On Friday 07 March 2008 01:50, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.
Which is all the more frustrating given that the problem with most of these trivia sections seems to be an interface problem rather than a fundamental content problem. Because we've adopted too many artifacts of print like purely linear article design and spatial arrangement on a single page we're stuck with masses of data and side notes being a distraction to the articles. As a result we steadily delete valuable content that is not reproduced elsewhere and will not be reproduced elsewhere.
Go us?
An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants to add
Why not?
it would rapidly descend into farce.
No, it wouldn't.
It's not about space, it's about reputation,
Who cares about reputation? We're here to build an encyclopedia, not to make the rest of the world fall in love with us.
quality
I fail to see how having an article on my neighbor's cat will diminish the quality of an article on the city of Indianapolis. It's a red herring.
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
If notability did not exist we would be forced to create it.
Why?
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
-- Kurt Weber kmw@armory.com
It's instructive to look at the history of Everything2 -- clearly there is *some* lower limit on the notability of concepts that can be included, because if there isn't you eventually get articles called "what is your favorite color" and containing "blue ~~~ green ~~~ yellow! ~~~" On everything2, these were called "getting-to-know-you nodes" and purged relatively early on.
But that particular lower bar is very, very low. Even an article called "my cat howie" is more encyclopedic.
Wikipedia is uniquely positioned to be an engine of more general wiki growth, where articles at its defined lower limit are siphoned off somewhere else. If that sort of thing is implemented properly, with the possibility of easily moving stuff in and out (and leaving a trail), it could be very cool.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
--
Kurt Weber kmw@armory.com
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.
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On 07/03/2008, Ben Yates ben.louis.yates@gmail.com wrote:
It's instructive to look at the history of Everything2 -- clearly there is *some* lower limit on the notability of concepts that can be included, because if there isn't you eventually get articles called "what is your favorite color" and containing "blue ~~~ green ~~~ yellow! ~~~" On everything2, these were called "getting-to-know-you nodes" and purged relatively early on.
Yes, everything2 mostly or partly uses a voting system for its notability, and to say that it is not without its problems is a bit of an understatement. I'm not sure what the precise deletion rate is, but I found maybe 1/3 of my articles were deleted out of hand. Often I would resubmit them with relatively minor changes and they would get good scores.
-- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com
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On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Ben Yates ben.louis.yates@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is uniquely positioned to be an engine of more general wiki growth, where articles at its defined lower limit are siphoned off somewhere else. If that sort of thing is implemented properly, with the possibility of easily moving stuff in and out (and leaving a trail), it could be very cool.
Yes, very! This should really be a priority.
Another criteria I have always liked better than notability is utility, [[Wikipedia:Utility]]. Would this information be useful? Is it likely to be accessible elsewhere? etc. Still maintaining proper sourcing of course.
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Not remotely comparable. The Internet as a whole isn't under a free license, it isn't NPOV, it isn't verifiable, it isn't editable, it doesn't have standardized style guides or access methods, etc.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
I'd rather stick around and continue improving Wikipedia by incorporating more knowledge into it.
On Mar 7, 2008, at 1:02 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
That's unfair on a number of levels.
The problem with our plot summaries and trivia sections has little to nothing to do with their quality - in fact, they're usually quite good for plot summaries and lists of odd connections.
Second of all, when we delete such things, they do not go elsewhere. Generally, we destroy those resources utterly. It is not as though we are duplicating content on those fronts.
-Phil
On 08/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 7, 2008, at 1:02 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
That's unfair on a number of levels.
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
The problem with our plot summaries and trivia sections has little to nothing to do with their quality - in fact, they're usually quite good for plot summaries and lists of odd connections.
Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value covering 'everything' higher.
Encyclopedias are not an exact science, and never will be.
-Phil
it is not the "less obviously notable things" that lower the actual quality, it's the poor articles regardless of subject. When good articles on intrinsically less important topics attract unfavorable attention it's because they stand in such contrast to the sketch and low quality poorly referenced articles on subjects that are generally recognized as more importance.
The solution is actually simple, at least in concept: to work on adding to and improving the articles that represent what you individually think the content should be focused on. But it does take work, much more work than trying to delete the articles you individually don't think important.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 9:35 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Ian Woollard wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Only if "quality" is defined as "notability".
On 08/03/2008, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Ian Woollard wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Only if "quality" is defined as "notability".
No, if quality is *correlated* with notability.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
I'm afraid this is an example of rather muddy-headed thinking on your part.
Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low. We're not in the business of producing Google rankings, and we don't get ad revenues from the hits.
Secondly, our Google rankings and our rankings on peoples' personal indicators of reliability are to do with the fact that we are likely to have pretty good content on a topic searched for, compared to what else is available online in one place.
If a person searches for something, the existence or non-existence of articles unrelated to their interests doesn't alter the quality of the information they find on what they ARE searching for. It's simply invisible.
However, if someone searches for something and we DON'T cover it - because some ad hoc 'consensus' of half-a-dozen AFD regulars decided it was 'non-notable' - then Wikipedia has failed to provide information. That tends to leave people with a bad taste in their mouths; double that if when they searched last week, Wikipedia DID have the information they wanted and now doesn't.
'Non-notable' content only 'hurts' our quality if you are measuring quality by some pretty odd measures.
Yes, it's embarassing when some blogger points out that we cover some random Pokemon better than we cover a head of state. The solution to that isn't to delete the Pokemon.
I think this is one way in which we are - as we often are - WAY too over-sensitive to outside criticism. We handle it poorly and panicked, and often make matters worse.
Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value covering 'everything' higher.
It might be better if you didn't assume that because people disagree with you they don't value the encyclopedia.
I also see no reason why we have to use any automated measure of quality that creates 'losers'. We don't have to do everything by algorithm.
-Matt
On 08/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low.
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though. Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it? Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings? I would think so. A *lot* of people find wikipedia articles that way. You more or less seem to be saying you don't care about what our audience wants. Well, it's an argument.
We're not in the business of producing Google rankings, and we don't get ad revenues from the hits.
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage. And that would push them way, way up in the google rankings.
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons, and you know that many of them will be forced for business reasons to anonymously sabotaging each other. Could that ever be a good thing? How could we deal with that kind and scale of in-article advertising? And once they're all in the database it would be horrible to try to delete them; millions of companies, you would have to go through one by one by one...
Secondly, our Google rankings and our rankings on peoples' personal indicators of reliability are to do with the fact that we are likely to have pretty good content on a topic searched for, compared to what else is available online in one place.
No, that's not really true, because the wikipedia implicitly (not deliberately) uses SEO techniques; google juice enters and never leaves. Basically almost any article in the wikipedia ranks higher than almost the rest of the web for that reason.
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us; that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant. But apparently you say above we shouldn't care about google. Uh huh.
If a person searches for something, the existence or non-existence of articles unrelated to their interests doesn't alter the quality of the information they find on what they ARE searching for. It's simply invisible.
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
However, if someone searches for something and we DON'T cover it - because some ad hoc 'consensus' of half-a-dozen AFD regulars decided it was 'non-notable' - then Wikipedia has failed to provide information.
It doesn't sound to me like they're following policy if it's ad hoc consensus.
That tends to leave people with a bad taste in their mouths; double that if when they searched last week, Wikipedia DID have the information they wanted and now doesn't.
There are worse things.
'Non-notable' content only 'hurts' our quality if you are measuring quality by some pretty odd measures.
Particularly if you call 'odd' any meaasures that delete items deemed 'non-notable' you are personally fond of i expect.
Yes, it's embarassing when some blogger points out that we cover some random Pokemon better than we cover a head of state. The solution to that isn't to delete the Pokemon.
You'll need to point me to where the policy says that that's the process.
But there's the opposite problem as well; deleting notability because somebody used it to delete Pokemon is *serious* overcorrection. The right answer is to work out a criteria that allows Pokemon (if we decide that Pokemon is desirable) and add it to the policy. NOT delete the policy. Big changes to solve small problems are rarely a good idea. You're suggesting removing a core policy that would create millions of articles including small business and people's cats.
Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value covering 'everything' higher.
It might be better if you didn't assume that because people disagree with you they don't value the encyclopedia.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
I also see no reason why we have to use any automated measure of quality that creates 'losers'.
Then you just haven't thought it through fully; which is not surprising, removing notability would be significant and complicated enough, that I'm not sure anybody CAN think it through fully. And if that doesn't scare you then it really, really, really should.
-Matt
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low.
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though. Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it? Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings? I would think so. A *lot* of people find wikipedia articles that way. You more or less seem to be saying you don't care about what our audience wants. Well, it's an argument.
If Wikipedia has good content people will read it. We have had little trouble finding readers without doing anything in particular to play to the search engines, and I suspect this will continue.
There's a reasonable case to be made that our popularity has exceeded our readiness for it.
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage. And that would push them way, way up in the google rankings.
I'm not, by the way, against having standards. I just believe that our standards are often set wrongly.
There's an argument to be made (as is done by Phil Sandifer among others) that 'Notability' isn't even required to prune out the crap. Insisting on verifiability and NPOV seems to do pretty well, for one thing, and enforcing rules on conflicts of interest helps as well.
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons, and you know that many of them will be forced for business reasons to anonymously sabotaging each other. Could that ever be a good thing? How could we deal with that kind and scale of in-article advertising? And once they're all in the database it would be horrible to try to delete them; millions of companies, you would have to go through one by one by one...
Strangely enough, people find having an NPOV article about their things to be a lot less satisfying than they think it is.
I have no opposition to deletion reasons that include 'blatant advertising', either, so long as they're correctly applied.
No, that's not really true, because the wikipedia implicitly (not deliberately) uses SEO techniques; google juice enters and never leaves. Basically almost any article in the wikipedia ranks higher than almost the rest of the web for that reason.
I'm pretty sure that that's not the reason, since Wikipedia's ranking doesn't seem to me to have improved since nofollow went into effect.
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us; that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant. But apparently you say above we shouldn't care about google. Uh huh.
I'm frankly unsure what you mean here.
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
What are they trusting us to have? Good information. I'm also confused by your use of 'non notable articles' here - generally the deletionist argument is about topics, not articles, here, but perhaps you used them interchangeably here.
If Wikipedia can have a good, encyclopedically written article on a subject, I rarely see a problem with us having one. I agree that a very sucky article on something is little better than nothing at all and may even be worse, but I'd tend to prefer improvement to deletion, or if deletion, a deletion that does not preclude someone else recreating a good article in its place in future.
It doesn't sound to me like they're following policy if it's ad hoc consensus.
"Consensus" on WIkipedia is often very minimal. Have you seen how many votes in total the average AFD discussion has? Perhaps half a dozen all told.
Particularly if you call 'odd' any meaasures that delete items deemed 'non-notable' you are personally fond of i expect.
I'm personally fond of useful encyclopedia articles, even if they're on specialist subjects that would not be covered in Britannica. Wikipedia is a specialist work as well as a generalist.
Yes, it's embarassing when some blogger points out that we cover some random Pokemon better than we cover a head of state. The solution to that isn't to delete the Pokemon.
You'll need to point me to where the policy says that that's the process.
Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's my personal reading that a lot of the pressure to delete certain subject areas comes from editors who find it embarassing that Wikipedia covers 'unserious' topics.
But there's the opposite problem as well; deleting notability because somebody used it to delete Pokemon is *serious* overcorrection. The right answer is to work out a criteria that allows Pokemon (if we decide that Pokemon is desirable) and add it to the policy. NOT delete the policy. Big changes to solve small problems are rarely a good idea. You're suggesting removing a core policy that would create millions of articles including small business and people's cats.
We can get rid of the flaws in the current 'Notability' idea without throwing the baby out in the bathwater, I agree.
However, the problem is that the people who work on deletion are a small subset of Wikipedia contributors, even regulars, yet they have an outsize effect on our deletion policies - especially since policies and guidelines are constantly changed.
That's because only deletionists spend so much effort on deletion discussion. People like me are out writing stuff.
I also see no reason why we have to use any automated measure of quality that creates 'losers'.
Then you just haven't thought it through fully; which is not surprising, removing notability would be significant and complicated enough, that I'm not sure anybody CAN think it through fully. And if that doesn't scare you then it really, really, really should.
I remember Wikipedia before 'Notability'. It didn't work so bad.
In general, though, I see in 'Notability' a very CS-major computer nerd way of trying to go about things. An attitude that says consistency beats getting things absolutely right. A belief that we can create policy as a computer program that ensures the right outcome - and even if that outcome isn't perfect, it's better that it be automatable than involve human judgment. A desire to make policy with a primary emphasis on it being hard-edged and definitive, because it makes the job of the deleters easier.
I have problems with that.
-Matt
On Mar 8, 2008, at 5:02 AM, Matthew Brown wrote:
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low.
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though. Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it? Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings? I would think so. A *lot* of people find wikipedia articles that way. You more or less seem to be saying you don't care about what our audience wants. Well, it's an argument.
If Wikipedia has good content people will read it. We have had little trouble finding readers without doing anything in particular to play to the search engines, and I suspect this will continue.
Well, and more to the point, we hit top ten Alexa status well before deletionism became as terrifyingly in vogue as it is now.
Remember our list of top 100 articles. It turns out our readers mostly do use us for anime and porn. Now, that means we should give really good anime and porn coverage. But the idea that if we allow these articles to flourish we'll lose readers is utterly unsupported by any evidence.
-Phil
A good current example of (IMO problematic) deletionist arguments can be found at [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mockingbird Don't Sing]] -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mockingbird_Don...
- in which several people argue that the article on a movie be deleted DESPITE IT MEETING THE "NOTABILITY GUIDELINE" ALREADY ESTABLISHED, with comments like:
* "I don't especially like the trend of article creation for seemingly every banal film coming down the pipeline these days, and here we can actually do something about it" * "We're trying to build a better encyclopedia, and the presence of this article isn't helping, which is why it should go, even if it happens not to transgress WP:FICT" * "If anyone voting "keep" has something other than WP:ILIKEIT, let's hear it"
-Matt
On 3/9/08, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mockingbird_Don... [...] with comments like: [...]
- "If anyone voting "keep" has something other than WP:ILIKEIT, let's hear
it"
[[WP:ATU]]
(of course someone had to add a bloody "humor" tag... why?)
—C.W.
On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 03:38:39AM -0800, Matthew Brown wrote:
A good current example of (IMO problematic) deletionist arguments can be found at [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mockingbird Don't Sing]]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mockingbird_Don...
- in which several people argue that the article on a movie be deleted
DESPITE IT MEETING THE "NOTABILITY GUIDELINE" ALREADY ESTABLISHED, with comments like:
- "I don't especially like the trend of article creation for seemingly
every banal film coming down the pipeline these days, and here we can actually do something about it"
- "We're trying to build a better encyclopedia, and the presence of
this article isn't helping, which is why it should go, even if it happens not to transgress WP:FICT"
- "If anyone voting "keep" has something other than WP:ILIKEIT, let's hear it"
-Matt
Yes, and it was a snowjob keep, with these approaches strongly criticised. Good work in fact.
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On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
No, that's not really true, because the wikipedia implicitly (not deliberately) uses SEO techniques; google juice enters and never leaves. Basically almost any article in the wikipedia ranks higher than almost the rest of the web for that reason.
That's treating google as some sort of immovable force -- but pagerank is ultimately, behind whatever soul-crushingly complex set of nested algorithms, a *subjective* measure, tweaked by engineers who evaluate different result sets by looking at them and deciding if they're "good" (or equivalently, by monitoring what web surfers think is "good").
So while SEOs like to think in terms of rules and algorithms, it's much more practical (and satisfying) to forget all that shit and just think in terms of creating useful, compelling content, trusting that "google" will somehow be able to tell that high-quality wikipedia articles aren't tarnished, action-at-a-distance style, by less visited wikipedia articles elsewhere.
See, for example, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/07/64130
Certainly we can get the same result using Reliable sources and verifiability as we can using Notability--but that is only because we define the non-trivial mention discussion of a subject in two RSs as demonstrating notability. This shifts the burden to "non-trivial", and to "reliable". Decide what you want in WP, and we can adjust those definitions to get the result. We can also do it in a more direct fashion be defining notability. The result however can be anything we might want. Refuse to accept local newspapers, and we can get quite restrictive about people and companies. Accept a birth certificate or a certificate of incorporation as a RS, and every one of them is included.
The question is what we want in WP. There are any number of ways to write rules to get there. It's clear enough from the above discussion--and thousands of others--that there is no agreement on the basic issue of what the encyclopedia is to contain. It's not the abstract definition of rules that defines the content. The rules have been adopted and interpreted in order to limit the content.
I think there's good reason to do that. We want to do more than a paper encyclopedia can. We also want to filter the internet, and produce something that people will recognize as an encyclopedia. That still leaves a great rang of possibilities. Given that most of the people working on the encyclopedia want to include whatever they are interested in working on in whatever detail they wish to do it, and exclude whatever they are not interested in writing or reading, and limit the detail on other topics to the amount that interests them, how can we possibly achieve a real consensus?
There are some consistent approaches: to limit the content to whatever the great majority of people all agree should be included, which is practice produces a very limited result, or accept whatever content any significant number want to include, which does the opposite. There's another approach that seems rational, to limit the content to what people are prepared to write a good article on, but this produces inconsistent results, giving an encyclopedia like the present citizendium, where there are articles on scattered subjects depending on the interests of the limited number of people working there. We have more people, but not all that many who can produce a high quality article.
We resolve the situation at present by accepting inconsistency: any ad-hoc group of people prepared to give sufficient case at AfD can overcome opposition one way or another, and the consensus is the consensus of the strong and the organized. Sure, this changes from day to day, so we enshrine that as a principle.
This is managed by a self-selected editorial hierarchy, of the people who care enough and have time enough to make consistent contributions at afds and policy pages in general. But that produced consistent results only when the encyclopedia was smaller and that group of people approximately agreed with each other. What I see happening now is that the people in that earlier group want to maintain the positions they had earlier adopted; they accomplish this by adopting a rule making process that only the most dedicated of the newcomers can understand and learn to participate in, in the hope that the newcomers will adopt the old ways during their acculturation. There enough of us active newcomers now to start changing things, but no consistency in what we want, and so the old formulations tend to hold and the encyclopedia gradually becomes fossilized.
On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:36, Ian Woollard wrote:
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though.
I don't see why. Personally, I couldn't care less.
Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it?
Because it's fun.
Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings?
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage.
And what's wrong with that?
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons,
So? As long as it's factual and NPOV, what do we care WHY it's there?
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us;
So what?
that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant.
So what?
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
We don't ask them to trust us; we have no responsibility to maintain it.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
It's a correct assessment. Why is it wrong to hold that position?
Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote:
On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:36, Ian Woollard wrote:
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though.
I don't see why. Personally, I couldn't care less.
Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it?
Because it's fun.
Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings?
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage.
And what's wrong with that?
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons,
So? As long as it's factual and NPOV, what do we care WHY it's there?
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us;
So what?
that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant.
So what?
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
We don't ask them to trust us; we have no responsibility to maintain it.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
It's a correct assessment. Why is it wrong to hold that position?
Kurt,
You line by line short responses "So what?" are not contributing anything helpful to good debate or discussion.
./scream
Screamer wrote:
Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote:
On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:36, Ian Woollard wrote:
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though.
I don't see why. Personally, I couldn't care less.
Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it?
Because it's fun.
Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings?
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage.
And what's wrong with that?
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons,
So? As long as it's factual and NPOV, what do we care WHY it's there?
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us;
So what?
that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant.
So what?
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
We don't ask them to trust us; we have no responsibility to maintain it.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
It's a correct assessment. Why is it wrong to hold that position?
Kurt,
You line by line short responses "So what?" are not contributing anything helpful to good debate or discussion.
How else do you expect him to respond to such inconsequential statements?
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Screamer wrote:
Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote:
On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:36, Ian Woollard wrote:
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though.
I don't see why. Personally, I couldn't care less.
Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it?
Because it's fun.
Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings?
There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a wikipage.
And what's wrong with that?
That's one of the important functions that notability deals with, without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an article for business reasons,
So? As long as it's factual and NPOV, what do we care WHY it's there?
So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us;
So what?
that could well mean that our current best articles become a lot less significant.
So what?
Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.
We don't ask them to trust us; we have no responsibility to maintain it.
No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.
It's a correct assessment. Why is it wrong to hold that position?
Kurt,
You line by line short responses "So what?" are not contributing anything helpful to good debate or discussion.
How else do you expect him to respond to such inconsequential statements?
Ec
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Notice, that I sometimes don't respond to "inconsequential" statements. They sometimes don't need responses at all. All I'm saying, is when I read the thread, "So what?" is not helpful to me. It does not serve to persuade me either way, or add anything useful. It does not give me opinion or information. It does //nothing//. I stand.
./scream
Screamer wrote:
Kurt,
You line by line short responses "So what?" are not contributing anything helpful to good debate or discussion.
You could try answering them. I really don't see why we should care what Google "thinks" of Wikipedia as a whole or any of its articles individually, so asking "so what?" makes perfect sense to me here.
IMO the only important issue is whether someone who searches Wikipedia for a particular piece of information will get the information they're looking for. If they do, we win. If they don't, we fail. The most that "cruft" can do to interfere with this is to make disambiguation pages a bit longer. That hardly seems like a major hindrance.
Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we are writing an encyclopedia for use. Though I know this may come as a foreign idea to some wikipedians, we're not a computer game, but a practical project. Our users are broadly defined as anyone commercial or non commercial who wants a ready reference source of general information in the web context. The web context we work in is aware of other browsers and other web services. We arent making a new system from scratch, we work in that environment, and we need to pay attention to how we are used and we need to have respect for those who depend upon us. No large information system on the web can operate in isolation from google. why this is so, and whether this should be so are separate questions, but as it is we operate as part of the present system. Wherever WP is situated conceptually or practically, it's not on an ivory tower.
On Sunday 09 March 2008 05:52, David Goodman wrote:
Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we are writing an encyclopedia for use.
No, we're not.
I'm not here because I want to provide an encyclopedia to others. I'm here because I want to *work on an encyclopedia*. I couldn't care less whether other people read it or like it.
Though I know this may come as a foreign idea to some wikipedians, we're not a computer game, but a practical project.
Perhaps some approach it that way; I don't.
David Goodman wrote:
Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we are writing an encyclopedia for use.
No, not quite. The Wikipedia that you see on the web is not our product, that's our working area. It's there first and foremost for editors. The fact that general readers also find it useful is a happy coincidence since that's how we draw most of our new editors in.
The product of Wikipedia is our database. If all we cared about was publishing an online encyclopedia we wouldn't need the GFDL or other open licence, we wouldn't need to worry about keeping the licensing consistent and compatible, we could just say "by posting your work here you're granting us the right to display it on Wikimedia" or somesuch. There are already tons of other user-generated sites out there with similar ad-hoc licensing that don't care about ease of reuse.
No, our most important target audience for re-use are people and organizations like those found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks, or anyone else who wishes to build something out of the resource we make available, big or small. Some day Wikipedia-the-project will be defunct (or evolve into something completely different) and the database will be what we leave behind for our successors to pick up and use or work with.
Label and categorize things, sure. Many mirrors and forks will likely be interested only in a subset of our content and this sort of labeling will allow them to cull that out more easily. But it makes no sense to cull out cull out topics for them ahead of time because we don't know what they'll be interested in. Maybe someone down the road will want to make the Encyclopedia Pokemonia, or set up a competitor for IMDB that focuses on TV shows, or whatever, and they could have used Wikipedia's articles for that.
The web context we work in is aware of other browsers and other web services. We arent making a new system from scratch, we work in that environment, and we need to pay attention to how we are used and we need to have respect for those who depend upon us. No large information system on the web can operate in isolation from google.
Sure it can. If Google were to decide tomorrow to exclude Wikipedia from their search results entirely we wouldn't close shop and shut down.
I personally don't use Google very much any more for searching for general information, I have a Wikipedia search installed in my browser's search bar to go there directly. IIRC Firefox 3 is going to be distributed with Wikipedia as one of the default searches pre-installed. Not to mention the traffic we get from direct links people post on their own external web sites, and from the other various search engines still out there. Google's handy but we don't really need it.
Yes, one of its uses will be as a database to be mined as an historical record, but I cannot see why you say that it is the only one. The actual use and readership of WP pages is very high. There seem to be some hundred millions or so people right now who find it useful; I want them to find it more useful yet.
Most of the subjects I work on are well-recorded elsewhere in much more professional sources, but where there is little of high quality available for the non-academic reader. We don't need WP as an archive in science or history or philosophy. There are really good sources out there. But we do need a easy-to-use and to understand source for the general reader, a free one, universally accessible. That';s the part I care most about. It wont interfere with your purpose. But making it into a low quality vacuum cleaner will detract from its overall reliability. There are other projects for an internet archive.
Of course we should cover popular culture thoroughly. In a quality-filtered version. I am one of those supported good plot summaries. Not long rambling pseudo-transcripts of the script. Not one sentence teaser is a long list. Good well-written episode descriptions in two or three clear paragraphs telling someone who isnt going to see the show what has happened there so they know about it. Good articles about major and recurring minor characters that summarize their role from a different aspect. Good articles about the use of major themes in major creative works--even they are primarily a list. This is the sort of material not available otherwise on the internet as well. And we need it for now, when people want to use it, as well as for later, when they also will.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 2:01 AM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we are writing an encyclopedia for use.
No, not quite. The Wikipedia that you see on the web is not our product, that's our working area. It's there first and foremost for editors. The fact that general readers also find it useful is a happy coincidence since that's how we draw most of our new editors in.
The product of Wikipedia is our database. If all we cared about was publishing an online encyclopedia we wouldn't need the GFDL or other open licence, we wouldn't need to worry about keeping the licensing consistent and compatible, we could just say "by posting your work here you're granting us the right to display it on Wikimedia" or somesuch. There are already tons of other user-generated sites out there with similar ad-hoc licensing that don't care about ease of reuse.
No, our most important target audience for re-use are people and organizations like those found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks, or anyone else who wishes to build something out of the resource we make available, big or small. Some day Wikipedia-the-project will be defunct (or evolve into something completely different) and the database will be what we leave behind for our successors to pick up and use or work with.
Label and categorize things, sure. Many mirrors and forks will likely be interested only in a subset of our content and this sort of labeling will allow them to cull that out more easily. But it makes no sense to cull out cull out topics for them ahead of time because we don't know what they'll be interested in. Maybe someone down the road will want to make the Encyclopedia Pokemonia, or set up a competitor for IMDB that focuses on TV shows, or whatever, and they could have used Wikipedia's articles for that.
The web context we work in is aware of other browsers and other web services. We arent making a new system from scratch, we work in that environment, and we need to pay attention to how we are used and we need to have respect for those who depend upon us. No large information system on the web can operate in isolation from google.
Sure it can. If Google were to decide tomorrow to exclude Wikipedia from their search results entirely we wouldn't close shop and shut down.
I personally don't use Google very much any more for searching for general information, I have a Wikipedia search installed in my browser's search bar to go there directly. IIRC Firefox 3 is going to be distributed with Wikipedia as one of the default searches pre-installed. Not to mention the traffic we get from direct links people post on their own external web sites, and from the other various search engines still out there. Google's handy but we don't really need it.
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On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant.
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant.
Google search rank is mostly a function of the page for a specific search term, so having an article about [[Bulbasaur]] (a pokemon) doesn't really affect our search results for [[Cholesterol]]
http://www.google.com/search?&q=bulbasaur http://www.google.com/search?&q=cholesterol
People, when talking about Bulbasaur online, will link to Wikipedia, upping its pagerank, and when people talk about cholesterol they will do the same. Probably not the same people. ;)
If we created an article that no one links to, or people link to some other source for that subject a lot more it won't be in the top results. I don't see that that would affect our highly ranked search terms though. I do think google rank matters, in a way. It is how most of our readers find us, and if there is a group of people uninterested in others reading the articles I think we would be at an argumentative impasse.
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur? yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx, (assumed population, 20,000) ? Will they use one about the main street in that town? In either case, should we have it as a separate article?
On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Judson Dunn cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant.
Google search rank is mostly a function of the page for a specific search term, so having an article about [[Bulbasaur]] (a pokemon) doesn't really affect our search results for [[Cholesterol]]
http://www.google.com/search?&q=bulbasaur http://www.google.com/search?&q=cholesterol
People, when talking about Bulbasaur online, will link to Wikipedia, upping its pagerank, and when people talk about cholesterol they will do the same. Probably not the same people. ;)
If we created an article that no one links to, or people link to some other source for that subject a lot more it won't be in the top results. I don't see that that would affect our highly ranked search terms though. I do think google rank matters, in a way. It is how most of our readers find us, and if there is a group of people uninterested in others reading the articles I think we would be at an argumentative impasse.
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur? yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
Judson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion
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On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 1:27 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx, (assumed population, 20,000) ? Will they use one about the main street in that town? In either case, should we have it as a separate article?
I lean towards if people can find reliable sources for the fire dept, and can actually stir up an article that's more than 2 sentences, why not. The lower balance on that I would use is utility and maintainability. Would a fire dept article be useful? Possibly, especially if there is something interesting about the fire dept there, but I'm not sure an article on every street would be maintainable, in the sense that one might expect enough traffic for it not to devolve into nonsense/spam.
It's certainly a very complex subject, and there are arguments on both sides. I would like to see the pendulum swing a little more in the more open direction, but the actual policy changes that would come to make that happen are complex. I would suggest that utility and maintainability be key, but I'm certainly interested in seeing what the community decides. :)
I do think, more than most of our other policies, notability is hurting our image. I also think many of the people that feel that way aren't wikipedians, and are just angry that something they care about got deleted, without putting much thought into what that inclusion would mean for the encyclopedia as a whole. There are a lot of solutions, as some people said above, maybe transwiki these to some other site would be even better.
David Goodman wrote:
The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx, (assumed population, 20,000) ? Will they use one about the main street in that town? In either case, should we have it as a separate article?
The reality, though, tends to be rather more political and content-based than that. Articles don't get deleted on their own, and relatively few are nominated for deletion by people applying some sort of theoretical objective standard (of notability or utility or anything else).
The cases that are controversial are mainly in areas where there are significant groups of people actively campaigning for a reduction in coverage---mainly anything to do with pop culture or recent news. If you write about an underground rapper with a large YouTube following, you're going to run into objectors. If you write about the most obscure 19th-century government official you can dig up, on the other hand, nobody is going to object.
-Mark
Judson Dunn wrote:
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur? yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
Certainly, we may find it difficult to imagine that anyone might find a reliable source for those fire hydrants, but if they do we must respect that.
So there really is a place called Pancake, Texas (population 11), but we don't even mention it in our article on [[Coryell County, Texas]], or even that the post office was once named "Bush". I haven't checked if we have articles on Pancake, PA or Pancake, WV, or the historical Pancake, NV.
Ec
If so, then even in what we think we do best, we are incomplete. It's time to stop worrying about having too much; we have too little. I'm sure there are hundreds of shows from the early years of television that need treatment. I know there are hundreds of classic novels that are merely mentioned in a list.
I have a suggestion: nobody be permitted to propose deleting more articles than they create, or removing more content than they write afresh.
On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Judson Dunn wrote:
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur? yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
Certainly, we may find it difficult to imagine that anyone might find a reliable source for those fire hydrants, but if they do we must respect that.
So there really is a place called Pancake, Texas (population 11), but we don't even mention it in our article on [[Coryell County, Texas]], or even that the post office was once named "Bush". I haven't checked if we have articles on Pancake, PA or Pancake, WV, or the historical Pancake, NV.
Ec
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On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 7:42 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
If so, then even in what we think we do best, we are incomplete. It's time to stop worrying about having too much; we have too little. I'm sure there are hundreds of shows from the early years of television that need treatment. I know there are hundreds of classic novels that are merely mentioned in a list.
I have a suggestion: nobody be permitted to propose deleting more articles than they create, or removing more content than they write afresh.
On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Judson Dunn wrote:
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur? yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
Certainly, we may find it difficult to imagine that anyone might find a reliable source for those fire hydrants, but if they do we must respect that.
So there really is a place called Pancake, Texas (population 11), but we don't even mention it in our article on [[Coryell County, Texas]], or even that the post office was once named "Bush". I haven't checked if we have articles on Pancake, PA or Pancake, WV, or the historical Pancake, NV.
Ec
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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Or, how about no one being allowed to put in text or create articles without removing or proposing for deletion a corresponding amount of text or number of articles?
Wait, such an arbitrary standard sounds ludicrous? Well...yes, it does! Good editors cut and prune, they don't just add. You still want to have -something- left, but preferably that something will have unimportant and redundant bits trimmed down or removed entirely. Most TV shows, for example, are great in list format. You have the whole thing in one article, allowing for easy navigation, and you don't have the overlong plot summaries, original research and speculation, and "In popular culture" sections that plague full articles on the things. Well, now we're good! We DO include information on them, we just don't overdo it or do more than we can without turning it to crap and sacrificing quality. Quality over quantity anyday.
It's time for MORE cutting, not less. One takes garbage to the can and gets rid of it, and it shouldn't take a five-day debate to do that.
On Monday 10 March 2008 03:06, Todd Allen wrote:
Wait, such an arbitrary standard sounds ludicrous? Well...yes, it does! Good editors cut and prune, they don't just add. You still want to have -something- left, but preferably that something will have unimportant
Nothing factual is unimportant.
and redundant bits trimmed down or removed entirely. Most TV shows, for example, are great in list format. You have the whole thing in one article, allowing for easy navigation, and you don't have the overlong plot summaries,
What's wrong with those?
original research and speculation,
Such as?
and "In popular culture" sections that plague full articles on the things.
What's wrong with those?
Well, now we're good! We DO include information on them,
But not as much as we otherwise could--therefore, we're worse off with your approach.
we just don't overdo it
There's no such thing.
or do more than we can without turning it to crap and sacrificing quality.
How does removing information make an encyclopedia better?
Quality over quantity anyday.
They're the same thing.
Those presenting "detailed articles" or "good general overviews" as mutually incompatible are presenting a false dichotomy. There's no reason we can't have *both* an episode list and a more detailed article for each episode. We do have lists of minor planets (for loading, broken into chunks of 10000) which just list the name, number, provisional designation, discoverer and discovery date, additionally some (though not yet all) minor planets have more detailed articles that fall under the list, for those who want to know more. There's no reason to pick one or the other when we can do both and not neglect a significant component of our readers.
Unless disk space suddenly got way more expensive?
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
Those presenting "detailed articles" or "good general overviews" as mutually incompatible are presenting a false dichotomy. There's no reason we can't have *both* an episode list and a more detailed article for each episode. We do have lists of minor planets (for loading, broken into chunks of 10000) which just list the name, number, provisional designation, discoverer and discovery date, additionally some (though not yet all) minor planets have more detailed articles that fall under the list, for those who want to know more. There's no reason to pick one or the other when we can do both and not neglect a significant component of our readers.
Unless disk space suddenly got way more expensive?
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On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article.
No. I sure hope you're joking or being sarcastic.
And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication.
No, since there isn't enough people on Earth to do that by a factor of billions. And even if we automated it, who the heck would ever read any more than the absolute vanishing tiny fraction of it? And how would the wikipedia back up such an enormous database of articles? And what are they all there for if, for all intents and purposes nobody reads them?
And if it's automated why not just automate generating an article if anybody actually wants that article from the databases? And in that case if it's automatically completely generated it's not part of the wikipedia per se. And tools that can process the data in multiple different ways, not *just* generate *an* article for *a* star are normally much more useful anyway. Again it's not something that the wikipedia gets involved in, and I don't think it ever should.
We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead.
Look, at the end of the day, there's a law of diminishing returns. Your email here is a poster-child to the absolute uselessness of having an article on each entry of a large database.
No offense meant, but this is the dopiest idea I have ever seen.
Only people with weak ideas dismiss and insult opinions of others. People who wish to mass remove articles have this tendency.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
naked
eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
there are
more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
planet.
Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article.
No. I sure hope you're joking or being sarcastic.
And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
something
as dull as Proxima Centauri (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
is any indication.
No, since there isn't enough people on Earth to do that by a factor of billions. And even if we automated it, who the heck would ever read any more than the absolute vanishing tiny fraction of it? And how would the wikipedia back up such an enormous database of articles? And what are they all there for if, for all intents and purposes nobody reads them?
And if it's automated why not just automate generating an article if anybody actually wants that article from the databases? And in that case if it's automatically completely generated it's not part of the wikipedia per se. And tools that can process the data in multiple different ways, not *just* generate *an* article for *a* star are normally much more useful anyway. Again it's not something that the wikipedia gets involved in, and I don't think it ever should.
We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead.
Look, at the end of the day, there's a law of diminishing returns. Your email here is a poster-child to the absolute uselessness of having an article on each entry of a large database.
No offense meant, but this is the dopiest idea I have ever seen.
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.
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On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Only people with weak ideas dismiss and insult opinions of others. People who wish to mass remove articles have this tendency.
Really? I'm crushed, honestly. I consider myself to be an inclusionist, but I did some more arithmetic on your idea that we should have an article per star:
According to the Observable Universe galaxy, there's ~1e22 stars in the observable universe (*rather* more than trillions- and while it's uncited, it seems consistent with the numbers following it which are cited). If we assume just 100 bytes of article per star, that's 1e24 bytes. If for the sake of argument we assume that 1G of data costs $0.1, then that's about $100e12 just for a single copy of all the articles. Allowing for a duplicate copy, that's ~100x the cost of the Iraq war (just the disk).
Apart from the costs, I hope you'll forgive me if I find the point of having 10 trillion articles for each and every man, woman and child on Earth incomprehensible from the point of view of an encyclopedia.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Only people with weak ideas dismiss and insult opinions of others.
People
who wish to mass remove articles have this tendency.
Really? I'm crushed, honestly. I consider myself to be an inclusionist, but I did some more arithmetic on your idea that we should have an article per star:
According to the Observable Universe galaxy, there's ~1e22 stars in the observable universe (*rather* more than trillions- and while it's uncited, it seems consistent with the numbers following it which are cited). If we assume just 100 bytes of article per star, that's 1e24 bytes. If for the sake of argument we assume that 1G of data costs $0.1, then that's about $100e12 just for a single copy of all the articles. Allowing for a duplicate copy, that's ~100x the cost of the Iraq war (just the disk).
Apart from the costs, I hope you'll forgive me if I find the point of having 10 trillion articles for each and every man, woman and child on Earth incomprehensible from the point of view of an encyclopedia.
- White Cat
-- -Ian Woollard https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
You two have just pretty much defined by example reductio ad absurdum, on both ends of the spectrum.
Isn't there anyone who isn't readily willing to descend into such inanity who will defend deletionism?
On 10/03/2008, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
You two have just pretty much defined by example reductio ad absurdum, on both ends of the spectrum.
Which "end of the spectrum" am I supposed to have done this for? If I attack inane ideas am I then inane or am I simply attacking the inane???
Isn't there anyone who isn't readily willing to descend into such inanity who will defend deletionism?
I consider myself an inclusionist, but I defend deletionism if done in the spirit and letter of the rules.
But now you mention it, isn't this about inanity anyway? If somebody creates an inane article do we let it stand?
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
On Monday 10 March 2008 14:54, Ian Woollard wrote:
I consider myself an inclusionist, but I defend deletionism if done in the spirit and letter of the rules.
What rules? There are no rules on Wikipedia...we are only bound by our obligation to further the aims of the encyclopedia.
Removing factual, verifiable information works AGAINST the aims of the encyclopedia.
But now you mention it, isn't this about inanity anyway? If somebody creates an inane article do we let it stand?
What makes an article "inane"? Being about something you're not interested in?
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not??
It should be allowed to stay, "notability guideline" or no, since "notability" is meaningless and unnecessary in the first place. We're not bound by it PERIOD.
And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
Information about people scratching themselves behind their ears, obviously.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
Can you find reliable verifyable sources for the subject?
Most of the stuff that's truly inane won't have any.
On 10/03/2008, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
Can you find reliable verifyable sources for the subject?
I deliberately picked it to be inane as I could think of, but it actually looks like it. There's sources on scratching, and there's one or two psychological things about scratching behind the ear while talking, you could probably say verifiable things about it. The only thing is whether it's notable? Probably not... I would expect that it's below the notability line.
Most of the stuff that's truly inane won't have any.
I wouldn't like to bet, there's a lot of stuff that may be mentioned in passing that is verifiable without it being something that most people would expect to find in an encyclopedia in its own article.
To give another more edgy and more amusing example that I discovered by accident, I created an article on encyclopedia articles, I figured that there were articles in the wikipedia on every other sort of article (newspaper articles, magazine articles....), so I might as well. Turns out there's not a lot written on it ;-). There's quite a lot written on entire encyclopedias, but even then not much on the articles, it looks like most of the stuff specifically on articles in them is probably either in a book I don't have immediate access to, or a trade secret ;-), so ironically encyclopedia articles might not be notable ;-) I'm not entirely sure which way that argues though ;-)
--
-george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
Ian Woollard wrote:
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
How can the rest of us know what is in it when you haven't written it yet? As long as as this is only a hypothetical straw man we can't tell what deletion or keep criteria will be used.
Ec
On 10/03/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
How can the rest of us know what is in it when you haven't written it yet? As long as as this is only a hypothetical straw man we can't tell what deletion or keep criteria will be used.
Without in any way wishing to disrupt anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_scratching_themselves_behind_their_ears
Deletion is currently tagged due to alleged lack of encyclopedic quality, lack of notability and it being 'likely socially irrelevant'.
You'll note that scratching behind the ears is a verifiable feature of the world, and it's probably adequately referenced, so this article doesn't necessarily violate WP:VER,
Any extreme inclusionists here presumably want this article to stay, so please improve it to make that happen. People that believe in notability can let it die, even help it die.
Clearly if by encyclopedia you mean simply something with an enormous quantity of information on essentially everything then this article deserves to live.
Personally I feel ambivalent towards it, so I'm not going to participate much further, but it seems to me that it serves as an acid test as to whether people are simply trolling here.
Ec
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 10/03/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
How can the rest of us know what is in it when you haven't written it yet? As long as as this is only a hypothetical straw man we can't tell what deletion or keep criteria will be used.
Without in any way wishing to disrupt anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_scratching_themselves_behind_their_ears
Deletion is currently tagged due to alleged lack of encyclopedic quality, lack of notability and it being 'likely socially irrelevant'.
It seems as though they forgot to mention articles created for the sole purpose of making a point.
Ec
Human non-verbal communication is a field of active study. There have been works on this subject for centuries. I wondered what we could find in Darwin''s The expression of the emotions in man and animals," took a look, and added a closely related reference.
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:34 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 10/03/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
If I create an article about 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' and the notability guideline is removed, would this article be allowed to stand or not?? And if it stayed, what sort of thing would be in it?
How can the rest of us know what is in it when you haven't written it yet? As long as as this is only a hypothetical straw man we can't tell what deletion or keep criteria will be used.
Without in any way wishing to disrupt anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_scratching_themselves_behind_their_ears
Deletion is currently tagged due to alleged lack of encyclopedic quality, lack of notability and it being 'likely socially irrelevant'.
It seems as though they forgot to mention articles created for the sole purpose of making a point.
Ec
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On Monday 10 March 2008 12:02, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article.
No. I sure hope you're joking or being sarcastic.
And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication.
No, since there isn't enough people on Earth to do that by a factor of billions. And even if we automated it, who the heck would ever read any more than the absolute vanishing tiny fraction of it?
Who cares? The important thing is that it's there if someone wants it.
Just because it's unfeasible doesn't mean that it's an unworthy goal, or that we shouldn't try to approach it as closely as possible.
I've just completed an essay that is related to this topic: [[User:GlassCobra/What Wikipedia is]]; many ideas were inspired by or lifted from (hope the mailing list's GFDL, haha) this discussion. I encourage everyone to leave comments or criticism on the talk page. Thanks in advance.
- GC
Ian Woollard wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article.
No. I sure hope you're joking or being sarcastic.
I would read his comments as perfectly serious. Not even the most extreme inclusionist will believe that it is possible to write an article on each of a trillion stars. He is intelligent enough to know that if every Wikipedian were to devote himself to only that task to the exclusion of everything else that's interesting, it could not happen. If some individual is delusional enough to believe that he can get somewhere in that kind of endeavour, and sets out on the task with properly referenced articles every star that's worked on, the rest of us are confident that at some point he will get tired of the task and proceed to another delusion. A very limited number of forgettable articles will have been created; the task will have been self-limiting without the intervention of deletionist drama. The articles may be readily admitted as useless, but a campaign to expunge uselessness only becomes support for the meta-useless.
It seems to me that with some of the deletion programmes the participants have just discovered the uselessness of male nipples, and have used this discovery to justify a policy of compulsory surgical removal.
And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication.
No, since there isn't enough people on Earth to do that by a factor of billions. And even if we automated it, who the heck would ever read any more than the absolute vanishing tiny fraction of it? And how would the wikipedia back up such an enormous database of articles? And what are they all there for if, for all intents and purposes nobody reads them?
Even you see the impossibility of the task. Why worry about enormous database space for something that will never happen? The US Patent Office is now up to around seven million in its main patent line. It does not expunge the record of an old patent on the sole grounds that nobody will ever read it. While there is an ego-boosting quality to having someone discover our work on a specific article one cannot presume that the writer and the reader will stand in the same relation to the article. Attaching utilitarian preconditions to articles stifles the creative interpretation of those articles.
And if it's automated why not just automate generating an article if anybody actually wants that article from the databases? And in that case if it's automatically completely generated it's not part of the wikipedia per se. And tools that can process the data in multiple different ways, not *juEst* generate *an* article for *a* star are normally much more useful anyway. Again it's not something that the wikipedia gets involved in, and I don't think it ever should.
I'm just as sceptical about the prospect of automatically generated articles, but until something like what you say becomes reasonably feasible there's not much to be concerned about. I'm sure we all remember the fuss when the articles for small US villages were botted in.
We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead.
Look, at the end of the day, there's a law of diminishing returns. Your email here is a poster-child to the absolute uselessness of having an article on each entry of a large database.
The great thing about the law of diminishing returns is that it would still work even if there were no deletionists running around trying to enforce it.
Ec
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead.
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined.
I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong.
In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
naked
eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
there are
more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
planet.
Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And
it is
feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
something
as dull as Proxima Centauri (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft".
We
should expand them instead.
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
-- geni
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True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined.
I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong.
In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
-- geni
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On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:18 PM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined.
I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong.
In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
naked
eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
there are
more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
planet.
Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And
it is
feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
something
as dull as Proxima Centauri (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft".
We
should expand them instead.
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
-- geni
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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What's wrong with manageable?
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, or tiny towns in a county, or episodes in a TV series, or albums from a band when the albums themselves have received little or no coverage, or the majority of players on a sports team, or.... Most of those things have little to no secondary source material, so a list makes far more sense than a thousand articles that will never get better, and may have inexperienced editors look at them, decide they're "too short", and put in a bunch of unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia/"Family Guy mentioned it once!". If it turns out an element or two of the list gets enough source material to write a good article on it, it can easily be split out, while leaving the rest of the list items as redirects. That's simply good organization.
Todd Allen wrote:
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, or tiny towns in a county, or episodes in a TV series, or albums from a band when the albums themselves have received little or no coverage, or the majority of players on a sports team, or.... Most of those things have little to no secondary source material, so a list makes far more sense than a thousand articles that will never get better, and may have inexperienced editors look at them, decide they're "too short", and put in a bunch of unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia/"Family Guy mentioned it once!". If it turns out an element or two of the list gets enough source material to write a good article on it, it can easily be split out, while leaving the rest of the list items as redirects. That's simply good organization.
In most of those cases it's possible to put in a lot of material that you would dismiss as "unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia" but which is IMO (and I the O of a lot of other editors) perfectly reasonable and valuable information to have in an article. For example, a plot summary and cast listing of a TV episode is neither unreferenced nor original research nor trivia.
By smushing everything together into one giant list page a lot of that information is going to be thrown away. I think you're going to have to come up with a reason for throwing that information away beyond simply asserting that it's "non-notable". The validity of judging things based on their "notability" is what's under discussion here, you can't just assume it.
in fact, there are usually review sources discussing each individual episode. True, only some of them are the conventional published sources that we use. What we need for both the conventional and the nonconventional is editors prepared to track these down, and add them to articles.
We should be writing an encyclopedia such that someone who is friends with a fan of a series, can learn enough from WP to be able to understand their interests and understand their conversation about the events and motivations of the individual episodes of the series--not the way a true fan would, but at least a casually interested other. that a parent, for example, could understand what a child was talking about without having to watch all the childrens' series. That's part of the very purpose of a general encyclopedia--the applicability to real life, not just background for the academic study of things.
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, or tiny towns in a county, or episodes in a TV series, or albums from a band when the albums themselves have received little or no coverage, or the majority of players on a sports team, or.... Most of those things have little to no secondary source material, so a list makes far more sense than a thousand articles that will never get better, and may have inexperienced editors look at them, decide they're "too short", and put in a bunch of unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia/"Family Guy mentioned it once!". If it turns out an element or two of the list gets enough source material to write a good article on it, it can easily be split out, while leaving the rest of the list items as redirects. That's simply good organization.
In most of those cases it's possible to put in a lot of material that you would dismiss as "unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia" but which is IMO (and I the O of a lot of other editors) perfectly reasonable and valuable information to have in an article. For example, a plot summary and cast listing of a TV episode is neither unreferenced nor original research nor trivia.
By smushing everything together into one giant list page a lot of that information is going to be thrown away. I think you're going to have to come up with a reason for throwing that information away beyond simply asserting that it's "non-notable". The validity of judging things based on their "notability" is what's under discussion here, you can't just assume it.
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On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
in fact, there are usually review sources discussing each individual episode. True, only some of them are the conventional published sources that we use. What we need for both the conventional and the nonconventional is editors prepared to track these down, and add them to articles.
We should be writing an encyclopedia such that someone who is friends with a fan of a series, can learn enough from WP to be able to understand their interests and understand their conversation about the events and motivations of the individual episodes of the series--not the way a true fan would, but at least a casually interested other. that a parent, for example, could understand what a child was talking about without having to watch all the childrens' series. That's part of the very purpose of a general encyclopedia--the applicability to real life, not just background for the academic study of things.
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, or tiny towns in a county, or episodes in a TV series, or albums from a band when the albums themselves have received little or no coverage, or the majority of players on a sports team, or.... Most of those things have little to no secondary source material, so a list makes far more sense than a thousand articles that will never get better, and may have inexperienced editors look at them, decide they're "too short", and put in a bunch of unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia/"Family Guy mentioned it once!". If it turns out an element or two of the list gets enough source material to write a good article on it, it can easily be split out, while leaving the rest of the list items as redirects. That's simply good organization.
In most of those cases it's possible to put in a lot of material that you would dismiss as "unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia" but which is IMO (and I the O of a lot of other editors) perfectly reasonable and valuable information to have in an article. For example, a plot summary and cast listing of a TV episode is neither unreferenced nor original research nor trivia.
By smushing everything together into one giant list page a lot of that information is going to be thrown away. I think you're going to have to come up with a reason for throwing that information away beyond simply asserting that it's "non-notable". The validity of judging things based on their "notability" is what's under discussion here, you can't just assume it.
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--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.), that's well and good. But let's make sure we don't lose sight of the reliability requirements here. What we should avoid is "I watched the series and saw that..." being used to support a full article. We can do some very basic, indisputable things from primary sources only, but the meat of an article should come from secondary, independent, reliable sources. If we can't do that, because such sources aren't in existence, we shouldn't have a full article, just a list entry. I applaud people who find sources, usual or unusual, so long as they're reliable.
Todd Allen wrote:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
in fact, there are usually review sources discussing each individual episode. True, only some of them are the conventional published sources that we use. What we need for both the conventional and the nonconventional is editors prepared to track these down, and add them to articles.
We should be writing an encyclopedia such that someone who is friends with a fan of a series, can learn enough from WP to be able to understand their interests and understand their conversation about the events and motivations of the individual episodes of the series--not the way a true fan would, but at least a casually interested other. that a parent, for example, could understand what a child was talking about without having to watch all the childrens' series. That's part of the very purpose of a general encyclopedia--the applicability to real life, not just background for the academic study of things.
And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.), that's well and good. But let's make sure we don't lose sight of the reliability requirements here. What we should avoid is "I watched the series and saw that..." being used to support a full article. We can do some very basic, indisputable things from primary sources only, but the meat of an article should come from secondary, independent, reliable sources. If we can't do that, because such sources aren't in existence, we shouldn't have a full article, just a list entry. I applaud people who find sources, usual or unusual, so long as they're reliable.
There is no algorithm for determining the reliability of a source. David's example of a valid episode summary was good. We are not looking for a series of academic treatises about the significance of each episode of "Lost". If a viewer misses an episode he will feel quite lost himself. Having a good summary available will help keep him in the loop.
Ec
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 2:58 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
in fact, there are usually review sources discussing each individual episode. True, only some of them are the conventional published sources that we use. What we need for both the conventional and the nonconventional is editors prepared to track these down, and add them to articles.
We should be writing an encyclopedia such that someone who is friends with a fan of a series, can learn enough from WP to be able to understand their interests and understand their conversation about the events and motivations of the individual episodes of the series--not the way a true fan would, but at least a casually interested other. that a parent, for example, could understand what a child was talking about without having to watch all the childrens' series. That's part of the very purpose of a general encyclopedia--the applicability to real life, not just background for the academic study of things.
And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.), that's well and good. But let's make sure we don't lose sight of the reliability requirements here. What we should avoid is "I watched the series and saw that..." being used to support a full article. We can do some very basic, indisputable things from primary sources only, but the meat of an article should come from secondary, independent, reliable sources. If we can't do that, because such sources aren't in existence, we shouldn't have a full article, just a list entry. I applaud people who find sources, usual or unusual, so long as they're reliable.
There is no algorithm for determining the reliability of a source. David's example of a valid episode summary was good. We are not looking for a series of academic treatises about the significance of each episode of "Lost". If a viewer misses an episode he will feel quite lost himself. Having a good summary available will help keep him in the loop.
Ec
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Great. Then (s)he can find such a summary on a fansite.
Or, if we have reliable sources, and only if, on Wikipedia.
On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Great. Then (s)he can find such a summary on a fansite. Or, if we have reliable sources, and only if, on Wikipedia.
For this purpose, that *is* a reliable source. Such sites being written by subject area experts.
"Reliable sources" is even squishier and more subjective than "notability." e.g. No-one who's ever actually dealt with journalists would assume that because something's in the NYT it's *necessarily* accurate to a useful degree for any given purpose.
"No reliable sources" is increasingly (as in the example of your email) used as an argument from a combination of personal distaste and subject-area ignorance. This is not helpful in writing useful encyclopedia articles.
- d.
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
- White Cat
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 2:58 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com
wrote:
in fact, there are usually review sources discussing each individual episode. True, only some of them are the conventional published sources that we use. What we need for both the conventional and the nonconventional is editors prepared to track these down, and add
them
to articles.
We should be writing an encyclopedia such that someone who is
friends
with a fan of a series, can learn enough from WP to be able to understand their interests and understand their conversation about
the
events and motivations of the individual episodes of the
series--not
the way a true fan would, but at least a casually interested other. that a parent, for example, could understand what a child was
talking
about without having to watch all the childrens' series. That's
part
of the very purpose of a general encyclopedia--the applicability to real life, not just background for the academic study of things.
And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.), that's well and good. But let's make sure we don't lose sight of the reliability requirements here. What
we
should avoid is "I watched the series and saw that..." being used to support a full article. We can do some very basic, indisputable
things
from primary sources only, but the meat of an article should come
from
secondary, independent, reliable sources. If we can't do that,
because
such sources aren't in existence, we shouldn't have a full article, just a list entry. I applaud people who find sources, usual or unusual, so long as they're reliable.
There is no algorithm for determining the reliability of a source. David's example of a valid episode summary was good. We are not
looking
for a series of academic treatises about the significance of each episode of "Lost". If a viewer misses an episode he will feel quite lost himself. Having a good summary available will help keep him in
the
loop.
Ec
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Great. Then (s)he can find such a summary on a fansite.
Or, if we have reliable sources, and only if, on Wikipedia.
-- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
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On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:40 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
- White Cat
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 2:58 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com
wrote:
in fact, there are usually review sources discussing each individual episode. True, only some of them are the conventional published sources that we use. What we need for both the conventional and the nonconventional is editors prepared to track these down, and add
them
to articles.
We should be writing an encyclopedia such that someone who is
friends
with a fan of a series, can learn enough from WP to be able to understand their interests and understand their conversation about
the
events and motivations of the individual episodes of the
series--not
the way a true fan would, but at least a casually interested other. that a parent, for example, could understand what a child was
talking
about without having to watch all the childrens' series. That's
part
of the very purpose of a general encyclopedia--the applicability to real life, not just background for the academic study of things.
And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.), that's well and good. But let's make sure we don't lose sight of the reliability requirements here. What
we
should avoid is "I watched the series and saw that..." being used to support a full article. We can do some very basic, indisputable
things
from primary sources only, but the meat of an article should come
from
secondary, independent, reliable sources. If we can't do that,
because
such sources aren't in existence, we shouldn't have a full article, just a list entry. I applaud people who find sources, usual or unusual, so long as they're reliable.
There is no algorithm for determining the reliability of a source. David's example of a valid episode summary was good. We are not
looking
for a series of academic treatises about the significance of each episode of "Lost". If a viewer misses an episode he will feel quite lost himself. Having a good summary available will help keep him in
the
loop.
Ec
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Great. Then (s)he can find such a summary on a fansite.
Or, if we have reliable sources, and only if, on Wikipedia.
-- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
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That is not a reliable, independent, secondary source.
On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:40 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
That is not a reliable, independent, secondary source.
And sourcing is not a bureaucratic checklist. The source text being discussed is obviously relevant to an article and, if objectively checkable, certainly citable.
- d.
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:46 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:40 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
That is not a reliable, independent, secondary source.
And sourcing is not a bureaucratic checklist. The source text being discussed is obviously relevant to an article and, if objectively checkable, certainly citable.
- d.
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While true, it is not in itself sufficient for an article. Independent, reliable, secondary sources decide if a subject is significant enough to write a significant amount on. If they say no, we follow suit and say no, and make a quick entry on a list. We don't second-guess them. Though the list entry can certainly cite the primary source.
Secondary sources are not a valid metric to determine notability unless you are a paper encyclopedia or seeking universal notability. Universal notability is a mistake according to Jimmy Wales: http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/wikipedia_is_ju.html
In addition secondary sources do not necessarily establish notability. Every US marine that served in Iraq or every victim of 9/11 attacks have plenty of secondary coverage. Not every one of them are notable.
[[WP:SPINOUT]]'s and [[WP:STUB]]'s are not banned
- White Cat
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
While true, it is not in itself sufficient for an article. Independent, reliable, secondary sources decide if a subject is significant enough to write a significant amount on. If they say no, we follow suit and say no, and make a quick entry on a list. We don't second-guess them. Though the list entry can certainly cite the primary source.
-- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
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On 13/03/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:40 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
That is not a reliable, independent, secondary source.
And sourcing is not a bureaucratic checklist. The source text being discussed is obviously relevant to an article and, if objectively checkable, certainly citable.
Yes, I completely agree with that. Provided the conclusion drawn is not synthetic- it has to be totally unarguable from the source, then the piece itself is a very good source on what it said.
But that's very different from notability. Notability is whether what it says or is is actually important, rather than what it exactly says.
And it's critical that these not be confused.
In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by making an article about it?
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles.
- d.
On Thursday 13 March 2008 10:34, Ian Woollard wrote:
Yes, I completely agree with that. Provided the conclusion drawn is not synthetic- it has to be totally unarguable from the source, then the piece itself is a very good source on what it said.
But that's very different from notability. Notability is whether what it says or is is actually important, rather than what it exactly says.
And is also totally irrelevant.
And it's critical that these not be confused.
In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by making an article about it?
Oh, COME ON. You're kidding me, right?
Seriously, call me "unhelpful" all you want, but all you're doing here is grasping at straws trying to salvage a lost cause.
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles.
Not at all.
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, I completely agree with that. Provided the conclusion drawn is not synthetic- it has to be totally unarguable from the source, then the piece itself is a very good source on what it said.
But that's very different from notability. Notability is whether what it says or is is actually important, rather than what it exactly says.
And it's critical that these not be confused.
In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by making an article about it?
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles.
- d.
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.
All stars are important. All stars have secondary sources. Only uncharted stars lack that information and that is a temporary situation. No one will create articles on such stars. This is because we do not even know the name of such stars let alone know their location, size or brightness. We are unaware of their existence (hubble was not yet pointed at them) but they are clearly there. However, there are hundreds of millions of charted stars. No one should stay in the way of anyone creating stub articles for such stars.
In the case of highways, townships and other such articles we do not need to wait for a telescope to point at them. Based on primary sources (such as official data) alone we can tell a lot about them.
Notability was drafted to get rid of trash. Trash no one but you, your fellow band members and etc know about. If your band is known by the *entire planet*, I'd consider your band notable even if Harvard has not yet studied your band.
On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote:
Yes, I completely agree with that. Provided the conclusion drawn is not synthetic- it has to be totally unarguable from the source, then the piece itself is a very good source on what it said.
I feel obliged to point out that, as a scholar working in popular culture, the phrase "totally unarguable from the source" is almost, but not entirely, meaningless. I point this out because it's an arbitrarily high standard that almost any claim can be argued to fall short of. The reasonable standard is "arguable straightforwardly from the source." That is, anybody reasonable, upon looking at the source and the claim, would go "OK, yes, I see why that claim is being made." One advantage of this standard over others is that we have a large number of reasonable people who can perform this check with no equipment other than their own presumably good judgment.
But that's very different from notability. Notability is whether what it says or is is actually important, rather than what it exactly says.
And it's critical that these not be confused.
In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by making an article about it?
No. That is not what notability is. There are many problems with having an article on my quite wonderful but largely non-notable little sister. None of the ten largest problems are that the article would violate NPOV.
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles.
This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri, the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally important to and for what? Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two million concepts.
-Phil
On 13/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote:
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles
This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri, the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally important to and for what?
You could do a straw poll, you could check sources, you could google it. There's lots of ways to do that; including weighted combinations of the above and others. None of them are perfect, but what ever is?
Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two million concepts.
I completely disagree.
It provides a cut-off. It says some things do not make the grade and others do, just like an exam gives a pass-fail mark. It's not that exams are perfect measures, it's simply that exams give a *reasonable* measure. And yes, an exam does compare.
It's only when you try to push things to extreme, to insist that something *has* to be a *perfect* measure that bad things start to occur. That leads to extreme inclusionism and extreme deletionism.
-Phil
We are dealing with an extreme case of deletionism (mass redirectification), yes.
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote:
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles
This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri, the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally important to and for what?
You could do a straw poll, you could check sources, you could google it. There's lots of ways to do that; including weighted combinations of the above and others. None of them are perfect, but what ever is?
Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two million concepts.
I completely disagree.
It provides a cut-off. It says some things do not make the grade and others do, just like an exam gives a pass-fail mark. It's not that exams are perfect measures, it's simply that exams give a *reasonable* measure. And yes, an exam does compare.
It's only when you try to push things to extreme, to insist that something *has* to be a *perfect* measure that bad things start to occur. That leads to extreme inclusionism and extreme deletionism.
-Phil
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.
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On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by making an article about it?
Whoa! Undue weight governs coverage within individual articles, and has no bearing on whether a topic should have an article. Wiki is not paper, really. (And even paper coverage greatly exceeds Wikipedia's current coverage on almost any given topic, in aggregate.)
-ragesoss
On 13/03/2008, Sage Ross sage.ross@yale.edu wrote:
Whoa! Undue weight governs coverage within individual articles, and has no bearing on whether a topic should have an article. Wiki is not paper, really. (And even paper coverage greatly exceeds Wikipedia's current coverage on almost any given topic, in aggregate.)
You're strictly correct. OTOH isn't this somewhat equivalent to arguing that it's perfectly OK to remove something from an article (or even lots of articles if they all mention it) on NPOV grounds, and then turn around and make an article especially for it?
-ragesoss
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
You're strictly correct. OTOH isn't this somewhat equivalent to arguing that it's perfectly OK to remove something from an article (or even lots of articles if they all mention it) on NPOV grounds, and then turn around and make an article especially for it?
There are plenty of things that should be removed from some articles on NPOV grounds but are OK in their own article. One big example is that of discredited or pseudoscientific theories. Mentioning them in our major science articles would be undue weight; however, this does not necessarily mean that they should not be mentioned in Wikipedia at all, especially if they gained a decent following.
-Matt
On 14/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
There are plenty of things that should be removed from some articles on NPOV grounds but are OK in their own article.
Yes, but are all of them? I'd say very definitely not. And if not, then we have a defacto notability standard.
FWIW 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' has been deleted for not being 'encyclopedic, notable or of social significance'. There you go then, notability.
-Matt
Fiction is endless. You can go delete all pokemon related pages. Some other popular series will come and we will again have hundereds of articles. If not tomorrow, in the next 5 years. Eventual ism suggests this 'problem' will never go away regardless of how many people try to mass remove pages. You may at best slow down the rate of increase. Eventually wikipedia will be really popular on countries like India and China (which have worlds highest number of English speakers). We will have many many articles on works of fiction created in India. - Bollywoodhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywoodrelated articles for example.
You know, if the intention is removing OR and Cruft doing so w/o putting anything in its place will result in the exact opposite. Now if you were to convert a crufty article with OR to a sourced high quality encyclopedia entry, I seriously doubt anyone would downgrade it back to a crufty OR.
Now instead of wasting everyones time (including your own) mass removing pages people are working on, you set example creating exceptionally high quality articles. For example the kind of sources you use may contain information on other fiction related topics. And if not, at the very worst case scenario you will have created one high quality article. People who write articles typically want to create the best quality article possible. Thats what they see as "best quality". If you show them a better example chances are they would adjust articles they write to your "best quality".
A good edit is very hard to revert. A bad edit/delete or even a good delete is not that hard to be reversed.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
There are plenty of things that should be removed from some articles on NPOV grounds but are OK in their own article.
Yes, but are all of them? I'd say very definitely not. And if not, then we have a defacto notability standard.
FWIW 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' has been deleted for not being 'encyclopedic, notable or of social significance'. There you go then, notability.
-Matt
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.
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On Mar 13, 2008, at 9:46 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:40 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
That is not a reliable, independent, secondary source.
And sourcing is not a bureaucratic checklist. The source text being discussed is obviously relevant to an article and, if objectively checkable, certainly citable.
Indeed. Comments like Todd's are deeply baffling to me. As an active scholar working on areas of popular culture, I cannot imagine any justification for going to a secondary source, independent or otherwise, for something as straightforward as a plot summary. Were I peer reviewing any paper that did that, I would reject it out of hand for egregiously sloppy research.
While I recognize that Wikipedia's goals in research are different from active professional scholarship, I would suggest that a policy that amounts to "use laughably bad sources instead of good ones" is not one that we actually mean.
-Phil
On Thursday 13 March 2008 00:41, Todd Allen wrote:
And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.),
Which are not necessarily unreliable.
How's this: instead of having these ridiculous blanket rules pigeonholing what is and is not a reliable source, perhaps defer to people who are actually familiar with the subject matter--they're more likely to know what is and is not considered a reliable source within that domain.
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list.
No, but that decision is best made by editors familiar with the subject matter in the regular editorial fashion, rather than being imposed from outside by an AFD nomination.
Note that the entire content of an article does not have to be from secondary sources; it just needs to be verifiable. For uncontroversial detail that can definitely come from a primary source.
-Matt
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:20 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:18 PM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined.
I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong.
In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
naked
eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
there are
more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
planet.
Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And
it is
feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
something
as dull as Proxima Centauri (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft".
We
should expand them instead.
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
-- geni
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What's wrong with manageable?
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, [snip]
A list of a few hundred billion items is not manageable. For asteroids, we've cut the list into chunks of 1000, and for maintanence, they're actually ten transcluded lists of 100. And the "main list" only includes some fraction of the information known about your average "Joe Asteroid". In addition, for any given asteroid or star, I can probably make a worthwhile graphic or two, or maybe find a relevant image that's free. Probably no articles exist that can be ideally compacted into a list without losing some value.
WilyD
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 7:07 AM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:20 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:18 PM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined.
I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong.
In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
naked
eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
there are
more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
planet.
Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And
it is
feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
something
as dull as Proxima Centauri (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft".
We
should expand them instead.
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
-- geni
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What's wrong with manageable?
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, [snip]
A list of a few hundred billion items is not manageable. For asteroids, we've cut the list into chunks of 1000, and for maintanence, they're actually ten transcluded lists of 100. And the "main list" only includes some fraction of the information known about your average "Joe Asteroid". In addition, for any given asteroid or star, I can probably make a worthwhile graphic or two, or maybe find a relevant image that's free. Probably no articles exist that can be ideally compacted into a list without losing some value.
WilyD
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You "snipped" a critical part of what I said. If significant amounts of independent reliable material really -are- available about the list element, it can and should be split out once the information and sources are -actually- added. If that eventually applies to every element in such a list, good! If it only applies to a few, good, and if to none, good! Keep it in the list, split it out once genuine, -reliable- (peer reviewed or fact checked by professional) sources are available.
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 7:07 AM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:20 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:18 PM, White Cat
wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined.
I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong.
In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite.
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/03/2008, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
naked
eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
there are
more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
planet.
Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And
it is
feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
something
as dull as Proxima Centauri (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft".
We
should expand them instead.
Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
-- geni
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What's wrong with manageable?
There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single, manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, [snip]
A list of a few hundred billion items is not manageable. For asteroids, we've cut the list into chunks of 1000, and for maintanence, they're actually ten transcluded lists of 100. And the "main list" only includes some fraction of the information known about your average "Joe Asteroid". In addition, for any given asteroid or star, I can probably make a worthwhile graphic or two, or maybe find a relevant image that's free. Probably no articles exist that can be ideally compacted into a list without losing some value.
WilyD
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You "snipped" a critical part of what I said. If significant amounts of independent reliable material really -are- available about the list element, it can and should be split out once the information and sources are -actually- added. If that eventually applies to every element in such a list, good! If it only applies to a few, good, and if to none, good! Keep it in the list, split it out once genuine, -reliable- (peer reviewed or fact checked by professional) sources are available.
-- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
Most of the cases that people are objecting to are ones that start by weed-whacking articles into the ground, then listifying them. Although I've been involved in a fight or two over astronomical articles which are short, but too long for a simple list entry, they're not usually picked on, presumably because they're generally considered "high-brow". Beyond that, lists should only be written by reliable sources as well.
WilyD
Oh and disk space has gotten cheaper. I once calculated the cost of disk space and it was like below
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Episode...
- White Cat
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
Those presenting "detailed articles" or "good general overviews" as mutually incompatible are presenting a false dichotomy. There's no reason we can't have *both* an episode list and a more detailed article for each episode. We do have lists of minor planets (for loading, broken into chunks of 10000) which just list the name, number, provisional designation, discoverer and discovery date, additionally some (though not yet all) minor planets have more detailed articles that fall under the list, for those who want to know more. There's no reason to pick one or the other when we can do both and not neglect a significant component of our readers.
Unless disk space suddenly got way more expensive?
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