On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 3:54 PM, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)yahoo.com.au> wrote: Repeat after me: Pure Wiki Deletion. Pure Wiki Deletion. - causa sui

Some people won't be satisfied until Wikipedia has no BLPs. 2010/1/21 K. Peachey <p858snake(a)yahoo.com.au>

2010/1/22 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Doc Glasgow/Scott MacDonald's position is actually not that far off. Quote: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=28263&view=findpo… Pete / the wub

The new arbitration case is an utterly predictable outgrowth of the BLP mass deletions and their endorsement by the arbitration committee. The committee didn't see it coming, apparently, which means the candidate field in the last election was far worse than we thought. Nathan

And why only BLPs?

Roger Davies has posted an excellent comment on the "civil disobedience" aspect of these events here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Ca… I've seen much talk today of doing the right things the right way and doing the right things the wrong way. I suppose the lesson of history is that determining which is which is usually possible only with the advantage of considerable hindsight. Think of some examples: the barons at Runnymede, the Roundheads, George Washington et al, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the sailors on the Potemkin; the suffragettes, Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela.... The core of civil disobedience is the principle that people should do the right things the wrong way when trying to do them the right way failed or is not possible. And that's pretty close to the underlying principle of WP:IAR. *Roger Davies* *talk* 16:39, 22 January 2010 (UTC) This was only the beginning; it was precipitated by the pressure of repeated failed attempts to reach elusive consensus on the matter. This is not anarchy, but a brief transition point. The RFC shows the way forward. MZMcBride's summary deletion proposal does not have consensus and will not reign. The processes proposed by Jehochman and David Gerard, on the other hand, are doing very well. Under these proposals, there will be a review period for unsourced BLPs, but any tagged biography that does not become sourced must be scrapped. Cool Hand Luke

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:20 AM, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: These maxims were very good in the formative stages of our project. You and other early editors were right (maybe even prophetic) to adopt them. The fledgling project needed hands, eyeballs, and content. By zealously keeping and expanding content--even shoddy content--we grew dramatically. But this debate has come to a boil because we've been too slow in realizing that the balance must change because conditions have changed. We are no longer a small project, but one that places in the top three google search results for almost any topic in our encyclopedia. We have succeeded because of our formative policies, and with our success comes responsibility. In an era when any living subject can have their life harmed by a poorly vetted biography, we should strike a new balance. We should not bite off more than we can chew. In this area, we ought to weed out BLPs that we can no longer maintain at appropriately high standatds. As a happy consequence of this process, many notable biographies will be improved. I hope that this improvement and re-examination process is continual. In this way, we will effectively shoulder the responsibility we have for maintaining one of the top ten sites on the internet. Cool Hand Luke

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is a radical misunderstanding of what I said. This isn't an old editor vs. new editor issue. David Gerard is hardly an arrogant upstart, and Jimbo Wales (one of the original Wikipedians) surely is not. Both are firmly on the side of change with regards to retaining shoddy BLPs. It's a question of what policies would be best for the project right now. Policies that were good in 2001 no longer strike the right balance in 2010. Originally, our goal was generating content, but we now have tons of content--so much that readers are more concerned about reliability. BLP subjects are most especially concerned that we get their entries right, and our project's credibility suffers most when they are harmed. At this point in time, retaining shoddy BLPs is bad for subjects and frankly bad for Wikipedia. Cool Hand Luke

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is really not the attitude that we want to project toward anyone. I'm very disappointed by the tone of this email. - causa sui

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Thanks for getting this back on track. In theory, an administrator "could" do this. "Technically". The solution to that is to follow dispute resolution and clean up the mess. We don't add rules to cover every possible eventuality. We have common sense for that. Pretty much. What you're describing, if it is happening, does sound like a problem deserving of attention. But I wouldn't jump to creating a new bureaucracy to handle this problem any more than I would another. - causa sui

Chicken Little is a fairly good comparison. I see in this group of BLPs only the possibility of potential problems. I am waiting for evidence that any of those deleted without checking so far has done harm by being there. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that out of the 500, 1 or 2 of them was a potential problem;. Based on my running work with this, for about half of them there was both the ability to source enough to lose the unsourcedBLP status very easily, and the potential to become a acceptable articles after reasonable work. The project thus has been wrong several hundred times more than it has been right. A yield rate of less than 1% and a damage rate of 50% is unacceptable quality. I would feel quite differently if either 90% of the articles were truly unsourceable or unsuitable, or if even 5% of them had been actual problems. BLP violations are serious, and I agree that we ought to risk making a few errors to remove them--a 5% error rate is as low as any Wikipedia process can reasonably attain-- but this was a process 99% of which was either wrong or unnecessarily hasty. If this does not meet the standard for "disrupting Wikipedia to make a point", I do not know what would. True, they made the point. There were so many ways to have done it better. They would have made the point just as well with 50, not 500 deletions. They would have made the point just as well and contributed something to the process if they actually checked for even the most obvious and easily sourceable notability. They would have been less foolish if they had not deleted the 5 or 10% of articles that did have sources, though not in the usual places. In the month or so that this plan probably took shape, each of the 50 people involved or strongly defending them could have checked properly 10 articles a day while still doing their usual work. That would have cleared 10,000 articles. In the years that people have been complaining about the situation, if they had worked instead of talked, the whole problem of the old articles could have been dealt with--even by themselves alone. And then we would be able to concentrate on the much bigger problem of all the sourced articles in Wikipedia that nonetheless contain major errors. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote:

He was not in this group, having been dealt with years ago. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 4:18 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2010/1/22 David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>om>: Evidently. WP:POINT is about doing something you *don't* want to have happen to make a point, not about doing things spectacularly in general. - d.

2010/1/22 Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com>om>: It does really suck that this is trashing what are mostly likely perfectly okay pieces that people put work into. This needs to be acknowledged and we need to work to alleviate the suck from it. the_wub's list will help recover stuff, and hopefully things will proceed in a less axe-crazy manner henceforth. - d.

On 23 January 2010 23:00, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: Last time the subject came up, I believe the advocates were asked for any examples, anywhere, of wikis that use Pure Wiki Deletion. I don't think they came up with any at all. Are there any? (Is it possible that the biggest and most popular wiki in the world might not be the best place to make the very first one?) - d.

David Gerard wrote: OpenStreetMap (the map database itself, not the support wiki).

Ryan Delaney wrote: Choose your allies with care, though. I was thinking that the "meme that spreads like wildfire through a crowd of one person" deserved a name, and of course it has one as Dickens knew: [[wikt: King Charles' head]] (no relation). There is certainly another perspective entirely on the current furore, which is that the absence of enough deletion has created the situation where people (David Goodman being an obviously honorable exception) volunteer the time of others by voting to keep articles, on the same rather anxious principle, that anything temporarily "lost" from Wikipedia is permanently lost from the world. Which is clearly absurd, stated in that way. The reason this matters, and maybe why this has come to a head now, is that we realise more clearly as time goes by that we have finite human resources to work with. The goose and the golden eggs has always been a good fable to quote against those (outsiders usually) who say "Wikipedia would be great if only..." and then suggest something that obviously isn't going to work. Perhaps cleaning up after the goose also deserves a mention. In other words the vibrant business of article creation cannot be decreed to be an unmixed blessing. That has to be proved in practice. If too many of our good people are trying to source obscure biographies, then they are not doing something else which might suit them and the encyclopedia better. Anyway I voted for the Jehochman RfC proposal, which has the mild sophistication of stealing one aspect of you want (I think). Charles

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 9:19 PM, Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean(a)me.com> wrote: Pure Wiki Deletion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pure_wiki_deletion_system Carcharoth

I appreciate being listed as an honorable exception, but I'm not an except. I see a lot of other people doing just the same as as I--about 3/4 of the articles I see on prod and put aside to be worked on later in the day, are in fact sourced by the timer I get there. sometimes, rather superficially, sometimes better than I could do. I think many of the people trying to deal with the deletions are doing as much as we can--but it is obviously 10 or 100 times faster to tag on the basis of impressions than to actually look for sources. What we need to see is other people first trying to source, and tagging for deletion afterwards if needed. this gives both better articles to keep, and more secure deletions. The latest unhelpful variant of people not even looking is people looking only in Google, not google news or Books or Scholar. If we are to remove the worthless or the unverifiable, and there is quite a lot of both of them, the best way is for people listing for deletion to do as full and honest a job of trying to source as is reasonable , and say where they have looked, and let others who think it might be worthwhile carry ti further. The change that would make the biggest difference is that each person who looks at an article for any reason , such as fixing typos or adding categories or disam links, actually try to spot any serious problems, not just do the routine task they came for. There are too many BLPs that have been looked at twenty times, but none of them carefully. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: There's an idea. Some people assert that Elvis is still alive. Why don't we put a whole section in his article saying he was a paedophile. If he doesn't sue we can assume he's properly dead and put an end to the debate. I feel this would be an excellent use of charitable funds.