--- David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Geoff Burling (geoff(a)agora.rdrop.com) [050519
> 09:58]:
> > On Wed, 18 May 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> > > Notability is not really definable. Jimbo has
> even suggested that it's a
> > > proxy for verifiability.
>
> > Last time I saw the word used on VfD, context
> suggested that it was the
> > equivalent of "another article about a teenager
> whose most important
> > achievement so far is not dropping out of high
> school, which was posted
> > by her/his friend or relative."
>
>
> Far too often I see it used to mean "it must not be
> important because I've
> never heard of it."
>
> (Not that I'm questioning in any way that almost
> everything that hits VFD
> needs to be killed with a very big axe.)
Far too often I see this straw man argument used to
villify people with good intentions. I've seen far
too many times, "Keep it, it must be notable, I've
heard of it." Isn't that just the other side of the
same coin? Please refrain from making personal
attacks on the motives of people who make VfD
nominations.
RickK
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> Speaking of explosives, should we talk of chemical measures in terms of
> moles (units consisting of a certain number of molecules, the number of
> which has slipped my mind at this moment)?
You're thinking of Avocado's Number, named after the famous lawyer.
Two avocados is a yotta molecules (if you interpret "yotta" in the
"binary prefix" sense of 2^80 rather than 10^24).
A mole is a small burrowing animal in the family Talpidae, and their
dentition does include molars.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
Thanks you David for forcing me to subscribe to a high volume list,
just so I can receive all the responses to my non-language specific
query about the intentions of wikipedia.
Here is the entire message which David quoted part of...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
Date: May 18, 2005 12:51 PM
Subject: Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.
To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org
Through my participation in the schools debate, it has come to my
attention that there are wikipedians who believe that we should
include everything which is verifiable and NPOV, with no standard of
notoriety applied. My perspective is that while that might be a good
set of criteria for a dictionary of trivia, it is not a good criteria
for an encyclopedia, even one made out of tiny bits of magnetized
composits rather than paper.
I don't wish to bring the school debate to this list right now.
However, I would like to discuss the include-everything view that I
have seen being used to justify including schools.
When I have exchanges like this:
-------------------
[[Wikipedia:Schools]]
** David, as we discussed on IRC, this rule would allow for the
creation of articles for a huge number of roadway intersections in the
US.. Plenty of official documentation at the city and state offices,
and Federal records in many cases, plus newspaper reports of
construction and accidents (just like schools). We could fill an
article up with trivia such as the frequency of accidents, time of
first construction... Photographs. Is this really acceptable in the
inclusionist agenda? Sure intersections are verifyable and NPOV, but
the vast majority of them are not notable. I encourage all who support
David's proposed rules, or similar proposed rulesets to reply. :)
--[[User:Gmaxwell|Gmaxwell]] 15:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
** Actually that sounds pretty cool. [[m:Wiki is not paper]]. Accident
data on road intersections could be very, very encyclopedic. Not sure
how feasible it would be, however. --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony
Sidaway]]|[[User talk:Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 15:31, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
-----------------------
I must question if I really understand the point of Wikipedia.
Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix
gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer. The prior one just fit
it's 1gb SD card and I find it amazingly useful ... I'm going to need
to come up with some kind of filter to reduce the size for the next
one)..... Soon we will begin brushing the size of what we can fit on
a DVD, so what of access to our work by people in disconnected
communities and third-world nations? As our working-set grows past the
amount of ram we can reasonably expect to put in our caches and
database servers, our performance will become increasingly diskbound.
I think that many people mistake the the claim that [[m:Wiki is not
paper]] with a claim that we have boundless storage without
compromise.
Most of the facts that are in Wikipedia (though to not all) were
available elseware on the internet prior to Wikipedia, but often a
quick google search wouldn't find them because they were in a wash of
cruft, random inaccurate uncorrectable information, and
advertisements. Today much of that information is easier to find
because of Wikipedia, a beautiful accomplishment, but one which may be
lost if we lower the barrier to entry to be sufficiently low as to
include anything that anyone can cite.
I think it would be useful to have a universal repository for
verifiable and neutrally reported trivia, but just as we use
Wiktionary rather than Wikipedia for word definitions and wikisources
for freely licensed reference works, we should put material which is
not substantially notable in it's own project which can cater to the
special needs of that material and the special costs of providing that
service.
I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was
a good strawman, ( :) ), I also choose it because I'm aware of the
level of information available, and could actually create a lot of
these articles myself. Since I used to work for a county government in
Florida, still have a copy of most of the GIS database, and know the
right people in a few other counties, I could patch together a bot to
create thousands of such articles, complete with aerial photographs,
construction dates, and in many cases some level of traffic
information (I have traffic counters for all the arterial/arterial
intersections with the data I have). ... The point is that I haven't
spammed wikipedia with this data because I believe it is completely
inappropriate for an Encyclopedia, and I imagine many other people
have a similar ability to produce endless quantities of non-notable
material if that what we thought wikipedia was supposed to contain.
... Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not
wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis?
So, I'd really appreciate some commentary on this... Am I in a
minority in expecting a criteria of notability to be used in our
judgement of encyclopedic merit, or should we really be including
every fact we can cite?
Timwi wrote:
>OMG, not again.
>
>You know, I've always found this AD vs. CE debate extremely stupid.
>Like, as if renaming "AD" to "CE" would immediately, suddenly and
>magically remove all connections with any religion! Guys, it's still the
>number of years after Jesus' birth, whether you like it or not.
I have a few, brief comments to make concerning the list-serve
discussion. First, I appreciate Skyrings comments (and several others),
very much. I disagree with Stephen Bain on one point: yes, BC and AD
should be used when appropriate. But I do not think that when
appropriate means Christianity related articles. Christianity related
articles, like Jewish related articles, Muslim related articles, Marxism
related articles, Fascism related articles must all be written from an
NPOV. BUT I recognize that many articles will include within them passages
that describe or present a Christian point of view. I believe that it is
in such sections that BC and AD are not only appropriate, but must be used
for the sake of accuracy.
But I have to respond to Timwis message at length. His very statements
actually exemplify the reason I have made this proposal. To be clear,
although I certainly do believe in the specifics of the proposal, my main
motivation was concern over peoples understanding of our NPOV policy. I
wanted to open up a debate about NPOV, and raise peoples consciousness
about NPOV. As far as I am concerned, what Timwi wrote proves that s/he
either does not understand, or does not accept, our NPOV policy, and by
itself justifies my proposal.
The fact is, if I thought everyone understood and was committed to our NPOV
policy, I would not have made this proposal NPOV should be a general policy
people can use to make decisions on an ad hoc basis. However, much of the
opposition to this proposal (and remember, the big dispute on the Talk:
Jesus page started with a change by JimWae) convinces me that many people
do not understand or care about NPOV. I realize you may think my
understanding of NPOV is eccentric. But here is what convinces me: many
people oppose the proposal because AD/BC doesn't bother them. Okay, they
have a right not to be bothered by AD/BC. But to make that a reason for not
using another term is and I am certain I am correct in this
fundamentally incompatible with our NPOV policy. The basis of our NPOV
policy is that not everyone feels the same way. This necessarily means that
it doesn't matter that you are not bothered by something; what matters is
that someone else is. I think this is the very essence of NPOV, to
recognize that one's own feelings are not shared by others and thus cannot
be the basis for making decisions concerning NPOV! Yet in many, if not most
of the arguments in favor of keeping BC/AD, this is the ultimate reason
people give. So I have very serious doubts about the commitment to NPOV.
Jimbo says it is an unconditional policy, and everyone pays it lip-service.
You know what? I think most people follow the policy because most of the
time it is easy to follow the policy. I think here we have stumbled upon a
situation where many people truly find it hard to follow the policy,
because they cannot understand why someone would object to BC/AD as POV.
But this is precisely the test: to accept that your position is POV even
when you cannot understand why others do not share it. If someone cannot
make that leap, then our NPOV policy is in jeopardy. That is why I make
this proposal: to bolster our NPOV policy in a situation where many people
find it hard to follow the NPOV policy.
By the way, I dont want to descend into an argument over language or
logic. I am NOT saying that all opposition to my proposal is motivated by
a disregard for out NPOV people. In fact, many people who oppose my
proposal share my commitment to NPOV, for which I am grateful. I do not
write this to convince anyone to support my proposal. I write this to
propel my real purpose, which is to spark a frank discussion about our NPOV
policy.
Steve
Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
I am posting this on different talk pages, and want to inform the mailing list.
I want Wikipedia to accept a general policy that BC and AD represent a
Christian Point of View and should be used only when they are appropriate,
that is, in the context of expressing or providing an account of a
Christian point of view. In other contexts, I argue that they violate our
NPOV policy and we should use BCE and CE instead. See [[Wikipedia:Neutral
point of view/BCE-CE Debate]] for the detailed proposal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/BCE-CE_Debate
There has already been a long and contentious discussion on the Jesus talk
page, and it has gotten cumbersome. It might get cumbersome to discuss
this proposal here, too. Anyway, in the very early stages of the debate,
someone told me that rather than argue on the Jesus talk page, I should
propose to change the policy. Thus ....
Steve
Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
I can just see the United States trying to do a mass
conversion of highway signs. Each state would have to
sign off on it, and many would not just out of "the
federal government can't tell us what to do."
We'll see if the states actually buy the new driver's
license requirements. Utah has already rejected the
"No Child Left Behind" education requirements, the DL
stuff is going to be even worse. But highway signs
would be a war.
RickK
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Skyring (skyring(a)gmail.com) [050519 05:57]:
> On 5/19/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > Skyring (skyring(a)gmail.com) [050519 00:27]:
> > > Yeah.
> > > Not as much fun.
> > Cool. Was there any particular reason you should stay on this list?
> To keep an eye on you, for one thing, now that I've looked back at the
> link given.
You could do that from the web archive. Is there any reason you can think
of to allow you to continue to trash-talk other editors on this list for
"fun" rather than work on sorting out your problems with them just as if
you're trying to write an encyclopedia?
- d.
I only relaised today that my IP address has been blocked, it says the
IP is 62.254.32.19. and it was blocked by RickK, but when I looked at
the block list, then at this IP's contributions, I had done none of
them at all, but they were all to do with things in my country.
My username is Escobar600ie and I have only made positive
contributions, I am not a vandal.
Check the contributions by both, you will see they are diferent.
I have continually tried to compromise, but these people have removed info w/o justification. BTW, I did NOT revert more than 3 times -- I have done several edits, trying to add in new info as well to counterbalance the extremely pro-Castro POV.
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