As an experiment, I am going to unban Michael and place him under the
mentorship of Danny and Guanaco, who will watch after him. He will
edit only under his new [[Mike Garcia]] account, and promises to make
only good edits.
I ask all other sysops and users to give him a try, and try to welcome
him into the community. I would like to ask those who have been
directly involved with dealing with his constant problem edits to
please just steer clear of him for awhile, and let Danny and Guanaco
or others try to mediate and deal with him.
Essentially, banning hasn't worked very well, because he's a
persistent problem. Blocking him has been problematic because he
comes in on an AOL proxy, which blocks lots of other people.
This is a unique situation, and it warrants a unique experiment, and
we have people (Danny in particular) who have taken the lead in
volunteering to try something new.
--Jimbo
When we passed 100,000 , 200,000 , 300,000 etc articles there was a fair
bit of fanfare.
I think it is only right therefore to announce that en passed the
100,000,000 word mark earlier this month.
This is about the same size as Columbia, Encarta Deluxe and EB put
together, and if printed would weigh about the same as George Bush.
Across all languages we reached this milestone back in January, and are
now up to 220,000,000 words.
Qualitätsoffensive, anyone?
Pete/Pcb21
It's funny, I honestly never seriously considered the possibility of
Wikipedia being dangerous in the way that librarian and jerk-columnist
thought it was... until something happened.
Nicolas Chuquet was the first person to set down in writing a system
--
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/
Hello!
First time post, glad to be here. I would like to
announce a new Fact and Reference WikiProject (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
) and am writing this email to get community input.
This project's goal is very ambitious - having facts
in Wikipedia verified by multiple independent sources
to make it the most authoritative source of
information in the world. Even if this goal is never
reached, the project is still useful in having facts
referenced will help deflect one of the largest
criticisms of Wikipedia - that it is not a reputable
source of knowledge.
Any community input is welcome but some questions you
might consider commenting is: Do you think its a good
idea? Do you have suggestions or recommendations? Do
you have a plan of action on how to best fact check
wikipedia? All input is welcome, excellent criticisms
have already been very helpful.
As well, if you have any knowledge about designing
wikimedia that would be very useful. This project and
these ideas likely could not be implemented without a
programmer contributing his or her time to code an
automatic referencing system. Programmers who are
interested in helping are very much encouraged to have
a look.
It would likely be easiest for people to review your
ideas and comments if you write in the project
discussion page here (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_…
). If you want to write me personally I welcome your
comments (shaun_macpherson2001 [-a-t-] yahoo.ca).
Thanks for your time,
ShaunMacPherson
______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
Christiaan complained:
> Just to clarify, I never argued that these people died and suffered
> _because_ of these ideals. My argument is that our culture has
> extensively used and abused such ideals simply to make its membership
> feel good about itself when collectively implementing the opposite
> (imperialism, intolerance of other economic models, war, etc.).
> Cognitive dissonance often being the outcome when actuality comes to
> light.
If you think Western Civilization has not lived up to its ideals, please
write a Wikipedia article comparing and contrasting Western ideals with
Western actions. I am not suggesting you do original research, but that
you summarize the extensive body of writings on this very topic. You
could start with Chomsky, easily the best known critic of the West. But
don't forget Toynbee (you wouldn't want to write a biased, unbalanced
article, would you?)
Along the same lines, if you interested in non-Western civilizations,
you might want to do a similar compare and contrast for East Asian,
Hindu, Islamic or other great civilizations. How well do these live up
to their own ideals (or compare to Western ideals, for that matter?)
This project ought to keep you busy, and I'd be happy to help.
Ed Poor
>I wasn't comparing. My interest is in Wikipedia. In any case, such
>comparisons do not make things inevitable and therefore unworthy of
>thought.
>
>The very idea of Wikipedia, it seems to me, is to avoid the dominance
>of any one group or person. That it does such a good job of this is
>actually all the more reason to keep in mind that it is not perfect and
>why.
People where saying the exact same thing a decade ago when the world wide
web was all the rage. That the "internet" would revolutionize human society,
that direct democracy would become usable and that all forms of oppression
and mass media control would magically disappear.. halleluja!
Well, it didn't and today the web is dominated by a few American giants like
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and some others. Yes you can find alternative
information on the net just like there was a lot of alternative papers that
noone read before the internet too. But the overexposure of the mainstream
(Beckhams sex life) makes it so noone but the few that actively look for
alternative stuff will ever find it.
Then if Wikipedia really is different, then why does those list report many
more Israelis killed than Palestinians when the real situation is the
complete opposite?
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If any Wikipedia article says that more Israelis have been killed in the
nationalistic violence of the last decade, then this should be corrected
immediately. The correct proportion is closer to 500 Israelis & 2,000
Palestinian Arabs. This ratio of 1:4 is off the top of my head and may
well be even higher.
Any articles which list victims by name, or group them by incident,
should be careful not to give the impression that the *numbers listed*
are representative of the *total numbers*.
I request that someone familiar with these articles go through them and
check them thoroughly for both these points, correct them necessary, and
report back to the list.
Ed Poor
> The solution I've occasionally suggested is to set up some sort of system
> whereby the meaning of categorization could be encoded right into the
> category link and understood by the software. That would allow all the
> different meanings of categorization to coexist. So for example the
article
> [[Io (moon)]] could be [[Category:is-a:moons]] and
> [[Category:related-to:Earth]]. Or Category:Writers could be
> [[Category:is-a:people]] and [[Category:related-to:writing]].
The categories already do co-exist, and there's a simple way to determine
which type a category is. If the category title is plural, (people, moons,
planets), then the articles or subcategories form an is-a relationship. If
the category title is singular, (writing, Earth, Environment, History), then
the articles or subcategories form a related-to relationship.
All that said, there definitely needs to be more support in the software for
is-a relationships. For instance, there should be a way to get a list of
articles which fit into the category or any of its subcategories. This
would be a good step toward replacing lists (though there are still other
features which need to be addressed).
Anthony
Hi, this is Neutrality. Can anyone help me put "Neutrality" in the place where it's should be, instead of "Cavs4 at aol.com"? I'm not very technically proficient with mailing lists.