WikiEN-l December 2006

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

157 participants
289 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Introducing a new mailing list
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 07 Dec '06

07 Dec '06

Matt R wrote > So in response to an environment where women feel uncomfortable about posting > because men may disagree with them, you would have it that men cannot disagree > with women over gender issues without running the risk of being flamed and > shamed? I don't believe that would result in the problem going away. Come now. They can perfectly well disagree. But I haven't seen so many clunky arguments put forward since I was a Fellow of a Cambridge college in the 1980s. I see very little actual sexism to complain about here. I see an almost complete dearth of tact. I see a hell of a lot of divisive language, as per your post. I see an almost total lack of empathy, from the males who are getting on a high horse about this. I see, also, an obvious flaw in the idea that the way technical issues are discussed extrapolates to discussion of social issues. Which is it doesn't: the whole culture of warring over getting your perspective installed as the de facto standard (which is the basic tech riff, no?) fails miserably in avoiding schism. So, it's a crying shame all right. And, unbelievably, some people are still hammering away, in apparent complete ignorance of the effect they are having. Guys, your rhetoric and tone is not good for this discussion. Try saying 'I agree' or 'I disagree', instead of attempting to blister people's monitors. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Handling unreferenced but likely-valid material
by dmehkeri＠swi.com 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

> > In the spirit of this, I did my own Special:Random sample of 30. I found: > > Unsourced: 13 > 1 Working External link/reference: 6 > Printed only: 2 > Multiple References: 8 > > Of the 13 unsourced articles, 3 were lists (and I didn't check the > articles they were linking to for sources) 9 stubs, and only one was a > full-blown article lacking sourcing. I may be in a minority on this one, > but I find unsourced stubs much less problematic than unsourced > ''articles'', so my personal findings gave me a lot more hope than I > thought. > Oh. Hadn't thought of that. Having opened this can of worms, I guess I should warn that the secret power here was that it was a truly random sample -- of ALL articles, not of full-blown articles. But wait! All is not lost! You can: click Special:Random, if it does NOT give you a valid article, ignore it and try again. When you have 25 valid articles, you're good. Of cousre, the result might depend heavily on your idea of valid. Also, if you have a restrictive definition what makes an article valid, this might not be practical at all. Share and enjoy, Dan

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

"The Cunctator" wrote > Sorry for the rant. Seems that Fabianism and VanWinkleism are somewhat different. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Discrimination on Wikipedia
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

"Gregory Kohs" wrote > The more excuses and explanations that the community comes up with, the more > obvious it is that you're avoiding the real issue. The more often you bring up exactly the same points here, the more obvious it is how little support you have. > Wikipedia unilaterally > has chosen to discriminate against non-volunteer activity in the article > space, despite the fact that the credentials and income sources of 99% of > editors are never questioned or verified. Why should not Wikipedia, #12 website in the world right now, decide 'unilaterally' (i.e. on the basis of its interests, rather than yours) how to set policy? >I would argue that if you looked at the > original authors of the New Pages in Wikipedia, 90% had some financial or > career "conflict of interest" that could be found if everyone was exposed to > a background check. Original research! Original research! Can you find a reliable source for this outrageous claim? > People who have never purchased or sold a pet skunk are unlikely to start an > article about [[Pet skunks]]. They don't seem to get banned, though. You mean 'on the Internet, no one knows you're a pet skunk'? Even if your claim on 'some financial or career "conflict of interest"' had any foundation, you are lawyering wildly to connect ownership of a skunk with such a conflict. You'd have to be a career skunk breeder promoting skunk ownership for your woefully scant reasoning to have any traction. Strangely enough, Wikipedians generally don't accept such chop-logic; and especially not arguments on conflict-of-interest policy from those lobbying against having any such thing. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

Stan Shebs wrote >The > hazard of asserting that women editors have something similarly > distinctive to bring to WP, by virtue of gender alone, is that one is > playing right into the stereotype of "women's topics" or "female > viewpoints", and risks creating a sort of "pink collar" ghetto in WP > that new female editors would be subtly (or not-so-subtly) steered towards. The argument is broken. Sure, creating the editorial equivalent of traditional newspapers' Women's Pages is not only a generation out of date and patronising, it is nothing anyone with WP experience would want anything to do with. But WP is a voluntary organisation, first and foremost. Discouraging women in any way is shooting ourselves in the feet, big time. Not just because slant in topic coverage will be harder to correct. But because women are (on average) better quality volunteers. Why else did we elect Angela and Anthere to the Board? Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Speedy deletion patrol
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote > > From: David Boothroyd <david(a)election.demon.co.uk> > > > > I agree with this. A few days ago I created [[338171]]. Being rather > > bored at the time I gave a facetious edit summary which claimed the > > article was all about the number 338,171. It was swiftly tagged with > > a speedy delete tag, and then deleted (despite me having quickly put > > a {{hangon}}). > > > > The article was actually a redirect to T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of > > Arabia"). Wanting privacy, in later life Lawrence re-enlisted in the > > RAF as an Aircraftsman (equivalent of Private in the Army), and was > > given 338171 as his service number. He often signed himself "338171 > > A/C Shaw", prompting Noel Coward to ask him "May I call you 338?". > > > > It was quite obvious on reading the article that it was actually a > > redirect. If the admin had checked the article to which it was > > redirected he would have found the reason explained there. So while > > it's legitimate to claim to have been misled by the edit summary, > > that really doesn't justify mistakenly speedying a perfectly good > > redirect. I appreciate that speedy deletion patrollers are often > > overworked but overwork is not an excuse for lack of common sense. > > Good intentions are not an excuse for disrupting Wikipedia to > illustrate a point. And underwork is not an excuse for lack of common sense, either. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Speedy deletion patrol
by Luna 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

If this is an isolated incident, it's probably easier to deal with it by leaving the particular admin a polite note explaining the misunderstanding, or by working through deletion review (WP:DRV). Unless you're trying to get at some greater trend or history of bad decisions. I know I've made a few mistakes, but once they're pointed out to me, I'm usually willing to correct them, or at least request/accept review from the community. Just a thought, -Luna On 12/5/06, David Boothroyd <david(a)election.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > I agree with this. A few days ago I created [[338171]]. Being rather > bored at the time I gave a facetious edit summary which claimed the > article was all about the number 338,171. It was swiftly tagged with > a speedy delete tag, and then deleted (despite me having quickly put > a {{hangon}}). > > The article was actually a redirect to T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of > Arabia"). Wanting privacy, in later life Lawrence re-enlisted in the > RAF as an Aircraftsman (equivalent of Private in the Army), and was > given 338171 as his service number. He often signed himself "338171 > A/C Shaw", prompting Noel Coward to ask him "May I call you 338?". > > It was quite obvious on reading the article that it was actually a > redirect. If the admin had checked the article to which it was > redirected he would have found the reason explained there. So while > it's legitimate to claim to have been misled by the edit summary, > that really doesn't justify mistakenly speedying a perfectly good > redirect. I appreciate that speedy deletion patrollers are often > overworked but overwork is not an excuse for lack of common sense. > -- > David Boothroyd - http://www.election.demon.co.uk > david(a)election.demon.co.uk (home) > dboothroyd(a)westminster.gov.uk (council) > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >

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Re: [WikiEN-l] "Reliable sources" - how to find 'em (was guideline being treated as absolute policy)
by phoebe ayers 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

On 11/28/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I see no reason why we should be flexible about sources. If it hasn't got > sources it can be deleted, regardless whether this is a policy or a > guideline. It may be kept if someone bothers to find the sources the > author > should have included, but that might not happen. <snip> I agree. As a matter of practicality, finding sources after the fact of writing, especially if you're not intimately familiar with the topic, is much more difficult than just including the original sources in the first place, and is probably less accurate. Even a 'further reading' section is more helpful than no sources whatsoever. I've been working on sourcing old articles on and off for a while, and it's an uphill battle; there are plenty of people willing to tag articles as unverified, but far fewer it seems are willing to sit down & do the research to come up with sources. At any rate, this seems like a good time to remind people of the resources for sourcing that exist: * [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check]] provides links to the unsourced catagories, discussion & directions * [[Wikipedia:Citation_templates]] -- some templates for sources, which I haven't seen in wide use yet; a corollary to * [[Help:Footnotes]] fun with footnotes * [[Wikipedia:Newspapers_and_magazines_request_service]] -- participants will try and get you an electronic copy of an article, if you come up with the citations, can also do some database checking as well (this project needs to have life breathed into it again, and more participants) * [[Wikipedia:Research_resources]] is marked as "historical", but there are still many good resources there for research on many topics; should be expanded & made current. If there are other relevant pages (besides the policies themselves) I would love to know about them. And finally, don't forget that fact-checking questions -- "I need a reliable source to find out exactly when General Custard died" and so on -- are precisely the sort of thing reference librarians tend to thrive on. And more and more public libraries are offering chat reference nowadays... -- phoebe

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 41, Issue 38
by Daniel P. B. Smith 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

On Dec 5, 2006, at 3:49 PM, wikien-l-request(a)Wikipedia.org wrote: > From: Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> > > On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Puppy wrote: >> Excellent solution, may I borrow your prod content for my own use? > > Yes, but the case I'm worried about is one where the targeted > article is > not libelous or about living people, still would have content if the > questionable material is removed, and actually does have sources, > but which > are not referenced in the recommended one-footnote-per-sentence > way. The > policy is letting people use the rules to disrupt by picking any of > that > 80% of articles and saying "you'd better source this, now, or I put > your > article up for deletion." Nothing about the verifiability policy requires _inline_ sources. And please stop asserting 80% of our articles are unsourced, when my informal check suggests that the number is more like 20%.

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Making it easier for the public to help out
by Steve Bennett 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

Hi all, Wikipedia started out with the idea that the person reading the article should be helping to fix it. But we're really moving further and further away from that, and defining a "Wikipedia community" that works on the articles, and end users who just read them. For example, we now tend to put many templates on the talk page (like "image requested") rather than on the article itself. Similarly, metacomments like "This section is not complete" are often put in HTML comments, or just on the talk page, rather than being more visible. Would anyone like to see this trend reversed? My girlfriend remarked tonight that she had found two different articles on the same topic, and was annoyed by it. I felt like saying, "why didn't you suggest a merge?" But then realised that the steps involved are totally unrealistic for the average passer by: edit the article, add "{{mergefrom|...}}" to that article, then do the same for the other article (but with "mergeto", then go and add your reasoning to the talk page! My suggestion: Get past the simplistic idea that since anyone can "edit" any page, anyone can "fix" any article. They're not the same. More concretely: 1) Put a big "Does this article need fixing?" link in a prominent place on each article (perhaps only for logged-out users or newbies?) 2) Upon clicking it, present a list of common problems: Plagiarism, factual error, duplicate article, incorrect name for article, missing information... 3) Explain that the user can edit it themselves *if they're interested*, or make it *very* easy for them to report the problem so more experienced Wikipedians can fix it. "So fix it" is a fine response from one oldbie to another - but not to a newbie. Anyone agree with me here? Or have we passed the point where we actively attempt to engage passers by to help us improve quality? Steve

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WikiEN-l December 2006