper article and I have the reference at hand. It would often be
very hard for someone else to find that passage just going from
whatever I put into a Wikipedia article. So it is easy to put in
exact references.

That does not end the matter, but it is a start.

Fred

On Dec 13, 2005, at 12:39 PM, Jon wrote:

>   Is there any reason why we don?t introduce immediately a rule
> that says all new information added to an article must be sourced
> or referenced or the edit will automatically be reverted? And any
> new articles must be sourced or referenced within two hours, say,
> of their creation, or will be speedily deleted?
>
>
>   Unsourced information has no place on the encyclopaedia, and the
> person introducing the information is best placed to know where he
> got it from. OK, this idea is not a panacea - it doesn?t help
> reference up information already in the encyclopaedia, but it?d
> stop making the problem worse. Nor would it address the issue of
> editors making up false sources - but any regular editor doing that
> will soon be rumbled, and this issue is already around anyway.
>
>
>   Editors would soon get used to the new requirement - and it?d
> have the benefit of making all those RC and New Pages patrollers
> who currently do not improve the encyclopaedia one jot (they merely
> prevent it from degrading) actually help improve the project by
> enforcing proper standards.
>
>
>   Ideally [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]] and [[Wikipedia:Cite
> sources]] would undergo a quick re-write to explain better how
> sources can be given, but that can easily be done.
>   This idea would start to improve our quality immediately, and
> make a Siegenthaler repeat far less likely. Why not go for it?
>
>
>   Jon (jguk)
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all
> new Yahoo! Security Centre.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jeremy Dunck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: FW: Wikipedia and Brittannica comparison

body:
I received this response to my inquiry for more details about the
Wikipedia study.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jones, Nicola <N.Jones at nature.com>
Date: Dec 15, 2005 8:04 AM
Subject: FW: Wikipedia and Brittannica comparison
To: "jdunck at gmail.com" <jdunck at gmail.com>

Hello. We have received many requests for this information and are currently
working to put it into a publishable format. It will be posted somewhere on
our website as soon as possible. Please check back next week.

Sincerely,
Nicola Jones.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicola Jones BSc, MJ
Online news editor news at nature.com
www.nature.com/news
4 Crinan St, London N1 9XW, UK
telephone: +44 (0) 20 7843 4952
mobile: 07733 408 853
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Dunck [mailto:jdunck at gmail.com]
Sent: 14 December 2005 20:58
To: news at nature.com
Subject: Wikipedia and Brittannica comparison

I've just read the article here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

Will you be publishing more detail on the results?  There is a horde
of researchers interested in these findings.


subject: [WikiEN-l] UK libel law and reusers

body:
On 12/13/05, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > On 12/13/05, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> >> You've already ceded that yes,
> >> there are reasons for the foundation to worry.
> >
> > No I haven't.
>
> I'm sorry, but when you stated that yes, there was concern for reusers
> regarding potential suits, and could I suggest anything to be done, that
> that meant the foundation was likewise concerned. Is it the case that
> the foundation has no worries regarding funding or reputation in the
> light of a potential suit?
>
Maybe we're just miscommunicating.  If there is something we can do to
help reusers which doesn't compromise the integrity of the
encyclopedia, we should do it.  But I don't think there is.  I
wouldn't say the foundation has to worry about this.

> > The fact that two British newspapers called Robbie Williams gay is
> > true information.  Does British law define this as libel or not?
>
> According to the BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A1183394#4
>
> "It is inadvisable to repeat a defamatory rumour unless you are in a
> position to prove it's true. Even if you are contradicting the rumour
> you should not repeat it. And adding 'allegedly' is not enough to get
> you out of libel difficulties."
>
> As far as I can ascertain, only once the trial has ended can the nature
> of the allegation may be reported, when it becomes a matter for the
> public record.  I am unclear on the position whilst the case is ongoing,
> but England and Wales have very strict laws to prevent the prejudicing
> of trials.
>
> > I don't understand.  Is it libel, in the UK, to say "Two newspapers
> > alleged that Robbie Williams was gay"?  I agree Wikipedia shouldn't
> > say "Robbie Williams is gay", if that's all you're saying.  Can you be
> > more specific as to what type of statement you *are* talking about?
>
> See above.  It can be deemed libelous to repeat a rumour, so it can be
> deemed libelous to state "Two newspapers alleged that Robbie Williams
> was gay"? up until the point that it is settled in court.  By repeating
> the allegation you are, if the allegation is false, disseminating false
> information and party to defamation.
>
I feel that enforcing such a rule in Wikipedia would greatly
compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia.  I also think it could
have some almost paradoxical conclusions, for instance when applied to
the Seigenthaler case.  Seigenthaler himself quoted Wikipedia in his
USA Today article.  Now obviously Seigenthaler couldn't sue himself
for this, and presumably he couldn't sue the USA Today for publishing
it.  But what if someone quoted Seigenthaler quoting Wikipedia?  Would
that be legit?  The rule to not repeat a rumor even if you make it
perfectly clear that it's a rumor makes no sense to me.

To bring it back to what I was saying before, the statement that "two
newspapers alleged that Robbie Williams was gay" is true, and
Wikipedia should not censor true statements simply because making
those statements is illegal under UK law.  This brings up another
difference between this libel law and copyright law.  Under copyright
law it is pretty much always possible to convey the information in
another way (*).  Under this UK libel rule there apparently isn't.

(*) In fact, this is essentially the reason why Wikipedia is a
success.  Copyright doesn't cover information.  True, some images are
very difficult to reproduce without falling under some copyright law
somewhere, but that's why we make an exception for those images.

> > I'll ask again.  What do you propose that we do?
>
> I made that proposal at [[Wikipedia:Libel]].  It doesn't seem to have
> met with community consensus.  The trouble seems to be hinging on whose
> definition of libel is used.  I would add, however, that the foundation
> review either European law or the basing of assets in the European
> Union.  I am not a lawyer, but I glanced at the Council Regulation (EC)
> No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and
> enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters
>
For the reasons given above, yes, I believe we should not exclude
*information* solely because of laws.

> > We clearly should
> > remove false information from Wikipedia.  I agree with that, and I
> > think everyone else does.  We should remove private information which
> > has not been published anywhere else.  Our verifiability rule ensures
> > that.  So what else should we do?
>
> Clarify the position with regards to libel laws around the world as best
> as possible.  At the moment we have different editors who are either
> based in the US and therefore do not care or have concerns but are
> feeling frustrated because no-one is prepared to stick their head above
> the parapet with even the loosest of risk assesments.
>
Wikipedia does not and should not give legal advice.  If you'd like to
do research on what the laws are your contribution to the encyclopedia
would be greatly appreciated.  But the foundation can't and shouldn't
force anyone to do that research.

> > Even with images we have only gone so far to protect reusers.  Images
> > which can only be used by Wikipedia are off limits.  Images which can
> > be used by a broad range of reusers, on the other hand, are generally
> > kept.  There is somewhat of a balancing act here.
>
> But that's the point at issue here.  Is wikipedia pursuing a policy that
> it is happy to use text which potentially only the online Wikipedia can
> use, or is it going to pursue a policy whereby text which can be used by
> a majority of reusers is the preferred option.  If the latter is the
> case, then I would ask that the foundation sits down and explores how
> various libel laws affect reusers, and then formulate a policy
> appropriately, informing and appraising the community along the way so
> as not to be seen to be handing down dictats.  If the former is the
> case, then I am unsure how wikipedia expects the text to be reused, and
> upon whose shoulders it places the burden of risk to fact check.  If a
> reuser has to check every page for potential libel, why would it do so?
>   When it comes to printing encyclopedias, information will likewise
> have to be vetted dependent upon the territory at which the publications
> are aimed.  It would make sense to have some idea of how these problems
> are to be tackled, wouldn't it?

I wouldn't mind a tagging system to facilitate reuse.  Right now
reusing Wikipedia is difficult, and tagging articles (on the talk
page) which are illegal to distribute in a particular country for
whatever reason would make things easier.  And while I agree that
"text which can be used by a majority of reusers is the preferred
option", I don't think it's appropriate to remove information solely
to address this concern.

If we insisted on following every law from every jurisdiction on every
page in the Wikipedia, I think we'd find ourselves with very little
information left.

If you can come up with a way to be in better compliance with the laws
of a particular jurisdiction without removing useful information from
the encyclopedia, then I think we should definitely consider it.

Anthony


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Christmas presents, or: MediaWiki,
	reloaded

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Well, as this is likely to affect all wikipedias one its live, I thought
> the initial announcement should go to wikipedia-l. You know how they
> hate it when a new feature appears and noone told them ;-)

Oh, you guys don't have to worry.  They'll just blame me for "managing
by press release" and "being secretive" even though everything is widely
discussed on public mailing lists for months.

But yes, we need to make sure we get the word out widely before things
are implemented to keep the lynch mobs at bay.

--Jimbo


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject:
[Foundation-l] Closer look at Nature's results: Average article
	size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB;
	Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB
	for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.5

body:
That's just great information.

What would be interesting also would be to draw a social map of articles
in WP and EB, in order to see if they take care of the same topics or
concentrate on different things.

Brian wrote:
> Nature has a special report at
> http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html ,  detailing
> the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the
> Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's,
> they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With Maveric149's
> help, I did:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F
>
>
> Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
> KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
>
> Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were
> also 2 1/2 times longer on average.
>
>
> Can someone please check my math, I did this pretty fast, and was half
> asleep :)  It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark
> estimate.  Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text,
> and removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other
> big tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature
> article was published.
>
> Raul654 and I separately submitted stories to Slashdot, and I would
> suggest anyone willing do something similar. The more requests they have
> for this, the more likely they are to accept it.
>
> brian0918
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Closer look at Nature's results:
 Average article
 size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB
 for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.5


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BBC News Online Story.

body:
On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what
> they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)

I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles
were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy
because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual
errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often
very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.

Sarah


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >   Is there any reason why we don't introduce immediately a rule that says all new information added to an article must be sourced or referenced or the edit will automatically be reverted? And any new articles must be sourced or referenced within two hours, say, of their creation, or will be speedily deleted?
> >
> We don't have the rescources to police this.
>
We could make a start by introducing such a rule for biographies of
living people. We have to provide a source when we upload an image or
risk that it be deleted in short order. And yet there's so such
requirement when adding a claim about a living person that could
potentially damage them. That discrepancy suggests we have our
priorities upside down.

Sarah


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] The a7 speedy

body:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> > Re: expansion, all I've heard on that front is people asking that band
> > vanity be speediable.  This doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me,
> > although the question of what to do with borderline cases is a big one.
> >  Consider garage bands that formed last week and haven't even decided
> > what songs they want to cover, let alone done any gigs or considered
> > writing their own songs, but have definitely had time to create a
> > Wikipedia entry ...
>
>
> I would not allow this one. There's been a few band deletions of
> Australian indie bands who *of course* they aren't on bloody allmusic,
> because it's essentially a US site. So one has to wade in and fix things.
>
They don't HAVE to be on allmusic. But we do need some verifiable
evidence they meet the guidelines set out in [[WP:NMG]] in some way.
If Australian indie bands are at all worth listing, surely they have
toured Australia, have a video out on national TV or at least some
reasonably popular CDs out, right?


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Where do I report editor deleting "skinhead" from
	manypages?

body: Should be all fixed now.


body:
Brian wrote:

> Nature has a special report at
> http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html ,  detailing
> the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the
> Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than
> Britannica's, they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With
> Maveric149's help, I did:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F
>
>
> Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
> KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
>
> Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were
> also 2 1/2 times longer on average.

True as this may be, there is no need for a campaign of spin doctoring.

I think that the "Nature" article was largely sympathetic.  Our best
response would be to review the articles surveyed to make whatever
corrections are needed, or even to make corrections that they failed to
notice as well.  Once this is done it could be brought to the attention
of the "Nature" staff and a challenge issued to see how long it takes EB
to make its corrections. 8-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Speedy deleletion patrol

body:
> > If there's a function I could build into my "Tasks" feature to assist
> > out patrolling heroes, please let me know :-)
>
"Tasks" feature? Can you tell me more about that?


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Reference.com displays Wikipedia edit history at the
	bottom of each article page.

body:
The problem is that you need to delete an entire article before you
can restore selected revisions. Perhaps the developers could change
this, or was there a reasoning behind the current workings?

Mgm

On 12/15/05, sydney poore <poore5 at adelphia.net> wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> Checking out the mirror sites, I saw that Reference.com displays
> Wikipedia edit history at the bottom of each article page. In fact it is
> the first link to the article. This makes vandalism and other
> unacceptable edits available to more people unless we purge them.
>
> Wikipedia contributors
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hager?action=history>
>
> Look of the bottom of Reference.com encyclopedia article page.
>
> Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (c) 2001-2005 Wikipedia contributors
> (Disclaimer) This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
> License.
> View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org
> - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Sydney Poore
>
> Go Bengals!
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/

body:
On 12/14/05, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/14/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What is going on here? And where did they get permission to use our logo?
> >
> > http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/
>
> See [[QuakeAID]] for details about this.
>
> However, I very much prefer wikipediaclassaction.com (read carefully
> before screaming).
>
> Mathias

You're right. That one makes much more sense. You might as well shut
down all messageboards if you are afraid of defamation...


subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>
>>I can remember the state of affairs.  There were more reverts,
>>bringing more attention to the articles, and forcing things to be
>>resolved more quickly.
>>
>>
>Yeah, that worked well on Mr-Natural-Health, while the AC case oozed
>through. Oh, wait.
>
There was more to that case than newbie exuberance.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Closer look at Nature's results: Average article size
	for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB;
	Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1;
	Britannica: 6.5

body:
Please let us know the links to the slashdot stories.
Nature stated the articles were of similar length. Are you suggesting
they were wrong?

Mgm

On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nature has a special report at
> http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html ,  detailing
> the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the
> Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's,
> they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With Maveric149's
> help, I did:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F
>
> Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
> KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
>
> Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were
> also 2 1/2 times longer on average.
>
>
> Can someone please check my math, I did this pretty fast, and was half
> asleep :)  It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark
> estimate.  Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text,
> and removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other
> big tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature
> article was published.
>
> Raul654 and I separately submitted stories to Slashdot, and I would
> suggest anyone willing do something similar. The more requests they have
> for this, the more likely they are to accept it.
>
> brian0918
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Tagline changed?

body:
The tagline was changed from "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."
to "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". The
tagline is the small text directly below each article's title, above
the article content.

All Wikipedia contributors are invited to comment upon the change at
the following URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Tagline

~Mark Ryan


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Speedy deleletion patrol

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

>>>If there's a function I could build into my "Tasks" feature to assist
>>>out patrolling heroes, please let me know :-)
>>>
>>>
>"Tasks" feature? Can you tell me more about that?
>
>
See:
* My test page http://magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php (note the
"tasks" tab and the sidebar)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Speedy_deletions (the
"Need some tools?" section)
* Preliminary (technical) documentation
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_extension

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/15/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> No libels or slurs are welcome on Wikipedia.  That said, the risk of
> blandness in dealing with live people is very real.  We _must not_ give
> people the right of approval on what WP writes about them.
>
I agree that people shouldn't have the right of approval over their WP
pages, but equally we shouldn't adopt a belligerent
published-and-be-damned position either. Waking up one morning to find
a Wikipedia article exists about you, one that anyone can edit, must
be a horrible experience quite frankly. We should be respectful to
people who are worried about it, and we should always err on the side
of caution and kindness, in my view. An aggressive journalistic stance
isn't appropriate, because we have no fact-checking process, no
public-interest claims, no teams of lawyers and publishers overseeing
publication. And, most importantly, we have no fixed, final version
where the thing is finally put to bed.

I'm in touch with one man who feels he was defamed in an article. The
information was removed after he contacted Jimbo, but he writes that
he has to check every day to make sure it hasn't been added again.  In
other words, we've changed this man's life, and yet he's not
particularly notable, the people who keep adding the information are
mischief-making, and the claims that were made about him weren't in
any sense newsworthy.

We need to sort out our publishing philosophy when it comes to the
biographies of living people, or claims about living people in other
articles. Errors in other kinds of articles are annoying, but errors
about living people are potentially cruel and very damaging, even if
they don't reach the level of an actionable libel. We need to start
thinking not only in terms of accuracy and verifiability, but also in
terms of *fairness*.

Sarah


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Closer look at Nature's results: Average article size
	for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB;
	Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB for
	Wikipedia: 1;	Britannica: 6.5

body:
geni wrote:

>On 12/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
>>>KB.
>>>
>>>
>>We badly need to tighten up our writing.
>>
>>
>Remember The britanica guy haveing a go at us becuase our article on
>encyopedia was too short?
>
The "tightening up" is less about content than writing style.  It's a
special skill to take a piece of text and pare it down to its essentials
by removing excess verbiage.  Recently, I happened to look at the
Wikijunior article on Chile.  It's very badly written because it
primarily fails to take into account that it's written for children.
Apart from the evident political tone of the article I noted the
seemingly innocent sentence, "In 1970, a man named Salvador Allende was
elected."  I have no factual dispute with this sentence.  What, however,
is the purpose of the phrase, "a man named"?  The sentence would have
read just as well without it

Tightened up writing meqans removing this kind of fluff.

Ec


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> >On 12/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Complaints about deleting unsourced material resulted in a separate page
> >>called Requests for Verification (RfV) where supporters have a full
> >>month to find sources.
> >>
> >>
> >This sounds like exactly what I'm suggesting for Wikipedia.
> >
> Of course the article is not deleted while waiting for that month to pass.
>

I should think not!


from_name: sydney poore

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>We could make a start by introducing such a rule for biographies of
>living people. We have to provide a source when we upload an image or
>risk that it be deleted in short order. And yet there's so such
>requirement when adding a claim about a living person that could
>potentially damage them. That discrepancy suggests we have our
>priorities upside down.
>
>Sarah
>
    Yes!

    Sydney Poore

    Go Bengals!


from_name: SJ

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BBC News Online Story.

body:
Yes, this makes it rather hard to design a good blinded study.
Feeding all text through a dialect-simulator, or better yet an editor
that unifies paragraph-length and word choice without altering any
facts or much clarity, might help.  The design of a decent
reference-work comparison study might merit a paper in itself.

SJ

On 12/15/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ... apparently the checkers weren't even told that what
> > they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
>
> I'm afraid it would have been obvious from the writing which articles
> were from Wikipedia. The EB is able to provide the facade of accuracy
> because the writing is so smooth, so you don't expect to find factual
> errors. In Wikipedia articles, you do, because the writing is often
> very poor, so the other problems tend to jump off the page.
>
> Sarah
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
++SJ


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
If you'd looked at what I was replying to, maybe my point would have
been more clear to you: "An example of a 'supernatural phenomenon'
which is not 'bunk' would be welcome. :)" I provided one, with an
emphasis that what counts as supernatural and what counts as natural
is not a transhistorical category. But I think my position on all of
this (predicting the future has nothing to do with this) should be
pretty clear from my other posts, so I won't repeat myself.

FF

On 12/15/05, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/15/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> > When Newton originally presented his theory of gravity it was seriously
> > attacked by his contemporaries as being comprised of "occult forces" rather
> > than being a truly mechanistic physics (like Cartesian physics). Now we all
> > know how that worked out in the end -- not only did Newton triumph, but even
> > what science was ended up being redefined in the process. And it has been
> > redefined many times since then, in different ways and different fields --
> > each time something initially incompatible becomes the accepted norm, it
> > changes not only the evidence, but the entire standard of what counts as
> > evidence and even what counts as argumentation. This is a well-documented
> > phenomena, and even the most positivistic of philosophers acknowledge this
>   (phenomenon)
> > to some degree.
>
> What's your point? The goal of Wikipedia is not to predict the future
> but to accurately reflect the present.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/15/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> I'd respond to slimvirgin that
> Wikipedia:Verifiability already gives editors the power to move
> unsubstantiated information to the talk page (at least after a good
> faith effort to locate a source).

Hi Anthony, it's not only a question of claims that have no source,
but also claims that have a poor source. The example I mentioned
earlier of the man who feels he was defamed: the source was a
satirical paper that doesn't mind publishing libels. When he and I
tried to remove the claim, a group of people associated with the paper
turned up as Wikipedia editors and started edit warring over it,
including having the subject RfC-ed and blocked for 3RR. There was
nothing I could do about it as an admin, because those edit warring to
keep it in weren't in violation of any of our behavior policies, and
we can't block over content disputes; and anyway, once I'd edited the
page, I couldn't take admin action. So the only thing the subject and
I could do was spend hours explaining the content policies ad nauseam,
and monitoring every change. It was very, very time-consuming.

Something needs to change to make it easier to remove claims that
damage people and that potentially damage Wikipedia.

Sarah


from_name: Jake Waskett

subject: [WikiEN-l] A suggestion for more easily gaining agreement on AfD

body:
There's a problem with AfD (actually, there are many, not least of which
is people ignoring policy, but let me focus on this one). It's very hard
to achieve consensus. We're currently in the bizarre situation in which
opinion is divided over whether to delete or merge, and as a result
neither is done, and an appalling article remains.

I believe that the problem is due to the three available options, and I
believe that there may be a solution: always express a first and second
choice.

Where there's a clear consensus on first choices, ignore second choices.
Otherwise, look at first and second choices together.

I recognise that this treats AfD as a vote, while for some reason that
is seen as a bad thing, but at least it would be an improvement.

It may be a stupid idea, but I wonder what people think?

Jakew


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an
>>unreferenced article.  Is it deletion or improvement?  I would easily
>>support improvement.  If an article is unreferenced that does not imply
>>that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
>>
>>
>There's no question over the endgame.  The question is over what to do
>in the meantime.  If we don't know whether or not something is right,
>it shouldn't be in an article.  Doesn't mean it can't be in user
>space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted
>articles history.  That's my interpretation of
>[[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
>
We can begin with some kind of "unreferenced" tag, maybe even a flashing
red "CAUTION" sign. :-)
Beyond that, we need to remember that most of our non-referenced facts
aren't controversial at all.  Look at how long it has taken to put
category tags on all articles.  That's a much simpler task than
referencing.  Of your four suggestions only putting material on the
article's talk page will even give a sporting chance for review.  If you
outright delete an unreferenced article there will not even be a link to
Xxxx's talk page so that the material can be reviewed and documented.
Have fun finding it!

Assuming good faith needs to be extended to the articles themselves.  It
recognizes that a contributor who was himself deceived by the
information was probably acting in good faith.  Fact checking an article
is a tedious process that needs to apply to every statement in an
article.  It may be easy enogu to have a bot tag every unreferenced
article with a notice that if it is not referenced in 24 hours it will
be deleted.  If ALL of us were to devote ourselves to that task for that
24 hours without sleeping there would still not be enough of us for the
job.  So when your second bot comes along and clears out the still
referenced articles what would we have left?  We need common sense, not
impatience.

>>Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes
>>and needless stress.  In planning new strategies this should be
>>considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress.
>>Without that this will be no different from AfD.
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>
>The endgame in either case is a well referenced article.  The question
>is how do we get there.
>
Of course, but we can't depend on any kind of quick fix.

Ec


body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:

>>> I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources,
>>> whichever is available.  In the case of primary sources, of course,
>>> these should only be readily available ones.  Ideally, an encyclopedia
>>> is a tertiary source - a summing-up of knowledgable opinion - but I
>>> would not exclude primary or tertiary sources unless better are
>>> available.
>>
>> I absolutely agree.  Once you start imposing serious limitations on
>> the acceptability of sources you set up the basis for many future
>> arguments of the "my source is better than yours" variety.  We need
>> to encourage people to use what they have, without worrying about
>> strict criteria.
>
> That depends on what you mean by "limitations".  "You can't use the
> subject's autobiography, wait until you can get a two-page treatment
> from a textbook" is kinda silly and limiting.  However, there already
> are very significant limitations: we aren't allowed to rely on the
> ravings of madmen to build a case.  Translated into NPOV, this means
> that the followers of Lyndon LaRouche are no longer allowed to use
> wacko LaRouchite propaganda to claim he's more important than he
> really is.
>
> I support this (well, nobody's asked me, but ...), and I imagine you
> do too if you've any knowledge about LaRouche, his movement and its
> followers, and the sort of material he prints.

The usefulness of a source depends on what you are using it for.  As
wacko as LaRouche writings may be, if he writes about a rant that he
gave in Akron on some specified day it is prima facie evidence that he
was in Akron on that day without an implications about the value of his
speech.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/15/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote
>
> > And yet there's no such
> requirement when adding a claim about a living person that could
> potentially damage them. That discrepancy suggests we have our
> priorities upside down.
>
> No libels or slurs are welcome on Wikipedia.  That said, the risk of
> blandness in dealing with live people is very real.  We _must not_ give
> people the right of approval on what WP writes about them.
>
> Charles

Showing them what we write about them and then listening to their
response wouldn't be such a bad idea, though.

Unsubstantiated rumors aren't welcome on Wikipedia either.  We're lax
about it in some cases, but in terms of potentially damaging
information we shouldn't be.  I'd respond to slimvirgin that
Wikipedia:Verifiability already gives editors the power to move
unsubstantiated information to the talk page (at least after a good
faith effort to locate a source).  We just haven't been exercising
that power as often as we should.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On 12/15/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>When Newton originally presented his theory of gravity it was seriously
>>attacked by his contemporaries as being comprised of "occult forces" rather
>>than being a truly mechanistic physics (like Cartesian physics). Now we all
>>know how that worked out in the end -- not only did Newton triumph, but even
>>what science was ended up being redefined in the process. And it has been
>>redefined many times since then, in different ways and different fields --
>>each time something initially incompatible becomes the accepted norm, it
>>changes not only the evidence, but the entire standard of what counts as
>>evidence and even what counts as argumentation. This is a well-documented
>>phenomena, and even the most positivistic of philosophers acknowledge this
>>
>>
>  (phenomenon)
>
>
>>to some degree.
>>
>>
>
>What's your point? The goal of Wikipedia is not to predict the future
>but to accurately reflect the present.
>
The point is that the trickster is still alive and well and living in
science.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: joao miranda

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] comparison between Encyclopaedia Britannica and
	Wikipedia (German)

body:
Here an english version of the story:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-14-nature-wiki_x.htm

JoaoMiranda

On 12/15/05, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> http://www.golem.de/0512/42221.html
>
> well ... this is why page creation by anonymous users is not so bad ...
>
> And why it is impossible that Encyclopedia britannica needs to proof and
> reproof each single word it writes
>
> http://www.golem.de/0512/42221.html
>
> "both" encyclopeadias - this means even that one that according to our
> infos needs to proof every single word - has the same amout of critical
> errors in the same articles only in different places ... - hmmmmm .....
>
> considering that Encyclopedia Britannica is 237 years old and Wikipedia
> only 5 .... hmmmmm ....
>
> (sorry I don't have time to translate this article - maybe there's an
> English one around as well???)
>
> Well I suppose it is time to go "back to ordinary" functioning of
> Wikipedia (anonymous users can create articles - this is even easier to
> check to my opinion - just switch off all registered users and have
> special regard to anonymous page creations).
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
> http://mail.yahoo.it
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject: [WikiEN-l] BBC News Online Story.

body:
Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT

Wikipedia survives research test

The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as
the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.

Full article at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm

--
Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
gordon.joly at pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
http://www.loopzilla.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>Because it assumes standards of evidence and even standards of what
>"science" is, how to define it, and whether or not all of what is generally
>considered "science" fits into these normalized molds (they don't).
>
It is too easy to forget the influence of Plato and Aristotle in the
development of modern science.  If these men had viewed things just a
little differently the impact on today's science could have been staggering.

>There are good reasons, though, for leaning towards the "scientific" point
>of view *when leaning is required*
>
Those who lean too much in one direction tend to fall over.

Ec


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
http://www.golem.de/0512/42221.html

well ... this is why page creation by anonymous users is not so bad ...

And why it is impossible that Encyclopedia britannica needs to proof and
reproof each single word it writes

http://www.golem.de/0512/42221.html

"both" encyclopeadias - this means even that one that according to our
infos needs to proof every single word - has the same amout of critical
errors in the same articles only in different places ... - hmmmmm .....

considering that Encyclopedia Britannica is 237 years old and Wikipedia
only 5 .... hmmmmm ....

(sorry I don't have time to translate this article - maybe there's an
English one around as well???)

Well I suppose it is time to go "back to ordinary" functioning of
Wikipedia (anonymous users can create articles - this is even easier to
check to my opinion - just switch off all registered users and have
special regard to anonymous page creations).

Ciao, Sabine

___________________________________
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
http://mail.yahoo.it


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
On 12/15/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/14/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Define bad.
>
> Not good.
>
> In this context, a "bad admin" is an admin who does not respect the
> spirit of policy, who bites newbies, who fuels edit wars instead of
> resolving them,

Admins have no conflict resolution role.

> or who otherwise does not uphold the obligations of an
> administrator in using administrative privileges.  In short, someone
> who uses administrative privileges for a reason other than to improve
> the encyclopedia.
>
> Kelly

Ah and thats where it gets tricky doesn't it. "Improve the
encyclopedia" so subjective. The fact is removeing admins who have
missused rollback would easly remove 1/3rd of the admins. It would
also be likely to hit the most active admins. Under such a situation
the only option would be to lock the database until we promoted some
more.

There are a minium number of admins we need to continue fuctioning.
And if we have to allow admins who you view as bad in order to reach
that number there isn't much you can do about it.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/13/05, Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>   Is there any reason why we don't introduce immediately a rule that says all new information added to an article must be sourced or referenced or the edit will automatically be reverted? And any new articles must be sourced or referenced within two hours, say, of their creation, or will be speedily deleted?
>
>

We don't have the rescources to police this.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> A better approach is for all of us in our regular editing start
> gradually asking more often for a reference and do more deleting when
> it is not provided.
>
> When I do serious editing I am usually working from a book or
> newspaper article and I have the reference at hand. It would often be
> very hard for someone else to find that passage just going from
> whatever I put into a Wikipedia article. So it is easy to put in
> exact references.
>
> That does not end the matter, but it is a start.

In other words, a good first step is for the experienced editors to be
an example.

Ec


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] OfficialWire: Founded On Porn,	Wikipedia Shapes
	The Way You Think

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>Link is of questionable work-safeness.
>
>http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=20683
>
>Not sure if OfficialWire is a news source to care about or not, but it
>is in Google News Alerts.
>
OfficialWire is the same as [[QuakeAID]] / wikipediaclassaction.org,
their main page shows they have a program of regular WP smears. It's
a little more troubling than some because it reaches people outside
the usual WP crowd - I first heard about it from a friend who works
in social services for instance, and who offered condolences that WP
had been turned into a pedophilia site.

Stan


from_name: Shyler Raadt

subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
I put up a "POV is disputed" thing on the page for munchausen syndrome
because it keeps saying her child and herself. Nobody has responded to what
I had to say on it's talk page for a couple of days. Should I just go and
change it myself since no one else seems to care?

Schyler

(my user name too)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/13/05, Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>   Is there any reason why we don't introduce immediately a rule that says all new information added to an article must be sourced or referenced or the edit will automatically be reverted?

One good reason is that it would be impossible to implement. Another
good reason is that it would give licence to edit warriors to fight
over the most trivial of statements.  A wiki is a work in progress; we
refine articles by adding whatever source information they need, and
we sometimes revert particularly contentious statements that haven't
yet been sourced.


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Obstetrician needed for 7 new Wikipedias

body:
?var, as far as I know, they're equal to the ISO/DIS 639-3 codes. Most
ISO/DIS 639-3 codes are taken directly from SIL, unless there is a
conflict with existing ISO standards.

While ISO/DIS 639-3 is still provisional, in all reasonable likelyhood
there will be no major changes to existing codes.

Mark

On 15/12/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> Note: Some of these proposals propose using the three letter sil codes
> for the projects in question, this is higly unadvisable because there
> might be an ISO code issued that equals that code in the future.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>The thing is, for many people, editing is *fun*. I actually honestly
>gain pleasure from taking an unstructured 1000 word article and turning
>it into a 500 word structured one. Finding references is *work*. If you
>know something to be true, to find a reputable refernce to back you up
>is simply hard work in many cases.  "no original research" says that if
>something is true, it should be easy to find a reputable reference -
>well, it isn't always.
>
If you're not changing any facts, then there's nothing to worry about,
go have fun. But how sure are you about that snippet of general
information you want to add? There have been a couple times where I
was *sure* about some claim, and yet it turned out my memory was
faulty. There were probably readers of the Seigenthaler article that
probably thought "hmm, didn't know he was implicated in the
assassination, but I remember seeing the name when reading about it
one time", and so it wouldn't occur to them to be suspicious of the
prankster's claim.

I actually enjoy tracking down the sources of facts, and many of my
edits are simply to add a reference or two. So if you do the
wordsmithing (which I tend to find tedious), and flag anything
that seems true but is unsourced, I'll come along later and see if
I can come up with something to cite.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
Jon wrote:

>  Is there any reason why we don?t introduce immediately a rule that says all new information added to an article must be sourced or referenced or the edit will automatically be reverted? And any new articles must be sourced or referenced within two hours, say, of their creation, or will be speedily deleted?
>
To some extent, that's quietly happening, both reversions of
unsourced adds, and edits that include references. I'd just as
soon not try to formalize beyond the warning that is now on the
edit screen - a sudden deluge of plausible-looking but faked-up
sources would be a major problem for RC and watchlist patrol.

Stan


body:
On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
> KB.

We badly need to tighten up our writing.


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BBC News Online Story.

body:
"Gordon Joly" <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:p0623090dbfc711d3a29a@[192.168.116.8]...
>
> Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
>
> Wikipedia survives research test
>
> The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the
> Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
>
> Full article at:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm

That's pretty neat, especially considering that the BBC's own H2G2 could be
considered a rival to Wikipedia in certain circles.

Does anybody know if the Nature people have published the errors that they
found, so that they could be corrected?

Obviously it would have been really appropriate if they could have corrected
them as they went, but apparently the checkers weren't even told that what
they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote in
message news:20051214181232.9008.qmail at web51610.mail.yahoo.com...
--- Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bad idea.  I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for
> > things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread
> > implementations of bad ideas.  Most recent case: someone had modified
> > the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied
> > that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in
> > question.
> How is that a bad idea? The page history is for showing how an article
> developed. If a bit of text
> is no longer in the article due to a revert for any purpose, then the edit
> that added it and the
> edit that removed it need not be there forever. A week is long enough. In
> addition to removing
> vandalism, the above idea would also help to de-clutter page histories.

Am I right in thinking that we're not talking about expunging these history
entries from the database, simply deleting them.

So they will still show up as "deleted edits" which admins could restore if
necessary.

Would it maybe be possible to fix it so that "deleted edits" show up in user
contributions, labelled in some way, with restricted access?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
What constitutes a reliable source is necessarily
subjective.  And I'm not sure it shouldn't be.
Appropriateness can change.

But there should be some limits.  With the
proliferation of blogs, any blog can be argued to be a
reliable source.

I wonder if we shouldn't have some sort of page where
sourcing can be evaluated?  "Sources for Review," or
something like that.  Some sort of page where people
who disagree over whether a source adequately meets
Wikipedia's sourcing policies can be reviewed by
neutral parties.

k.

--- slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

> On 12/15/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org>
> wrote:
> > I'd respond to slimvirgin that
> > Wikipedia:Verifiability already gives editors the
> power to move
> > unsubstantiated information to the talk page (at
> least after a good
> > faith effort to locate a source).
>
> Hi Anthony, it's not only a question of claims that
> have no source,
> but also claims that have a poor source. The example
> I mentioned
> earlier of the man who feels he was defamed: the
> source was a
> satirical paper that doesn't mind publishing libels.
> When he and I
> tried to remove the claim, a group of people
> associated with the paper
> turned up as Wikipedia editors and started edit
> warring over it,
> including having the subject RfC-ed and blocked for
> 3RR. There was
> nothing I could do about it as an admin, because
> those edit warring to
> keep it in weren't in violation of any of our
> behavior policies, and
> we can't block over content disputes; and anyway,
> once I'd edited the
> page, I couldn't take admin action. So the only
> thing the subject and
> I could do was spend hours explaining the content
> policies ad nauseam,
> and monitoring every change. It was very, very
> time-consuming.
>
> Something needs to change to make it easier to
> remove claims that
> damage people and that potentially damage Wikipedia.
>
> Sarah
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Empty passwords

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> By mistake, I seem to have logged in as another user. I was typing my
> username, when my finger slipped and I logged in before I had either
> finished typing my complete username, or any password whatsoever.
>
> It seems that the user I accidently logged in as has an empty password.
>
> * is this really possible, or have I made a mistake?

Yes.

> * if this really is so, this is a moderate-sized security hole, because
> this has the same dangers as accounts with publicly accessible
> passwords, which are generally held to be a case for block-on-sight.

Don't do that if your account is important to you.

> It would probably make sense to check for zero-length passwords at
> account creation time,

On your own site, set the minimum password length. See DefaultSettings.php for
all available configuration settings.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20051215/32d04bbb/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
Hi,
>   Is there any reason why we don't introduce immediately a
> rule that says all new information added to an article must
> be sourced or referenced or the edit will automatically be
> reverted? And any new articles must be sourced or referenced
> within two hours, say, of their creation, or will be speedily deleted?

Here's a reason: because currently probably less than 10% of material
(and maybe less than 1%) is referenced.  So we'd be throwing out almost
all changes.  And then people would start making fake references etc...

>   Unsourced information has no place on the encyclopaedia,
> and the person introducing the information is best placed to
> know where he got it from. OK, this idea is not a panacea -
> it doesn't help reference up information already in the
> encyclopaedia, but it'd stop making the problem worse. Nor
> would it address the issue of editors making up false sources
> - but any regular editor doing that will soon be rumbled, and
> this issue is already around anyway.

Does Britannica really reference *that much*?

>   Editors would soon get used to the new requirement - and
> it'd have the benefit of making all those RC and New Pages
> patrollers who currently do not improve the encyclopaedia one
> jot (they merely prevent it from degrading) actually help
> improve the project by enforcing proper standards.

I suspect lots of Wikipedia's edits are made by people who have never
even read an encyclopedia, let alone are capable of editing to that
standard.  Referencing and sourcing comes naturally to those of us who
have been to university, but for the rest?  We could possibly do
something like this if it was easier for them - maybe two comment boxes
for their changes, one that says what they did, the other that says
where it came from.  Currently the footnoting system is just a bit too
complicated for the average user.

>   This idea would start to improve our quality immediately,
> and make a Siegenthaler repeat far less likely. Why not go for it?

IMHO, we're not ready to make such a dramatic change.  It would be like
suddenly instituting a black tie dress code at your local bar.  You
could slowly ritz up the bar to a state where people would expect that,
but if you just did it overnight, everyone would abandon you overnight.
No?

Steve


body:
On 12/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
> > KB.
>
> We badly need to tighten up our writing.

Remember The britanica guy haveing a go at us becuase our article on
encyopedia was too short?
--
geni


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] The a7 speedy

body:
On 12/15/05, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>
> G'day Mgm,
>
<snip>

> WP:MUSIC isn't the be-all and end-all.  A band may be included because
> it's very unusual, or culturally significant, or any number of reasons
> I'm too tired to think of right now.
>
> For instance, I believe we have an article on a Melbourne twee pop
> outfit called Clag.  Now, Clag only released one album ... but for a
> time there they were *very* popular in Melbourne's indie music scene.
> Their music is also extremely unusual: about as twee as twee pop can get
> without becoming nursery rhymes.  Also, it's really good.  But that's
> neither here nor there.
>
> I'd oppose deletion of this band's article (I will be most hurt if
> anyone takes the opposite view solely because of WP:BEANS).  However,
> there are thousands of bands out there with the same or less of a
> profile who are, and should be, deleted.  WP:MUSIC is *generally* a good
> guideline.
>
> There was a new user on AfD recently who opposed deletion of every band
> iff WP:MUSIC was mentioned by the nominator or a voter (if a nominator
> attempts to argue for deletion without mentiong WP:MUSIC, by the way,
> there's often something wrong).  I am not nearly so extreme.  But just
> because a band fails to meet the "notability guidelines" doesn't mean we
> should delete it.  It's not a bad argument for doing so, admittedly.
>
>
> --
> Mark Gallagher
> "What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
> - Danger Mouse
>
Like allmusic the number of albums available is just one of the
criteria it could fit. A band doesn't need to fit all the criteria
listed. One or 2 of them is enough. If the claim they're extremely
popular can be referenced that, together with "their music is unusual"
should make quite a case for keeping it. Unusual music would make them
important to their genre right?

Mgm


from_name: steven l. rubenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
It is natural that as we grow our values take more certain form, and our
understanding of them, and the reasons for them, develop.

I believe that Verifiability and No original research are two policies
essential to the future of the project, which is to produce a high-quality
encyclopedia.  If other encyclopedias are not rigorous on these matters, it
is because their articles are generally written by PhD.s or graduate
students, and are peer-reviewed.  I do not want our articles to have to be
written by PhD.s or go through mandated and rigorous
peer-review.  Therefore, I think these two policies are necessary.  And
hand-in-hand with them, our Cite sources guideline is just as important.

If I have been following this discussion adequately (and I admit I often
miss things) many people have concerns about how realistic it is to expect
every editor, especially newbies, to comply with these standards.  And I
appreciate these concerns.  However, I do not think the issue is compliance
with these standards as such.  I think there is a different issue.

Specifically, it is our articles that must comply with these
standards.  This I think is important for one simple reason that gets at
the heart of our project: it is a collaborative work in process.

If Wikipedia is as I believe it is and ought to be a collaborative work in
process, then our policies are ideals to which we expect our articles to
aspire, but no one editor can bear the full responsibility of achieving this.

This, at least, has always been my understanding of our prized NPOV
policy.  For example, I just added considerable material on the role of
"love" in Judaism in the "Judaism and Christianity" article.  I have no
doubt that I have failed to express the full range of Jewish
views.  Moreover, I am not qualified to explain the Christian views.  Does
this mean I have violated NPOV?  I do not think so, because I have
identified which point of view I have represented (and here, citing sources
is practically a requirement).  And I have left notices on a variety of
talk pages, of both articles and users, inviting them to add more Jewish
views and Christian views.  This is what I mean by a collaborative
effort.  It may not be this week or this month but I have no doubt that in
a year this section of the article will represent a variety of views fairly.

In other words, I wrote my contribution so as not to break our NPOV policy,
and so as to leave room for others to contribute.

I just think we should take the same approach to Verifiability.  No one
should deliberately add unverifiable information in an article, and if they
do, it should be deleted.  Moreover, no one should bear the bull
responsibility of providing all sources.  In the Capitalism article someone
has made claims about communism.  I did not immediately demand that they
provide a source.  I first when to my books by Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Trotsky, and Mao.  I could not find confirmation in any of the books for
some of those claims added by another editor.  Had I, I would have added
the sources myself -- this is what I mean by collaboration.

In one case I could not find a source and said so, and another contributor
provided the source -- this is what I mean by collaboration.

I would demand that the specific editor adding specific information provide
the source only if I could not find the source myself and suspected that
the information were unverifiable.  If the contributor in question, as well
as other contributors, cannot find a verifiable source, I do believe that
warrants deletion.  But my point is this: I believe verifiability should
and will be achieved through a collaborative process.

That said, I also insist on the corollary: our collaborative process should
be dedicated to producing articles based on verifiable sources.  A
collective process requires a collective commitment.

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] OfficialWire: Founded On Porn,
	Wikipedia Shapes The Way You Think

body:
Link is of questionable work-safeness.

http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=20683

Not sure if OfficialWire is a news source to care about or not, but it
is in Google News Alerts.


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Foundation-l] CANCEL BRIAN0918'S POST

body:
Brian0918 has asked me to cancel his post; his Gmail appears to be
faulty so he cannot do this himself.

~Mark Ryan

On 15/12/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nature has a special report at
> http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html ,  detailing
> the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the
> Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's,
> they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With Maveric149's
> help, I did:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follow-up:__How_do_the_article_sizes_compare.3F
>
> Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
> KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
>
> Put another way:  Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were
> also 2 1/2 times longer on average.
>
>
> Can someone please check my math, I did this pretty fast, and was half
> asleep :)  It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark
> estimate.  Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text,
> and removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other
> big tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature
> article was published.
>
> Raul654 and I separately submitted stories to Slashdot, and I would
> suggest anyone willing do something similar. The more requests they have
> for this, the more likely they are to accept it.
>
> brian0918
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] CANCEL BRIAN0918'S POST


subject: [Foundation-l] CANCEL BRIAN0918'S POST


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [WikiEN-l] BBC News Online Story.

body:
Sherool wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:29:42 +0100, Gordon Joly
> <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
>>
>> Wikipedia survives research test
>>
>> The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as
>> the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
>>
>> Full article at:
>>
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
>>
>
> Neat, one nit pick though, where to they keep pulling these numbers of
> the number of contributors from? 13,000 contributors?
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics> says there are
> 686,624 users. Now granted not ALL of those have contributed (not
> constructively anyway), but still...
>
> --[[User:Sherool]]
>
>
They may be talking about those who made 5 or more edits in the last
month. of which there were 13174 in September 2005, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm

-- Neil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
On 12/15/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> A better approach is for all of us in our regular editing start
> gradually asking more often for a reference and do more deleting when
> it is not provided.

Heh. "Do you have a reference for that?" has always been the warcry of
our more skilled edit warriours.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BBC News Online Story.

body:
At 13:43 +0000 15/12/05, Phil Boswell wrote:
>"Gordon Joly" <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote in
>message news:p0623090dbfc711d3a29a@[192.168.116.8]...
>>
>>  Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
>>
>>  Wikipedia survives research test
>>
>>  The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the
>>  Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
>>
>>  Full article at:
>>
>>  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
>
>That's pretty neat, especially considering that the BBC's own H2G2 could be
>considered a rival to Wikipedia in certain circles.
>
>Does anybody know if the Nature people have published the errors that they
>found, so that they could be corrected?
>
>Obviously it would have been really appropriate if they could have corrected
>them as they went, but apparently the checkers weren't even told that what
>they were checking came from Wikipedia so as to avoid bias :-)
>--
>Phil
>[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>
>
>

AFAIK, H2G2 was bought (software and all rights) from "The Digital
Village" and the software is still in use.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/

See also

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/

which is an interesting development for the licence fee funded BBC.

Also, BBC News Online is not the same part of the BBC as BBC Online;-)

--
Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
gordon.joly at pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
http://www.loopzilla.org/


from_name: Delirium

subject:
[Foundation-l] Closer look at Nature's results: Average article
	size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB;
	Britannica: 2.60 KB. Number of errors per 2KB
	for Wikipedia: 1;	Britannica: 6.5

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:

>I believe Britannica and Wikipedia are pursuing the same goals, with
>different means.
>
Well, not quite the same goals.  Britannica does not in any way advance
the goal of having a Free compendium of human knowledge.

-Mark


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR Unenforceable

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

JAY JG wrote:

>> From: Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> Ryan Delaney wrote:
>>
>> Yes it happens with quite a few policies most recently NPOV but
>> 3RR is something that's not just like other policies where
>> occasionally issues pop up but 3RR at the fundamental level seems
>> to be flawed by the fact that it is misused by those who wish to
>> gain an upper edge in content disputes and administrators who try
>> to enforce it have to end up digging through edit warring and
>> conflicts many times and much of the time end up being villified
>> for it even more than administrators normally are for doing their
>> jobs... and coming from someone who gets threats and personal
>> attacks against him quite a bit that's saying a lot. Enforcing
>> 3RR has become an everyday battle. ~~~~
>
>
> The alternative is (and was) worse.
>
> Jay.

You're right, of course. Part of the job of being in administration is
that you have to deal with unreasonable people, and this is certainly
no less true on Wikipedia.  It's probably best to just sigh and move
on rather than take the trollish actions personally.  Besides,
revoking 3RR because some people use it as an excuse for citations of
"administrator abuse" by "rouge admins" isn't going to be a solution,
because those people will complain no matter what. 3RR is just the
excuse they use.

Ryan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFDocuD6MKb8lYmCtcRAtPtAJ9Bc5QGyoQaeS9DX0gaU9TDFsMspACfdtZK
pameddvzNayW3R+qf2eEfU8=
=KFi2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Sherool

subject: [WikiEN-l] BBC News Online Story.

body:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:29:42 +0100, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com>
wrote:

>
> Last Updated: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 10:42 GMT
>
> Wikipedia survives research test
>
> The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as
> the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
>
> Full article at:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
>

Neat, one nit pick though, where to they keep pulling these numbers of the
number of contributors from? 13,000 contributors?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics> says there are 686,624
users. Now granted not ALL of those have contributed (not constructively
anyway), but still...

--
[[User:Sherool]]


from_name: Snowspinner

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On Dec 15, 2005, at 3:08 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> This resembles a circular argument.
>
> Is there any word or phrase in *common usage* (i.e., we can't coin a
> Wikipedia-only neologism) that covers what is meant by
> "pseudoscience"?

Penn and Teller have been using "bullshit" for a while now, but I bet
that would be even less popular.

-Phil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
> When I do serious editing I am usually working from a book or
> newspaper article and I have the reference at hand. It would
> often be
> very hard for someone else to find that passage just going from
> whatever I put into a Wikipedia article. So it is easy to put in
> exact references.

I, by contrast, almost never do such editing, and often work with
articles of low quality (eg, in the fields of skiing, snowboarding, rock
climbing, computer games...).  There is often a lot that can be done to
improve the article by restructing, rewriting, removing POV or adding
snippets of general information - even with limited or no knowledge of
the subject.  People like me would probably throw their hands in the air
and stop working overnight if required to find references for
everything.

The thing is, for many people, editing is *fun*. I actually honestly
gain pleasure from taking an unstructured 1000 word article and turning
it into a 500 word structured one. Finding references is *work*. If you
know something to be true, to find a reputable refernce to back you up
is simply hard work in many cases.  "no original research" says that if
something is true, it should be easy to find a reputable reference -
well, it isn't always.

There really should be different sourcing guidelines for different
fields in Wikipedia - popular culture is just "different" to history,
science or geography.

I also suspect that a guideline could say somewhere that if it's
possible to verify something on google, then that may be good enough in
some circumstances.  As opposed to making a claim that cannot be
verified even by someone searching the entire internet.

Steve


from_name: Brian

subject: [WikiEN-l] The George W. Bush article: is this still a wiki?

body:
I think this problem has been thoroughly discussed on the article's talk
page, and the evidence clearly shows that this variable drastically cuts
down on the number of random vandalisms. Please leave your complaints on
the talk page rather than fishing for support on the mailing list. Oh,
and I am that idiot. :)

brian0918

------

Is this still a wiki, or do we have a policy of hindering edits on
certain articles?

The George W. Bush article is rather large, about 95 kilobytes, but
fortunately like most of our larger articles it's divided into many
smaller sections which can be edited individually.

Except they can't.  Someone has *deliberately* inserted a
"noeditsection" directive into this article, and all suggestions that
this hinders editing are resisted, on the grounds that, as well as
hindering legitimate edits, it hinders vandalism.

I'm in a bit of a spitting fury over this.  It seems to be the
silliest situation.  If I want to correct a spelling error, I should
not be hindered in doing so by the action of some well-meaning idiot.


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
geni wrote:

>On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 12/14/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.
>>>
>>>
>>Just what do you mean by that?  There's no reason why we need to
>>continue to grant admin privileges to people who abuse them.
>>
>>Kelly
>>
>>
>
>We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any
>reasonable scale is not an option.
>
>
>--
>geni
>
>
No big deal, remember? Deopping should be as easy as opping, IMO.
Anyway, I think a lot of admins (including myself) have misused rollback
at one time or another, or just misclicked (due to impulse?). I support
hitting people who misuse rollback on the head with a cluestick, but
unless the admin refuses to heed the advice, I'm not sure deopping would
be the right thing. (Though it's always up to the community.) This is
also why I think removing rolled back edits from the page history is a
*bad thing*. Just because it's no longer in the article doesn't make a
particular edit bad. In addition, as others have noted, we'll lose
history of vandalism and disputes. (Although it would be funny to see a
user talk littered with {{test5}}s but nothing in
[[Special:Contributions]].)

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think this problem has been thoroughly discussed on the article's talk
>>page, and the evidence clearly shows that this variable drastically cuts
>>down on the number of random vandalisms.
>>
>>
>
>And, no doubt, the number of edits!
>
>
Consider it necessary semi-protection. Unless you plan on watching that
article for vandalism, which, without that NOEDITSECTION, happens once
every 2-5 minutes, please do not complain so vehemently. This appears to
be the best option until next month when some big changes occur. If you
want, you can use a browser that allows you to search in edit boxes,
such as Internet Explorer. But, the reality is, the majority of the
George W. Bush article is alright and in need of little editing. The
other option, which will happen if you remove the NOEDITSECTION, is to
once again protect the page, so that only admins can edit it. This is a
much freer option.


body:
Also, there is now a Firefox extension allowing you to search in edit boxes!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Browser_Integration#Search_within_Textarea_Extension

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think this problem has been thoroughly discussed on the article's talk
>>page, and the evidence clearly shows that this variable drastically cuts
>>down on the number of random vandalisms.
>>
>>
>
>And, no doubt, the number of edits!
>
>
>
>
>>Please leave your complaints on
>>the talk page rather than fishing for support on the mailing list.
>>
>>
>
>I'll do both.  This is ludicrous.  It's a wiki.
>
>
>
>
>>Oh,
>>and I am that idiot. :)
>>
>>
>>
>Quite.
>
>
>


from_name: Liviu Andronic

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Why MO.wikipedia. - Moldovan,
	are written in cyrillic ?

body:
On 10/12/05, V. Ivanov <amikeco at gmail.com> wrote:
> Stop talking nonsense about my country. ;) Wikipedia is a neutral
> place, it's not a place for nationalist extremists like you.
>
> Sl.
>
> 2005/12/10, Adrenalin <adrenalinup at gmail.com>:
> > I say it again, the only Moldovans who write Moldovian language using
> > cyrillic are the Transnistrian ones, but they are FORCED by russian
> > MILITARY FORCES! (read more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria)
> > They don't choose that, the RUSSIA CHOOSE FOR THEM! (or have you heard
> > of any referendum?).
> ...
> > Or i feel like wikipedia are under russian military forces influence too...

I do not think there is a problem of national extremism here. It is
pure indignation. I was born in Moldova, I was taught Romanian in
school and passed the Baccalaureate exam on Romanian and on the
History of Romanians, I spoke all my life Romanian, I wrote it always
with the Latin script, and I come on Wikipedia - a decent source of
information - and I find out that actually it is Moldovan that we
speak in Moldova, and that we write it with the Cyrillic script (that
I couldn't even use for writing anything in Romanian and that does not
represent all the Romanian sounds, anyway). And furthermore, taking
into consideration the way mo.wikipedia is organized (containing all
the Cyrillic content), I conclude that Cyrillic Moldovan is
representative of Moldova. This is the non-sense in all this issue.

OK, so let it be that Moldovan language existed and exists, but only
in Cyrillic script, and only as an artificial language that was always
imposed by the authorities. This should not suggest that it has
anything to do on mo.wikipedia. As it was said in previous posts, this
is Moldova's domain, where Romanian is used (no matter what the
authorities say). If anything finds it sound to maintain a Cyrillic
Moldovan Wikipedia, let it be. However, not on mo.wikipedia. A
compromise place would be mo-cyr.wikipedia. Anyway, Wikipedia is
structured by languages and not by countries. There is no
nz.wikipedia, nor au.wikipedia, nor at.wikipedia.org. There are no New
Zealand, Australian or Austrian languages. There was once a Moldovan
Cyrillic language that is presently imposed to a minority of citizens
of Moldova that live in a separatist region called Transnistria. As it
was said earlier, mo.wikipedia is just a means of disinformation.
Mo.wikipedia should be keeped only as a disambiguation page, having a
redirect to ro.wikipedia.

A compromise solution, in my opinion:
1) Move all the mo.wikipedia content to a mo-cyr.wikipedia.
2) Remove Node_us' administrative powers over mo.wikipedia and give
him the Administrator privileges on mo-cyr.wikipedia. Thus he
conserves the Administrator status over the Wikipedia that he created
(in the sense of having most contributed to it).
3) Organize an election for a new mo.wikipedia Administrator. I
believe Ronline or Oleg Alexandrov would be good candidates (of
course, under the condition that they desire so). Mo.wikipedia should
be administered by a Moldovan or a Romanian.

Thus this issue will cool down. At least for the moment.

So, please, could an Administrator - with enough privileges - join
this discussion?


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote

>  "no original research" says that if
> something is true, it should be easy to find a reputable reference -
> well, it isn't always.

Agree - it's an academic model but even in intensely-covered areas of
academia there can be things that are known, and known to be known, without
people knowing why they are known (called 'folklore').  So it is a bit
simplistic.

Charles


body:
On 12/15/05, Brian <brian0918 at gmail.com> wrote:

>>But, the reality is, the majority of the George W. Bush article is
>>alright and in need of little editing.
>>
>>
>
>
>You says it's alright and in little need of editing, so we don't have
>to worry about the fact that you are deliberately taking steps that
>you know will hinder editing of the article.
>
>You appear to have admitted that you're deliberately taking steps to
>maliciously hinder the editing of this article.  I think that can be
>regarded as vandalism.  Please stop it, the article does not belong to
>you and you do not have the right to render bona fide editing of the
>article extremely difficult.
>
If it's vandalism, it's the first vandalism to be universally supported
on an article's talk page. Thank you for picking one sentence to attack
and ignoring the rest of my statement.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
<slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote

> And yet there's no such
requirement when adding a claim about a living person that could
potentially damage them. That discrepancy suggests we have our
priorities upside down.

No libels or slurs are welcome on Wikipedia.  That said, the risk of
blandness in dealing with live people is very real.  We _must not_ give
people the right of approval on what WP writes about them.

Charles


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Fund drive started

body:
The fourth quarter 2005 Wikimedia fund drive has started. Please make sure all
[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] messages on all wikis have a translated version of the fund drive notice.

See:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4_planning/Translations

This drive will be held for 3 weeks and thus end at 00:00 UTC Friday 6 January 2006.

-- Daniel Mayer

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Fund drive started


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

body:
Note: Some of these proposals propose using the three letter sil codes
for the projects in question, this is higly unadvisable because there
might be an ISO code issued that equals that code in the future.