(Anyone who has ever dressed a child will love this one!)
Did you hear about the teacher who was helping one of her kindergarten
students put on his cowboy boots?
He asked for help and she could see why.
Even with her pulling and him pushing, the little boots still
didn't want to go on. By the time they got the second boot on, she had
worked up a sweat.
She almost cried when the little boy said, 'Teacher,
They're on the wrong feet.' She looked, and sure enough,
They were. It wasn't any easier pulling the boots off than
It was putting them on. She managed to keep her cool as
Together they worked to get the boots back on, this time
On the right feet ..
He then announced, 'These aren't my boots.'
She bit her tongue rather than get right in his face and scream,
'Why didn't you say so?', like she wanted to. Once again, she
Struggled to help him pull the ill-fitting boots off his little
Feet. No sooner had they gotten the boots off when he said,
'They're my brother's boots. My Mom made me wear 'em.'
Now she didn't know if she should laugh or cry. But, she
Mustered up what grace and courage she had left to wrestle
The boots on his feet again.
Helping him into his coat, she asked, 'Now, where are your Mittens?'
He said, 'I stuffed 'em in the toes of my boots.'
She will be eligible for parole in three years.
An article about a person (i.e. a biography), should be about their life.
That is what biography means. The story of a life.
Paris Hilton is not "notable" for going to jail, lots of people go to jail.
She is notable, and also she went to jail.
Once a person is notable enough to have an article here at all, then we
should present their biography.
If we wanted to only present, in a person's article, what they are notable
for, then we shouldn't have an article on the person at all, but rather on the
incident, mentioning the person with that incident-article.
Notability is used to establish whether or not the person gets an article.
It doesn't establish what all goes into that article.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 2/22/2009 3:09:56 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com writes:
An article about a person should primarily be about what the person is
notable for.
**************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you.
(http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agencies&ncid=emlcntusye…)
I have been looking over a number of items having to do with educational
methods. There are a few items that I think would benefit from
illustrations of the methodologies, and I've found some examples,
labelled with 'materials may be reproduced for educational purposes.'
They are the sort of thing where in the course of a 10 page lesson plan,
there's one page for photocopying for distribution, where they have
relinquished some rights (but nothing clear like a CC license).
Does an encylopedia count as an educational purpose (or, I should say,
for a declaration like that, does Wikipedia count in the eyes of the law
as educational)?
S.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> "A short article is not a stub." Repeat 10 times under your
> breath.
>
> ... A subject that can be exhaustively
> covered briefly, is not a stub. Period.
Thank you for saying this. Often, especially in biographical articles,
I've been seeing facts tossed in that seem way below the bar for
encyclopedia-worthiness: names of the subject's children, birthplaces
of people they know (!), etc. Are people adding stuff like that in
order to get stub tags removed?
IMO, making an article "not a stub" by padding it with trivialities
does not make the article better. It clutters Wikipedia and distracts
from the genuinely important content. A one-paragraph article that
crisply tells the noteworthy fact or two about its subject can be an
excellent article.
Is there any controversy about that? Or are those trivial facts
getting in not because of stub tags but just because lots of people
love to pad?
Ben
Suddenly am finding it kind of tough to find talk content. There must
be at least one mirror with indexed talk?
Of course now the internal searches are much better. As a test of how
good the internal searches are, try using them to find the discussion
about de-indexing the talk pages.
<<In a message dated 2/23/2009 6:11:09 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
sam.blacketer(a)googlemail.com writes:
do we really need to know the names and dates of birth of her
children? And what of the career details of her husband, who is not notable
in his own right? On the other hand, details of campaigns she worked on
before being elected are highly salient to political views, and it's her
political career that makes her notable.>>
"Need"? No, not at all. The political career makes her notable, and if she
is notable enough that someone has written her biography, including those
details, then we "can" include them. We don't "need" to include them. If the
only sources commenting on her children (at all) are primary ones, than we
should not include them. Primary sources extend, amplify, clarify and specify
details, they should not be used to introduce details not otherwise present in
the secondary sources.
So if secondary sources mention "her husband the plumber", and "her five
children are named Marjory, Bruce, Wayne, Robin and Ambidextrous", then we can.
If they don't, we shouldn't. That would be the first line of attack for
anyone who wants to remove these details.
Will Johnson
**************Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your
neighborhood today.
(http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=Tax+Return+Preparation+%26+Filing&n…)
Say, does anyone else here edit Wikipedia as "therapy"?
I'm in grad school now, and my head has been spinning from the frequent
context-switching: jumping between one in-depth class and another and
another, without finishing one thing before starting another, and
without having time to dig in enough depth to satisfy the need to "get
to the bottom of it". Until a few days ago, the noise in my head (a
rhythm of non-stop interruption--"cogitus interruptus", you could call
it) had gotten so intense, it was becoming hard to function.
At times like these, I've occasionally turned to Wikipedia. Hmm,
something needs doing. Let's just do it. I can work it over until I'm
content. Each little editing project is short: from a few minutes to
an hour. There are no deadlines. I just follow my inspiration for
what to work on as it comes. If I get stuck on something, like not
being able to find a fact, I just leave the article in better condition
than I found it and call my little project "done".
Saturday morning, I started an article about a topic in one of my
classes. Just summarized what was in the book. And then spent the
weekend merrily editing whatever I felt like editing. It's now Monday
morning, and my head is clear. There is no more noise in my head!
Who needs drugs or doctors when you've got "edit this page"? ;)
Ben
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>>
>> As will surprise none of the Knol nay-sayers here (in which number I
>> believe I can count myself), Knol hasn't done too great.
>
> Compared to what? I can't imagine Knol is much worse than Wikipedia when it
> was 6 months old. Knol just published its 100,000th article. When
> Wikipedia was 5 months old, it said on the main page "We've got over 6,000
> pages already. We want to make over 100,000." The Wayback machine then
> skips ahead 5 more months, by which point Wikipedia brags "We started in
> January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over
> 100,000, so let's get to work"
>
> To be sure, Knol has a lot of very serious problems with it. But it's only
> 6 months old. The concept is far from finalized. 6 months into Jimmy
> Wales' encyclopedia dream he was still working on Nupedia.
>
> Here's the Wikipedia on George Bush 19 months into Wikipedia:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20020817062610/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/George_Bush
>
> How long will it take you to find a better article on Barack Obama in Knol?
With Wikipedia by this point, the basic concept of collaboration had
been proved. With Knol, we see only the divisiveness of the payments
system*, and a few isolated authors striving on their own.
More to the point: yes, we should expect more of Knol than of
Wikipedia at similar stages! Knol has, by virtue of its position in
time, *numerous* advantages over Nupedia/Wikipedia. We should expect a
lot more.
It has:
1) A clear license regime. Thanks to 8 years of Creative Commons, the
choice is not limited to just the GFDL (with its many problems).
2) 8 years of hardware advances, or approximately 5 iterations of Moore's law.
3) 8 years of wiki development, demonstrating dead ends, the good
ideas, & what remains to be improved. Imagine if Knol had to start
with the state of the art in 2001. It would be truly gruesome. (Anyone
looked at the very old Wikipedias in Nostalgia, or old usemod wikis
like Ward's? They're hideous and unusable! They make me quite grateful
for 2009 MediaWiki with all its modern conveniences.)
4) The backing of a commercial juggernaut. Quite aside from Knol's
hosting being a) very good; and b) not the Knol devs' concern,
Google's backing offers an array of advantages, from certainty to
excellent software development resources**, such as:
5) Massive publicity. To be facetious, at launch Knol had infinitely
more publicity than did Wikipedia.
6) A public educated to read wikis, and to use them. How many people
could Wikipedia hope to draw on at day 1 - that cared even a little
about Free content, that knew what a wiki was, that wouldn't dismiss
it as hopeless, and had an editing familiarity with wikis? Darned few.
We had to constantly evangelize and educate people about wikis, and by
dint of unremitting effort create the English Wikipedia and make it
interesting and valuable enough that people would contribute who
didn't fulfill any of those criteria. En was the existence proof that
large-scale wikis were possible and valuable. Knol, on the other hand,
can draw immediately on that pool of people Wikipedia created.
7) A model targeted directly at people unhappy with Wikipedia. Are you
an expert tired of 'anti-expertism' on Wikipedia? Why try to get along
with those bumpkins when you could have your own article completely to
yourself on Google Knol (and get paid for't)? Wikipedia appealed to
those unhappy with Nupedia. Nupedia when Wikipedia launched was a lot
smaller than Wikipedia was when Knol launched. I think this pool of
possible contributors was thus also much larger for Knol than it was
for Wikipedia.
etc. etc.
* If I weren't so lazy, this is where I'd cite some of the studies
showing paying some contributors to FLOSS projects reduces
volunteerism.
** Not to denigrate the efforts of Magnus and Tim and all the other
MediaWiki developers over the years, but one simply expects more of
full-time developers experienced with the famous Google infrastructure
and supposedly at Google's standards of excellence.
- --
gwern
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEAREKAAYFAkl3RIsACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oJWXwCfVL0x328tmey5rElGolu44PQj
2RcAoIhofvJUWXmj0HoeJwbl+kPSftIB
=kEJG
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----