(Pardon me if I'm doing something wrong regarding the mailing list, I'm a newbie to posting despite lurking for some time)
David Lindsey wrote:
<snip>
> I would like to think that we can all agree that Professor Wertheim's
> critical response is a helpful one, and that adapting the article
> appropriately would be of benefit to Wikipedia. The entire process of
> finding an expert to review the article took no more than a half hour of my
> time and produced a benefit for Wikipedia that substantially exceeds that
> cost.
</snip>
Yes, the critical response is helpful, and reacting to it would be a good idea.
I do raise my eyebrows at the time required, though. There are plenty of difficulties involved in finding an appropriate expert, contacting them, and—importantly—convincing them to use their time to review the article. It's hard to generalize that most Wikipedians should be able to find a (willing) expert on a subject in so little time, especially for more obscure or less academic topics.
<snip>
> Finally, though this idea failed to gain any real traction on wiki, I would
> like to state my support for the idea of adding a fifth criterion to
> WP:WIAFA: "5. The article, if possible, has been reviewed by an external
> subject-matter expert." Even if no such criterion is added, though, I would
> like to emphasize that it will always, or nearly always, be productive to
> attempt to find an expert reviewer.
</snip>
Yes, expert reviewers are generally a good thing. I think that there might be some trouble with controversial articles (if the expert is slanted one way or another, a review correcting "mistakes" might not be helpful to NPOV). The dubiousness of Citizendium's homeopathy article makes a good example.
I don't currently believe that expert review should be added as a criterion for Featured articles, however, because of the classic problems with experts. First, how would the interactions/credentials be verified? I can just imagine it now: "I'm submitting this article 'Unobtainium synthesis' to FAC because I think it meets the criteria. Also, the article got an excellent rating on review by Dr. L. Olfake, which she emailed to me the other day." (In case you didn't catch it: "lol fake") Second, how do we avoid Citizendium-like problems? (This is certainly an issue, see also the earlier "Citizendium dead?" thread in this list) Third, would it add systemic bias, or extra hurdles to the process, as Charles Matthews mentions? I'll stop touting the issues, because that's not quite helpful, but there are significant problems with integrating expert review that we ought to address (if not solve) before making it remotely mandatory.
If we were to integrate expert review, I'd start it as another *layer* of Wikipedia. I strongly believe that showing very prominently the level of review a given article—or even a given *revision* thereof—has received, and the perceived level of quality involved, is a good thing. The Wikipedia 1.0 assessment system (Stub, Start, C, B, A, GA, FA…) seems to serve as a decent start for that sort of thing. (In the long run, I'd love to see some system integrating this with some addition to the planned "patrolled revisions" feature that adds passive flags to revisions.) If we were to bolt on an expert review process to the Featured article system, why not make it a new level? I can imagine it now: "FA+". Take a community FA, and give it a (reasonably verified) expert review, and if all outstanding issues are addressed, call it an FA+ instead. Granted, this involves all sorts of instruction creep, but it's just a starting idea. A practical implementation is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
I think that expert review is a good idea (we like expert participation as long as they're not jerks about it), but I'm cautious about its feasibility in Wikipedia as an "official" process.
</ramble>
Cheers,
Nihiltres
In March 2010, about 90 people made even a single edit to Citizendium:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics#Number_of_authors
Compare Conservapedia, which has 76 at the time I write this. The
difference is, the latter is pretty much a personal website run by a
gibbering fundie lunatic which gets pretty much all its traffic from
sceptics making fun of it; the former was a serious project.
This is terribly sad. What went wrong?
- d.
Dear WikiEN Mailing list,
I am doing some research on the increasing structure in information
transmission and I am very interested to know some information on the
history and growth of infoboxes, or other machine searchable extracted
information, in wikipedia.
Could you tell me, or tell me how to find, the following:
the date of the first infobox on wikipedia?
the rate of increase in infoboxes, or at least the number of infoboxes
at several points in time and the date that number was measured?
The discussion page "How many Wikipedia articles covered by DBpedia?"
gives two such infobox data points and one approximate date, but I want
to flesh out the history a bit.
Thank you very much in advance, and please feel free to ask me if there
is any more information I can provide you with!
Kind regards,
Julia Kasmire
PhD Researcher
TU Delft
Following some of the responses to my recent article on featured
articles<http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2721/2482>,
I decided to carry out a single test run of what adding expert feedback to
the featured article process might look like. To this end, I selected
(several days ago) a recently-promoted featured article, The Open
Boat<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Boat>,
and set out to find an expert reviewer. I initially asked Paul Sorrentino,
a professor at Virginia Tech, biographer of Crane and editor of several
works on Crane, to have a look at the article. He declined to participate,
saying that he was currently too busy, but recommended that I approach
Stanley Wertheim, author of, among many other books, The Stephen Crane
Encyclopedia. Professor Wertheim kindly agreed to undertake the review, and
produced the following commentary for me (which he agreed to have publicly
distributed):
"Dear Mr. Lindsey*,*
The W*i*kipedia article on "The Open Boat" seems to me for the most part
well-written, accurate, and appropriate to the topic. I do not find serious
omissions and it seems to me that the major biographical sources and
critical views are well represented. I believe that it is a good thing that
some of the more recent post-modern critical interpretations are not
presented since they would only confuse the general reader, as I think they
confuse many professional readers.
*
*
*Introductory Paragraph*: It may be misleading to say that the Commodore sank
after hitting a sandbar. The Commodore was beached twice on sandbars in the
St. John’s River before it attained the open sea, and the following day the
ship foundered following a mysterious leak in the engine room that could not
be contained.
* *
The story is not told “from the point of view of an anonymous
correspondent.”* *There is* *a detached narrator. The focus is on the
collective (and sometimes individual) consciousness of the four men in the
dinghy as they react to their ordeal. This mistake is repeated in the *Plot
Summary* section where it is stated that the narrarion is from the point of
view of the Correspondent, based on Crane himself. Also in this section “the
metaphysical conflicts” are described as “the correspondent’s thoughts”
rather than the collective reflections of the men rendered by the
third-person narrator. What is more puzzling is that some of this confusion
is attributed to me (See ftn. 27) when in fact I clearly state in the source
cited that these are the reflections of “the collective mind of the men in
the dinghy,” not those of the Correspondent.
* *
*Publication History*: The newspaper prelude to “The Open Boat, “Stephen
Crane’s Own Story” was not first published in the *New York Press*. It was
printed in various newspapers on January 7, 1897, by the Bacheller syndicate
and the title was taken from the *New York Press* version.
*Man Versus Nature*: In “they came to believe that nature instead
ambivalent,” I would substitute “indifferent” for “ambivalent.” Indifference
is stressed in the rest of the paragraph. “Ambivalence” would indicate
personified and contrasting attitudes rather than neutrality.
Why is the the Commodore sometimes referred to as simply Commodore? Isn't
the article "the' necessary?"
I would like to think that we can all agree that Professor Wertheim's
critical response is a helpful one, and that adapting the article
appropriately would be of benefit to Wikipedia. The entire process of
finding an expert to review the article took no more than a half hour of my
time and produced a benefit for Wikipedia that substantially exceeds that
cost.
Thus, I would like to reiterate my call for the use of expert reviewers. I
am happy to lend my assistance to anyone who would like to become involved
in contacting experts. Obviously, the authors of featured articles should
be the best-suited for contacting experts, as they should have a grasp of
who might be appropriate to ask, and so forth, but this need not always be
the case.
Finally, though this idea failed to gain any real traction on wiki, I would
like to state my support for the idea of adding a fifth criterion to
WP:WIAFA: "5. The article, if possible, has been reviewed by an external
subject-matter expert." Even if no such criterion is added, though, I would
like to emphasize that it will always, or nearly always, be productive to
attempt to find an expert reviewer.
David Lindsey
> I think that the major problem with the software is that it assumes
> that things are true/false. In the real world shades of gray are much
> more common.
Well, actually, green means that "consensus exists that the statement
is true" and red means that "no consensus exists that the statement is
true or false", i.e. red does not mean false. I think the software
takes care of the "grayness" issue very well - you have to craft your
statements in such a way that they properly illustrate the "gray
areas" of the real world - otherwise, they get refuted and turn red.
> There seems to be no way to have things that oppose
> something and other things that boost it.
Refute is really all you need. To oppose, you refute. To support, you
do nothing - or, you refute other statements that contradict the
statement you want to support. So, if someone refutes statement X with
"Why?", you can refute "Why?" with an explanation that supports X.
> I'm also very unconvinced by the percentages, they seem to be
> pseudo-information rather than anything meaningful. Possibly using
> averages of values assigned by people might be a better approach or
> something.
You're correct about that - any kind of score, percentage, etc.
suffers from the same problem - they average the opinions of many
people, each having only a subset of all the facts (something that
averaging "values assigned by people" isn't immune from).
And since the project is rather young, the percentages don't really
mean much yet. But if you have a million people working away on a
statement, the percentages will start to offer a more useful insight
into the lean of the population. Tell me if you think the percentages
should be hidden for now.
www.thegraph.org
As requested, here's the weekly Flagged Protection update.
Now recovered from the developer meeting, we have made further progress,
and have only a few known issues between us and release.
If you'd like to verify that for yourself, start here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
To see what we've changed this week, there's a list here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Flagged_Protection_upd…
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and
Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
We are very close now; only a few UI issues remain between us and final
testing, after which will hopefully come a launch on the English Wikipedia.
We expect to release to labs again next week, and each week thereafter
until this goes live on the English Wikipedia.
William
Hoi,
It is much easier to have sound files that have you listen to it. I had
added soundfiles to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer among others on the English WP.. I
had an Italian friend do Silvio Berluscone
For whatever reason they were removed.. Dutch can be hard language to
pronounce .. and as has been said, IPA is not universally understood.
Thanks.
GerardM
On 22 April 2010 09:11, J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov <
alexandrdmitriromanov(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Enabling a pop-up (for example) for the IPA prononciation would be a big
> plus as far as I am concerned.
> I've never quite got my head around it, but can see its usefulness. This is
> particularly useful when the word is of non-English extraction: I find it
> an
> added benefit to see the word in its original form (spelling and script),
> notably when there is a local version of the word which has completely
> transformed the native version (e.g. Londres from London, Maroc / Morocco
> from المغرب).
>
> Alexandr Dmitri
>
>
>
>
>
> 2010/4/22 Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com>
>
> > On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> > <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > A lot of so called IPA out there is created by Americans for Americans
> > and
> > > expect that certain sounds can be expressed by the ordinary Latin
> > > characters. The consequence is that such polution makes the whole of
> IPA
> > > hard to use.
> > >
> > > Consequently I argue that in order to save the usefulness of IPA at all
> > we
> > > HAVE to be academically correct in how it is expressed.
> > > Thanks,
> > > GerardM
> >
> >
> > I disagree to an extent of the first part of you post, and agree with the
> > second part. I actually answered an email about this situation, the
> ticket
> > can be found here if you have access <
> >
> >
> https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=…
> > >
> >
> > The correspondent wasn't very, how shall I say, nice in the initial email
> > or
> > the reply to my response, but here's what I wrote:
> >
> >
> > "The Wikimedia Foundation projects, which include the English Wikipedia,
> > are
> > aimed
> > at and have a broad global appeal. In fact, many of our contributors are
> > not
> > native speakers of English but use the project as a way to enhance their
> > knowledge
> > of English and providing translations. We actively encourage that.
> >
> > The "gobbledygook" is the International Phonetic Alphabet, contrived and
> > maintained by an international collection of linguists over a hundred
> years
> > ago as
> > a method, based on Latin characters, to phonetically pronounce even
> > unfamiliar
> > languages. This method of adoption across our projects allow people from
> > around
> > the globe to understand a pronunciation no matter their language.
> >
> > We are sorry that this is inconvenient for you and diminishes your
> interest
> > in
> > Wikipedia. We do hope that you can learn the IPA from our language
> guides
> > available- it's actually pretty quick to catch on to and is a common
> sense
> > approach to phonetics.
> >
> > You can find more information about the IPA here
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International Phonetic Alphabet> which
> > includes
> > external links to educational tools in learning the system!
> >
> > Again, we do appreciate your concerns about the usability of Wikipedia."
> > --
> > ~Keegan
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:45:27 -0700, stevertigo wrote:
> 1) As a rule, all language wikis should use International Phonetic
> Alphabet as their standard pronunciation scheme. Very few appear to
> actually do.
> 2) All language wikis should attempt to use IPA to pronounce the
> endonym of a foreign word, not the exonymic re-pronunciation (ie. Iraq
> = /i??r??k/ not /??r?k/).
...which has its problems, as seen above: in the digest version of
this list, non-ASCII characters are converted to question marks,
making it impossible to read the IPA pronunciations even if one
understands that symbol system.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
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