body:
On 31/03/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/31/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> > In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future.  And therefore
> > it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and
> > more serious about quality.

> Any proper measure of quality for Wikipedia also includes comprehensiveness.

Yes. These proposals to produce a polished Wikipedia by razing the
existing works in progress to the ground completely fail to take into
account that en:wp's ridiculously broad spread of articles is one of
its greatest strong points and a reason for its massive popularity.

- d.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] deleting unsourced articles ..... gradually

body:
If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how
about blanking them?

More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged,
replace the article with a template saying "This article has been
removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by
clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by
editing the previous version and adding sources."

That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading
unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the
template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all
Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for
anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and
it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up
than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 31/03/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how
> about blanking them?
> More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged,
> replace the article with a template saying "This article has been
> removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by
> clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by
> editing the previous version and adding sources."
> That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading
> unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the
> template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all
> Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for
> anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and
> it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up
> than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.

Probably not on living bios, but if those who wish to raze much of
Wikipedia to the ground in order to save it have their way, this would
be better than utter destruction.

- d.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Mohamed Magdy

subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 3/30/07, christophe.henner at wikimedia.fr <christophe.henner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> And reveal there identity publicly.
>
> I don't know that publicly is important. I think that revealing it to
> the foundation is very important.

For trust issues, yes.

   I think that being over 18 is also
> important.

Why important?


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


from_name: William Pietri

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
Angela wrote:
> On 3/31/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES
>> CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
>>
>
> One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents
> correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
>

Well, I wouldn't say it prevents it.

As a guideline, I think it discourages it, but if a freshly-arrived
person with a conflict of interest actually corrects an article (as
opposed to the more common COI-driven "improvements") I'd be very
surprised if somebody undid it solely out of process worship. Especially
if what they're correcting is uncited defamatory material of the sort
that apparently ruins lives.

William


body:
> Probably not on living bios, but if those who wish to raze much of
> Wikipedia to the ground in order to save it have their way, this would
> be better than utter destruction.

I don't see any need for living bios to be singled out. This policy
would be in addition to WP:BLP.


from_name: Samuel Klein

subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Sebastian Moleski wrote:

> Actual abuse isn't necessary to be subject to a lawsuit. People who
> volunteer to perform checkuser functions must be fully aware of the
> responsibilities their actions incur and the possible consequences of those
> actions. It may be customary to assume good faith in Wikimedia projects.
> Unfortunately, the real world doesn't always work that way.

With respect: ANYTHING AT ALL can subject a project or person to a
lawsuit.  Every editor of the site can do something that would subject
someone to a related lawsuit -- the someone could be an individual editor
who the suer tracks down, the foundation, or anyone else in the world.
Many such suits would be woefully misguided, but they could be brought all
the same.

Please describe actual risk of exposure if you are proposing policy
changed founded in legal FUD.  FUD is not always 'wrong' -- there are
cases in which there really is justifiable uncertainty and doubt, and in
which it is proper to be fearful as a result.  But please do not spread
this sense without attention to detail, or without addressing the question
of how likely a particular disaster scenario is.  Then we can consider why
such scenarios have not yet happened, and what the tradeoffs are to being
paranoid about security [at what point do we shut down the site to all
edits, remove all biographies, and only modify it further in response to
takedown requests?].

SJ

[I said earlier that I agree weakly with the statement that IF we have
explicit legal concerns, it makes sense to describe the necessary response
in terms of age of majority in the local jurisdiction... I am not at all
convinced that these concerns merit the policy changes being discussed.]


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
On 3/31/07, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > On 3/30/07, christophe.henner at wikimedia.fr <christophe.henner at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> And reveal there identity publicly.
> >
> > I don't know that publicly is important. I think that revealing it to
> > the foundation is very important.
>
> For trust issues, yes.
>
>    I think that being over 18 is also
> > important.
>
> Why important?

Because people who have checkuser are trusted with information that
could mean they end up in court one day, whether to testify for or
defend the Foundation. As such, they should have the capacity to act
without the consent of their parents.

I believe 18 is a(n almost?) world-wide age at which people attain
majority, and are considered able to act responsibly before the law.

Delphine

--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Klingon Wiktionary closed

body:
On 31/03/07, Elisabeth Anderl <n9502784 at students.meduniwien.ac.at> wrote:
> What legitimate purpose to Wikimedia's mission do serve then Esperanto,
> Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, etc. Wiktionaries?
> You might want to lock all invented languages then.
> The message You got on tlh.wikt. is unaccaptable. But it should not be a
> reason for closing that wikt.
> Please have a look at the statements here
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9164
>
> The reason to reopen it is:
> It is a _dictionary_ of an invented language. We have other Wiktionaries
> of that kind.
> Also, as I could see, there are quite active contributors there, so this
> wikt. got even bigger than some of the other mentioned invented
> languages sites not closed.

One can't dismiss all constructed languages out of hand. Esperanto,
for one, has an ISO 639 code (1, 2, and 3) and has a signficant level
of usage. Several other constructed languages come close to this.

Despite Klingon not being the same in terms of real-world usage, I'm
not sure what harm such projects do. If they bring people to Wikimedia
who wouldn't otherwise be here, then they are good.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
  James,

Quoting James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com>:

> {{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
>
> Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been
> kept after an AfD.

  If this worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

                           Jkelly


body:
On 31/03/07, Elisabeth Anderl <n9502784 at students.meduniwien.ac.at> wrote:
> What legitimate purpose to Wikimedia's mission do serve then Esperanto,
> Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, etc. Wiktionaries?
> You might want to lock all invented languages then.
> The message You got on tlh.wikt. is unaccaptable. But it should not be a
> reason for closing that wikt.
> Please have a look at the statements here
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9164
>
> The reason to reopen it is:
> It is a _dictionary_ of an invented language. We have other Wiktionaries
> of that kind.
> Also, as I could see, there are quite active contributors there, so this
> wikt. got even bigger than some of the other mentioned invented
> languages sites not closed.
>
> Thanks,
> best regards,
> Elisabeth Anderl -aka- spacebirdy
>
> Brion Vibber escribi?:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Per the announcement I put in the sitenotice last month, I have locked
> > the Klingon-language Wiktionary, http://tlh.wiktionary.org/
> >
> > As far as I know there was never any deliberate intention to have such a
> > site (it would have been automatically created alongside the Klingon
> > Wikipedia), and it was forgotten when the Klingon Wikipedia was closed.
> > As soon as I was notified of its existence I put up the notice that it
> > would not stay, so anyone working on it would be aware.
> >
> > The only response I got to my notice was this very rude message, which
> > was hidden away where I never saw it until today:
> > http://tlh.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo%27wI%27_ja%27chuq:Brion_VIBBER
> >
> > It seems pretty clear to me that the site doesn't serve any legitimate
> > purpose to Wikimedia's mission; while it may be _fun_ it would be better
> > hosted somewhere else, perhaps whereever the Klingon Wikipedia ended up?
> >
> > If there's some legitimate reason to reopen it, let me know. We could
> > hand the question off to the Language Committee if desired.

Well, it turns out Klingon has an ISO 639-2 and an ISO 639-3 code too.
If it is recognised as a language by the ISO, why are we rejecting
their right to have a project?

ISO 639 as the basis for the existance of language projects has been
constant used to justify the Belarussian turn of events. Aren't we
acting with double standards to consider ISO 639 all-important for one
language but suggest this is not important for another.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: improving quality on enwiki

body:
On 31/03/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/03/07, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Essentially, what you're describing isn't Wikipedia as it works but a
> different project starting from the same database.
>
> (Put this new project at en.wikipedia.org and put the old one at
> en-dev.wikipedia.org?)

Or http://en-x-old.wikipedia.org/ :)

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
On 3/31/07, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/31/07, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 3/31/07, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Because people who have checkuser are trusted with information that
> > could mean they end up in court one day, whether to testify for or
> > defend the Foundation. As such, they should have the capacity to act
> > without the consent of their parents.
> >
> > I believe 18 is a(n almost?) world-wide age at which people attain
> > majority, and are considered able to act responsibly before the law.
>
> Generally agreed. I would only point out 18 is not world-wide age
> considered as adult who make their legal decision without the consent
> of their parents. In Japan, the age is 20. If you think it important,
> we are better to amend this part "at least 18 and explicitly or over
> the age at which they are capable to act without the consent of their
> parent in the country they reside".

Agreed.

Delphine

--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


from_name: Dmcdevit

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> You know what? Hell with it, what do I care.
>
> I'm removing the lock.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
Aside from the sensationalist fallacious logic that getting rid of
Klingon Wiktionary means we will get rid of every other constructed
language, even ones with native speakers and literature, has anyone
offered any reason to keep it?

We're still talking about the fictional language of a race of
intelligent crustaceans in the 24th century as portrayed in a popular TV
show, right? I think it should be the responsibility of that project's
editors (if there are any), now that the Wikipedia is shut down, to now
take it through the normal procedure for opening new Wiktionaries, as
this one never did.

Dominic


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

body:
>> on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?

> On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
>>
>> To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.

on 3/31/07 1:24 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill at gmail.com wrote:

> This is not a definition of harm I recognise.

It is, however, most precise.

Marc


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
<snip>
> Generally agreed. I would only point out 18 is not world-wide age
> considered as adult who make their legal decision without the consent
> of their parents.
Yes.
  In Japan, the age is 20.
In Egypt, the age is 21.
  If you think it important,
> we are better to amend this part "at least 18 and explicitly or over
> the age at which they are capable to act without the consent of their
> parent in the country they reside".
>
Yes, that would be great.


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Foundation-l] Language Prevention Committee created

body:
> Q. How many Wikipedias have been created since the creation of the
> language subcommittee?
>
> [ ] 0
> [X] Some number greater than 0

If you count the creation of the new be.wp. If you don't, then the
answer is in fact 0.

> Q. What is the difference?
>
> [ ] The Language Subcommittee is having the same effect as a complete blockage
> [X] Everyone who wants a new Wikipedia has become magically stupider
> since the creation of the Language Subcommittee
> [ ] Other: _______________________

Isn't it obvious? It could never be Langcom's fault.

Mark

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


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
If the intial treshhold for keeping bios is low and deletion is suspended
for a significant amount of time, we're going in the right direction without
being too drastic.

I'd like to see some study done that checks how many people would actually
participate in a massive spring-like cleanup that would involve sourcing
lacking articles.

I know I want to help out with such a project, but I have limited time,
limited access to sources, limited language skills (foreign sources are not
preferred but acceptable) and a limited article subject interest. To
effectively source all the articles (in this case bios) that run the risk of
deletion we need to attract the right audience to fix them.

Mgm

On 3/31/07, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > Not every article is a biography of a living person.  I am therefore
> > unwilling to delete large amounts of EXISTING WORK simply because
> > biographical articles are problematic.
> >
> > I am quite happy with a process whereby all articles on living people
> > MUST be sourced by a certain date, or within X days of being tagged.
> > Perhaps we should identify other categories of article that need to be
> > sourced to a deadline as well.
> >
> > I am also happy with a process that says that all new articles after a
> > specified date must be sourced within X days - although I fear that
> > the process-happy will turn that into 'all new articles must be
> > sourced FA-style with inline references for every three words'.
> >
> > I'm also happy with turning on some kind of stable versions feature
> > that makes all unsourced articles default-invisible to browsing
> > readers - but even then, I would wish a 'We have no stable article on
> > this topic, but we do have an unchecked work-in-progress.  Do you want
> > to see it?' thing for those articles.  Remember, the vast majority are
> > not libellous or harmful, just incomplete or unsourced.  In fact, the
> > attack article many times WILL be sourced.
> >
> > I am not happy with any process that sends OK articles on
> > non-contentious subjects to the trash without a conscientious attempt
> > to find sources.
> >
> > -Matt
> >
>
> OK, so let's go simply with biographies of living people, and see how it
> pans out.
>
> What about:
>
> "any biography of a living person, which altogether lacks sources (other
> than webpages directly connected with subject), may be tagged us such.
> If no sources are added within seven days, the article may be deleted.
> However, such a deletion shall be without prejudice to a sourced
> re-creation at a later time [i.e. G4 will not apply, unless the
> re-creation is still unsourced]"
>
> We could initially start tagging articles, but suspend deletions for,
> say, a month - that would allow time for cleaning up of the current
> stock. The tagging would create a large category of 'unsourced BLPs'
> which people could start sourcing to minimise deletions.
>
> Bear in mind this policy is simply asking for a source - any source - so
> it is a very low threshhold. But it would perhaps start to change how we
> think about quality and inclusion.
>
> Doc
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
He's probably thinking of Lower Sorbian =
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/dsb (approx. 300 pages
already), Saterlandic = http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/stq
(approx. 300 pages already), and Latgalian =
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/bat-ltg (approx. 150 pages
already), among others.

The new policy has been confusing for the people who made these
requests originally. They cannot understand why they should have to
make a second request. And besides, if their first request can just be
shot down for no reason at all, why couldn't their second request? I
think this is starting to seem pointless to them. Going directly from
"approved requests" to "automatically denied requests"... makes 0
sense.

Mark

On 31/03/07, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Aside from the kabyle, ottoman turkish, and crimean tatar wikipedias, what
> requests are you thinking of where editors are serious about starting
> their wiki?
>
> By the way -- I haven't said it often enough since incubator.wikimedia
> got set up, but Three Cheers for that lovely site.  It is wonderful to
> have a proper space to develop a new language wiki, precisely so that
> these issues of how to fix a reasonable language policy can take place
> without preventing interested editors from developing new articles in
> their chosen language.
>
> I'm not sure anyone is saying "everything is fine, move along", but I
> think we also have a familiar exaggeration on both sides of the issue of
> what the differences are between two fairly similar positions about what
> is required to start a new wiki... perhaps it is time for a loud
> broadcasting of the new language policy, and a call (in more languages
> than just English) for interested participants to return to
>    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_languages
> and weigh in?
>
> SJ
>
>
> On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Arbeo M wrote:
>
> > 2007/3/30, The Cunctator cunctator at gmail.com:
> >
> >> The reasonable assumption is that something in the process is broken.
> >
> > That's exactly the point. On one side we have a number of well-advanced
> > requests for new languages with good potential. There's a number of editors
> > who are serious about starting their wiki. And on the other side we have a
> > committee in charge enabling this type of progress. Yet, nothing ever
> > happens, instead today we're "celebrating" half a year without a single new
> > Wikipedia.
> >
> > That's just the cold hard facts and they speak for themselves.
> >
> > I don't want this discussion to revolve in circles or drift off into
> > polemics but we'd be a whole lot further if the committee would acknowledge
> > this reality instead of insisting that everything is fine a long as the holy
> > rules are left untouched. Please!
> >
> > --Arbeo
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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


body:
On 31/03/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you read the phrasing about languages, you will find that an ISO-639
> code is a requirement. This does however not imply at all that it guarantees
> the creation of a project. With the ISO-639-6 it is likely that there will
> be a code for the American orthography (among others) for the English
> language. This will not imply at all that it will be ok to split the English
> language Wikipedia.

I was merely suggesting that if we take ISO-639 to be our basis as to
what is a language and what is not a language, Klingon passes the
mark. Your American English example isn't quite the same since
American English still has an expression in Wikimedia project. At the
moment, the Klingon language has no representation on any Wikimedia
project (effectively).

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
There's a bot that runs through the newpages log to search for articles that
are potentially suitable for DYK and there's also a bot that suggests users
articles to edit based on their other edits (assuming those edits display
the editor's interests. There's no reason why we can't have a bot running
that categorizes new articles (either automatically or semi-automatically)
and lists them on the relevant project pages.

The question is if we can find programmers to write such a bot and find
people to run it 24/7

Mgm

On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/31/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > This actually fits well with how wikiprojects have evolved, from loose
> > groups with shared interests to well-organized collaborations - so in a
> > sense it's just blessing what so many people are doing already.
>
> Yes.  The idea came about from talking to people who mainly edit
> content, oddly enough.  Something which the people who play at running
> Wikipedia do not do enough of, I am afraid.
>
> > I like
> > the idea that *every* article should be associated with one or more
> > projects. As always, we can't *make* anybody do anything, but project
> > people usually want to know about new articles in their areas, and right
> > now the discovery process is haphazard - always disconcerting to find a
> > duplicate article created several months earlier.
>
> The haphazardness is the problem that I really think needs to be dealt
> with more than anything else.  It's always the article that we've
> overlooked (e.g. [[John Siegenthaler]]) that rises up to bite us.
>
> Kelly
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
On 31/03/07, Ilario Valdelli <valdelli at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not only, the role is very important and critical.
> Who has knowledge of network and Internet can easily avoid the tools
> which are used by CU. In Italian Wikipedia I have said that I could
> connect to Wikipedia using two different IP and two different users in
> the same time on the same PC avoiding any control. It's very simple.
> IMHO the CU should have a strong knowledge of network.
> It's not a barnstar.

Yep. A checkuser needs to have good network knowledge. Quite a few of
us on en:wp are sysadmins or network admins for a living.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


body:
>> On 3/30/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
>>>
> Slim Virgin wrote:
>>>
>> Wow, Geni.  :-(
>
> on 3/31/07 1:37 PM, William Pietri at william at scissor.com wrote:

> If we are really trying to encourage the broadest participation, then
> demanding that all participants agree to some particular set of values
> conflicts with that.
>
> Naturally, some sets of values work better with our goals than others.
> But I'd rather focus on the goals, where I think we have some hope of
> agreement.
>
The issue here is not "values" but "ethics". Can we please stop confusing
the two?

Marc Riddell


subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation - muslimwikipedia.com


body:
http://muslimwikipedia.com/mw/index.php/Main_Page

>From the intro page
http://www.muslimwikipedia.com/mw/index.php/MuslimWikipedia:Introduction
-

"Firstly there are guidelines, such as all work has to be sourced and
referenced.
Secondly the MuslimWikipedia has a NPOV policy, i.e this isn't the
place for Peoples points of view.
Thirdly the MuslimWikipedia is to present Islam, its History, its
people, its tenets, its faith, its ideas in a POSITIVE light, and
hence negative views of Islam are against the Muslim Wikipedias
policies."

Good going matching points two and three, guys.

- d.


from_name: phoebe ayers

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania scholarships

body:
Scholarships are available to help defray the costs of attending Wikimania
2007, which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan from August 3-5. The deadline for
scholarships has been extended to April 15, 2007; please apply soon.

You can find more information here:
http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
and an application form here:
http://wm07schols.wikimedia.org/apply.php

Registration and our Call for Participation are also both open:
http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration
http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/CfP

Wikimania is the annual conference of the Wikimedia Foundation. It provides
a chance to meet the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia
projects, share ideas and research, and make new friends. All are welcome to
attend and present, but you must be a current editor of a Wikimedia project
to qualify for a scholarship.
Send questions to wikimania-scholarships at wikimedia.org or
wikimania-info at wikimedia.org.

Please translate and widely distribute this notice to your communities.

thank you,
Phoebe Ayers
Wikimania 2007 scholarships committee and program committee


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania scholarships


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimania scholarships


from_name: Ilario Valdelli

subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
Not only, the role is very important and critical.

Who has knowledge of network and Internet can easily avoid the tools
which are used by CU. In Italian Wikipedia I have said that I could
connect to Wikipedia using two different IP and two different users in
the same time on the same PC avoiding any control. It's very simple.

IMHO the CU should have a strong knowledge of network.

It's not a barnstar.

Please... more quality.

Ilario

Florence Devouard wrote:
> to my opinion, should be over 18 of age.
>
> Anthere
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lock new article creation for three months

body:
On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. It's a lot easier to fix
> the 1,5 million articles we have if there's not constantly new stuff pouring
> in. But people will turn to Wikipedia if there's a new hurricane or massive
> flood or to read about a country's new prime minister or president.
>
> These are the type of articles that need to be created and kept up-to-date
> as they happen for maximal effect. If we were to do this for a significant
> amount of time, we'd be severely lacking in articles about current events.
> How do you think we should handle that?

Admins can still create new articles as needed.

I called for a one-month moratorium on new articles in my blog
recently (<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/03/notability-maintainability-and-quality.html>).
 I found Kurt's comment there interesting: the German Wikipedia is
apparently discussing a proposal to disable new article creation one
week out of each month; this proposal is not faring well.

I suppose it is more fun to create than it is to maintain.  Open
source software has the same problem -- which is why there are
hundreds of half-written IRC clients out there.  The only way we got
GIMP to 1.0 was to declare a "feature freeze" and to spend a couple of
months doing nothing but killing bugs.  Wikipedia needs to do
essentially the same thing: stop adding new stuff until they get the
old stuff organized, at least a bit more.  Until they do, the bleeding
will not stop.

Kelly


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:46 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

> Which is exactly why only sources from the subject are not enough.
> People
> and companies are notoriously bad at determining their own
> notability, so to
> do that (and avoid uncontestable deletions of good information) you
> need at
> least one outside source to determine notability.

And that's fine(ish). But this amounts to an incontestable speedy
deletion for articles of questionable notability. That's not OK.

-Phil


body:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:58 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

> This proposal didn't suggest deleting something because it was
> foreign. If
> it's a legitimate Andorran political party, there will be secondary
> sources
> although they are in French. English sources are preferred but
> French or
> Peruvian ones are acceptable if those are the only ones the editor
> working
> on it can find or understand.

You miss the point - it's not that these articles can't get sources.
It's that they don't have sources now and have a very small pool of
editors working on them who would be overwhelmed, if not driven off
entirely, by the demand to source all of the articles or see them
deleted.

-Phil


body:
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As a followup, doc's suggestion presupposes that unsourced == crap
> most of the time, which is not true.

Doc said unsourced does not equal crap. I didn't see anything about "most of
the time". Even if it's true some of the time, this idea would lead to
deleting non-crap. And doing that even once is one time too many. That's
what I believe to be the point, although doc glasgow's mileage may vary.

Mgm


body:
On 3/31/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how
> about blanking them?
>
> More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged,
> replace the article with a template saying "This article has been
> removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by
> clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by
> editing the previous version and adding sources."
>
> That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading
> unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the
> template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all
> Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for
> anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and
> it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up
> than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.

That would certainly deal with the fact that regular editors can't help in
sourcing deleted entries. Of course, we should avoid articles reaching
deletion stages to begin with. We should focus more on how to fix them than
how to get rid of non-fixed work (except perhaps in cases where inaccuracy
can lead to significant problems like biographies).


body:
Oldak Quill wrote:
>
> I, for one, object to the closure of projects based on elitist
> concerns as to the origin of the language. What matters is the place
> of the language in the world now. This language is, crucially,
> recognised as a language by the International Standardisation
> Organisation
>
>

There is no sense of "recognition" in the ISO code designations. As they
say for the 693-3 codes, "it is a goal for this part of ISO 639 to
provide an identifier for every distinct human language that has been
documented, whether living, extinct, or constructed, and whether its
modality is spoken, written or signed." There are 7,589 currently. It's
not about elitism; in fact, it's rather likely to me that other
constructed languages of the same speaker population would not have
gotten a wiki in the first place. I agree that what matters is the place
of the language in the world right now, and that place is as a backdrop
to a fictional universe with a fanbase who are sometimes known to use
the words amongst themselves. It is encyclopedically interesting as a
cultural phenomenon, but has no place as a dictionary. Words that aren't
in common independent use except in reference to a literary work, or
discussion in the context of that work, are not material for a general
dictionary.

Dominic


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

references:
<C23407BE.29DD%michaeldavid86@comcast.net>
	<460E9E83.4070609@scissor.com> <460EABB6.8060704@ntlworld.com>

body:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 2:43 PM, doc wrote:

> "We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the
> price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we
> can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if
> we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have
> some
> of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're
> more
> concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking
> your life.
>

Oh stop being ridiculous. This is straw man argumentation at its most
needlessly outlandish.

Nobody, to my knowledge, is advocating unchecked expansion of
articles and the maintenance of bad information. Nobody doesn't want
libelous and false information to be removed.

However...

1) The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error-
free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones
is foolish.
2) The statements "we need to improve the accuracy of our articles"
and "we should begin large-scale deletion of the content that made us
so prominent in the first place" are in no way equivalent.

There are ways to demonstrate a commitment to improving accuracy
without sacrificing the process that developed a very good resource.
I tend to think that WIkipedia is pretty good. Needs improvement, but
is pretty good. I wouldn't care if it weren't. So I tend to be
skeptical of solutions that seem to involve throwing a lot of it out.

The biggest problem is not unsourced information - it's false
information. It's appallingly libelous shit that anyone who looked at
the article would see if only people looked at the article. But with
one million articles, we can't afford to look at the article. But
adding sourcing requirements won't change that, because no rule will
suddenly increase the number of eyes on articles.

Hence the need for stable versions to be implemented. And for a time-
out where we work on creating stable versions of as many of the
million as we can manage before we proceed with new material.

-Phil


from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
The closure of the tlh.wikipedia was announced by Jimmy Wales at Wikimania
.. The room cheered and thought it a good idea. This was before the
lanuguage committee was started.

When you read the phrasing about languages, you will find that an ISO-639
code is a requirement. This does however not imply at all that it guarantees
the creation of a project. With the ISO-639-6 it is likely that there will
be a code for the American orthography (among others) for the English
language. This will not imply at all that it will be ok to split the English
language Wikipedia.

Having two projects for Belarus is a really bad situation.  For me the
only reasonable
outcome would be when the two projects merge.

The existence of new policies does not imply that they will be retroactively
applied. When this is thought to be unfair, I do agree, it is often not
fair.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On 3/31/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 31/03/07, Elisabeth Anderl <n9502784 at students.meduniwien.ac.at> wrote:
> > What legitimate purpose to Wikimedia's mission do serve then Esperanto,
> > Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, etc. Wiktionaries?
> > You might want to lock all invented languages then.
> > The message You got on tlh.wikt. is unaccaptable. But it should not be a
> > reason for closing that wikt.
> > Please have a look at the statements here
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9164
> >
> > The reason to reopen it is:
> > It is a _dictionary_ of an invented language. We have other Wiktionaries
> > of that kind.
> > Also, as I could see, there are quite active contributors there, so this
> > wikt. got even bigger than some of the other mentioned invented
> > languages sites not closed.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > best regards,
> > Elisabeth Anderl -aka- spacebirdy
> >
> > Brion Vibber escribi?:
> > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > > Hash: SHA1
> > >
> > > Per the announcement I put in the sitenotice last month, I have locked
> > > the Klingon-language Wiktionary, http://tlh.wiktionary.org/
> > >
> > > As far as I know there was never any deliberate intention to have such
> a
> > > site (it would have been automatically created alongside the Klingon
> > > Wikipedia), and it was forgotten when the Klingon Wikipedia was
> closed.
> > > As soon as I was notified of its existence I put up the notice that it
> > > would not stay, so anyone working on it would be aware.
> > >
> > > The only response I got to my notice was this very rude message, which
> > > was hidden away where I never saw it until today:
> > > http://tlh.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo%27wI%27_ja%27chuq:Brion_VIBBER
> > >
> > > It seems pretty clear to me that the site doesn't serve any legitimate
> > > purpose to Wikimedia's mission; while it may be _fun_ it would be
> better
> > > hosted somewhere else, perhaps whereever the Klingon Wikipedia ended
> up?
> > >
> > > If there's some legitimate reason to reopen it, let me know. We could
> > > hand the question off to the Language Committee if desired.
>
> Well, it turns out Klingon has an ISO 639-2 and an ISO 639-3 code too.
> If it is recognised as a language by the ISO, why are we rejecting
> their right to have a project?
>
> ISO 639 as the basis for the existance of language projects has been
> constant used to justify the Belarussian turn of events. Aren't we
> acting with double standards to consider ISO 639 all-important for one
> language but suggest this is not important for another.
>
> --
> Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>


body:
On 31/03/07, Arbeo M <arbeo.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Where did the WMF officially say that multilingualism isn't a priority? A
> link would be nice so readers can check that for themselves.
> Or do you rather mean that having things exactly the way the subcommittee
> wants them to be has no priority? OK, fair enough  - but what would be an
> adequate response to that?

Indeed.

Q. How many Wikipedias have been created since the creation of the
language subcommittee?

[ ] 0
[ ] Some number greater than 0

Q. What is the difference?

[ ] The Language Subcommittee is having the same effect as a complete blockage
[ ] Everyone who wants a new Wikipedia has become magically stupider
since the creation of the Language Subcommittee
[ ] Other: _______________________

- d.


body:
on 3/31/07 4:07 PM, William Pietri at william at scissor.com wrote:

> we'll be more
> effecting focusing on shared practical goals then achieving mental
> conformity.

Sharing (and achieving) goals requires a shared code of ethics as well as a
set of common values. And, "achieving mental conformity" is the very last
thing I would advocate.

Marc


body:
On 3/31/07, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>
> We either do that by
>
> 1) drastically lifting notability thresholds to reduce the number of
> biographies to a level we can manage to maintain and monitor.
>
> OR
>
> 2) introducing a strong quality threshold, where we don't include, or
> swiftly delete, articles that aren't currently up to it. Yes, in theory
> they can be fixed, and if someone is actually willing to do it, then
> fine; but most wont be fixed and should not hang around 'because in an
> ideal wiki we'd fix them'

Both options rely on removing content. Option 1 would lead to deletion of
perfectly sourced content that needs little maintainance just to make things
manageable which would greatly affect our coverage and not neccesarily get
rid of problem material.

Option 2 focuses on removing material instead of fixing it. We shouldn't let
stuff lie around for years waiting for fixes, but a certain amount of
eventualism is certainly desireable.

There's plenty of less drastic solutions that will move towards the goal at
a slower pace without disrupting the current encyclopedia. If quality
control isn't scaling, quality control in a short time period isn't going to
work any better. I believe the solution to be improving quality control in
Wikipedia through targetted WikiProjects, bots and anti-vandalism type
programs like VandalProof aimed at fixing new articles as they come in.

I offer you:
Option 3) Stem the tide of new unsourced material by monitoring new articles
and organizing a long term effort to cite all existing articles.

And I also offer a question. How much time would it take to give all
currently tagged articles sources? Long articles require more research and
more time and articles about old subjects may require hard to get sources
and library trips to dusty archived books. I don't think it's realistic to
expect all this to get cleaned up in anything less than a year unless every
active Wikipedian pitches in. We need to answer this question before we can
build any kind of realistic time plan.

Mgm


from_name: Tomasz Ganicz

subject: [Foundation-l] Belarusan Wikipedia

body:
2007/3/31, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> Tomasz Ganicz schreef:
> > 2007/3/31, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com>:
> >
> >> On 31/03/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 3/31/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 3/31/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>> Nor is it closed; it lives at
> >>>>>> http://be-x-old.wikipedia.org/
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> Living in a vegetative, comatose fashio, though. The database is locked.
> >>>>>
> >>>> It shouldn't be. I'll try to figure out what's going on there.
> >>>>
> >>> Ah, apparently a misunderstanding; Brion thought a move to "be-x-old"
> >>> was meant to imply that it is an archive of the existing Wikipedia.
> >>> The "old" refers to the orthography, not the wiki.
> >>>
> >>> I have asked him to remove the lockfile; both wikis should be editable
> >>> now. Mind you, it might be a good idea to merge them, to kill one of
> >>> them, or whatever. This is for the community to work out, and I'm not
> >>> going to have us impose a preference for any solution.
> >>>
> >>> For now, the only thing we have authorized the LangCom to decide is
> >>> what the language codes for the respective versions should be if they
> >>> are to be separate. *Not* to close or lock wikis. That is not within
> >>> the authority of the LangCom.
> >>>
> >> Thanks for clearing this up. I think the unannounced lock was one of
> >> the main points of confusion and contention among the community.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > I am wondereing what has happened with all interwiki links which were
> > pointing to the old version. As the old version was two times larger
> > than the new one many interwiki points to the non-existing pages. Even
> > the still existing ones sometimes point to nowhere as the old spelling
> > of them is slightly different the new one. What is the interwiki code
> > for old version?
> > This especially affected Polish Wikipedia, as we have a lot of
> > articles about cities and villages in Biellaruss, as well as the
> > Biellarusian VIPs, but I expect many other Wikipedias are affected as
> > well.
> >
> > And again I am repeating my old questions. Did the LangComm contacted
> > any experts from outisde before this decission was made, or just
> > decided on the basis of short and probably biased discussion on meta?
> Hoi,
> The pywikipedia bot has a program that allows you to change strings ..
> so you can replace "[[be:" with "[[be-x-old".
>
> As to your question, the situation was stark and obvious. The official
> orthography was not accepted. Now the be code does stand for Belarus.
> The current situation is however not really acceptable. Both wikipedias
> should integrate. The current situation with two projects is horrid it
> will result in two biased projects.
>

But the true is that there is around 4 million people who really speak
Belarusian as their mother tongue and vast majority of them are using
old version. It is true that the new version is tough in schools in
Belarus, but this country is really strange in terms of language, as
the Belarusian is a minority language in Belarus. Vast majority of
people, including president of this country and most of goverment
officials does not speak Belarusian and they prefer Russian. Even most
of the Belarusian law acts are curently originaly writen in Russian.
In Minsk in 2006 only 15% of students of primary and secondary schools
decided to learn Belarusian as it is not obligatory subject in
schools. So, the question is what really matters in this case? Is it
important which version of language is though in the govermental
schools in the country, where only minority of people use this
language or rather which version is prefered by majority of people
really using this language? I ask again - did the LangComm checked
which version is used by majority of people for whom Belariusian is
their main, mother tongue? You could for example ask for this experts
from US or German universities, who specialize in history and current
state of this language.

Wikipedias are not country located but language oriented. If they
would be country located the be Wikipedia should be writen rather in
Russian than in Belarusian, or it should be bilingual with majority of
Russian speaking users...

--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html


subject: [Foundation-l] Belarusan Wikipedia


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> The biggest problem is not unsourced information - it's false
> information. It's appallingly libelous shit that anyone who looked at
> the article would see if only people looked at the article.

Acutally, the biggest problem is the appallingly libelous shit that
someone who looked at the article would think was true.

Obviously false statements look bad, but really aren't harmful except
from a PR standpoint.  As I understand it false statements aren't even
considered libelous if no one in their right mind would believe them.

In that sense, sourcing requirements *will* help, and they *will*
increase the number of eyeballs on articles, because a sourced
statement is faster and easier to check than an unsourced one.  A rule
alone might not suddenly increase the number of eyeballs, but a rule
that's enforced would certainly make the eyeballs more effective.

Stable versions could probably help too, if implemented properly.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Report on board meeting in Florida

body:
Hoi,
When you resigned, you did not want to motivate your reasons. You said you
would candidate for the board of trusties. You said that at that time you
would give us your motivation.

Do I understand that you have started your campaign for election? If so we
are entitled to the promised motivation. If not, it would help to have a
more constructive response. I am a bit puzzled with your choice of not being
open about your motivations, I am as puzzled about what you hope to achieve.
The right way to go about things is by fixing issues, suggesting solutions..
Given your recent occupation, your insights might be perfectly valid and
relevant; by not sharing your ideas they become stale.

It is your choice. I hope you will not become one of those that can only
snipe from the sidelines, I hope that you keep your relevance by doing the
right thing.

Thanks,
     GerardM


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about
> the last two lines"
>
> These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not
> untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But
> it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an
> individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims
> about certain activities.

Did you check?

> On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the
> complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure
> they didn't happen. I may have lied.
>
> Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
>
> "We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the
> price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we
> can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if
> we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some
> of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more
> concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.

Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES
CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.


body:
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee at rahul.net wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
> >> This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of
> >> "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we,
> >> as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that
> >> to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical
> >> article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
> >
> > "Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
> >
> Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be unacceptable.

But as several other people have posted, NPOV content *can* do harm
and, for the sake of NPOV, this is acceptable.

How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset? I'm sure
most of us consider it somewhere close to the latter. If a religious
person reads a few of our articles on God and religion and is thrown
into existential crisis (hoping too much?), is this mental upset
"harm"?

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Jossi Fresco

body:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:16 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:

> I do admit that it is not well associated with the current culture in
> enwiki, but that's because the current culture in enwiki is defective
> and problematic and needs to be changed.

And how will you *change* culture? You can't. I will evolve as it
sees fit, if unencumbered by bureaucracy.

-- Jissi


body:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:20 AM, Kelly Martin wrote:

> This is the core, underlying attitude that dooms Wikipedia to
> mediocrity.

I disagree strongly with that statement. You aseert mediocrity by
means of what, exactly?

-- Jossi


from_name: doc

body:
John Lee wrote:
> On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee at rahul.net wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
>>>> This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the
>> concept of
>>>> "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information
>> we,
>>>> as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was
>> that
>>>> to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical
>>>> article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
>>> "Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
>>>
>> Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be unacceptable.
>>
>> Marc
>
>
> If I'm not mistaken, there is a lot of bitterness in the Armenian community
> about the Turkish genocide. Doesn't having an article about the Turkish
> massacre of the Armenians harm the Turks by supporting the Armenian
> bitterness against the Turks? Hell, doesn't having any article which
> objectively states facts that aren't to the liking of somebody harm that
> entity?
>
> I still fail to see why "Do no harm" should be elevated to the status of a
> pillar of WP, or above that. It's a good principle, but if it means throwing
> out NPOV or accuracy, I know what I'd go with.
>
> Johnleemk

This is ridiculous. I did not suggest 'do no harm' was to be a pillar of
wikipedia. I merely
suggested that when we are considering policies for improving wikipedia,
that simply
looking to what might get us sued is insufficient. We should also
consider organising
ourselves to minimise the damage we may do to individuals by having POV
articles, attack pages, or allowing malicious people to post any crap
about them. Here we have a moral as well as a legal responsibility to
minimise harm. We are human beings, we don't need
[[Wikipedia:TheSermonOnTheMount]] to tell us that thinking about others,
and the impact our project has on them, is a Good Thing.
Doc


from_name: Arbeo M

body:
2007/3/30, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> I fail to see it because the WMF has said officially that this does not
> have a
> priority. It is not for us to wonder why.

Where did the WMF officially say that multilingualism isn't a priority? A
link would be nice so readers can check that for themselves.

Or do you rather mean that having things exactly the way the subcommittee
wants them to be has no priority? OK, fair enough  - but what would be an
adequate response to that?

Judging by the opinions brought forward in this thread so far, most users
would opt for the most obvious choice and continue to handle the issue the
way it's been handled in the past six years (which has worked well enough to
get us where we are) until more perfect options will be available.

The language subcommittee, however, comes to a far less logical conclusion
and chooses to cut off any progress instead - for reasons you keep repeating
but very few people outside the committee understand.

I wish you guys would end this fundamentalist "all or nothing at all"
approach, for the sake of our fellow Wikipedians from Kabylia, Yakutia and
other places.

Regards,
--Arbeo


from_name: Sage Ross

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> Stable versions could probably help too, if implemented properly.

Since stable versions finally actually seem to be just around the
corner, with a live alpha version running on the developer's test
wiki, we should probably start talking about what "implemented
properly" will mean.  If I understand the technical parts correctly,
it will enable a pretty open-ended version flagging system, so that
article versions can be flagged (by editors with the appropriate
permissions) "non-vandalized", "checked for accuracy", and whatever
other levels of certification we want to create.  The decision of
which is the minimum display level (what non-editors see) can (I
think) be set on a per-article basis.  So it would make sense to have
a higher bar than just "non-vandalized" for all biographies of living
people.

The questions are, what should that bar be?, and how big a portion of
the editor pool should have the ability to so certify articles?.  The
easy way would be to pick some edit count and time requirement (500
edits, 3 months?); otherwise, we would have to create some kind of
"clueful editor" status aside from admin.

-Sage


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] More concerns about wide scale article protection

body:
Erica wrote:

>I believe many vandals will type in the first thing they think of and
>vandalize that. If they are unable to vandalize, a certain percentage
>will think "oh, that sucks" and move on to some other non-wiki
>activity.
>
It seems as though you are assuming that they are not smart enough to
discover the "Random page" function. :-)

Ec


from_name: Slim Virgin

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 31/03/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > {{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
> > >
> > > Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been
> > > kept after an AfD.
> >
> > {{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on
> > the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a
> > hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]]
> > every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to
> > spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
>
> Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.
>
This isn't carping on the sidelines, James, it's trying to persuade
the community that something needs to change.


body:
2007/3/30, The Cunctator cunctator at gmail.com:

> The reasonable assumption is that something in the process is broken.

That's exactly the point. On one side we have a number of well-advanced
requests for new languages with good potential. There's a number of editors
who are serious about starting their wiki. And on the other side we have a
committee in charge enabling this type of progress. Yet, nothing ever
happens, instead today we're "celebrating" half a year without a single new
Wikipedia.

That's just the cold hard facts and they speak for themselves.

I don't want this discussion to revolve in circles or drift off into
polemics but we'd be a whole lot further if the committee would acknowledge
this reality instead of insisting that everything is fine a long as the holy
rules are left untouched. Please!

--Arbeo


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
>
> On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:58 AM, doc wrote:
>
>> 2) Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the
>> subject's own
>> pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
>>
>> 2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other
>> than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted
>> after 7
>> days.
>> 3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own
>> pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
>>
>
> Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are
> reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly
> reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or
> even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when
> they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's
> perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely
> on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to
> make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some
> people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
>
> And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random
> pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime
> example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really
> think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or
> less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's
> official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well
> served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to
> his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing
> we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on
> him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be
> incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of
> very messy stitching together.)
>
> The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good
> enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be
> speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be
> edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK
> because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I
> just learned something from it!)
>
> -Phil
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for
that..... so it is a poor example.

Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the
odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of
marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5
million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net
impact on the project, not one or two cases.

Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.

Doc


body:
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of
> "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we,
> as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that
> to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical
> article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
>
> And, as far as "choosing a system of ethics" for WP: I don't believe it is
> something you shop around for. But, rather, it develops, and is agreed upon,
> by the Community of persons in WP itself.
>
Editors from English--speaking and European countries do operate under
more or less the same ethical system, which promotes freedom and
fairness, and all the arguments we have are only about where the
balance should lie in any given case. The ethical system was famously
described by John Rawls in his "original position" in A Theory of
Justice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position I doubt there
are many editors from Western countries who don't subscribe to it,
whether they know it or not, and Rawls himself argued that it was in
fact universal.

For anyone not familiar with it, imagine a bunch of people sitting
round a campfire. They're there to make decisions about the type of
society they want to live in (but it can be adapted for practically
any kind of moral decision). They have only a small amount of
information about themselves. I forget what this is, but basically
they know they are human beings, and they have basic information about
the kinds of things that hurt human beings. But they don't know
whether they're male or female, black or white, rich or poor, healthy
or ill, talented or not, beautiful or not. They're behind what Rawls
called the "veil of ignorance."

Using this veil of ignorance, they have to decide what would be fair
in any given situation, knowing that they may actually turn out to be
the poor person in a wealthy society, or the woman in a misogynist
one, or the budding entrepeneur in a socialist one, the black person
in a racist one, and so on. This forces them to place themselves
radically in the shoes of each set of characteristics they consider,
and by carefully considering all positions -- as if considering their
own -- they're able to arrive at a just decision.

Geni, John Rawls would have said that this is your system of ethics,
and that it's buried deep within you as a set of instincts, even if
you feel you've rejected it. :-)


from_name: Sebastian Moleski

subject: [Foundation-l] check user...

body:
On 3/31/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Why important?
>
> I'll revise my position based on Aphaia's comment below:
> "I think that being at least the age of majority in their country of
> residence is important".
>
> Checkusers are in a somewhat unique position to cause irreversible
> harm and cause legal problems for themselves and the foundation. As
> such they should be old enough to assume legal responsibility for
> their actions.
>
> Just be glad that I'm not also suggesting that checkusers be insured. ;)

It might be prudent to use the term "jurisdiction" instead of country if
we're talking semantic details here. Shouldn't this discussion take place on
a talk page somewhere?

Regards,

Sebastian


subject: [Foundation-l] check user...


from_name: James Farrar

subject: [WikiEN-l] Yet another legal threat

body:
On 31/03/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> In this thread:
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=7820
>
> somebody allegedly associated with The American Mutoscope and
> Biograph Company is threatening to sue Wikipedia over his company
> being "done wrong".

[...]

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mutoscope_and_Biograph_Company

"In 2003, Biograph announced that it had acquired title to 1,777 acres
on the Moon for use as a filming location, and Thomas R. Bond II
stated that he planned to start filming there by 2008.[24]"

The guy's a kook, evidently.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> geni wrote:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe.27s_daughter_-_news_story_originating_from_Wikipedia.3F
>> So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
>
> I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was
> referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source, so a
> policy of "instantly nuke any unsourced statements" would have failed to
> catch this.

This was in no way an appropriate external source.  It was, at very
best, original research, but apparently it was not even that, but a flat
out lie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=85665104&oldid=85227651

I am sure you will agree with me that a link to a list of students,
which did not even at that time contain the name, along with a link to a
login page which is alleged to contain the name, does not constitute an
"appropriate external source".

So I think you just didn't read it closely enough.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ken Arromdee

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> It doesn't prevent them editing such articles. It even gives them
> tips on how to handle it properly:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_have_a_conflict_of_interest

No sane Wikipedia newcomer is going to read that section and think they are
permitted to fix their own article about themselves.  If you squint at that
section long enough, you might realize that it doesn't in fact prohibit
editing where there is a conflict of interest, but this is a very non-
obvious reading that is not what anyone's going to think of when the first
thing the article says is that a conflict of interest is strongly discouraged.
A newcomer simply will not have the sophistication to understand that
"discouraged" actually means "encouraged in some cases".

Allowing people to fix errors in articles about themselves won't work unless
you make it *utterly clear* that they can do so.  Having an article which
sounds like it says they cannot, but which upon very careful examination
reveals that it is after all allowed, will not let them know.


body:
geni wrote:
> On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> geni wrote:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe.27s_daughter_-_news_story_originating_from_Wikipedia.3F
>> So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
>
> BLP won't solve that problem.

This is exactly the kind of negative information without valid sources
that I am strongly encouraging people to remove on sight.  So, except
for unrealistic definitions of the word "solve", I think BLP does in
fact help a great deal.


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 30/03/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>
>> It seems to me that an interviewer will for years to come be able to
>> easily find something in Wikipedia that is obviously wrong. Treating
>> that a a problem is accepting a negative premise, which I understand to
>> be a PR mistake.[1] When people catch us in errors, aren't we better off
>> going with positive responses that begin with, "Yes, exactly..."?
>
>
> You got it. "Of course. Wikipedia is not *reliable* in the sense it's
> all checked. It can't be by the process it's written by. You have to
> think when you're reading. But if you do, it's good and useful."
>
> ("But what if people take it as gospel?" "We can't and don't promise
> to think for people. You have to do that for yourself.")
>
> I take this line every time this comes up - live radio, if not TV -
> and it works fine. It would have worked here too.

Well, it more or less DID, and that's what I call dancing.


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> >One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents
> >correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them.
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
>
> It should not do.  Where is the absolute prohibition on correcting
> errors of fact on an article about yourself?

A newcomer--the type of person most likely to be concerned about problems
with their own article--is not going to think "oh, it really strongly
discourages it, but it doesn't absolutely prohibit it, so I guess I'll do it
then".

To anyone who is not a pedant who has been around for a while on Wikipedia,
that COI policy says you can't edit your own article, regardless of whether
its prohibition is not absolute when you look at the fine print.

To anyone who is not a pedant who has been around for a while on Wikipedia,
that COI policy says you can't edit your own article, regardless of whether
its prohibition is not absolute when you look at the fine print.


from_name: Oldak Quill

body:
On 31/03/07, Arbeo M <arbeo.wiki at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2007/3/30, The Cunctator cunctator at gmail.com:
>
> > The reasonable assumption is that something in the process is broken.
>
> That's exactly the point. On one side we have a number of well-advanced
> requests for new languages with good potential. There's a number of editors
> who are serious about starting their wiki. And on the other side we have a
> committee in charge enabling this type of progress. Yet, nothing ever
> happens, instead today we're "celebrating" half a year without a single new
> Wikipedia.
>
> That's just the cold hard facts and they speak for themselves.
>
> I don't want this discussion to revolve in circles or drift off into
> polemics but we'd be a whole lot further if the committee would acknowledge
> this reality instead of insisting that everything is fine a long as the holy
> rules are left untouched. Please!

The system is nice in principle but has proven itself unworkable.
Perhaps, rather than just decrying the failing system, we could come
up with ideas for how a different system could be implemented more
effectively and workably. The old system had its failings too.

The main problem seems to be a disjoint between the wish to create a
project in one's own language and the technical process of preping the
interface and whatnot. Is this a reasonable summary?

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen
> <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
>> I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was
>> referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source
>
> A student email directory?  In what way is that not original research?

Let's be even more clear about it.  EVEN WHEN INSERTED, the claim was
that the name used to be at a certain page (quite probably a flat out
lie), and NOW is behind a login page.

I am a little ashamed to admit something here, but I will.  A while
back, I thought about Robert Mugabe, whose story I used to follow in the
news quite regularly, and I went and read our article about him.  I
remember reading this about his children not being subject to a travel
ban.  I did not follow the link to see the source (I was not editing at
that moment, I was just reading Wikipedia like any other consumer of
information).

A little bell went off in my head that this was a link directly to a
student directory, but I ignored it.  That's a real shame, because if I
had been reading with a little more intensity about BLP issues, I would
have removed it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
> sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error-
> free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones
> is foolish.

This is a false dialectic.  It's not a binary choice; please stop
presenting it as one.  Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but
a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.

Kelly


body:
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?
>
> To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
>
> To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.

This is not a definition of harm I recognise.

The Oxford English Dictionary on "harm": 'To do harm (to); to injure
(physically or otherwise); to hurt, damage. Orig. intr. To be hurtful,
with dative (like L. noc{emac}re), which was sometimes in ME.
expressed by to, but generally became a simple object, making the verb
trans.'

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


body:
Ken Arromdee wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Fred Bauder wrote:
>>> The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material.
>>> Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair
>>> portrait of the person.
>> Yep, that's what happens, but folks need to know that one side is right, the other side wrong. There is no limit to removal of unsourced crap. Repeatedly putting crap back in will, eventually, result in sanctions.
>
> Am I missing something here?  That wasn't about "unsourced crap", it was
> about sourced-but-biased material, which is different.

I am not sure about what example you had in mind Ken, but in this thread
there have been two main examples:

The tv reporter about whom it was claimed that she had a rock star
brother... no source.

The Mugabe children case, which was not "sourced but biased" but rather
appears to have been a totally fabricated pseudo-source that admittedly
had the *formatting* of an actual source.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is this community particularly susceptible to persuasion by rant?

The sensible part of the community is susceptible to persuasion by
rational discussion.  The insensible part is not susceptible by
persuasion by any means.  My recommendation is that the sensible part
needs to accept that it needs to exclude the insensible part from the
community entirely, and proceed to do so.  Unfortunately, as of yet
the sensible part is still too caught up in the belief that everyone
should have a chance to participate to accept that this simply isn't
the case.

Kelly


from_name: cohesion

body:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely
> for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing
> articles.

I'm not completely convinced, but don't forget images, if by some
miracle this gets adopted. :)

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen
>> <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was
>>> referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source
>> A student email directory?  In what way is that not original research?
>
> Original research would have been if someone "pieced together" what
> university she went to through indirect clues - for example finding one
> source that says she lives in that city and another source that says
> she's a student and concluding that that she therefore goes to that
> _particular_ university.
>
> In this case the reference is a primary source that says "these people
> go to this university." A perfectly good reference to cite when saying
> "this person goes to this university." That's hardly a creative act of
> information synthesis.

No, I don't agree... even if this is what happened, and I think this
description is charitable in the extreme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=85665104&oldid=85227651

Cites one page, which apparently does not now and never did mention the
name "Bona Mugabe" as if it has been changed, but suggests that behind
the login page you could still see the name.

Additionally, the name "Bona Mugabe" is likely not unique in the world,
so appearing in a list of students... how does that prove anything?

This is exactly why we have a strong ban on original research.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] BLP - a case study

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

>Marc Riddell wrote:
>
>
>>Respect is something which cannot be legislated or regulated; it is part
>>civility and part empathy - the ability to respect another being should be
>>built in to us all.
>>
>>
>"Should be", yeah. Interesting to ponder how it is that we have
>thousands of editors who seem to lack a great many human qualities. My
>cynical theory is that an encyclopedia that *anyone* can edit is going
>to attract a disproportionate number who would never be accepted into,
>or have been ejected from other kinds of collaborative projects; and
>because one of our fundamental principles is to assume good faith, we
>are slow to get rid of those that are simply not ever going to be a net
>positive.
>
Yeah.  It's much easier to solve the problems through more onerous rules
that make editing equally difficult for good editors.

Ec


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
> I assume you're also one of the folks who supports removing Angela
> Beesley's birthdate from her article because although the birth register
> for her hometown's hospital listed an Angela Beesley born on the same
> date she claimed was her birthdate, there could have been _another_
> Angela Beesley born on the same day and in the same hospital as her?

I would like to know exactly what kind of lunatic would look up Angela's
birth date in a hometown hospital register, and why we should let them
edit Wikipedia rather than having a quiet debate about whether Angela's
safety would be enhanced by reporting the person to the authorities.

--Jimbo


body:
Slim Virgin wrote:

>On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>
>
>>It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
>>
>>
>The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living
>persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
>
>By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit
>them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of
>controlling.
>
A strict approach to not allowing article subjects to edit articles
about themselves only compounds the problem.

.Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Yet another legal threat

body:
On 31/03/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why is the "new" company even mentioned in the article on American Mutoscope
> and Biography--as other than a redirect to its own stub (probably notable
> enough to earn a wittle stubby) ?

Good question.

> >>"In 2003, Biograph announced that it had acquired title to 1,777 acres
> >>on the Moon for use as a filming location, and Thomas R. Bond II
> >>stated that he planned to start filming there by 2008.[24]"
>
> >The guy's a kook, evidently.
>
> >James Farrar james.farrar at gmail.com
>
> There are plenty of notable kooks, though.

This is true, but I don't think I'm one of them :-)

Trawling through the history, I see that they've been threatening
legal action since at least November 2005...


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ref Desk makes Boing Boing

body:
On 3/30/07, Ryan Wetherell <renardius at gmail.com> wrote:
> No kidding!  That they wouldn't even mention the correction is really
> disturbing.
>

Yeah, it's not completely embarrassing for them either, I mean their
source _was_ wrong. Not that they shouldn't actually find primary
sources, but you know, it's just a newspaper ;)

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]


body:
doc wrote:

>#Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with
>specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho')  - should
>be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining
>eventualism on the rest.
>
You mean tough rules "there"?

It's an intriguing idea, and I can't say for sure at this point whether
I support or oppose it.  How would this affect articles which though not
about a person still contain considerable indirect biographical details
about a person's involvement?

Ec


from_name: Dycedarg

body:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why don't we lock new article creation in the main namespace entirely
> for three months? Or six months? Demand that people fix existing
> articles.
>

I have a question concerning this: Is it possible in the software to lock
down only article creation in the mainspace and nowhere else? After all,
IP's can't create pages, and they can't create any normal (as opposed to
talk) pages at all. If this wasn't the case, you'd either have to get the
developers to program something, or deal with the hundreds of angry people
who are used to randomly making new subpages in their userspace all the
time, the new users who wouldn't have user pages at all, and project pages
requiring new archives. I see nothing in any of the MediaWiki documentation
about being able to restrict page creation by namespace, except for a
distinction between normal pages and talk pages.

If this was technically possible or made possible, I'd definitely be in full
support of it. It is completely and utterly impossible to increase the ratio
of good articles to bad articles at the current exponential rate of article
creation. The percentage of articles that qualify as good articles is
dropping; from what I understand fairly rapidly too. Sure, creating crappy
articles is more fun than fixing crappy articles, but which is better for
the encyclopedia in the long run?

--

Dycedarg


from_name: Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 3/31/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 31/03/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > it's trying to persuade the community that something needs to change.
>
> Is this community particularly susceptible to persuasion by rant?
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

See [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Doc glasgow#Outside view by
Newyorkbrad]] for my own take on not only articles that contain false or
unsourced negative information about living people, but also unnecessarily
embarrassing information about non-public information that editors insist on
keeping just "because we can, and Wikipedia is not censored" with no thought
for the effect that we have on real people's lives.

IMHO, this is one of the two most pressing issues facing Wikipedia.

Newyorkbrad


from_name: Dmcdevit

body:
Oldak Quill wrote:
> On 01/04/07, Dmcdevit <dmcdevit at cox.net> wrote:
>
>> Oldak Quill wrote:
>>
>>> I, for one, object to the closure of projects based on elitist
>>> concerns as to the origin of the language. What matters is the place
>>> of the language in the world now. This language is, crucially,
>>> recognised as a language by the International Standardisation
>>> Organisation
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> There is no sense of "recognition" in the ISO code designations. As they
>> say for the 693-3 codes, "it is a goal for this part of ISO 639 to
>> provide an identifier for every distinct human language that has been
>> documented, whether living, extinct, or constructed, and whether its
>> modality is spoken, written or signed." There are 7,589 currently. It's
>> not about elitism; in fact, it's rather likely to me that other
>> constructed languages of the same speaker population would not have
>> gotten a wiki in the first place. I agree that what matters is the place
>> of the language in the world right now, and that place is as a backdrop
>> to a fictional universe with a fanbase who are sometimes known to use
>> the words amongst themselves. It is encyclopedically interesting as a
>> cultural phenomenon, but has no place as a dictionary. Words that aren't
>> in common independent use except in reference to a literary work, or
>> discussion in the context of that work, are not material for a general
>> dictionary.
>>
>
> Wiktionary don't just contain the words of the language they're
> written in. Words of all languages and contexts are ideally in
> Wiktionary.There's no reason why Klingon couldn't get a broad coverage
> of words.
>
>
Are you suggesting we make a dictionary that defines words in terms that
it does not itself define, since they cannot be attested according to
normal dictionary standards? Or are you suggesting that we make a
dictionary that, because it was established as a dictionary written
using words that cannot be attested according to normal dictionary
standards, does not maintain the same standards as a dictionary? Neither
of them is acceptable.

Dominic


body:
Oldak Quill wrote:
> On 01/04/07, Dmcdevit <dmcdevit at cox.net> wrote:
>
>> Oldak Quill wrote:
>>
>>> On 01/04/07, Dmcdevit <dmcdevit at cox.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Oldak Quill wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I, for one, object to the closure of projects based on elitist
>>>>> concerns as to the origin of the language. What matters is the place
>>>>> of the language in the world now. This language is, crucially,
>>>>> recognised as a language by the International Standardisation
>>>>> Organisation
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> There is no sense of "recognition" in the ISO code designations. As they
>>>> say for the 693-3 codes, "it is a goal for this part of ISO 639 to
>>>> provide an identifier for every distinct human language that has been
>>>> documented, whether living, extinct, or constructed, and whether its
>>>> modality is spoken, written or signed." There are 7,589 currently. It's
>>>> not about elitism; in fact, it's rather likely to me that other
>>>> constructed languages of the same speaker population would not have
>>>> gotten a wiki in the first place. I agree that what matters is the place
>>>> of the language in the world right now, and that place is as a backdrop
>>>> to a fictional universe with a fanbase who are sometimes known to use
>>>> the words amongst themselves. It is encyclopedically interesting as a
>>>> cultural phenomenon, but has no place as a dictionary. Words that aren't
>>>> in common independent use except in reference to a literary work, or
>>>> discussion in the context of that work, are not material for a general
>>>> dictionary.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Wiktionary don't just contain the words of the language they're
>>> written in. Words of all languages and contexts are ideally in
>>> Wiktionary.There's no reason why Klingon couldn't get a broad coverage
>>> of words.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Are you suggesting we make a dictionary that defines words in terms that
>> it does not itself define, since they cannot be attested according to
>> normal dictionary standards? Or are you suggesting that we make a
>>
>
> A dictionary in language X should be able to define a concept in
> language Y, even though language X doesn't have a word for that
> language, in relatively few words.
>
>
That's not how Wiktionary works. The English Wiktionary, for example,
defines non-English words *in English*. A Klingon dictionary would be
expected to define words in Klingon. So I repeat, your choices are
either to have a dictionary define words using words it does not define
(Klingon words) or to define words (Klingon words) that cannot be
attested according to normal dictionary standards. Either choice damages
the integrity of the dictionary.

Dominic


from_name: Ron Ritzman

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

references:
<C23407BE.29DD%michaeldavid86@comcast.net>
	<460E9E83.4070609@scissor.com> <460EABB6.8060704@ntlworld.com>
	<dfd0b40703311348l74ce065alb20d88dff2cc7451@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES
> CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.

But will it stay corrected?


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
"I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about
the last two lines"

These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not
untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But
it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an
individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims
about certain activities.

On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the
complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure
they didn't happen. I may have lied.

Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:

"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the
price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we
can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if
we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some
of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more
concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.

Over time we hope to correct articles like this, although, at current
rates of growth we'll have ten times as many by then and still won't be
able to cope.

We have fixed the article, but please be aware that this incident may
well reoccur. We'll do our best to try to avoid that (providing it
doesn't interfere with our determination not to change our basic way of
operating).

Disclaimer: the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 and so
  takes no responsible, and the Wikipedia Community has not signed up to
any ethics code.

PS. You might like to know that the objectionable content has probably
been picked up by our mirrors by now. You can either live with that, or
contact them yourself.

Yours sincerely etc."

Doc


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.

Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been
kept after an AfD.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> {{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
>
> Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been
> kept after an AfD.

{{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on
the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a
hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]]
every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to
spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.

If the *community* is not willing to pull together to maintain such
articles, the community's desire to have them "kept and cleaned up" is
rather futile.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/03/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > {{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
> >
> > Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been
> > kept after an AfD.
>
> {{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on
> the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a
> hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]]
> every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to
> spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.

Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.


from_name: Angela

body:
The issue is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WP:LIVING#Privacy_of_birthdays

Just because you can look up birth records in primary sources doesn't
mean Wikipedia should list everyone's birth date.

Angela


from_name: Matthew Brown

body:
On 3/31/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is not a good idea. Haven't we learned anything from locking
> down *anonymous* page creation, and from the constant, and
> people-pissing-off, mess that is Articles for Creation?

I agree.  Volunteer effort is not transformable in that way.  There is
absolutely no proof WHATSOEVER that shutting down article creation
will help our project at all.  It's yet another manifestation of the
belief that if you stop people doing what they want, they'll instead
go off and do what YOU want.

This doesn't happen.  If people can't do what they want, in a project
MOSTLY CREATED BY OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTORS, they'll simply leave.

The only people steerable in such a way are regular contributors.  We
do need to find ways to encourage those deeply committed to the
project to waste less time dealing with crap that doesn't matter.
Encourage, not force.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

body:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 31/03/07, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > {{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
> > >
> > > Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been
> > > kept after an AfD.
> >
> > {{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on
> > the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a
> > hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]]
> > every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to
> > spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
>
> Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.

Doc is not on the sidelines; this is a complaint from the coalface!
He's one of the people who doesn't scale - I know where he's coming
from, as I was doing much the same before I partly burned out.

There are no shortage of crap articles thast the community vaguely
feels we ought to have, but where no-one steps up to maintain
neutrality and they just sink back into hideousness. We need to figure
out what to do, and just having a committee say "keep, cleanup" every
six months isn't it.

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


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Dycedarg wrote:
> On 3/31/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>> Or AfD could be shut off too, starting one week after article creation
>> is shut off.
>
> I think this would be a mistake. With the greater focus on already existing
> articles, it will actually increase the chance that people will find
> articles that should be deleted but have never really had enough attention
> payed to them to discover that.

What's the rush? The really urgent stuff like copyvios will be deleted
whether AfD is running or not. Flag the rest and come back to AfD them
when the three months are over.