Please take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kathmandu_Unive...
Should we, as I suggest there, cut a bit of slack for artciles about something in the Third World, or do we just accept the "no reliable third party sources for notability" mantra. It is just a stub and the information seems well supported by the external link to the School site. Not perfect, I agree, but I do not suppose Kadmandu newspapers are searched by Google and that is not perfect either. I would welcome views in general on this sort of thing, without asking any of you to intervene in that discussion for deletion.
Brian
We should probably have some form of researchability for items whose predominant form of reference will be a non-English language.
Perhaps link to a Google Translate version of the page?
Parker
On 2/15/07, Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au wrote:
Please take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kathmandu_Unive...
Should we, as I suggest there, cut a bit of slack for artciles about something in the Third World, or do we just accept the "no reliable third party sources for notability" mantra. It is just a stub and the information seems well supported by the external link to the School site. Not perfect, I agree, but I do not suppose Kadmandu newspapers are searched by Google and that is not perfect either. I would welcome views in general on this sort of thing, without asking any of you to intervene in that discussion for deletion.
Brian
-- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity
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On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
Should we, as I suggest there, cut a bit of slack for artciles about something in the Third World, or do we just accept the "no reliable third party sources for notability" mantra.
This is a special case of a fundamental problem with Wikipedia: the demand for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on the Internet and can be easily found.
I'd say to accept it, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason to do so other than IAR. (Which proves that IAR can apply to *anything*... how many of you thought there would ever be a case where it needs to be used to ignore notability?)
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:05:44 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
This is a special case of a fundamental problem with Wikipedia: the demand for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on the Internet and can be easily found.
It's called FUTON bias and it doesn't only affect Wikipedia.
Guy (JzG)
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:05:44 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
This is a special case of a fundamental problem with Wikipedia: the demand for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on the Internet and can be easily found.
It's called FUTON bias and it doesn't only affect Wikipedia.
In some corners of academia, particularly computer science, this is sometimes seen as a positive phenomenon. Papers freely available on the internet are cited more frequently (controlling for other factors) than papers that are only available in print or from pay archives [1]. This provides a nice bit of pressure for authors to put their papers on their homepages, and for journals to make their archives publicly accessible. That pressure has been successful in a number of cases (e.g. the editorial board of the journal _Machine Learning_ resigning en masse to support an open-access alternative [2], which pressured _Machine Learning_ itself into making many of its own archives freely available online). The result is more information available to everyone, not only the wealthy or those who have affiliations with wealthy first-world universities---a goal that seems rather in keeping with Wikipedia's spirit.
-Mark
[1] S. Lawrence. Online or invisible? _Nature_ 411, 2001. Online version: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
[2] Editorial Board of the Kluwer Journal, Machine Learning: Resignation Letter. _SIGIR Forum_ 35(2), 2001. Online version: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigir/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html
Delirium wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:05:44 -0800 (PST), Ken Arromdee wrote:
This is a special case of a fundamental problem with Wikipedia: the demand for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on the Internet and can be easily found.
It's called FUTON bias and it doesn't only affect Wikipedia.
In some corners of academia, particularly computer science, this is sometimes seen as a positive phenomenon. Papers freely available on the internet are cited more frequently (controlling for other factors) than papers that are only available in print or from pay archives [1]. This provides a nice bit of pressure for authors to put their papers on their homepages, and for journals to make their archives publicly accessible. ... The result is more information available to everyone, not only the wealthy or those who have affiliations with wealthy first-world universities---a goal that seems rather in keeping with Wikipedia's spirit.
-Mark
[1] S. Lawrence. Online or invisible? _Nature_ 411, 2001. Online version: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
I grok the idea but am unfamiliar with the acronym.
Computer science is a relatively recent field of study, so the positivity of the phenomenon makes more sense there than it would in most other fields. In older disciplines entire archives of material have never been digitized at all, and I can't help but be concerned about the control on knowledge exercised by those who choose what to digitize. Affordability is a major factor, but it's far from being the only one. I'm far more concened by who don't bother to look beyond the internet, and what that's doing to the general state of knowledge.
Ec
Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
Should we, as I suggest there, cut a bit of slack for artciles about something in the Third World, or do we just accept the "no reliable third party sources for notability" mantra.
This is a special case of a fundamental problem with Wikipedia: the demand for sources and notability produces a heavy bias towards things which are on the Internet and can be easily found.
I'd say to accept it, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason to do so other than IAR. (Which proves that IAR can apply to *anything*... how many of you thought there would ever be a case where it needs to be used to ignore notability?)
I support "Ignore All Rules", but I don't see that as being applicable here. It looks too much like the easy way out. One does not deal wih a fundamental problem by ignoring it.
I agree with the importance of sources, but if we truly want this to be a project for the world we need to avoid imposing western Aristotelianism in places where it was not the cultural norm. That would just be another form of imperialism that we made ourselves believe was gone when Europe's former colonies became independant.
We do Wikipedia a disservice when we insist on a rigorous interpretation of reliability. Sources allow us to trace the origins of concepts that are expressed in an article; having them implies nothing about the validity of the concept. There is certainly no necessity that a source be on the internet, and some benefit might be derived from insisting on at least one source that is not from the internet. There is certainly no necessity that a source even be in English (or whatever other language is used in the Wikipedia inquestion); somebody who understands the source language can always translate it later.
Ec