In a message dated 3/29/2008 3:51:13 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
bobolozo(a)yahoo.com writes:
great majority of
the members of this list have major disagreements with
Wikipedia:Verifiability.>>
-----------------------------------------
I agree with the last few posters, that the above is over-reading the thread.
The initial question was re whether mass-deletions were ok. The reaction
was, "No don't do that".
Taking that particular response, to the opposite extreme is equally flawed.
The consensus view would be somewhere between these views.
Will Johnson
**************Create a Home Theater Like the Pros. Watch the video on AOL
Home.
(http://home.aol.com/diy/home-improvement-eric-stromer?video=15&ncid=aolhom0…)
Say, how long do new subscribers get
> The reason it is being held:
> Post to moderated list
for? I already posted several messages and they were approved but am
still on the probation list. How many messages do we have to have
approved before we graduate? P.S. I wrote the list owner but that went
into a blackhole.
Is there any point why we even have arbcom? They do not seem to be doing
much of resolving disputes lately. Granted they accept cases and close them.
But by the time case is closed very little of the dispute is been resolved.
Often disputes continue as if the RFAR wasn't filed.
They often do not respond to inquires in a timely fashion or at all. They
ignore evidence or at least make statements that are directly contradicted
by hard evidence. The remedies they pass generally are common-sense
statements and nothing more. For example, they will say that meatpupperary
is disruptive but they will not pass remedies in prevention of it.
They are not fair. They give a lot of leeway to long term trolls yet they do
not give a fraction of that to good standing users. For example they will
decline a case if is is not adequately engulfed in disruption. If you want
your case to be heard by arbcom you need to be revert waring left right or
else you will not be given much attention even if you exhaust dispute
resolution.
Maybe it is time to dissolve arbcom.
- White Cat
Dear All,
The survey on Wikipedia contributors' information source use is still
open for anyone interested and willing to participate.
I am currently engaged in conducting research on Wikipedia users'
information behaviour and especially the information sources and
services used in contributions.
The purpose of this survey is to map information sources used in writing
and editing Wikipedia articles. The survey is a part of the research
project "Information service 2.0" conducted by myself (Department of
Information Studies, Åbo Akademi University, Finland) as a part of the
Academy of Finland research project "Library 2.0 - a new participatory
context".
The individual answers will be processed strictly confidential, the data
will not be handed over to any third parties or to non-academic use and
all informants will remain strictly anynomous.
Survey URL
http://survey-3.istohuvila.fi/index.php?sid=62924&lang=en
More information about the project may be found at
http://www.istohuvila.fi/library-20http://www.library2pointoh.fi
Best Regards,
Isto Huvila
--
Ph.D., research fellow, lecturer
Information Studies :: Åbo Akademi University
(w) +358-2-2153467 (m) +358-40-5726259
(e) isto.huvila(a)abo.fi (w3) www.istohuvila.fi
>From The Daily Yomiuri
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080327TDY03102.htm
"Kairyudo Publishing Co. focuses on Wikipedia, the Internet-based free
encyclopedia, in its textbook, discussing how it began and how it is used.
Based on information from Wikipedia, Zoshindo-Jukenkenkyusha Publishing Co.
features in its English textbook a map highlighting countries that maintain
the death penalty.
An Education, Science and Technology Ministry official said: "We just check
whether the descriptions in the textbooks are appropriate after confirming
that they're based on facts. We don't care whether they deal with Wikipedia
or not." "
One of the reasons everyone and their sockpuppet scream "WYSIWYG
editor" is the accumulation of intricate wiki markup on even otherwise
simple pages. Coincidentally, this is also what prevents a WYSIWYG
editor at the moment ;-)
It is also said that the template hell and other things scare away
newbies, or lead to their accidental breaking of pages.
Once Upon A Time (TM), I wrote a function into MediaWiki that would
separate some of the meta content into a separate editing area, thus
reducing the clutter in the actual edit box. The code's still there,
deactivated, and probably broken right now.
Today, I rewrote the thing in JavaScript. It separates
* templates, images, and horizontal lines at the top of a page
* templates and some magic words at the end of a page
* categories
* language links
into text boxes of their own. This happens automatically right after
loading the edit page, and it all gets reconstructed into a single
text the moment you save, preview, or diff the edit. On preview or
diff, everything gets separated again.
It is only enabled for the article namespace. Top and bottom edit
boxes can be hidden (I could add an option to hide either as default),
and everything can be reset to "standard", giving the normal edit page
for the moment.
Besides better structuring of article body and "meta" content, it does
clean up whitespace, sort categories and language links
alphabetically, etc.
A demo of what it does to [[Stevan Faddy]], a short, regular biography, is here:
http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/less_page_clutter.png
Finally, the script:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/less_edit_clutter.js
It seems that there is no "withJS" option on en.wikipedia, which would
allow for a transient demo.
To use, add the usual incantation to your monobook.js:
importScript('User:Magnus Manske/less edit clutter.js');
Cheers,
Magnus
Much of the text of Wikipedia is unsourced currently.
In addition, due perhaps to lack of understanding of
our policies, or just the desire to add sources, we
have tens of thousands(at least) of unreliable sources
listed as references. By doing a Special
pages/External links search, it's not hard to find
large numbers of these. A search on *.tripod.com, for
example, gives 10,000+ links, many of which are being
used as references. africanelections.tripod.com alone
is linked to
484 articles, and is being presented as a source in
multiple templates.
My question is, is it a good idea to simply go through
and remove large numbers of these? Are we better off
with no sources at all for portions of text, rather
than have references which consist of message board
postings and personal websites and such?
I noticed people using urbandictionary entries as
references, and went through and removed all I could
find, from about 100 articles (I left any links in
External links sections, as having a link there is
entirely different from having it listed as a
reference). But now, having discovered the ease with
which I can find thousands more unreliable sources as
references, I'm wondering what others think of the
mass removal of unreliable sources.
Am I correct in believing that we're better off having
an unsourced paragraph of text, rather than a
paragraph which has as a reference
somedudeswebpage.tripod.com?
(And, yes, I know, it would be optimal to replace
unreliable sources with reliable ones. But this would
take about 100 times as long)
____________________________________________________________________________________
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On 25 Mar 2008 at 00:03:47 UTC, "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com
wrote:
> Which would be you falling afoul of the fallacy that "all A is B
> therefore all B is A." You need to think why in this case you're
> wrong.
The lesson I got out of it was "If A has a bigger and more powerful
clique of friends and supporters than B, then by definition A is
right and B is a troll," but what do A and B equal in *your*
explanation?
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
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