WikiEN-l September 2006

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

137 participants
216 discussions

Leaving the project
by John Lyden 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

Hey gang, I'm pretty burned out on Wiki, and I don't anticipate coming back anytime soon, if at all. Please desysop me (and yes, it was me who blanked my User and Talk pages). Thanks, John "RasputinAXP" Lyden -- John Lyden - rasputinaxp(a)gmail.com "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time..." -Kerouac

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia
by dmehkeri＠swi.com 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

> > How do we get across to the CVU that they can't vote amongst > > themselves to dispose of Assume Good Faith? Which is, ahh, a *policy*. > > Telling them they can't has had no effect. > > Well of course not because they will just cite WP:IAR. Then they could > go on the argue that policy is descriptive not proscriptive and throw > in the words "common sense" a few times. > Hmm. Maybe we could try speedy-deleting their project page. > Sorry sorry sorry. Cheers. Dan

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia
by Sydney aka FloNight 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

---- Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix(a)gmail.com> wrote: ============= Oh yes, the Unblock mailing list has given me an interesting view on the interaction between newbies and admins who regularly block users ('Wikipedia says I was blocked for "user." What the heck is that and why I am being blocked?' is a fairly common complaint, along with the usual autoblocks and AOL collateral damage). I've also noted that most of us replying on the Unblock mailing list have used "customer service" language to a high degree. ======== On 9/5/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Ah, a great example of something where both policy and its practical > implimentation are biting newbies. > Agree with George Herbert's remarks. SP

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia
by dmehkeri＠swi.com 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

> > I had an article rejected from GA on two grounds, its statistics > weren't referenced, which is fine, I will have to look into that. And > two, it didn't have a picture!!! Of all things you think they would be > lenient on a picture. Not to sound overly harsh on the policy stuff > but thats going a bit too far. > Reminds me of: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fermi_paradox&diff=22857362&… (Wasn't me)

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Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Essays on the future of the projects
by SJ 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

David Gerard notes that on wikien there are many such essays; and I believe there are also quite a number on de:wp. Are there any efforts to gathering/organizing these essays, similar to efforts to organize policy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_essays (250+ entries) SJ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> Date: Sep 5, 2006 9:27 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Essays on the future of the projects To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org On 9/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On 05/09/06, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > Aaron Swartz has started a series of such essays. The latest one > > suggests something I have long suspected, that the huge body of new > > and anonymous contributors, who often make the first serious stab at > > an article or provide a needed injection of expertise, are as > > important to the 'pedias development (if not more so) than the core of > > dedicated editors. > > http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads > > http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia > > > Greg Maxwell is sceptical of the numbers (since Aaron doesn't give > methodology); since Greg is very good at running interesting numbers > on the database, I've suggested to each that they contact the other. It's been a long-standing debate without numbers; hopefully we can throw data into the mix now. I know Greg and Aaron were >> Is anyone else writing long essays these days? Where are they kept, >> and how categorized? > > Probably and nowhere I can think of, but they should! Indeed. It's a shame that some of the good long essays in recent memory are written off-wiki, in places where they can't be improved over time (even if it is a public mailing list). This is an interesting twist on wikification: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Who_Writes_Wikipedia%3F I hope the text itself goes up there soon. Likewise, for anyone who has posted a great rant to mailing lists lately. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Essays is surprisingly sparse. SJ -- ++SJ

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Fighting over (R) and (tm) symbols
by Daniel R. Tobias 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

There seems to be ongoing fighting over at the [[Certified Financial Planner]] page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Financial_Planner over whether the page should be festooned with (r) and (tm) symbols everywhere the trademarked title of the article occurs, including as part of the article's title itself. It is my impression (IANAL) that such usages are not necessary, nor are they standard in English-language writing style, when the usage is of a journalistic or encyclopedic nature rather than as part of marketing materials. After all, Wikipedia has many articles, like [[Coca-Cola]], that are named after trademarks, but don't display the symbols demanded by the lawyers. At any rate, if such symbols do remain in the article, they ought to be done with proper Unicode characters (technically feasible now that the site is entirely in UTF-8) rather than their ugly ASCII imitations. -- Dan Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

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Asteroids (first Wikipedia post)
by David Mestel 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

I think that the key question you have to ask yourself, and indeed in many ways the fundamental criteria for inclusion of everything, is "is anyone going to want to actually read this article?". If you believe, as I do, that no-one is for the 20,000 very short stubs, we shouldn't have them. -- David

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pop culture articles (was WP:LIVING and "sensitivity" again)
by Sean Black 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

> Message: 5 > Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:44:20 -0400 > From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] WP:LIVING and "sensitivity" again > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> > Message-ID: <AE950BBF-4D5A-4038-9A37-3B6734D40931(a)gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed > > > > On Aug 29, 2006, at 6:37 PM, geni wrote: > > > On 8/29/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> Yes. Bluntly, most of our articles about pop cultural figures need > >> an enema. > > > > Evedences? > > Have you ever READ a popular culture article? > > Particularly one about a fictional character, where you've got better- > than-even chances of being right to add {{cleanup fiction-as-fact}} > to it before you even start to deal with its other problems, of which > there will be many. And have you ever considerd trying to fix that and improve the articles instead of complaining about it on some mailing list? It's amazing how often the people who have virtually no experience actually editing articles and creating content are the ones who complain the most. ~~ Sean

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Re: [WikiEN-l] You realise this means [[Pokemon]] has to be brought to feature quality. (was Well darn, Pokemon is important after all.)
by MacGyverMagic/Mgm 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

On 9/2/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote: > > The word "breast" is a classic example of why simplistic "stop words" > approaches will fail. Does anybody want to delete this article? > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer > > > Gordo > Not particularly. It's perhaps a bit wordy, but I don't see any policy reason to delete this. Can you?

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This list
by Daniel R. Tobias 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

Why's this list so quiet all of a sudden? You can hear the crickets chirping and the tumbleweeds tumbling. Is nobody posting here, or is there some technical problem that's holding up message distribution? -- == 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/

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WikiEN-l September 2006