On 12/15/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: We could make a start by introducing such a rule for biographies of living people. We have to provide a source when we upload an image or risk that it be deleted in short order. And yet there's so such requirement when adding a claim about a living person that could potentially damage them. That discrepancy suggests we have our priorities upside down. Sarah

<slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote requirement when adding a claim about a living person that could potentially damage them. That discrepancy suggests we have our priorities upside down. No libels or slurs are welcome on Wikipedia. That said, the risk of blandness in dealing with live people is very real. We _must not_ give people the right of approval on what WP writes about them. Charles

<slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote information was removed after he contacted Jimbo, but he writes that he has to check every day to make sure it hasn't been added again. In other words, we've changed this man's life, and yet he's not particularly notable, the people who keep adding the information are mischief-making, and the claims that were made about him weren't in any sense newsworthy. What are the actual implications of this? Note firstly that if one wants to do random defamation on the Internet, there are 30000 newsgroups to choose from - and once sent, a newsgroup cannot be then removed from the Google archive (OK, technically perhaps it can - but not in the easy way our articles are editable). WP matters in this only to the extent that WP has got itself a high profile - which recent though the result of some millions of hours of volunteer time. We have climbed a small mountain, at least. Perhaps the view now shows us things we happily did not see before. Certainly, currently, if someone started arguing that WP is media, rather than a sort of repository of half-finished research, then that makes sense in terms of the kind of reactions we have recently seen. In this case, can your correspondent really not request admin help, periods of page protection, blocking of the malicious editors? biographies of living people, or claims about living people in other articles. Errors in other kinds of articles are annoying, but errors about living people are potentially cruel and very damaging, even if they don't reach the level of an actionable libel. We need to start thinking not only in terms of accuracy and verifiability, but also in terms of *fairness*. It is certainly true that if the letter of the law is NPOV and verifiability, it should not be the spirit of the law here. It would be just another aspect of the excessively legalistic tone we get, as a reward for defining policies better, that people do argue that anything verifiable should be in the page. Obviously it should in some sense be germane. I have had to cut out details of a kidnapped child recently, which was not relevant, even though the information was already in the public domain. And yet - we should not admit arguments on content on the basis of who is making them. That really should be ruled out of court. Charles

On 12/15/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: Hi Anthony, it's not only a question of claims that have no source, but also claims that have a poor source. The example I mentioned earlier of the man who feels he was defamed: the source was a satirical paper that doesn't mind publishing libels. When he and I tried to remove the claim, a group of people associated with the paper turned up as Wikipedia editors and started edit warring over it, including having the subject RfC-ed and blocked for 3RR. There was nothing I could do about it as an admin, because those edit warring to keep it in weren't in violation of any of our behavior policies, and we can't block over content disputes; and anyway, once I'd edited the page, I couldn't take admin action. So the only thing the subject and I could do was spend hours explaining the content policies ad nauseam, and monitoring every change. It was very, very time-consuming. Something needs to change to make it easier to remove claims that damage people and that potentially damage Wikipedia. Sarah

Yes, the hand work involved in responding to complaints, takes a lot of resources too. To say nothing of damage to our reputation and possible litigation. Fred On Dec 15, 2005, at 8:59 AM, <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/15/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: Heh. "Do you have a reference for that?" has always been the warcry of our more skilled edit warriours. -- geni

Hi, What would be good is if we started by forcing people to specify, in broad terms, where things came from. But we didn't punish them for choosing bad sources - we would just fix it later. But at least you would know that the original writer thought it was a) common knowledge, b) personal experience, c) read it somewhere but don't remember where, d) heard it on TV, e) actually know the source, but it's dubious, f) actually know the source and it's reliable. Currently we're basically saying, if it's not f), don't bother telling us. Whereas the great majority of additions are probably in a)-d), and are being added with no source at all. Currently we just don't know how unsourced we really are, or where the hell all those millions of edits actually came from. Steve

I, by contrast, almost never do such editing, and often work with articles of low quality (eg, in the fields of skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, computer games...). There is often a lot that can be done to improve the article by restructing, rewriting, removing POV or adding snippets of general information - even with limited or no knowledge of the subject. People like me would probably throw their hands in the air and stop working overnight if required to find references for everything. The thing is, for many people, editing is *fun*. I actually honestly gain pleasure from taking an unstructured 1000 word article and turning it into a 500 word structured one. Finding references is *work*. If you know something to be true, to find a reputable refernce to back you up is simply hard work in many cases. "no original research" says that if something is true, it should be easy to find a reputable reference - well, it isn't always. There really should be different sourcing guidelines for different fields in Wikipedia - popular culture is just "different" to history, science or geography. I also suspect that a guideline could say somewhere that if it's possible to verify something on google, then that may be good enough in some circumstances. As opposed to making a claim that cannot be verified even by someone searching the entire internet. Steve

Steve Bennett wrote: I sometimes write something off the top of my head then Google for any tolerable reference that'll do for the moment ;-) Some sort of referencing should be possible. For TV or movie synopses, the text itself as an implicit reference is obvious and sufficient, for example. If there's nothing else, that's fine again IMO. Any usable reference is better than none. (Though that's not to say that really crappy references will do just because they're on the net somewhere. One has to use that thing called "editorial judgement.") - d.

"Steve Bennett" <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:000301c601df$013a2380$ea01a8c0@minou... When it provides enough information for someone else to find a citeable reference to back it up, or in the alternative to demosntrate satisfactorily that there is no such reference. Maybe it's time that, instead of having to do everything, people were made comfortable acting in the roles of "editors" and "researchers": the former tidy up articles to make them readable, the latter back up articles to make them credible. HTH HAND -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

David Gerard wrote: [[Taylorise]] now redirects to [[Scientific management]]. - d.

David Gerard wrote: To some extent we can make use of "standard" references. The Internet Movie Data Base is a good example for movies, but that won't work for everything. Many subjects, however, are more controversial and the standards there need to be more stringent . Editorial judgement is important. Google is really a mixed blessing on this. Simply saying that something gets some number of Google hits is not enough. One needs to make a critical evaluation of those linked sites. One needs to distinguish between an academic study and somebody's blog.. Speaking as a person for whom book collecting is an addiction I have many references that I can use, but that is not convenient for many people. The first versions of material may not be perfect, and the verifying material may not be perfect. When material is challenged there must be reasonable time its supporters to find verification. Ec

David Gerard wrote: One could begin with Taylorizing the Taylorizations. The Manual of Style is great for those interested in an encyclopedia of guidelines. Ec

Ray Saintonge wrote: Heh. I have started in a slow way tightening up some of our ridiculously bloated, opaquely-written and special-case-riddled guideline and policy pages; I look forward to the time to really go the hack on the MoS. I think it could be one-third the length without losing a single useful detail. Heck, someone might even want to read it for reasons other than querulousness. LOL! - d.

David Gerard wrote: I have tried similar things at Wiktionary, where I often trace a wide circle of "What links here" that ends up where I started. The problem is not just with the people writing imaginative new policies, but also with individuals who come along with a great plan to reorganize everything. They start with a lot of enthusiasm, but half way through their project they fall off the edge of the earth never to be seen again. Then at least two others develop contradictory policies on the same thing on two different pages; this entitles newbies to use whichever one they found first to justify whatever action they want to take. One never knows when one will be deleting someone's pet policy> Being bureaucrat and the most senior active editor in the project buys me a certain amount of sin points, but I would prefer to limit that kind of boldness to situations which really matter. Dear Abby, what would you do? :-) Ec

Steve Bennett wrote: If you're not changing any facts, then there's nothing to worry about, go have fun. But how sure are you about that snippet of general information you want to add? There have been a couple times where I was *sure* about some claim, and yet it turned out my memory was faulty. There were probably readers of the Seigenthaler article that probably thought "hmm, didn't know he was implicated in the assassination, but I remember seeing the name when reading about it one time", and so it wouldn't occur to them to be suspicious of the prankster's claim. I actually enjoy tracking down the sources of facts, and many of my edits are simply to add a reference or two. So if you do the wordsmithing (which I tend to find tedious), and flag anything that seems true but is unsourced, I'll come along later and see if I can come up with something to cite. Stan

I quite agree, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Wilkes %2C_Wyss_and_Onefortyone/Proposed_decision#Sources_for_popular_culture There are different ways of working, I follow your way too. But I don't argue when someone who has done research contradicts me. Fred On Dec 15, 2005, at 8:05 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

Hi, Yeah, for me it's "too much". Mostly because, as I said, I'm frequently working on very low quality articles just attempting to improve their coverage a bit by adding a sentence or two. Or just wordsmithing existing unreferenced material. Obviously going the extra mile and referencing is even better, but it's sort of a "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" kind of situation, isn't it? Incidentally, googling is getting harder with the number of wikipedia clones out there. Even adding "-wikipedia" isn't foolproof. I wouldn't mind a solution to that particular problem. Steve

Ray Saintonge wrote: Yep. It can only be encouraged by making it into a cultural expectation. - d.

Stan Shebs wrote: That would be worse than no references at all. Ec