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Apparantly people who think that consensus on AfD means "70-75% with at
least 10 clear non-sock/meatpuppet votes, with votes without clear
reason being disregarded" aren't suitable to be admins.
AfD is evil. Long may it and the people who play there burn in wikihell.
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I posted this question at the Village Pump last night,
but it hasn't got much response (perhaps because most
everyone was asleep at the time I wrote it).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#How_many_A…
The crux of my point is that the number of active
editors in Wikipedia has grown nearly 10 fold since
ArbCom was created 2 years ago, while the number of
Arbitrators has remained constant at 12.
Perhaps this just means we should expand the pool of
Arbitrators and elect 20 or 30 this time around as
some people had proposed (though one might have
trouble finding enough people to run).
As an alternative, I suggested moving to a system more
like Admins / Bureaucrats where we continually approve
trusted members of the community to serve in this role
and allow the pool to grow as needed to keep up with
Wikipedia's growth. A pool of 50-100 trusted
community members, working in groups of 10-15, could
make short work of the backlog generally seen at
RFArb.
-DF
Hi,
Since the helpdesk-l address was made more instantly visible, there
has been a surge of questions to the list - of a wide range of
queries/problems/issues. Your help would be appreciated. You can
subscribe at http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l
Thanks,
Cormac / Cormaggio
Timwi wrote:
>Even shorter:
> Your [[IP address]] will be logged when you submit. If you are
> not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], it will be shown publicly.
> See [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
"SUBMIT! SUBMIT TO WIKIPEDIA!" heh :-)
The use of "logged" in two different ways is (apparently) very bad. How about:
Your [[IP address]] is recorded when you edit. If you are not
[[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], it will be shown publicly. See
[[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].
Can anyone go even shorter and not lose important info?
- d.
Dear fellow wikipedians,
Yesterday, stewards received a request to unsysop
Stevertigo, after a failed reconfirmation of
sysophood, following an arbcom decision.
Jtkiefer also asked me privately by irc to carry on
the request.
I consequently unsyoped Stevertigo.
Today, Steve post on my talk page, this comment :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthere#Request_for_permissions
As a reminder, stewards are not here to judge, but to
carry on the decision of the community. I have no idea
why Steve was brought in front of the arbcom (well,
right, it is a 3RR issue, but I do not know the
details, and I do not want to get in this).
Now, I think in this case, the "judges" are
* the arbcom
* the voting community
And the steward is just to carry on the decision the
"judges" made.
If there is something unclear in the final decision,
it should not be my job to go reading all the
discussions around this case, so as to figure out
myself the "correct" conclusion. I think Stevertigo is
a honest editor, and he would not try to cheat on the
decision, so if he feels the outcome has not been
fair/clear, it is probable that there is a little
something unclear somewhere.
So, what I would like you to do, is to clarify the
current situation, so that the correct decision, to
desysop or not to desysop, is taken.
I give it 48 hours without doing anything, and if
there is no clarification by then, I will revert to
the previous stable situation (ie, Steve sysop) till
an agreement is reached between yourselves.
Ant
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com
> From: Jtkiefer <jtkiefer(a)wordzen.net>
>>> The Guardian has a story entitled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" in
>>> which
>>> various specialists rate Wikipedia articles in their field of
>>> knowledge: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1599116,00.html
>
> As I also posted in another thread roughly on this topic, although we
> should be concerned whether or not Wikipedia is trustworthy we
> shouldn't
> get ourselves too concerned about the register's "articles" about
> Wikipedia since every single article is clearly biased against
> wikipedia
> beyond factuality so the register slamming us with criticism is just
> business as usual.
No, but we _should_ be concerned about the _Guardian's_ articles
about Wikipedia.
Because the Register isn't trustworthy, but the Guardian is.
On a trustworthiness scale of 0 to 10, I'd pesonally score the
Register as 3, the Guardian as 9.5.
And Slashdot as 2, Drudge as 4, and Wikipedia as, um, about a 7?
--
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/
I think that photos, which are intended to make a specific point, should not be uploaded to Wikipedia unless they have been previously published by a disinterested, reputable 3rd party.
Flikr.com, weblogs, partisan political web sites (dailykos, freerepublic, etc) and such are not acceptable, but commercial news organizations and commericial publishers and to a lesser extent, non-profits would be ok. There is simply too much opportunity out there to stage photos, for example:
Supporters of Candidate A take Candidate B's signs and make a big mess in a parking lot with them and leave also a lot of trash like water bottles and sandwich wrappers.... the Wiki caption for this reads, "trash left behind after local rally for B".
Clearly it's a staged photo intended to make a point. If the control parameter of "intended to make a point" is not enforced, the excuse regarding the above scenario would be "I found the trash & signs in the parking lot and merely snapped the photo". Such assertions could not be disproved, opening a pandora's box of scheming opporunities.
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Some time ago, I bemoaned the fact that our poor treatment of
webcomics topics had led to a fork, and that we were going to lose
webcomics contributors.
For those who did not believe me, I point to http://www.websnark.com/
archives/2005/10/on_the_other_ha_13.html
Websnark is one of the three big sites in webcomics commentary. The
writer of that entry, Eric Burns, has an article, his blog has an
article, he maintains two comics, and writes for both of the other
two big sites - Comixpedia and the Webcomics Examiner. He is not an
idiot. He knows what he is talking about on webcomics.
And he's right here. Deletions are being carried out by people who
know nothing about the subject. The opinions of people who do (I will
admit, I am referring to myself - but go ahead and see
[[User:Snowspinner/Webcomics]] if you like - my credentials are
existent here) are being counted the same as the clueless.
Explanations of notability are disregarded - people are making the
assertion that webcomics that are a part of professional syndicates -
the webcomic equivalent of KIng Features - aren't notable. When
linked to the site of a syndicate that clearly lists a comic among
its members, they claim this is not a reliable source.
I don't know how many times I can continue to put this in new and
innovative ways. Deletion is broken. We are making mistakes. Our
mistakes are costing us contributors. They are costing us good
contributors.
We need a solution here. Not hand-wringing and a conviction that we
should come up with a solution. We need a damn solution, and we need
it back before Comixpedia split off in the first place.
Here's a first stab - people with documentable credentials in an area
that would, in the eyes of a reasonable layman, qualify them to make
a decision on the importance of a topic will be allowed to speedy
keep articles in the area of their credentials.
-Snowspinner
The 'added whitespace' flaw when category tags are
placed at the top of articles may be a way to solve
the template cruft problem, while still showing a
visible change on the article itself (i.e the extra
line of whitespace). In otherwords, corrections
templates (cleanup - merge - delete - etc) needing to
be made can be hidden in the article, and can be seen
by editors when they click the edit link.
If that's too subtle and difficult (ie links dont
work) a simple edit issues box (like a {{shortcut}}
box) could give everybody note that there are issues
regarding the article, and link to the talk page where
people can stick any number of templates they want.
SV
__________________________________
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http://mail.yahoo.com
Fastfission wrote:
> Yes, but judges generally don't listen to philosophers (the legal
> realm generates its own implicit philosophical concepts, some of which
> are quite interesting). I think a judge would have a problem with a
> mathematician testifying that yes, his work was completely logical and
> worked from first principles, though he also wanted to count it as
> artistically creative. But I don't know for sure.
In the case of research papers, though, it wouldn't be the mathematician at
all...since the mathematician (or anyone writing for an academic journal, if
I understand correctly) doesn't actually personally have the copyright...the
publisher does.
> The difference is that I am perfectly willing to trust a known and
> "certified" authority (i.e. a guy with a real job) than some anonymous
> guy on the internet who claims to know what they are talking about.
> Hence the dominance of printed sources from well-respected publishers
> over testimonies of any miscellaneous user. Obviously in some cases
> these two communities are actually made up of the same people, except
> in the "real world" there are many checks and verification steps that
> we don't (and won't) have on an open project like Wikipedia.
Well, there are many people with "real jobs" here, and it's easy to verify
that. I am not talking about research-level material, I'm talking more
about basic skills, undergraduate-, or at most, beginning graduate-level
material. In the case of math, I really think there's less to worry about.
If a true crank does post some nonsense or even half-nonsense, it will get
viewed by many people quickly.
We allow people here to correct grammar and sentence structure, or at least
check that it's correct, without them having "certified" authority. You
don't have to submit a paper to Literary Criticism Quarterly to verify that
"Irregardless of what people think, the single most important criteria
determining there future success is whether they could care less." is a
sentence with a lot of mistakes in it. If you asked them how to fix it,
they would consider it a waste of their time. Similarly, you don't need to
contact a published print source to verify the mathematical equivalent -- a
routine computation of a limit, integral, or series; or even some
symbol-pushing in algebra or topology. Usually, you just ask a friend to
look over it. If worst comes to worst, you can give a reference to a
textbook explaining the concept.
The difference, of course, is that to a certain extent, knowledge of correct
grammar (or the potential knowledge of correct grammar) is something held by
everyone, so that everyone knows the difference between correcting grammar
and verifying sources, claims, and arguments in a particular domain, etc.
And of course, grammar is not considered to be "original research". Whereas
the mathematical equivalents are still only held by a relative minority, so
to the majority who aren't mathematical, there is no discernable difference
in appearance between the truly trivial and routine, and the genuinely
nontrivial and novel.
darin