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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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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.
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