Steve ranted:
Wikipedia's Achilles heel was inevitably going to be its size, and the unwieldiness of managing or guiding large group trends. If you think about any society in general, its continuity is dependent on the establishement of ritual behaviours. Wikipedia's core principles are for the most part exactly what should be, but Ive been concerned that we lack rituals for indoctrinating people into a sense of our community goals and nature.
[snip]
The general idea, back in the day, was that as problems grow, the community must restructure to answer them. Disputes gotten too big for JW and the mailing lists?--empower a committee to deal with this, and another to deal with that. The point is that these committees are more than just bantha fodder--they represent community structure, which is just as important as software structure, or NPO structure. If were not responsive in terms of community structure... <i>aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again. Wal, uh hope you folks enjoyed yourselves. Catch ya further on down the trail.</i>
Not rambling, Steve, that was a darn good rant!
Our community of volunteer writers still have not developed sufficient dedication to avoiding bias and incivility. This might be due (in part) to a lingering sense of anarchistic idealism. Anyway, there is a well-founded fear that "structure" and "government" will lead to tyranny.
I've been experimenting with [[Wikipedia:Policy enforcement log]]. I've made a lot of templates and (proposed) policy pages. Tim Starling wrote a cool little hack to allow blocked users to edit their own talk page.
Steve and I have revived the Mediation Committee (Mgm asked me to co-chair). I'm trying to wrap up two VERY DIFFICULT article mediations before my vacation tomorrow.
A lot of problems Wikipedia has comes down to:
* "I want the web site to reflect my own ideas, feelings and desires."
This comes into endless conflict with our stated mission of creating an unbiased yet comprehensive free encyclopedia. Nonetheless, we've done an outstanding job. We've got the world's attention, but we need to figure out how to take it to the next level.
Uncle Ed
P.S. I will be on vacation July 22-31. (Try not to tear down the place while I'm gone. ;-)
--- "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
Not rambling, Steve, that was a darn good rant!
Aw shucks, Ed. Thanks.
Our community of volunteer writers still have not developed sufficient dedication to avoiding bias and incivility. This might be due (in part) to a lingering sense of anarchistic idealism.
Well, in any case, for anyone (newbies, etc) who may not quite understand the fragility of the project--any number of "anarchist" tendencies can take root.
Steve and I have revived the Mediation Committee (Mgm asked me to co-chair). I'm trying to wrap up
two >VERY DIFFICULT article mediations before my vacation >tomorrow.
...comes down to:
- "I want the web site to reflect my own ideas,
feelings and desires."
I.e. the simple and basic lack of individual understanding or fidelity to NPOV concepts has become a broad systematic problem. Hence the notion of an NPOV committee remains something to think about.
Nonetheless, we've done an outstanding job. We've
got the world's attention, but we need to figure
out how to take it to the next level.
Jolly good. And "next level" of course doesnt mean a "pushing to 1.0" mentality, or even any "commercially-funded real-time-DB-access paid-academic-supervised Wikipedia-fork," but rather a simple refocus on the encyclopedia as the main objective.
SV
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steve v (vertigosteve@yahoo.com) [050722 04:27]:
Jolly good. And "next level" of course doesnt mean a "pushing to 1.0" mentality, or even any "commercially-funded real-time-DB-access paid-academic-supervised Wikipedia-fork," but rather a simple refocus on the encyclopedia as the main objective.
Indeed. When doing meta stuff, ask yourself: "How does this help write an encyclopedia?"
- d.
Poor, Edmund W (Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com) [050721 23:56]:
A lot of problems Wikipedia has comes down to:
- "I want the web site to reflect my own ideas, feelings and desires."
This comes into endless conflict with our stated mission of creating an unbiased yet comprehensive free encyclopedia. Nonetheless, we've done an outstanding job. We've got the world's attention, but we need to figure out how to take it to the next level.
We're having fun with this on [[WP:SCN]] (a Scientology wikiproject). You have the views of the CoS members and the views of the critics, and they're basically almost utterly incompatible. But NPOV is achievable! With great effort! (Also, we have a recently ex-member who's doing a great job on the articles about the "tech", i.e. the substance of the religion itself.) [[Xenu]] is achieving widespread fame in the blogosphere, and is being quoted (uncredited) in just about every recent press article on Tom Cruise's proselytisation for the Church. So we're getting just a little attention. I'm sure we'll weather it, and Wikipedia's immune systems appear to be kicking in just fine in at least one case ...
- d.
David Gerard:
We're having fun with this on [[WP:SCN]] (a Scientology wikiproject). You have the views of the CoS members and the views of the critics, and they're basically almost utterly incompatible. But NPOV is achievable! With great effort! (Also, we have a recently ex-member who's doing a great job on the articles about the "tech", i.e. the substance of the religion itself.) [[Xenu]] is achieving widespread fame in the blogosphere, and is being quoted (uncredited) in just about every recent press article on Tom Cruise's proselytisation for the Church. So we're getting just a little attention. I'm sure we'll weather it, and Wikipedia's immune systems appear to be kicking in just fine in at least one case ...
While I would love to agree with you entirely, the situation e.g. with the LDS articles is exactly the opposite. Criticism is spread on sub-articles of sub-articles, and you have pages like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mormonism which is largely an LDS description of anti-Mormon activities. Some of the LDS pages could come straight out of glossy brochures from Utah.
Then you have stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephi - a character out of the Book of Mormon - which is simply prefaced with "According to the Book of Mormon", and everything else is presented as fact. There's a Mormonism WikiProject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Latter_Day_Saint_movement - most of whose members appear to be Mormons.
There are many passionate Mormons and relatively few critics. The critics focus on a small number of key articles, which are continually unstable. Many articles off the main center of activity will simply reflect official LDS or at least believer POV because nobody else cares to work on them, and even if they do, they can easily be pushed away by the Mormon majority.
Opus Dei members are also presently trying to turn the OD-related articles into pure apologetics, largely relying on writings by Catholic scholars and trying to discredit everyone in the anti-cult movement outside the Church. In addition to changing the text, some of them tried to insert series of photos of smiling women and children into the main article to reflect the "theology of joy" of Opus Dei. This effort is currently stalled due to copyright issues with the images.
Then there's articles like [[creationism]] which never reach any level of long-term stability, and where, beyond the conflict between science and faith, there's a conflict between many different beliefs about creation, Christian or otherwise, and whether or not they should challenge science, or coexist with it.
Every religious movement with resources and some intelligence will eventually discover Wikipedia and try to systematically undermine its articles, aided by the passion of its members. If we want to stay open even to irrationalism, there is no solution beyond occasionally taking snapshots when the articles have reached some level of stability. That is, when we have peer review, we can systematically try to guide NPOV-aware Wikipedians into the dark corners of Wikipedia and push them to be ready for publication, then leave them to the ignor^Wpeople of faith again.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Then you have stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephi - a character out of the Book of Mormon - which is simply prefaced with "According to the Book of Mormon", and everything else is presented as fact.
I don't see a problem with that article. What else is there to say about it? The Book of Mormon claims something about a person named "Nephi", and we report "the Book of Mormon claims the following about Nephi". Do we need to explicitly say "however, people who think the Book of Mormon is mostly hogwash think this claim is also hogwash"? Should we add to the [[Nirvana]] and [[Shiva]] articles that a lot of people think that Nirvana is nonsense and Shiva might not actually exist?
-Mark
[With]in [the context of] Mormonism, Nephi is...
Seems fairly neutral to me. However there are valid concerns that n/10 average random articles fail to put things in this context, and carry this through. Its easy to be overly general ("worrying trends") or overly particular ("Nephi") and miss the balance.
SV
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't see a problem with that article. What else is there to say about it? The Book of Mormon claims something about a person named "Nephi", and we report "the Book of Mormon claims the following about Nephi".
Do we need to explicitly say "however,
people who think the Book of Mormon is mostly hogwash think this claim is also hogwash"? Should we add to the [[Nirvana]] and [[Shiva]] articles that a lot of people think that Nirvana is nonsense and Shiva might not actually exist?
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steve v (vertigosteve@yahoo.com) [050722 15:07]:
[With]in [the context of] Mormonism, Nephi is... Seems fairly neutral to me. However there are valid concerns that n/10 average random articles fail to put things in this context, and carry this through. Its easy to be overly general ("worrying trends") or overly particular ("Nephi") and miss the balance.
Remembering to properly place articles in their context is a common problem. It's most pronounced with fictional characters - the writers forget to mention that this isn't real.
- d.
On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 08:03:34PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
I don't see a problem with that article. What else is there to say about it? The Book of Mormon claims something about a person named "Nephi", and we report "the Book of Mormon claims the following about Nephi". Do we need to explicitly say "however, people who think the Book of Mormon is mostly hogwash think this claim is also hogwash"? Should we add to the [[Nirvana]] and [[Shiva]] articles that a lot of people think that Nirvana is nonsense and Shiva might not actually exist?
We do reasonably well with fictional characters. We mention the context in which they appear, and then go on to discuss their character and life as presented in the story. We don't keep saying "By the way, Luke Skywalker doesn't exist" or "Nobody sane believes Harry Potter -really- lives in England; after all, there's no village of Little Whinging".
The same approach should work for religious and mythological figures -- start by mentioning the context in which they appear (e.g. the Book of Mormon) and then go on to describe them within that context. This should work just as well for Nephi as for Noah or Maui or Krishna or Apollo.
Consider the following passage from [[Apollo]]:
Apollo had an affair with a mortal princess named Leucothea, daughter of Orchamus and sister of Clytia. Leucothea loved Apollo who disguised himself as Leucothea's mother to gain entrance to her chambers. Clytia, jealous of her sister because she wanted Apollo for herself, told Orchamus the truth, betraying her sister's trust and confidence in her. Enraged, Orchamus ordered Leucothea to be buried alive. Apollo refused to forgive Clytia for betraying his beloved, and a grieving Clytia wilted and slowly died. Apollo changed her into an incense plant, either heliotrope or sunflower, which follows the sun every day.
Would this passage be improved greatly by stating that modern science holds that the heliotrope or sunflower evolved rather than being created by Apollo from the corpse of a princess?
Delirium:
I don't see a problem with that article. What else is there to say about it? The Book of Mormon claims something about a person named "Nephi", and we report "the Book of Mormon claims the following about Nephi". Do we need to explicitly say "however, people who think the Book of Mormon is mostly hogwash think this claim is also hogwash"?
The Book of Mormon is different from, say, ''Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith'', in one important respect: People believe that it records historical facts. This also distinguishes it from ancient mythologies that are no longer believed. Furthermore, many of these factual claims are not, on their face, absurd: There are many ancient tribes about whom we know little, and the discovery of new ancient cultures is a real possibility.
When someone makes a claim about a clearly fictional universe, that's fine, and an initial establishment of context is sufficient. When they make claims, based on their scripture, about reality, then these claims deserve to be challenged. We challenge a 19th-century healing mythology like homeopathy with facts, so we should equally challenge the Mormon belief system, where it is not mere theology, with facts.
A Mormon who wants to know: Did Nephi exist? Did the Jaredites really live? - will not find answers in Wikipedia. Instead, they will find what they already know: official church doctrine, and perhaps some other LDS-related beliefs as in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaredite
Wikipedia's mission is not "free storage space for all belief systems", but "free knowledge for all." Another problem with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephi , more than the first paragraph, is the second one, which goes on:
"Another Nephi lived around the time of Christ, and he was a descendant of Lehi as well. This Nephi was the son of Helaman. Nephi also had a son who was called Nephi after him."
The context "Book of Mormon" is easily lost once established.
An NPOV article - makes sure that the context is clear at any given point - balances claims about historical reality which are believed by many with scientific knowledge.
So yes, a statement like "These claims are not accepted by historians of the period" is generally necessary in these articles, but it would almost certainly be reverted immediately by Wikipedia's Mormon congregation.
Erik
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 12:33 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
Delirium:
I don't see a problem with that article. What else is there to say about it? The Book of Mormon claims something about a person named "Nephi", and we report "the Book of Mormon claims the following about Nephi". Do we need to explicitly say "however, people who think the Book of Mormon is mostly hogwash think this claim is also hogwash"?
The Book of Mormon is different from, say, ''Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith'', in one important respect: People believe that it records historical facts. This also distinguishes it from ancient mythologies that are no longer believed. Furthermore, many of these factual claims are not, on their face, absurd: There are many ancient tribes about whom we know little, and the discovery of new ancient cultures is a real possibility.
When someone makes a claim about a clearly fictional universe, that's fine, and an initial establishment of context is sufficient. When they make claims, based on their scripture, about reality, then these claims deserve to be challenged. We challenge a 19th- century healing mythology like homeopathy with facts, so we should equally challenge the Mormon belief system, where it is not mere theology, with facts.
A Mormon who wants to know: Did Nephi exist? Did the Jaredites really live? - will not find answers in Wikipedia. Instead, they will find what they already know: official church doctrine, and perhaps some other LDS-related beliefs as in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaredite
Wikipedia's mission is not "free storage space for all belief systems", but "free knowledge for all." Another problem with http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephi , more than the first paragraph, is the second one, which goes on:
"Another Nephi lived around the time of Christ, and he was a descendant of Lehi as well. This Nephi was the son of Helaman. Nephi also had a son who was called Nephi after him."
The context "Book of Mormon" is easily lost once established.
An NPOV article
- makes sure that the context is clear at any given point
- balances claims about historical reality which are believed by
many with scientific knowledge.
So yes, a statement like "These claims are not accepted by historians of the period" is generally necessary in these articles, but it would almost certainly be reverted immediately by Wikipedia's Mormon congregation.
Erik _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fred Bauder (fredbaud@ctelco.net) [050723 07:46]:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon.
[[Abraham]] states clearly that the only evidence for his existence is in Genesis, and says "If he was a historical person, then ..." which establishes context nicely.
- d.
It's a rather different situation. I have little doubt Abraham existed, due to his being part of an oral tradition. The account given of him may be grossly inaccurate, but it is almost certain he existed. The Book of Mormon, supposedly delivered into the hands of Joseph Smith by an angel, then gone!, is a whole different animal.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:30 PM, David Gerard wrote:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud@ctelco.net) [050723 07:46]:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon.
[[Abraham]] states clearly that the only evidence for his existence is in Genesis, and says "If he was a historical person, then ..." which establishes context nicely.
- d.
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Fred Bauder (fredbaud@ctelco.net) [050723 09:09]:
It's a rather different situation. I have little doubt Abraham existed, due to his being part of an oral tradition. The account given of him may be grossly inaccurate, but it is almost certain he existed. The Book of Mormon, supposedly delivered into the hands of Joseph Smith by an angel, then gone!, is a whole different animal.
Next you'll be impugning the story of Xenu. You Wikipedians and your lack of respect for religion!
- d.
Fred Bauder wrote:
It's a rather different situation. I have little doubt Abraham existed, due to his being part of an oral tradition. The account given of him may be grossly inaccurate, but it is almost certain he existed. The Book of Mormon, supposedly delivered into the hands of Joseph Smith by an angel, then gone!, is a whole different animal.
Yet it is something that I personally take as an article of faith, just like the First Vision. There is a differnece between saying "There are people who believe this to be false" and saying "This is false".
On the other hand, there are people who do in fact believe that there were no such people as Abraham, Moses, or Jesus of Nazareth.
religious articles are always tricky since it is very hard to keep one's pown point of view out. The trick is not to delete other people's viewpooints when they conflict with your own.
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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I believe the church has spent quite a bit of money funding legitimate archaeological research, in the hopes of turning up something definite; a summary of the various projects and their results would make a nice little WP article.
Stan
Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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See Archaeology and the Book of Mormon on Wikipedia.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 5:49 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
I believe the church has spent quite a bit of money funding legitimate archaeological research, in the hopes of turning up something definite; a summary of the various projects and their results would make a nice little WP article.
Stan
Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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Incidentally, google for "Los Lunas inscription" to find out more about one particularly intriguing piece of physical evidence. Definitely worth its own article...
Stan
Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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See Los Lunas Decalogue Stone on Wikipedia.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 6:00 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
Incidentally, google for "Los Lunas inscription" to find out more about one particularly intriguing piece of physical evidence. Definitely worth its own article...
Stan Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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Cool, I wonder why Google doesn't return this page in its results...
Stan
Fred Bauder wrote:
See Los Lunas Decalogue Stone on Wikipedia.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 6:00 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
Incidentally, google for "Los Lunas inscription" to find out more about one particularly intriguing piece of physical evidence. Definitely worth its own article...
Stan Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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Ah but it returns Answers.com 's version instead. Say, ka-chinng!
SV
--- Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Cool, I wonder why Google doesn't return this page in its results...
Stan
Fred Bauder wrote:
See Los Lunas Decalogue Stone on Wikipedia.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 6:00 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
Incidentally, google for "Los Lunas inscription"
to find out more
about one particularly intriguing piece of
physical evidence.
Definitely worth its own article...
Stan Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to
prove the reality of
any person, city, nation or event which is in
the Book of Mormon
would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the
nation of Nephi,
even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic
script, found in the New
World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge
wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited
this article, noting
that no historical evidence exists other than
the Book of
Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they
dare... Or come up
with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins
with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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On Yahoo!, the Wikipedia article is #15.
On Google, Answers.com is #21, a WP clone is #31, a Dansk Wikipedia article is #38... and the English article isn't in their index. http://www.google.com/search?q=los+lunas+inscription+wikipedia
Similar results for "Los Lunas" alone (linking to the article about the city).
SJ
On 7/24/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Cool, I wonder why Google doesn't return this page in its results...
Stan
Fred Bauder wrote:
See Los Lunas Decalogue Stone on Wikipedia.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 6:00 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
Incidentally, google for "Los Lunas inscription" to find out more about one particularly intriguing piece of physical evidence. Definitely worth its own article...
Stan Fred Bauder wrote:
The discovery of any evidence which tended to prove the reality of any person, city, nation or event which is in the Book of Mormon would be a revolutionary event. A coin from the nation of Nephi, even the tiniest scrap of ancient Semitic script, found in the New World, would be priceless.
Fred
On Jul 22, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we will find out. I have just edited this article, noting that no historical evidence exists other than the Book of Mormon. My cousins can revert me, if they dare... Or come up with some evidence. Maybe a few gold coins with Nephi's visage...
Where could you spend them? :-)
Ec
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--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
The Book of Mormon is different from, say, ''Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith'', in one important respect: People believe that it records historical facts.
Oh contraire! It says right up front: "A long time ago..." And George Lucas ain't no liar!!!
Heathen!
-- mav
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Yes, we have come a long way. I remember creating the article Great Salt Lake. I got a little flack from someone in Brooklyn, but Utah did not weigh in. Anti-Mormonism exists. Mormons, especially in groups, don't always act cool and some folks exaggerate or even make up grievances. POV pushing violates our policies. But we have never had a Mormon arbitration case.
Fred
On Jul 21, 2005, at 5:08 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
While I would love to agree with you entirely, the situation e.g. with the LDS articles is exactly the opposite. Criticism is spread on sub-articles of sub-articles, and you have pages like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mormonism which is largely an LDS description of anti-Mormon activities. Some of the LDS pages could come straight out of glossy brochures from Utah.
David Gerard wrote: "...success..."[!]
On Jul 21, 2005, at 5:08 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
While I would love to agree with you
entirely...[there are] pages like
is largely an LDS description of anti-Mormon
activities. Some of the LDS pages could
come straight out of glossy brochures from Utah.
Peoples can become greatly occupied with historiologising their collective persecution. (Which is easy enough to designated as a general -ism with anti- in front of it.) For example 9/11 articles might just as easily be filed under "Category:Anti-Americanism," and written off as a "largely Western/American description of anti-Western/American activities" (Didnt certain people even set up a "memorial wiki"?)
So, whilst its generally rather easy (for objective[istical] people) to see when something's a bit one-sided, it can be difficult for experienced editors to promote basic NPOV policy in some areas. So its not that "its all too much hard work," its that WP should try to conceptually organize various types of NPOV debates and approach them more collectively. Say "N P O V c o m m i t t e e."
SV
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David Gerard wrote:
Poor, Edmund W (Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com) [050721 23:56]:
A lot of problems Wikipedia has comes down to:
- "I want the web site to reflect my own ideas, feelings and desires."
This comes into endless conflict with our stated mission of creating an unbiased yet comprehensive free encyclopedia. Nonetheless, we've done an outstanding job. We've got the world's attention, but we need to figure out how to take it to the next level.
We're having fun with this on [[WP:SCN]] (a Scientology wikiproject). You have the views of the CoS members and the views of the critics, and they're basically almost utterly incompatible. But NPOV is achievable! With great effort! (Also, we have a recently ex-member who's doing a great job on the articles about the "tech", i.e. the substance of the religion itself.) [[Xenu]] is achieving widespread fame in the blogosphere, and is being quoted (uncredited) in just about every recent press article on Tom Cruise's proselytisation for the Church. So we're getting just a little attention. I'm sure we'll weather it, and Wikipedia's immune systems appear to be kicking in just fine in at least one case ...
In other words, achieving consensus is hard work. Calling for a poll on some of these question can blow any possibility of consensus.
Ec
On Jul 21, 2005, at 9:56 AM, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
This comes into endless conflict with our stated mission of creating an unbiased yet comprehensive free encyclopedia. Nonetheless, we've done an outstanding job. We've got the world's attention, but we need to figure out how to take it to the next level.
I am increasingly coming to believe that NPOV does not lead to an unbiased encyclopedia, but rather an encyclopedia that is biased against idiocy. There's a wide number of totalizing POVs - Church of Scientology springs to mind - that can't function in a NPOV environment because they deny the existence of multiple points of view. These POVs are excluded. We are biased against them.
As well we should be, but still. It's a key distinction, and one that I think plays into other parts of this debate.
-Snowspinner