Someone please unblock me. �var Arnfj�r� Bjarmason has gone off his rocker.
VeryVerily
_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com
That is not relevant. The quickpolls system of temp-banning users who
did this no longer exists, and to my knowledge no substitute system for
doing so is in play. The ArbCom has issued revert paroles for
individual users such as Wik and Cantus, which were exceptional cases
after long deliberation.
--- On Wed 09/01, Fred Bauder < fredbaud(a)ctelco.net > wrote:
From: Fred Bauder [mailto: fredbaud(a)ctelco.net]
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:11:22 -0600
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)
You seem to have reverted Henry Kissenger 4 times.
Fred
_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com
Christiaan claimed:
> I don't know about lists, but what you mention is an interesting
> problem, and not just for Wikipedia, but for all societies in
> regard to
> the internet. Our economic system, and the plight of people
> such as the
> Palestinians, means that access too and creation of
> information on the
> internet is an extremely unequal affair.
This is incorrect, as far as societies that don't censor Internet access
go. Now, maybe in Islamic countries it's hard to get online due to
national restrictions. But in every part of the English-speaking world
that is not a problem.
Also, the cost barrier is much lower than you may realize: 4 hours of
minimum wage labor will pay for one month of Internet service, in the
US, for example. If someone has 30 hours a week of free time, okay,
maybe if he's wealthy it only costs him 30 to 60 minutes of labor time
to pay for Internet, and he can spend the other 29 hours surfing or
(better yet) writing Wikipedia articles; while the other guy has only 26
hours. That's only a 12% advantage: admittedly unequal, but not
extremely so. More like moderately or slightly...
If people have plights, and you want to write about it for Wikipedia,
please do so. Not having a homeland is a plight, so you can write about
Kurds as well as Palestinians. Not having a safe place to live is a
plight, so you can write about any of 2 or 3 dozen insurgencies and/or
civil wars dragging in recent decades. Not having a country that's free
from the threat of foreign invasion is a plight, so you can write about
Taiwan and Israel, et al. Not having freedom of religion or the right to
emigrate is a plight, so you can write about Cuba, North Korea, et al.
There are lots of plights, and Wikipedia has LOTS of disk space. Go to
it!
Ed Poor
Crotchety old middle-aged Wikipedian
RickK wrote:
> Unfortunately, even though the class assignment required that the
> articles created by the students meet Wikipedia requirements, now that
> most of them have been listed on VfD, the instructor is trying to
> claim that they do meet our requirements. It seems if the vast
> majority of the articles have made it to VfD, then not only has the
> majority of the class failed the assignment, but the instructor
> doesn't understand the nature of Wikipedia. If the majority of a
> class fails an assignment, that has to say something about the
> instructor, as well.
I phoned the instructor a couple of days ago.
I am almost certain that RickK is wrong in saying that "most of [the
articles created by the students] have been listed on VfD." I checked
out one or two that the instructor happened to refer to indirectly, and
they're fine. They're almost models of what we'd like to see on
Wikipedia. Since they're a) not obviously connected to Dartmouth and b)
first-rate articles, they never got listed on VfD, and I don't believe
they ever will be.
One purpose of the exercise is to give nonprogramming students hands-on
experience in a collaborative an open-source project is like.
The persona he projects in private emails and on the phone is so
different from the uncooperative persona he projects in Wikipedia VfD
discussions that at one point I actually wondered whether it was the
same person. It is. When I commented on the apparent personality
difference he said something to the effect that he'd been on USENET for
years, knows a flamewar when he sees one, and was just determined to
defend his students.
The instructor's perception is that there is actually an anti-Dartmouth
animus among WIkipedian. I would have said both were wrong, but after a
recent "second wave" I am actually starting to perceive such an animus.
Many Wikipedians' perception is that a group of Dartmouth students are
systematically and deliberately spamming Wikipedia with a flood of
Dartmouth-boosting promotional pieces.
The well-written assignment directs students to all the places you'd
want them to be directed, such as "What Wikipedia is not."
Unfortunately they call for creating entire articles. The instructor
commented that he didn't know how you could give an objective grade to
"improving an article."
The pieces that are starting to arouse such irritation are not all that
terrible. In most cases, what seems to me to have happened is that some
feature of campus life that should have been a line or a short
paragraph in the Dartmouth College has become the subject of a
full-page article that uses the sort of breezy, promotional language
that is appropriate to a college's website, or a campus freshman
resource guide. We should patiently cut 'em down, clean 'em up, and
stick 'em in the Dartmouth College article and make the articles
redirects. No big deal, except that people resent having to do the
work. There's not even any big rush about it. Who cares if there's a
page up for a month or so lauding the wonders of the Nelson A.
Rockefeller Center? These article all fall squarely in the "borderline"
category. Get them cleaned up, but we don't need to drop everything and
do it right away.
Not that it matters, but the instructor personally seems to fall
somewhere in between the extremes of the deletionist/inclusionist
spectrum. He cited "Internet is shit" as a good example of an article
that needed deletion. (And I hadn't mentioned it. He knows more about
Wikipedia than I had thought). But he's uncomfortable with measuring
"notability" and would set the bar lower than today's VfD community
consensus would set it.
I'm getting Wikistressed about all this, by the way. Here's a lovely
opportunity for what should have been a positive interaction. It all
has a beautiful tragic Rashomon-like quality to it. I wish people would
just cool down instead of piling on. If you've dealt with too many
Dartmouth articles and your patience has run out, then deal with
something else and stay away from them. Come back in a month and if
they're not all cleaned up by then, start cleaning them up.
And I think we really need to ask whether something about VfD is
actually _inducing_ the demeanor shown by User:Pcw in VfD discussions.
Just for the record, so there's no misunderstanding, I think every
Dartmouth article placed on VfD by RickK is royally VfD-worthy, and
sparkling examples of article meriting "ruthless editing" (or what some
editor called a "POVectomy"). I just happen to think that the right
resolution for most of them is trim them down to 5 to 20% of their
current size, merge into Dartmouth College, and redirect.
Sir, as I have said, it is a small college, and yet there are those of
us who are starting to see it as a PITA. But, personally, if I can't
judge an article on the basis of the content of the article, rather
than on the presumed organizational affiliations of the article's
authors, then I don't think I should be discussing that article's
deletion.
--
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/