On 5/17/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 16 May 2007, Charlotte Webb wrote:
> > > Charlotte, in my view you'd be wrong. Paderewski was hugely and
> > > internationally famous as a pianist, whereas his fame as a Prime
> > > Minister of Poland is largely limited to Poland ...
> > '''Ronald Wilson Reagan''' ...
>
> The United States is bigger and much more important in international
> politics
> than Poland, and being president of it is much more notable. President of
> the US and Prime Minister of Poland just don't produce equal amounts of
> fame.
>
> If you look at the article for Grace Kelly, being an academy award winning
> actress is mentioned before being princess of Monaco.
Right on. After all, size is all that matters, and only the last few
hundred years of history have any meaning.
KP
On 27 May 2007 at 02:50:02 +0100, "Andrew Gray" <shimgray(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> That wouldn't really solve the problem at all - it's quite possible to
> have a stable-but-crap article. "Stable" only really means "pretty
> likely it doesn't say Joe is Gay anywhere"...
That would be copyedited into proper encyclopedic style as "Mr.
[Joseph's last name] has been reported to be homosexual {{fact}}".
--
== 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/
What is the on-Wiki for en.wikipedia.org enforceable policy against posting
IRC logs? Just curious. If it is not on-Wiki, and is only say in the login
process for the given IRC channel, and the IRC channels are unofficial,
how/why are 3rd party service policies implemented by random people
enforceable on-Wiki? Thanks!
I noted also that Hipocrite actually linked to the Freednode policies at
http://freenode.net/policy.shtml which makes no reference either way to
logging.
Regards,
Joe
http://www.joeszilagyi.com
On 5/25/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
> On May 24, 2007, at 3:34 AM, Charlotte Webb wrote:
> > Generally speaking, that would violate the terms of the GFDL, which
> > requires us to maintain documentation of all changes that are made.
> >
> > Sometimes sloppy workarounds are used, such as pasting a dump of the
> > edit history (really just a list of usernames/IPs, timestamps, and
> > edit summaries) in a prominent location, such as the talk page (this
> > is usually used for pages that get transwikied to another project).
>
> For this reason, I advocate deleting and rewriting from scratch in
> cases where we feel
> some significant portion of the history is problematic.
>
> We do have the ability to write an amazing amount of material really
> really quickly. The
> feeling that we have to carefully save every word forever is outdated.
>
> --Jimbo
The same problem is in Wikipedia:Copyright problems. Is it compliant with
the GFDL to clean up an article through a temporary page? Since this way it
looks like all the edits come from (usually) one editor, while the other
original edits are deleted. Which still are in the history for admins of
course but not for readers and mirrors. One example is
Histiocytosis<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histiocytosis>,
and many other examples since this is the usual way of cleaning up copyvio's
with the copyvio template.
See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copyright_problems#Temp_article…
Garion96
On 25 May 2007 at 14:57:33 +1000, Gallagher Mark George
<m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
[long line rewrapped in accordance with RFC 2822]
> The important things to remember are: Consensus Stamp of Approval
> does not make it appropriate to do the Wrong Thing. Nor can
> people stop Wikipedia being an encyclopaedia by voting on it. Not
> even if it's a really, really big vote, with all the people from
> CVU and Esperanza and Concordia and so on voting to destroy the
> project. It just can't happen.
I vote to make it a kumquat. They're much tastier than
encyclopedias.
--
== 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/
>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Goodman [mailto:dgoodmanny@gmail.com]
>Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 02:00 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BLP, and admin role in overriding community review
>
>So it seems that the problem after all is the basic idea, "that
>anyone can edit". We have people who can be trusted to write extremely
>good fair articles on many topics, but we can't count on their being
>the ones to write the article.
>
>We are then saying that there are some topics not appropriate for an
>open wiki, and that WP can not aspire to be a universal encyclopedia
>because we cannot really count on maintaining a neutral point of view.
>
>I think this is what some of Fred's messages amount to: the editorial
>and review procedures at WP cannot be trusted, so there must also be
>some top-down control, namely by him (and Jimbo, who joined this
>discussion to endorse his views)
>
>DGG
>David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
I don't think Jimbo endorsed my views, but I think we probably agree that when things go wrong responsible editors should try to fix them. That could include you, or not.
Fred
I don't like riding a train, rather ramble...
Jeff Raymond wrote:
> The problem is BLP
> being used as a bludgeon to get rid of well-sourced, verifiable, NPOV
> information because the neutral point of view is negative.
>
How can the neutral point of view be negative? That's a contradiction in
terms. An article may contain negative information, but the presentation
must still be neutral. The notion that if only negative information is
available, this excuses making the "neutral" point of view negative, is
at the root of many of these problems. It seems that very few of our
contributors have the skill and judgment needed to translate highly
unfavorable source material into neutral prose.
--Michael Snow
On 24 May 2007 at 22:41:34 -0700, William Pietri
<william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
> Honestly, out of the things that come up in the first page of results,
> I'd generally rather they ended up on the Wikipedia article if they were
> going to read something uncritically. (Of similar quality were
> government sites, although they were often less readable.) We're not
> perfect, of course. But neither are we trying to separate people from
> their money.
I tried searching on "Viagra", one of the most heavily-spammed
keywords on the Internet, and found that the second site in the
Google search results (not counting the paid results in a box above)
is the Wikipedia article on Viagra (which redirects to its generic
name, Sildenafil). (The first search result is the official
manufacturer's site on the drug.) That's pretty good of Wikipedia to
get ahead of all the spammers with their SEO voodoo, and pretty good
of Google to manage to get the relevant and informative sites at the
top.
--
== 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/
How many articles _should_ Wikipedia have?
Step back, think a minute about that question.
If there was some magic way to immediately have each and every
deserving article that was and could be written from what
*you*personally* consider reliable sources (currently, as of this
instant, extant ones), that was verifiable...
...all that, and furthermore could _in_theory_ be maintained NPOV by
the tender loving care of an infinite, nay transfinite, number of
shallowing eyes, and could (again, in theory) be written
encyclopaedically, even if the only one with the necessary expertise
happens to be an illiterate but dedicated self-pigeonholed expert...
...in short if all the natural restraints of raw manpower and human
limitations of ability were for one instant magically extinguished,
but what only remained was the standards you think wikipedia should
set itself, now, at this time, with the sources we have and the
knowledge already contained in them...
...then; I ask you what is the number of articles you think wikipedia
should have? A billion? 4 million (over twice we have now)? 20
million? What?
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]