Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the
amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of
the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also
have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite
patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a
friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability
not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security
hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be
able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the
cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job,
and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you
have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are
interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies
Based on a list collected by [[user:Bluemoose]], I have generated
link-lists at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Encarta_Encyclopedia_topics
There are 19 lists, with initially 2000 links each, *including existing
links*. The lists will have to be manually cleaned from links to
existing articles (due to naming problems, I would not recommend a bot).
I have already done two of these lists (one and a half, to be honest, as
#19 was only half full), but now it becomes a PITA ;-)
So please, assist in the effort. Each of the remaining 17 pages has 40
sections to ease editing. If just a few of you do some sections, the
lists will be usable pretty soon.
Thanks,
Magnus
On Jul 23, 2005, at 6:21 PM, wikien-l-request(a)Wikipedia.org wrote:
> Impressive responses. One point: OR is often used as a
> an excuse to squash certain debated points, without
> allowing them to devlop (including citing sources).
> A silly example might be something like "go find some
> source for your notion that the world is round, and
> come back when you do so." Such source can then be
> debated for a while.
I, and everyone else, frequently insert stuff that is "well known"
without citing sources. "Beethoven is widely regarded as one of the
greatest of composers..." "f = m * a"...
However, whenever a statement, however obvious, is seriously
challenged, I take it seriously.
IF something is TRULY well known, it is usually EASY to find a
source. When someone says cite a source, I just find one and cite it.
And the article is the better for it.
Let's take "The world is round." I have just spent ten minutes
browsing my bookshelves looking for the clearest citation. A popular
book by Menzel entitled Astronomy... nope. "A Field Guide to the
Stars and Planets?" Nope. "Norton's Star Atlas?" Nope. All of them
give the radius of the earth... but fail to say in so many words that
the world is round, because, well, everybody knows that.
Aha. I have it.
"The earth is approximately an oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at
the poles.... For many navigational purposes the earth is assumed to
be a sphere, without intolerable error."
There you go. _American Practical Navigator: An Epitome of
Navigation_, originally by Nathaniel Bowditch, LL. D. 1966--Corrected
Print. Published by the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office. U. S.
Government Printing Office, 1966. Pp. 62-63.
And that settles it. Nobody can argue that _that_ book doesn't
contain _that_ sentence. Anyone can check it out. It does. Any
argument about the authority of the book is beside the point. It's an
objective fact that that book contains that sentence.
Once I've cited the source, I can replace the sentence in the article
that says "the world is round" with the sentence "The U. S. Naval
Oceanographic Office states that for many navigational purposes the
earth is assumed to be a sphere, without intolerable error." Problem
solved.
It's now up to anyone who disagrees with it to cite _their_ source.
It's up to the reader to judge which sources are reliable. If the
reader trusts John Cleves Symmes, Jr. more than he or she trusts the
U. S. Naval Oceanographic Office, that's their prerogative.
--
Jean is going to be bicycling 83 miles in the Pan Mass Challenge in
August, raising money for cancer research. Her profile is at http://
www.pmc.org/mypmc/profiles.asp?Section=story&eGiftID=JS0417
I have a bit of a tricky copyright question. Recently I decided that I
would like to create a derivation of the Wikipedia logo for personal use
soley on the Wikipedia site, after seeing that it was copyrighted to the
Wikipedia foundation I emailed Jimbo asking for formal permission to use
the image as a part of the future work. I have not recieved any reply
and so I decided to continue assuming that since there are already other
works based off the Wikipedia logo on the site it would be ok and I
could deal with tagging later.. I have since uploaded the work and amd
wondering whether it is a copyright violation or not and if not what it
should be tagged since it doesn't seem to fall under any of the
licensing schemes. BTW, the image can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Darkwiki.jpg.
I've also been meaning to ask how the copyright on the Wikipedia logo
works since it seems to be a paradox of terms, especially since it has
been established that despite claims otherwise, see [[User:Pioneer-12]]
everything posted or uploaded to Wikipedia is automatically licensed
under the GFDL yet the logo appears to be exempt.
Thanks,
-Jtkiefer
Unfortunately someone lobbed the "proposed policy or guideline" template on the project page. I never intended this to be policy or guideline. It's more a drive towards making more articles accessible to more people. After all, it's better to have an article that can be understood by 1,000 readers rather than none at all. The point here is that it is better still if 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 can understand and learn from it.
As far as how this is meant to pre-suppose what readers want - it only assumes that readers want accurate and informative articles that they can understand and that they enjoy reading. It makes no more assumptions than that. It's not meant to be a panacea to be applied everywhere (and it will not resolve or help the BC/BCE dispute). But it may improve other articles. Take the article on chromosomes, for instance. Don't look at it yet. What would you expect/want such an article to offer?
I think it should tell a reader not familiar with biology what a chromosome is and why it is important. It should explain to that same reader what it does. It may have a small section at the end containing technical details for someone with more advanced knowledge, but really I'd be surprised if there's much that can't be explained to a novice.
Now look at the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome It tells me nothing. Not what one is, not why it's important. To me (and I guess to anyone else who is unfamiliar with what a chromosome really is) it is meaningless. And it's here that Wikipedia ceases to function as a proper encyclopaedia. I also ask myself, what would it cost to those who already know quite a bit about biology if the article was more accessible. The answer's nothing - no information needs to be deleted, none should be removed. It's just a question of rephrasing so that more can comprehend.
This is what Readers First is about. Encouraging editors of articles to think about their audience - and in particular to aim for as wide an audience as possible. Einstein wrote a best-seller on relativity and Hawkings a best-seller on time (although the later chapters admittedly beat many people). They did show that complicated ideas can be explained to a general population. There's no reason why we should not try to make our articles as accessible to as
many as possible.
If there are volunteers who understand chromosomes and who have the patience to explain it to a layman, then let me know and I'll work with them to improve the article so you can see how much better it can get.
Jon (jguk)
---------------------------------
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre.
First off, my credentials:
[[en:User:Brian0918]]
Administrator
11,754 edits
Short version: There is a huge battle going on in which VFDers on WP,
WS, and Commons are pushing user-compiled lists from one project to
another. In each case, they are saying the lists belong on one of the
other 3 projects. Almost nobody is saying that these lists don't belong
anywhere, but nobody can decide on where they belong. It also doesn't
help that nobody on one project accepts the outcome of another project's
VFD (an outcome which may have said to transwiki to this project) as a
reason to keep it on this project.
Long version: There has been an ongoing battle between Wikipedia,
Wikisource, and Commons over the fate of user-compiled, well-sourced
lists. Specifically, I'm talking about lists of victims of disasters. It
all started with the [[List of General Slocum victims]] and [[List of
victims of the 1913 Great Lakes storm]]. The first appears to have only
one source, but is not a copyvio nor direct copy of an original source,
while the second was compiled by me for Wikipedia (originally), and
required more research than most people put into 5 featured articles...
Anyways, the first was VFDd from Wikipedia, with a few suggestions that
it should be transwiki'd to Wikisource:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/List_of_General_S…
These suggestions led to both myself and the creator of the first list
to move our lists over to Wikisource. My list was subsequently VFD'd
from Wikisource, and a VFD was also instituted for ALL such
user-compiled lists. Both of these VFDs are still open, I think:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Proposed_deletions#March_2005http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#Remove_Tables_and_Lists_f…
At Wikisource, the opinion seems to be that these lists belong either at
Wikipedia or Commons (yes, Commons does accept text, read the Main
Page). Following these suggestions, we subsequently copied these lists
over to Commons in the event that they suddenly disappeared from
Wikisource......
And, of course, they are now up for deletion on Commons, where the
opinion has been less favorable (they don't like being the "last
choice" for things deleted from elsewhere), although many have expressed
the opinion that these lists do in fact belong on Wikipedia.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Deletion_requests#List_of_victim…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Deletion_requests#List_of_Genera…
Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, an Undelete request was instituted (by myself,
I think) for the General Slocum list, but the majority are saying that
it doesn't belong on Wikipedia, but on Commons or Wikisource.
Summary: As Stevertigo said: "Theres no sense in people batting this
thing about. Clearly it belongs at source or [WP]... There needs to be
some policy against batting things around."
Hi, list :)
So, here I am writing an article on a creature
from [[Norse mythology]], the primeval cow
[[Auðumbla]]. I start with quoting the relevant
primary source and then I say a few things
about the creature's name and its possible
anglicization. Often I call it quits at this
point and go to the next article but this time
I was interested in writing about parallels to
the primeval cow in other mythologies.
So I read up on Zoroastrian mythology, find a
scholarly article, a relevant primary source
in translation and I'm good to go.
But I also want to say a few words about [[Hathor]],
an Egyptian cow goddess. Unfortunately I'm far from
being an expert on Egyptian mythology and don't
have the knowledge to use the primary sources.
So I rely on secondary and tertiary sources. I fish
around a bit on the Internet but don't find anything
that looks especially reliable. The Wikipedia article
looks okay and has the information I want to use but
unfortunately it doesn't have any references listed.
So, I decide to, honestly, cite the Wikipedia article
on Hathor as my reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au%C3%B0umbla
Is this a faux pas? I don't see anyone else doing this.
- - -
Here's another Norse mythology article; [[Lofn]]. This
time I quoted the most important primary source, mentioned
the others, cited my four references and I was out. A short
article for a minor character about whom very little can be
said.
Today I noticed someone added a link to the Greek Wikipedia
article on Lofn. Out of curiosity I took a look. Apparently
someone basically translated my English article. I'm fine
with that, of course. Happy, in fact. What bothers me a bit
is that all the references are simply omitted.
You could argue that it wouldn't be appropriate for the Greek
article to translate the reference section since those probably
aren't the references the translator is working from. I'm fine
with that. But shouldn't the English Wikipedia be cited as
a reference? And shouldn't direct quotes, like the Old Norse
text in this article, be sourced to their origin?
So, what do you reference pedants have to say
about all this? :)
Regards,
Haukur
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Some interesting things I've found in Google Alerts...
Hot for hookahs -
http://159.54.227.3/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050730/LIVING/50730001/1004
The Olympian - Olympia,WA,USA
... shishas or hubble-bubbles -- are traditional smoking devices
typically imported from the Middle East or Asia, according to online
dictionary Wikipedia. ...
I think they need to see [[WP:WIN]] :)
Films that did not mind their Fs and Bs -
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IE420050728053420&Page=4&Title=…
Newindpress - Chennai,India
LONDON: A new poll conducted by encyclopedia website Wikipedia suggests
that British film Nil By Mouth features the F-word more times than any
movie in history ...
Wikipedia conducted a poll? More likely that IMDB did...
- --
Alphax | /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
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Hi,
Yes, it's not generally considered proper to delete primary references and not cite as a reference an article that is essentially being translated.
I figure it is sometimes OK to reference other Wiki articles, unless there is a controversial claim that is disputed by other scholarly sources, then that needs to be mentioned.
Just my opinion
Chip Berlet (Cberlet)
________________________________
From: wikien-l-bounces(a)Wikipedia.org on behalf of Haukur Þorgeirsson
Sent: Sat 7/30/2005 9:49 PM
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Citing Wikipedia within Wikipedia
<<snip>>
But shouldn't the English Wikipedia be cited as
a reference? And shouldn't direct quotes, like the Old Norse
text in this article, be sourced to their origin?
<<snip>>
So, what do you reference pedants have to say
about all this? :)
Regards,
Haukur
> Establishing the truth of a proposition, however obvious, as this is,
> is not the purpose of Wikipedia, nor the purpose of categories.
> Categories are an aid to the reader to in finding information.
I don't understand the dichotomy you seem
to be trying to uphold. Wikipedia provides
information but not truth? What is truth?
Here's the start of our article on the Eiffel Tower:
"The Eiffel Tower ... is a metallic tower built
on the Champ de Mars in Paris ... and is nowadays
the most famous landmark and symbol of Paris."
This is information. And truth.
When we say "Homeopathy is a pseudoscience."
we are also providing information by writing
down a true statement. If I may paraphrase
a couple of sentences from a certain sci-fi
franchise:
"The first duty of every Wikipedian is to the truth,
scientific truth, historical truth and personal truth.
It is the guiding principle of Wikipedia."
When reasonable people interpret available data
in different ways we try to describe each position
fairly.
Then there are some unreasonable positions. Those
are usually dealt with in separate articles and
otherwise ignored. Here's an excerpt from the
start of the [[Apollo program]] article:
"Project Apollo ... was devoted to the goal of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to Earth within the decade of the 1960s. This
goal was achieved with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969."
There are many people who disagree with this but
since their position is unreasonable it is not dealt
with in the main article but relegated to a separate
article. Now, *that* article will try to fairly present
the views of those who believe that the Apollo program
was a hoax. However, by choosing to privilege the
reasonable view in the main article Wikipedia has
*already* chosen a position, whatever category the
hoax article is put into.
Or let's take [[Earth]]. Here's an excerpt from the lead:
"The planet formed around 4.57 billion (4.57×109) years ago and shortly
thereafter acquired its single natural satellite, the Moon."
There are many people who disagree with this. We try to
describe their positions fairly in separate articles,
e.g. [[Creationism]]. The article on creationism may
try to be scrupulously fair to the creationists but the
bottom line is that Wikipedia has *already* acknowledged
the scientific facts as superior to the creationist
theories (at least the "Young Earth" variety) by
including them in main articles like [[Earth]].
Including [[Creationism]] in [[Category:Pseudoscience]]
is just icing on a cake that has already been baked.
Regards,
Haukur
