WikiEN-l December 2005

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

192 participants
299 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Proposed policy on biographies: input sought
by David Gerard 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

I wrote: >SlimVirgin wrote: >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_on_living_persons_deserv… >>It deals with the need to be respectful of subjects, which policies >It reads too much like an attempt to invalidate Neutral Point Of View >and instead install Sympathetic Point Of View for living subjects. And I see someone on the talk page already thinks this is a cue to abandon NPOV. - d.

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Re: Parascience subst. pseudoscience
by Michael Snow 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

Ray Saintonge wrote: > The difference is that "parascience" assumes good faith; > "pseudoscioence" does not. Assume good faith is a policy about interaction between contributors, not content. A neutral point of view assumes neither good faith nor bad. --Michael Snow

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Re: Esquire article has been published
by Michael Snow 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

David Gerard wrote: >http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20051215wikipedia > >Presumably the print version is available soon or now. > > The print version has been available on newsstands for over a month. The Signpost reported on this, including our failure to correct the number of Encyclopædia Britannica articles, several weeks ago. Speaking of Britannica, our article about them needs some serious work. I pointed out some serious problems with the history narrative on the talk page recently, but nobody has yet done the research to tackle the problem. The article also suffers from serious pro-Wikipedia bias in spots. Dealing with the recent Nature study, for example, is it more neutral to throw in out of the blue that "Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Britannica" or would something along the lines of "Britannica remains more accurate than Wikipedia" be better? --Michael Snow

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Biographies of living persons - new draft guideline
by David Gerard 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

I've done a rewrite of the proposed guideline at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/temp It's rewritten very much in the style of a quickly usable guideline - you should be able to get the whole idea from the intro, the rest is details. I've also tried to greatly tighten the writing from the original, but it could do with more (e.g. the looong examples). Please hack away. - d.

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Stable version now with cache (Tim, this one's for you!:-)
by Magnus Manske 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

I've partially rewritten the StableVersion extension. It now can * store multiple stable versions (someone wanted this; I can turn that off) * store multiple types (not actually supported yet, but the potential is included), e.g.: ** stable ** stable candidate (someone wanted this) ** "soft-protected" ** other "levels of stability" like "thoroughly reviewed" And most important: When you click on the "declare this stable" link, it now caches the source *with replaced templates*, meaning the stable page will look the same even if the templates it uses were changed or deleted. With some help *ahem* the feature could go live this year, IMHO. Magnus

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Checkuser for all admins
by David Gerard 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

Sam Fentress (Asbestos) wrote: > Why not make the checkuser function available to all admins? Privacy concerns - IPs are hot information. The Foundation is understandably *really touchy* about this stuff. Anyone who has checkuser now is known directly to the stewards and/or the ACs as someone who takes this stuff seriously; adding anyone else will be a slow process. This is not a strike on anyone who hasn't been picked - it's just justifiable paranoia :-) The other matters are finding people with enough technical knowledge of the funny little ways of the Internet (though that's easy because we have lots of those) *and* enough about the funny little ways of good and bad editors on the wikis (a little harder, but we have lots of those too). I think we have enough checkers on en: right now. Kelly Martin's been doing a lot of it of late, taking a great deal of the load off me, so I'm coping better with the requests I've got! (I'm considering going active on the AC again for the last two weeks of the year to help clean up, but don't know WHERE I'm going to get the time ... the holiday season has been absolutely batshit crazy so far.) I trust all our admins to a large extent - you don't get through RFA without having some sense and judgement - but not *that* much. - d.

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Checkuser for all admins
by Sam Fentress (Asbestos) 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

This may have been discussed before. If so, apologies. Why not make the checkuser function available to all admins? There are constant allegations of sockpuppetry, and I'm sure there are plenty of cases of ballot-stuffing or fake-consensus-building which go unnoticed because someone's suspicions weren't enough to both a developer with. Having the function available to all admins would cut down on a lot of this underhandedness. If there is a problem concerning privacy, such as making IP addresses available (I'm not sure exactly what the checkuser funcion shows), when couldn't it be modified to only show which users have been created by the same IP (i.e., put in a name, and it shows you the other users) If there is a problem concerning privacy for legitamate uses of alternate accounts, such as keeping edits separate or not wanting to be stalked by another user, then I'm sure it couldn't be too hard to modify the code to show only those sockpuppets that have edited the same page. Even if we accept that there are legitamate uses for alternate accounts, such accounts ought never to edit the same page. Any thoughts? Sam -- Asbestos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos

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Now we're a cult ...
by charles matthews 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

Charles Arthur (The Independent, London) this Thursday: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1667346,00.html . Charles

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Improve quality by reviewing all new articles
by Rob 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

Interesting you should mention biology, as there are few things on the planet Earth I know less about than that. But I'm sure most of us could, with a modest amount of effort, compose a plausible article in our own subject specialties that would pass a cursory new pages patrol check. The JFK assassination is one of my specialties, and I do my best to make the many, many, many WP articles on that topic a little more sane. If the Seigenthaler article had shown up in Category:JFK assassination or even been linked to [[JFK assassination]], I most likely would have spotted it and saved us a lot of grief. And yes, I try to RC patrol as much as possible, but I can only be on WP about 18 hours a day. ;) But I honesty don't believe that you need any specialized knowledge of US history or the JFK assassination to spot a whopper like the one in the Seigenthaler article. This isn't an article carefully crafted by an expert to slip under the radar, it's a prank that a UPS guy tossed off on his coffee break. Are we really so easily fooled? All that we need to spot things like that is a critical, skeptical eye. Stan Shebs shebs at apple.com wrote: Heh, I guarantee you that I could create a ichthyological whopper, pun intended, with pictures and citations from some of the rarer books in my personal library, and it will slip right by you, plus everyone else who doesn't happen to have those books to check. I bet I could even get it into the day's DYK! But if you don't know enough to evaluate, say, the plausibility of an article about the popular home aquarium fish Melanocetus, I'm not going to take that as evidence you should not be editing the encyclopedia; it just means that no one person can know enough to be able to make accurate quick judgments on each new article. We need better teamwork, not just individual prowess. Come to think of it, why didn't *you* personally catch the bogus Seigenthaler article? Seems like it should be right in one of your areas of special knowledge, right? And don't you RC patrol? Stan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles
by Rob 21 Dec '05

21 Dec '05

I'm sorry, but if you don't think that the assertion that someone was involved in both the JFK and the RFK assassination is not some sort of lunatic fringe claim that at least deserves some sort of cursory verification, then I don't think the suggestion that you should not be editing an encyclopedia is all that outrageous. The articles that get a lot of Wiki attention are great, but on the fringes we take too much on faith and too much slips through the cracks. Collectively, we need to develop more of a critical eye and letting these sorts of things can be slipped through without acting upon them is, as we have already seen, going to cause lasting harm to the usefulness, reliability, and public image of this project. In the end, it does not matter if this error was "obvious" or not, though it clearly was. However you define obvious, it is a definition that needs to include this sort of claim, otherwise new pages patrol will be an exercise in uselessness and futility. Delirium delirium at hackish.org: This was not (except in retrospect) obvious to me either, because I am not an expert in the Kennedy assassination. I have a vague recollection that it took a long time to come up with the official determination of what happened, so for all I know there may have been hundreds of suspects in the earlier stages of the investigation, and I do not know offhand all their names, or whether Mr. Seigenthaler was one of them. Quite frankly, if you have nothing better to do than insult Wikipedians and tell us we are not fit to participate in your project, I should think we need new leadership. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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WikiEN-l December 2005