WikiEN-l April 2007

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

179 participants
353 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Original research or common sense inferral?
by Fred Bauder 03 Apr '07

03 Apr '07

>-----Original Message----- >From: Seraphim Blade [mailto:seraphimbladewikipedia@gmail.com] >Sent: Tuesday, April 3, 2007 11:33 AM >To: 'English Wikipedia' >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Original research or common sense inferral? > >Fred Bauder wrote: > >>It would be common sense to adopt this position. I support it. Why >should be deny users the right to add what they know? Published or >not? > >Go look at your Armenia-Azerbaijan arbitration case for your answer. >(Or for that matter, most arbitration cases.) All those editors, every >one of them, are -adding what they know-. And I guarantee you, they >KNOW it, you could never convince one of them that everything they're >writing is not 100% true and factual. That's why we should stick to >what we can verify, not what we know. > >Seraphimblade You're comparing apples and oranges. If I say that Saguache Creek is a tributary of San Luis Creek in the Closed Basin of the San Luis Valley, that is one thing, saying that the Azerbaijanis desecrated an ancient Armenian graveyard, is quite another. One is a mere fact, the other is a contested matter. I guess I should say: It would be common sense to adopt this position. I support it. Why should we deny users the right to add uncontroversial facts that they know? Published or not? Fred

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
by Sheldon Rampton 03 Apr '07

03 Apr '07

Stan Shebs wrote: > Isn't it interesting how nobody ever complains > about inaccuracies in articles other than the ones about themselves? > Egos, geez... Actually, people *do* complain about inaccuracies in other types of articles. Moreover, there are good reasons other than ego for people to notice the inaccuracies in articles about themselves. For one thing, we all know our own biographies in a lot more detail than other people. I'm willing to bet that no one on WikiEN-l other than myself knows off the top of their head what city I was born in or my date of birth. If someone other than myself were to read that I was born in 1961 in Toledo, Ohio, it's unlikely that they'd know it was incorrect, whereas I'd notice the error immediately. In any case, the people who complain about inaccuracies in articles are doing Wikipedia a favor, not a disservice. Complaints help Wikipedia learn about errors and improve. It may be momentarily embarrassing for Jimbo to have an error pointed out to him during a TV interview, but that's a small price to pay for useful feedback. Slim Virgin wrote: > The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living > persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request. > > By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit > them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of > controlling. Actually, hosting living bios probably helps improve fact-checking and accuracy more than publishing other types of articles. If there's an error in an article about some dead guy, he's NOT going to point out the error. Without the feedback from live people, Wikipedia would know less than it knows now about the accuracy of its articles and the validity of its editorial policies. -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Original research or common sense inferral?
by Fred Bauder 03 Apr '07

03 Apr '07

>-----Original Message----- >From: Phil Sandifer [mailto:Snowspinner@gmail.com] >Sent: Monday, April 2, 2007 08:43 AM >To: 'English Wikipedia' >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Original research or common sense inferral? > > > >On Apr 2, 2007, at 9:38 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote: > >> On Mon, 2 Apr 2007 06:18:49 -0700, "Seraphim Blade" >> <seraphimbladewikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Generally, "being right" is not a defense to NOR. NOR helps to >>> preserve relevance and importance of information as well as >>> correctness of it. If no one else has seen fit to investigate this >>> matter or publish that conclusion, why should we be the first? If the >>> guy's that concerned, tell him to suggest the story to a >>> newspaper. If >>> the paper decides it's correct and important enough to publish, >>> there's the source! >> >> I completely agree. > >I completely disagree. > >Straightforward interpretation of primary sources is not original >research. It never has been, and it needs to remain that way because >of the number of notable articles about which there are not good or >usable comprehensive secondary sources. > >-Phil It would be common sense to adopt this position. I support it. Why should be deny users the right to add what they know? Published or not? Fred

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So as not to destroy the Wikipedia in order to save it:
by David Gerard 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

Move en.wikipedia.org to en-dev.wikipedia.org and put only the contents of the Wikipedia 0.5 DVD at en.wikipedia.org. Betcha we'll suddenly have amazingly efficient procedures for getting good content across from dev to stable. This also avoids the issue of appearing to declare the Wikipedia project a failure by effectively shutting it down and/or deleting large swathes of it. Since, after all, the impetus for this is nothing but public relations. - d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] So as not to destroy the Wikipedia in order to save it:
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

"David Gerard" wrote > On 02/04/07, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com > I have something in mind about 'the bottom of the barrel', and trying > to define sensibly what we want to do about not scraping it straight > into low-rent articles. > At this point you lost me in the fogs of metaphor ... er, come again? We all google, don't we? I'm fairly obstinate: I will hammer on Google using variant searches, to the point where I have refs for an article together. But, there are occasions when Google simply doesn't have enough reputable pages. This for me is 'scraping the bottom of the barrel': other types of database searching, too, give me the feeling that the supporting data for what I hoped to be able to assert is not quite there. This is a warning red light on the dashboard: it would be a stretch, don't go there. Now, WP's rep is damaged more than in any other way, I think, by people who write for us, over-riding such signals. We've discussed numbers of such examples on this list. E.g. the reality show contestant with really no checkable background, all sources in effect reproducing stuff from a press pack. Internet memes, things that turn out to be old urban myths. Rumours, blogs. In short, I'm saying something like 'reliable sources' in some cases shouldn't be butter spread too thin for the size of slice of bread. Damn, metaphor creep once more. But perhaps there's an essay in there. Certainly the sources discussion seems too much to be on 'which single source would you trust', not on evaluating the network. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Lock new article creation for three months
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

"The Cunctator" wrote > I think a powerful fallacy in your line of reasoning is the assumption > that the encyclopedia in its current state is anywhere near the point > of being comprehensive. Oh, but I entirely agree. Adding bishopcruft at a great rate, myself. > We should be expending every effort to prevent Wikipedia from being > less welcoming or harder for newbies. Signs that Wikipedia is becoming > less welcoming for newbies indicate the primary points of decay in the > system. Well, I certainly agree on one aspect of this: somehow making it harder for new editors to edit simply means they remain inexperienced newbies longer, which is no help at all. Another thing: policy should be brought to a state where it belongs in the same sentence as 'lucidity'. This is a known (political) problem. I think you may misunderstand the sort of direction that would meet my approval. There is a theoretical kind of place that would be 'upmarket of Wikipedia'. That is where Citizendium wants to be. I think we have the smarts to be there ourselves. 'Floor the accelerator' doesn't really acknowledge the possibility, because it is solely about growth. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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Re: [WikiEN-l] So as not to destroy the Wikipedia in order to save it:
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

"David Gerard" wrote > Since, after all, the impetus for this is nothing > but public relations. WP has always needed the right kind of good PR. We have become a bit blasé about press coverage, I think. Has anyone pointed out to this list last week's Technology Guardian snippet: search for 'Bob Woolmer' gives the enWP page as second destination after his personal page. Fantastic! (I thought I'd check the page while writing this - oops, vandalism to revert.) We have a _huge_ readership, and a steadily growing share of web traffic (per Alexa), itself a growing market. Sure, if PR is 'reputation management', let's not get too fatigued with the day-to-day brawling, and wonder also about priorities some more. I have something in mind about 'the bottom of the barrel', and trying to define sensibly what we want to do about not scraping it straight into low-rent articles. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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"So fix it." "The next day someone will fix it back."
by Fastfission 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

Excerpt from NY Times Magazine, "Questions for Douglas Hofstadter", 4/1/07: Q. Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence. A. I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kinds of depresses me. Q. So fix it. A. The next day someone will fix it back. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01wwlnQ4.t.html My thoughts: It strikes me that there is really a crisis of confidence in people that editing Wikipedia will have any long term effect. I have heard it many, many times from people on the web and in person as well as seen it in print. "Why bother, someone will just change it back later, or erase it?" I think it is too important to be dismissive about this approach. Even correctly cited things can be removed or butchered, even incorrectly cited things can stay on. I'm not sure that increased calls for citation will solve or even mitigate the problem. Any academic can tell you that citation is hardly a gold standard; it is not what convinces people of the accuracy of any claim. In the end that comes down to trust, and that comes down to authorship, and that comes down to things that Wikipedia doesn't, won't, and maybe can't do right. At this point, Wikipedia's epistemology privileges the persistant, the dedicated, and those with a lot of free time on their hands. Which is a set of qualities which describes both the best _and_ the worst editors. I don't have an answer though. Just something to muse on, in the face of some rather derisive high-brow publicity from an immensely popular, immensely intelligent person. FF

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Lock new article creation for three months
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

William Pietri wrote > That's not to say it isn't the right thing to do if the model really is > a failure. But I'm not there yet. The original WP wiki model was :Talk pages + NPOV + IP edits allowed and was a roaring success. So much so that :FTA (Floor the accelerator) was added to enWP. That gets us to where we are today in the somewhat modified form :Talk pages + dispute resolution + NPOV + NOR + RS + BLP + no IP page creation + COI + ... + TMOO (too many other acronyms) but FTA still applies pretty much to enWP, though Jimbo was for easing off last year. It looks like FTA has had its day. That surely is the main conclusion from this discussion. There are numerous ways to look at this change (of which locking new articles would seem to be one of the least flexible and attractive). Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Copyright question
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 02 Apr '07

02 Apr '07

Bryan Derksen wrote >OR doesn't ban any conceivable creative act or we'd be in serious > trouble. Its scope has crept larger over the years, but I still think > it's stretching it rather far out of the bounds of common sense to claim > that watching a set of shows and noting down a list of all the cars that > are covered in them is OR. Collation without selection or interpretation is not (usually) original research. It is adjacent to it: take a list of collated names, separate out men and women (for example) and you may have done some original research; the bare presentation may 'tell a story' against our content rules. The hypothetical (I hope) TV watcher shouldn't be trying to present a thesis that the program is favouring Japanese cars ... As usual, I'm not much interested in drawing the line more precisely. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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WikiEN-l April 2007