body:
Delirium wrote:
> I think that the major dispute isn't over the German and Polish
> Wikipedias, but over place names in the English Wikipedia: when and how
> prominently to use the historic German names versus the modern Polish
> names (for example, Danzig vs. Gdansk).

Oh, I thought the original post was about something going on at
de.wikipedia, my mistake.

Perhaps we can form a general policy of how to do it, something made
in the abstract that covers all the general cases, without reference
to German or Polish, and then go from there...

For example, when referring to a place at a time in the past, prefer
the name of that time while parenthetically pointing out the current
name if the clarification will be helpful to the reader.  When
referring to a place at a time in the present, prefer the present name
while parenthetically pointing out the past name, blah blah blah.

I can't help but suppose that there's a tedious wikipedia policy wiki
page on this somewhere.  :-)

--Jimbo


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [iris.steineck@aon.at: donation to ferdinand
	porsche?article is not available under the terms of the GNU
	FreeDocumentation License.]

body:
Matthew Brown wrote:
> * Attempts to engage this user in discussion have been utterly and
> completely ignored.  Possibly out of simply not understanding Wikipedia all
> that well.

Well, to me, that's pretty important.  It's hard to find a
satisfactory common ground if he won't even log in and answer
questions or contribute to the discussion in any way.

> I must confess a little bit of bias against a user who doesn't create a
> username and doesn't engage in discussion.  In the spirit of Assume Good
> Faith, I will presume that these have been due to lack of knowledge of the
> way Wikipedia works.

Yes, I agree with all of that -- both the little bit of bias, and the
assumption of good faith.

> I am certainly not anti her point; I am against some of the ways she is
> presenting her case, and would like to work with her to make the articles as
> fair and accurate as we can.
>
> Should I email her directly, do you think?

Yes, I think that would be delightful.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Resolving content disputes

body:
James Duffy wrote:
> major historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to
> keep biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because
> we don't have a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we
> can in because we can' isn't encyclop?dic, it is amateurish.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that.  Erik in particular has been
a big proponent of breaking down articles into more manageable sizes
when they grow too big.

That doesn't seem to be the issue in this particular case, though --
the article isn't that long, indeed for such a major figure in history
it clearly isn't nearly long enough.

> And in depth NPOV is not wikipedia's strong point given that it does
> not go through independent assessment but is produced in a
> free-for-all writing spree.

I'd say that in-depth NPOV is precisely our strong point -- we do it
better than anyone else ever has.

> (Often that
> free-for-all approach produces superb stuff. All too often it doesn't, as
> the embarrassing article on Mother Teresa, which not a single solitary
> person hasn recommended in preference to a better, more NPOV version by
> Adam Carr, is the embodiment of, showing what happens when an article goes
> seriously, embarrassingly and indeed almost comically wrong.)

If not a single solitary person prefers the current version to that of
Adam Carr, then why doesn't someone just cut and paste and replace it?

I suspect the answer is that there is a single solitary person (at
least) who does prefer the current article, or who would like to see
them merged, is that right?

(I ask seriously, becuase I haven't read the Adam Carr version.)

Be Bold.

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] 10.000 queries per day from MetaGer?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> >>When you say 'queries' does that mean searches in our search engine?
> >
> >That's how I understood their mail.
>
> Well, just keep in mind that we don't have a working search engine at
> the moment.

Right, but I could write a really fast one pretty quickly using
fastcgi and dbm files.  I just dump the database, do some keyword
magic, bomis-style, and there ya go.  It isn't as fancy-dancy as mysql
full-text searching, and it wouldn't be updated constantly on-the-fly,
but it should do the job nicely for an outside search engine that
would like a reasonably up to date feed from us.

--Jimbo


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
There's a war going on as to what to call the Elizabeth Smart article.  It can't be just [[Elizabeth Smart]], because that's a disambiguation page.  It can't be [[Elizabeth Anne Smart]] because she isn't known by her middle name.  It was at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] yesterday, but is now at [[Elizabeth Smart (2000s media sensation)]] , which, IMHO, is not only offensive to her, but a ridiculous name.

RickK

---------------------------------
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from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mother Teresa article

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>
>With the exception of Cimon avaro, no Wikipedian has challenged Jtdirl's
>behavior.
>
I pointed out Jtdir1 abusiveness months ago on this list, but I don't think
anybody paid attention at the time. Abusive persons never change their
behavior, as generations of women have learned the hard way.

Until Wikipedians agree to take a harder line on abuse of other editors,
instead of always making excuses for the abuser, this is going to keep
happening.

Stan


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [iris.steineck@aon.at: donation to ferdinand porsche?
	...]

body:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 09:17:40AM -0500, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
>      > From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
>
>      > It looks from the history as though there's an ongoing edit war, and so
>      > probably more eyeballs would be helpful.
>
> Your wish is our command!
>
>      >> From: "Dr. Iris Steineck" <iris.steineck at aon.at>
>
>      >> My grandfather Erwin Komenda designed the VW-beetle and Porsche sport
>      >> car type 356.
>      >> ...
>      >> Both, the Volkswagen and the first Porsche sport car, the Porsche type
>      >> 356, were designed by Porsche's longstanding chief designer [[Erwin
>      >> Komenda]].
>      >> [[Erwin Komenda]], the longstanding Porsche chief designer, developed
>      >> the car body for the famous VW-beetle and Porsche 356.
>
> I have checked in the "definitive" Porsche reference book:
>
>      Karl Ludvigsen, "Porsche: Excellence Was Expected"
>
> and Erwin Franz Komenda was indeed Porsche's chief body stylist up until the
> 1960's. He joined up with Porsche in 1931, so it's quite credible that he
> designed the bodies for the Beetle and 356.
>
> I suspect that part of the problem is in the wording = Komenda wasn't really
> the "chief designer" (as that term would normally be construed in English),
> but rather the "chief body stylist"; also, he didn't "design ... both the
> [Beetle] and [356}" (which implies he had overall responsibility for the whole
> thing) - the latter wording "developed the car body" is probably fairly
> accurate.
>
I think the issue here is whether Komenda has any place at all in the
[[Ferdinand Porsche]] article; the info in question should really be at
[[Erwin Komenda]], where it currently is.

Relevant para from [[Talk:Erwin_Komenda]]:

   I have removed the link to the Erwin Komenda Porsche Designer page from
   many (but by no means all) the pages it had been placed on. Komenda
   was not sufficiently important to the subjects of those articles. I
   have removed mention of him entirely from articles (such as the
   [[Porsche Boxster]]) in which mention of him is rather off topic.

Thus, while the discussion of the wording can continue at [[Talk:Erwin_Komenda]],
he should stay off [[Ferdinand Porsche]] (IMHO).

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Kurt Jansson

body:
Jimmy Wales schrieb:

> Do they speak English?

I think so :-)
You can write to Dr. Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann: wsb at uni dot de

Kurt


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German  articles

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Exactly. I'm surprised this is even an issue. It would beyond silly to only
>refer to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg in a separate article dealing with the
>history of the Soviet Union. Likewise it would be very odd to refer to the
>United Kingdom in an article about the Norman Invasion. Gaul/France along
>with Constantinople/Istanbul are other examples (as would be
>Londinium/London, for that matter - Peking/Beijing is a different matter
>dealing with a change in the accepted English transliteration).
>
>
>
Transliterations can be tricky issues too.  Should we always accept the
current preferred transliteration, or use historic ones when commonly
used?  For example, the Greek government and Ministry of Antiquities
currently prefers a different transliteration scheme from the one used
by most non-Greek archaeologists--Peloponnesos instead of Peloponnesus;
Makedonia instead of Macedonia; Ithaki instead of Ithaca; and so on.
Should we use the current transliteration or the one that's become
common in English?

>In the future we will have so much info about the city now known as Gdansk,
>that the article can logically be broken-up by having all pre-1945 history at
>[[Danzig]] and all the post-1945 history at [[Gdansk]] (with appropriate
>brief lead-in summaries to each respective sister article -
>[[Constantinople]] and [[Istanbul]] are divided in a similar way). In the
>meantime [[Danzig]] can redirect to [[Gdansk]] and any pre-1945 reference to
>the city should be in the form of "[[Danzig]]" or the more informative
>"Danzig (renamed [[Gdansk]] in 1945)."
>
>
Part of the issue is one of disagreement over history.  The Polish
nationalist POV being promoted by one of the editors of [[Gdansk]] is
that Gdansk has always been the name of the city, and Danzig was only a
name used relatively briefly by the German occupation (1795-1945 or so),
and as such should be excised and replaced with the "true" historical
name of the city.  As far as I can tell, this isn't really what
happened, and the city--even when it was part of the Kingdom of Poland
in the 16th and 17th centuries--had a majority German-speaking
population who called it Danzig.  But in any case, what's complicating
things is that, unlike with Constantinople/Istanbul, there's
disagreement over which name should be used for what period.

Basically, the one POV is that Danzig was an essentially German city,
made into a Polish city by the expulsion of the German citizens in 1945;
the other is that Gdansk has essentially always been a Polish city,
occupied at times by Germans and then rightfully reclaimed by the Poles
in 1945.  The truth of course is probably neither of those...

This "rewriting history" seems to be a common theme of recent disputes
as well.  For example, a large part of the Serbian/Croat/etc. dispute on
Wikipedia is between people trying to claim certain regions have
essentially "always" been Serb/Croat/etc., and so writing the history of
various cities circa 200 AD as if they could be reasonably considered
Serbian at that time.  This phenomenon of retroactively claiming an
unbroken succession to well-known historical events is somewhat common
and larger than Wikipedia, so it'll take some effort to combat (and
perhaps some library research to get good citations to back up what
"really happened").

-Mark


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Response sent to WikiEN-l instead of Wikipedia-l since this is an en.wikipedia
matter.

Jimbo wrote:
>For example, when referring to a place at a time
>in the past, prefer the name of that time while
>parenthetically pointing out the current name if
>the clarification will be helpful to the reader.
>When referring to a place at a time in the present,
>prefer the present name while parenthetically
>pointing out the past name, blah blah blah.

Exactly. I'm surprised this is even an issue. It would beyond silly to only
refer to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg in a separate article dealing with the
history of the Soviet Union. Likewise it would be very odd to refer to the
United Kingdom in an article about the Norman Invasion. Gaul/France along
with Constantinople/Istanbul are other examples (as would be
Londinium/London, for that matter - Peking/Beijing is a different matter
dealing with a change in the accepted English transliteration).

In the future we will have so much info about the city now known as Gdansk,
that the article can logically be broken-up by having all pre-1945 history at
[[Danzig]] and all the post-1945 history at [[Gdansk]] (with appropriate
brief lead-in summaries to each respective sister article -
[[Constantinople]] and [[Istanbul]] are divided in a similar way). In the
meantime [[Danzig]] can redirect to [[Gdansk]] and any pre-1945 reference to
the city should be in the form of "[[Danzig]]" or the more informative
"Danzig (renamed [[Gdansk]] in 1945)."

People cannot be divided this way, however. So any ref to Muhammad Ali before
he changed his name would have to be something like "Cassius Clay (who later
took the name [[Muhammad Ali]])".

Just my 2.5 cents.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Delirium wrote:
>
>
>>Transliterations can be tricky issues too.  Should we
>>always accept the current preferred transliteration,
>>or use historic ones when commonly used?
>>
>>
>
>Use the most commonly used form as per our 'common name' naming convention.
>However, "official" transiterations sometimes filter into common usage given
>enough time. Peking was once the most common name in English for the Chinese
>city. But a couple decades of the PRC insisting that the transliteration
>should be Beijing changed that.
>
>For now at least, "Makedonia" is a non-starter since very few interested
>English speakers will know that that is "Macedonia" (in American English at
>least, the "c" in "Macedonia" is pronounced as an "s", but a "k" is never
>pronounced as an "s" in English AFAIK). Given enough time English usage of
>that term may change or it may not change. It is not our job to hasten that
>change - our job is to choose the term most likely to be searched for or
>linked to by interested English speakers in the context of an encyclopedia.
>Of course we should still mention in the article the name controversy and
>what the Greek Ministry of Antiquities thinks the name should be.
>
>
This seems a little inconsistent with [[Mumbai]] though -- by far
[[Bombay]] is the most common English name for the city (and someone
used to Bombay could hardly recognize the much-differently-pronounced
Mumbai), but we use the new official name for our article.

-Mark


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
> From: James Duffy
>
> Absolutely correct. Encyclop?dic articles are not simply limited by
paper
> but by a range of other issues; readability, context, comprendability,
> communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics
need
> a
> lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts,
> major
> historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep
> biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we
don't
> have
> a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we
can'
> isn't encyclop?dic, it is amateurish.

No, actually "encyclopedic", in its root meaning, is "including
everything".

> Encylop?dias communicate themes,
> movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in'
approach..
> We
> have books to do that. An encyclop?dia fulfils a different educational
> role.

A dead-tree encyclopedia fulfils a different educational role. Wikipedia
is not a dead-tree encyclopedia.

Your argument conflates trying to include everything in Wikipedia with
making impossibly long articles.

That is fallacious.

It is TRUE that people should avoid making super-long articles because
of readability, editability, etc.

It is FALSE that people should avoid adding tons of content because of
the problems of super-long articles.

There should be a limit on the length of entries; if not formally
enforced, then informally.

A method of automagically linking associated articles in an intelligent
manner would be a helpful (though complicated to implement) tool.


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
RickK wrote:
> There's a war going on as to what to call the Elizabeth Smart article.  It
can't be just [[Elizabeth Smart]], because that's a disambiguation page.  It
can't be [[Elizabeth Anne Smart]] because she isn't known by her middle
name.  It was at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] yesterday, but is now
at [[Elizabeth Smart (2000s media sensation)]] , which, IMHO, is not only
offensive to her, but a ridiculous name.

The '2000s media sensation' one is just out of the question, completely...
kidnap victim seems less than ideal, but I can't think of a better one
offhand.I'd say stick with that.

-- Jake


from_name: Andrew

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
I agree with keeping it at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]], if that
means anything.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 9:19 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

> RickK wrote:
> >There's a war going on as to what to call the Elizabeth Smart article.
> >It can't be just [[Elizabeth Smart]], because that's a disambiguation
page.
> >It can't be [[Elizabeth Anne Smart]] because she isn't known by her
middle
> >name.  It was at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] yesterday, but is
now
> >at [[Elizabeth Smart (2000s media sensation)]] , which, IMHO, is not only
> >offensive to her, but a ridiculous name.
>
> Using a person's middle name or initial is a natural way to disambiguate
and
> therefore acceptable ([[George W. Bush]]/[[George H. W. Bush]]).
[[Elizabeth
> Smart (kidnap victim)]] would be my second choice. The 'media sensation'
one
> has got to go, though.
>
> I see the article is at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] right now, so
I'm
> happy with that.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l NPOV (Charles)

body:
> Euh...cela veut dire que je suis claire pour une fois
> ou que le contenu de ce lien est clair ? :-)

Celui-ci (j'espere bien que mon francais d'ecolier me reste, apres
trente-cinq ans).

Charles


body:
Delirium wrote:
>Transliterations can be tricky issues too.  Should we
>always accept the current preferred transliteration,
>or use historic ones when commonly used?

Use the most commonly used form as per our 'common name' naming convention.
However, "official" transiterations sometimes filter into common usage given
enough time. Peking was once the most common name in English for the Chinese
city. But a couple decades of the PRC insisting that the transliteration
should be Beijing changed that.

For now at least, "Makedonia" is a non-starter since very few interested
English speakers will know that that is "Macedonia" (in American English at
least, the "c" in "Macedonia" is pronounced as an "s", but a "k" is never
pronounced as an "s" in English AFAIK). Given enough time English usage of
that term may change or it may not change. It is not our job to hasten that
change - our job is to choose the term most likely to be searched for or
linked to by interested English speakers in the context of an encyclopedia.
Of course we should still mention in the article the name controversy and
what the Greek Ministry of Antiquities thinks the name should be.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
RickK wrote:
>There's a war going on as to what to call the Elizabeth Smart article.
>It can't be just [[Elizabeth Smart]], because that's a disambiguation page.
>It can't be [[Elizabeth Anne Smart]] because she isn't known by her middle
>name.  It was at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] yesterday, but is now
>at [[Elizabeth Smart (2000s media sensation)]] , which, IMHO, is not only
>offensive to her, but a ridiculous name.

Using a person's middle name or initial is a natural way to disambiguate and
therefore acceptable ([[George W. Bush]]/[[George H. W. Bush]]).  [[Elizabeth
Smart (kidnap victim)]] would be my second choice. The 'media sensation' one
has got to go, though.

I see the article is at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] right now, so I'm
happy with that.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Mirko Thiessen

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

body:
NPOV in the articles concerning all events and locations along the
German-Polish border has always been difficult to attain. I don't know
what the trigger was, but for almost two weeks now many articles are
in the permanent state of edit war. Wikipedians interested in
anything, but not in neutral articles, are reverting and re-reverting,
insulting each other and ignoring the basic Wikiquette. Take Silesia
or Gdansk as some examples.

I am completely at a loss, where all this hatred comes from. My
unsuccessful attempts to mediate in this conflict have completely
shattered my nerves. I am not used to be affronted by narrow-minded
nationalists from either side, and after one party had demanded my
de-adminship, I gave up and retreated from these articles. Another
user with courageous attempts to solve the conflict, Ruhrjung, has
reacted in the same way.

I had some days of thinking, what to do in this conflict, and I am at
a loss. Editing these articles is almost impossible, because you are
either reverted or insulted (or, most likely, both). This is not the
atmosphere where I am
willing to participate anymore. Probably it is, because I am engaged
in a special area within Wikipedia, but from my angle Wikipedia is not
the same place anymore. Please think about, how these disputes can be
handled. Good work of many years is destroyed within few days in the
moment.

Good luck,

Mirko (Cordyph)


body:
Delirium wrote:
>This seems a little inconsistent with [[Mumbai]] though --
>by far [[Bombay]] is the most common English name for
>the city (and someone used to Bombay could hardly
>recognize the much-differently-pronounced Mumbai),

Maybe when you and I went to school, but that is not the case anymore.
Searching only English-language websites on Google actually returns a quarter
million more hits for Mumbai than Bombay. And over a third of the Bombay hits
have Mumbai in them.

So this is an example of English usage in transition (like Beijing/Peking was
about 15 years ago). I would expect, however, that outside of India "Bombay"
is still the clear dominant usage, but we cannot forget the tens of millions
of English speaking Indians (many of which speak much gooder than average
yanks and brits).

So in cases where usage is more or less similar between two terms, then using
an "official" name to break the tie seems to make sense to me. Also if there
is a coup or other major change of government and a nation officially changes
its name and the names of its cities, then we should follow that as well
(thinking of Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: James Duffy

body:
>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>I think that deletionism forgets that Wiki Is Not Paper, and that
>>completionism is likely to lead us to a better final article.
>>
>>
>The problem with this approach is that while Wiki is Not Paper, readers'
>attention spans are limited.  If I want to read an overview of Mother
>Theresa's life, I most certainly do not want it to be 20 pages long.  I'd
>much prefer a more summarized (dare I say, "encyclopedia-style") biography.
>  If the rest of the information must be in Wikipedia, it'd be nice if it
>were factored out into separate articles (maybe "Criticism of Mother
>Theresa" and "Reasons for Mother Theresa's Beatification" or something
>similar).  Generally if a Wikipedia article is so ridiculously long that
>nobody not doing a thesis on the topic would want to read it, it becomes
>much less useful to the general public.
>
>-Mark

Absolutely correct. Encyclop?dic articles are not simply limited by paper
but by a range of other issues; readability, context, comprendability,
communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics need a
lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts, major
historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep
biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we don't have
a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we can'
isn't encyclop?dic, it is amateurish. Encylop?dias communicate themes,
movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in' approach. We
have books to do that. An encyclop?dia fulfils a different educational role.
And all producing articles of mini-thesis size will do is frighten away
readers, because people don't come to encyclop?dias for that sort of
information, which they can get, written by professional
sociologists/historians/academics on the shelves of their library. If they
can get a five paragraph summary in Brittanica, and a good book in the
library they will do it, in preference to a 32K article whose reliability
they cannot vouch for because they don't know how qualified the authors were
to write about it or how much is someone's personal agenda, on wikipedia. We
need to remember what an encyclop?dia is and is not, what we can do well and
by our nature we cannot do well. And in depth NPOV is not wikipedia's strong
point given that it does not go through independent assessment but is
produced in a free-for-all writing spree. (Often that free-for-all approach
produces superb stuff. All too often it doesn't, as the embarrassing article
on Mother Teresa, which not a single solitary person hasn recommended in
preference to a better, more NPOV version by Adam Carr, is the embodiment
of, showing what happens when an article goes seriously, embarrassingly and
indeed almost comically wrong.)

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Voting and/or Consensus

body:
Message: 5
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:31:10 +0800
From: "Andrew Lih" <alih at hku.hk>

> On Behalf Of Brian Corr

> A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of
the
> organizations have a board of director that votes
and uses majorities
when
> necessary, but most hesitate to accept a vote if it
is close, and
they
> prefer to achieve something approaching consensus,
but will accept a
decision
> if there is a large majority (this seems similar to
Wikipedia).

Yes, this is one of the things we're trying to pin
down with VfD policy
revisions: see [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]] and
[[Wikipedia
talk:Deletion policy]] for exact details, but we are
going with
majority
vote, and qualifying voters.

he ! you succeeded to push me to go and read the new
policy Andrew. That is the qualifying voters terms
that motivated me.

I read the new proposed policy, and this were my
feelings

* majority of 2/3 : this is a very low treshold.
Definitly not consensus any more. I was thinking of
all those cases where only three people give their
opinion,  two on one side, one against, and those
three being trusted users. And I was wondering if the
fact someone showed expertise or on the contrary never
showed any sign of being knowledgeable in a field
would make a difference. Say, if I create an very
specific article on an agriculture matter, perhaps one
I even work in, and two users that know nothing in
agriculture just say it gets only 100 hits on google,
so just delete it, it will just be deleted even though
these people know nothing of the matter ?

That sounds weird.

*100 major edits and one month old registration.
Whaou, that is huge. I reflected as well on the number
of french editors that stay only about a month, but
provide us 30 very good articles. I see not why they
would not have the right to speak their mind. I
understand quite well the need to avoid vandals
voting, but really, is not the 100 edits a bit high ?
Dunno, a user is allowed to give his opinion on a very
important communication matter such a logo, but is -
by definition, as long as he has not written enough -
not trusted to help cleaning the place ?

Also weird

>One reason why true consensus doesn't really work in
>Wikipedia is that
>voters are not stakeholders, as in your example of
>American Friends
>Service Committee (AFSC).  The ease of editing in
>Wikipedia means any
>passing joker can throw a pebble into the gears and
>jam the system.

That is not true. Everything can be reverted. Even
what a sysop do. A passing joker can not *jam* the
system

>So true consensus works only in a membership which is
>filtered in some
>way, or voters are stakeholders in the result.

Probably true.
But then, on votes for deletion, there is now a
proposed procedure to filter the people who have the
right to speak up, still true consensus is not the
choice. 2/3 for filtered, trusted people is very low.

>So in the revised voting procedures for VfD, we try
to >filter or distinguish stakeholders from ballot
>stuffers -- valid voters must have existed for a
while >(days to weeks) and have made 100 article
edits.

yup, but no true consensus afterwards nonetheless

>This seems to be a reasonable enough of a requirement
>to make sure
>voters are stakeholders in Wikipedia's coherence.
>This isn't the first
>time, the Logo vote (gasp!) also stipulated voters
>have at least 10
>edits to their name.

I disagree with 100 major edits being reasonable
requirement.

I hope that this does not progress with only filtered
people over 100 major edits having the right to vote
for NPOV :-)
Seriously

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subject: Voting and/or Consensus (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Mother Teresa

body:
From: Brian Corr <BCorr at NEAction.org>

>A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of the
>organizations have a board of director that votes and
>uses majorities when necessary, but most hesitate to
>accept a vote if it is close, and they prefer to
>achieve something approaching consensus, but will
>accept a decision if there is
>a large majority (this seems similar to Wikipedia).

Nod. Filtered users, older than one month, with more
than 100 major edits are the board.

Perhaps will it be necessary to flag them for easier
management. They could be also those with the right to
"validate" wikipedia for the paper/Cd version.

>C) True Consensus: One organization I work with --
the
>So it might not be too easy with so many Wikipedians
>who like to argue about *everything* ;-)

You noticed ? :-)
Yes, probably not very usable.

btw, is the new deletion policy being submitted to the
2/3 threshold to be adopted, and to consensus ?

Primarily, I think that we need to think about the
concept of voting and  how it affects group processes.
Wikipedia is an unusual hybrid of Wiki,  NPOV, *and*
altruistic self-interest (i.e., we all get some
satisfaction  from what we do here, but we also do it
for the good of the  project/community/world). I also
think we need to look at how our  decision-making
processes affect how much we are open or closed -- we
can  be "open" to everybody, but if only one type of
person can handle being  a  contributor or editor,
what does that really mean for us.

Very true
As well as the limit where those who do not fit well
in that spirit decide to leave under peer pressure, or
because the rules put them away.
Somehow, I think that when a user does not fit well,
it is quite different that people go to him, and try
to explain, and try to negociate, try to convince him
to change for the better

or just drop a boilerplate on his user page, saying
"this is user does not respect regulations #23.3 bis
and TR-W3 ter - user name blocked".

Of course, second choice is much quicker, and likely,
the person putting the boilerplate feels little
responsability since she is just following a legal
rule. Her action is little controversial. That help
going toward more peace and fluidity.

If the choice is to discuss, it is longer, it is more
controversial, it can generate a lot of heat, perhaps
too much heat.

I was thinking here for example of the issue of
refactoring/removing personal attacks versus not.

If removing is not "legalised", it may be that the
cleaner is attacked himself, reverted, has to insist a
lot to clean the place, to fight for his opinion.
Likely to generate much anger between people

If removing is "legalised", when he does, and someone
complain, he just has to say "look, there is a rule.
If you disagree with my doing so, just change the
rule".

So...perhaps would it be best to have few rules when
the community is strong and can handle disagreement,
and on the contrary strong rules when it is chaotic
and diverse ?

>Anyway, I have been reflecting a little bit about
what >I should focus my energy on -- and it seems like
I >should be writing articles and *not* checking Votes
>for deletion fifteen times each day. But I also feel
>that it is important to pay attention to the
>housekeeping work also, and that often
>takes me back to VfD and to Recent Changes. But I do
>think that we can
>bring something positive to articles and be NPOV --
but >I find it hard to decide the balance between
>*contributing* and *housekeeping*.

:-)
When people start, they write contribute mostly
After a while, they do housekeeping
After, perhaps, they teach others to do the
housekeeping :-)

There are many different task in housekeeping
My laundry is waiting btw

>And here's one more good link to check out:
><http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLifeCycle>.
I >think we might be somewhere near 17
>(Wiki:DeclineOfCivility -- there are more strangers
>than friends, and AssumeGoodFaith fails as reputation
>is fleeting) and 18 (arrival of the PoliceForces)

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLifeCycle is a
good link

>Anyway, that what I'm thinking today -- but tomorrow
>it may all change
>;+)>

>Brian

That is what make it worth it :-)

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list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l ext pict

body:
Message: 6
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:27:02 +0900
From: "Guillaume Blanchard" <gblanchard at arcsy.co.jp>
why don't allow them in meta/user/talk pages ? I had a
pictures of my
baby
on my user page, I can't see it any more :o(

If you upload the baby picture on fr, I promise you we
won't delete it :-)

(but put a newer one)

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from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> writes:

> Oh, I thought the original post was about something going on at
> de.wikipedia, my mistake.

There the German name haters already won ;-( At times, the German
"Recent changes" list looks funny: many a lot names completely unknown
to me.  The strange thing is that they don't step forward renaming also
"Stra?burg" (Strasbourg), "Mailand" (Milano), "Rom" (Roma), "Venedig"
(Venezia), "Kopenhagen" (Kopenhavn), etc.

> Perhaps we can form a general policy of how to do it, something made
> in the abstract that covers all the general cases, without reference
> to German or Polish, and then go from there...

We agreed to run the so called Google test - but the German name haters
deliberately ignored this agreement ;)

> For example, when referring to a place at a time in the past, prefer
> the name of that time while parenthetically pointing out the current
> name if the clarification will be helpful to the reader.  When
> referring to a place at a time in the present, prefer the present name
> while parenthetically pointing out the past name, blah blah blah.

This seem like a good solution for the English WP

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Using a person's middle name or initial is a natural way to
> disambiguate and therefore acceptable ([[George W. Bush]]/[[George
> H. W. Bush]]).  [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] would be my
> second choice. The 'media sensation' one has got to go, though.

I think that's true in the case of the Bushes because everyone knows
them by those initials.  But almost no one knows the middle initial of
Elizabeth Smart, kidnap victim.

I think kidnap victim is a good term for disambiguation in this case.

> I see the article is at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]] right
> now, so I'm happy with that.

Yeah, seems fine to me.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> > I agree with keeping it at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]], if that
> > means anything.
> >
> Reading the article, I get the impression that "kidnap victim" might not
> be NPOV. I don't want to say that she was not kidnapped, but some points
> of the story indicate the possibility of a different explanation.

Well, I'd say that if any information comes out definitively to say
otherwise, or if there's any actual controversy about it, we could
try something different.  The thing I like about 'kidnap victim' as
a disambiguator is that it *instantly* disambiguates -- everyone will
know exactly who we mean.

> I'd prefer disambiguating by her middle name or by year of birth.

But those are meaningless, so if you got the page title in a search
result or whatever, you'd not know to click on it.

--Jimbo


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German
	articles

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> There the German name haters already won ;-( At times, the German
> "Recent changes" list looks funny: many a lot names completely unknown
> to me.  The strange thing is that they don't step forward renaming also
> "Stra?burg" (Strasbourg), "Mailand" (Milano), "Rom" (Roma), "Venedig"
> (Venezia), "Kopenhagen" (Kopenhavn), etc.

Well, that's very strange to me.  It's not really my place, exactly,
to comment much on what the wiki-consensus should be in German
language, but if I was German, I'd probably want to work on fixing
that.  But perhaps there are subtleties that I don't understand, so
I'll just refrain from comment.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikiquette "committee"

body:
sannse wrote:
> > This is not about avoiding lawsuits.  This just about finding a way to
> > ban people from editing Wikipedia in a way that respects our internal
> > culture.
>
> And (I hope) about finding a way to avoid banning people in the first place!

Absolutely!  I was on a bit of rant there.

My goals for the procedure are of course all about keeping and
extending the peace, and a culture of mutual helpfulness, and the
prevention of the need to ban people any more than absolutely
necessary.

We want a procedure that is widely viewed as credible and fair, so
that even if people disagree with a specific decision, they will agree
that the process is worth supporting.

(Even my retaining a right of executive clemency or pardon, is
something that I would exercise judiciously, deferring to the decision
of the committee in almost all realistic cases, even if I didn't
*quite* agree.  I only want everyone to understand that I intend to be
there to keep the process from going wildly haywire with dozens of
bans per month or whatever.)

However, and I think that Alex and I agree much more than my rant
yesterday would suggest, I really want to make sure that our putting
in place a process does not give rise to anyone thinking that they
suddenly have new legal rights to edit the Wikipedia website,
regardless of the wishes of the other users, or regardless of the
final decision of the Wikimedia Foundation.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Major Correction

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
>There is a legitimate medical term for this procedure,
>which goes back to before the anti-choice movement
>politicized it: intact dilation and extraction. That some
>people haven't heard the term doesn't mean we can't
>use it.

I agree. "Partial-birth abortion" simply is too POV for us to use because of
the use of the word " birth." This negates our "common use" naming convention
in a similar way as "Eskimo" is depreciated in favor of the less widely-used
"Inuit" ("Eskimo" is a derogatory term meaning "eaters of raw fish" while
"Inuit" means "the people"). Might was well also swap the word "abortion"
with "murder of the unborne" since "birth" has very clear baby-related
connotations. "Intact dilation and extraction" is an accepted medical term
that is dryly descriptive.

So if I can't say that Pol Pot was a genocidal maniac responsible for the
murder of over 2 million of his own people and have to instead dryly state
that "During his rule up to two million Cambodians were killed", then I don't
think we can use "partial-birth abortion" as an article title about the
procedure (maybe, if we get enough material, we could have an article at
[[partial-birth abortion]] about the term and the controversy surrounding the
use of the term).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Major Correction

body:
At 11:24 AM 10/28/03 -0800, Delirium wrote:
>Eileen wrote:
>
>>I also note the use of "birth canal" to describe the vagina as if a woman
>>had an exit chute on her baby factory; and the use of "womb" in place of
>>'uterus'. Both these terms, and the misstatement of the time the procedure is
>>performed, lead me to believe the article was mainly written by somebody
>>opposed
>>to abortion who was more interested in getting a subtle message out then
>>actually providing honest information.  Since we are describing a medical
>>procedure appropriate medical/biological terminology which is well
>>understood by the
>>general population is the appropriate vocabulary.
>>
>>May I suggest reading this article before using the term "PBA" as loosely as
>>it is used in your current entry.
>>http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/499/
>>
>>
>In both these cases, the problem is that there is no entirely neutral
>terminology.  Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by the
>anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a moral
>issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical terms is
>seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community.  My preferred
>solution would be to use both sets of terms interchangeably--both "womb"
>and "uterus" and both "birth canal" and "vagina/cervix/vulva").  In
>particular I don't really see anything wrong with "birth canal", and have
>seen it used in pro-abortion literature as well as anti-abortion literature.

Womb is a fine old English word, uterus is medical Latin. Both are
perfectly acceptable.

There is little or no "pro-abortion literature": those of us who support
abortion rights
also support the rights of women to have children if they wish--and, in
fact, part of the
fight for reproductive freedom is an ongoing battle against forced
sterilization. If you're
trying for neutrality, don't use one side's terminology for the other.

>As for the term "Partial Birth Abortion" itself, there's no good solution
>to that either that I can see.  Certainly there some be some discussion
>about the controversy over terminology, but simply adopting an alternate
>term would be biased as well.  The only other term in reasonably
>widespread use is "late term abortion", but as you pointed out some of
>these procedures do not actually occur in the last trimester, so can't
>really fall under that heading.  So I'd say keeping the term PBA with the
>qualification that some abortion supporters object to the term is the best
>solution.
There is a legitimate medical term for this procedure, which goes back to
before the
anti-choice movement politicized it: intact dilation and extraction. That
some people
haven't heard the term doesn't mean we can't use it.

What I think we should do is use the medical term, and note that some abortion
opponents prefer to call it by a recently-invented term that makes better
anti-abortion
propaganda.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikiquette "committee"

body:
No one has a legal right to "edit" on the Wikimedia servers.

But *everyone* has a moral AND legal right to edit any article they like
and post it, print it, sell it, etc. -- wherever they want, other than
at Wikimedia -- without any limit. This is called the "right to fork".
It's an essential aspect of the GFDL.

I'm not anal (I mean, IANAL), but I know this much...

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] "partial-birth abortion" (was: Major Correction)

body:
Ed Poor wrote:
>Why not have the [[partial-birth abortion]] article be
>about the LEGAL aspects? You know, that bill the US
>Congress passed this month.

Hm. Interesting idea. We could also throw most of the controversy about the
procedure there. Of course in the first paragraph we would need to refer to
the actual medical procedure and link to it.

>The bill creates a legal term for a specific act
>(which will become illegal if the president signs
>the bill). The article will then correctly refer to the
>illegal act.

This makes sense.

>If I get (or stay?) involved with writing that article,
>I can link to [[intact dilation and extraction]] (pro-choice)
>and [[infanticide]] (pro-life or "anti-choice"), too!

Well no article should be 'pro-choice' or 'pro-life', but it does make sense
to separate subjects from each other on a logical basis after the article
gets to a certain length. So [[intact dilation and extraction]] could be
mostly about the medical procedure while [[partial-birth abortion]] can be
mostly about the controversy/legality/morality of using that procedure (both
are separate subjects). Both articles will have to briefly summarize the
other and provide a link.

There certainly is enough material on both topics to justify two articles and
the proprosed scheme seems to be a natural way to disambiguate the subjects
(in any medical context [[intact dilation and extraction]] will be linked to,
while in any political context [[partial-birth abortion]] will be linked to).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Voting and/or Consensus

body:
> On Behalf Of Brian Corr

> A) Seek Consensus, But Vote: For example, most of the
> organizations have a board of director that votes and uses majorities
when
> necessary, but most hesitate to accept a vote if it is close, and they
> prefer to achieve something approaching consensus, but will accept a
decision
> if there is a large majority (this seems similar to Wikipedia).

Yes, this is one of the things we're trying to pin down with VfD policy
revisions: see [[Wikipedia:Deletion policy]] and [[Wikipedia
talk:Deletion policy]] for exact details, but we are going with majority
vote, and qualifying voters.

One reason why true consensus doesn't really work in Wikipedia is that
voters are not stakeholders, as in your example of American Friends
Service Committee (AFSC).  The ease of editing in Wikipedia means any
passing joker can throw a pebble into the gears and jam the system.  So
true consensus works only in a membership which is filtered in some way,
or voters are stakeholders in the result.

So in the revised voting procedures for VfD, we try to filter or
distinguish stakeholders from ballot stuffers -- valid voters must have
existed for a while (days to weeks) and have made 100 article edits.
This seems to be a reasonable enough of a requirement to make sure
voters are stakeholders in Wikipedia's coherence.  This isn't the first
time, the Logo vote (gasp!) also stipulated voters have at least 10
edits to their name.

-Fuzheado


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Intlwiki-l] lt.wikipedia

body:
Cross posted ot Wikitech-l

Andre wrote:
>The person was talking about lt.wikipedia.org, not
>it.wikipedia.org - that's Lithuanian, not Italian.

Yikes! Sorry about that. If I made that mistake then the developers reading
the headline may have made the same mistake and thus have not yet looked into
why lt.wikipedia.org is not working. Please somebody fix the Lithuanian
Wikipedia!

>Try http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki.cgi instead.

Thanks for the link.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] meta:Development status

body:
I've just created a new page on meta. It is:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_status

 From the intro: "This page is intended as a place where developers can
write their intentions for future development, and maybe even coordinate
with each other (however unlikely that may be). Also, it should describe
the current state of the two CVS branches and the live copy."

At the moment it's basically a personal to do list, but I'd be very
happy if everyone else working on the PHP script also used it. It's
similar to [[meta:Development tasks]] except it contains stuff that's
actually going to happen in the forseeable future, and it says when it
will happen.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
Rick wrote:

> There's a war going on as to what to call the Elizabeth Smart
> article.  It can't be just [[Elizabeth Smart]], because that's a
> disambiguation page.  It can't be [[Elizabeth Anne Smart]] because she
> isn't known by her middle name.  It was at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap
> victim)]] yesterday, but is now at [[Elizabeth Smart (2000s media
> sensation)]] , which, IMHO, is not only offensive to her, but a
> ridiculous name.
>
Using the middle name "Ann"  (rather than "Anne"?) is the sensible
solution. (Assuming, of course, that it is her correct middle name.)  To
say that it can't be used because of a rule that prevents it when she
isn't known by her middle name seems like policy running-amok over
common sense  A middle name is a "natural" disambiguator, though I
haven't been easily able to track down the author's middle name.

I doubt that Elizabeth Ann became a kidnap victim or media sensation out
of any premeditated act of her own to get her 15 minutes of fame.  Any
identification of her on that basis is demeaning and sensationalistic,
notwithstanding the fact that it is so far her only claim to fame.  It
is unlikely that anything in the near future will change that, though it
is certainly possible that she may yet become newsworthy in her own
right as she grows up.

The author, by virtue of her accomplishment, is certainly the more
important of the two Elizabeth Smarts.  Her impression will be a lot
more long-lasting than a kid who. to the delight of the paparazzi, had
the misfortune to be kidnapped.

I believe that the article should move back forthwith to [[Elizabeth Ann
Smart]].  Unfortunately, the move function did not work for it, but if
it stays where it is I will have no compunctins about using the more
tedious cut-and-paste process.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
Eileen wrote:

>I wish to take the time to thank those who responded to my attempt at a
>neutral replacement page for the current one dealing with the D&X abortion
>procedure.  The responses have made the methods and purpose of Wikipedia much
>clearer to me.
>
>I was laboring under the false impression that the purpose of Wikipedia was
>to present factual information in an encyclopedic form.  The answer I
>received from Delerium/Mark makes it abundantly clear that I was mistaken in this
>evaluation.  These two paragraphs sum up his point succintly.
>
>
>
The point of Wikipedia is to present factual information both about
medical procedures and about the controversy surrounding them.  We are
not going to "take the side", as it were, of either The Reverend
Anti-Abortionist or Dr. Pro-Choice.  The article, when it's done (if
ever) should be factual but also readable by the average person.  Your
position seems to be that the point of view in the current medical
literature is "factual information in an encyclopedic form" which I
dispute--journal articles are rarely written in the manner we'd like our
articles to be written.

>The medical terms I suggested (which were also linked) **ARE** neutral and
>are well understood by both the lay person and the medical professional.  Your
>preferred choices are in fact **NOT** neutral terms but deliberately loaded
>terms intended to subtly present a particular POV.
>
>
>
That's not true: the term "partial dilation and extraction" is not
understood by the lay person.

>Furthermore the propaganda term "Partial Birth Abortion" is not a medical
>term and ** HAS NO DEFINITION ** according to the rulings of a number of State
>Supreme Courts, the US Supreme Court, the ACOG who are most qualified to
>discuss abortion procedures, and the AMA representing in excess of 35,000 members
>of the US medical profession (Dec. 2002).  It is neither a medical procedure
>NOR a lay term for any abortion procedure because it has no unequivocal
>description even in the current S3 bill.
>
>
>
Well, we still need to talk about it, because it is widely talked about,
and the subject (as you mentioned) of several lawsuits and bills.  As
suggested by Ed Poor, however, perhaps we should move the medical
discussion to [[Partial dilation and extraction]] and discuss only the
legal issues at [[partial birth abortion]] (where it would be certainly
desirable to mention the vagueness of its definition).

>So it has become obvious to me very quickly that the "edit" function on your
>articles in Wikipedia is open to exactly the same type of "stacking the
>deck" abuse that online internet polls are and thus the entries in Wilipedia are
>less than useless if the purpose is to find reliable information.
>
>Fred Bauder suggested I just jump in and edit liberally but this, I have
>absolutely no doubt, would simply lead to a pissing contest between those who
>want the propaganda retained and those interested in factual information. I
>have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in such an exchange.
>
>
>
Perhaps you should consider the issue a bit and realize that your point
of view is itself propagandandistic.  I personally am neither "pro-life"
nor "pro-choice" (or "anti-life" or "anti-choice", if you prefer), and
would like the article to reflect both points of view.  Simply
sanitizing it and making it read like a medical journal will certainly
satisfy one side, but our job is not to satisfy one side, even if the
one side holds academic degrees.

Frankly, I have neither the time nor inclination to further consider the
viewpoints of those who wish to turn Wikipedia into a mouthpiece for
their propaganda.

>It is for these reasons that I will retain the answers I have recived to
>this query as background and support of my position and will simply refuse in
>the future to accept any citition from Wikipedia as a reference to a legitimate
>authority but will put it in the same class as a letter to the editor in a
>small local newspaper.
>
>
If you have factual errors that should be corrected, those will be
corrected (at some point when I get time I'll go through your modified
version and integrate all those changes to our current article--or
someone else can feel free to do so first if they have time).  If your
dispute is merely over the fact that you consider "womb" to be
"anti-choice" terminology, then I think your concern is rather trivial,
as well as not really well-grounded (it seems in this discussion Vicki
generally agrees with you, but she has no problem with the term "womb"
either).

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Our credibility is questioned

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>What are everyone's thoughts on Eileen's
>evaluation of our editorial policy on articles
>relating to abortion?
>
>
The result is exactly the same as what I expect would happen were
someone virulently "pro-life" (or "anti-choice" if you prefer) to write
to complain to us that our use of sanitized medical terminology is
"whitewashing babykilling" and that we should change our articles
accordingly.  There's really no way to satisfy someone who would like to
foist a particular point of view on a controversial issue like this.

I'd imagine we'll get the same problems if someone (professor or
otherwise, from either side) writes in wanting us to change our
editorial policy on the Israeli vs. Palestinian issue.

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_standards_kick may also be relevant.

-Mark


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>
>
>Unfortunately, after a brief encounter with
>the mailing list, a person who may have
>considerable influence among readers has now
>dismissed this project as having any standing
>as a useful reference.
>
>What are everyone's thoughts on Eileen's
>evaluation of our editorial policy on articles
>relating to abortion?
>
She sounds like an activist who will interpret anything neutral
as taking a position against, and who's lost so much perspective
that a single person's statement is taken as the official word. I'm
just as happy she's going away, because there's no evidence that
she would be able to work cooperatively with anybody who
disagrees with any part of her position.

Be not too troubled, because this will happen more and more; a
successfully neutral Wikipedia will come in for nonstop calumnies
from the partisans.

Stan


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 09:38:50PM -0800, Andrew wrote:
> I agree with keeping it at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]], if that
> means anything.
>
Reading the article, I get the impression that "kidnap victim" might not
be NPOV. I don't want to say that she was not kidnapped, but some points
of the story indicate the possibility of a different explanation.

I'd prefer disambiguating by her middle name or by year of birth.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikiquette "committee"

body:
 From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
 > Alex R. wrote:
> > > That is, I can't conceive of any real circumstances where we should be
> > > concerned that a court will force us to publish the writings of
> > > someone we don't want to publish.
> >
> > But isn't this inconsistent with the NPOV principle? that would be
> > the opening that someone might use to go for the courts.
>
> I can't imagine that they'd get very far with that argument.  NPOV is
> not a legal requirement for us, it's just something we do.

"Something we do" has legal consequences. Behavior, generally
speaking can easily have legal consequences, especially when it
is community behavior and standards are involved.

> Wikimedia Foundation has a strong first amendment right to publish
> whatever it sees fit, NPOV or no.

Yes, but who is this Wikimedia Foundation?  It is no longer the
property of one person but it is now a not for profit corporation.
If it were about a specific point of view, then yes it makes sense
that the board could decide what could and could not be published.

But adopting the NPOV policy it should be applied evenhandedly.
People contribute and each has equal rights to contribute. Someone
does not have more rights to contribute than someone else. So the
perimeter of this right is behaviour that is distructive. People who
are distructive are not operating within the NPOV after multiple warnings,
continue to do destructrive things to the goals of Wikipedia as
an project and thus, should be banned. I think that is pretty clear to me.
(see my point about Wikipedia being a trust below).

> not different from Fox News striving to be conservative, or the NYT
> striving to be liberal, or Hustler striving to be pornographic.  Each
> organization retains the sole right to determine the content of it's
> own publication, and to change policy about that at will.

Once again, none of these are not-for-profit corporations that
have all the policies of openness and inclusiveness that
Wikipedia has developed.

> > If one agrees to an arbitration plan (remember it is a contract)
>
> Why is it a contract?  I say that it is not a contract any more than
> me reflecting for weeks on end about whether or not to ban someone is
> a contract.  The person banned at the end of the arbitration (if
> that's what happens) is just banned, whether they agreed to it or not.

Because they make a contribution in exchange for it being released
under the GFDL. That is why it is a contract. It is a bargained for
exchange.  You log onto a web site and you accept the terms of use
of that site. That is an agreement. You get the right to view the site
and they get "eyeball time" that they can sell to third parties. That
is a contract. Here the contract is make a contribution and it will
be released to the public under certain terms.

> > It is not easy in most jurisdictions to violate an arbitration clause.
> > However sometimes it is possible by being totally unfair, unresponsive
> > and unwiling to listen to some one put forward their perspective.
>
> What bothers me about the thrust of what you're saying is that it
> sounds like you believe that by instituting more formal procedures for
> deciding this sort of thing, we are thereby changing things so that
> people could at least conceivably have standing to complain that the
> process is arbitrary, i.e. we are somehow allowing outselves to
> foolishly give people some sort of legal right not to be treated
> arbitrarily.

They can complain now. So why not make it clear to them that the
rules are that you cannot complain except under some very limited
circumstances. If you call it arbitration or  the "NPOV Violatons
Committee"  or " review of user status" it is all the same thing
legally. It does not have to be called arbitration for it to be
arbitration, nor does it need to be called mediation. It only needs
to be structured with minimal fairness; you are listening
to the person before locking them out. You can call it wikilove
or whatever. Whatever you want to call it. It is not giving them
a legal right, it is limiting it or making sure that it is not abusable.
That is what businesses do all the time, that is perfectly reasonable.
Leaving it formless and just up to scrutiny of anyone who decides
to scrutinize it is not putting it into a form that will give Wikimedia
the power to control user conduct. If you want to control user conduct
then set up a policy that addreses that and have some decision
making process. If you want to make it bullet proof give it
the semblance of fairness (or due process or fundamental
justice depending on your legal tradition) and then apply
it in an even handed way.  The fact is that people already
beleive that there is some "rule" about banning. It is not
done to anyone arbitrarily, it is only done in a very rare
instance of behavior that is unacceptable. All institutions
have the right to limit such people and I have not suggested
that Wikipedia give this up. I am suggesting that Wikipedia
make it clear to all users so that they must comply or will
face a banning procedure that will be final, unappealable
and cannot be discussed in court because Wikipedia's
ill defined policies have opened the doors to them to discuss it
there at great expense to the projects of Wikimedia.
Resources are scarce, so let's conserve them.

>
> I guess the problem I'm having with all of this is that we are not
> talking about entering into formal arbitration agreements with people
> like EofT.  That's just asking for trouble, if you ask me.

What does "formal" mean? Contracts are formed constantly.
When you use a ISP, when you log onto a web site, when you
go to the store and buy a quart (or liter) of milk or a newspaper
you enter into a contract. It happens millions (if not billions) of
times every day.  Yo set up a standard form to it and then everyone
follows it. They do not even think about it or know that there
is a contract. It only comes up when someone feels that the
contract is a problem (like getting sour milk or if you ISP keeps
bumping you off line). Otherwise everyone is bound by the
contract and must follow it. There is a contract, make it formal,
easily inforceable and to the community's benefit and that
disempowers those cranks who are being disruptive.

>
> Perhaps we should drop the name 'arbitration' if that's what it
> implies.  If we want arbitration with someone to avoid a lawsuit,
> that's a WHOLE OTHER THING.
>
> This is not about avoiding lawsuits.  This just about finding a way to
> ban people from editing Wikipedia in a way that respects our internal
> culture.

That is exactly what I have been taking about. Do it internally in a
way that respects the internal culture and one of the benefits is that
it also avoids lawsuits; nothing wrong with that added benefit, no?
You just say, "you have no right to appeal the decision of
 of 'whoever that is in authority decides these things.' Their decisions
are final decisions of Wikimedia. If you do not like it start you own
online encyclopedia and do what you what there."
...

> But I can't conceive of any sensible grounds for user complaints of
> any kind.  We absolutely should make very clear that users have the
> absolute minimum legal rights against the Wikimedia Foundation as
> possible!

That is what I am proposing. Putting in an internal "dispute resolution
scheme" is only limiting such rights even more. They can't complain
to anyone except a limited number of people. Someone reviews the
complaint, listens to the user that might be banned, and unless they
have some persuasive argument not to be banned (which most likely
will not be the case in 99% of the cases when someone is engaging
in negative, unsocial behavior) then they will be banned. It is transparent
so other members see that the process is fair and do not quit Wikipedia
because they don't want to participate in a project where power  is
abused arbitrarily and the goals of the project are progressed Wikipedia
is more stable and more valuable contributors continue to contribute.
I can't see any problem with this in terms of Wikimedia limiting any
of its "rights" to create an online encyclopedia.

> > However,  it does not say that anywhere (I have been trying to get an
> > approach adopted, but everyone seems to think that it is just an
> > inordinate amount of legalism). The reality is that you have to protect
> > your rights as when you let people collaborate they all own the
> > intellectual property in common, why does the guy (or org.) that
> > owns the server have any more right to decide what goes on the
> > computer than anyone else once the floodgates have been opened?

> Can you really imagine a court buying this argument?  I can't.  I
> can't really conceive of a case like this getting very far at all.

Courts do things that are unexpected; smart business people try to
prevent that from happening so that their is less intereference. Wikis
and the internet are still areas of law that could be interpreted in new
ways.  We see that there are people trying to subvert Wikipedia
in any way they can. Limit their ability to do so while appearing
to be fair. That is what it is all about. The fact is that when one
gives their contribution to wikipedia they still own the copyright,
Wikipedia is only getting a GFDL license. That opens the door
to a lot of questions. Is Wikipedia a trust that all contributors
have contributed to and those who maintain Wikipedia now
have a fiduciary duty to all those contributors? I think this is
a valid question. If there is a fiduciary duty to all contributors
then, yes the courts may try to exert a lot of scrutiny over
how Wikimedia deals with those contributions in a fair way.

Let us make it clear what is going on so that no one can bog
us down with lots of legal issues because of the evolutionary
nature of a wikis without some minimal amount of policy it
will just self destruct.

>
> > Having an ironclad arbitration scheme and an licencing scheme
> > that deals with issues that are not covered by the GFDL will
> > protect Wikipedia more, not less.
>
> Well, I agree with that!  I think we should do whatever we need to do,
> with legalistic formalism and all the bells and whistles to make sure
> that if some crank does try to take us to court to get us to let them
> edit the site willy-nilly that we can just point to Exhibit A
> (whatever that might be) and the Judge will say "Oh, o.k., well this
> whole thing is frivolous, good day!"
>
> > Leaving it to the hope that
> > some judge will just say, "you can do whatever you want" rather
> > than getting people to acknowledge that from the moment they
> > log on does not seem like a really swift way to solve the issue.
>
> Well, I totally agree with that.

I think we are really on the same page, just maybe forget to call it
arbitration call it something that fits in with the culture, and make
it simple, straightforward and something that anyone who logs
on can understand. It may be long, but there are a lot of issues
now that Wikipedia is a community.

Alex756


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> This is precisely the sort of misunderstanding
> I was hoping would be averted, if we could
> convey our neutrality policy properly.

Indeed.

> Unfortunately, after a brief encounter with
> the mailing list, a person who may have
> considerable influence among readers has now
> dismissed this project as having any standing
> as a useful reference.

Well, I think she was really rude to go off like that based on her
disagreement with one person's remarks.  As it turns out, I think that
she's right on the content issue, and that the medical terms are
neutral and should be used uniformly in the article.

> What are everyone's thoughts on Eileen's
> evaluation of our editorial policy on articles
> relating to abortion?

Knee-jerk and not very helpful, that's what I think of her evaluation.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] shell account

body:
I don't know E23, but if others do, I have no objections.  I'm just
not the right person to ask in this case.

The main requirement for being a developer, is knowing that developer
status has *zero* to do with editing, and also knowing enough about
Linux/Apache/Php to not do any harm.

E23 wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I'm hereby asking for a shell account on the servers ("developer
> status"?). My primary reason for the request is to satisfy my own urge
> to start looking for possible causes when the wiki decides to hang
> (especially since there has been a number of occasions when the swedish
> wikipedia has been unresponsive while others has worked fine). At least
> it will give me something to do while I'm waiting for it to save my
> edits. I'm not promising anything besides doing no harm, although I do
> have some experience in this area.
>
> I'm an administrator on swedish wikipedia, and I seem to have the trust
> from the other admins. I put out a question[1] about it, and got 4
> supportive replys and none vehemently against.
>
> Yours,
> E23, user page at [2].
>
> 1.http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Beg%E4ran_om_administrat%F6rsskap
> 2.http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%E4ndare:E23
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Why not have the [[partial-birth abortion]] article be about the LEGAL
aspects? You know, that bill the US Congress passed this month.

The bill creates a legal term for a specific act (which will become
illegal if the president signs the bill). The article will then
correctly refer to the illegal act.

If I get (or stay?) involved with writing that article, I can link to
[[intact dilation and extraction]] (pro-choice) and [[infanticide]]
(pro-life or "anti-choice"), too!

Ed Poor


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] lt.wikipedia

body:
On Monday, Oct 27, 2003, at 03:30 US/Pacific, Mantas Dirg?la wrote:

> Today is the second day when lt.wikipedia.org shows "internal server
> error".
> Is it a technical difficulty or the site has been deleted?

It certainly hasn't been deleted. In fact I can run the wiki CGI
program just fine on the command line. I have no idea what's wrong.

Apache log says: "Premature end of script headers:
/home/usemod/wiki-lt/work-http/wiki.cgi".

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikiquette "committee"

body:
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>

> However, and I think that Alex and I agree much more than my rant
> yesterday would suggest, I really want to make sure that our putting
> in place a process does not give rise to anyone thinking that they
> suddenly have new legal rights to edit the Wikipedia website,
> regardless of the wishes of the other users, or regardless of the
> final decision of the Wikimedia Foundation.

As my detailed rant reply to your rant states is that yes, we do agree
and no we are not granting new rights by having an arbitration
type procedure that deals with cranks who are disrupting the
collaoborative nature of the Wikipedias and their communities
of user/volunteers.

Actually I am all for limiting the rights to access to Wikipedia
because that will make it easier for more people to contribute
and will hopefully cut down on the time that those of us who
would like to contribute more seem to be spending on these
policy issues.

Alex756


from_name: Matt M.

subject: [WikiEN-l] place names

body:
> Exactly. I'm surprised this is even an issue. It would beyond silly to
only
> refer to Leningrad as Saint Petersburg in a separate article dealing with
the
> history of the Soviet Union. Likewise it would be very odd to refer to the
> United Kingdom in an article about the Norman Invasion. Gaul/France along
> with Constantinople/Istanbul are other examples (as would be
> Londinium/London, for that matter - Peking/Beijing is a different matter
> dealing with a change in the accepted English transliteration).

Another datum: [[Newfoundland]] refers to the island, and [[Newfoundland and
Labrador]] the province; when I set this up, I went through all the articles
that mentioned Newfoundland, and those that were historic references to the
colony, dominion, or province (under the then-correct name "Newfoundland"),
I changed it to [[Newfoundland and Labrador|Newfoundland]]. That seemed
fairly reasonable.

Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Science, politics, point of view, encyclopedic style...

body:
I think this is excellent.

The Cunctator wrote:

> The debate over the handling of abortion language largely boils down to
> the postmodern dispute over the nature of bias in scientific language
> and thought. That is: the practice of science includes only that which
> is (potentially) confirmable or repeatable, rather than that which is
> inherently subjective or unconfirmable.
>
> Medical terminology falls under the scientific rubric in that the terms
> have a precise practical meaning. The terminology excludes moral and
> personal weightings.
>
> "Uterus", for example, is a more precise term than "womb", in that
> "uterus" only refers to the female organ, whereas "womb" is regularly
> used metonymically.
>
> One can argue that using medical terminology to discuss medical
> practices is biased, because the terminology avoids the moral questions.
> That is the argument used by those who say that we need to describe
> abortion issues using words such as "birth canal" or "partial-birth
> abortion", and who say that when we discuss medical practice the moral
> issues must be admixed.
>
> Delirium wrote: " Using strictly medical terms is considered biased by
> the anti-abortion community, as they see it as an attempt to cast a
> moral issue as a strictly sanitized medical issue; using non-medical
> terms is seen as similarly biased by the pro-abortion community."
>
> >From that he concludes that we need to somehow intermix the terminology
> in order to construct a neutral article.
>
> But that conclusion is fallacious, as the "moralist" and "medicalist"
> arguments are not equivalent ones that cancel each other out, leaving
> perfect neutrality. Medical terms have specific, objective meaning, but
> non-medical terms do not.
>
> Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having a
> bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.)
> language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I believe)
> necessary.
>
> If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express
> confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle
> meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a
> breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple authors
> will not lead inexorably to one result.
>
> Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased
> towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific
> language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
>
> A specific recommendation for the article at hand: the discussion of the
> medical procedures and the political debate about the medical procedures
> need to be mde distinct.
>
> One thing this means is that the language of anti-abortion proponents
> can't be used to describe the medical procedures, as that language
> expressly disallows such a distinction.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Major Correction

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I agree. "Partial-birth abortion" simply is too POV for us to use because of
> the use of the word " birth."

Agreed.  But of course we do need an article on 'Partial-birth
abortion', an article distinct from an article about any medical
procedure, explaining what the term is, how it is used, and why.

> This negates our "common use" naming convention
> in a similar way as "Eskimo" is depreciated in favor of the less widely-used
> "Inuit" ("Eskimo" is a derogatory term meaning "eaters of raw fish" while
> "Inuit" means "the people").

Presumably, though, we should have an article "Eskimo" about the word,
linking to "Inuit" the people?

> So if I can't say that Pol Pot was a genocidal maniac responsible for the
> murder of over 2 million of his own people and have to instead dryly state
> that "During his rule up to two million Cambodians were killed",

Is that a specific example?  I don't think that there would be much
controversy in attributing those deaths to Pol Pot's decisions and
policies, would there?  Even Noam Chomsky would likely admit that
much.

--Jimbo


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] An expansion of Ed's proposal on "partial-birth abortion"

body:
Here's a proposal to try to achieve something reasonably neutral.

Despite the fact that I think our commentator is biased in the opposite
direction, upon re-reading the article I do agree that something should
be done about the problematic terminology (though I don't think the
article as a whole is particularly bad).  The basic problem is that both
terms are considered biased by the people who use the other term: the
disagreement is over whether this partial removal of the fetus from the
"womb" (or corresponding term if you prefer) properly constitutes
"birth".  Those who say yes call it "partial birth", while those who say
no refer to it simply as "extraction".  Many "pro-choice" advocates find
the former biased, implying as it does that it's a baby being killed
rather than a fetus being aborted; many "pro-life" advocates find the
former biased, implying as it does that it's merely some tissue being
"extracted".

Since I think perhaps some citations will help our credibility here
(since it's so contentious an issue), I've been casting around for who
to cite as neutral enough.  So far the best source I've come up with is
the Journal of Applied Ethics, which seems to take a fairly neutral
stance on these issues, and consider all points of view more fully than
the medical journals do.  A quick survey of articles I could readily
identify as "pro-choice" or "pro-life"  indicated that they're
numerically biased slightly in favor of "pro-choice".

They primarily use the terminology "partial-birth abortion", written in
one of the following ways:
* Partial-birth abortion
* "Partial-birth abortion"
* "Partial-birth" abortion

Some commentators further qualify it, as in "The loosely-defined
'partial-birth' abortion has featured prominently in the recent
political debate over legalized abortion in the United States ...".

Use of the term "partial dilation and extraction" is fairly sparse,
often also put in quotes; it's used now and then to identify a specific
medical procedure when the details of the procedure are relevant to the
argument (but not to refer to the entire issue).  A typical sentence
would be along the lines of "The most widely used 'partial-birth'
abortion procedure is 'partial dilation and extraction', in which
[...description...]".

With that in mind, and expanding on Ed's proposal, what do people think
of the following:

one article
---
[[Partial-birth abortion]] - A discussion of the legal, moral, and
related issues, and a link to specific procedure(s) that commonly are
held to fall under this heading.  An introductory sentence (well, two)
might be along the lines of

"The term '''''partial-birth abortion''''' is used by some to refer to
abortion procedures such as [[partial dilation and extraction]] in which
the fetus emerges partially from the uterus during the procedure.  Note
that some supporters of legalized abortion consider the term biased, and
there is controversy over which procedures it covers; the remainder of
this article [...some sort of disclaimer...]."

a second article
---
[[Partial dilation and extraction]] - Dicsuss only the specific medical
procedure, and mention that it features controversially in the debate
over [[partial birth abortion]].

---

As for terminology within articles, it'll just take some careful reading
to try to balance it.  The basic tension is between opponents of
legalized abortion, who want the descriptions to be as gruesome and
detailed as possible, and between supporters of legalized abortion, who
want the descriptions to be as detached, clinical, and jargon-filled as
possible.  Hopefully we can avoid doing either.

Does that sound reasonable?

.-Mark


body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Considering both Wikipedia's mission and Wikipedia's methods, having a
>bias towards scientific (objective, confirmable, empirical, etc.)
>language and methods in constructing articles is right and (I believe)
>necessary.
>
>If we do not use specific, empirical language, we cannot express
>confirmable statements. We will instead use sentences that muddle
>meaning and issues. This fails Wikipedia's mission and leads to a
>breakdown in Wikipedia's methods, as the hammerings of multiple authors
>will not lead inexorably to one result.
>
>Another way of putting the same idea: Wikipedia needs to be biased
>towards language based on consensual thought, such as scientific
>language, because Wikipedia is a consensual product.
>
>
>
I don't in general agree with this: there is very good reason Ethics
journals do not use scientific terminology exclusively when discussion
the abortion issue, because such terminology, while well-suited to
discussing specific medical procedures, is ill-suited to discussing
ethical issues.  I think when discussing ethical issues we should make
current accepted practice in the field of Ethics our model, not current
accepted practice in the largely unrelated scientific fields.  I've
suggested the Journal of Applied Ethics as a good model, but I'm open to
other suggestions as well.

>A specific recommendation for the article at hand: the discussion of the
>medical procedures and the political debate about the medical procedures
>need to be mde distinct.
>
>One thing this means is that the language of anti-abortion proponents
>can't be used to describe the medical procedures, as that language
>expressly disallows such a distinction.
>
>
>
This I agree with.  There should be a section (or separate article) that
describes only the medical procedure, using medical terminology (but
with an attempt to keep it from becoming dry and jargon-filled so that
it's not comprehensible to a layperson).

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Our credibility is questioned

body:
Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
> I would suppose that Eileen follows a scientism-based view of abortion
> and considers it self-evident that a woman has a right to control her
> body; that abortion is a medical procedure and should receive
> encyclopedic treatment similar to any other medical matter; and that a
> fact-based article on abortion would be superior to one grounded more in
>  emotion than science.
>
> I have to imagine that there is somewhere, out there, a pro-life person
> who could argue just as persuasively that it is self-evident that babies
> are created at conception and being unable to speak for themselves are
> deserving of the greatest consideration and protection; that these
> issues predate the medicalization of childbirth and reproduction and
> should not be treated merely as a medical matter; and that a fact-based
> article on abortion would lack compassion and fail to address the
> personal, social, and human implications of the subject.
>
> We can't win, because each point of view defines the baseline
> assumptions of the other as being unworthy of consideration or
> discussion.

I hold forth a great deal more hope that we can, in fact, win.  While
it is of course true that there are some people, a small minority, for
whom neutrality itself is offensive, I think that by and large, there
is a HUGE group of people who can work together peacefully to present
a controversial issue in such a way as to satisfy both sides.

For the two people you have imagined, I would offer the following
solution(s) to which I think both could agree:

1.  Abortion is an important political issue because some believe in a
woman's right to choose abortion, while others believe that it is
tantamount to murder.

2.  Abortion is a medical procedure, the facts of which are easily
describable in medical terms, and an understanding of various methods
is important to an understanding of the debate.

3.  We need to have clear fact-based articles about not only the
medical facts, but also about the personal, social, and human
implications of the subject.

The key here is that both side is convinced that they are right, so
intelligent proponents of both side can agree to a neutral
presentation because they believe that a neutral presentation will
naturally lead intelligent readers to come to the right conclusion,
their own.

--Jimbo


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Apparently she knows a pissing contest when she sees one...

But surely here in an area a number of us have an interest in, we could
make NPOV work.

Fred

>This is precisely the sort of misunderstanding
>I was hoping would be averted, if we could
>convey our neutrality policy properly.
>
>Unfortunately, after a brief encounter with
>the mailing list, a person who may have
>considerable influence among readers has now
>dismissed this project as having any standing
>as a useful reference.
>
>What are everyone's thoughts on Eileen's
>evaluation of our editorial policy on articles
>relating to abortion?
>
>Ed Poor
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
>If you have factual errors that should be corrected, those will be
>corrected (at some point when I get time I'll go through your modified
>version and integrate all those changes to our current article--or
>someone else can feel free to do so first if they have time).  If your
>dispute is merely over the fact that you consider "womb" to be
>"anti-choice" terminology, then I think your concern is rather trivial,
>as well as not really well-grounded (it seems in this discussion Vicki
>generally agrees with you, but she has no problem with the term "womb"
>either).
>
>-Mark

Our article is just not that bad. If anything is goes pretty easy on the
horrific aspects of the procedure, which is all right, it it not quite
Halloween yet.

Fred


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Major Correction

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>Presumably, though, we should have an article "Eskimo"
>about the word, linking to "Inuit" the people?

Yeah, why not? The only issue right now is that there is not enough extent
Wikipedia text about the term "Eskimo" to move from [[Inuit]] to [[Eskimo]].
When that changes then [[Eskimo]] can be changed from a redirect to an
article. This will require, however, some degree of future maintenance to
make sure references in other articles meaning to link to an article about
the people are changed accordingly.

>> So if I can't say that Pol Pot was a genocidal maniac
>> responsible for the murder of over 2 million of his own
>> people and have to instead dryly state that "During his
>> rule up to two million Cambodians were killed",
>
>Is that a specific example?

Yep. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot

>I don't think that there would be much controversy
>in attributing those deaths to Pol Pot's decisions and
>policies, would there?  Even Noam Chomsky would
>likely admit that much.

Yeah, perhaps the text should be modified a bit. But my POV on this issue is
perhaps a bit too strong against Pol Pot, so I can't trust myself to be
neutral.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Eileen wrote:

> I was laboring under the false impression
> that the purpose of Wikipedia was to present
> factual information in an encyclopedic form.
> The answer I received from Delerium/Mark
> makes it abundantly clear that I was mistaken
> in this evaluation.

And

> I will retain the answers I have received to
> this query as background and support of my
> position and will simply refuse in the future
> to accept any citation from Wikipedia as a
> reference to a legitimate authority but will
> put it in the same class as a letter to the
> editor in a small local newspaper.

This is precisely the sort of misunderstanding
I was hoping would be averted, if we could
convey our neutrality policy properly.

Unfortunately, after a brief encounter with
the mailing list, a person who may have
considerable influence among readers has now
dismissed this project as having any standing
as a useful reference.

What are everyone's thoughts on Eileen's
evaluation of our editorial policy on articles
relating to abortion?

Ed Poor


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
--- Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:

> Reading the article, I get the impression that "kidnap victim"
> might not
> be NPOV. I don't want to say that she was not kidnapped, but some
> points
> of the story indicate the possibility of a different explanation.
>
> I'd prefer disambiguating by her middle name or by year of birth.

She is famous because she was a victim of kidnapping. Had this not
happened to her, she would not get an entry here.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
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body:
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Possibly a permissions problem?  Apache will run the script as
> 'nobody' typically, and you probably ran it as 'brion' or 'root'?

Apache runs as the 'apache' user on this machine, and I even tried su'ing
to apache to run it manually (which required giving it a login shell for a
minute). Works fine.

And now it magically works again!

Why? I don't know.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Public Library of Science GFDL Compatible

body:
Wouter Vanden Hove wrote:

>I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, so I post it anyway.
>
>Last week the Public Library of Science (www.plos.org) launched their
>first Open Acces Journal under the Creative Commons Attribution License
>http://www.plosbiology.org
>
>This means (at least in theory) all of this can be reused in the
>Wikipedia, including images.
>
>
This is something I'd like a lawyer, or at least someone familiar with
copyright law (perhaps Alex?) to clear up: are attribution-style
licenses compatible with the GFDL as used by Wikipedia?  My
understanding is that there might be a technical problem, because
attribution-style licenses require attribution of the original author,
while the GFDL only requires attribution of five principal authors.  If
there are more than 5 principal authors, the GFDL would permit you to
omit some of them; you could then choose to omit the original author (if
perhaps the original author's relative contribution is now not the major
part of the article), but this would be a violation of the original
attribution license.  So it would seem that in some cases at least
attribution-type licenses impose additional requirements above those
imposed by the GFDL, which could be a problem.  Not a *major* problem
really, but a technical one that I'm not sure how to solve.

Comments from someone with more knowlege of copyright law?  This is
important to resolve, because it's come up several times before (on the
village pump, for example), and there are quite a few attribution-type
licenses that all are fairly similar to each other.

-Mark


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

body:
> What are everyone's thoughts on Eileen's
> evaluation of our editorial policy on articles
> relating to abortion?

I would suppose that Eileen follows a scientism-based view of abortion
and considers it self-evident that a woman has a right to control her
body; that abortion is a medical procedure and should receive
encyclopedic treatment similar to any other medical matter; and that a
fact-based article on abortion would be superior to one grounded more in
  emotion than science.

I have to imagine that there is somewhere, out there, a pro-life person
who could argue just as persuasively that it is self-evident that babies
are created at conception and being unable to speak for themselves are
deserving of the greatest consideration and protection; that these
issues predate the medicalization of childbirth and reproduction and
should not be treated merely as a medical matter; and that a fact-based
article on abortion would lack compassion and fail to address the
personal, social, and human implications of the subject.

We can't win, because each point of view defines the baseline
assumptions of the other as being unworthy of consideration or
discussion.  Therefore, any article that merely includes terminology and
ideas from each POV is inherently wrong according to the other.

The armies of activists are coming to promote each agenda.  Are we ready?

Louis


from_name: sannse

subject: [Wikipedia-l] External pictures

body:
Aoineko wrote:

> I fully agree the fact we must not use external pictures in articles, but
> why don't allow them in meta/user/talk pages ? I had a pictures of my baby
> on my user page, I can't see it any more :o(
> More seriously, I'm afraid prohibit external link will make people copy
more
> non encyclopedic pictures on the server and will make harder to select
right
> pictures when we will make a static version.

I don't see a problem with people uploading a few unencyclopaedic pictures.
Several users have their own photo on their user page, I've got a butterfly
that isn't used elsewhere on the 'pedia (there is already a good one of that
breed available).  Sure, we don't want people using Wikipedia as a personal
photo album, but one or two personal photos to illustrate a user page seems
fine to me.

Regards,

sannse


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikiquette "committee"

body:
Jimbo worte (in part):

> This is not about avoiding lawsuits.  This just about finding a way to
> ban people from editing Wikipedia in a way that respects our internal
> culture.

And (I hope) about finding a way to avoid banning people in the first place!

Actually that is, I would like to think, covered by "respects our internal
culture".

Wikilove and all that :)

sannse


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l ext pict

body:
> Aoineko wote:

> From: "Anthere"
> > If you upload the baby picture on fr, I promise you we
> > won't delete it :-)
> >
> > (but put a newer one)

> It exacly what I want to denounce. People will put non-encyclopedic
pictures
> on the server !
> What is the reason to ban external pictures from meta/user/talk pages ?

As I understand it the problems are:

* We have had past problems with offensive images linked on multiple pages.
It's arguably easier to remove one uploaded image than many external images
linked all over the 'pedia (whether that is on article pages or others)
* There are potential copyright problems with external images.  I know we
have these anyway, but at least internal images can be annotated with
copyright information and the uploader is required to say that the image has
no copyright issues.
* There are issues of "bandwidth theft" with external images.

Regards

sannse


subject: [WikiEN-l] Elizabeth Smart

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I moved her from (kidnap victim) to [[Elizabeth Ann Smart]]. If anyone
>wants to move her back, fine.
>
Thanks.  I've gone through and changed links in articles (but not user
and talk pages) to reflect this.

Ec

>