On the hip hop music article you can see how huge, informative chunks of
text are replaced with useless, POV edits. For example:
"What many fail to recognize is the distinct importance of the gritty,
choppy sound of hip hop. The music seldom sounds like other organic forms.
Even hip hop crews that have their own band often use samples and the
gritty, choppy texture of machines to create their beats in the studio as
featured on their album (when performing live, they usually recreate this
sound with a full band). One popular misconception is that samples and drum
machines exist in hip hop music as merely a lazy substitute for a real band;
in fact, hip hop producers obsess over the [[timbre]], texture and frequency
of specific samples and drum machine sounds. A session drummer playing James
Brown's Funky Drummer break is no substitute for the sampled break from the
original record. However, in recent years, there has been a tendency towards
original instrumental compositions in hip hop from the likes of artists and
producers such as [[Timbaland]], [[OutKast]], [[The Roots]] and [[The
Neptunes]]."
is replaced with:
"Many producers and listeners pride certain records for being hip hop lore,
the source of samples and breaks. To this day, producers use arcane
equipment to replicate the same rough sound used in older records. This
lends credibility to the records and serves as a historical reminder to the
listeners of hip hop's origins."
On 8/4/2006 Sam Korn wrote
>> The definition of "child pornography" differs from country to
>>country.
>Yes, in terms of laws. This image might not fall under child
>pornography rules in some country or another, but that doesn't
>actually stop it being child pornography.
Of course that does! Whether something is or is not child pornography is clearly subjective (especially in borderline cases like the picture you decided to delete) and I do not see why your personal judgement on the matter should be considered to supersede the judgments of other editors on Wikipedia who are neither POV-pushers nor trolls.
People left and right are saying things like "It was child porno" or "it was inappropriate for Wikipedia". These sort of things are what are called weasel words on Wiipedia articles. Wikipedia should not be edited according to the personal likings and dislikings of one or even several editors.
I believe it is accepted process to maintain status quo unless there is consensus to change, not change unless there is consensus to keep. We don't start by deleting articles and then undeleting them if people demonstrate a super-majority for retaining them, we do it the other way. I don't see why the process should be otherwise for image deletions.
Your rationale for deleting the image without consensus (that the IfD had failed to delete the image) is very strange, surely that's why the IfD is there for, to prevent the deletion of images when Wikipedia editors don't want to delete the image? "I will let the IfD delete images when I want them deleted but when it keeps images I want to be deleted then I'm just going to go ahead and delete them": doesn't this sound wrong to anyone?
Supposedly an admin has only abilities and not rights, but clearly in this case an admin has the right to irreversibly delete images that are not to his taste while an ordinary user doesn't have the right to keep images that are to his taste.
---------------------------------
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big.
To The Administrators of WIKIPEDIA,
I have been blocked from editing pages. Why, I do not know. I offer my website as an external link for the wikipedia IQ page. I have no spam at my website and offer a comprehensive database that is full of free information.
Here is my IP Address: 70.173.162.237.
This is one of the editors that blocked me: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
This is where I am blocked from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iq
This is my link: * [http://www.kids-iq-tests.com/<B>Kids IQ Test Center</B>]
I cite your website numerously in my WebPages. I am not spamming wikipedia and I do not understand why I am being hassled. I offer a unique website that offers information that is simply not found on other so-called IQ websites.
Actually, I have scrolled through numerous so-called IQ websites that are featured in the External Links and the majorities have spam linking directly to the sorriest piss poor excuse for an IQ from the www.tickle.com website.
If anything, I feel that I am being hassled because I actually have a website that is NOT TRYING TO PAWN SOME CRAPPY TICKLE TEST down a visitors throat.
I ask that you lift the ban on my site and allow me to continue to offer FREE INFORMATION regarding IQ, personality and other psychological tests on the internet.
Look past the front page of my website. Look at all the information that is free and that provides a service.
Thanks for your consideration of this matter.
Regards,
etexzan
---------------------------------
How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messengers low PC-to-Phone call rates.
The biggest problem that wikipedia is facing right now is deterioration. I
really don't find the featured article review to be effective enough to
prevent featured articles from getting worse. What ideas do you guys have
for how we could prevent featured article deterioration?
--Ben
> Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 23:10:24 -0400
>
> Huh? I thought that we had pretty much accepted that the general
> trend for
> high-profile, highly edited articles is that as time passes they
> tend to
> become higher quality. The often incredible improvement for front page
> featured articles is proof enough of this. Do you have a particular
> example
> in mind of this deterioration effect?
I'm afraid I don't, not at hand, but one phenomenon I've noticed and
am going to make a point of documenting the next time it occurs is
that there is a significant tendency for references to be lost over
time. I notice it because I try to be fairly punctilious about
providing them, and in several cases when reviewing articles I put
significant work into, say, a year ago, I find that treferences have
been lost.
Given the inability to perform a text search through histories, it is
sometimes fairly laborious to find them again. On the other hand, a
Google search on anything that's been in Wikipedia for more than
about six months is apt to turn up, overwhelmingly, WIkipedia and
mirrors as the first few pages of hits. I believe, but I cannot
prove, that Web sources quoted in Wikipedia, that _still exist,_
sometimes fail to show at all in Google searches if they are small
and insignificant sites and there are hundreds of bigger ones
(Wikipedia and mirrors).
As I say, I don't have an example to point to, but I'll make a point
of doing so when I find one.
The edit history usually shows that what seems to be happening is
very sloppy editing, particular in rewriting or restructuring parts
of articles. Sometimes people will remove a sentence they think is
wrong and inadvertently remove an adjacent reference. Sometimes
people remove an item but not the reference that supports it.
Sometimes people remove a reference but not the item it supports.
Sometimes people remove an item and its reference, then later someone
reinserts the item but fails to reinsert the reference...
> From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca>
> Hopefully the new cite.php reference formatting will help in this
> regard. Reference text can now be bundled directly with the text
> that it
> is a reference for with the list of references at the bottom of the
> page
> being automatically compiled from that. It makes it impossible to have
> "orphan references" now, and perhaps having the full description of
> the
> referenced material in place will make it harder for an editor to
> accidentally delete it when removing unrelated material.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes for anyone who was
> unaware of the new system. I'm loving it. :)
Oh, I should have said something nice about it in the first place. It
is, literally, a dream come true.
<hip></hip><hooray/>!
I only wish (well, you knew that was coming) that there was a way for
a reader to hide/show the superscripted links to the references.
Hi all,
This has probably been debated millions of times before, but could
someone tell me the basic results of the debate, even if that's the
case?
Proposition: When you create a blank page, instead of having an empty
page, have a basic template like:
<!-- Lead, including '''article name''' in triple quotes. -->
<!-- Sources - please include at least one verifiable source under a
==Sources== heading -->
<!-- Stub template. If the article is less than two complete
paragraphs, please insert {{stub}} or something more specific (see the
stub page [[can't remember it]]) -->
<!-- Categories: Every article should belong to at least one non-stub
category. Add these like [[Category:Wikipedia articles]] -->
Etc. If nothing else, it would help us avoid forgetting some of these
basic things, and would help newbies not get bitten, create peace on
earth, free beer, etc...
I assume this is technically possible. So what's the social reason for
not doing it?
Steve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Admins_willing_to_make_difficult_blo…
I'd add myself to that page (my home address and home and mobile
numbers are findable), but I don't have time for the abuse cases of
this sort I already get asked to investigate. How annoying!
That said: we need hardarses, but our hardarses need to remember to
block with *love*.
- d.
Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on
Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a
continuing battle.
The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money...
2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror...
3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time...
4 profit!
However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
Currently, Wikipedia's running costs are about $1.2M per year, and this
pays for, among other things, serving about 4000 hits per second, that
is to say, about 1.26 x 10^11 hits per year, or about $ 10^-5 per hit.
(Of course, this is average gross cost; marginal cost will be
significantly higher, say $ 10^-4 per hit).
Web advertising rates are generally of the order of $1 CPM: that is, $
10^-3 per hit. If an advertiser manages to get 10,000,000 hits per year,
they will make $10,000 in ad revenue, and costs the Wikimedia Foundation
around $1000 in leeched server load.
What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per
hit for an official real-time mirror service? (Of course, this would be
aggregated in lumps, because it's impossible to bill tiny fractions of a
dollar). Now, the economics to the mirror operator is $ 10^-3 - $0.2 x
10^-3 per hit, and they still make 80% of the money they would have
before, and don't need to worry about being cut off. However, the
economics for the WF are now quite different: instead of losing $ 10^-4
per hit, the Foundation would make $ 2 x 10^-4 income - $ 10^-4 cost per
hit, and thus makes $ 1000 gross profit over the course of the year for
those 10,000,000 hits, which can be ploughed back into achieving the
Foundation's charitable goals (for example, by buying new server kit and
bandwidth, or paying for other real-world activities).
Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for
use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they
are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a
modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.
Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the
existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering
an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for
contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.
As a result:
* Wikipedia remains ad-free
* the WF gets revenue
* the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
without leeching unauthorized resources.
The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null
skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly
reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater
possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content
easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from
around the page contents.
With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links,
serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly
WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of
mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month
or less.
Good idea, or bad idea?
-- Neil