http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/Process_essay
I want to move it to [[Wikipedia:Practical process]] fairly soon,
relinquishing all ownership and leaving it to the community's tender
mercies.
I'd most welcome you all looking over it and letting me know of:
1. Anything that's clearly missing from what it says about how to do
process on Wikipedia.
2. Anything that makes you cough up a hairball.
3. - and this is the good bit - anything you think will make any other
particular editor cough up a hairball.
Talk page or hack on the essay or email to me. Thank you!
- d.
Hello,
My name is Einat and I'm a researcher with IBM. I'd like to ask for your
help with a study I'm conducting.
I want to study the way people choose to express themselves in their blogs,
personal homepage, work page, wiki, shared tagging, etc.
In order to do this I need people to send me back a list of the URLs that
they have authored on the Web.
Sending this message to a widely distributed mailinglist may help me reach
many people with similar interest.
If you are willing to help me collect this information please send me a
list that looks like this:
personal homepage: [url]
blog: [url]
professional homepage: [url]
family album: [url]
anything else: [url]
When the study is over I will send a report to those who will help me
collect this data (i.e. to those who sent me their list).
Thanks,
Einat
---
Einat Amitay, PhD.
Information Retrieval Group
IBM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel
Alter ego:
http://WebIR.orghttp://einat.webir.orghttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/webir/
I have to wonder whether the combinatorial plethora of creative
commons licenses is a problem of some kind.
Believe it or not, I didn't figure out until yesterday that the
license names are strings of two-letter tokens identifying modular
characteristics of the license. All this time, I had been reading
"by," not as an indicator, but as a preposition... I kept thinking it
was something like "by" as in "when the wind is north-by-northwest, I
can tell a hawk from a handsaw," or "passed by reference," or "two-by-
four."
The general public doesn't understand the concept of a free license
to begin with, how are they ever going to understand the zoo of
possible licenses and what can and can't be done with them?
[[September 2006 Thailand coup attempt]]
Sorry to ask the obvious rhetorical questions here:
* Wasn't WikiNews designed to be for news?
* Why is [[Wikipedia:Recentism]] only an essay?
* Is at a good idea to write an encyclopedia article based a news tickers and CNN?
Regards,
[[User:Pjacobi]]
--
NEU: GMX DSL Sofort-Start-Set - blitzschnell ins Internet!
Echte DSL-Flatrate ab 0,- Euro* http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl
Tim Starling wrote:
> I've implemented an extension to the [[MediaWiki:Bad image list]] feature.
> You can now specify a list of exceptions, i.e. articles where the image is
> allowed to be displayed inline. The typical format is:
>
> * [[:Image:Penis.jpg]] except on [[Penis]]
>
> The text "except on" is ignored, it is not special. Only the links are relevant.
>
> I've documented the format at:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list
>
/me imagines that this will be quite useful for enforcing "fair use"
restrictions (cc-ed to wikien-l)
--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
Stephen Streater wrote
> Some of us are working on a new notability guideline:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
>
> The key to me is that the content is reliable,
> which is covered by the first two points under
> Rationale:
> In order to have a verifiable article, a topic must be notable enough
> that it will be described by multiple independent sources.
> In order to have a neutral article with minimal errors, a topic must
> be notable enough that there will be non-partisan editors interested
> in editing it.
It all sounds much like what Jimbo took to saying on the subject. It helps to exclude some promotional and journalistic froth. Does it do much else?
Example (has happened on the site), some science competition winner, a no doubt bright teenager, gets plenty of media coverage for a ho-hum bit of work. The press release adds the usual kinds of hype (e.g. anything at all to do with a prime number gets related to public key crypto, gasp). We can cut this out as not notable, because unless it warrants the learned journal route to publication it's below threshold.
That's OK; but the learned journals contain an immense amount of the truly tedious and the me-too. Saying 'verifiable' just ducks the issue, really.
Years of debate have only proved that, while we may know what we are doing, that's not because we have a theoretical criterion for inclusion. We have numerous operational criteria.
Charles
-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
[[Wikipedia:Policy trifecta]] makes it sound so easy...
So I figured why not try it? After all, I've been here for two and a
half years. I've got a pretty good idea of what we're doing here. Why
not just stop worrying about what all the policy pages say today, and
about what the process to list something on AfD is?
So I'm not anymore. I understand [[WP:NPOV]], [[WP:DICK]], and I
especially understand [[WP:IAR]]. I understand what an encyclopedia
is. I understand how to do good research. (I'm a professional
academic - I teach people how to do good research. I know this stuff.)
So as of today, I'm just going to go ahead and edit. Lord knows the
rules are making me nervous and depressed. So I'll follow all the
stuff I can remember, and not try too hard to learn the other stuff.
If I can't remember how to list something for AfD today, I'll just
use PROD. If I can't get it deleted via PROD, I just won't delete it.
Someone who remembers how to use AfD can do it. If I can't remember
how many warnings a vandal gets, I'll just zap 'em for 24 hours two
warnings early, and call it a day. If I can't remember the status of
blogs and personal websites as they apply to a specific topic, well,
I'm a professional researcher. I teach people how to research. I'll
trust my judgment.
Note that this means that if you cite a policy page to me and expect
me to carefully divine the meaning of section 14, paragraph 3, clause
2 of it, odds are I'll just say "Yeah, but what's ''wrong'' with what
I'm doing?" "It violates policy" isn't enough. If it's against
policy, it must be bad for some reason, so just explain to me what it
does that's bad.
Otherwise... well, you might drive me off the page, but you sure
ain't gonna convince me.
In the meantime, I'll be keeping [[User:Phil Sandifer/Process blog]]
updated with anything I run into that's just impossible to handle
without checking lots of policy pages. I'm doing this not so much
because I'm trying to find the essential policies as because I'm
trying to find the broken ones. I figure anything so complex an admin
who's been editing for two and a half years can't do it is
fundamentally broken.
Not that I'll be the one to fix it. I've got an encyclopedia to write.
-Phil
Stephen Streater wrote
> PS Congratulations on getting so many
> approval votes in the election!
Why, thank you. On my first stab at the ArbCom, I came one place behind Ed Poor. Moving up a notch, I come one place ahead of the Esperantist. Could be progress.
Charles
-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
Stephen Streater wrote
> I thought the biggest problem was
> that they didn't implement policy.
If you look at admins doing speedy deletion, particularly under A7, and at prod deletions, you actually see people pushing the envelope in trying to implement it.
The problem comes at the crunch point: what _is_ an assertion of notability?
I have had at least one futile-type argument over this: if I write that X is 'known' for work in area Y, is that not an assertion of notability? By the way, this is just the sort of criterion we should actually use. A reference work should contain information on 'known' things that are worth knowing, in the opinion of those who know. It is no good asking in the abstract whether proving the Fronckensteen Conjecture makes you notable, without knowing whether the FC is a long-standing issue, or something the guy next to you in lectures wondered about yesterday.
Charles
-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
"Daniel R. Tobias" wrote
> So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV
> shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or
> would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in-
> depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like
> IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
Do the flames of the old inclusionist/deletionist wars really need fanning?
I worked out my position long ago: pretty much deletionist on the science side, for anything suspect; pretty much inclusionist in the humanities; pretty much indifferent as to pop culture where it really doesn't much matter one way or the other whether we have articles on soap actors or not.
On schools, they can be hacked back to stubs if they are full of unverifiable stuff, or, more likely, promotional material.
Charles
-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information