WikiEN-l November 2003

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69 participants
251 discussions

RE: [WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism
by Peter Bartlett 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

-----Original Message----- From: The Cunctator [mailto:cunctator@kband.com] Sent: 06 November 2003 16:02 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism >[snip contents of several of the sep11 victim pages] If those are the best examples to be found, I think the goals of Wikimedia would be best served by having all those pages on the memorial wiki and not on the en.wikipedia as well. Keeping two copies around sucks up precious maintenance resources (in terms of keeping both copies up-to-date with one another) and creates endless debate about the encyclopedicness of the subjects. What are we and our users losing my having this content at sep11 only, linked-to wherever necessary in the other Wikimedia sites. Seems like the wikipedia enjoys unnecessary superior status to the Wikimedia sites sometimes Pete www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pcb21

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism
by engelsAG＠t-online.de 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

"The Cunctator" <cunctator(a)kband.com> schrieb: > Actually, it does. The Cory Hall page was a legitimate stub. Again, one > should hesitate to generate such stubs, but it's bad form to delete them. I don't buy this argument. Either having such a page is good for Wikipedia, and in that case we should not hesitate to generate them, or it is bad, and in that case we should seriously consider deleting them. Andre Engels

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Well, not really (was We are SLASHDOTTED)
by Daniel Mayer 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

jheiskan wtote: >Subject line pretty much say it all. Calling all volunteer >firedepartment personnel. > >See you at Recent changes. All I saw was a reference link to our Heliopause article. That really isn't a slashdotting (which would mean that we were part of the actual story, and not just a reference). Many people reference us. This is not new. But we should still keep an eye on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliopause Oh and after we get the new monster database server up we will probably pass Slashdot.org in terms of traffic. Then people will fear us when we link to them on our Current events page. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Rampant Deletionism
by Anthere 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

From: "The Cunctator" >The removal of any guidelines for inclusion on vfd (including the most >important one: when in doubt, don't delete) is criminal. >So is the separation of guidelines for "regular" people and for >administrators. >So is the "merge and delete" attitude. Merging entries into big messes >under general titles is much, much worse for the long term health of >Wikipedia than having many entries with specific titles. >So is the "kill all ephemera" rampage, since presuming that we know now >what will be considered ephemera 10, 20, and 1000 years from now is >pathetically presumptive, especially considering there are NO SPACE >LIMITATIONS on Wikipedia. >So is the obvious takeover of the VfD page by a horde of deletionists. >Once upon a time one vote against deletion was enough to stop deletion. >And that is all it should take. Once upon a time, pages could not be deleted by anyone but Jimbo and Larry Once upon a time, every user had a voice for or against deletion, not only respected old hands (with at least xx days of presence, and at least nn number of major edits) Once upon a time, a "regular" user could ask for the undeletion of an article and see his request respectfully and generously temporarily acknowledged Once upon a time, it was also possible for a sysop to undelete articles upon someone asking to see the content, this without being repeatedly outed Once upon a time, things were decided per consensus, not per democracy 50% + 1 voice (undeletion rule) Once upon a time, there were not so many rules that makes en looks like a french administration Once upon a time, users did not need to be sysops to dare weeding wikipedia Once upon a time, users dared weed wikipedia without fear of being said all the time their weeding does not follow the rules Once upon a time, a rule was not so much carved in stone that it could not be challenged Once upon a time, it was easier :-) >So is, imho, the renewed assault on the sep. 11 pages, but I guess >that's to be expected, since the argument "some people put so much work >into carefully researching the reports on the lives of the people killed >that day and creating entries for them, and we can't be bothered to do >the same for other people who have been killed, so we should delete all >the entries" will never die. Some people said they would not make donations, because there was no reason their donation would be used to support the existence of the 9/11 memorial :-(( Some people suggested wikipedia memorial should also welcome all the iraki victims for npov :-(((( At least, this is not deletionism Today, I am negative, tomorrow, I will be positive :-) --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard

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Re: Articles about ourselves
by Sheldon Rampton 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

You wrote: >Right, well, we could talk about that offlist if you really want, OK, whatever, but if you don't want to talk about it here, maybe you shouldn't have brought it up here. >but >that wasn't really the point. The point was just that the entry about >you that exists right now is biased, and I think that one of the >reasons that it's biased is that people are reluctant to edit it. If you think the article that exists right now is biased, CHANGE IT! I've said that several times now. If you don't, I have to assume that whatever bias you claim to perceive isn't really that much of a problem for you. And what's your basis for claiming that people are "reluctant to edit it"? Ed Poor hasn't been reluctant, nor have several other people. The only person here who seems to think the article is biased is you, for reasons that you don't want to discuss on this list. Based on what you've stated so far, it is impossible for anyone to judge whether the real problem is MY bias, the ARTICLE's bias, or YOUR bias. Personally, I vote for the conclusion that the problem is YOUR bias. But maybe that's just me. ;-) >In general people are going to be reluctant >to edit a biography of someone here, and more so if it's >_autobiography_. Of course, my bio isn't really an "autobiography." It's not written in the first person, and it actually has multiple authors. It's no more an "autobiography" than the Rev. Moon article is a "biography of Moon written by a member of the Unification Church." There's also nothing in the text of the article itself that would inhibit anyone from editing it. I suppose you might fantasize that someone would review its history, see my name there and get all inhibited, but that's a fairly fanciful speculation. (Wikipedians don't usually begin their editing by reviewing an article's history; at least, I know I don't.) And actually, it's equally plausible that seeing my name in the history would motivate people to edit it MORE aggressively, rather than less so. Try this thought experiment: If I had edited the article under an anonymous pseudonym instead of my own name, would Ed Poor have used the term "self-serving" to describe the paragraph he removed? I think his edit demonstrates that editing under my own name actually INCREASED the amount of critical scrutiny the article has received. Your argument reminds me of something I used to hear from one of my feminist friends back in the 1980s. I knew a woman who complained that at meetings of a political group to which she belonged, men tended to dominate because they didn't hesitate to speak up, whereas women were shy about expressing themselves in front of a group. She thought that this phenomenon constituted some kind of male oppression. I pointed out to her that men were under no obligation to stifle themselves just because some women lacked the gumption to speak up. If women really are more shy in public than men (which may have been true at the time, but is probably less true now), the solution isn't for men to stifle themselves but for women to find their own voices. Similarly, the solution to the problem you're posing isn't for me to stifle myself but for others to overcome their reluctance to edit boldly -- assuming that such reluctance even exists, which you haven't demonstrated. -- -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism
by Lee Pilich 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

At 08:02 06/11/2003 -0500, Cunc wrote: >I haven't really edited on Wikipedia for a while, and I checked in >because I wanted to add some content. But a quick perusal of my >watchlist showed that the votes for deletion situation is ridiculous. > >The removal of any guidelines for inclusion on vfd (including the most >important one: when in doubt, don't delete) is criminal. They were removed in order to save space, I think - a shame, but the size of VfD really is ridiculous these days. They are linked to from VfD, and I'm pretty sure that people who delete pages are aware of them. >So is the separation of guidelines for "regular" people and for >administrators. I agree that looks a bit odd. The idea, I think, is to have one page which details the deletion policy, and another page which explains to admins what they should actually do when deleting a page. It may well be better to merge them. If you feel strongly about it, well, you know what to do... [snip a couple of bits i basically agree with] >So is the obvious takeover of the VfD page by a horde of deletionists. >Once upon a time one vote against deletion was enough to stop deletion. >And that is all it should take. But once upon a time, we didn't have people making pages like [[List of people with one arm called Michael]] (contents: "*[[Madonna]]") and then defending them to the hilt on VfD. Well, OK, I've made that example up, but comparable things do happen now more than they used to. That said, I do agree that there is a general move towards deleting more, and that this is a bad thing. [snip] >Also, if a page has been around for a year or two and been seen by a >bunch of eyeballs, there's probably a reason it's there, and it probably >shouldn't be deleted. I do agree with you that stuff is getting put on VfD that should really never be put there, but if you actually look at what *does* get deleted you'll probably find it's not *quite* as bad as it first seems. I think that the number of old pages that get deleted, for example, is very tiny. Besides, if you don't like the way traffic is being handled through VfD, you should handle more of it yourself. Maybe that's what I'll start to do. LP (Camembert)

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Partial solution to rampant deletionism
by Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

I often find that many of the deletionists endorse and use this "policy": If an article is not up-to-date, NPOV, well-written, long enough, or sufficiently accurate; then, it should be deleted. It is up to those who vote "keep"; to render this article to a "proper" level of quality; otherwise, it will be deleted. I think a statement by Jimbo, if he agrees, that it is up to the deletionists to improve articles (rather than deleting them) will be somewhat useful for the non-deletionists. I am tired of seeing articles listed for deletion, simply because somebody thinks it "sucks"; I am tired of being threatened, "You either improve this article within the week; OR, we are gonna kill it!"

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Eternal Ephemeral
by Alex Rosen 06 Nov '03

06 Nov '03

> As evidence of the tremendous attractive power of trivia, there has > always been the persistent popularity of "The Guinness Book of Records". The counter-argument is, the Guiness Book of Records and the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia are two different things. Perhaps this is for a reason, other than the fact that they are printed on paper. Nobody is discounting the fact that trivia is popular. The question is, does it detract from the perception of an encyclopedia as a serious source of information? Does it threaten to move Wikipedia part of the way down the path to being Everything2? (Not to mention that 99% of all trivial subjects are not at all interesting to the vast majority of people, like information about one particular elementary school.) Alex

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Re: Articles about ourselves
by Sheldon Rampton 05 Nov '03

05 Nov '03

Jimbo wrote: >Ed Poor removed that line with the comment "(moved self-serving ... >text to talk)". And of course since then, famously, you two have been >at each others throats. I'm not suggesting a direct causal >connection, but just showing how articles about ourselves are fraught >with the possibility of conflict. This causal connection doesn't exist at all. Ed Poor started the article about me about a year before I ever heard of Wikipedia. I didn't object to his original article or to his subsequent edits to my edits of it. Our conflicts have revolved around other things, such as his attacks on me here on wikien-l related to the global warming article. >You're well-liked around here. I like you. But in my local >newspaper, I read an editorial you wrote (an excerpt from _Weapons of >Mass Deception_, I believe) that almost made my head explode. :-) I >thought it wasn't just mistaken, but deeply misleading. And I think >that your posture in that piece as some kind of neutral arbiter >exposing PR spin was absurd -- the piece itself was a masterpiece of >spin. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but without knowing what you think was specifically misleading in my article, I'm not prepared to respond to these charges. And for the record, I've never claimed to be a "neutral" arbiter of spin. I don't even know what you mean by "neutral" in that context. John Stauber and I, and the Center for Media and Democracy, are watchdogs. It's impossible to be a "neutral" watchdog. If you had a "neutral" watchdog in your house, it wouldn't bark at burglars because it wouldn't presume to take a position on whether they had the right to enter your home. You may recall that part of my reason for establishing the Disinfopedia as a separate project from the Wikipedia is that I wanted to pursue an editorial policy of "fairness and accuracy" rather than "neutral point of view." I strive to make my writings fair and accurate, and if there was something in my article that you thought was inaccurate (as opposed to merely "making your head explode"), I would appreciate having you point it out to me. >And yet the article reads like pure hagiography. It's a perfectly >appropriate self-biography for PR purposes, but it completely fails as >encyclopedia material. And I think that most people will naturally, >and rightly, refrain from adding criticism of your work there, _as a >matter of personal courtesy_, because you edit it yourself, and you >are known and liked here. I have no objection to people adding criticism of my work there. (Of course, they have a responsibility to make factually-based criticisms.) In fact, the reason I mentioned the article here is precisely because I want to go out of my way to make sure people feel INVITED to revise it (as several have done). If you still think it "reads like pure hagiography," go ahead and revise. My feelings can take it. Moreover, I think that some of the things I added to the article myself are details that do NOT "read like pure hagiography." I'm not personally thrilled about my history with the Mormon church, for example, and the fact that I have been influenced by feminism and peace activism is something that Ed Poor's camp might cite as evidence of my political bias. >2. UNVERIFIABLE INFORMATION > >You are an expert on yourself, to be sure. So, who could possibly >challenge you on such statements as "At the age of three, his family >moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where his father worked as a musician"? And you see that as a problem? Of course, there ARE ways to verify that information. Someone could look up my birth certificate or interview my father's co-workers if they cared to take the trouble. In short, the information is as verifiable as any other information on this earth. Moreover, I don't see the question of when my family moved to Las Vegas as something that terribly controversial or likely to create a big point of view problem. All information has some sort of provenance, beyond which nothing can be done to further verify it. I don't think any of the information I've added to my own article is any less verifiable than anything else in Wikipedia. Frankly, I think it's rather silly to worry about whether I might have added something inaccurate about the age at which my family moved to Las Vegas. And if you think that information is inappropriate for inclusion, feel free to remove it entirely. Just for comparison's sake, in the biography of Sun Myung Moon, Ed Poor has added a phrase which says that "word play on Rev. Moon's name provides a source of merriment to Unificationist disciples." This, of course, can only be verified by Unificationist disciples such as Ed. Do you think that's a problem too? And should Unificationist disciples then be expected to recuse themselves from contributing to the biography of Rev. Moon? >3. GOOD TASTE > >Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a reference work, not a tool for our own >self-promotion. I can easily envision a mocking criticism of us as a >non-serious work if we all start writing entries about ourselves. "Of >the 1,234 page-length biographies in wikipedia, fully 10% of them are >of Wikipedia contributors writing about themselves." OK, but I didn't start the article about myself. Ed Poor did. Evidently he thought that I was important enough to merit an article, long before we had ever communicated personally and before I had even heard of Wikipedia. I would not have created it myself, but since it already existed, I think I'm entitled to edit it. And if someone else wants to edit my edits, that's their right too. >Let me say it another way -- it isn't so much the conflict-of-interest >that's a problem, it's that personal courtesy prevents people from >editing an article about you that you've edited yourself, with the >result being an entry that is not encyclopedic. Oh, please. "Courtesy" didn't stop Ed Poor from deleting the paragraph that he described as "self-serving" -- and as you've noticed, I didn't challenge his change. I accepted his revision without quarrel, and I don't bear him any ill will for having made it (even though I've disagreed with him strongly about other things). If you still think the article reads like "hagiography," don't wuss out -- change it! I don't see how "courtesy" prevents you from doing that any more than it has prevented people from editing the Rev. Moon article or the article on global warming just because their edits might be perceived as "discourteous" to Ed's beliefs. My personal take on the question of "good taste" in this context is that it obliges me to be more careful to respect others' edits than if I were not the topic of the article. I've tried to do that, but I don't think that I (or anyone else) should feel obliged to refrain completely from editing articles that mention them. -- -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception --------------------------------

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Re: Articles about ourselves
by Sheldon Rampton 05 Nov '03

05 Nov '03

Jimbo wrote: >At a very minimum, it seems most tasteful for anyone about whom we do >have an entry to recuse themselves from working on it. Um...I've done some edits to the Wikipedia article about me (which was originally created by Ed Poor). I don't see how this is inappropriate. I arguably have a "conflict of interest" in what I write about myself, but on the other hand, I know quite a bit about the topic. Anyway, there's nothing in the Wikipedia rules to prohibit people with conflicts of interest from contributing. We don't ask people who work for drug companies to recuse themselves from posting information about health-related topics. The ethos here is that people are allowed to have their own POV but are expected to work constructively with others in arriving at articles that are NPOV (insofar as that is attainable). In the case of the article about myself, both Ed Poor and I have strong (and differing) opinions on the topic, but I don't have any problem with the role he has played in editing my bio, and I haven't seen him express any objections to the role I've played myself. I'm mentioning this now partly as a heads-up so that if anyone DOES object to the way I've contributed to my own article, they should feel invited to fix it the usual wiki way -- by making whatever revisions they feel are appropriate. Here's the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Rampton -- -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception --------------------------------

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WikiEN-l November 2003