From: Mark Gallagher
<m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au>
Reply-To: m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au,English Wikipedia
<wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Madness of King Infobox
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 00:49:32 +1000
G'day Christiano,
From: Mark
Gallagher <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au>
G'day Christiano,
What sort of thing? Edit warring over infoboxen?
There are circumstances where edit-war-like behaviour is justified.
Reverting vandalism, for example. Not silly infoboxen. Heck, even if
it's a banned user, rather than edit-war you're better off blocking the
user (or getting someone else to block him).
What's the rush to get your version to the top? It's a bloody infobox,
not tubgirl.
Now see ANI.
I've seen it. Okay, so the chap isn't a random IP but is in fact
NewYork1956.
So, explain again why it's justified to deliberately engage in edit
warring? Is it because you're the good guy and he's not? I think I've
seen this reasoning before.
Actually, there are possibly more problems with
this particular infobox
than
I thought, let alone wider issues. For starters,
the time given for when
he
was active contradicts the article, and Grove,
when I check that. Then
again
we have redundany: if you're going to
describe him as an opera singer,
then
obviously he sang opera, you don't need to
state that twice.
Assume for the moment that I agree with you that the infobox is
a) crap
b) inappropriate
How does this agreement make one iota of difference?
Then the image is fair use, which I'm just a
bit iffy about. Can someone
advise me as to the copyright status of that?
The image is iffy, though no iffier than many others we've happily
ignored (for now). A source would be nice. I'd prefer to see it gone.
Someone with more (much more) knowledge of copyright issues could give
you a better answer. Greg?
--
Mark Gallagher
Yes, I'd definitely like someone to tell me about the copyright. There must
be a free image of him kicking around somewhere, after all.
All the rest is a bit of blind alley, we can talk about that more privately.
Of more relevance is
Earlier on, someone said that this was a "mistake". No, it wasn't. I'm
not
attacking or trying to knock anyone, but someone deliberately added two
infoboxes in one edit. That something like this could happen really is a
consequence of the all-must-have infoboxes culture. In this occasion, it
leads to disaster; common sense goes out the window. Even with one infobox,
you just can't do a useful summary short enough to fit: "Pianist, Prime
Minister/Foreign Minister of Poland" is useless, for obvious reasons. It
doesn't tell you anything, nothing that you could possibly be satisfied
with. It's completely redundant, because with a person like that you just
have to read the rest.
I'm not saying anything very complex, just that sometimes rather complicated
stuff just can't be adequately reduced to the one or two words required of
an infobox. It doesn't always work, particularly, so it seems, with
biographies, though obviously the things are more useful with more -
one-dimensional? - subjects like albums, say. I'm not asking for a
revolution, just that infoboxes do not get in the way of accuracy and common
sense. Getting things right is more important than spurious brevity and a
false illusion of conformity.
Moreschi
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