The big return of recipees.
Many months ago, and several times already, it has been discussed
whether en:wikipedia should contain recipees. There was no obvious
majority between "a recipee should be kept" or "a recipee should be
deleted".
However, a sort of consensus has been found that some recipees of high
cultural value could be kept and other moved to wikibooks. It was also
rather a consensus that small articles could be kept here, and link the
the recipee on wikibooks.
Some users are now not only trying to have these small articles deleted,
but even eventually speedy deleted.
When that happen, first the consensus previously made is broken ; which
I consider quite wrong.
And second, which is much much much more relevant is that access to
information is damaged.
I wrote a note on the pump about that, but got no answer whatsoever. I
would like to discuss it though.
------
Here is what I wrote
There is something bugging me in the transwiki system.
Here is an example.
* A user create a recipee
* Later, someone list it on vfd, some suggest it be transwikied to
wikibooks, while other try to keep it in the encyclopedia. Nevertheless,
the article is transwikies, but a stub kept, WITH a link to wikibooks,
as it was agreed upon a few months ago.
* Later, someone finds the stub and list it on vfd (or even
suggests it for speedy deletion). In spite of those initially supporting
keeping recipee, and in spite of the consensus, the stub is deleted. The
link to the recipee subsequently disappear. Those deleting it do not
particularly attempt to keep the link active somewhere, so, it is likely
that all traces of the initial recipee is deleted.
* This is called a forced consensus :-)
Now... here is what is bugging me. In deleting not only the content, but
also the link to the wikibooks article and references to it, I consider
there is a big loss of information. Other answer me it is not a loss at
all since the information is kept... well stored somewhere else.
Except... that... wikipedia is FAR MORE known than wikibooks. Actually,
I still am waiting to see big articles on wikibooks. I still wait to see
google search leading me to wikibooks. I suspect that for many people,
Wikipedia could become the everyday encyclopedia, and at least for some
of us, the everyday encyclopedia should contain recipees. When the
recipees are deleted entirely, the reader coming to Wikipedia and typing
a recipee name... will get ... nothing. Not the recipee, nor the link to
a recipee. He will not even get a more generalist article where the link
to wikibooks could be. He will get just nothing at all.
Information *may* exist somewhere, but it is "hidden". The link has been
broken. The network does not exist.
And I think the network should exist. Our goal is to GIVE access to
information to readers. Not only to CREATE information. We must create
the information, organise it, categorize it, link it, and make it
accessible. Each time we delete information links from one project to
another, we may not hurt the content itself, but we reduce the
networkability (does that word exist ? If not, here it is) : we limit
access to information. We hid it.
When information exists, but can not be found easily by readers, then we
have failed. Imho. SweetLittleFluffyThing 23:59, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
-------
Meanwhile, in case the redirect article is deleted, I will restore it as
it was agreed last spring.
anthere
Today I blocked a user for making legal threats. See User:Gordy and
Vandalism in progress. Since doing that I have received two emails
threatening to take me to court
"You claim to have banned me for threatening wiki with legal action. at
no time did I do this. I may well have suggested that to personal users,
including yourself, and believe me, I am serious in my threat, so
serious in fact that I already have draft writ produced in the time that
I have waited on you getting back to me."
He goes on to write
"The whole impression that you have created of me is derogatory,
defammatory and extremely distressing. Such actions can be remedied
legally, and believe me, I you continue to push me on this one, you
better have a good lab technicians salary, because I'll take you
personally to the cleaners. Your actions can be addressed by way of writ
for interdiction/ and or damages, because on at least two counts you
have interfered in a matter which I did not believe was any concern of
yours."
And in a separate email he writes:
"Having secured wiki's legal owners, I shall then be compelling them by
order of court to provide me with the full names and addresses of the
individuals who have attacked me on this unbelievable place, whereby I
can raise personal actions against those individuals without harming
wikipedia."
So it's not just me, he intents to sue others as well. There is actually
a lot more but it's mostly just rant.
1) Was I right to block him or did I act too hastily?
2) Should I respond to his email or ignore it?
(3. I've just typed ~~~~ instead of my name does this mean I'm a
wikiaddict?)
Theresa
> --- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> > Each view will be managed by a group of people who make
> their own rules as
> > to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being
> the "mother
> > view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most
> > inclusive).
> Mav replied:
> That is moving away from NPOV and creates POV editor groups;
> both are dangerous to the project. I don't expect you will
> get any traction in that direction, so I won't waste much
> time on this topic.
>
> But having NPOV articles that described in detail the views
> of particular groups of people are fine; they just need to be
> correctly titled and qualified. This is just a more focused
> form of NPOV where less relevant material gets an appropriate
> amount of coverage. It is a fallacy to assume that NPOV means
> we can only have very general articles (not that I'm saying
> you ascribe to that fallacy).
I think it all depends on how much you're willing to tolerate the
expression of multiple points of view:
1. Non-controversial stuff (like gravity makes rocks fall downward, Rome
is in Italy, or Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa)
We all want one well-written, comprehensive article which tells the
objective truth about what the world is like, and what people have done
in it. These rarely have edit war, and the NPOV policy is irrelevant,
because there are no competing versions of reality on these topics.
2. Mildly controversial stuff (like my religion is true, but yours
isn't)
Almost all of us choose to "agree to disagree". We regard religion as a
realm of personal opinion, and even the most ardent believers are tame
enough to soft-pedal it for Wikipedia. Edit wars are rare, but the few
that crop up are blatantly obvious (like [[Prem Rawat]]).
For most of these mild controversies, it's possible to create a
consensus version that everyone can agree states all points of
disagreement fairly.
3. Highly controversial stuff (people go to jail or to war over these
issues)
No matter how many of us agree to treat these topics "neutrally", the
POV-pushers become unmanageable. Article is in constant turmoil, and
even contributors who are widely held to be NPOV-champs find themselves
sucked into the endless squabbling.
Summary:
If there is only one point of view of a topic, it's easy to write. Just
find out the facts and describe them. If there are two POVs which don't
arouse rancor, we can create a consensus article which describes them
and their differences.
But if there are severely antagonistic POVs, there's no way to reach
consensus, because the POV-pushers refuse to tolerate any mention of
opposing POV but one which condemns it.
So it really depends on how much we can tolerate divergent points of
view.
Ed Poor
If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly
great web projects and its success cannot be questioned.
However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its
limits and for some things it doesn't work. One of the
things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on
controversial topics.
I'm writing as someone who recently decided to stop
editting Wikipedia after making about 3000 edits over
a year or so. The area I most worked in was the Middle
East, about which I have substantial expertise. The hope
I had when I started was that despite some ups and downs
articles would gradually get better; that is, the average
quality would slowly improve over time so that the
long-term benefit of one's labors would be clear. Alas,
it is not so. Sometimes a serious effort from a few
contributors with NPOV at heart can create a major
improvement in an article, but it only lasts as long
as they man the trenches to fend off the barbarians.
A moment of lapsed attention and the article is back to
where it was before.
The dynamic process is like a cup of water with some sand
in it. You can get the sand closer on average to the top
by energetic stirring, but any success in getting it closer
to the top than that average is fleeting. Stop stirring
and all your prior work is gone in an instant.
I frankly don't think this problem can be solved by making
small changes. Tweaking the rules won't help very much.
Yes, people should have to write NPOV rather than merely
accept it in principle, but who is going to enforce that
rule and who is going to stop the enforcers from becoming
a sort of star chamber which in practice is a source of POV?
Having a "latest stable edition" won't work either, because
any sort of mechanism for changing the stable edition based
on consensus will never gain that consensus. (If you doubt
this, review the history of attempts to delete truly awful
MidEast articles via VfD; it is nearly impossible.)
Of course I wish the best of luck to those willing to devote
more of their time to trying to fix the unfixable, but I have
personally had enough. I hope to return later on to edit in
an area (mathematics) where Wikipedia works pretty well.
Zero.
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Robert said :
> I constantly invite others to add their own points of view.
+
> if you have
> some information that is useful for an article, by all
> means please add it, in NPOV fashion.
NPOV is not a fashion, it's not a dressing of different points of view, nor
a salad with opposing colors veggies linked together with a consensual npov
sauce, whose sweet npov taste hides pov behind a smokescreen.
One shouldn't add one's "own points of view", but write articles without any
"points of view" at all.
To say that "Devil is evil" is a point of view, that should not be stated
this way in articles. To say that "Devil is considered as evil (by whom,
when, where, etc.)" is not a point of view, it's a fact, and has to be
stated.
And this is not enough. If few people like Devil and praise him, this has to
be stated also. But most importantly the proportion of Devil lovers (say
around 0.01%) has to be stated also. All those are facts, even if we
actually don't have any usefull tool to measure them (except stats, that are
often biaised, as anyone knows too much).
By far, that's how I understood pov/npov...
Take an example in WP : [[Missionaries_of_Charity]] is fulled with "infos",
but is it npov ? No, it's just a garbage... Should that article be speedy
deleted ? reduced to a stub ? should we wait for an hypothetical defender of
MC that would add a hugde amount of useless waffling positive point of view
to balance that "thing" ?
I've been involved in very few edit wars, only one actually. What frightens
me is not that some newbees come and add silly things about their hobbies
(as most of them will slowly become concerned editors), what frightens me
are those ground solid hidden lines one can feel behind wikipedia, and even
in the most active and reliable editors writings. Those lines are related to
a set of beliefs that I do share as many others : pro-linux, pro-freedom,
pro-democracy, anticlericalism, western-centrism, and so on. Everybody has
an ideology but in our free world fewer and fewer person do know they have,
because it is not fashionable. Most Wikipedians have in common a part of
this ideology. This is a weight is the balance and a heavy stone in our
garden, I'm afraid.
What is cheering anyway is that it is also the case for conventionnal
encyclopedias we should wish to compare to...
gbog ('sciouze my poor English)
Elian wrote:
> NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."
> Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal
> views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work
> for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article
> at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article
> and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your
> best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do
> so, leave the article alone". And this policy should be enforced by the
> community.
I support Elian's idea. And I concur with the conclusions Rebecca made in
an earlier posting. I decided myself to leave the English Wikipedia
one year ago
after getting tired of fighting POV vandals for months. Their names
changed but their ways remained the same. I had great hope when the
arbitration committee was founded but soon I felt that this committee
is not an adequate measure for the problem.
If you reached general
agreement about a version then there should be a fast process of
barring a new generation of POV pushers from tearing all the success
down. It is not reasonable that we should go through the painfully
long processes of mediation and arbitration again and again while
these new POV pushers have time enough to undo all the progress in an
article.
I regard Adam Carr as one of the best editors Wikipedia ever had in
the history sector. With the current system you can only hope that new
NPOV defenders come and go to fight the POV pushers. The main
arguments against a stable version policy appear to be dogmas about
what a wiki should be. At last you need to come to a sort of content
arbitration or locking selected versions from major edits. If not, I
fear that one day the potential NPOV defenders will be used up.
Mirko
--
Mirko Thiessen, aka Baldhur
mailto:baldhur@mirko-thiessen.de
>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: Loosing more of our best contributors
>Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:32:36 +1000
>JAY JG wrote:
>
>>Exactly. As my watchilist grows I find myself spending no time actually
>>creating content, and all my time monitoring existing articles with
>>painfully reached NPOV, as each new POV warrior discovers Wikipedia and
>>decides to add a few "relevant" comments promoting his/her POV, which in
>>turn prompts other to insert their own POV, etc. Or, as I've more
>>recently been experiencing, the replace the article entirely with their
>>own POV version. In the latter case, if they don't ultimately get their
>>way, they often create new articles with their own POV under similar
>>titles, or highly POV titles, as a back-door to getting their way. If
>>these articles are eventually discovered, they are often listed for VfD or
>>re-direct, a process which usually takes further weeks of negotiation. In
>>the end, we're either left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping
>>articles, or (in the best case) the POV warriors eventually abandon their
>>quest, having wasted many person-days of individual editors times which
>>could have been far more profitably spent creating new content.
>>
>>Jay.
>
>If the authors are having to create new articles to add their POV, then may
>I suggest that they are not getting a fair hearing on Wikipedia?
They generally aren't interested in the Talk: pages, and when forced to them
they tend to use them for soapboxes or ad hominems, rather than for
discussing article content.
Jay.
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>From: "Charles Matthews" <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
>Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:00:51 +0100
>Jay jg wrote
>
> > In the end, we're either
> > left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping articles, or (in the best
>case)
> > the POV warriors eventually abandon their quest, having wasted many
> > person-days of individual editors times which could have been far more
> > profitably spent creating new content.
>
>Well, these outcomes are different in nature.
>
>I think it is common ground that edit wars create poor articles; so, yes,
>edit warriors do leave wikijunk. Experienced editors are capable of dealing
>with this.
I think a number of experienced editors here are telling you the exact
opposite; that they "deal with it" by giving up.
>'A mass of overlapping articles' is indeed a probable consequence of two or
>more sides to an argument backing up their cases: this is intrisically a
>Good Thing, in that one can get behind strongly-held beliefs to some of the
>grounds. A case I was looking at today is [[loop quantum gravity]]; where
>WP
>is getting the benefit of some expert contributions, though not in the most
>finished or useable form. The merge options are a little tricky here (and
>are surely more so in other cases); but typicallly are mostly about skill
>as
>an editor.
It is intrinsically a Bad Thing if it persists; we get to the state where
Wikipedia cannot be trusted because it simultaneously (and often
vociferously) asserts all sorts of contradictory things, and no-one actually
knows where to look for information, because the articles (as stated) all
overlap. It also makes the maintenance effort grow exponentially.
>Finally, time consumption. Undeniable that responsible Wikipedians
>watching
>contentious areas do have to put in the hours. Perhaps creating new
>content
>would get more recognition. It is, though, rapid to revert; the bias is in
>favour of sustaining the status quo if that's the object.
Hmm. I've personally been criticized quite strongly and regularly for
reverting to the status quo; maybe the bias in your mind is not that of
others.
>By the way, it seems a fairly good rule of thumb that when Robert complains
>to this list, he has some other quarrel on his agenda; and no change with
>this one.
True enough, but regardless of the source, it does touch on a broader
problem.
Jay.
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>From: Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Loosing more of our best contributors
>Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:37:10 -0400
>To add additional perspective, he's also single-handedly written some of
>our best, in-depth wiki articles, as well as forged consensus on some
>difficult topics, such as [[Anti-Zionism]]. Much of his frustration seems
>to stem from the fact that, even after such difficult consensus is forged,
>the wiki method means that any random POV pusher can come in and mangle the
>article, which has happened on [[Anti-Zionism]] on numerous occasions.
>Unless a group of knowledgeable people are willing to waste their time
>baby-sitting an article, which usually amounts to revert-wars (since rarely
>are the additions even remotely helpful), the articles go rapidly downhill,
>wasting the effort of the people who painstakingly put together a quality
>article on a contentious subject.
>
>I'd have to say I agree with that criticism. I've wasted some time myself
>on some of these contentious subjects, only to come back a few months later
>and find an abysmally horrid article in its place. Now I could start over
>again and try to hammer that article back into a reasonable state, or I
>could just revert to my 3-month-old version, or I could give up and say,
>"fine, the crappy article can stay". And, increasingly, a lot of people
>are taking the third option.
Exactly. As my watchilist grows I find myself spending no time actually
creating content, and all my time monitoring existing articles with
painfully reached NPOV, as each new POV warrior discovers Wikipedia and
decides to add a few "relevant" comments promoting his/her POV, which in
turn prompts other to insert their own POV, etc. Or, as I've more recently
been experiencing, the replace the article entirely with their own POV
version. In the latter case, if they don't ultimately get their way, they
often create new articles with their own POV under similar titles, or highly
POV titles, as a back-door to getting their way. If these articles are
eventually discovered, they are often listed for VfD or re-direct, a process
which usually takes further weeks of negotiation. In the end, we're either
left with wikijunk, or a mass of overlapping articles, or (in the best case)
the POV warriors eventually abandon their quest, having wasted many
person-days of individual editors times which could have been far more
profitably spent creating new content.
Jay.
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