"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote
> a) Most of the unreferenced material in Wikipedia is accurate. What
> do I mean by "most?" 90%? 95%? 99%? Something like that.
My thinking has shifted a bit after three years at the coal face. Strange errors do get in. And, as one of the world's great historians of science convinced me, the historical truth is just about always stranger than you'd imagine.
But I say citation practices should go 'horses for courses'. The 'course' is per topic area, not per article, naturally.
> c) Everything in Wikipedia should eventually be referenced or
> removed.
Nah. There's even an interesting reason, which is that with exponential growth the boundary (wild wiki frontier) is always of size very significantly large with respect to the central 'core' of must-have articles. What we actually need is a _targeted drive_ to bring up the quality of the core articles, and that must include fact-checking and all the other good things. Tagging just everything creates work, and implies work only likely to be done sporadically.
Wikipedia has been on a billion-second spree (roughly). What is needed is a kind of kneading or churning motion where editors don't just follow the ribbon development.
Charles
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> From: "James Hare" <messedrocker(a)gmail.com>
>
> I was thinking of an idea that articles could be trimmed down to
> what's been
> sourced and the longer (albeit unsourced) article could go to some
> sort of
> Crappopedia where it awaits confirmation. Stuff that is confirmed
> with a
> source could be added back. That way, Wikipedia could maintain
> integrity and
> the other wiki could be a development grounds.
My own suggestion would be:
a) that the reference apparatus should delineate the _range_ of text
that's being referenced (not just the _end_ of the text that's being
referenced);
b) that the default display of an article should use a fairly subtle
difference in color between referenced text (black) and unreferenced
text (a dark tint of some dark color--perhaps Zune brown to suggest
"crap"), with of course a user preference to change this.
User preferences could include
a) any color combination, including no distinction between referenced
and unreferenced (which would also suppress superscripted footnote
numbers), and
b) hide unreferenced text.
I don't think it's all that hard to imagine solutions, provided what
we want to do is solve the problem, as opposed to battling between
the existing unsatisfactory alternatives of deleting unsourced text,
marking it and deleting it sometime much later, or leaving it in
forever without any ugly marks in hopes that "eventually" someone
will source it.
> > From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info>
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:11:02 -0700
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [Arbcom-l] Fwd: simple
> example
>
>
> On Nov 29, 2006, at 3:45 PM, Rob Smith wrote:
>
> > I submitted an AMA request and pledge not use the
> account for other
> > purposes outside an Appeal.
> >
> > Wikipedia:AMA Requests for
> Assistance/Requests/November 2006/Nobs02
>
> Looks good to me.
>
> Fred
>
I hope that's not a "need right away" thing, because
we're always backlogged. It might be a couple days/a
week before we can get to it. We're _really_ short on
active members.
[[w:en:User:Royalguard11]]
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Guy Chapman wrote
> We have WP:V and WP:NPOV
> and WP:NOR - we absolutely must have a decent, working definition of
> what defines a source, so that we can apply these.
It's the carpet we sweep the dust under. Which makes the rest of the place look a damn sight tidier. Remember, though, that it is the wikilawyers who run this 'you haven't defined your terms' riff into the ground, for their own sordid 'gain'. I'm happy enough that articles which, after best efforts to add reliable sources, do not have much to show, should be deleted at AfD.
I think we should admit that the pool of 'reliable sources' is dynamic, and certain things that are premature creations at the moment will in the future be much easier to source. This kind of argument helps keep us straight on celebrity (Warholinan 900 seconds) versus notability; and that WP cannot, be definition, itself be the pioneer reliable source on anything.
Charles
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If the benchmark for a community ban is being lowered then the ban should
not be indefinite but no more than a year. If there's a desire to make the
ban permanent the community should ask the ArbComm to extend it.
Indefinite bans are like sentencing a criminal to life imprionment without
parole - it encouraged ban evasion and bad behaviour and does nothing to
rehabilitate or encourage compliance.
Michel
On 11/27/06, Rob Smith <nobs03(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/27/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 27, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Rob Smith wrote:
> >
> > > On 11/25/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote:
> > >
> > >>
> > >> Kiko is still alive. What is this innocent person, who is leading an
> > >> ordinary life, doing on Wikipedia with false information about him?
> > >>
> > >> Fred
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > > Wow Fred. Another extraordinary coincidence in this case (I count
> > > about four now). Turns out Kiko's papers are closer to where I've
> > > been sitting and working the past few years than the bathroom I use.
> > >
> > > http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:E2qQtWlea6gJ:libxml.unm.edu/
> > > rmoa/content/nmu/finished/nmu1mss640bc.html+Francisco+E.+Mart%C3%
> > > ADnez+Defense+Committee+(FEMDC),&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3
> > >
> > > Looks like I unwittingly may have become another unathorized
> > > biographer of another activist.
> > >
> > > Now we see it wasn't past associations with Chip Berlet, or the NLG,
> > > why your transformed a Content Dispute into something it was not. It
> > > was a close and apparantly longtime personal friendship with Fransisco
> > > I. Martinez.
> > >
> > > Nobs01
> > >
> >
> > Interesting. "After he was exonerated, Martinez was reinstated to the
> > bar. He continues to live and practice law in Alamosa, Colorado,
> > where he remains involved in community and social activism." We are
> > on speaking terms, but "longtime personal friendship" would be a
> > gross exaggeration.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> >
>
> Wikipedia says, "Ken Lay... best known for his role in the
> widely-reported corruption scandal... was found guilty on May 25,
> 2006, of 10 counts against him..."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Lay
>
> And "Oliver North was...indicted on sixteen felony counts and ...
> convicted of three...", replete with a mugshot
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran-Contra_affair
>
> One dead one living. But in neither article are they refered to as "innocent".
>
> This source says, "Martinez was brought to trial by the Immigration
> and Naturalization Service ... and convicted ... ".
>
> So it appears, just as dispute resolution, it depends who your friends
> are in being able to push POV.
>
>
> Nobs01
>
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
> Absence of any claim to validity is what is at issue, and the
> absence of any sources is one of the diagnostic factors. very few
> sourced articles are flagged for A7.
Oh, some are, you know. I had a worry about this yesterday, writing about a historian who was at the College de France. What if some admin has no idea whether this is an 'assertion of notability' or not? I'm not going to demean myself by adding 'the world-famous and prestigious academic institution in Paris'. But I do wonder whether some people would think I should, in order to be asserting a bit louder.
Charles
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"The Cunctator" wrote
> That's the type of reasoning that I find convincing with respect why it
> would be a bad idea to try to do explicit Erdos number categories.
The 'categories-for-deletion' vote to rid ourselves of those failed. So we have them. Nemmind, we can try again some time.
You can't tag a category with {{fact}}, which is a bummer.
Charles
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geni wrote
>
> On 10/14/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste(a)dapyx.com> wrote:
> > Should we have a category which says that the subject of the article
> > (a mathematician) collaborated with another mathematician who
> > collaborated with another mathematician who collaborated with
> > with another mathematician who collaborated with Hungarian
> > mathematician Paul Erd?s?
> >
> > Well, according to the apparent CfD result, we should.
> False the existance of a category does not mean that we should have
> articles on everything that could fall within that category.
That's a misapprehension of what this is about.
I'd have voted for deletion myself. This is about as pop-cultural as mathmos get (I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales).
Charles
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Ray Saintonge wrote
> The most effective solution for dealing with a bad thread is the onset
> of boredom. Eventually they all come to an end.
Actually, they don't, and trolls don't always go back under bridges. It only takes two folk who won't concede the last word.
Ray, where does this bottomless pit of generalisations come from?
Charles
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