That article is vaguely interesting, but the fact they have an ex E-Britannica guy commenting on our encyclopedia article says a lot about what they wanted to hear.
----- Original Message ----- From: slimvirgin@gmail.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 3:58 PM Subject: [WikiEN-l] Guardian article about Wikipedia
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1599325,00.html
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On 10/24/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
That article is vaguely interesting, but the fact they have an ex E-Britannica guy commenting on our encyclopedia article says a lot about what they wanted to hear.
Indeed. An expert opinion.
Yeah, but the EB hates Wikipedia with a passion, Expert != Neutral.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Sidaway" f.crdfa@gmail.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 4:21 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Guardian article about Wikipedia
On 10/24/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
That article is vaguely interesting, but the fact they have an ex E-Britannica guy commenting on our encyclopedia article says a lot about what they wanted to hear.
Indeed. An expert opinion. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:14 +0100, Martin Richards wrote:
That article is vaguely interesting, but the fact they have an ex E-Britannica guy commenting on our encyclopedia article says a lot about what they wanted to hear.
I'd have to agree there. Not to say that any of the criticisms in the article are invalid, but overall, it takes a negative tone. The title is, after all, "Can you trust Wikipedia?" and it begins by stating, "The founder of the online encyclopedia written and edited by its users has admitted some of its entries are 'a horrific embarrassment.'" Not exactly a flattering introduction.
On a semi-related note, is there something mailman can do to alleviate mailers that break threads? I'm using Evolution, and this topic has broken into at least four separate independent threads.
On 10/24/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1599325,00.html
Interesting. I'm not familiar with any of the articles except the Dylan one, but there are no surprises. There are problems of balance, smaller but still significant problems of accuracy, and the prose style isn't up to professional standards.
A whole section on the spelling of the word "encyclopedia"? This is one of the problems that are endemic to wikis. Relatively trivial topics become extended into a pseudo-debate.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
A whole section on the spelling of the word "encyclopedia"? This is one of the problems that are endemic to wikis. Relatively trivial topics become extended into a pseudo-debate.
I agree to some extent, but only in that it's a problem of organization and focus. I think this sort of information is useful to have, just not useful to have highlighted in prominent places. I've taken the liberty of moving the "debate about how this article should be spelled" sections out of the intro of a few articles to a #Name section near the end, which I think works fine. There's certainly no reason to remove information that might be of interest to someone, so long as it's verifiable and not unduly getting in the way of other information.
-Mark
On 10/24/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I've taken the liberty of moving the "debate about how this article should be spelled" sections out of the intro of a few articles to a #Name section near the end, which I think works fine. There's certainly no reason to remove information that might be of interest to someone, so long as it's verifiable and not unduly getting in the way of other information.
That sounds pretty sensible. The linear form of the article can be exploited for organisation. If relatively trivial sections of the article are placed further down, it doesn't matter much if they become a little bloated.
On the question of style, I'd say that the section in question could be rewritten as one or two sentences to the effect that the ae form derives from a romanization of the alpha-iota diphthong, major dictionaries in UK and US describe both ae and e forms as acceptable spellings, and the ae form is preserved primarily in the latin titles of some encyclopedias. The rest is just filling.
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 09:58 -0500, slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1599325,00.html
Yes I was just reading it. Generally they are fairly complimentary; its not surprising they could come up with a few factual errors; they are experts after all. Apart from haute couture which got 0 out of 10. Maybe I will get my fashion friends to improve it. The Britannica guy wants us to write 26000 words in one article about encyclopaedias, obviously hasnt understood the web.
Justinc
On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
The Britannica guy wants us to write 26000 words in one article about encyclopaedias, obviously hasnt understood the web.
Actually his point wasn't that we should produce 26,000 words. It was rather that by contrast to the Britannica article of that length, ours runs to a mere 2000. This is surprisingly short, given the subject. If we can manage 750 words on Squeaky Fromme, why so few on Encyclopedia?
On Oct 24, 2005, at 11:52 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
The Britannica guy wants us to write 26000 words in one article about encyclopaedias, obviously hasnt understood the web.
Actually his point wasn't that we should produce 26,000 words. It was rather that by contrast to the Britannica article of that length, ours runs to a mere 2000. This is surprisingly short, given the subject. If we can manage 750 words on Squeaky Fromme, why so few on Encyclopedia?
Does Britannica also have separate articles on Encyclopedia Britannica, Brokhaus Encyclopedia, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Judaica, Etymologiae, Bibliotheke, Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Encyclopedie, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Lexicon technicum, or, for that matter, Wikipedia?
Because I bet if you count all of those (And probably a few more), we've got more than EB on the subject, just broken into multiple articles.
Which may well be a flaw on our part.
-Snowspinner
Snowspinner wrote:
Actually his point wasn't that we should produce 26,000 words. It was rather that by contrast to the Britannica article of that length, ours runs to a mere 2000. This is surprisingly short, given the subject. If we can manage 750 words on Squeaky Fromme, why so few on Encyclopedia?
Does Britannica also have separate articles on Encyclopedia Britannica, Brokhaus Encyclopedia, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Judaica, Etymologiae, Bibliotheke, Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Encyclopedie, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Lexicon technicum, or, for that matter, Wikipedia?
I dug out a copy of Britannica to look at their article, and that's a big part of the word difference: While we give a high-level overview of the history of the encyclopedia, and break out individual detailed histories into their own articles, Britannica gives a long narrative exposition on the history of the encyclopedia, not entirely unlike what you would get if you merged all those articles back into the main one. That certainly accounts for the history portion of the Britannica article, anyway, which is a pretty good proportion of the wordcount.
-Mark
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:52 +0100, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
The Britannica guy wants us to write 26000 words in one article about encyclopaedias, obviously hasnt understood the web.
Actually his point wasn't that we should produce 26,000 words. It was rather that by contrast to the Britannica article of that length, ours runs to a mere 2000. This is surprisingly short, given the subject. If we can manage 750 words on Squeaky Fromme, why so few on Encyclopedia?
But how much of this would be in other articles? I suspect most. There are lots of articles in the category. It is true that is pretty crap with respect to history and has too much POV stuff, and doesnt talk about lots of stuff it should though.
Justinc
On 24/10/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1599325,00.html
The Basque history guy is obviously rather shockingly ignorant of Basque history, if he hasn't heard of Acquitanian... And some of his other comments appear to be POV pushing.
-- Abi
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:44 +0100, Abigail Brady wrote:
On 24/10/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1599325,00.html
The Basque history guy is obviously rather shockingly ignorant of Basque history, if he hasn't heard of Acquitanian... And some of his other comments appear to be POV pushing.
I suggest you read his book on Basque history before making comments like this. Mark Kurlansky, A Basque History of the World. He doesnt say he hasnt heard of the Aquitane language, just that he doesnt speak it, and thinks it is unlikely to be related to Euskera. Read more carefully.
Justinc
On 24/10/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:44 +0100, Abigail Brady wrote:
The Basque history guy is obviously rather shockingly ignorant of Basque history, if he hasn't heard of Acquitanian... And some of his other comments appear to be POV pushing.
I suggest you read his book on Basque history before making comments like this. Mark Kurlansky, A Basque History of the World. He doesnt say he hasnt heard of the Aquitane language, just that he doesnt speak it, and thinks it is unlikely to be related to Euskera. Read more carefully.
No, you read carefully. He says "I am not familiar with the Aquitaine language but would be very surprised if it bore any relation to Euskera, the Basque language." Such a language is recorded (it's now extinct so of course he doesn't speak it), and does indeed appear to bear some relation to Basque, although not much of it is attested. If he was rejecting the proposed connection, that would be fair enough, but instead he is (in admitted ignorance) rejecting any possibility of a link. Anyone who knows anything about Acquitanian knows about the possible link with Basque, he's just dismissing it out of hand.
-- Abi
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:59 +0100, Abigail Brady wrote:
On 24/10/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 16:44 +0100, Abigail Brady wrote:
The Basque history guy is obviously rather shockingly ignorant of Basque history, if he hasn't heard of Acquitanian... And some of his other comments appear to be POV pushing.
I suggest you read his book on Basque history before making comments like this. Mark Kurlansky, A Basque History of the World. He doesnt say he hasnt heard of the Aquitane language, just that he doesnt speak it, and thinks it is unlikely to be related to Euskera. Read more carefully.
No, you read carefully. He says "I am not familiar with the Aquitaine language but would be very surprised if it bore any relation to Euskera, the Basque language." Such a language is recorded (it's now extinct so of course he doesn't speak it), and does indeed appear to bear some relation to Basque, although not much of it is attested. If he was rejecting the proposed connection, that would be fair enough, but instead he is (in admitted ignorance) rejecting any possibility of a link. Anyone who knows anything about Acquitanian knows about the possible link with Basque, he's just dismissing it out of hand.
Well the helpful link to Aquitanian links to the geological era, so its no wonder he couldnt verify this. Fixed now. The actual [[Aquitanian language]] article has no references or indeed much content.
Justinc
The only thing that stands out is that we should send for a fashion victim, right now, to fix up [[haute couture]].
Might be a little harder than finding a Linux wizard ...
Charles