David Gerard wrote:
>Tony Sidaway wrote:
>>In the light of the recent escalation of the Ashida Kim case on Wikipedia, I
>>have registered on Ashida Kim's board and made the following post in the
>>General forum as a good faith attempt to open a dialog as the first step in
>>resolving this issue. My username is Tony Sidaway.
>>http://p206.ezboard.com/bashidakimmessageboards.showUserPublicProfile?gid=t…
>Nice one :-) If they're amenable to reasonable discussion, this should
>be just the thing.
Looks like he's, er, not:
===
Tony,
I could care less about your policies.
By your own admission my friends are not allowed to vote. In fact,
they are blocked every time they even try to say something nice about
me, so they game is rigged.
Hiding behind pleasantries doesn't make it right. This is the same
circular logic as Clinton trying to defend himself by defining "what
is, is."
I don't want to "open a discussion on the subject." We have already
had more than enough of that waste of time on the Wiki board.
I ask one thing: to be taken off your website altogether and not to be
put back up when you think we aren't looking. That is the only way
SOME of the slander of Bullshido will stop. I am not the Church of
Scientology or any other big outfit. Just a humble guy who loves
martial arts and has a lot of fun in my life studying, practicing and
teaching them. Been really lucky to have written a few books and made
a lot of friends along the way.
Bullshido is just jealous, you are just helping them. Stop it. End of story.
Ashida Kim
===
Ah well.
- d.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
>embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.
>
>Why? What can we do about it?
>
>
This is a common problem we have, especially with biographies of living
people. They tend to develop by people adding various facts piecemeal,
without any attempt to think about how to organize an encyclopedia
article about the subject. At most they manage to accomplish a rough
chronological sequence, heavily weighted to recent events of course.
Unless somebody comes along to synthesize the material, it will remain
incoherent. So the solution, it would seem, is to encourage editors to
tackle an article in its entirety, or find more people willing to do so.
This is one reason the featured article process is so important, because
it's really this kind of treatment that is the key to featured status.
Biographies generally are also very vulnerable to a form of POV-pushing
I call death-by-anecdote, and both of the examples Carr picked suffer
from it. The rambling recitation of chronological facts encourages
people to add all manner of trivial incidents, ephemeral news that does
not contribute to any greater understanding of the subject. Often
editors will key on mentioning every inconsequential matter they can
find to put the subject in a negative light (or alternatively to engage
in hagiography). Attempts to "NPOV" this produce a back and forth in
which the discussion of some trifle grows out of all proportion to its
significance.
--Michael Snow
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> I like your idea of adopting the Economist house style, but a lot of kids
> are taught in schools to write unimaginably long, tedious essays on quite
> trivial subjects, so they have to learn how to trim out the waffle when they
> come to writing for real readers.
Jakob Nielsen's "Writing for the Web" is not ideal for this purpose
(highlighted promotional keywords?), but it's a useful start.
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
- l,d.
Silverback makes a good general point:
> ... [snip] By accusing Fvw of
> abuse I was making a point, and that point was not the Fvw is
> somehow worse than other admins, but rather to make the point
> that using a system to implement 24 hour blocks that for a
> long time has been known to routinely block people for much
> longer is an abuse of admin powers. Regardless of the fact
> that some oppose the 3RR rule, when the prescribed punishment
> is a 24 hour block, putting someone in a system that almost
> certainly will result in a longer block without careful
> monitoring and intervention by the admin is abusive. Of
> course having to track the times to make sure this abuse does
> not happen is a burden for the admins, and they should not be
> put in this position. The admins should insist the blocking
> software be fixed, or refuse to use it, rather than abuse
> either by intent or oversight.
This can be addressed by encouraging (requiring?) Admins to log all
their 3RR blocks in one place. It could be a section of:
* [[Wikipedia:Account suspensions]]
Like:
* [[Wikipedia:Account suspensions#3RR]] - a section of the project page
* [[Wikipedia:Account suspensions/3RR]]- a subpage of it
If it's a section, then everything is on one page, and we'll see "recent
changes" to it. Admins and others can watch the page.
If it's transcluded, then we can "watch" the 3RR blocks separately.
Uncle Ed
Developer Emeritus
Former Bureaucrat
Administrator
Mailing List admin
...and all around nice guy! :-)
The 24 hour 3RR block expired 7 hours ago and it still hasn't been removed. If Fvw isn't going to properly implement these things, he should leave it to more reponsible admins.
-- Silverback
On 10/6/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>Michael Turley wrote:
>
> >
> > There are a lot of current administrators that
I've either voted to
> > support, or simply refused to vote oppose in their
RfA that I
> > would never consider supporting in the position of
an arbitrator.
> > If I'd thought that one future day they'd get
handed the authority
> > to arbitrate in any way stronger than they now can
(by blocking,
> > page locking, etc) it would certainly have been
less "no big deal"
> > and a lot more "let's screen these people very
carefully".
> All right, then. How would you suggest we choose
them?
I also agree with what has been said by Turley and
others. Arbitration is not something I would trust to
every admin, and there are at least a couple admins
that I would shudder to see given binding judicial
powers.
How about a mixed system? First, have a Supreme Court
(or whatever we want to call it) whose membership is
fixed in number and determined through an election
process such as governs Arbcom now. And then have
lesser courts/magistrates/whatever confirmed through a
process of community consensus such as occurs in RFA
now?
-DF
-------------- Original message --------------
> Do we really need to discuss in detail incidents in 2005 where someone
> spat at her at a book signing? That one guy in Kentucky won't show her
> films in his cinemas?
It depends on the level of detail, on a recent news item,
I think we should consider what level of detail would
still be notable 1 or 5 years from now. The persistence of
resentment against Jane Fonda is a notable part of her life,
and that she got spat on, and her movies get boycotted
probably will still notable after her death.
Contrast that with the Iraq War, a particular incident like
the recent British conflict with some local Iraqi police,
although probably more important in the scheme of things,
probably won't be encyclopedic unless it becomes some
kind of persistent international incident. If it doesn't
it surely wouldn't be in some encyclopedia article 1 or
5 years from now.
Notability depends on the subject.
-- Silverback
There's a long rant on Wikipedia (and the so-called Web 2.0) by Nick Carr at:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
I've posted a comment, which is currently waiting in his comment
moderation queue. Read the above, and below is my reply. I left this
on another blog commenting on the Nick Carr post, at:
http://asay.blogspot.com/2005/10/commentary-nick-carr-on-amorality-of.html
I'll probably put it on my LiveJournal
(http://reddragdiva.livejournal.com/ - combining utter tedium with bad
taste!) tomorrow or something as well.
- d.
David Gerard said...
Everything Nick wrote is a valid opinion, and commercial
encyclopedias are doomed anyway because (as Microsoft is finding out
with Linux) it's hard to compete with free. (I eagerly await EB
putting out TCO studies on Wikipedia.)
Speaking as someone who's highly involved in it (I write stuff,
I'm an administrator, I'm on the Arbitration Committee, I'm a mailing
list moderator, I do media interviews), Wikipedia is of mediocre
quality with some really good bits. If you hit the "Random page" link
twenty times, you'll end up mostly with sketchy three-paragraph stub
articles.
That said, the good bits are fantastic. Although articles good
enough to make "Featured Article" status (which are indeed excellent)
tend to be hideously esoteric; somehow getting more general articles
up to that sort of quality is not facilitated at present.
Encyclopedia Britannica is an amazing work. It's of consistent
high quality, it's one of the great books in the English language and
it's doomed. Brilliant but pricey has difficulty competing
economically with free and apparently adequate (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - this story plays out
over and over again in the computing field and is the essence of
"disruptive technology"). They could release the entire EB under an
open content license, but they have shareholders who might want a word
about that.
So if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have
to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good
encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia
better, or there won't be anything.
I've made some efforts in this direction - pushing toward a
page-rating feature, a "Rate this page" tab at the top, which, unlike
an editorial committee, will actually scale with the contributor base
and will highlight areas in need of attention. (See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topics - the feature is
currently waiting on an implementation the lead developer thinks won't
kill the database.) Recent discussion on the WikiEN-L mailing list has
also included proposals for a scaleable article rating system.
Wikipedia is likely to be it by first-mover advantage and network
effect. Think about what you can do to ensure there is a good
encyclopedia in ten years.