WikiEN-l December 2006

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

157 participants
289 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Time for preformatted empty articles?
by dmehkeri＠swi.com 02 Dec '06

02 Dec '06

> > > > Plus it would slow down making redirects to cut boilerplate text. I do a > lot of redirects ... I do mean thousands. > > > I was going to say, it should be possible to disable this feature for > > experienced users. > > > Maybe. OTOH, just have a look through [[Special:Newpages]] on a Sunday > afternoon US time. You'll consider hitting Ctrl-A before typing > #REDIRECT to be a small price to pay. > > - d. Maybe the preformat should appear only when an IP address creates a page... - another d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Nazi userboxes
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Dec '06

02 Dec '06

"Jim Schuler" wrote > It > seems to me that some of us were attempting to hold a philosophical > discussion on a broader topic, not a topical conversation on the banning of > one person. Did you succeed? It's pretty hard to game Godwin's Law, and the userbox thing is our own personal Wikipedia for-Gawd's-sake topic. 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] Time for preformatted empty articles?
by dmehkeri＠swi.com 02 Dec '06

02 Dec '06

> >Maybe the preformat should appear only when an IP address creates a page... > Except that IPs can't create pages in the main namespace. :p Huh, you don't say... well, when are we going to fix that? > Don't recall how long ago that was disabled. Oh, I do. About a year ago, wasn't it. Cheers, Dan

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletions, lists, etc?
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Dec '06

02 Dec '06

"The Cunctator" wrote > I'm mildly sorry for taking the shortcut of asking the list about things I > could figure out by wading through the insanely complicated policy pages, > but here goes-- if you think a page that went through the AfD process was > wrongly deleted, what is the proper action? There is a process, which is apparently full of twisty little passages, all of which sound the same. > How wrong is it for an admin to undelete a page? If you believe 0WW, it's wrong. > Also, are we trying to get rid of all "list" pages? This is actually a good question. I'm not trying to rid enWP of lists, though in a sense they have to some extent had their day. Their functionality is still much superior to categories, in some important respects. One of those respects is that one could _in principle_ annotate lists, entry-by-entry, justifying each claim. Something of the sort goes on at [[list of polymaths]], I gather, though I don't follow it in detail. No one knows what 'polymath' really means, so in the end we'd get out of that a fairly interesting article of who said of whom and when that polymath applied. That's OK, I think. Another example in which I'm involved is [[editio princeps]]. I'm kind of staggered that I haven't just come across a list of when the classical Greek and Roman authors were first printed. So, anyway, there's a list being compiled there, mostly from internal enWP evidence. Technically it's fairly illegal to use other articles to source a list like that. In practice (a) the material, if from 1911 EB as it typically is, is highly reputable anyway; and (b) collating such a list is a very good first step, because checking an edition was produced in Venice in 1495 or something of a specific author is a short Google away. In other words, fact-checking something specific is convenient enough. There have always been some really junky lists around, and some of those could reasonably be axed via AfD. It is not a solution just to use categories, certainly. That hides the problem, rather than solving it: categories look more trustworthy, but some are real rubbish. (Like the Erdos number fiasco ...) 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] GNAA Deleted!
by Daniel P. B. Smith 01 Dec '06

01 Dec '06

> From: <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> > > "The Cunctator" wrote > >> I'd just like to remind people that Wikipedia was doing quite well >> in the >> Age Before Required Sourcing. > > Yeah. But there has been something of a 'phase change'; and that is > not for no reason. Several really. The readers are less tolerant of > and amused by errors; the editing community has largely preferred a > more academic approach over time. Nothing scales 'with impunity' (I > think this is the fundamental theorem of computer science ...) And in that age, when you said anything you were told that everyone understood that Wikipedia was a work in progress, and that sourcing would happen eventually. Well, the work in progress is progressing, and that means that more and more "eventually" is now. I was doing quite well in the age when I wore diapers, but eventually...

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Re: [WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 01 Dec '06

01 Dec '06

"The Cunctator" wrote > I'd just like to remind people that Wikipedia was doing quite well in the > Age Before Required Sourcing. Yeah. But there has been something of a 'phase change'; and that is not for no reason. Several really. The readers are less tolerant of and amused by errors; the editing community has largely preferred a more academic approach over time. Nothing scales 'with impunity' (I think this is the fundamental theorem of computer science ...) 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] On Completeness and Restrictiveness (was Re: GNAADeleted!)
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 01 Dec '06

01 Dec '06

David Gerard wrote > Our breadth is a strength, not a weakness. We don't have to have a > 30,000-byte article on something to be a useful source on it. We have been trying to empty the ocean of Google with the teaspoons of stubs of a couple of paras, from the early days. This indeed is one of our great strengths. In other words we have people willing to do this, on _anything_ really; and we have other people willing to see that this pile of stubs - the stack of filing cards filled in at the library, as it used to be for scholars, has value. In a hypertexted world, it does have the great value, that the pigeonholes created fill up gradually. 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] GNAA Deleted!
by Laurence Parry 01 Dec '06

01 Dec '06

>> Should Wikipedia accept original research or use less-than-ideal sources >> in >> cases where there is little or no existing literature? Nope: the reader >> would >> have no way to establish whether they could trust an article's contents. >> It >> might work if you had those articles controlled by verifiable experts, >> but >> again, Wikipedia's not that encyclopedia. > > I feel that if I go to Wikipedia to look up something relatively > notable, and Wikipedia's response is "We don't have an article on > that", then Wikipedia has failed me. If Wikipedia's response is > "GNAA's website is X, and we couldn't verify any information beyond > that, but here are some blogs", then it has performed much better. On a similar note . . . a fortnight ago there was a spate of AfDs for furry fandom articles, including a few furry conventions. Many of these articles were little more than "X is a furry convention in Y occuring at Z, it has 1000 people attend each year here's their website". Nobody was actually disagreeing that this was the case, but there was a lot of "Furrycruft!", "Wikipedia isn't a dictionary!" and "if you can't find a reliable 3rd party published source, you must convict!" flying around. What I ended up doing was creating [[furry convention]], which is essentially "[here's all the stuff we know in general about furry conventions from the reliable sources], if you want to know more about PafCon in particular, you want to go look at their website and at WikiFur, which is an encyclopedia that can contain original research and unverifiable material". Of course, PafCon doesn't have a website because it's a fictional convention, but you get the idea. If Wikipedia doesn't want to write about topics, a good alternative is to do some kind of portal to direct people to those who *do* want to write about it, as long as they are doing so competently. That's helpful for the user because they get the information they're looking for, and it's helpful for Wikipedia because it avoids repeated creation of pages about "non-notable" topics (which inevitably result in a certain proportion of angst-filled AfDs that burn some of our most dedicated contributors out). --- Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry http://greenreaper.co.uk - http://wikifur.com

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Phrase and fable
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 01 Dec '06

01 Dec '06

I glanced yesterday at a recent dictionary 'of phrase and fable', which had a Pokemon article. Here's a thought, addressed to one part of 'what do we do about popular culture articles?' A new wiki, Wikifable, could be a place to transwiki material which was basically narrative treatment of myths (Norse, manga, soap operas ...). WP itself should be left with analytical and scholarly treatment of myths. Wikifable would have to work out its own protocols (canon, fourth wall, sources ...) but they could be independent of WP's. Anyway, this would follow a pattern and path going back to Wiktionary. 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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WikiEN-l December 2006