Phil Boswell wrote:
>"Rex" <rexy at ij.net> wrote:
>> ... They cover up discoveries by the historian Rex Curry.
>Just checking: are you actually "the historian Rex Curry"?
>If so, are you sure you have checked the Wikipedia policy against "original
>research"?
http://rexcurry.net/
It's an ... amazing page.
- d.
Creidieki wrote:
>> [[John Lauritsen]] was recently nominated for speedy deletion by some
>> ignorant moron. SPEEDY deletion. Absolutely unbelievable. How many more
>> cases do we have to show??
>
>I assume you're making an argument against the "no claim of
>notability" speedy criterion? The current article doesn't state
>notability; it mentions only profession. Being an activist or
>journalist aren't notable enough to merit automatic inclusion. So
>[[John Lauritsen]] seems to qualify.
You miss my point. Anyone *remotely* familiar with the topic or the subject
of the article (regardless of their opinions or which side of the debate
they fall on) knows that notability in this instance is trivial. Only people
completely ignorant of the subject would nominate it for speedy delete. Why
is "no claim of notability" a crietrion for speedy delete? Why should it
even be a criteron for deletion? There is difference between CLAIM OF
NOTABILITY in the article and ACTUAL NOTABILITY. In this case, anyone
familiar KNOWS the subject is notable, but just because the STUB fails to
provide evidence, this is considered enough for speedy delete or delete?
What about leaving a message on the original editor's talk page? What about
contacting people who know more and allowing a few days to get a response?
As it is now, such articles can be started by inexperienced users who aren't
aware of the esoteric lawyeristic discussions about AfD, and then the
articles deleted simply because they were unaware of those very esoteric
lawyeristic discussions. Then, when someone comes around to writing it
again, they'll probably say, "well, it was already speedy deleted earlier".
Well, no shit, you never bothered to look into it in the first place.
darin
Looking through the Helpdesk-l mailing list, it seems that some people
are having a hard time finding the edit link at the top of the page,
although they can find the edit links for the sections. Should
something be done about this?
ABCD
Daniel Brandt is far from the first subject of a Wikipedia article to come
along, find the article, and try to 'fix' it, edit it, delete it, or even
boost themselves on it. And he won't be the last. As Wikipedia becomes more
and more in the public eye, and as well-known people become more and more
familiar with online things, we'll see it quite often.
We should be more prepared for this. Do we even have a page to point people
at if they are themselves the subject of a Wikipedia article, explaining how
Wikipedia works when it comes to biographies of living persons, and how they
should engage with Wikipedia to improve articles on themselves? If not, we
should.
We should also try and interact better ourselves with these people, and
recognise that in most cases their intentions are not evil. They simply
don't understand Wikipedia or the way it works, and thus misread and
misinterpret what's going on.
For instance, just yesterday I noticed that an anonymous contributor had
repeatedly removed a piece from the article on a fairly well-known author.
After several rounds of removing it, the anon created a userid and removed
the info again, with an edit comment that the information was inaccurate.
The username was clearly based on that author's name, so I contacted them
asking if they really were the author in question or if they were a fan
using the author's name. The author subsequently contacted me in email and
verified their identity, and we discussed the issue; it turned out that the
incident being removed was one where the author had been quoted in the press
as having said things they insisted they had never said.
I'm working on a peaceful resolution of this, and I'm very hopeful that it
can be achieved.
What concerns me is that for quite a few users, the very idea that a notable
person was attempting to remove information from the article on themselves
would have made them dig in their heels about Wikipedia's rights and
freedoms, the information would have been kept in the article merely to
spite the person, and no doubt threats of lawsuits and the like might have
resulted. We should be aware that many times, if someone is attempting to
change information in an article about themselves, it is because they
honestly believe it to be inaccurate. Nutcases like Brandt aren't the norm.
-Matt
Ed Poor seems to be back to some very problematic administrative abuses. He
was involved in some controversy with me over his creation of pages
involving the creation/evolution controversy. One of the articles he wrote,
Aspects of evolution, I put up for AfD and it was about to go through when
he changed namespaces and deleted the reference to the nomination. Another
user:Vsmith, moved the page back only to have Ed Poor delete the page
entirely and move it to a WikiProject page. Since this seemed to be against
AfD policy, I moved the page back and reinstated the AfD notice.
That's when Ed Poor decided to block me. I was quite surprised because I
was under the impression that administrators are not to block users when
they themselves were involved in the conflict. Since Ed Poor bloked
Duncharris yesterday, I think this may be an indication that Ed Poor should
be stripped of administrator privileges.
Sincerely,
User:Joshuaschroeder
Hello!
Hi!
The user Dbachmann blocked me for two days using his administrative powers
for contributing to an article Proto-World language, where he is also a contibutor.
He argued that I had violated the 3RR rule.
This is not true because I added in my version the phrase that he insisted,
but he refused to dicuss and talk in the talk page.
Another user, probably, his friend continued to revert my contibution,
without any comment, in spite I asked him to discuss the revertion in the talk
page.
Dbachmann did block me for the second time in two or three days, first
time for the Proto-Indo-European language article, also without
violation of the 3RR rule, in that artisle ha was also a contributer.
As so, he received warning for edit warring in his talk page by another administrator.
It seems he just reverting any edits of mine.
Also, he commited some personal attacks on me in the
Proto-Indo-European language talk page.
Please, unblock me and make him to discuss the edits.
Sincerely yours, Ilya. E-mail: neptunia(a)mail.ru
The point made by Justinc has merit. Allowing mirrors to redistribute user
pages and user talk pages serves as biographical info and documents the
process of building the encyclopedia.
My first thought was to change the proposal to allow reuse of the images
with the condition that the pages they are used in are substantially
unchanged (there is no legitimate reason to distribute a substantially
changed version of my user page). However, this modified proposal would
still cause problems with the use of images on talk pages, and there are
legitimate reasons for the distribution of substantially changed versions of
talk pages (like continuing the debate in a fork of Wikipedia).
So after some though, I have decided to not modify the proposal, but let it
stand as it is. The use of non-redistributable community images is intended
to be limited, and the impact of a mirror not having the image of me on
their copy of my user page is small.
Regards
-Thue
On 22 Nov 2005, at 16:27, John Lee wrote:
>
> > Thue Janus Kristensen wrote:
> >
> >> I have created a proposal which would allow the use of non-free
> >> images
> >> in special cases outside the encyclopedia.
> >>
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images
> >>
> >> Please CC any replies to me, I am not on this mailing list
> >>
> >> Regards
> >> en:User:Thue
> >>
> > I would support this unless some sort of justification for "free
> > images only at all times" policy is provided. The existing photo of
> > me on my userpage is released under a free licence, and I have no
> > intention of changing that barring extenuating circumstances. I
> > would just like for other users to have the freedom to use an
> > unfree-image as long as it is not used in the encyclopedia itself.
> > There is no point for mirrors to keep our userpages anyhow, and
> > many users when relicencing their contributions under another
> > licence add a notice to the effect of "I relicence all my
> > contributions except my userpage under the following licence". I
> > believe the right exists for non-free content (as long as it's not
> > a copyvio) to be used on userpages.
>
> There is a point in mirrors having userspace. user talk includes
> documentation of the process of building
> the encyclopaedia outside article talk, and User is just like the
> biographical info about contributors
> that you get with a traditional encyclopaedia.
>
> If people dont want their pictures free, they dont have o add them.
> They can always link to an external site.
>
> Justinc
>
>
>
Geoff mentions "cranks, kooks & partisans". Apart from being a
nuisance, these also destabilise perfectly fine articles. Number five
of Raul654's laws of Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raul654/Raul%27s_laws) is that
articles with a strong consensus base are crashed into by
agenda-pushers. While the edit warring takes place, and the new
contributors are taught the importance of NPOV, original research and
verifiability, the articles look like a shambles and often remain
pockmarked by the attempts to accomodate fringe views.
While I have no immediate solution for this problem, this is
important issue that will need to be addressed. It is certainly a
massive waste of time for long-term dedicated contributors to be
warring with anons/newbies who think their pet theory should really
be mentioned, or that a featured article is {{totallydisputed}}. This
process does not bring quality to encyclopedia articles, it brings
mayhem. And the dispute resolution process is not geared for dealing
with it. For one thing, if I were to RFC every difficult POV-pusher
(let alone RFM or RFA), there would be no more time left to actually
work constructively on articles. Is this what we want?
User:Jfdwolff
PS I share Mav's observation that Wikipedia has grown in quantity and
certainly in quality over a surprisingly short period of time.
>Message: 5
>Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 20:05:56 -0800 (PST)
>From: Geoff Burling <geoff(a)agora.rdrop.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Google Alert - Wikipedia
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0511221943510.1413-100000(a)joan.burling.com>
>Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>
>On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> > --- Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it
> > > went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the
> > > web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be
> > > somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)?
> > > Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper"
> > > encyclopedia from Year One?
> >
> > My first edit was on 2 January 2002. Boy was the place a mess
> (have you seen
> > UseMod ; ugly ; en.wikipedia had less than 20,000 articles and
> Larry Sanger was
> > still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do. Almost every
> > article I saw was obviously a work in progress. We were still
> working out basic
> > rules and conventions. WikiProjects were just getting underway. Just about
> > anybody could have a major influence on policy formation and the
> direction of
> > WikiProjects.
> >
> > At the time we thought it would take us 5 years to to reach our
> initial goal of
> > 100,000 articles. All the focus I saw was on development, not use
> in the near
> > to mid term. I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could
> have dreamed we
> > would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
> >
> > Now when I look around, most articles that cover subjects
> encyclopedias should
> > cover look fairly complete. Articles on technology, popular culture, and
> > current events are even better on average.
> >
> > Wikipedia becoming useful; well, that is something that kinda
> snuck up on me
> > while I was helping make it useful. I'm sure it also surprised
> many other old
> > timers as well. The idea seemed too far in the future to even think about.
> >
>I haven't been around as long as Mav (I still kinda consider him one of the
>"authentic original Wikipedians"), but much of what he says above
>could be my words.
>
>But if I could build on what he wrote, one thing worth noting is the speed
>of change in this project. I've mentioned in the past the problem that some
>important policies are proposed & adopted before some of us who have been
>on Wikipedia for a while notice. Usually there is no problem: give me a
>little time to understand & adjust, & I will accept any new proposal that
>is based on common sense.
>
>Another point is that I feel compelled to defend the quality of Wikipedia
>because, in part, it is my baby, but also because I know that the
>professional experts are guilty of more acts of botched analyses & bad
>writing than they want to admit to. Wikipedia is not only reinventing
>the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia:
>while our structure makes it easy for cranks, kooks & partisans to push
>their own agendas here, it also frees us from the abuse of authorities
>who expect us to accept their biasses as profound new discoveries or
>insights.
>
>Perhaps most of these changes will have worked their way out in the ten
>years that Andrew mentions above. I can only hope that, unlike Moses,
>I will be permitted to enter that Promised Land when they have finished,
>& see what this experiment has led to.
>
>Geoff
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Greetings,
Thank you for your mail. We really appreciate your reaction as well as your
comment today. I hope we stay a useful resource for you and your students and
welcome your participation.
Yours sincerely,
Florence/Anthere
--
Florence Devouard
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.org/
<ldodham(a)wesleysps.ca> écrit:
> To whom it may concern:
>
> On behalf of our school, we would like to apologize for the actions of one of
> our students in vandalizing a particular article about George W. Bush. The
> page was temporarily protected due to this student's actions. Although on
> your website, it is mentioned that "clueless newbies" may edit pages
> inappropriately or in the wrong manner, we feel very strongly that what our
> student did was inappropriate. We have spoken to the student involved and
> have provided a consequence not just for the action but that it was done on a
> school computer.
>
> We have also spoken to the whole class regarding the ethics of using the
> internet and free resources. Thank you for your kind attention to this
> matter.
>
> XXX
> Administrative Assistant
> Wesley Christian Academy
>