The following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:No…
is to a deletion debate on a page for bounties (cash etc) for bits of work on the project. I believe such a page would be a good thing. Arguments in favour follow:
It's worked fine, as far as I can tell, on the German edition since last July, and in a number of free software/open source communities. Some people have argued that selfless altruism is the ideal goal for Wikipedian motives. I disagree. Altruism is good if you can get it, but most people work on Wikipedia for a variety of additional reasons: for fun, to practice a language, to gain a reputation, to socialise, to document their POV, and so on. We don't need to worry so much about motives, but rather whether people follow policy in their editing. We should encourage reward systems where we can do so without compromising our goals.
Others have argued that the lure of cash would cause people to pay others to insert their bias and such. Of course, this is a risk with or without a bounty board, but at least we can monitor and police this page. Moreover, Wikipedia mechanisms are quite robust against POV pushers, regardless of motivation. We deal daily with people with strong views on religion, politics, ethics etc, yet we cope well -- and as we probably all know, people get more passionate about these things than any financial pressure could induce.
Wikipedians will always be volunteers. But cash is useful for Wikipedians. For example, we now demand, and rightly, reliable sources for facts. But it's the case that acquiring reliable sources can be an expensive activity.
-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]
Hi all,
I have access to a report published by Gartner (a giant in the
database research world). As I understand, it's publicly available -
for a significant cost. I also believe that I am allowed to privately
distribute it under certain circumstances, probably including
verifying that I'm not making up stuff supposedly in it.
It's an incredibly detailed analysis of 20 or ETL tools, and would be
very useful for articles such as [[Extract, transform, load]] and
articles on individual ETL tools. But, is it verifiable?
Steve
It has been proposed to officially deprecate the mother of
meta-templates, qif. Please contribute to the discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MFD/QIF
John
Channel five's "The Gadget Show" reviewed Wikis and Wikipedia in this
week's show (repeated Saturday morning, about 1115). What they said can
be found at
http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/5gsmain.jsp?lnk=401&featureid=142&description…
Unfortunately, since the show went out [[The Gadget Show]] has had to be
protected...
Arwel Parry
...from some material on his talk page, it appears as if wikitruth may be trolling him, in which case the comment on (one revision of) the Wikitruth main page that he maintains an "official" Wikitruth mirror might be part of that effort.
Please ignore my earlier comment.
www.wikitruth.info is still down. When it was up, it suggested "If you find the wikitruth.info site is down, please contact David Gerard at Wikipedia, who has seen fit to download a copy of the entire Wikitruth site through his DSL line to serve as an official Mirror. Thank you, David!"
If you're reading this, David, could you give us the URL for the mirror?
Hi all,
Are there any "request for second opinion" templates? There are many
times where I come across an article that smells fishy to me. However,
I'm not certain. All the processes like AfD, Prod etc presume that you
are personally sponsoring the destruction of the page. But at times
I'd simply like to add the page (with a minimum of effort) to some
list where smart people can be alerted to possible dodginess.
Ideally for me, such a template would simply add a template, with no
big ugly banner, again on the basis that I could be wrong.
The kinds of things that I might like to flag an article with:
- "smells like copyright violation"
- possible hoax
- contribution from user with history of bad edits
- unsourced change of a figure (eg, adjusting a city's population, a
number of awards won by someone, but not explaining the source for the
new figure)
I suppose what particularly concerns me is that some tags, like
cleanup, are really ugly and a bit of a slap in the face to
contributors to the article.
Any ideas?
Steve
Wikitruth.info seems to be slashdotted, but according to the Google
cache, http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:
8yjjGVPUOb0J:www.wikitruth.info/ or http://tinyurl.com/otg6n , the
Wikitruth wiki is not editable, for our own good.
In its words: "We want you to read this website, not be locked in a
full-on piss-battle over changing varying articles to reflect the
whims and madness of a thousand people. Wikis do work, make no
mistake, but they ultimately only work when you have a small amount
of people doing the editing. Sure, it progresses a little slower...
but it progresses."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
Just wanted to point everyones attention to a slashdot story about
wikipedia censorship, it's at
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/16/1656208
What the hell is wikitruth.info anyway, I've never heard of it? It's
currently offline (slashdotted) so I can't check. And who are these
disgruntled administrators? Is it some sort of wikipedia review
splinter?
--Oskar
Wikipedia:Archives as sources <WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
There is a proposal going on to alter the No Original Research policy.
Just in case people missed it.
Garion96