[snippages]
> the original poster was adding off-the-cuff pizza places that, at
> least as far as was indicated in the article, had no particular
> significance except possibly to the poster.
> RickK
>
> "John C. Penta" <pentaj2(a)UofS.edu> wrote:
>
> I think the whole idea of 'encyclopedic'-ness is becoming a barrier to
> Wikipedia.
>
> I have to agree with Erik; include these places. For those who know
> the Jersey Shore, imagine an article on the area _without_ including
> something on the Stone Pony. I live here...Not including the Stone
> Pony would leave a gaping hole. Not including the Hilltop Steakhouse
> in a similar article on Boston would be similar.
>
> Yeah, you'd get all the facts, but you'd miss a lot of the character.
I plead guilty to personal inconsistency on this. ("I am large, I
contain multitudes...") I thought RickK was right about the inclusion
of Sally's Apizza and Pepe's Pizza. On the other hand, some time ago
Angela slapped me _very, very_ gently on the wrist for mentioning by
name all two of the lodging options available in Lancaster, Wisconsin
(population 4070); the specific sentence was "Lancaster accommodations
include the Best Western Welcome Inn (608-723-4162) and the lovely
Maple-Harris Bed and Breakfast 608-723-4717, 888-216-0888." Well, the
Best Western is fine, but the Maple-Harris _is_ lovely. (Anyway, we
settled for replacing the sentence with external links to the lodging
sections of the City of Lancaster website)
Clearly, certain kinds of articles, particularly those about towns and
universities (and university towns!) tend to acquire a certain
"community" flavor. Obviously this is because the people most likely to
contribute are present/former residents/students, who have an emotional
attachment to the place. Equally obviously, the mention of specific
commercial establishments is apt to be perceived as "advertising" by
outsiders, whereas in many cases the motivation for placement is just
affection for the establishment. I certainly do not have any business
connection with Maple-Harris, for example.
Of course, the problem is that merely mentioning an establishment may
be evocative of local color to people that know the town, but doesn't
do much for outsiders. It's true that I'm not a proper judge of whether
Sally's Apizza is "encyclopedic" or not. But unfortunately it's equally
true that mentioning it in an article on New Haven doesn't do a thing
to convey anything about New Haven to me.
So... what we probably have here in the New Haven article is people
from New Haven writing things about New Haven that are mostly to be
appreciated by people _from_ New Haven. Which is probably why this sort
of thing is faintly annoying to outsiders.
(By the way, for the record, the current article on Boston does _not_
mention the Hilltop Steakhouse. Nor Jake Wirth's, nor the Union Oyster
House, nor Durgin-Park, nor the much-missed Jack and Marion's in
Brookline, home of the Empire State Skyscraper Sandwich... Ah, Jack and
Marion's... What care I about lunch counters and pizza joints in New
Haven, Jack and Marion's was a cultural icon of the first water. Say,
get this--their menu, well, see, it had these red stars next to certain
items and when you tried to figure out what it meant and looked at the
bottom of the menu, it said "Red star indicates good profit item for
Jack and Marion's--please order!" Yes, indeed, Jack and Marion's is
surely worthy of an entire Wikipedia article of its own, perhaps two...
but I digress. Or do I?)
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, but clearly Wikipedia is
no more (and no less) like a print encyclopedia than email is like
traditional ink-on-dead-tree-USPS "snail mail."
I'm beginning to wonder whether we should recognize a division between
"high encyclopedic" (as in Diderot, Britannica, etc.) and "low
encyclopedic" (as in "Encyclopedia of Beer," "Ohio State Football
Encyclopedia," "The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction").
Certainly there seem to be things which are not "encyclopedic" but
which are nevertheless "wikipedic."
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net alternate:
dpbsmith(a)alum.mit.edu
"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/
> It's another thing to have a link or entry that does
> nothing more than
> promote the business. I removed an external link to
> a listing of a local
> chain of restaurants for that reason. From your
> description, Nunh-huh is
> doing nothing more than providing free advertising.
>
> Geoff
>
I disagree. Imagine [[Las Vegas]] without mentioning
the MGM Grand, or [[Chicago]] without mentioning
Wrigley Field. Private enterprises compose an
essential part of the character of many places, and
avoiding them emasculates the articles.
Meelar
=====
"If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and [Sen. John] Edwards [D-N.C.] have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth we've had."
-- Vice President Cheney, in an MSNBC interview March 2, lending his perspective to the economy's loss of 2.2 million jobs over three years.
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Could an admin delete the 2nd version of [[Image:Two polar bears
sparring.jpg]]? It's identical to the next (current) version. Me
being silly.
Is there a better place to post this request? I couldn't find it.
Peter
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Today, a whole thread was deleted from the mediation board.
This was the thread holding the mediation between Bird and Sannse.
The mediation was over, and both of them had deleted their messages,
though it seems that a last message was posted by Bird, that Sannse has
not seen.
Sannse intended to ask for this thread to be deleted, however she never
had the chance, when she came back today, the thread was gone.
We would like to know who deleted the thread.
We would like to know as well for which reason, and from whom request
that thread was deleted.
We would also like to indicate that we would appreciate that the
mediation committee is asked its opinion before information is deleted
from the mediation board, at least that a deletion be authorized by the
participants of the thread.
We would also like that a mediator (Sannse candidate) be the owner and
the administrator of the board.
Sannse and I express our extrem displeasure of the action done.
I would like guarantees that this is not done again. I do not think we
should go on using the board if threads can be deleted without notice.
Perhaps we should have a wiki instead of a board ?
I do not feel Anthere made any personal attacks
against Moller. He did make a personal attack against
her, in which he essentially said she was "trolling"
(see also: wiki/internet troll)
The Link at Which Erik Moller Makes a Personal Attack
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-March/011780.html
I felt it was important to bring this to the attention
of the mailing list; because I feel Erik has a
tendency to personally attack people while
simultaneously claiming that it is they who are
personally attacking them -- I think such behaviour
needs to be addressed.
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I propose that the current Project Sourceberg is integrated into a larger
"Wikimedia Commons".
Said "Wikimedia Commons" should reside at commons.wikimedia.org and be a
repository for
- images
- public domain texts
- otherwise freely licensed documents
- music, artistic works (but see below)
All material in the commons would have to be licensed under one of several
licenses, not necessarily the FDL, but all allowing at the very least free
distribution and commercial use. For texts, modification rights would also
be a requirement. There would be NO fair use material on
commons.wikimedia.org.
Material would be eligible for inclusion in the Commons if it is useful to
at least ONE Wikimedia project. This includes plausible *future*
usefulness.
The Commons Community would apply commons sense .. excuse me, common
sense, to determine which files are eligible for inclusion, i.e. if a band
is notable enough to have an article in Wikipedia, and their MP3s are
freely licensed, they can be deposited; if a file is highly referenced
from the outside and causes unbearable bandwith costs, it can be removed.
The larger and more popular a file, the more pressing needs to be its
rationale for inclusion.
I propose that we shall build an interface between the files residing in
the Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikipedia projects, so that it will be
possible to easily reference a file in the commons, like so:
[[Image:co:Airplane.jpg|200 px|A very nice airplane]]
[[Media:co:listen.mp3]]
This would not create a copy of the file or auto-generated thumbnails on
the local server (e.g. en:). However, [[Image:Airplane.jpg]] could be used
to describe the file in the local language and context (we should probably
rename the Image: namespace to File: in the long term, because it is also
used for other description pages.)
All new uploads would automatically go to the commons unless the uploader
explicitly chooses not to send them there (e.g. for material which is
clearly only relevant to one project, only allowed under certain
jurisdictions ..).
The commons wiki itself should of course be multilingual as Project
Sourceberg and Meta are. There are some features which we should enter
into our software development roadmap to facilitate the transition to
using the commons:
- user interface languages can be set in the preferences
- automatic import of source information from the commons to the
description page of the local wiki
- better interlanguage handling in a single wiki installation
- friendly user interfaces for multi file uploading, automatic addition of
uploaded files to a category etc. - things that make life easier for
people not familiar with Wikipedia
- automatic gallery generation for multiple images of one category
What are the advantages of this system?
- Central place to resolve licensing issues
- Less time wasted on locating relevant files
- Less time wasted on re-uploading files
- A place for things like image galleries that go beyond the needs of a
single article (e.g. 10 different pictures of the same airplane)
- We can actively solicit contributions specifically to the commons from
people who are not interested in contributing on a regular basis
- We can provide the largest such respoitory of freely licensed material,
with a quality control mechanism that other such projects lack (the
community)
- We further establish our name beyond being merely the largest, greatest
encyclopedia ever
- We benefit from the positive connotations of the term "commons" and
appeal more directly to altruism, which will be beneficial when we ask for
donations
- We create a very real consciousness for the copyleft idea which so far
is missing especially for images, where many people simply upload whatever
they find on the net.
- We can use this platform to become more politically relevant in the
ongoing discourses about copyright law.
What are the downsides?
- The user interface is likely to be a bit clunky at first. We can fix
that.
- This project can exceed Wikipedia in costs if it is successful. I
believe prominent fundraisers will cover us, if not, we can fix this by
limiting the scope of the commons.
- People will upload all sorts of things which we don't want. We can fix
that the same way we deal with Wikipedia articles we don't want.
- Changes to the software will be very specific to our needs, other
MediaWiki sites will probably be unable to interface directly with the
commons. Maybe we can authorize other projects on an individual basis to
interface with us.
I believe that we should not work on a temporary fix to the licensing
(tagging) problem, but address this issue in one fell swoop instead. More
generally, if we want to do this, I would suggest for Jimbo to authorize
me to set up a roadmap on Meta for the implementation. That roadmap would
also be a place for volunteers to list themselves for specific tasks that
need to be completed. This will have to be a community effort among
developers, sourcebergers, wikibookers, wikipedians etc.
I believe we can launch the Wikimedia Commons within about 3 months, maybe
less, if we work together. Let me know your thoughts and possible
improvements to this concept.
Please help to get the word out about this proposal by forwarding this
message to the other project mailing lists, translating it, summarizing it
etc. As this concerns a way to share relevant data among *all* projects, I
believe every Wikimedia user should know about this and participate in the
planning phase.
I suggest that the initial discussion (do we want to do this?) take place
on wikipedia-l (we have no Wikimedia list yet, sadly), and that the
implementation discussion, if any, take place on meta.wikipedia.org.
All best,
Erik
Ma cherie amie und meine freuden,
Pardon my French and German spelling, please!
Both of you, my dear friends, have been doing an excellent job and
working hard to help Wikipedia. I don't think either of you has done
anything wrong about the Mediation discussion boards.
However abrupt or rough the request may have been to hand over control
of the Mediation board, it's nonetheless a reasonable request.
Sometimes misunderstandings arise, due to language nuances not being
well understood -- or due to quick vs. slow ways of doing things, or
"intrusive" vs. "collaborative".
Let's put this in the past, shall we?
Being the first to apologize doesn't bring any shame down upon a party
to a conflict. Rather it shows who's "the bigger man", the one who cares
the most about the relationship. It only raises everyone's opinion of
you! :-)
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
This mailing list will not be censored -- not as long as I am the
Administrator of it.
If a thread goes on too long, any one may suggest (not demand!) that it
be taken to a different forum -- such as private e-mail.
But this mailing list is for any topic related to improving the English
Wikipedia. I hope that we can have a COURTEOUS discussion about
improving the level of courtesy!
Thanks.
Ed Poor
Administrator
English Wikipedia mailing list