Is there any chance for progress to be made on this? I recently ran
into this problem again at a featured article candidate I was
reviewing. It is has a very worthy 'National Historic Landmarks' set
of templates at the bottom, but unfortunately this leads to massive
template linkage bloat. Of the over 100 articles that link to this
article, I estimate that only three links are from within the text of
other articles - the rest are from the templates.
If I had been able to see at a glance that this article was linked
from two other articles, I would have been able to make a suggestion
to link back to those articles, and maybe link from other articles. As
it was, I was unable to do this and this caused some problems (which
it is best not to go into here).
So is there anyway to encourage or help with whatever needs to be done here?
Carcharoth
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 4:10 AM, David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> agreed. The footer templates are the biggest source of linkage bloat.
> the templates are useful, and we need some way of keeping track of
> what should be in them when we add or delete articles, but they make
> working with what links here for any practical purpose extremely
> difficult. They'd be much more helpful if they were separated.
>
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>> On 07/02/11 10:56, Carcharoth wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Magnus Manske
>>>> <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Many of these links are due to templates, which I can do little about.
>>>>
>>>> Can *anyone*, even in principle, do something about that? It really
>>>> bugs me that the "what links here" function doesn't distinguish
>>>> between links arising from templates (often not directly relevant) and
>>>> links directly from the article wiki-text. If the answer is something
>>>> to do with parsers, please do explain!
>>>
>>> Yes, it's possible. It was necessary to register links from templates
>>> in the pagelinks table so that when a page is deleted or created, the
>>> HTML caches can be updated so that the link colour will change. With a
>>> schema change and some parser work, it would be possible to flag such
>>> links so that they are optional in "what links here".
>>
>> That would be wonderful. It might even get me to create a bugzilla
>> account to vote for a bug if there is one open on this...(of course,
>> one problem is still that some templates are relevant to article
>> content and some are not - the ones that generate distracting links
>> are the navigational ones that tend to be at the bottom of pages, the
>> footer templates - and I'm not sure if infobox links would count as
>> template links or not - they are generated from parsing of a template
>> parameter, but don't appear in the template itself, unlike the footer
>> navboxes).
>>
>> [In case anyone is confused, an example is the massive footer
>> templates that can lead to Nobel prize winners decades apart linking
>> to each other, or diverse topics within a broad area linking to each
>> other, though only through templates and not in the text. Oh, and some
>> links appear in both footer templates, infoboxes, and the article
>> 'text'. Not sure how that is handled.]
>>
>> Carcharoth
>>
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> --
> David Goodman
>
> DGG at the enWP
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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"10:20, 29 April 2011 Jimbo Wales (talk | contribs) m (37,376 bytes)
(moved Kate Middleton to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge over
redirect: Marriage to the Duke of Cambridge) (undo) "
He must have had his finger on the button waiting for Beardie[*] to
pronounce them man and wife...
[*] I can call him that; my mother knows him reasonably well
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:16:12 +0000
From: Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia
>This encyclopedia has been rated as C-Class on the project's quality scale.
>This encyclopedia has been checked against the following criteria for
>B-Class status:
<snip>
>2. Coverage and accuracy: criterion not met (currently 3.5 million
>of an estimated 4.4 million articles)
<snip>
You think there are only 4.4 million possible topics? Based on what criteria?
Stevertigo also thought this in the essay Wikipedia:Concept limit, which I
tagged as [citation needed]. There are probably tens of millions of potentially
notable topics, if not hundreds of millions. However, we're better at deleting
new articles than writing them and writing a new article that will survive these
days requires more detailed research than in years gone by.
It turns out that if you're the encyclopedia that everyone actually
reads, the mountain will come to you: people will go to some effort to
get their field properly documented.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/academics-in-new-move-begin-to-work-…
This is, of course, no reason to be complacent. But it does give us
something to reach out with - "look at these other fields that have
benefited!", similar to the approach we take with GLAMs.
- d.
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~lam/papers/lam_group2010_wikipedia-group-decis…
:
> "We also found that there have been two bots (computer programs that edit Wikipedia)—BJBot and Jayden54Bot—that automatically automatically notified article editors about AfD discussions and recruited them to participate per the established policy. These bots performed AfD notifications for several months, and offer us an opportunity to study the effect of recruitment that is purely policy driven. We use a process like one described above to detect successful instances of bot-initiated recruitment: if a recruitment bot edited a user’s talk page, and that user !voted in an AfD within two days, then we consider that user to have been recruited by the bot.
> Using the above processes, we identified 8,464 instances of successful recruiting. Table 2 shows a summary of who did the recruiting, and how their recruits !voted. We see large differences in !voting behavior, which suggests that there is bias in who people choose to recruit. (From these data we cannot tell whether the bias is an intentional effort to influence consensus, or the result of social network homophily [14].) Participants recruited by keep !voters were about four times less likely to support deletion as those recruited by delete !voters. The participants that bots recruited also appear unlikely to support deletion, which reflects the policy bias we observed earlier."
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net
Hi all,
I'm not sure about the history of this article, but it it was recently
brought to my attention via Facebook.
My take on this article is that it is an abuse of Wikipedia's notability
guidelines. The article goes out of its way to cite lots of sources, but I
do not believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media is both a
necessary and sufficient condition for notability. In this particular case
it sounds like someone with a lot of name recognition used that name
recognition to get media attention for their smear campaign. This media
attention was then used to justify a Wikipedia article. This is an excellent
reductio ad absurdum case that brings a boundary condition of our notability
guidelines to light. It is, quite frankly, manufactured notability and IMO
it does deserve an article.
When you Google for Santorum's last name this Wikipedia article is the
second result. This means that people who are looking for legitimate
information about him are not going to find it right away - instead we are
going to feed them information about a biased smear campaign rather than the
former Senators BLP.
Please discuss.
--
Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
Santorum isn't the only candidate who's had somebody try to use his
name as a word for something gross (though probably the most
successful example of it happening)... in a recent Cracked article:
"He wanted to be President Trump, even though "trump," as a word,
sounds like it should be slang for that sometimes flabby part of the
body where the under-ass rubs up against the back of the leg. Like,
"We were making out behind the shed at the mini-golf place and I was
grabbin' her butt, but I had to quit because this chick had mad trump-
sweat. It was gross." He said he wanted to run for president."
http://www.cracked.com/blog/i-cant-tell-if-world-being-serious-anymore/
--
== 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/
Disclaimer: I don't actually use ED and what I know of it comes from mentions
on the talk page and here, which seems to be quite enough to understand this:
Summary: This site is a controversial site that is often considered an attack
site, but we have an article about it anyway. The site shut down and the
users of the old site restarted it at a different location. Wikipedia has
decided that site should be considered defunct and the new site ignored
because 1) the new site is for harassment and we shouldn't link to harassment
(even though the same is true of the old site, yet we have an article about
it), 2) the new site is a copyright violation of the old site and we're
not supposed to link to copyright violations (even though the claim that it
is a copyright violation is based on selectively using one of two
contradictory copyright notices from the old site), and 3) we have no reliable
source claiming the two sites are the same.
It seems obvious to me that this is being excluded because either the editors
don't want to link there and find this a good excuse, or else are simply
blindly adhering to rules even when they make no sense (I recall a case where
an open-source project was restarted by the same people under a new name and
we couldn't have an article about it because we had to provide separate
notability for the new version of the project).
We also may want to rethink the rules about copyright violations. It's one
thing to ignore a site because it contains a bootleg copy of Star Wars. It's
another to ignore a site where there's a copyright dispute and Wikipedia has
to actually decide the dispute in order to call the site a copyright
violation. It especially makes little sense when the same people are
involved in the "copyright violating" site who were involved with the original
site--shouldn't it make more sense to treat it as the same site if it has the
same content and the same people, even if its copyright status did change?
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 8:38 PM, Scott MacDonald
<doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
> But my point is celebrity stories in newspapers, if they use unnamed or
> unattributable sources, are not reliable and should never amount to
> verification.
Unfortunately, the current language of WP:V not only declares that
professional newspapers are unilaterally reliable, they are even
decreed to be secondary sources, which removes some slight limitations
on how the material in newspaper stories could be used. It seems that
some editors of WP:V actually believe this is the appropriate way to
handle newspaper stories; in any case it is unlikely to change.
> We might as well source things from random internet blogs and claim: "but
> this is verification (it may be true or not, but we don't care about
> truth)".
This is essentially what we already do. Moreover, many editors like
the fact that we cover stories quickly using primary sources (e.g. the
death of Michael Jackson) rather than waiting (for years?) for a
definitive account to be published in secondary sources.
> "Verification not truth" must not be a suicide pact and certainly not an
> excuse for sloppy publishing of gossip on BLPS.
The idea that someone cannot challenge a source fact simply because
they doubt its truth is very useful, though. It reduces many arguments
where editors "know" they are right, when they are really wrong. If
we can't use sources to judge truth, and we can't use expert knowledge
without sources, what third option remains?
- Carl
On 13/05/2011, Scott MacDonald <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
> The point is that the story of "Otto the true earring-eating Dog of Kate
> Middleton" was also verifiable from multiple reliable sources, despite being
> a crock of shit. (Indeed you can find articles published as late as last
> week referring to
> "Kate's dog Otto" - despite the hoax being identified a year ago).
We're never going to avoid untrue things being in the Wikipedia.
Sometimes, the sources make mistakes. (And yes, it's much more likely
to be a mistake with The Daily Mail).
But I don't in any way agree that that impacts on verifiability over
truth. We have no way to know the real truth about anything for
certain, but verifiability of sources is at least possible.
That's one part of the Wikipedia that has to remain as bedrock. We
have to build the Wikipedia on rock.
> Scott
--
-Ian Woollard