Apologies for the bias and frustration evident here.
At DRV right now is a debate regarding Finger Lakes Christian School.
The sources for this article are: a diary date and a quote form the
principal; and the school website. The school is a private church
school with 75 students.
The problem with the article itself was established at AfD: absence of
non-trivial coverage in reliable secondary sources. We cannot verify
anything much other than its existence, so the article contents was a
simple directory entry, but of course [[WP:NOT]] a directory does not
apply to schools.
The problem with the deletion debate is obvious; it has the S-word in
the title so the subject is "inherently notable" (whatever that might
mean, no sources were cited to back this claim). Obviously if one
were to substitute "company" for "school" in the article title it
would have been snowballed into the bitbucket, with its 75 unique
Googles outside Wikipedia and mirrors.
The problem with the DRV is that the existence of a number of votes
from obdurate "all schools are inherently notable" types means that
vote counting gives no consensus, whereas a comparison of arguments
from policy - specifically verifiability and hence the ability to
cover the subject objectively - shows a clear delete.
The problem with the whole argument is that the quasi-religious belief
that every school article must be kept because all schools are
inherently notable appears to override all concerns of verifiability
and neutrality, to the point where nobody arguing to keep has even
tried to fix the major issue raised at AfD, that the contents of the
article cannot be formally verified per policy. Folk memory has it
that one outright hoax was nearly kept as a result of this line of
reasoning.
I'm rather hoping that someone on this list will care enough and have
sufficient resources to actually find the reliable sources the article
needs, since I have little doubt that the school inclusionists will
see to it that it is kept one way or another, and the last thing we
need is yet another unverifiable promotional article on a private
Christian school. I can't find much other than directory entries, and
I find I lose the will to live after reading a certain number of them.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
I've just been pointed to this - http://futef.com/
It seems to search on keywords, and then produce a related list of
categories for browsing as well as the keyword results. I haven't had
much of a chance to play around with it, but it's certainly promising
- any thoughts?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
If you are an admin on ENWP and are interested in copyright and
permissions issues, I would like to encourage you to become involved in
the permissions OTRS team. For an idea of what's involved, take a look
at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS/permissions-en-guide.
Participants must understand copyright issues as they affect Wikipedia,
understand and support the project's position on copyright and fair
use, and have a history of keeping their cool.
If interested, email me off-list.
The Uninvited Co., Inc.
On 30 Sep 2006 at 10:12, "Jussi-Ville Heiskanen"
<cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally I think a little bit of ignore goes a long way here. Tell
> Seth to divest himself of the EFF pioneer award, and come back again,
> methinks.
Then he'd be notable as somebody who renounced an award, wouldn't he?
I think the handful of people who refused, renounced, returned, or
had revoked [Oscars | Pulitzer prizes | Olympic medals | Nobel prizes
| Fields Medals] tend to be very notable for this fact.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
On 30 Sep 2006 at 12:12, Stephen Streater <sbstreater(a)mac.com> wrote:
> May preference is to use colour. There are many
> possible ways to do this, but one way would be for
> sentences to start out light grey, and each independent
> editor who approves or disapproves turns it darker and
> either more blue or more red. So dark blue would be
> strongly supported, dark red would be strongly opposed,
> and light grey would be not supported or opposed.
An interesting possibility; but just how would the user interface be
done so as to allow editors to mark such preferences (which might
pertain to anything from entire articles to single words) without
requiring use of complex and bothersome command or markup syntax?
Some sort of WYSIWYG interface to highlight pieces of text and add
approval or disapproval would be desirable, but that would probably
require complex scripting that wouldn't be cross-browser compatible
for all users.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
"David Gerard" wrote
> Indeed. I wrote an [[WP:PRO|essay]] about this. Feel like applying
> some of the ideas in it?
I have an upmarket quote for you.
'Maladjustment in human affairs is a concomitant of change. Forms, procedure, and ideas outlive the conditions which gave them rise; disbodied they continue an independent existence. [...] The cri de coeur of a member of the [[Long Parliament]], "You will shout 'Fire, fire', be it in Noah's flood", describes one aspect of the ever-changing divergence between fixed ideas and a changing reality.'
[[Lewis Namier]], a 1952 essay "History".
Charles
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"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote
> I sometimes think that at least some people who object to citations
> do so because what they really want is to _establish themselves as
> authorities_ through social interaction with other page editors. That
> is, they want their Wikipedian colleagues to recognize _them_ as
> reliable sources, and agree that any fact inserted by
> [[User:Pantomath]] does not need a citation because everyone agrees
> that User:Pantomath knows everything.
That sort of thing is not the reason why I don't think that (to take a random sort of mathematical fact) the centre of a group being a subgroup doesn't merit a reference. I do think it would be clutter. I do think, also, that "if you know enough to ask the question, you know enough to answer it". If you understand what is at issue here, you can see that it is a reasonable statement with a quick proof. If not, looking at a book will presumably not help that much.
Also, I have to say that where I come from, priorities are different. Statements with undefined terms in are completely opaque. Therefore, getting pages up with definitions on is the way to increase well-founded knowledge. And until people know what is being talked about, they cannot possibly know whether they are on the right page, at all. This is a crunch issue. The Web contains huge numbers of technical papers with the latest stuff. What you want may be out there, but actually no one is polymathic enough to be able to grok it all. We do a pretty good job here of making technical literature accessible, and that access is more to do, in my view, with demystification of buzzwords, than by fact-checking zealotry. I'm all for purging errors, but not for referencing the bleeding obvious.
Charles
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Robth wrote
> Yes, yes, yes. Our articles need to come in with a chip on their shoulders,
> as it were. There is no external reason to believe that what it says resembles
> the truth, no author or organization claiming responsibility for the text. The
> article needs to make a case for the information it presents being
> accurate. Don't
> just state facts, show the reader how they can confirm the accuracy of the
> statements. Trusting a Wikipedia article requres a leap of faith; we want to
> minimize the distance of that leap.
Actually, I think an ultra-sceptical attitude is complete poison, when it comes to learning anything you don't already know. It is actually rather symptomatic of adult learners, that they have to know everything in full detail, before assenting to anything. Insisting on reading the fine print is a good life lesson, but it is hopeless when it comes to self-education.
I contrast what is above with the point made by [[Frank Adams]], about reading survey articles: you should try first to get the general idea of what is going on.
I always think of WP articles as aspiring to be exactly that: good surveys. I hope it doesn't signify too much that [[survey article]] is still a red link. In such articles, anyway, it is assumed that there is a good biblography, but usually little footnoting.
Charles
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On 29 Sep 2006 at 09:43, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
> I was struck by Seth's account of how he "strongly argued the
> case against myself" at AFD. I suspect that a biographical
> article's subject tends to carry significant but paradoxical
> undue weight at AFD, in two contradictory directions. Subjects
> who argue that they are notable and that their articles should be
> kept are obviously vain self-promoters, so their articles should
> obviously be deleted. But subjects who argue that their articles
> should be deleted are obviously trying to hide something (or, at
> least, to unjustly influence the free flow of information), so
> their articles should obviously be kept.
Yeah... reverse psychology would seem to be a productive way of
getting what you want from an AFD, whether it be "keep" or "delete",
if you have the smarts to argue strenuously for the *opposite*
position to the one you really want, and do it as obnoxiously as
possible.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
David Russell wrote
>It's not as if it is a brand
> new guideline that may be under dispute or unknown - WP:CITE has been
> around since 2002, if some editors decided to ignore it then it's no
> surprise that others objected to their work being elevated to GA status.
This ignores the actual history and debate around most policies: 'you mean we have to do A?'; 'No no, dear boy, it's just to stop B. I mean look at X and what has happened to the articles in contentious area P that you never look at.' 'I see, so I just get on and occasionally try and upgrade a few older articles that really do need help.' 'Just so, dear boy, and your fear that we shall all be writing limping prose spattered with footnotes is quite unfounded.'
So one turns one's back and gets on with the actual business of adding one of many thousand pages that will turn a red link blue. Only to find that suddenly filling a much-needed gap in the references is somehow an issue.
Anyone here see a slight contradiction between having 100K featured articles, and having pedants running riot demanding citations we can reasonably do without?
Charles
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