On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:46 AM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 9:34 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/04/2008, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
Everything is contraversial, and every article has cranks & the passionate trying to push junk into it.
See, this is actually entirely false. Almost no articles on Wikipedia are actually that controversial. (Greg Maxwell and Kim Bruning ran the numbers on this in January 2006.)
As I said, this appears to be a damage limitation exercise on the extreme cases - and is problematic in that it's messing up things for the vast majority.
- d.
Not perpetually contraversial, but yeah, it crops up almost anywhere (I'd review such a study if you know where it's at).
But WP:V and WP:NOR put contraversies to rest. They take away any leverage, and make contraversial articles uncontraversial. There's exactly no other method in the encyclopaedia for dealing with bad faith editors who obey WP:CIVIL unless you have such overwhelming number advantage you can simply 3RR them. But if you're working on "Coriolis Force" with two-ish regular editors who hang around there, you're hosed without those two policies. Absolutely hosed.
WilyD
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I would also add, that when there are "oral traditions", Wikipedia is not a first written publisher and is not intended to be. (See WP:NOT.) NOR indicates that we will -not- be the first place those "oral traditions" appear in print, and that's good, it's not our function to publish original thought. Once those thoughts have been previously published in other reliable sources, then (and only then) can we publish them here. We write from material that has been previously -published-, not just material that has been previously -stated-. That distinction is critical. "Oral traditions" are not verifiable until someone writes them down.