>> Therefore, Arbcom is not being "unfair" to such a person by ruling
against him.
>It is rarely so simple.
>One of the reasons is that our policies are not drafted by legal
>professionals. Therefore the assumption that they can be used as the
basis >of an entirely judicial approach to resolving disputes is flawed
from the >outset. The policies, for most editors, are a rough indication
of what >Wikipedia expects in the way of behaviour. That's good enough
for most >editing.
>ArbCom cases are not 'everyday situations' (thank God). They cover all
>possible variations on editing that transgresses or tries to exploit
policy. >If someone is working with a misconception of what policy
means, or is in >effect wikilawyering by sailing very close to the wind,
there does come a >point at which Arbitrators look at the substantive
effect of editor >behaviour, not the letter of policy.
>Charles
I think that the arbcom has made decisions that diverge quite strongly
from the existing policies and guidelines. For example, cited evidence
against me was repeatedly linking to a website maintained and authored
by the subject of the article. My behavior was okay according to
[[WP:EL]]. I had made every effort to follow dispute resolution.
When there is such a big difference between guidelines and the ruling of
the arbcom then the decision of the arbcom is not fair to the
contributor, even if the decision helps the encyclopedia.
Andries Krugers Dagneaux
[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most
viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are
currently semi-protected. Of the 5 that aren't, 2
have been sprotected for major portions of the last
month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and
only one has never been protected.
In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and
you'll find the article is sprotected. God, Satan,
Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on. Any major
topic you look at, if they're not protected currently,
they have been recently.
We seem to be sliding towards a policy of
semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by
requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both
protected again. In looking at those who vandalized
those pages, what I found is that almost all of them
vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.
My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles
does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism
- it just spreads it around. Instead of messing up
our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular
ones and mess those up instead.
I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all
popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it
makes life easier for the editors who watch those
articles. The rather more substantial negative side
to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have
certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and
moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit
for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.
I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of
sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it
basically makes no sense. If we aren't going to let
new editors edit articles, we might as well just come
out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the
whole database.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a PS3 game guru.
Get your game face on with the latest PS3 news and previews at Yahoo! Games.
http://videogames.yahoo.com/platform?platform=120121
Jeff Merkey takes care not to post to en:wp or its mailing lists, but
he just posted this to foundation-l after analysing an en:wp data
dump.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey(a)wolfmountaingroup.com>
Date: 01-Apr-2007 06:23
Subject: [Foundation-l] Extensive Link Errors related to Proper Names
- Needs Fixing
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia
Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
I have been compiling a machine compiled lexicon created from link and
disambiguation pages from the XML dumps. Oddly, the associations
contained in [[ARTICLE_NAME | NAME]] form a comprehesive "real time"
thesauraus of common associations used by current English Speakers in
Wikipedia, and perhaps comprise the worlds largest and most comprehesive
Thesaurus on the planet emedded within the mesh of these links within
the dumps.
While going through the dumps and constructing associative link maps of
all these expressions, I have noticed a serious issue with embdded
linking with proper names. It appears there may be a robot running
somewhere that is associating Proper Names listed in articles about
relationships between people
by linking blindly to any entry in Wikipedia that matches a name in an
article.
Some of the content may create controversy to post examples here, so I
will complete the thesaurus compilation, and folks should go through the
encyclopedia. Articles about movies stars and other "gossipy" type
articles seem to have the highest errors linking proper names to
unrelated people without proper disambiguation pages. It could be
interpreted as violations of WP:BLP and some of the error linkages could
be troublesome for the foundation.
Whomever is running bots that link between articles should look at
proper name links based on categories and check into this. I found a
large number of these types of errors. They are subtle, but will most
probably show up when browsing through articles unless you can analyze
the link targets and relationships in the dumps.
Jeff
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 1 Apr 2007 at 10:21, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
I think that Hofstadter, an author I greatly respect by the way,
isn't being entirely fair here. The cited statement in Wikipedia's
article on him does not actually contradict what Hofstadter said
about it; it's perfectly logically consistent for a person to have no
interest in computers, but nevertheless have, through his work,
inspired many students to begin careers in computing. The former is
a statement about Hofstadter's personal interests (about which I
would presume Hofstadter himself is the best judge), while the latter
is a statement about the interests and motivations of students who
read of Hofstadter's work; it's quite possible that they can be
motivated in directions that seem bizarre or perverse from the
standpoint of the author himself. After all, Jodie Foster could be
said to have "motivated" John Hinkley, Jr. to attempt to assassinate
Ronald Reagan, but that's hardly something she intended, supports, or
had an interest in.
Anyway, developing an interest in computing and AI from reading
Hofstadter's works doesn't even require a leap of madness of the sort
that Hinkley underwent; those books are full of references to these
topics, and at some points Hofstadter even gives illustrative
examples in the form of pseudocode in programming languages he
invents for this purpose. I'm not sure in what sense he's not
interested in computers (perhaps he just wishes to disassociate
himself from the "geek community"?), but his own works seem to show a
great interest in the logical and philosophical issues raised by
computing.
However, if the statement that he's inspired people in those fields
is merely a personal feeling of an editor, it should be removed as
original research unless a specific source is found.
--
== 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/
On 31 Mar 2007 at 23:20, "Matthew Brown" <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia cannot be perfect. Wikipedia can get better. IMO,
> Wikipedia is a lot less bad, percentage-wise, than it seems to someone
> who spends a lot of time trying to clean up biographical articles or
> reading OTRS complaints.
...and a lot less good, percentage-wise, than it seems to someone who
spends a lot of time reading featured articles. Using the "Random
article" link repeatedly tends to result in unexceptional mediocrity;
neither anything scandalously bad nor brilliantly good.
(When I tried it just now, one of the articles I got was [[List of
asteroids/83201-83300]], which happens to include some of those that
were discovered on September 11, 2001. Interesting. Must be a
conspiracy!)
> I am fearful of the rush to 'do something' without the examination of
> likely consequences. I am pessimistic about more rules being the cure
> for current rules being ignored. I am cynical about the prospects for
> success of any solution that starts with drastic over-reaction and
> ignoring the reasons why Wikipedia is as successful as it is.
Don't just do something... stand there!
--
== 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/
Rich Holton wrote
> How about locking article creation for everyone one day a week? Or one
> day in 5? or 10?
Well, what I'd do would be to write the same articles in my userspace, and add them all to article space the next day. You'd have the same articles, but I'd probably spend less time on various associated checks and redirects. Why would this be an improvement?
It would be better to get some agreed priorities on which kinds of clean-up to target. And to think about solutions for New Pages Patrol, perhaps technically based. At present you basically have to go there and play Space Invadeers with the junk articles? Tagging is somewhat random, and is there there a tag saying "NPP Inspected April 1 2007"?
Charles
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Following the multiple long mailing list discussions about the lack of
references in a large group of articles on Wikipedia, I've launched a
proposal I hope will promote the addition and maintainance of references and
make it easier to find articles to reference in a specific field of interest
to work with. It is an attempt to see if updating the referencing project
can improve the current situation without resorting to more drastic options
like deletion or an article creation lockdown.
I invite you to share any thoughts and additional ideas on the proposal's
talk page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Improving_referencing_efforts
If any of you has the technical knowledge to set up the programs or bots
I've mentioned in the proposal, please contact me.
--Mgm
"Andries Krugers Dagneaux" wrote
> I will continue editing at Citizendium.
Please support the use of the GFDL there.
Charles
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Fastfission wrote
> 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.
You cited Douglas Hofstadter on [[Douglas Hofstadter]]. He was not given quite the right advice. Better advice would be to post a list of corrections to [[Talk:Douglas Hofstadter]].
Think of WP as a coral reef and you get a better picture. You can tell that you are in 'the community' if you are one of those polyps, memorialised by some permanent addition. The reef does actually grow.
Charles
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"Andries Krugers Dagneaux" wrote
> >Editors from English--speaking and European countries do operate under
> >more or less the same ethical system, which promotes freedom and
> >fairness [..]
> That is untrue. One of the working principles of the arbcom is that it
> does not want to be fair to editors, but to make decisions that will
> help the project. This was explicitly written down by arbcom members
> Flonight and Charles Matthews. I hence decided to follow their example
> of not trying to be fair to others in Wikipedia.
Not too clever, really. And your formulation is not helpful. Sometimes ArbCom decisions are led by 'management' rather than 'judicial' considerations; but that's not to say Arbitrators want them lack in fairness.
Charles
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