wjhonson(a)aol.com wrote: I agree, although I think it depends upon the case. It all depends upon which policy you are talking about. Yes, but the driving impetus was to stop vanity pages and advertising, if you look back at the discussions regarding drafting the porn guidance, you'll see advertising was a concern for those participating.The trouble with gaining consensus on anything for fiction is that there are people who won't even allow a bar like "has to have appeared in five works of fiction". I've just had to point out to someone that their whole argument, which was based upon the fact that subject specific notability guidance couldn't extend or provide an alternative route to notability beyond that in the main notability guidance, actually contradicted the notability guidance itself, which emphatically states the opposite. I'm also concerned with a potential rewrite of the intro to our notability guidance being discussed on the talk page, because it looks like it might remove these subject specific routes. We're kind of losing sight of the argument that we don't have to think of Wikipedia as paper, and that each article is a different page and a different entry. We've kind of lost sight of the argument that because we aren't paper, our articles can be seen as sections of one large article. So like you say, or at least I'm assuming you're saying, our porn star coverage is allowed to go to as deep as possible to ensure our coverage is as broad, wide and encompassing. That means saying five films is enough, to sate the desire of those who become immersed in the field. (It's kind of hard to avoid double entendres with this subject) I'm aware of the arguments. The big flaw in the argument you are pushing is that our policies, especially no original research, call for articles to rely mainly on published reliable secondary sources. That's been in policy in some form or another for ages, I think it is one of Larry Sanger's additions to the rule book. It's currently coming into play in a number of places. So yes, fine, you can read stuff of a dvd box, but the argument is, if that's all you have, then you don't have an article. You also don't have an article if you have a lot of primary and tertiary sources, but very few secondary sources. I think the trouble is that very early on you'd have people interested in science subjects writing policies over here, and people interested in fiction subjects writing policies over there, and conflict has ensued when people discovered the other "set of policies" and started applying them to the "wrong" subject, if you see what I mean. And original research is really hard to apply to fiction, because a lot of it surprisingly does amount to interpretation. Now yes, we should let consensus determine content, but is that a consensus as defined in policy or by editors? And then we fall into arguments over what a local consensus is. Surprisingly few people appreciate the argument that a consensus enshrined in a policy can be just as localised as any other. I can never tell if that's small mindedness or political ignorance. I also find people are too busy arguing at article "a" in order to protect or advance positions at articles "b", "c" and "d". It would be so much easier if there was some way of just debating the merits of article "a". Alternatively, I find the people I think of as my peers are increasingly avoiding debates and just editing the encyclopedia. I kind of appreciate and understand that.

Not that it's a single source. The problem is that it's a single outmoded source, never really balanced and NPOV, and by now wholly unreliable in almost all subjects, the ancient world included. About 95% of it was written over a century ago, and there is almost nothing for which new information and new interpretations have made the existing version inappropriate as the base for a modern encyclopedia. Essentially all text from there needs to be removed, except for some quotations to show how things were looked at historically, and the relevant portions or articles redone from what would now be considered reliable sources. To even know what parts can be rescued requires a sound knowledge of the subject and its development, and cannot be done mechanically. The situation is exactly comparable to what it would be if that EB had simply reprinted Diderot's 1770 Encyclopedie. It would have been a laughing stock to have presented that as a current work, and so with our articles derived from it. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 7:30 PM, <wjhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:

2009/8/19 <wjhonson(a)aol.com>om>: I remember copyediting one article on a now-obscure 18th century British parliamentarian. Basically I just rewrote for style. And, y'know, I'm pretty sure it'd be a reasonable start on the article, and certainly not a deletion candidate just for having 1911EB as its sole source. - d.

Of course I wouldn't put them up for AfD. There is no reason to make the previous text inaccessible--and conceivably some of it could be used. I could do much more rewriting if people put fewer acceptable (or at least fixable or mergeable) articles up for unwarranted AfDs, or did not try to change WP:N policy to justify deleting still more. Now, I came here to write, but I've ended up doing mainly rescuing. It's hard to say which should have priority--making existing articles better, or getting acceptable new articles. My choice was rescue because fewer people were doing that. A difficulty with the updated EB articles is that people did not normally indicate just what part was from the EB, so it is hard to tell from the face what part is unreliable. (It can of course be told by looking at the first versions in the history, or by checking the Wiksource link if present--or one of the other available online texts, or guessed at by looking for opinionated prose. ) As for the British parliamentarian, I can't identify him. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 10:30 PM, Andrew Gray<andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:21 AM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The big problem with 1911EB articles used to seed articles is that the phrases and text used often survive through to later versions, and when trying to critically assess an article, it is very difficult to tell which bits were from the 1911EB article, and which bits were added later (precise footnoting and referencing would help here). Sometimes a comparison in page history, or with a wikisource page, can help. Sometimes not. There is a project that tries to clean these articles up, and lots of guidance. The guidance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1911_Encyclopaedia_Britannica "The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is out of copyright and can in some cases be used as a source of material for the English Wikipedia. However, it is now quite old, and there are many problems with this material in a modern encyclopedia. Even in 1917 it was seen as an unreliable source when Willard Huntington Wright published his scathing Misinforming a Nation, a 200+ page critical examination of the problems with the encyclopedia. The "myth" of the EB1911 being the best and greatest Encyclopedia is a testament to a successful marketing campaign which usually doesn't hold up under critical examination." All those 10 points on that page are good, but how often are they followed? As a brief aside, I loved Brion's comment on the talk page: "Well, even if the edit histories on the live server get cleared again, I for one intend to have a century's worth of backups in my petabyte storage crystal library when the times comes. :) --Brion 03:52 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1911_Encyclopedia_topics "The only remaining task on Variation and selection is integrating references, probably to their own authors' pages. That page is still up for historical interest and to finish small amounts, but for all intents and purposes, this article is merged. I'm taking it off the 1911 list, and thus declaring the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica to be, at first draft level, merged into Wikipedia. Ladies, gentlemen, and algorithms, it's been an honor. Alba 15:24, 27 February 2006 (UTC)" Impressive! How long did that take, I wonder? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_art… "Please verify that each of the articles is free of such errors, and has updated coverage, before removing the item from the list. Also, if the article does derive from the encyclopedia, make sure it has the {{1911}} tag in its References section. It may be helpful to note on the article's talk page any significant differences in the comprehensiveness of our article as compared to the 1911 article. New guideline June 2008: If the article is in the Wikisource repository of EB1911, include a {{Wikisource1911Enc}} tag as the first line of the References section." Unfortunately: 4.5% complete. So it looks like it will be slow progress there. Carcharoth

wjhonson(a)aol.com wrote: You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension this is "my" argument, rather than just one argument that I have heard put forwards. I'm not going to waste time defending it, since it isn't my argument to start with. You'd be better off looking at [[WP:NOR]] and working out how to amend it to reflect what you believe is consensus. I am well aware of the provenance of many of our articles. I kind of like the idea that people will tag an article for clean up rather than nominate it for deletion. It makes me kind of warm and fuzzy and nostalgic. The thrust of the argument against tertiary sources is this: "Third party sources don't provide any evidence of notability unless they contain some sort of commentary on their subject matter, othewise they are classed as tertiary sources." What's at issue is that there are good faith misunderstandings of policy and guidance out there, which it seems it is hard to correct. We seem to have created language which doesn't solve any problems at all. Look at this fragment from WP:NOR: "Tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources. Some tertiary sources may be more reliable than others...". That's a tremendous weapon to charge any tertiary source not to taste as "not as reliable as these other ones that I like". Look at this fragment: "Deciding whether primary, secondary or tertiary sources are more suitable on any given occasion is a matter of common sense and good editorial judgment, and should be discussed on article talk pages." That leaves the whole issue to argument, with no onus on either side to budge from their position. We've probably entrenched the idea that it's better to stick to your guns than seek compromise. After all, why wouldn;t "your" opinion be the one that is common sense and good judgment. Who is going to admit having bad judgment. Add to this that arb-com won't touch content disputes, and you are left with an atmosphere where both sides try to act as nice as possible whilst trying to goad the other party into a mistake for which they can get blocked. Is it any wonder disputes can fester across Wikipedia?