JzG wrote: Then you're not thinking very hard! We could show them only to registered users and not anonymous users. Or only to registered users who self-identify as "editors". We could, as you say, move them into a sidebar. We could move them off the page entirely, and (effectively) into [[Category: Articles needing ___]]. (Where is it written that editorial cleanup tags must necessarily be visible to every reader?) We could make them dismissible, so that anybody who didn't want to see them didn't have to. There's lots of things we could do! (Actually, I think I like the idea of making them dismissible best of all.)

JzG wrote: Trivia is not a neutrality issue. Not-long-enough introductions are not a neutrality issue. Not being written in a suitably encyclopedic tone is not a neutrality issue. Having too many links is not a neutrality issue. Even having too few citations is not necessarily a neutrality issue.

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:11:31 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ditto. Usually along with the trivia. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 21:02:16 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Naturally. I usually leave anything that looks genuinely compelling, or which (incredibly rare) has a reference. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 25/11/2007, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: They were put in by one. OTOH, most trivia sections are indeed crap. - d.

On 25/11/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Because that is what talk pages are for. -- geni

On 25/11/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: {{fact}} You also need to consider any advantages as balanced against the downsides. After all something in sitenotice would probably be even more effective. -- geni

On 25/11/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Because fact contains a waring element for the reader that someone finds the info questionable (personally I wouldn't put it in an article either mind) Wasting the reader's time and bandwidth. Making the article unreadable on mobiles and breaking up the article while in no way providing a service to the reader. -- geni

On 25/11/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Uncat shouldn't be in the article. Wikify is generally there when the the problem with the article is serious enough that we should acknowledge it. -- geni

On 11/27/07, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't understand. A tag that says "please integrate this content" promotes the removal of that content, rather than its integration? Do you have evidence of this removal taking place? And I'm asking a lot, but can you demonstrate at all that the tag is doing more harm than good? You're making some bold claims here. Steve

Ian Woollard wrote: "NPOV" _is_ "neutrality." The two are synonymous. Right. But notability and verifiability are, sadly, not synonymous in their usage on Wikipedia. I think they should be but therein lies the great conflict of our time. Even accepting that "notability" is going to be with us for the forseeable future, though, I think it's a bad idea to be applying it widely on a sub-article level. We want our biography articles to contain peoples' dates of birth, for example, but in very few cases is that date of birth a "notable" fact. Simply a verifiable one.

Ian Woollard wrote: But you're not me, and therefore can have different opinions. Hence the conflict. I see extremely few citations for birthdates in Wikipedia. They usually only show up when some pedant is using WP:V as a blunt instrument for other reasons, or in a few rare cases when there actually is some sort of significance to the person's birth date.

On 26/11/2007, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not quite true. An example would be school ofsted reports. They are published and verifiable (another example is school accounts which are nominally available) but it would be posible to render articles on schools pretty much unreadable by including enough information from them. -- geni

On 26/11/2007, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: If reliable source(s) mention it, then it is noted, and notable. Even if it is disparaged it is still notable, notable for being disparaged. Of course that pushes back on to how you tell if the reliable sources are reliable. If they're noted of course! At this point you might start to think that there's an infinite regress... but no you don't need to infinitely regress in practice. It's a similar issue to that faced by google when they calculate Page Rank- google have a web of page links; essentially each link states that the web page thinks that another web page is notable. So each link puts ups the reputation of the page they link to. However, google don't use a straight count of links to determine reputation (page rank). What google do is, progressively diminish the transitive effect of reputation, and so after a certain number of hops the reputation of going n-ancestors back stops having any effect. So bringing the analogy back to the wikipedia: if the BBC says that X is true, then it probably is notable, because there's lots of people that in turn say that the BBC are notable, and some subset of the people that say that the BBC are notable are notable also; because others say that they are. And then for example you might stop. Whereas if 45.65.73.4 says that X isn't true, then there's probably nobody that says that this anonymous IP is notable. I think that the wikipedia's processes approximate to this method; in many cases people agree that certain organisations are notable without having to check further, so we don't normally have to bother with going more than one notability back unless somebody challenges it. Is the BBC really notable? Yes, because the New York Time says so. Anyway, I claim that this is roughly how the Wikipedia's notability works. It's not that it's perfect, but it's better than most of the alternatives. —C.W. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.