Interesting article on fivethirteight.com for people perhaps. It
discusses Wikipedia, and other websites role in the selection of Sarah
Palin. Not quite our use of the word "Wikipedian", but... :)
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/wikipedian-candidate.html
"Brickley, a self-described "obsessive" political junkie who recently
graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me
that he began by "randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for
Republican women."
Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion
"Thomas Dalton" wrote
> There
> must be better ways to research politicians (political who's whos,
> looking at actual polls, reading transcripts of their actual speeches,
> reading manifestos, etc.) than looking them up in a general
> encyclopaedia.
Correct. But to avoid the Andrew Keen-ish spin, one should note that "search" and "research" have become rather different animals. "Search" on Wikipedia, as we know, is brilliant if you are trying to compile a list of politicians. You'll get your list and the risk of there not being an article on someone relevant to American national politics as a candidate is low. As we always say, this should only be the first step in your research.
Question - was this paid work?
Charles
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"Judson Dunn" wrote
> "Brickley, a self-described "obsessive" political junkie who recently
> graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me
> that he began by "randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for
> Republican women."
Yup - but not "too moderate". Perhaps moderately moderate Republican women might have had a chance? This is one for the category system to get a furball over ... what categories would Brickley appreciate, to make the pre-2012 search less random?
Charles
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On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 19:23 +0000, wikien-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
wrote:
> From: Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>
> Talk about overlinking - take a look at this:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Ellis
>
I checked the article back in history and I did not detect any sign of
overlinking. In fact it is as it should be, and as I would like all
articles to be. I could even say that I would like some more links in
there (eg 1970s). I assume some people obviously have different
definitions of overlinking than mine.
--
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/
FYI. The devs have been working quite hard on making the internal
search not suck, and helpful feedback would probably be quite
welcomed.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Stojnic <rainmansr(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2008/10/19
Subject: [Wikitech-l] search server migration
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi all,
As some of you noticed, there are some new features on enwiki search page.
We are in progress of migrating all of our internal search to lucene-search
2.1 running on our brand-new&shiny search cluster. Since not all of the new
servers could be racked at once, we are unracking old ones, and putting new
ones in. As a result, enwiki moved to new cluster, alongside with partially
dewiki, frwiki and jawiki. Others are still on the old cluster.
Two new features to notice on enwiki are:
1) text snippets are now internally handled by lucene-search, which means
more intelligent snippet extraction, and also detection of matches to
redirects and sections.
2) interwiki matches. When a query matches a title from a sister project in
same language, a box on right appears holding the link to the sister project
page. So, for enwiki, a search matching a enwiktionary page will also appear
on the search page. The captions for different projects can be more
intelligent by tunning MediaWiki:search-interwiki-custom. For instance, for
enwiki it could be (format is interwiki:caption per line):
wikt:Wiktionary word definitions
n:Wikinews news results
..
The search should also hopefully give better ranked results than before.
There will be more new features coming up when we update rest of the
software, including the MWSearch plugin used to fetch results from the
search servers. I'll try to keep the community updated as new stuff comes up
and hopefully in few weeks time we will finish the whole migration.
Cheers, Robert
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Στις 18-10-2008, ημέρα Σαβ, και ώρα 16:24 +0000, ο/η
wikien-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org έγραψε:
> From: Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Linking Dates
> Chaos can be a good thing; it means that change is happening. But
> organized
> chaos is better; it means that there is some form of rational planning
> involved.
Liang Thow Yick with his intelligent organisation theory in the
Organizing Around Intelligence book explains this idea very well.
--
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/
> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:59:54 -0400
> From: Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Dealing with disappearing online sources
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> If the original source was reliable, and can be found through archive.org
> or
> something similar, then the obviously best approach is to replace the
> broken
> link with one that works. If the value of the reference can't be
> determined,
> but the statement it was referencing is not controversial (i.e. Vermont is
> a
> state in the United States) then simply remove the reference, maybe with a
> note on the talkpage. If it is an "amazing claim" as Will states, then for
> once he's right - the dead and unverifiable reference leaves the claim
> unreferenced, and a {{fact}} tag is appropriate.
>
> Nathan
I think we should be using webcitation.org more often. It takes 6 months or
more for web.archive.org to scrape a site.
Jonas Rand
User:Ionas68224
I myself have removed dead links and in some cases where some claim is
amazing such as "John Carradine has appeared in over 750 films" I add a fact tag.
When we write, our statements must be *able* to be verified and amazing
claims require amazing citations. Dead links are really sub-par, esp.so if the
link citation itself does not make it clear *how* to re-verify the source with
dead trees.
A link to some dead-fan-site cannot tell the new editor anything about
whether or not the dead-fan-site itself had a proper source or was just being
gushy and hyperbolic.
Perhaps you could give the exact case with exact details.
Will Johnson
**************New MapQuest Local shows what's happening at your destination.
Dining, Movies, Events, News & more. Try it out
(http://local.mapquest.com/?ncid=emlcntnew00000002)
Message: 4
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:45:30 +0100
From: "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] My experience with the Avril Lavigne troll
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<a4359dff0810141045m6ae94a02sff97ee5aff1fe5b1(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> Aside from that, yes, the reference desk is a breeding ground for
> trolls, maybe even by design. Village pump less so.
It attracts them, but they are easy enough to deal with, so it's not
really a problem. This is what I'm talking about, though. Why are we "dealing" with trolls? They want attention, we want an encyclopedia. Conflict of interest.Everything doesn't have to be "ZOMG EVIL PEOPLE BAD PUNISH", sometimes it's just better that some people don't edit.