WikiEN-l November 2004

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
111 discussions

3RR policy change
by Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

I am personally endorsing and promoting a proposal that the 3 Revert Rule be enforced. The exact wording of the proposal is: If you violate the 3 revert rule, sysops may block you for up to 24 hours. In the cases where both parties violate the rule, sysops should treat both sides equally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three_revert_rule_enforcement I encourage everyone to vote. I actually even encourage you to vote yes. This is a long overdue change, and I believe there is strong community consensus for it. After the poll is finalized, I will back it fully. I discussed the exact wording with several people, and have discussed the revert rule generally with a lot of people, even some of the worst violators. I don't think we'll have much problem getting this passed quickly. --Jimbo -- "La nèfle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org

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Re: Plagiarism
by Daniel P.B.Smith 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

> Robert <rkscience100(a)yahoo.com> mentioned having seen his first example of plagiarism and says "Sadly, a huge amount of NYC inner-city high school student are literally writing at a fourth or fifth grade level, and show zero awareness of issues such as plagiarism and copyright infringement." This isn't particularly new and is not limited to inner-city students. In the 1970s I knew someone who taught a junior high-school class in a middle-class neighborhood of a Wisconsin town of about 100,000. The story is long, but the punchline is: "Well, you shouldn't have copied his lab notes. But if you're going to copy something and you don't want to be caught, don't make a _carbon_ copy. But if you do make a carbon copy, at least be sure you erase the other student's name _completely_. And don't put it in my in-basket _directly underneath the original._" When I was a teaching assistant in a lab course, I frequently received lab notes containing illustrations which students had copied or traced out of textbooks. I made a big point of saying "If you do copy something you _must_ say that it's a copy and you _must_ credit it." I showed them some examples in their textbook that said "after so-and-so" and "from so-and-so." Interestingly enough, from that point on they continued to copy illustrations but gave proper credit lines. (They didn't seem to regard illustrations in lab papers as part of the factual record, but as some kind of decoration or enhancement). When I was in high school--and in the eyes of the locals, the only scope for debate was whether our town, or New Trier, or Newton, Massachusetts had the very best high school in the entire world--I was once was in a health class where we all had to write up papers about something. One fellow-student was very annoyed that he had received a C+, after he had gotten his father's secretary type it up, neatly, straight out of the _Scientific American._ (By the way, this was not an act of arrogance; this was a really nice guy who wasn't fantastically bright and completely sincere in his puzzlement over his grade). -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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Re: difficulties
by Robert Graham Merkel 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 05:05:33PM +0000, wikien-l-request(a)Wikipedia.org wrote: > I have had difficulties finding a "list" of California legislatures > from your http://www.fact-index.com/c/ca/california.html page. As > well, on the sports list of professional sports in California - there > is no mention of minor league soccer - there are various numbers of > teams - here's two websites: > http://prosoccer.uslsoccer.com/teamdirectory/66078.html ; > http://pdl.uslsoccer.com/teamdirectory/65510.html ; & > http://www.mpsl.info/teams.aspx > Dear Steve, Firstly, the site you link from, fact-index.com, merely re-uses Wikipedia content, as Wikipedia's copyright allows it to do; we are however not responsible for the content of any such re-use. Often such sites use old versions of the articles. Wikipedia's actual article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California. As for your substantive comments, Wikipedia is the creation of its users. Every article on Wikipedia is written, revised, and improved through the collective efforts of people like yourself! You can fix any omissions or errors that you come across if you can. If you can't fix an article, or don't have the time or inclination, leave a comment on the article's "discussion page" (you can click on the "discussion" tab on the top of the article to go to it), so that the people who are interested in working on this particular article can see your comments. Thanks for taking the time to contact us. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Merkel robert.merkel(a)benambra.org http://benambra.org One of the young bankers at Deer Valley told how he went to buy a Superman costume for his son's ninth birthday party and found the label weirdly appropriate: "Wearing this garment does not enable purchaser to fly". -- Tina Brown, salon.com, 2003-03-13 --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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election fraud article
by Delirium 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

Personal political views disclaimer: I voted for John Kerry, and am of the mind that the possibility of voter fraud in the just-completed election cannot be altogether discounted. --- That said, I find the fact that people keep adding [[en:2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities]] to the main page odd. It's a poorly-written article that mostly cites amateurish statistical correlations (with lots of graphs) and draws unwarranted causations from them, and generally reads like it was written by the tinfoil-hat crowd. Furthermore, this issue isn't really "in the news" by any stretch of the imagination, and even on left-leaning sites such as dailykos.com, it's controversial and not agreed upon. In short, this article presents a viewpoint that: 1) Shouldn't be on the front page, based on newsworthiness and neutrality; and 2) Is controversial *even* by the standards of a left-wing community that agrees John Kerry would make a much better president than George W. Bush. As such, it would be nice if someone would remove it from the front page. I've already reverted three times today, so will not do so again, but I feel it makes us look like we're both amateurish and biased. -Mark

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the AC needs people with free time and interest
by Delirium 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

After a year (?) or so on the arbitration committee, and not being particularly interested in staying on it, there's one main obstacle I've seen: A lack of people with sufficient free time and interest to wade through the often complicated disputes. It's not, in my opinion, problems in getting together a quorum, or even problems in discussing contentious disputes that are the primary stumbling block. It's just the lack of getting *anything* rolling at all. Often parties to disputes will dump literally hundreds of links to edit histories, and engage in lengthy multi-page accusations and counter-accusations. Someone has to sort through that and try to make sense of it. It's not a particularly interesting job, of course. Once someone does sort through it, and proposes something, the actual voting is comparatively unproblematic. There have been occasions when voting has been too slow, but that can be dealt with by e.g. leaving nagging messages on peoples' talk pages. The biggest and hardest to overcome delays are those where voting has simply never started, because nobody had the time or inclination to wade through the pile of evidence and accusations to distill a set of options to vote on in the first place. How to solve that I don't really know. -Mark

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Found my first case of Wikipedia plagiarism
by Robert 14 Nov '04

14 Nov '04

Well, I have just come across my first case of Wikipedia plagiarism. Someone just turned in an extra-credit research paper on the legality and morality of abortion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_and_legality_of_abortion They simply cut-and-pasted the entire article, including bulet points and "Related articles", added their own introduction paragraph, and their own conclusion paragraph. I dealt with this in accord with my school's plagiarism policy - and a lot of leeway - since the student in question really did not understand the difference between plagiarism and writing one's own paper. Sadly, a huge amount of NYC inner-city high school student are literally writing at a fourth or fifth grade level, and show zero awareness of issues such as plagiarism and copyright infringement. >From my conversations with middle-school teachers (and reading articles in teaching journals) it is an unwritten policy in NYC schools that children are automatically promoted to the next grade as long as they have good attendance and behave in class. The result of this pseudo-liberal(*) attitude is that we have high schools full of illiterate kids who can't read, can't write, and think that "handing a paper in" is truly what matters, even if they did not write it themselves. Currently, I am trying to deal with this issue by giving a copy of the following paper to all of my students, and having a day discussing this topic. Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml Obviously, a high school science shouldn't have to do this; we should be teaching science. But in practice most of our students have been failed by their family, their community and many of their previous teachers; they come to us ignorant of what a well-schooled sixth grader should know by heart. (Some high-schoolers, in fact, are on a third-grade reading level.) We thus need to spend time teaching them things that others did not. Lately I have been seeing more and more borderline plagiarism taking place in homework assignments, and the text is often coming from sites that have copied Wikipedia content. Have others here seen this problem? I understand that Wikipedia is not at all responsible for someone's plagiarism or copyright infringement; however I was thinking that we should have an article on the subject that we could use as a handout. Our Plagiarism article is a good start. Robert (RK) (*) I say pseudo-liberal, because these policies do not represent actual progressive educational policies. Actual progressive educational policies help students learn; the status quo, however, grossly lowers the bar for passing to give the illusion of progress, which hurts the students and eventually their community. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com

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The Vote Fraud Flurry
by Fred Bauder 13 Nov '04

13 Nov '04

Here's a reasonably good story regarding the Vote Fraud flurry: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html It was news, but not for its substance. Fred

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Speeding up arbitration
by Mark Pellegrini 13 Nov '04

13 Nov '04

(crossposted to Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration) One of the largest complaints about arbitration is that it is too slow. In an attempt to remedy this, the arbitration committee has decided to require that '''all evidence''' on evidence pages be formatted chronologically, with concise summaries of events and links to page diffs. [[User:Raul654/Plautus]] should serve as an example. Evidence not formatted this way may be summarily deleted. The reasoning behind this is as follows - the slowest part of arbitration is arbitrators trying to understand what happened in a dispute. All too often, disputants do 'mental dumps' onto the evidence pages, making the job of sorting it out extremely difficult and time consuming. This requirement should serve to make this step it easier and faster. --Mark

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AC with a small quorum and IRC meetings
by Tim Starling 13 Nov '04

13 Nov '04

Mav and I had a chat today on IRC about the arbitration committee, and we came to a somewhat different and more aggressive model to the one Michael Snow is proposing. I can take very little credit for this, since our discussion basically consisted of me putting forward my ideas, Mav saying his were better, and me agreeing. The basic problem, as I think we all understand, is that the Arbitration Committee is slow. It is slow because some of the members don't reply to emails and don't watch the relevant pages on the wiki. What emails they do send are few and far between. The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee. The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them. Under this proposal, the size of the arbitration committee can expand to meet the ever-increasing demands placed on them. Preliminary judgements leading to blocking pending a full review should be possible within minutes of a request. I'll put up this proposal on the wiki some time in the next couple of days, unless someone else beats me to it. -- Tim Starling

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Preliminary Deletion
by John Lee 13 Nov '04

13 Nov '04

Preliminary Deletion's voting has closed; alas, a consensus was unobtainable, although some have been making effort arguing that a consensus is not necessary, as a 2:1 majority in favour of the proposal was achieved. I take no sides in this debate. However, I have taken the leisure of rewriting the proposal to include a suggestion of anthony's, and answers to nine questions/objections. I have also merged a popular suggestion with the proposal itself, albeit cutting out a lot of fluff. I hope I can get quite a few people from the mailing list to go over the proposal again, because I fervently believe we need to do something about VFD before collapses under its own weight. I wanted to address people's objections, I really did, but I can see no conceivable way to do so without alienating yet another sizeable segment of Wikipedia. People want less bureaucracy, but they don't want to give admins a free rein. So what do we do? Let users delete and recreate articles freely? Imagine the delete wars! I think it's very sad that about half of the objections couldn't be addressed with more than a list of points about why they cannot be handled. I'm quite unhappy that we can't have our cake and eat it too, but I'm even more unhappy that it seems quite a bit of people think we can. Some others seem to have voted against the proposal without giving a reason beyond that "it's bad", so I could not address their objections, whatever they may be. In closing, I beg some of the wiser and not-so-wiser ones reading this list to read (or reread) [[Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion]] and engage in discussion about it; we need all the suggestions we can get. If we could still somehow grasp that elusive cake from our stomachs and yet obtain full nutitrional benefit... John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])

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WikiEN-l November 2004