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
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>
> 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
"The Cunctator" wrote
> Sorry for the rant.
Seems that Fabianism and VanWinkleism are somewhat different.
Charles
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"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
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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
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"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
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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)
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>
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
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%.
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