For everyone's information, en:User:OneGuy has posted a proposal here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement
There is already a vote of sorts taking place -- a list of "support" and "oppose" votes is growing slowly. I am not clear as to why a vote is taking place so early, or whether the vote is intended to have any force. I also don't know if it was advertised anywhere (I hadn't seen it anywhere but RC), but I thought a proposal (and apparent vote) to disable anonymous editing and add stricter requirements for registering as a user deserved a note on the mailing list. If it's already been posted here, forgive me (but I don't think it has). Thanks for your attention to this issue,
James Rosenzweig (en:User:Jwrosenzweig)
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On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 15:19:00 -0800 (PST), James Rosenzweig jwrosenzweig@yahoo.com wrote:
For everyone's information, en:User:OneGuy has posted a proposal here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement
*sigh* Not this again!
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which anyone can edit. Not "anyone who can be bothered to fill out a form, wait for an e-mail to arrive, fiddle about with magic verification URLs, and then try and remember what it was they were going to edit". Anyone who wants to start a project that's the latter, go do it.
See, for example: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_users_should_not_be_allowed_to_edit... and its talk page.
And for those of you looking for light relief: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_gays_should_not_be_allowed_to_edit...
James Rosenzweig wrote:
For everyone's information, en:User:OneGuy has posted a proposal here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement
There is already a vote of sorts taking place -- a list of "support" and "oppose" votes is growing slowly. I am not clear as to why a vote is taking place so early, or whether the vote is intended to have any force. I also don't know if it was advertised anywhere (I hadn't seen it anywhere but RC), but I thought a proposal (and apparent vote) to disable anonymous editing and add stricter requirements for registering as a user deserved a note on the mailing list. If it's already been posted here, forgive me (but I don't think it has). Thanks for your attention to this issue,
Sorry but that link is not to en existing page.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
James Rosenzweig wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement
Sorry but that link is not to en existing page.
Ec
Broken link, try : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling_edits_by_unregistered_users...
Pete
Sorry but that link is not to en existing page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling_edits_by_unregistered_users...
Ray Saintonge wrote:
James Rosenzweig wrote:
For everyone's information, en:User:OneGuy has posted a proposal here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement
There is already a vote of sorts taking place -- a list of "support" and "oppose" votes is growing slowly. I am not clear as to why a vote is taking place so early, or whether the vote is intended to have any force. I also don't know if it was advertised anywhere (I hadn't seen it anywhere but RC), but I thought a proposal (and apparent vote) to disable anonymous editing and add stricter requirements for registering as a user deserved a note on the mailing list. If it's already been posted here, forgive me (but I don't think it has). Thanks for your attention to this issue,
Sorry but that link is not to en existing page.
Ec
Here's the fixed link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disabling_edits_by_unregistered_users...
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
James Rosenzweig wrote:
There is already a vote of sorts taking place -- a list of "support" and "oppose" votes is growing slowly. I am not clear as to why a vote is taking place so early, or whether the vote is intended to have any force.
I consider such decisions to remain firmly within my range of discretion, so any such vote would necessarily just be a poll of community opinion, which is of course always a valid thing to do.
As it stands, it seems that community opinion is, as always, firmly in favor of openness, a position which I wholeheartedly endorse.
I *do* think there is a serious problem which needs to be addressed, and I actually agree with Adam Carr's comment that "Unless Wikipedia takes some policy initiative such as this, it will not only be unable to achieve its objectives, it will begin to deteriorate in quality as serious editors are driven away."
But I think this is the wrong approach -- editing by anonymous ip numbers is barely a problem at all. Under current blocking rules, anons are not given the same "due process" protections as logged in users, and so it's easy enough (other than some very annoying technical limitations which could eventually cause me to change my mind) to deal with.
Our biggest problems within the community are not anons trolling and vandalizing, but rather egregious trolls and pov pushers who log in and take advantage of our boundless good will. Making it harder to sign up will not help with this at all, and can actually hurt it if the overall rate of participation by the (good willed) general public declines in the face of some extra burdens of signing up.
POV pushers will jump through the hoops of signing up. Making it harder to sign up does nothing to discourage them. So, yes, we need to do something about how long it takes us to get rid of difficult people -- and this is a difficult problem to reconcile with the demands of NPOV and openness and quality.
--Jimbo
A comment on said poll page -
I think it's easier if we develop a Bayesian Flitering Edit system. The RC patrol can mark edits for a Bayesian filter to show what kind of changes are considered as "spamish" or "trollish"... in our case, "vandalism." Then in the RC changes, have a percentage listing how much of a chance that the article was vandalised by the edit. Factors would include large amounts of missing text, large amounts of added links, and so on, and so forth. --[[User:AllyUnion| AllyUnion]] [[User talk:AllyUnion|(talk)]] 09:13, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
So the questions are, can it be done, and how dificult would it be to do?
I'm forwarding this to Wikitech-l and see if the devs can have a go at it.
John Lee ([[en:User:Johnleemk]])
Robin Shannon wrote:
A comment on said poll page -
I think it's easier if we develop a Bayesian Flitering Edit system. The RC patrol can mark edits for a Bayesian filter to show what kind of changes are considered as "spamish" or "trollish"... in our case, "vandalism." Then in the RC changes, have a percentage listing how much of a chance that the article was vandalised by the edit. Factors would include large amounts of missing text, large amounts of added links, and so on, and so forth. --[[User:AllyUnion| AllyUnion]] [[User talk:AllyUnion|(talk)]] 09:13, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
So the questions are, can it be done, and how dificult would it be to do?
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 09:22 PM Subject: [WikiEN-l] New policy proposal
Our biggest problems within the community are not anons trolling and
vandalizing, but rather egregious trolls and pov pushers who log in and take advantage of our boundless good will.
Can you give any examples of what you mean by "egregious trolls and pov pushers"? Also of the "boundless good will."? Also, who is meant by "we" and "our"? -WikiUser.
:::www.emails.net::: Is this Spam? If so, report it!
WikiUser wrote
Can you give any examples of what you mean by "egregious trolls and pov
pushers"? Also of the "boundless good will."? Also, who is meant by "we" and "our"? -WikiUser.
Of course Jimbo can; and of course he isn't going to make pointed personal remarks. And if he can't speak of 'we', the community of Wiki-en or Wikipedia as a whole or Wikimedia as a whole (take your pick), I wonder who can.
For the record, I think POV pushing is the single problem in relation to WP to which we don't have a working solution, as of end 2004. So I'm entirely behind Jimbo's analysis of the challenge. We have the eyeballs to fact-check with, in many areas; we have the eyeballs to see what is too vague to be checkable, as a practical matter if not as a legalistic definition. What we don't have, in practice, and what I feel the lack of, is the way of defining a 'pattern of POV editing' that would warrant warning and then sanctions. This ought to be seen as the current defining issue. Anyway, this all points back to the ArbCom elections as the real focus of Wiki-en's public life; which is only right and proper.
Charles
Charles Matthews (charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com) [041212 09:32]:
For the record, I think POV pushing is the single problem in relation to WP to which we don't have a working solution, as of end 2004. So I'm entirely behind Jimbo's analysis of the challenge. We have the eyeballs to fact-check with, in many areas; we have the eyeballs to see what is too vague to be checkable, as a practical matter if not as a legalistic definition. What we don't have, in practice, and what I feel the lack of, is the way of defining a 'pattern of POV editing' that would warrant warning and then sanctions. This ought to be seen as the current defining issue. Anyway, this all points back to the ArbCom elections as the real focus of Wiki-en's public life; which is only right and proper.
The POV-pushing problem can be alleviated to some extent with references. (e.g. when Mr-Natural-Health added a reference to [[Alternative medicine]] which someone looked up and pointed out it actually supported the opposite view to the one he was intending it to support).
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
I would love love love it if the standard edit boilerplate included the following as the first paragraph, on its own:
Have you remembered to include your references?
- with the word "references" being a link to a page on how to reference things. (Inline links, a mention in ==External links and references== ... Do we have a suitable page?) What would it take for this to happen? Can anyone see any insuperable problems with putting this in?
- d.
David Gerard wrote
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references.
I'm happy if I can get a good book or two referenced, and an external link or so to corroborate. I am totally against having to footnote everything. That is a lame way to have to write - training wheels for Ph.D. students.
Basic point for me, in fact becoming fundamental: WP is not an academic institution, and can't afford 'guild restrictions'. Leaving the question of what it is.
We need to have the word 'para-academic' in mind. WP can be everyone's resource of quick access, to extent that they have an Internet connection. WP can be one of the Seven Wonders of the Web. WP can make para-academic sound very good: not the thesis of 300000 words on a humanities subject, but the executive summary. Please don't tell me that WP can go head-to-head with academia. Of course cranking up the standards would help, generally speaking; of course making formats for references less slapdash, and having some editing tools for that, would also be a plus.
Charles
Charles Matthews wrote:
David Gerard wrote
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references.
I'm happy if I can get a good book or two referenced, and an external link or so to corroborate. I am totally against having to footnote everything. That is a lame way to have to write - training wheels for Ph.D. students.
A sense of balance is important. We also can't confine ourselves to only peer-reviewed journals, as some seem to suggest.
We need to have the word 'para-academic' in mind. WP can be everyone's resource of quick access, to extent that they have an Internet connection. WP can be one of the Seven Wonders of the Web. WP can make para-academic sound very good: not the thesis of 300000 words on a humanities subject, but the executive summary.
Hmmm! An executive summary of everything. :-)
Of course cranking up the standards would help, generally speaking; of course making formats for references less slapdash, and having some editing tools for that, would also be a plus.
Agreed
Ray Saintonge (saintonge@telus.net) [041213 20:03]:
Charles Matthews wrote:
David Gerard wrote
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references.
I'm happy if I can get a good book or two referenced, and an external link or so to corroborate. I am totally against having to footnote everything. That is a lame way to have to write - training wheels for Ph.D. students.
A sense of balance is important. We also can't confine ourselves to only peer-reviewed journals, as some seem to suggest.
I'm for footnoting quite a lot, particularly on contentious pages - I've seen how effective it can be in defusing editor conflicts. I'm thinking particularly of [[United Kingdon Independence Party]], the section on neo-Nazi infiltration. That was thrashed out between a UKIP supporter and myself (not a supporter) using sentences each of which was followed by a reference. The resulting paragraph is quite readable, getting its facts across nicely, and you can look up every assertion.
That's an extreme case, but it was needed for an NPOV summary of the facts that would survive the editing process.
(And at the moment I'm herding [[Xenu]] through Featured Article Candidates. You can be sure *tremendous* attention is being paid to NPOV and solid referencing ...)
You'll have the occasional Adam Carr who just *knows* his stuff. But, as [[Wikipedia:Cite sources]] points out: "This applies even when the information is currently undisputed - even if there's no dispute right now, someone might come along in five years and want to dispute, verify, or learn more about a topic." Furthermore, contributors like that are in fact *rare*.
A culture of referencing will do wonders for the general standard of Wikipedia.
Of course cranking up the standards would help, generally speaking; of course making formats for references less slapdash, and having some editing tools for that, would also be a plus.
Agreed
I'd still love '''Have you included your [[Wikipedia:Cite sources|references]]?''' on the 'Submit' boilerplate. If it doesn't lead to [[m:Instruction creep]]. Because, you know, editors generally just don't bother much with references, and they should.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Ray Saintonge (saintonge@telus.net) [041213 20:03]:
Charles Matthews wrote:
David Gerard wrote
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references.
I'm happy if I can get a good book or two referenced, and an external link or so to corroborate. I am totally against having to footnote everything. That is a lame way to have to write - training wheels for Ph.D. students.
A sense of balance is important. We also can't confine ourselves to only peer-reviewed journals, as some seem to suggest.
I'm for footnoting quite a lot, particularly on contentious pages - I've seen how effective it can be in defusing editor conflicts. I'm thinking particularly of [[United Kingdon Independence Party]], the section on neo-Nazi infiltration. That was thrashed out between a UKIP supporter and myself (not a supporter) using sentences each of which was followed by a reference. The resulting paragraph is quite readable, getting its facts across nicely, and you can look up every assertion.
UKIP from the vantage point of someone outside the UK seems like a fringe party, but nevertheless worthy of some mention. Waiting for them to be analyzed in a peer-reviewed journal could be a long wait. It's a good example of the need to have an expanded corpus of acceptable references.
You'll have the occasional Adam Carr who just *knows* his stuff. But, as [[Wikipedia:Cite sources]] points out: "This applies even when the information is currently undisputed - even if there's no dispute right now, someone might come along in five years and want to dispute, verify, or learn more about a topic."
In the short run referencing needs to stress the more important and more realistic sources.
A culture of referencing will do wonders for the general standard of Wikipedia.
At this stage building the habit is far more important than determining the validity of references.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote
A sense of balance is important. We also can't confine ourselves to only peer-reviewed journals, as some seem to suggest.
I can see why the historians get annoyed, in that if you don't have to check any sources, anyone who can read a newspaper can write 'history'. On the other hand on WP anyone _can_ write anything. That's not balance, it's how a wiki works.
Charles
Just heard a radio interview with [[Andrew F. Smith]], who edited this two volume set, the contents of which, he claimed, were severely limited by space. It would be wonderful if we could fill in the gaps left by his 770 articles on (the minutia of) food and drink in America, as well as the rest of the world. Just wanted to share. It might be interesting to look at the kind of articles these guys consider 'encyclopedic'
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195154371/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-4604303-2289765...
Mark Richards
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Mark Richards wrote:
Just heard a radio interview with [[Andrew F. Smith]], who edited this two volume set, the contents of which, he claimed, were severely limited by space. It would be wonderful if we could fill in the gaps left by his 770 articles on (the minutia of) food and drink in America, as well as the rest of the world. Just wanted to share. It might be interesting to look at the kind of articles these guys consider 'encyclopedic'
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195154371/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-4604303-2289765...
Uh-oh, his stuff is going to get listed on VfD for sure now....
:-)
Stan
At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the bottom?
I've had this idea kicking around in my mind for a while. What would people think about a third tab for references. ie. The main article tab, the talk tab, and the references tab, and the subscripted numbers (or whatever) would be links to the references tab. i mentioned this to tim starling, and i dont think that he saw any particualarly big tech problem with this.
paz y amor, [[User:The bellman]]
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 21:33:59 -0800, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the bottom?
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Robin Shannon (robin.shannon@gmail.com) [041213 00:24]:
I've had this idea kicking around in my mind for a while. What would people think about a third tab for references. ie. The main article tab, the talk tab, and the references tab, and the subscripted numbers (or whatever) would be links to the references tab. i mentioned this to tim starling, and i dont think that he saw any particualarly big tech problem with this.
I see a slight problem in using it to reduce contention: that sometimes the recalcitrant editor has to be hit over the goshdarn head with the references for them to sink in. I'd rather have them rendered in <small> at the bottom of the article if they're not in the main text.
OTOH we could have an option, cinse developer time is of course copious and free [*].
OTOOH, I suggest we get editors into the general habit of providing backup for their assertions, see what form references tend to take then write the feature to facilitate that. How it's done on other Wikipedias would be important to check too.
- d.
[*] probably not
After literally minutes of further thought, and reading the other contributions to this thread, I can see that there are two things needed: * a syntax for footnotes within article text * a way of gathering them at the end of the article, and inserting links within the article text to the footnote.
It seems that these are two different functions. The first would be done best by using the template syntax. The second would be best done using an extension tag, to allow the footnotes to be gathered together as a list under a heading (and to manufacture that heading if it is not present in the article), and generating the links within the HTML structure. (All of this assumes that template expansion is done before page-rendering).
So, you could have nice templates like {{book-ref|author=...|publisher=...|etc...}}, {{journal-ref}} and so on, taking named arguments, which are * self-explanatory * easy to understand * easy to customise * use existing friendly inline syntax and a lower-level <reference subheading="..."> ... </reference> syntax which can be used within the templates themselves that invokes a Wikipedia extension mechanism. Thus, the implementation (and low-level syntax for invoking that mechanism) is nicely decoupled from the user-visible syntax.
We could probably also do {{extlink}} in the same way, to mop up the remaining in-line external links, and put them under the "External links" subheading.
-- Neil
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the bottom?
The following won't solve the entire problem, but it's an easy fix to part of the problem of providing references.
I've recently noticed, while updating a few of the articles that offer statistics on nations, that for the most part they lack any notice that the information was taken from the CIA Factbook. Adding a reference to those articles would not only explain where these figures came from, but in the all-too-frequent case of outdated information allow a user to find the latest numbers.
The only reason I can see that we wouldn't want to provide proper attribution is that contributors don't want to acknowledge a connection to the US CIA, which, to put it mildly, has a remarkably tarnished reputation.
So to solve this problem in attribution, I wrote {{template:CIAfb}}, to be added to the bottom of the relevant articles. Perhaps some folks could join me in adding this template to more articles where appropriate?
Geoff
Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the bottom?
<footnote>This would probably be better and more intuitive.</footnote>, where the tag might be "footnote", "foot", "note", or whatever. It also fits in with the way that the software is designed to be extended.
-- Neil
On 13 Dec 2004, at 14:18, Neil Harris wrote:
<footnote>This would probably be better and more intuitive.</footnote>, where the tag might be "footnote", "foot", "note", or whatever. It also fits in with the way that the software is designed to be extended.
-- Neil
You're aware that we do have footnote syntax, right? Admittedly somewhat unwieldy (and a new syntax has been proposed), but it's there anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes#Example_2
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Jens Ropers (ropers@ropersonline.com) [041214 12:17]:
You're aware that we do have footnote syntax, right? Admittedly somewhat unwieldy (and a new syntax has been proposed), but it's there anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes#Example_2
Those are called HTML anchors ;-)
A less unwieldy footnote syntax (e.g. not needing to be renumbered by hand every time the article sections are shuffled) would, I assume, require some intelligence from MediaWiki in processing it into a nice-looking article.
- d.
Neil Harris wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the bottom?
<footnote>This would probably be better and more intuitive.</footnote>, where the tag might be "footnote", "foot", "note", or whatever. It also fits in with the way that the software is designed to be extended.
I think that this approach would be more idiot proof. It should parallel the category system but probably simpler since it does not need to be directly referenced from anywhere outside of the article. The categories for an article can be made to show up together at a predetermined place on the page; in that regard this would be no different.
I don't think that multiple references to the same source should be combined. It would make it difficult to backtrace a reference to see just where a reference was used. If the reference is in any way questionable you want to be able to see just what statements were based on it. Still other references will be to the same source but may differ only by the page number in the work.
The default placement of footnotes should be at the bottom of the page, but I would add a couple of options. In the first I would allow for them to be put at the end of each section with an H2 heading. This would put the notes closer to where they are needed. In some cases the editor may even want them at the end of each paragraph.
Another option could be to put them in a new column to the right of the noted text, and aligned so that the notes can scroll with the text. In Wikisource this could have some very interesting applications. In addition to having footnotes we have also had some talk about encouraging translations of the works that we carry. A very similar technique could be used to anchor the translations of text sections, perhaps by putting the note as the first item in a paragraph.
Ec
David Gerard wrote:
Charles Matthews (charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com) [041212 09:32]:
For the record, I think POV pushing is the single problem in relation to WP to which we don't have a working solution, as of end 2004. So I'm entirely behind Jimbo's analysis of the challenge. We have the eyeballs to fact-check with, in many areas; we have the eyeballs to see what is too vague to be checkable, as a practical matter if not as a legalistic definition. What we don't have, in practice, and what I feel the lack of, is the way of defining a 'pattern of POV editing' that would warrant warning and then sanctions. This ought to be seen as the current defining issue. Anyway, this all points back to the ArbCom elections as the real focus of Wiki-en's public life; which is only right and proper.
<snip>
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
I would love love love it if the standard edit boilerplate included the following as the first paragraph, on its own:
Have you remembered to include your references?
- with the word "references" being a link to a page on how to reference
things. (Inline links, a mention in ==External links and references== ... Do we have a suitable page?) What would it take for this to happen? Can anyone see any insuperable problems with putting this in?
- d.
[[Wikipedia:Cite sources]]? I'm not sure if they cover inline references, though.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
John Lee (johnleemk@gawab.com) [041212 23:00]:
David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.) I would love love love it if the standard edit boilerplate included the following as the first paragraph, on its own: Have you remembered to include your references?
- with the word "references" being a link to a page on how to reference
things. (Inline links, a mention in ==External links and references== ... Do we have a suitable page?) What would it take for this to happen? Can anyone see any insuperable problems with putting this in?
[[Wikipedia:Cite sources]]? I'm not sure if they cover inline references, though.
That would be the page I was thinking of :-D
- d.
I wrote:
Our biggest problems within the community are not anons trolling and vandalizing, but rather egregious trolls and pov pushers who log in and take advantage of our boundless good will.
WikiUser wrote:
Can you give any examples of what you mean by "egregious trolls and pov pushers"? Also of the "boundless good will."? Also, who is meant by "we" and "our"? -WikiUser.
Oh, I don't even know where to begin, really.
But if we tried really really hard, we might be able to find a user who was given a short term block from Wikipedia and who responded with a bizarre claim to the mailing list that the admin who did the block was corrupt and violating Federal law.
We might even find that this same user has a long history of calling people Nazi, and accusing people of being "racist against the English" for the flimsiest of reasons and so on.
And then, wonder of wonders, we find that this person is *still editing Wikipedia daily* and in fact *posting to our policy discussion mailing list*. This is what I mean by taking advantage of our boundless goood will.
--Jimbo
p.s. Yes, I know, I know... "Don't feed..." but it was too fun to pass up.