Vicki announced,
<<Unless *just about everyone* disagrees with me,
I'm going to continue to delete new pages that
consist of obvious nonsense--asdfghjkl or the
equivalent--rude grafitti, and "you should have
an article here". >>
I agree with Vicki that obvious nonsense may be deleted without a
"vote". We trust all our sysops to know what is "obvious nonsense" -
it's one of the key criteria for becoming a sysop: you've been around
long enough to show that you have good judgment.
Ed Poor
>> With all due respect, how is this a "strawman?"
Jamesday said "I propose that we simply stop deleting anything for six months." Sounds pretty absolute.
-Fuzheado<<
You expressed an objection which merited a response. A specific problem question would have received a better response, but how you want to be perceived by others is your choice.
All,
Please address any objections or proposals seriously rather than criticising the person posting the comment. Straw men won't impress anyone here, so those using those techniques are hurting their own view enough already. No need to add to it - they already shot themselves in the foot.
I proposed this so we could think about alternative ways to do things, so lets try doing that in his topic, even though it's not the one where we're talking about how to rank and filter comment so the most significant rises to the top and the uninteresting sinks to the point where nobody ever sees it.
You're good at rhetoric, my dear Cunctator, but you haven't pricked my
conscience with your latest thrust.
It's really your first premise which troubles me: we don't want articles
of limited interest.
Well, ex-cuse me, but what is an encyclopedia BUT a clinking, clanking,
colossal collection of random articles each of which is of EXTREMELY
LIMITED INTEREST to most people?
We each tolerate the boring articles, because the collection as a whole
is useful to us in that we can easily find those few items of reference
that we're looking for.
Now just stamp QED on my forehead, and I'm through.
(bows modestly)
Ed Poor
There's no rule against a sysop editing a
protected page - provided they do so in a
way that others can easily see that they're
not trying to take advantage of their status.
For example, I protected [[Silesia]] (twice,
actually) because Wik and Nico and all them
were at each other's throats and reverting
like crazy. I've made several edits since
then, without a single complaint about
"abusing sysop status". In fact, when I
unprotected the page most of the contributors
begged me to re-protect it.
We're not making much progress there these
days, but there's hardly any bickering going
on there either.
Uncle Ed
Originator of the s-m-o-o-t-h vibe (for licensing, contact Stevertigo)
"Delirium" <delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com> schrieb:
> Given that:
> --He's aware of the delicacies involved
> --His edit was a factual correction to Neustadt's place of death
> --His edit was unrelated to the portion of the article that sparked the
> edit war that caused the page to be protected
Don't forget:
--He explicitly added a message on the talk page before making the edit,
saying what he was going to do, that he thought it was not contentious,
and inviting anyone to asking him or another sysop to revert if he was
wrong about that.
Andre Engels
-----Original Message-----
From: Jake Nelson [mailto:jnelson@soncom.com]
Rick wrote:
>> I stronly object to that information as junk. It is extremely
useful,
>> and deserves to be in the Wikipedia, just as much as information
about
>> any other location in the world.
>Indeed, it's an extremely important base to work from. Though I
wouldn't
>mind an option for Random Page to skip it.
I went through a stage of whenever I hit random page (indicating that I
was bored) and hit a rambot page of trying to add something to that page
by using web searches. Virtually always possible. Makes random page much
less annoying.
Pete
"An entry is useful or it is not. It's as simple as that."
Some articles may be useful.
Some articles may be so useless that it's worth our time and energy, as
well as the risk of alienating the article's contributor, and the
inclusionists, to delete them.
On the other hand, some articles may be useless, but not so useless
that the benefit of deleting them outweighs the negatives listed above.
I used to be a deletionist, and in fact I still am, but I've moved my
deletionist stance to the eventual "1.0" version. Let's face it - the
current Wikipedia is great for compiling a large quantity of pretty good
(on average) information. It's lousy at compiling consistently very good
information. So why try? Only a more structured project will ever
accomplish the latter, so it's pointless to be perfectionist about the
current Wikipedia. We should shift our perfectionism to the "1.0"
version.
Here's another way to look at it. Some people think that the perfect
electronic encyclopedia should include every verifiable fact in the
world (let's call them the exhaustivists), while some think that it
should only include notable or important or "encyclopedic" facts (the
filterists). The nice thing about shifting our perfectionist worries
onto the "1.0" version, is that it accomodates both camps when thinking
about the current version of Wikipedia. When someone adds an article on
a non-notable topic, the exhaustivists will of course be happy, but the
filterists (like me) won't mind *too* much, because that article will
get weeded out of the great 1.0 version (we hope).
That's the only way I see out of this debate. Otherwise we'll just
never have peace between the two camps - the gap is just too wide.
(Maybe there'll be two "1.0" versions - an exhaustive version and a
filtered version.)
Alex
"Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com> schrieb:
> You're making the argument that since someday, some lonely person
> might have enough freetime to waste typing in thousands and thousands
> of entries in the manner of a robot, we have to delete any and every
> article that's too trivial today.
>
> I think that are some missing steps in that deduction, so that the
> conclusion does not follow from the premises.
I'll add the missing steps:
Either these articles are having a positive effect on Wikipedia, and then
we should allow this hypothetical person or a bot, not ban them. Or these
articles are having a negative effect on Wikipedia, and then it's good
thing to delete them.
Andre Engels
> From: Andre Engels
>
> "The Cunctator" <cunctator(a)kband.com> schrieb:
> > I believe you mean to use the conditional tense ("Either these
articles
> > would have a positive effect..."), not the present tense.
> >
> > Those steps still do not connect the hypothetical thousands of
> > mass-imported entries to actual "trivial" entries.
>
> I think it does. An entry is useful or it is not. It's as simple as
> that. Usefulness does not depend on having been mass-imported or being
> a single page - or if it does, it goes in the other direction because
of
> completeness.
>
That's a completely different argument, one which also has flaws (the
primary one being that it is not true that "an entry is useful or it is
not"--utility is a continuous, relative measure.)