On 15 Dec 2005 at 11:04, <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Waking up one morning to find
> a Wikipedia article exists about you, one that anyone can edit, must
> be a horrible experience quite frankly.
Sometimes, for some people... I'm sure there are others who would
feel honored, and still others who wouldn't particularly care one way
or the other. This can't be dealt with in a "One size fits all"
manner.
Those who are big-time celebrities, from G. W. Bush to Britney
Spears, will probably expect to be written about online, including
silly rumor-monging, and won't be bothered by it unless it goes
extremely far in the direction of libel or defamation. Those who
aren't celebrities might feel impressed that somebody would regard
them as important enough to be worthy of a bio in Wikipedia. Some
who are attempting to become more famous than they currently are may
take the position, "I don't care what they say about me as long as
they spell my name right." But others will take offense at even the
most innocuous article about them. You'll find all types out there.
--
== Dan ==
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On 15 Dec 2005 at 09:04, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
> If we insisted on following every law from every jurisdiction on every
> page in the Wikipedia, I think we'd find ourselves with very little
> information left.
Sure... let's follow Muslim law by not including any pictures of
unveiled women... and Chinese law by not mentioning freedom,
democracy, Tianamen Square, or Falun Gong... and there are some
countries that severely restrict the use of Nazi symbols or
literature, so maybe some of the articles on such topics are in
violation. Various religions and political movements are banned in
various places, so we should delete all articles on politics or
religion to be safe. Some places have passed or proposed laws
banning even the provision of information about certain sensitive
topics, such as abortion, contraception, or illegal drug use, so some
articles might be illegal on those grounds too.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Nature has a special report at
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html , detailing
the results of an accuracy comparison between WP and EB. While the
Wikipedia articles often contained more inaccuracies than Britannica's,
they don't look at the article sizes in each case. With Maveric149's
help, I did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Nature_follo…
Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60
KB. Number of errors per 2KB for Wikipedia: 1; Britannica: 6.
Put another way: Wikipedia has 4 errors to their 3; our articles were
also 2 1/2 times longer on average.
Can someone please check my math, I did this pretty fast, and was half
asleep :) It's not 100% accurate, but I was only going for a ballpark
estimate. Note: we copied the displayed WP text, not the edit box text,
and removed the TOC, See also, references, external links, and any other
big tables or lists. The WP text came from just before the Nature
article was published.
Raul654 and I separately submitted stories to Slashdot, and I would
suggest anyone willing do something similar. The more requests they have
for this, the more likely they are to accept it.
brian0918
David Gerard fun at thingy.apana.org.au:
If we know any non-insane JFK assassination experts on
the wiki, please get them on the case
Yeah, I guess that's me.
There are 102 articles in [[Category:JFK
assassination]], almost all of which I have
watchlisted, and I've tried to remove the worst of the
insanity from most of them and made significant
rewrites to the most important ones. Some days it's
all I can do (with significant help from JimWae) to
keep the main assassination article and [[Lee Harvey
Oswald]] free of utter nonsense and conspiracy
speculation, and I find myself getting into bizarre
talk page arguments about Oswald's childhood TV
viewing habits and whether or not he was molested as a
teenager by his supposed CIA contact. (Yes, those
arguments really happened.) [[Kennedy assassination
theories]] is one that I've largely avoided, apart
from removing the more bizarre theories involving
aliens and so forth. Mark's probably got the best
solution - "replace the
article with a stub, insisting that any of the removed
claims be
referenced before being readded." It's probably best
to start from scratch.
I've thought about starting a WikiProject on this
topic to police and improve these articles, but I
never got around to it, mostly because I didn't really
think anyone would be interested besides myself.
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If we're going to improve the quality of new articles,
we'll going to need an actual quality check, not just
a block on anonymous editors' ability to start
articles. Most of new articles don't meet basic
quality standards. A significant number are so bad
that they need to be speedily deleted, or put on AFD.
I suggest that we tackle this by putting all new
articles into an approval queue - they shouldn't
appear on Wikipedia unless they meet basic quality
standards. If a reviewing editor judges that the
article meets an objective set of criteria, it should
be "published". If not, the submitted new article
should either be deleted or sorted into a "needs
improvement" category outside the main namespace.
Here's some background data on the problem. I checked
50 new articles tonight, all created between 22:46 and
23:03. I graded them into five categories as follows:
* Speedy deletion fodder (falling into the categories
set out in [[WP:CSD]]):
- 10 articles (20% of the total)
* Sufficiently poor to warrant a deletion vote
([[WP:AFD]]):
- 2 articles; 1 of them a copyvio, 1 a probable
spamvertisement (2% of the total)
* Serious content problems (no wikilinking or
references, badly written, non-English; generally
these were just plain blocks of text dumped into
Wikipedia):
- 7 articles (14% of the total)
* No obvious problems with content, but problems with
the formatting, spelling or layout:
- 12 articles (24% of the total)
* No obvious problems
- 19 articles (38% of the total)
Note that I didn't check whether the content was
*accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted
etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards. As these
figures indicate, the majority of new articles created
during this period failed the quality check. Nearly a
quarter failed so badly that they were worth deleting.
This certainly accords with my previous experiences in
monitoring [[Special:Newpages]].
We already have a huge amount of crap in the database,
as we all know. Unfortunately the problem is getting
bigger all the time. No amount of work to fix existing
articles is going to help if we don't also fix the
problem of poor-quality new articles being published.
We're effectively trying to bail out a leaky boat
while the water is still entering.
Note also that quite a few of the speedy deletions
were things like personal attacks, patent nonsense,
tests etc (e.g. "wow, hey carly, i cant believe i can
put this on a site! :O its so cool!"). I strongly
suspect that people wouldn't submit this sort of thing
if they knew that they wouldn't see it appearing
instantly on a Wikipedia page.
So how could we deal with this? Three measures, I
think:
1) New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not*
immediately enter the main namespace.
2) We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria
for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is
it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly
formatted? Includes references? etc etc...
3) Reviewing editors should assess newly created
articles against these criteria. If the article
passes, the article should be cleared to enter the
main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a
queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For
instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and
incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a
"needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling
corrections", then finally moved to the main
namespace.
Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be
people with a bit of experience of editing, I would
limit the ability to review and approve new articles
to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+.
However, any editor should be able to work on
improving a queued article.
Any thoughts on this idea?
- ChrisO
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Magnus Manske wrote:
> Due to a suggestion (forgot from whom, though...) the Tasks extension
> can now automatically create a task for a newly created article. This
> can be configured separately for article creations by logged-in users
> and anons (should we allow that again).
> Major advantages of this mechanism over the "new pages patrol" are
> * tasks are not forgotten, even if noone checked the page for days or
> month
> * tasks can be closed by logged-in users, so patrols can focus on
> unchecked (new) articles
\o/
> P.S.: Thanks to Brion and Hashar for fixes and improvements!
Does this mean it might be active in the near future? :-D
This would also help with making Wikinews a bit more workflow-like,
wouldn't it? Which would avoid unnecessary software forking.
[cc: to wikien-l]
- d.
What are you talkign aobut again? I just want to know why i was blocked i
feel i was blocked unjustly. I'm stillknew to Wikipedia and don't know the terms
I just put in a open minded ideal. and I feel a closed minded person
attacked me by blocking me.
you lost me there. I just want to know why i was blocked and called
Anti-Semetic. I'm a new user still and don't know much about editing or how Wikipedia
works. I just wanted ot add to a Page that seems ot be a one sided thing.
I'm still new to Wiki pedia and it's hard figuring out editing. looked up a
show called Reboot. and sumited a picture of a character that was said not to
have ever been seen on the show but only heard saying "What" well i added a
screenshot i took and i added it to the page and then added it to the discussion
area under a thign about a character named mouse since that seemed like a
good place for it also.