On 10/3/05, *Tony Sidaway* <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
"I have a different view of Wikipedia's strengths--I think we're really good at producing so-so, useful but not perfect articles, and that we should spend energy trying to maximise our production rate at this level. I view the FA process as masturbatory, self-congratulatory, and of low impace on the project as a whole."
While you are entitled to your opinion, you are simply wrong. The featured articles have many-fold benefits. Not only are they wonderful for public relations (because when people ask "How the hell can Wikipedia produce something of quality?" we have a ready-made answer), but the featured articles also encourage people to produce higher quality writing *instead* of medeocre ones. In other words, it gives us a very visible way of "pushing" the manual of style and other good writing habits onto people. (If it were not for the featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
Turning the FAC into something like the AFD is a perfectly good way of ruining a well-functioning system. We should instead be exploring ways to make AFD (which is functionally broken) more like the FAC.
The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already have articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional encyclopedia. The big job from now on is going to be improving those articles into something better. It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be aiming for, not medeocrity).
-Mark
On 10/3/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
(If it were not for the featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
I find this rhetorical question difficult to credit. Anybody who has ever encountered a content dispute knows the value of references. The process that produces referenced articles has absolutely nothing to do with the featured article process.
And again, good writing isn't the product of the featured article process. Ian Fleming's Thunderball, we're told today, was created "with the intention of being turned into a film." A book with self-awareness? In any case, a very weak sentence construction.
The article waits until the second paragraph to tell us that the novel was filmed twice, first as Thunderball and then as Never Say Never. And then the grammar bogey strikes again, telling us that Thunderball "was originally scheduled to have been" the first Bond movie, and this was due to a lawsuit "brought about" by one of Fleming's collaborators on the original screenplay.
This is not terrible stuff, but you'd think that a decent peer review process would pick up and remedy poor writing style. But the cast and character list that follows the plot summary neglects to state which film it applies to. Adolfo Celi's presence in the cast list as Largo suggests that it was the 1965 version--Connery played Bond in both.
And "the famous Aston Martin DB5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Martin_DB5makes its second appearance, previously in *Goldfinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger*." That isn't even good English grammar.
The article was apparently picked as a featured article mainly because it has an interesting subject and some flashy pictures with pretty girls, guns and explosions. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's be honest about it. It certainly wasn't picked because it represented the best Wikipedia has to offer, because the writing is pretty mediocre and in places is downright embarrassing.
On 10/2/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
While you are entitled to your opinion, you are simply wrong. The featured articles have many-fold benefits. Not only are they wonderful for public relations (because when people ask "How the hell can Wikipedia produce something of quality?" we have a ready-made answer), but the featured articles also encourage people to produce higher quality writing *instead* of medeocre ones. In other words, it gives us a very visible way of "pushing" the manual of style and other good writing habits onto people. (If it were not for the featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
I agree with Mark completely here. Striving for perfection is one of the things that subtlely drives the entire project. Three glorious things that I cherish that Wikipedia has pioneered are: the distributed featured article, the distributed news essay, and the distributed writing class. Each is worthy of real praise. All three require talented individuals to produce model content for others to emulate, and require the development of simple policies so that people three steps removed from the models can still contribute productively.
I'd like to know at what point WP has produced half of the world's "writers familiar with good encyclopedic style." We're probably a few years away from that yet.
SJ
On 10/2/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
(If it were not for the featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
I would, and it has nothing to do with FA. I've referenced every significant content contribution I've made over the last few months.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that notability is simply a POV, so third party verifiability is absolutely critical to good editing. It's part of my writing style now. I don't contribute any significant unsourced content unless it's obvious common knowledge. Even then, I try to cite sources because it makes better articles. We could ingrain this into the culture of most of Wikipedia editors if we made an effort of it.
Anyone have any good ideas of how better to encourage people to cite sources? -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused
On 10/3/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
Anyone have any good ideas of how better to encourage people to cite sources?
Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert unsourced statements a blockable offence.
On 10/3/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert unsourced statements a blockable offence.
Trying to figure out if a source exists or not is going to be fun.
-- geni
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/3/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert unsourced statements a blockable offence.
Trying to figure out if a source exists or not is going to be fun.
I have the phone number of my local library.
Could you fix your reply-to? I always end up replying solely to you and have to send again.
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote: I have the phone number of my local library.
So supose I claim that "heterocycles can have many nitrogens but only one sulfur or oxygen in any ring" and cite page 1176 Organic chemistry Clayden, Greeves, Warren and Wothers ISBN 0-19-850346-6. Now the book exists but your local libary may not have a copy so it takes time for you to get it. That is quite a lot of effort (fortunetly in this case the book is a fairly standard text book so there should be at least one other person who has a copy). This gets really fun when someone decides to reference something that can only be aquired from the public records office.
Could you fix your reply-to? I always end up replying solely to you and have to send again.
I'll try
-- geni
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote: I have the phone number of my local library.
So supose I claim that "heterocycles can have many nitrogens but only one sulfur or oxygen in any ring" and cite page 1176 Organic chemistry Clayden, Greeves, Warren and Wothers ISBN 0-19-850346-6. Now the book exists but your local libary may not have a copy so it takes time for you to get it. That is quite a lot of effort (fortunetly in this case the book is a fairly standard text book so there should be at least one other person who has a copy). This gets really fun when someone decides to reference something that can only be aquired from the public records office.
Your claim of course should probably be in just about *any* advanced organic chemistry text book.
But supposing it was something more obscure. I don't see the problem with citations from public records or reference books available through the public library system. These are eminently verifiable.
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote: I have the phone number of my local library.
So supose I claim that "heterocycles can have many nitrogens but only one sulfur or oxygen in any ring" and cite page 1176 Organic chemistry Clayden, Greeves, Warren and Wothers ISBN 0-19-850346-6. Now the book exists but your local libary may not have a copy so it takes time for you to get it. That is quite a lot of effort (fortunetly in this case the book is a fairly standard text book so there should be at least one other person who has a copy). This gets really fun when someone decides to reference something that can only be aquired from the public records office.
There's a difference between making sources necessary and making them sufficient. Just because something has a listed source doesn't mean it can't be removed. In the case of obscure sources we have to use our best judgement, including considering the user who has cited the source and the reasonableness of the statement being claimed. But something without a listed source, for which no source can be found, should definitely be removed from the article.
Anthony
P.S., I'm sorry for so many replies to this thread, but I consider citing sources to be one of the most important things for an encyclopedia article.
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
So supose I claim that "heterocycles can have many nitrogens but only one sulfur or oxygen in any ring" and cite page 1176 Organic chemistry Clayden, Greeves, Warren and Wothers ISBN 0-19-850346-6. Now the book exists but your local libary may not have a copy so it takes time for you to get it. That is quite a lot of effort (fortunetly in this case the book is a fairly standard text book so there should be at least one other person who has a copy). This gets really fun when someone decides to reference something that can only be aquired from the public records office.
There's a difference between making sources necessary and making them sufficient. Just because something has a listed source doesn't mean it can't be removed. In the case of obscure sources we have to use our best judgement, including considering the user who has cited the source and the reasonableness of the statement being claimed. But something without a listed source, for which no source can be found, should definitely be removed from the article.
The question that arises from this is just how far an editor (not the contributor of the material) should look for those sources. There are many instances where I suspect that the writer may be correct, but I'm not prepared to spend an hour or more in a search that may turn up nothing.
P.S., I'm sorry for so many replies to this thread, but I consider citing sources to be one of the most important things for an encyclopedia article.
No need to be sorry. I find this important enough to simply say, "Me too!"
Ec
On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/3/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert unsourced statements a blockable offence.
Trying to figure out if a source exists or not is going to be fun.
I have the phone number of my local library.
An even easier solution: the holdings of the Library of Congress is accessible from the Internet. I would expect that the same could be said for the British Library, the Biblioteque Nationale (sp?) in Paris, & the equivalents in Germany, Italy, Japan, & Australia. (However, funding for such useful projects always seem to be lacking.)
Any citation from a source that cannot be found at one of those sites is considered invalid; & considering that, by law, a copy of every book printed in the US or the UK ends up at the respective national library, one would have to work hard to find a reliable source not in one of those catalogs.[*]
Using the guideline of [[Assume good faith]], we would assume all quotations or citations are reasonably accurate. However, if it can be shown that a given contributor is falsifying their citation of sources (e.g., claiming Sir Frank Stenton wrote on page 276 of his _Anglo-Saxon England_ that "Bill Clinton is a weenie"), then we toss him to the ArbCom. Or to a rabid pack of hyenas. Whichever happens to be in the worse mood at the moment.
A policy like that ought to keep things simple & easy -- while not preventing anyone from back-checking citations.
Geoff
[*] ISTR someone mentioning that it is not uncommon for most important works in at least one field -- railroad history -- to be published by the author & often not listed in these catalogs. I'd be happy to include some or all college, public or private libraries with online catalogs to solve this problem -- but there *needs* to be some easy way to verify that the work cited does exist.
On 10/3/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
[*] ISTR someone mentioning that it is not uncommon for most important works in at least one field -- railroad history -- to be published by the author & often not listed in these catalogs. I'd be happy to include some or all college, public or private libraries with online catalogs to solve this problem -- but there *needs* to be some easy way to verify that the work cited does exist.
Simular for canals except there you go back to the primary sources which you dig out of various record offices (which for some reason are often in a completely different part of the country to the canal).
-- geni
On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, geni wrote:
On 10/3/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
[*] ISTR someone mentioning that it is not uncommon for most important works in at least one field -- railroad history -- to be published by the author & often not listed in these catalogs. I'd be happy to include some or all college, public or private libraries with online catalogs to solve this problem -- but there *needs* to be some easy way to verify that the work cited does exist.
Simular for canals except there you go back to the primary sources which you dig out of various record offices (which for some reason are often in a completely different part of the country to the canal).
Finding documents in Britain is half of the challenge: as I understand it, records of a given locale are scattered across the country -- & over the ocean to the US & beyond -- due to historical connections, accidents of history, vagarities of how family papers are disposed of, as well as previous researchers who did not try hard enough to remember to return what they have borrowed.
However, Geni, you have touched on another matter. If the material cited is unpublished, then we can't use it in Wikipedia. The policy is that if you need to depend on unpublished primary material for an article, have your research published first in an appropriate forum (in your case, a local history journal or monograph), *then* quote from there. As burdensome as this may seem, having your research published elsewhere first helps Wikipedia to offer the assurance that at least one set of expert eyes has examined the material we are using.
Geoff
On 10/4/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
However, Geni, you have touched on another matter. If the material cited is unpublished, then we can't use it in Wikipedia. The policy is that if you need to depend on unpublished primary material for an article, have your research published first in an appropriate forum (in your case, a local history journal or monograph), *then* quote from there. As burdensome as this may seem, having your research published elsewhere first helps Wikipedia to offer the assurance that at least one set of expert eyes has examined the material we are using.
What about pictures?
-- geni
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, geni wrote:
On 10/4/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
However, Geni, you have touched on another matter. If the material cited is unpublished, then we can't use it in Wikipedia. The policy is that if you need to depend on unpublished primary material for an article, have your research published first in an appropriate forum (in your case, a local history journal or monograph), *then* quote from there. As burdensome as this may seem, having your research published elsewhere first helps Wikipedia to offer the assurance that at least one set of expert eyes has examined the material we are using.
What about pictures?
What about them? Are they from these archives? If so, are they permitted under GDFL or PD?
Geoff
On 10/4/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
What about them? Are they from these archives? If so, are they permitted under GDFL or PD?
Geoff
Well it did occure to me that the archives would be a way of getting PD maps.
-- geni
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, geni wrote:
On 10/4/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
What about them? Are they from these archives? If so, are they permitted under GDFL or PD?
Geoff
Well it did occure to me that the archives would be a way of getting PD maps.
If you scan them, & contribute them to Wikipedia-EN (although I'd encourage you to submit them to commons), then they are published, right?
And even if you scan & upload the images to commons or Wikisource the original documents, you make them available to anyone who wants to verify your research.
(This does raise the question about how do we determine forgeries, but we have the same problem with the physical originals.)
Geoff
On 4 Oct 2005, at 18:19, Geoff Burling wrote:
Finding documents in Britain is half of the challenge: as I understand it, records of a given locale are scattered across the country -- & over the ocean to the US & beyond -- due to historical connections, accidents of history, vagarities of how family papers are disposed of, as well as previous researchers who did not try hard enough to remember to return what they have borrowed.
Its not that bad. Although some stuff is dispersed, most isnt. It depends what kind of records you are looking for to some extent. Before the 19th century can vary, but most parish records are still where you would expect I believe.
However, Geni, you have touched on another matter. If the material cited is unpublished, then we can't use it in Wikipedia. The policy is that if you need to depend on unpublished primary material for an article, have your research published first in an appropriate forum (in your case, a local history journal or monograph), *then* quote from there. As burdensome as this may seem, having your research published elsewhere first helps Wikipedia to offer the assurance that at least one set of expert eyes has examined the material we are using.
I think if you have real source materials wikisource should be sufficient.
Justinc
geni wrote:
On 10/3/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert unsourced statements a blockable offence.
Trying to figure out if a source exists or not is going to be fun.
That's precisely why the burden of proof should be on the person who is making the claim, but the person should be given reasonable time to provide that source if asked to do so.
Ec
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/3/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
Anyone have any good ideas of how better to encourage people to cite sources?
Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert unsourced statements a blockable offence.
Great idea!
Ec
Anyone have any good ideas of how better to encourage people to cite sources?
Move any uncited contribution to the talk page, and contact the contributor to tell her you've done so.
Note that I'm not saying there has to be a footnote for every contribution, but every source you use to create an article should be listed in the ==References== section. This isn't just for verifiability purposes. It's important to document your sources in case you are ever accused of copyright infringement or plagiarism.
And yes, I don't always follow this myself, but a) I really should, and b) I would if someone dropped me a reminder on my talk page to do so.
--
Michael Turley User:Unfocused
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Anyone have any good ideas of how better to encourage people to cite sources?
Move any uncited contribution to the talk page, and contact the contributor to tell her you've done so.
Note that I'm not saying there has to be a footnote for every contribution, but every source you use to create an article should be listed in the ==References== section. This isn't just for verifiability purposes. It's important to document your sources in case you are ever accused of copyright infringement or plagiarism.
And yes, I don't always follow this myself, but a) I really should, and b) I would if someone dropped me a reminder on my talk page to do so.
That's good. I've been thinking of trying something like that in Wiktionary. Since stubs are perfectly acceptable there it will mean that whole articles will end up with no content, an only a talk page. Many of these entries come from anons for words with ancestries as questionable as their own. When asked for evidence certain contributors put forth the notion that the credibility of a term is in direct proportion to the number of Google hits.
Ec
On 10/3/05, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be
aiming for,
not medeocrity).
But it is certainly much easier if you start with a stub.
Quite. That's what wikis are all about.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/3/05, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be
aiming for,
not medeocrity).
But it is certainly much easier if you start with a stub.
Quite. That's what wikis are all about.
Because if you know a little bit about something, someone else can come and write some more.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
On 10/2/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already have articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional encyclopedia. The big job from now on is going to be improving those articles into something better. It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be aiming for, not medeocrity).
I think you're dead wrong when you suggest that Wikipedia already has sufficient topic coverage. Even just comparing article titles to the other encyclopedias makes it obvious that a lot is missing. Looking at the list of requested articles does as well. And then there's the fact that the world is always changing. I just added a new article today on something which didn't even exist a few months ago - the [[Open Content Alliance]].
But the reason I'm writing is to respond to your second point. Yes, it's much easier for most people to write a stub than to write a comprehensive, well referenced article. And yes, some of this won't ever go away. But I think this also points to a weak point in the Mediawiki software. Adding references is a major pain in the ass, and once those references are added it's usually not at all clear what parts of the article are referenced and what parts aren't, so the same work gets done over and over again. Finally, even though there are in theory rules that people should be adding references whenever they add substantial text to the wiki, these rules are not at all enforced.
Maybe a really simple addition to the wiki could be made to help this - an optional field in addition to the comments field to list source(s) for your edit. Just a free text field, which you could leave blank if you really want to, which would be accessible to people who want to fact-check a contribution. Eventually we might be able to figure out how to get the software to tie the reference to the contributed text, but just adding the field would be a good start and less than a day's worth of coding.
Personally I agree that the featured articles candidates system, as it is currently implemented, is not very useful. But you yourself were the one complaining about not enough articles getting through the process. Do you think this is because there is a dearth of good, comprehensive articles in the encyclopedia, or do you think it's because the process of FAC doesn't scale properly?
-Mark
Anthony
On 10/2/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already have articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional encyclopedia. The big job from now on is going to be improving those articles into something better. It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be
aiming
for, not medeocrity).
I think you're dead wrong when you suggest that Wikipedia already has sufficient topic coverage. Even just comparing article titles to the other encyclopedias makes it obvious that a lot is missing. Looking at the list of requested articles does as well. And then there's the fact that the world is always changing. I just added a new article today on something which didn't even exist a few months ago - the [[Open Content Alliance]].
But the reason I'm writing is to respond to your second point. Yes, it's much easier for most people to write a stub than to write a comprehensive, well referenced article. And yes, some of this won't ever go away. But I think this also points to a weak point in the Mediawiki software. Adding references is a major pain in the ass, and once those references are added it's usually not at all clear what parts of the article are referenced and what parts aren't, so the same work gets done over and over again. Finally, even though there are in theory rules that people should be adding references whenever they add substantial text to the wiki, these rules are not at all enforced.
Maybe a really simple addition to the wiki could be made to help this - an optional field in addition to the comments field to list source(s) for your edit. Just a free text field, which you could leave blank if you really want to, which would be accessible to people who want to fact-check a contribution. Eventually we might be able to figure out how to get the software to tie the reference to the contributed text, but just adding the field would be a good start and less than a day's worth of coding.
Personally I agree that the featured articles candidates system, as it is currently implemented, is not very useful. But you yourself were the one complaining about not enough articles getting through the process. Do you think this is because there is a dearth of good, comprehensive articles in the encyclopedia, or do you think it's because the process of FAC doesn't scale properly?
-Mark
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
But the reason I'm writing is to respond to your second point. Yes, it's much easier for most people to write a stub than to write a comprehensive, well referenced article. And yes, some of this won't ever go away. But I think this also points to a weak point in the Mediawiki software. Adding references is a major pain in the ass, and once those references are added it's usually not at all clear what parts of the article are referenced and what parts aren't, so the same work gets done over and over again. Finally, even though there are in theory rules that people should be adding references whenever they add substantial text to the wiki, these rules are not at all enforced.
Maybe a really simple addition to the wiki could be made to help this - an optional field in addition to the comments field to list source(s) for your edit. Just a free text field, which you could leave blank if you really want to, which would be accessible to people who want to fact-check a contribution. Eventually we might be able to figure out how to get the software to tie the reference to the contributed text, but just adding the field would be a good start and less than a day's worth of coding.
The irony is that rules about references are ignored, while dubious rules about notability are regularly applied by a certain segment. Something that lacks verifiability tends to say more about the credibility of the project than something which is verifiable but merely trivial.
Linking references to spscific parts of an article is important, but I would be less concerned about that than about articles that have no references at all. Adding references is indeed a pain in the ass, and even more so when you did not write the article. Someone who encounters an article with no references at all may have no idea where to look for information about it. The original contributor presumably had references right there when he wrote the article If he didn't, and wrote from memory, we have no way of knowing whether he is perpetuating some sort of urban myth. Your idea is constructive, and it makes the physical process of adding references a little easier, but I don't see the problem of references as primarily at that level of the process. The writers just need to do their own basic research.
Ec
Linking references to spscific parts of an article is important, but I would be less concerned about that than about articles that have no references at all. Adding references is indeed a pain in the ass, and even more so when you did not write the article. Someone who encounters an article with no references at all may have no idea where to look for information about it. The original contributor presumably had references right there when he wrote the article If he didn't, and wrote from memory, we have no way of knowing whether he is perpetuating some sort of urban myth. Your idea is constructive, and it makes the physical process of adding references a little easier, but I don't see the problem of references as primarily at that level of the process. The writers just need to do their own basic research.
I think it makes the process a lot easier in many ways, though. For instance, if one is merely adding to a single section, adding a reference takes two edits, one to the section, and then one to the references section. And then, if you're going to go through that trouble, you really should remember the format. Being able to stick a url or an ISBN into a field and have the reference generated automatically would be a *huge* time saver.
I wonder how much Google Print and the others are going to help this task. I don't use Google Print that often, but it seems this would greatly improve the likelihood of finding a reference for all but the most obscure of facts.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Linking references to spscific parts of an article is important, but I would be less concerned about that than about articles that have no references at all. Adding references is indeed a pain in the ass, and even more so when you did not write the article. Someone who encounters an article with no references at all may have no idea where to look for information about it. The original contributor presumably had references right there when he wrote the article If he didn't, and wrote from memory, we have no way of knowing whether he is perpetuating some sort of urban myth. Your idea is constructive, and it makes the physical process of adding references a little easier, but I don't see the problem of references as primarily at that level of the process. The writers just need to do their own basic research.
I think it makes the process a lot easier in many ways, though. For instance, if one is merely adding to a single section, adding a reference takes two edits, one to the section, and then one to the references section. And then, if you're going to go through that trouble, you really should remember the format. Being able to stick a url or an ISBN into a field and have the reference generated automatically would be a *huge* time saver.
I wonder how much Google Print and the others are going to help this task. I don't use Google Print that often, but it seems this would greatly improve the likelihood of finding a reference for all but the most obscure of facts.
I've referred to Google Print for words that come up in Wiktionary, and it can be very helpful. For an editor who is checking someone else's work incorporating that research is a painstaking job. Copy-and-paste doesn't work because their pages are graphic images of the book, so you need to copy the quote the hard work. Then one still has to take the trouble to go elsewhere in the site to get the more general information about the book. I recently checked for the word "nationist" and got 102 hits. The usages there don't support the definition that the user gave, and I have no idea where he found it. Sorting that out for one word can easily take a couple of hours.
Ec
On 10/3/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already have articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional encyclopedia.
Actually, no, but that's by-the-by. Why this insistence on reference to paper encyclopedias? Why is it important to cripple Wikipedia by removing content? I say "removing content" because it looks to me that in violating deletion policy through the insistence on deleting articles that could be merged, the intention of some parties is to destroy certain wikipedia content, to declare it, by edict of four or five editors who happened to be around during a debate, beyond the reach of Wikipedia.
A discussion is now taking place on Wikipedia Votes for undeletion. An article about a developing games forum website was deleted a few months ago on the grounds that it was "crystal ball gazing". Now the website is up and running and someone asks for the article, with some 40 edits by to be deleted. People are sitting on VFU right now and seriouslyarguing that it should be kept deleted because "at the time, the VfD discussion was valid.
That beggars belief.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/3/05, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already have articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional encyclopedia.
Actually, no, but that's by-the-by. Why this insistence on reference to paper encyclopedias? Why is it important to cripple Wikipedia by removing content? I say "removing content" because it looks to me that in violating deletion policy through the insistence on deleting articles that could be merged, the intention of some parties is to destroy certain wikipedia content, to declare it, by edict of four or five editors who happened to be around during a debate, beyond the reach of Wikipedia.
A discussion is now taking place on Wikipedia Votes for undeletion. An article about a developing games forum website was deleted a few months ago on the grounds that it was "crystal ball gazing". Now the website is up and running and someone asks for the article, with some 40 edits by to be deleted. People are sitting on VFU right now and seriouslyarguing that it should be kept deleted because "at the time, the VfD discussion was valid.
That beggars belief.
I agree. AfD and VfU need serious overhauls. (I remember when I started the VfU on [[Elf Only Inn]] to recover about a dozen deleted edits, and the article had to go through AfD again as a result...)
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
"Tony Sidaway" f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote in message news:605709b90510031651m279f3052h91646a05ac8b8d40@mail.gmail.com... [snip]
A discussion is now taking place on Wikipedia Votes for undeletion. An article about a developing games forum website was deleted a few months ago on the grounds that it was "crystal ball gazing". Now the website is up and running and someone asks for the article, with some 40 edits by to be deleted. People are sitting on VFU right now and seriously arguing that it should be kept deleted because "at the time, the VfD discussion was valid. That beggars belief.
Some choice quotes (** is me):
* Valid VfD - "organic growth"? (Nice phrase) Just because a site added some content doesn't automatically change its notability. ** actually the "organic growth" refers to the article, not to the subject...
* The fact that the site now might pass AfD does not invalidate the previous AfD...If an identical article were re-created it could validly be speedied. If a new and substantially different article were to be written about this topic, it could not be deleted without another AfD, and we can't prevent and article being written for the reason given above. (Although I wish with all my heart we could.)
* valid AfD. If you have significant new information, create a new article. **This ignoring the already-established problem that the article has been protected on a blank because of vandalism...
* Keep Deleted. I thought I had already voted on this one.
One interesting argument on the original VFD was that no article about a website can be verified through a link to the website itself. The specific datum quoted was "number of users". One would be intrigued as to how many websites it would be possible to determine the number of users through any source **other** than the website itself? One would also be intrigued as to how many websites have their existence verified through peer-reviewed published papers as suggested in the same discussion...
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
Phil Boswell wrote: <snip>
One interesting argument on the original VFD was that no article about a website can be verified through a link to the website itself. The specific datum quoted was "number of users". One would be intrigued as to how many websites it would be possible to determine the number of users through any source **other** than the website itself? One would also be intrigued as to how many websites have their existence verified through peer-reviewed published papers as suggested in the same discussion...
Should we apply the same standards of verifiability to articles about TV shows, computer and video games, and software?
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
On 10/5/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
- valid AfD. If you have significant new information, create a new
article. **This ignoring the already-established problem that the article has been protected on a blank because of vandalism...
I decided to take this advice, which I thought was fair comment, and create a new article. This was speedied several times by people who repeatedly claimed falsely that the article, the product of my own mind, was a recreation. I afd'd it and it looked like it was headed for deletion (fair enough) but then someone prematurely closed the AfD and speedied it. I gave up.
Finally someone asked for history undeletion so I performed this task (which doesn't require a VFU debate). I haven't checked today, but I wouldn't put it past some over-zealous sysop to delete even that.
It's getting beyond a joke.
One interesting argument on the original VFD was that no article about a website can be verified through a link to the website itself. The specific datum quoted was "number of users".
Well obviously the website can be verified--just open telnet to port 80 and send a http head command, and if you get a valid http response there's a website.
The estimated number of users can be attributed, so that the reader knows that it is self-reported. Or (my preference) it can be omitted as not really relevant.
I do find a lot of these "keep deleted" arguments frustratingly ad hoc.