>> OK, so let's take this test and try it on an article.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons
>> Here we have a case where some very sincere people are campaigning
>> to get the medical establishment to recognise a disease. The
>> medical establishment refuses, saying this is just symptoms of
>> already known diseases.
>> Read www.morgellonswatch.com if you have the time; the top two or
>> three posts are a very balanced statement of the medical
>> establishment's POV here.
>I neither know nor want to know anything about Morgellons. There are
>clearly some people who believe that it is a validly distinct syndrome,
>and others who don't. It is not for us to judge which of them is
>correct. The fact that the medical establishment is in opposition is
>not in itself a valid argument against this concept. It is an argument
>from authority. We can only say what each side believes.
That rather misses the point. What we're doing here is looking at
the actual article, the actual editors of the actual article, and
seeing if the proposed test yields an unambiguous answer: who are
the Martin Luther Kings and who are the Jason Gastriches?
******
A particularly apt side of this is that the medical establishment has a
distinctly different explanation for Morgellons: delusional parasitosis.
I've watched this article from a distance and protected it twice. The POV
problems are compounded with COI issues, but the underlying matter as I view
it is this.
It is not Wikipedia's role to make an editorial statement about which of
these two radically different explanations is correct. It is our role to
represent the shape of the debate so that a reader who comes to this site
can see where the two sides are, get a rough sense of the proportion of
peer-reviewed research and qualified professionals on either side of the
debate, and get a basic outline of the grass roots movement that advocates
for recognition as a separate disease.
As new research and developments occur it's entirely possible that this
balance will shift. Wikipedia's function as a tertiary source necessarily
places it on the tail end of whatever developements take place, after other
reliable sources have published. Editors who wish to misuse the site's open
edit function for soapboxing deserve polite explanations of our standards
and how we function, and if they fail to adjust then a series of external
limitations can remedy the situation.
-Durova
*Jimmy Wales* jwales at wikia.com
<wikien-l%40lists.wikimedia.org?Subject=%5BWikiEN-l%5D%20JzG%27s%20banning%2…>
*>Thu Nov 1 20:53:02 UTC 2007* >
>wrote:
>
>The hard part is getting something accomplished in an environment where
>people are hurting and where other people are afraid of speaking out.
>
>Let's try to move past that.
>
>--Jimbo
Yah, when are we gonna action on my case?
Rob Smith
aka Nobs01
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
> Here's a problem, though: there is a tendency to assume bad faith on
> the part of deleting admins, and not to address bad speedy tagging
> by RC patrollers. I completely support any initiative to educate
> those who patrol recent changes, to persuade them to make better use
> of {{prod}} and {{afd}} rather than {{db}}.
Whoa. The admins are hand-picked. Anyone who can get online can come and start adding templates. Admins are picked just because they can be trusted with "delete" and other tools. The correct decisions for an admin with a suspect speedy range over "pass" or "not a speedy, I'll take off the tag". They do not include "if I don't delete within 30 seconds, no one ever will, so here goes".
Charles
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Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
> I don't think it's unreasonable that on the *English* Wikipedia, the
> English-speaking community should be able to verify at least the
> core facts.
I think you are thinking of the "monoglot English" Wikipedia. That would be a fork ... for people who "moen" a lot about foreign languages. Yes, why not fork enWP according to this prescription? Of course you'd have to give up scholarly sources on huge amounts of interesting material, but I expect the "moeners" would agree to that.
Charles
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Vickhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/
The archive search index was last rebuilt at Wednesday, 19 Sep 2007
I thought for sure that there was a discussion recently on the List
about Graham Vick and the fact that he was profiled in Grove, and because
Grove was unreliable, his page was going to be deleted. Unfortunately, I
didn't save the messages and they can't be found in the Archives because
the DAILY rebuild/re-indexing hasn't been done in almost two months. I
looked him up at the Public Library and just added three more references
for him, two of which (Hamilton & Warrack/West) are NOT Grove.
____________________________________________________________
Doug Henkle - mailto:henkle@pobox.com
P.O. Box 1447, Oshkosh, WI 54903-1447
On 9 Nov 2007 at 10:39:57 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 09/11/2007, zetawoof <zetawoof(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > [[Scientology]]?
> > Less imaginary than you might expect.
>
> Obsessive POV pushers in general, who don't get or don't care about NPOV.
>
> If you act in a manner perceived by others as being jerklike, they are
> likely to perceive you as being jerklike.
...which still doesn't justify being a jerk back to them. Two wrongs
don't make a right.
--
== 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/
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
> "De Ware Tijd is one of two daily newspapers in Suriname. Like its
> rival De West, it is Dutch language, and privately owned.
>
> The newspaper publishes also an online edition, dwtonline, and a
> Netherlands editions"
>
> So: which of those two sentences contains the claim of notability?
Of the three sentences, the first and third say something interesting. The first defines its position in newspapers in a whole country. The third suggests an international readership, which many newspapers cannot claim.
Charles
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Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
> Or is it really too much
> to ask that the English Wikipedia actually provide some usable
> English sources to back up an article?
Yes. Your argument shows how bad the systemic thing is. Notability is a bad criterion, just not easy to replace by anything snappy. Significance in the world at large is poorly represented by publication in English, except in a few fields. This is roughly where we came in, on systemic bias.
Charles
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Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote
> <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
> wrote:
>
> >I don't accept the framing. As far as I'm concerned, a deletion is an assertion that the topic is unwelcome. In other words that no useful stub can be made. Not that _no useful stub can be made out of the words on the page_. I'm sure we used to be better at this.
>
> Maybe we did, back when we had fewer than two million articles and
> fewer than a million users, and were not a top-ten site making us an
> essential part of any vanity, spam or POV-pushing campaign.
Well, this is a live issue. What is the correct level of due diligence for a deleting admin? If it is a funny foreign-sounding name (to native English speakers), or written in bad English, do you do more or less before deleting? Do you think first what the encyclopedia needs, or do you cite policy and say "just following orders"?
Tomorrow, I think, the problem gets exacerbated by re-enabling article creation by IP numbers? That "announcement" was not retracted, I think. So New Pages patrollers get Space Invaders with double aliens. Are we going to benefit with new articles that will correct systematic bias, or, per Guy, will _even less be done_, in an average case, to salvage the articles we are really short of?
Charles
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