WikiEN-l January 2007

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

176 participants
354 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] editorial oversight, re: afd, fac, etc.
by Ryzvel＠3mail.com 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

I was intrigued last year to find that somebody had deleted one of my contributions on the grounds that the deletor [?] had never heard of it. Acting on this criterion, I would spend my waking hours deleting Wikipedia articles. Tim . . .

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Re: [WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?
by Daniel R. Tobias 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

On 21 Jan 2007 at 07:42, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: > This is my very first experience with a Mailing List of any kind. Please > bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other > material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying > to? Normal netiquette (though subject to some degree of debate, as with just about anything on the Internet) is to trim down the quoted material to the relevant portions and reply beneath them. Exactly what is "relevant" may be up for discussion; certainly, the exact statements you're replying to are relevant, and perhaps a little bit more that's related to them (lest you be accused of taking quotes out of context), but certainly such things as message headers and footers, and entire paragraphs that have nothing to do with anything you're replying to, are irrelevancies that should be snipped. Here, mailing list reply style differs from the style often enforced in corporate communications, where they insist on preserving the entire thread history (somewhat wastefully) in order that the participants can follow the CYA (cover your ass) principle by showing that they received all parts of the previous messages (even while often showing, in their replies, that they failed to have any decent degree of reading comprehension as to actually understanding any of it). More info: http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/ As for your other problem, with character sets, your mail program is apparently putting in such things as "curly" quotes and apostrophes in the proprietary Macintosh character encoding, which has these characters in different positions from the proprietary Windows character encoding that many of the readers support; however, your messages are also going out without any header indicating what character encoding they are in, which means that standards-compliant readers should render them as US-ASCII, a 7-bit character encoding containing only 128 different characters (including control characters) which does not include any of the "extended" characters of either the Mac or Windows proprietary encodings, or of more standardized encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. What it means is that you're better off sticking to plain-ASCII straight quotes and apostrophes unless you can get your program to send the more exotic characters in a standards-compliant, platform-independent way. http://mailformat.dan.info/body/charsets.html -- == 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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Re: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb
by Daniel P. B. Smith 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> > I don't know how long the list was but being a "list" it should be > enough if there are sources on the listed pages themselves. Nobody > puts > sources on the index or Table of Contents of a book, because the > sources > would already be at more appropriate places. The book analogy does not hold because are integral entities. Once a book is printed, the table of contents doesn't change independently from the rest of the book. In theory, I agree that "it should be enough if there are sources on the listed pages themselves," but in practice this is _far_ from being the case. People simply add names to the list. Just because the name is a blue link, it doesn't mean the person who added the name even glanced at the linked article. It is common for the linked article not even to _mention_ the list topic. It is _extremely rare_ for the mention to have an inline citation of a confirming source. It is probably _less than an even chance_ that the page has a general reference or external link that is identifiable by inspection as a obvious source that ought to confirm the specific fact. Just for laughs, let me look at a list I've never checked: the section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_Swarthmore_College_people headed Arts, film, theatre, and broadcasting, blue links only. Peter Bart: Article says he graduated from Swarthmore, but statement has no inline citation. No "references" section. None of the seven external links explicitly says "bio." The most plausible place to look seems to be the imdb profile link? Nope, the imdb profile does not say anything about his education. The next most likely would be "Variety's website," maybe he has a bio or profile there? Nope, that link is just to http://www.variety.com. Conclusion: not easy to find a confirming source. Al Camines: Article says he graduated from Swarthmore, but statement has no inline citation. Article is completely unreferenced. David Dye: Article does not mention Swarthmore at all. Judith Edelman: Article says she graduated from Swarthmore, but statement has no inline citation. Article has no references section. Article has a single external link, to her profile at Compass Records. Linked page is not her bio, but has the start of an "about..." article. That "about" page is a bio... and does say "She followed one of her brothers, coincidentally a bluegrass-loving fiddler, to Swarthmore College." H. C. Robbins Landon: article says he studied music at Swarthmore College and Boston University, but statement has no inline citation. Article has no references at all and no external links. So, of the first five entries checked, a) I was only able to trace _one_ of them to a published source, b) One of them did not even _assert_ the fact asserted by the list. This is pretty typical.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb
by Fred Bauder 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

>I don't think you did the *wrong* thing, but I think we should always >aim to stick to process. The fact that we have processes to delete >articles and to remove libelous content (OFFICE) should protect us. If >the risk was that great, I'm sure someone in the office would have >done something (perhaps you should have e-mailed?). > >-- >Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com) He did follow process, the process in Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. Office is 3 people. The bulk of the work needs to be done by the users. Fred

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Mathematics university lecture notes - useful to anybody?
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

"Thomas Dalton" > I don't think your lecture notes are a reliable source, so anyone > using them would have to verify them with a textbook, so they might as > well just use the textbook to start with... Aha. There is no adequate textbook for the typical [[Mathematical Tripos]] course. So a wikibook rendering is actually quite a sound idea; the main issue not being reliability, but the need to expand exposition. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Mathematics university lecture notes - useful to anybody?
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

"Thomas Dalton" wrote > > Aha. There is no adequate textbook for the typical [[Mathematical Tripos]] course. So a wikibook rendering is actually quite a sound idea; the main issue not being reliability, but the need to expand exposition. > > There won't be one textbook for the entire Tripos, no... you have to > get textbooks on each lecture course. Sometimes the textbook won't > coincide exactly with the lecture course, but you can usually find one > that covers a superset of the course, or two that cover the entire > course between them. Not so, really. If you did the Fluid Dynamics course as set up by George Batchelor, then, yes, the Batchelor book would be the 'book of the course'. But this is not typical. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information

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Re: [WikiEN-l] What is an
by Fred Bauder 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

>This is my very first experience with a Mailing List of any kind. Please >bear with me. Are you saying that, when replying, I should delete all other >material on the original message except the exact statement(s) I am replying >to? > >Help! > >Marc Riddell Yes, provided those following the thread can still understand the context. Fred

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Re: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb
by Fred Bauder 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

>Process merely makes things run smoother and keeps people from doing >dumb things more often than not. > >Meanwhile, I've already restored about 5 of those in the article, and >I'll try to get to more later. a quick post somewhere saing "we know >these things are true, can we find sources" and it'd be done in 5 >minutes. Instead, knee-jerk reaction time, whee!!! > >Maybe some people would like to pitch in? The Google cache is right here: > >http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:FBnIbSOEGeoJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis… > >-Jeff Yes, please pitch in. This monstrosity has been nominated for deletion. Fred

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What is an "expert"?
by Marc Riddell 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

Hello all, I believe there is something we should ask at this point. This question is for everyone participating in this Mailing List: What is your definition of an "expert"? Please, for now, try to resist responding to the others' answers, simply state your own. Marc Riddell

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Re: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb
by Fred Bauder 21 Jan '07

21 Jan '07

>-----Original Message----- >From: Ray Saintonge [mailto:saintonge@telus.net] >Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 01:27 AM >To: 'English Wikipedia' >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] defused timebomb > >Pedro Sanchez wrote: > >>I just blanked, and deleted >> >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famous_people_responsible_for_a_death >> >>We had names of many famous people, stating they were responsible for >>someone else dying. >>** Not a single reference ** >> >>I was told that I should have AFD it instead >> >>The potential for libel was huge, afd was likely to come as no >>consensus or delete. >>Wikimedia can't take the risk of being sued for the sake of process. >> >>So I deleted the entry to hide history, and drop a note stating should >>anybody readd content it must be with references. >> >>Probably many people will complain and ask for my head, just telling >>you people why I did it. >> >That sounds terribly unilateral. AFD would have been more prudent. >Altering the title would have been more sensible, given that some were >apparently only accused, and never convicted. > >I don't know how long the list was but being a "list" it should be >enough if there are sources on the listed pages themselves. Nobody puts >sources on the index or Table of Contents of a book, because the sources >would already be at more appropriate places. > >The "huge" potential for libel is a product of your imagination. I'm >not saying that there is none at all, but it is certainly much less than >what you imagine. In any event, other ways of fixing the article would >also have eliminated that problem. I don't know when the page was >started but its talk page has been there four months; there was no urgency. > >The chronic bad blood in the deletion process is precisely because of >people who take drastic and sudden unilateral action when they could >have taken the time to think of softer ways of dealing with a problem. > >It would be a peaceful gesture if you restored the page, and initiated >alternative solutions. > >Ec I looked at the deleted material. Most entries are not controversial. However, all entries on the page fall under Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and may thus properly be deleted by any person without limit. This is a case where a user has taken responsibility. They should be commended. Fred

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WikiEN-l January 2007