WikiEN-l October 2008

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78 participants
168 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 23 Oct '08

23 Oct '08

In a message dated 10/22/2008 6:14:44 PM Pacific Daylight Time, snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes: Actually, in my understanding, EB generally hires an expert to write an article and leaves it at that.>> --------------------------------------- Somewhat. And yet they do issue corrections pages. So how do you square that? The problem here is the use of the word "error" and "correction" and so on, in biographies. If your mother says "He was always a naughty child" and YOU say "No I weren't" What are we supposed to write? Typically in a biography you write... both, and quote who said which. That is what divorces biography from say mathematics where presumably there is one single correct version of any issue. (more or less). If, after some use of a source, it's generally found that it often contradicts other sources which more-or-less agree with each other, we might be led to think that source unreliable. If you can think of some better methodology for how to write biographies, than what we have, state it. However believing that some anonymous editor is actually Jaron Lanier and he should be allowed to willy-nilly change his own biography, isn't going to fly. **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 23 Oct '08

23 Oct '08

In a message dated 10/22/2008 5:38:11 PM Pacific Daylight Time, snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes: Sure we are. EB actually corrects its errors. We stamp our feet and say "You didn't update your website like we asked you to so it's not an error.">> ------------------ I don't think I understand the position. EB does not pull it's statements out of thin air. They also use sources, exactly the same way we do. In fact, we are even more loose than they are, in our updating standards. You're making it seem like it's the other way round, and it's not. **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 23 Oct '08

23 Oct '08

In a message dated 10/22/2008 5:07:48 PM Pacific Daylight Time, snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes: tend to believe that spreading untrue information, no matter where it came from, is an irresponsible and at times immoral thing to do on a top ten website.>> -------------------- And what exactly is "unTrue" about the idea that Britney Spears likes cheese ? Really it's quite silly. Whether Jaron Lanier is a "director" or not is just as silly. What is being "a director" now so offensive as to raise your hackles and call me irresponsible and immoral for citing sources ? You as well as anyone can weigh in on the appropriate policy board for Attribution/Verifiability and change the way we do things. But really, if we cite reliable published sources, we're doing our job. We don't need to feel the great burden of the world for citing things that turn out to be not accurate. It's ...done... every... day. And yes by encyclopedias as well as any newspaper. EB puts out correction sheets all the time. We're not in a fishtank alone here. **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 23 Oct '08

23 Oct '08

In a message dated 10/22/2008 4:59:57 PM Pacific Daylight Time, snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes: This ethic that people are responsible for our not fucking up their articles has rightly been considered offensive by numerous actual people.>> -------------- Except Phil you make it seem like we are responsible for what our sources state. And we're just not. We're responsible to use sources that are reliable. But if they say "Britney Spears likes cheese" other then being silly, we're not responsible for them saying it, and we can cite it without guilt :0 **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 23 Oct '08

23 Oct '08

Yeah heresay is something like "I heard so and so say this..." However verification as we define it, requires that the source be accessible to the public in some fashion and for incidental cost. (At least I hope after the long arguments we had about cost, that something like that is still in the final product.) But there's an excluded middle between heresay and verifiability. **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 22 Oct '08

22 Oct '08

In a message dated 10/22/2008 4:51:29 PM Pacific Daylight Time, geniice(a)gmail.com writes: Doubtful. A self published source vs a third party source?>> -------- Yes we can always quote the subject of the article on anything they want to say. The subject gets a pass much easier in this regard than any source who isn't the subject. We can for example quote press releases from a company on the fact that they said it. The main point here, is that we can't add it *without* quotes. Even though the subject stated it, it should be enquoted and cited to their claim elsewhere. **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 22 Oct '08

22 Oct '08

Can you explain more clearly which parts of what you posted you consider to be issues? **************New MapQuest Local shows what's happening at your destination. Dining, Movies, Events, News & more. Try it out (http://local.mapquest.com/?ncid=emlcntnew00000002)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 22 Oct '08

22 Oct '08

An interesting and rather telling criticism is that "some publications don't do error checking". Presumably the editors of "Edge" at least checked that the person they were interviewing and quoting as Jaron Lanier, was in-fact Jaron Lanier. That is the crux, of all we need, to change the article. Wikipedians don't really have an easy ability to verify the identify of another editor. Jaron as an internet guru eventually didn't understand that all he has to do, is set up his own official web site and then say "No I'm not a director" and we can then cite his page. Will Johnson **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by Matt Jacobs 22 Oct '08

22 Oct '08

> Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:29:57 -0700 (PDT) > From: Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0810221514390.19535-100000(a)green.rahul.net> > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > >>We do >>not require someone to publish in a secondary source in order to quote them. > > That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article. > > And it's not about quoting them, anyway, it's about correcting an error. > An error can be corrected by removing the erroneous information as well as > by adding a quote saying that the error is an error. > >>Secondly, we do not assume that a secondary source "would do fact-checking". >>Rather our policy clearly (or should clearly) state that we *use* those >>secondary sources who *are known for* doing fact-checking. > > That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article. > >>Thirdly our COI rules do not prevent a person from changing their own >>biography. > > That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article. > Seeing a pattern here? > I'm in agreement. The way our COI rules are used does not jive with what they actually say. One of the things I found most discouraging in the original article is that someone slapped one of those stupid COI templates on the WP article. I hate those, as they serve no reasonable purpose. They only seek to embarrass and discredit the subject of a BLP when they attempt to do what will often seem perfectly natural: set the record straight.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Slashdot article
by WJhonson＠aol.com 22 Oct '08

22 Oct '08

In a message dated 10/22/2008 3:36:14 PM Pacific Daylight Time, thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com writes: However, most of our articles don't say that. They say "Y [X]", which isn't the same thing.>> ------------------------------------ Sure, and in those cases where a situation is becoming fraught with controversy over sourcing, the appropriate thing to do in the case where we have an article that says "Y [X]" would be to change it to something like "It's been reported by X that ""Y"" " Most things don't reach that level of controversy and so people take shortcuts, which of course makes the article more readable anyhow, and is generally the way writers write. They only quote things likely to be of high interest being extraordinary, bizarre, appropos or curious. Will Johnson **************Play online games for FREE at Games.com! All of your favorites, no registration required and great graphics – check it out! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1211202682x1200689022/aol?redir= http://www.games.com?ncid=emlcntusgame00000001)

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WikiEN-l October 2008