On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
A+ for snippyness, D for actual content there. What makes you believe that our notability guidelines appear coherent and consistent to the outside?
Given that the outsiders is unlikely to have taken time to study them I have no reason to think they do appear so. But then many things in this world are incoherent to outsiders.
Particularly in light of, in the last week, three separate instances of people showing inconsistencies in three very different approaches (Straub, McCloud, and Noah).
Noah didn't, we don't know what McCloud said and Straub identified a weakness in our system that has little to do with policy.
No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be. Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black and white guideline could ever portray.
This is going to come as a serious shock to all those lecturers teaching the subject
This page is not flawed in any particular manifestation - it is flawed at the most fundamental level imaginable - it's a policy page trying to perform an impossible task.
For an impossible task it appears to have been done an awful lot of times. Anyone writing a review article will establish what is and is not a reliable source.
It generally fairly well known which journals can be trusted and which ones need to be used with caution that the reactions they describe may only work one time in 10.
Yes. We took our notability guidelines, which used to be a vague sense of "if things like it survive VfD, it probably will too" and yoked them to our sourcing guidelines. This isn't so much throwing the baby out with the bathwater as drowning the baby in the bathwater.
You were the one objecting to stuff being done "inconsistently, arbitrarily, and in a manner that is not meaningfully predictable"
Now you object to an attempt to create a single unified rule set.
I don't think this describes the problem. It's not that we have rules that make sense but follow them badly. It's that we have rules that don't really make sense and that we follow them pretty well.
Just because you don't agree with the rules and don't agree with people's actions it does not mean that one flows from the other.
The quality still isn't that high. But I don't think it's gone up much since Siegenthaler. I think it's stuck in a situation where it can't actually improve. Which might explain why 1.0 has stalled.
Depends on the area you are looking at. I'm seeing a lot more citations.
No. Policy does not reduce dross.
G11
Good editors reduce dross. Policy reduces good editors.
Dealing with dross doesn't exactly help them.
[[WP:AGF]]
We are talking about stuff off wikipedia here. AGF does not apply. Thus there is no reason to make assumptions of any type.
And 10% of the time Rome burns. That's a high enough error rate to deserve more care than the pithy dismissals you've perfected.
However after it has burned you know what the real problem is and can fix it. As a bonus you haven't spent time fixing it against attacks from giant geese.
Aside from an admittedly polemical call to nuke RS I've not demanded total change right now.
Aside from that Mr Lincoln how was the play?
In fact, total change right now is what got us into this mess. (Oh no, we got panned in USA Today. We'd better overhaul the system!) If anything, my position is more conservative than yours.
I never claimed to be conservative.
And I'm wearing rose-coloured glasses? I remember when I could be advancing two or three arbcom cases against POV pushing lunatics at once.
And those made up a significant percentage of their population.
Now you might just clean half the lunitics out of one subject area.
And those were just the ones I knew about, which, we ought remember, was almost certainly a minority as I've only looked at around .5% of the articles on Wikipedia in my life. We've always had dreadful POV problems. And we've always dealt with them the same way
- by going "OK, you're nuts" and blocking the person.
No because that only works with the more incompetent POV pushers.