Consider, for a moment, this edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Addams_Family_%28pinball%29&d…
It is a minor modification to our description of "The Addams Family"
pinball machine. Because I happen to own one of those machines, I know
that this edit is partly right but almost certainly partly wrong.
However, I haven't played it much lately, so my first instinct was to
commit the grievous sin of original research by playing a few games.
In thinking about this further, there are whole classes of article just
like this one, full of uncited information that is probably original
research. The unifying characteristics seem to be:
1. If the article is somewhat inaccurate, there is little risk of
real-world harm,
2. The topic is of relatively low importance,
3. Having something on the topic is a net benefit to our readers, and
4. There is a wide enough base of people with knowledge of the topic
that the article can generally be verified from collective
personal experience.
Personally, I think these articles are worth keeping. Our readers get
information they want. It also seems like a good place for newbies to
contribute: it's a topic they are interested in, there is plenty for
them to fix, and if they don't get it exactly right they won't
immediately be reverted and slapped with a talk page notice containing
eight links to policy shortcuts as they would on, say, [[Evolution]].
As far as I can tell, though, there is no written policy or guideline
for this kind of thing. Is that the case? It's probably for the best,
honestly, as they are doing fine without it, and I imagine creating a
special exception for this kind of thing would lead to all sorts of
disruptive wikilawyering.
Regardless, I thought it was interesting how much has been built in the
outskirts of our metropolis. Not up to our building codes, but not a big
problem, and better than nothing.
William
On 5/25/07, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.com> wrote:
>
> I seem to recall a page of requested images but I can't recall where.
> Can someone point it out to me?
>
> More specifically, if your favorite hypothetical person were about to be
> punished by cruel fate with spending the week of 18-25 June at [[le
> Bourget airport]], is there anything in particular would you want him to
> try to photograph?
>
> --
> Sean Barrett | If we can't say "fuck," how can we say
> sean(a)epoptic.com | "fuck the government"? --George Carlin
Photograph native plants with their names at botanical gardens--close up of
flower, of leaf, of branch, portrait of entire plant. Post on Wikipedia
talk:WikiProject Tree of Life or my talk page (User talk:KP Botany).
Take this as a standing request for all list members.
And, please, more than anything, anyone who happens to go anywhere near New
Caledonia or know anyone who knows anyone whose third cousin thrice removed
married the daughter of someone who's uncle's sister moved to New Caledonia,
please please please get a picture of *Amborella*! It's beautiful leaves
would be fine, a plant in its native environment would be stunning, but only
if without causing environmental damage. Flowers would be to dream the
impossible dream, you don't even have to know if they're male or female.
Just please get the picture of *Amborella trichopoda*.
KP
Can anyone give me a 1-sentence description of the net outcome of the
recent spoiler war? I notice that wp:spoiler now refers to the need
for a "compelling reason" for the inclusion of a spoiler, which is a
much better, more nuanced position than many real and strawman
arguments I heard from both sides (ie, "no spoilers ever" and
"spoilers everywhere"). But I'm not sure what the actual policy was
before, so could someone enlighten me?
Steve
An Open Letter to the person posting on Wikipedia as "SlimVirgin" -
It has come to our attention that you have made claims that our site, the
Wikipedia Review, contains postings that include, in your words "actionable
libel".
This is a serious accusation. Without waiver of any protections afforded as
an internet content provider under 47 U.S.C. § 230
(1996)<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_sec_47_00000230----000-…>,
it is not our intention to continue hosting any statements that are
defamatory once we are made aware of them.
We offer to you to remove any statements on the Wikipedia Review that are
defamatory. However, as only your pseudonym is known to us, it is impossible
for us to determine which statements about you are true and which are not.
As we are sure you know, true statements cannot be defamatory. These are
options which you may pursue:
First, you are welcome to join our site as a member and contribute
corrections to any false information.
Second, you are always welcome to email either our administrators (many of
them have email addresses linked to their usernames on our site), or to send
mail to "AntiCabal =at= Gmail =dot= com".
We hope that you will take advantage of this offer. As noted, your
accusations are serious, and a claim of "actionable libel" itself may be a
legal threat of a kind that we understood was not allowed on Wikipedia. We
will welcome any effort you make to set the record straight.
/signed/
Wikipedia Review
AutoWikiBrowser is open source but Windows-only, being written to the
.NET 2 framework. Mono isn't up to .NET 2, and .NET 2 doesn't install
under Wine on Linux. But I've opened a Wine bug for it:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8499
Others are invited to give their stacktraces, relay traces, etc. Be
sure to be using the current Wine, the .NET issue is being actively
worked on and two weeks can make a difference.
(Darn, a reason to keep Winders around. AWB is just unbelievably cool,
and is a much nicer browser to *edit* Wikipedia in. See [[WP:AWB]].)
The related .NET 2 on Wine bug is http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3972 .
If you have other useful .NET programs you would like to run under
Wine, give them a try on the current version and let wine-users know
and possibly file a bug.
- d.
Later on in the article, Jimbo also says something that me and several
others, such as the rest of the Final Fantasy WikiProject and User:Seraphimblade,
have been advocating:
"[Wikia] is not Wikipedia, right. It's my new organization with a completely
separate website. Basically part of the way we're framing it is that
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia and Wikia is all the rest of the library. So it's
anything people want to collaborate on."
I urge people to encourage the transwiki of cruft. Cruft isn't things like
articles on games or the entire cast as a whole; by cruft, I mean lists of
weapons, armor, locations, and other stuff that goes into excessive detail and
does not have a chance to balance in-universe with out-of-universe. The Final
Fantasy WikiProject has been doing it for a while, and we're moving right
along. Granted, this is off the topic of "reliable sources", but it's still a
good point.
************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
Yesterday while editing a Wikipedia article and babysitting my nieces, they
came up to see what I was doing. They both were impressed that I was
editing an article (theyr'e 10 and 12, and highly web supervised), and
wanted to see how it worked, and wanted to know how I knew what to write.
The older girl told me that they get to use Wikipedia at school but if they
"vandal" it they'll get in trouble.
KP
So, reading wikien-l in one window, and browsing random-article with
the other, I came across:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jews_in_politics
"This List of Jews contains individuals who, in accordance with
Wikipedia's verifiability and no original research policies, have been
identified as Jews by reliable sources."
Given the context of the ongoing discussion about wilfuly outing
people... is it just me who finds that wording, hmm, a touch odd?
Discuss.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
On 30 May 2007 at 12:30:18 -0400, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, I can't think of any occasion where such a link would be
> beneficial to the project. What exactly did you have in mind?
Then you're not thinking hard enough. Plenty of reasons have been
discussed here, in other places where this debate has proceeded, and
in my essay on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dtobias/Why_BADSITES_is_bad_policy
--
== 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/
Mark Gallagher wrote:
> This is the site that welcomed AMorrow with open arms. This is the
> site
> that Daniel Brandt regularly contributes to. This is the site that
> organised severe harrassment of Phil Sandifer, then lied about their
> motives. This is the site that drove Katefan0, *an admin who even
> they
> couldn't fault*, away from Wikipedia out of pure meanness of spirit.
> This is the site where, when a board administrator mentioned that
> revealing personal information was frowned-upon, the rest told that
> fellow: "Speak for yourself."
Here's an example of the sort of rhetoric-by-repetition technique
that works much better spoken than written. The repetition in this
case is the phrase, "This is the site that..." It would spare Mark a
bit of typing if he would just list his litany, without the
oratorical device.
I know a bit about AMorrow because he showed up briefly on my own
wiki, SourceWatch, before we banned him. One thing that happens with
people who can't get along with Wikipedia is that after they quit in
anger or are banned, they go forum-shopping to other websites. We get
a few disgruntled ex-Wikipedians this way, and almost always it turns
out that they were banned for good reason, which was certainly the
case with AMorrow. Given the mission of Wikipedia Review, I'm sure it
attracts far more disgruntled ex-Wikipedians than we do.
Just now, however, I did a Google search for AMorrow on
site:wikipediareview.com, and it appears that he was banned there
about a year ago. I didn't spend a lot of time reading the discussion
threads, but there was some debate over his banning, with a user
named "blissy2" writing, "Amorrow was commenting in ways that could
be considered to be cyber stalking. Since Wikipedia Review is a law-
abiding entity, it is risky for us to be associated with someone who
may be engaging in illegal activity. ... Even if Wikipedia was
sitting there being decent, not harassing us, not slandering us, not
trying to destroy us, and we were working together, we still couldn't
allow this kind of activity. Its got nothing to do with whether or
not Wikipedia hates him."
Banning him on grounds that he is a cyberstalker doesn't sound to me
like "welcoming with open arms."
I did a similar brief search to see what happened in the case of
Katefan0. (I hadn't heard of it before.) In that case my snap
judgment is that it was indeed meanspirited and wrong for Brandt to
go after her as he did.
The problem I have with litanies like the one that I quoted above
from Mark Gallagher is that they dredge up old history mostly for the
sake of rehearsing bitterness, and they usually do so in a
tendentious way that selectively presents the facts in order to make
WR look even worse than it is (such as saying that AMorrow was
"welcomed with open arms" without mentioning that they banned him).
If this sort of history is important enough to keep bringing up, then
it ought to be done in a more thorough, precise fashion, which
inevitably means linking to and quoting from the relevant threads on
Wikipedia Review so everyone can see for themselves what is being
discussed. But, um, that presents a problem, doesn't it?
I also couldn't help noticing the similarity between the anti-
Wikipedia rhetoric that comes pouring out of "blissy2" and some of
the rhetoric that I've seen written here about WR. Blissy2 says
Wikipedia is "harassing us, slandering us, trying to destroy us." Do
any of these phrases sound familiar?
I agree that WR is a pretty pissy bunch with which I would not
personally want to become associated, but I think the problem is
being exacerbated rather than improved by a few Wikipedians who are
so busy seeing red that they can't let a few things go.
--------------------------------
| 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
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