Mark Richards wrote:
>Yes, rapid fire drive-by-deletion is out of control.
>People list articles within minutes of their creation,
>without doing even basic due dilligence to see whether
>they meet the criteria for deletion.
>Mark
The problem is that Vfd is presently very slow (one week is really very
long). Also, if the math articles are legit, the author should aim to make
as clear as possible how relevant it is! Sometimes a few words are enough
to give some context.
Btw the presence of many red links is a good predictor of an article's VfD
death :-)
JFW
Ed Poor wrote:
>Today, the main page's current event box had this for its lead story:
>
>> Nearly 380 tons of explosives are missing from an Iraqi site
>> meant for Saddam Hussein's dismantled nuclear program but never
>> secured by the U.S. military.
>
>It took me less than 5 minutes of googling to find the opposite POV:
>
>> An NBC News crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the
> > Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the
>> liberation of Iraq. According to NBC News, the HMX and RDX
>> explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.
>
>So it is not accurate to assert that the explosives were "never
>secured", as the US Democratic Party and its liberal media allies
>complained.
It took me less than 5 minutes of Googling to find a number of
distortions in what Ed wrote:
* According to a Fox News (hardly a "liberal media ally" of the
Democratic Party), Al Qaqaa "was placed under U.S. military control
but repeatedly has been looted, raising troubling questions about
whether the missing explosives have fallen into the hands of
insurgents battling coalition forces." Ed is therefore inserting his
own bias when he states that Democrats and the liberal media are
exclusively responsible for making the the claim that the explosives
were never secured. And if the weapons facility has "repeatedly been
looted," this suggests that the security measures put in place after
American troops arrived were not adequate.
* CNN and other media have quoted Mohammed Abbas, Iraq's director of
planning, as saying much the same thing. He stated that the material
disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which
he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental
installations due to lack of security." Mohammed Abbas is not a
Democrat or a member of the "liberal media" either. He is a member of
the provisional government installed by the U.S. under the leadership
of George W. Bush.
* Finally, it is rather bizarre to give this thread a title of "More
anti-US bias." Even if Ed were right instead of wrong about this
story all being cooked up by Democrats and their liberal media
lackeys, there's still no evidence of "anti-US bias." Ed seems to
have forgotten that the U.S. Democratic party is based in the United
States and that its members are U.S. citizens. Even if this story
were driven by anti-BUSH bias, that's not the same thing as bias
against the UNITED STATES.
References to the stories cited above are as follows:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,136466,00.htmlhttp://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/
--Sheldon Rampton
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> In the course of a Canadian Broadcating Corporation program on the US
>election it reported on a survey of whom Canadians would vote for if they
>could. 80% favored Kerry.
Actually, I didn't write this. Someone else did.
--Sheldon Rampton
The idea of letter writing isn't particularly novel:
In the Italian general election of 1948, the United States organised a
massive letter writing campaign warning the Italians of the consequences of
a Communist victory. (10 million letters were sent). The CIA, with
approval of the NSA and President Truman, funnelled contributions to Italy's
anti-communist candidates via diplomatic channels. The Ambassador to Italy,
Claire Booth Luce, and Joseph P. Kennedy helped raise $2 million for the
Christian Democrat Party's candidate, Alcide de Gasperi...
Dunc
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:54:40 -0700
>From: Sheldon Rampton <sheldon(a)prwatch.org>
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Apology for "anti-US" remark
>To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
>Message-ID: <p0611041fbda6f6e918aa(a)[192.168.1.100]>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>
>Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> > You are talking, but are you listening? If the choice of US president
> > matters so much to Europe, then why aren't the Europeans supporting
> > Kerry in a way that will get him some more votes? Guardian readers
> > lecturing Iowans in letters was a really dumb idea, I can't believe
> > that in all the millions of Europe there isn't anyone with a better
> > idea for two-way dialogue.
>
>Why was the Guardian's gambit a "really dumb idea"? And if you think
>it's easy to come up with a better approach, what's your proposal?
>
>There's nothing terribly intrusive about simply sending letters to
>people in the United States, and the Guardian set things up so that
>no one in Ohio would receive more than a single letter from their
>readers. In any given week, I receive dozens of unsolicited letters
>from companies trying to sell me products, organizations asking for
>my money, and campaigns trying to sell me their candidates. Getting
>one letter from someone in the UK would hardly be a burden and would
>actually be a refreshing improvement over the mail I usually get.
>
>The objection can't possibly be that we object to outside meddling,
>given the numerous ways that the United States routinely meddles in
>other countries' elections. So what's the problem?
>
>What I found most shocking about the Guardian campaign was the
>vitriolic response from Bush supporters. One person, for example,
>called the British "stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a
>rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your
>worthless little life." Other responses were full of similar
>profanity and insults. The level of overt hatred toward the British
>is all the more striking since England is in fact the best ally that
>the Bush administration has in its war in Iraq. If nothing else,
>these responses may help educate a few Brits firsthand about the ugly
>depths to which American politics has fallen, which in turn might put
>some additional pressure on the Labour Party to change course.
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1329858,00.html
_________________________________________________________________
It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today!
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Sorry, Jeff, I wrote hastily. I should have said "Anti-US Military" bias
or "Anti-Bush Administration bias". I apologize for my offensive
wording.
Ed Poor
>From: "csherlock(a)ljh.com.au" <csherlock(a)ljh.com.au>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: More anti-US bias in Current Events
>Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:37:58 +1000
>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>> In the course of a Canadian Broadcating Corporation program on the US
>>election it reported on a survey of whom Canadians would vote for if they
>>could. 80% favored Kerry. That's an astounding ratio, but I suspect that
>>a similar result would be found in many countries.
>It wasn't just Canada. The Sydney Morning Herald, and numerous other
>International papers did the same poll and got similar results. I can find
>the article if you want because I read it just the other day. It was on the
>front page!
The presentation given here is a bit misleading; in the poll in question,
while 22% said they'd vote for Bush, only 60% said they'd vote for Kerry.
> I'm also sick and tired of being attacked for making person attacks,
> when the people on the other side who also make the personal
> attacks get a free ride.
> RickK
You're an admin, RickK. We hold you to a higher standard than a newb who
"doesn't edit Wikipedia that much".
Anthony
> >Rambot articles are of disputable encyclopedicness.
> Places are certainly encyclopedic.
Places are no more indisputably encyclopedic than schools or people.
> > Articles on years and numbers, and lists are of disputable
encyclopedicness.
> >
> Depends on the subject. Most of them are encyclopedic, though (I don't
> really understand why we need lists now when we have categories, though).
Can you point to a single encyclopedia that has articles on years? What
about non-cardinal numbers? Lists I think are clearly unencyclopedic.
> It just means Britannica is paper. Wikipedia is not. Statistics can be
> twisted to back any argument. Since Wikipedia is not paper, we can
> afford more articles.
Well, encarta isn't. But that Wikipedia is inherently more inclusive than
traditional encyclopedias is exactly the point. Taking a standard like
"encyclopedic" and applying it on an article by article basis makes no
sense. I agree that articles need to be encyclopedic, but to me that's
about topic, and not about specific instances. People, schools, companies,
places, these are topics which are in encyclopedias. Verbs, adjectives,
years, non-cardinal numbers, these aren't.
> I did not argue for an ignorance about what goes on in VFD; what I was
> saying is that much of the articles on which there is such heated
> argument (most common example: schools) are often not as relevant to the
> creation of an enyclopedia.
Well, that's clearly just your opinion. Those who are arguing for inclusion
of these schools obviously don't feel that way.
> Schools are relevant only to the population of a certain area.
That's more relevant than many of the other articles in an encyclopedia.
I'm sure I only have to hit "random page" 5 or 6 times before I find
something just about no one cares about. But, I mean, should I count "Franz
Werfel"? I'd bet my chemistry teacher changed more lives than he did.
"Hustle is a British TV drama series"? I mean, more people have heard about
it, maybe, but has it really affected anyone's life? I mean, c'mon, you
agree we should have articles on places. Those are relevant to just as many
people as schools. In fact, one solution to schools other than deletion is
to merge them with their town and redirect.
And you want to talk about substubs? Rambot articles have less useful
information than most school articles.
[[342]]. There's a year I bet gets a ton of hits, from google searches and
the like. I mean, I always search on random years when I'm bored. [[163
(number)]]. This makes us look good?
> Obscure mathematical or scientific concepts, or an
> obscure architect, etc., on the other hand, probably have contributed
> more to the world than any one school.
Depends on the concept, and on the school.
> Perhaps using the word "indisputably" was a mistake. The
> phrase "almost certainly" is probably closer to what I was
> trying to say. It's just an exaggeration for a statement, much
> like your estimate of 90%.
My 90% was based on your "indisputably".
> In short, school articles are nice to have, but higher
> priority should be given to those who have done things on a
> global/national/state-level basis.
So now they're nice to have? Before I thought you said deleting them would
cause no harm. Deleting school articles causes two problems. They remove
something that's nice to have and they waste time on deletion that could be
spend improving articles that are in your opinion more important.
> What I'm trying to say is: We need to learn to differentiate between
> articles that are nice to have and essential.
I firmly disagree.
> Having substub school articles makes us look bad.
Most of the school listings aren't substubs, but if you think substubs make
us look bad, move them to the talk page until they're finished.
> I doubt that assessment. If you look through the articles actually on
> VfD, a relatively small percentage are actually controversial (the
> school example being one).
If was a rough number, but I think it was if anything a low estimate. For
every school we delete, there are 100 others that aren't written for fear
that they'll just be deleted. There are hundreds of thousands of schools.
There are millions of teachers, nearly a million actors, hundreds of
thousands of movies, etc. Deletionists are keep *all of these* out of
Wikipedia.
> As you can see, most of those are not particularly controversial
Most of them should be kept.
Anthony
On Tuesday 26 October 2004 22:26, David Gerard wrote:
> what was your Wikipedia username again?
The reason I have not answered that question is because it was first asked by
a person who offended me ("as faulty as your logic", 23 October 2004).
Although I have ignored his e-mail address, thanks to your webarchive it came
to my attention that he repeats his attacks:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-October/031751.html
Please note that I am a bit touchy and any kind of personal attack is not
compatible with my culture and my education. I have no problem with people
who disagree with me, but I have zero tolerance for things who engage in
personal attacks.
That said, I also don't understand why I need to answer this question. Is it
some kind of policy in Wikipedia to say your user names in emails? I notice
many people post without mentioning their usernames and I wonder why you
picked me specifically.
> Do you in fact edit on Wikipedia at all?
Does it matter? I cannot understand why you ask this question. Are your
mailing lists restricted only to your members? I don't think so, because it
was very easy for me to register (if that's not the intended behaviour, you
need to configure your Mailman installation).
You can find me in many mailing lists or fora, including FSF-GNU/GNOME/CC/AMD,
and I am lurking on many other mailing lists and communities, while I have
also joined projects such as Drupal.org and OpenFormats.org and very soon I
will join KDE. Slashdot has published stories written by me (KDE/FSF's
WIWO...) and my karma there is Good. My university dissertation is on wikis.
I notice some people refer to me as "he/she" and I wonder whether they have
noticed who am I.
I was lurking here for some time before I decided to start posting, so I had
accumulated many possible suggestions and ideas about Wikipedia. Since I
decided to start posting, I started remembering whatever I had thought about
all that time, so perhaps some people disliked me because of the initial
quantity of my postings. Although I have already asked whether anybody wants
me to stop posting, nobody said something like that, so I understand that I
should be welcome here - but I still notice that some participants seem to
dislike me and I cannot understand why.
I don't really have enough time to edit much on Wikipedia. I have my own
projects and soon/hopefully will have my own nonprofit organisation. So,
although my community website now is still very new (just opened this August,
but already serving more than 65 thousand hits per month), it will certainly
become very known and important in the near future. My interests in the
Wikipedia community are mostly establishing public relations, helping each
other to improve our community policies and sharing software development tips
and practices. I mostly want communication with Wikipedia decision makers,
the Board and the development team, so that we can find ways to cooperate as
independent separate projects. So, I think it should be obvious that I
participate in your mailing lists as a representative of a friendly website
which seeks to have relations, cooperation and knowledge sharing with
Wikimedia. But if WMF does not wish to cooperate or thinks I am a
"competitor", then you can just say so and I will leave.
I suspect that some people may dislike me because I have my own wikis. Please
try to understand that I am not a "competitor" of Wikipedia. I have written
interesting articles under the GFDL that you can copy if you like (by
providing proper attribution under all the terms of GFDL - please include the
authors' names in the article). See for example this article of NerdyPC.org,
my knowledge base wiki on computer hardware and the Information Technology
industry: http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/AMD_Opteron - note the most
recent version under development is at
http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Test:AMD_Opteron
Finally, I would like to know how we can implement interwiki links to each
other and whether WMF is interested in this kind of linking.
--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org