Folks, Please see a Google news alert on recent stories featuring Wikipedia. The Mail and Guardian article from South Africa relating to articles relevant to that country is particularly interesting. The original article is here ( http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=255920&area=/insight/insi...) Our rugby articles were rated 10 out of 10 while our Media in South Africa article performed poorly rating 2 out of 10. Regards. *Keith Old * ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Google Alerts googlealerts-noreply@google.com Date: Nov 16, 2005 6:11 PM Subject: Google Alert - Wikipedia To: keithold@gmail.com
Google Alert for: *Wikipedia*
*Wikipedia* springs into action after M&G Online articlehttp://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=256607&area=/insight/insight__national/ Mail & Guardian Online - Johannesburg,South Africa Wikipedians have taken to heart the Mail & Guardian Online's recent article "Can you trust *Wikipedia*?" (November 10), which evaluated the quality of entries on *...*
Wiki news: Of the people by the peoplehttp://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5953168.html ZDNet - USA *...* Wikis began in various forms, but it was the online encyclopedia known as *Wikipedia* that propelled the concept into the popular consciousness. * ...*
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My suggestion is just to ignore them, the guardian has, is, and most likely be anti Wikipedia though for the life of me I don't know why they're so anti-us.
-Jtkiefer
On 11/16/05, Jtkiefer jtkiefer@wordzen.net wrote:
My suggestion is just to ignore them, the guardian has, is, and most likely be anti Wikipedia though for the life of me I don't know why they're so anti-us.
The Guardian absolutely is not opposed to Wikipedia at all. This statement is apparently an utterly ludicrous overreaction to a pretty good attempt by the Guardian to establish how reliable Wikipedia is, by referring selected articles on traditional encyclopedia subjects to experts in their relevant field.
Does failure to fall drooling at our feet now count as opposition?
On 11/21/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Does failure to fall drooling at our feet now count as opposition?
I seem to recall, in fact, that a fair number of their experts didn't find our articles all that awful. And in at least one case of a negative reaction (the fashion expert's horror at our [[haute couture]] page) I'm not surprised - that's a Wikipedia weak spot at present.
They found what is pretty much the real state of Wikipedia right now; that we have some excellent articles, a fair number which are OK but need improvement, and some real stinkers. We've come a long way, BUT there's still a long way to go.
-Matt
On 21/11/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
They found what is pretty much the real state of Wikipedia right now; that we have some excellent articles, a fair number which are OK but need improvement, and some real stinkers. We've come a long way, BUT there's still a long way to go.
David Gerard has argued that "if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia" - the Rubicon of free-content has been crossed, and good-but-costly doesn't handle well against free-but-patchy in the marketplace (at least, not in the general public sphere).
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/more_on_wikiped.php
We've come a long way, and there's still a long way to go - but the key third clause is, arguably, that we've already gone too far to stop...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 21/11/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
They found what is pretty much the real state of Wikipedia right now; that we have some excellent articles, a fair number which are OK but need improvement, and some real stinkers. We've come a long way, BUT there's still a long way to go.
David Gerard has argued that "if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia" - the Rubicon of free-content has been crossed, and good-but-costly doesn't handle well against free-but-patchy in the marketplace (at least, not in the general public sphere). http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/more_on_wikiped.php We've come a long way, and there's still a long way to go - but the key third clause is, arguably, that we've already gone too far to stop...
Yeah. Note that that's Wikipedia *or a fork*. Could be an internal fork, could be an external one.
I do think we've peaked way too early. What we have now is an interesting alpha that should have 1995-style heavily aliased "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" GIFs on most pages, and that really isn't something you want as a top-40 website. The article rating feature won't really help this for three to six months, as we will expressly not be doing anything with the results except have them available (until we've gathered enough data to see what makes sense to do with them). Going hogwild with deletions won't hold back the tide and will piss off the actual contributors. I'm not sure there *is* a quick answer :-)
- d.
On 21/11/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
We've come a long way, and there's still a long way to go - but the key third clause is, arguably, that we've already gone too far to stop...
I do think we've peaked way too early. What we have now is an interesting alpha that should have 1995-style heavily aliased "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" GIFs on most pages, and that really isn't something you want as a top-40 website. The article rating feature won't really help this for three to six months, as we will expressly not be doing anything with the results except have them available (until we've gathered enough data to see what makes sense to do with them). Going hogwild with deletions won't hold back the tide and will piss off the actual contributors. I'm not sure there *is* a quick answer :-)
This prompts a question I've been idly toying with for an hour or three. I first ran across Wikipedia in late 2003 (I think) - someone on Usenet mentioning it. I don't believe I encountered it as a reference until shortly before I first edited, looked at it properly, about a year ago. I suspect a fair chunk of people on the list are about the same.
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
A lot of our problems seem to be that we've been declared to be An Encylopedia when, frankly, we're not - we're a pile of working documents, some of which are fit to be finalised. And we can't do anything about this. It's a wonderful thing - we wouldn't get anything like the contributions we get if we hadn't become An Encyclopedia for the web. But it brings with it a lot of misapprehensions, because we're really 10-25% of an encyclopedia, with a lot of working papers that are quite interesting to read in a big folder at the back. As you say, there's no quick answer... and by the time we've got one, god only knows what else the project will have developed into.
It'll be interesting to read the book on this, ten years from now.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
My first edit was on 2 January 2002. Boy was the place a mess (have you seen UseMod ; ugly ; en.wikipedia had less than 20,000 articles and Larry Sanger was still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do. Almost every article I saw was obviously a work in progress. We were still working out basic rules and conventions. WikiProjects were just getting underway. Just about anybody could have a major influence on policy formation and the direction of WikiProjects.
At the time we thought it would take us 5 years to to reach our initial goal of 100,000 articles. All the focus I saw was on development, not use in the near to mid term. I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could have dreamed we would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
Now when I look around, most articles that cover subjects encyclopedias should cover look fairly complete. Articles on technology, popular culture, and current events are even better on average.
Wikipedia becoming useful; well, that is something that kinda snuck up on me while I was helping make it useful. I'm sure it also surprised many other old timers as well. The idea seemed too far in the future to even think about.
There were fewer than 20 reads per write when I started. Now there are now more than 200 reads per write. I guess now somebody has to work on sorting the wheat from the chaff for our readers. Heck, let them do it through an article validation feature. We have an encyclopedia to write. :)
-- mav
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On 11/22/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do.
Me too. The fact that most of the articles were pretty rubbish is what drew me in. Had I arrived to day, and looked at our quality articles I would have probably thought (there is nohing I can add) and left.
I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could have dreamed we
would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
I didn't think it would be so fast, but I always knew we'd be a top website. We've still a way to go before we peak. Until we stop growing exponentially, we will continue to have a large number of crap articles. However crap articles cry out to be improved and attract more editors in o fix them which causes growth.
Theresa
Heck, let them do it through an article validation feature.
Open question:
* How is the validation feature supposed to work? * How is it to be refined? * How is the data to be used and processed? * How is such data going to be reinput to work on the wiki to produce results?
SV
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stevertigo wrote:
Open question:
- How is the validation feature supposed to work?
Read:
[[m:Article validation feature]] [[m:En validation topics]] [[m:Article validation possible problems]]
- How is it to be refined?
- How is the data to be used and processed?
The current plan is to gather the data and ... do nothing with it. All ratings will be visible, exactly as all edits are visible. Nothing will be done with the numbers for now except a numerical average per revision ID.
The thing is that we don't know what shape the data will take, what anticipated problems will eventuate, whether we actually *need* to separate anon (reader) and logged-in (editor) votes, etc. So if we gather the data *then* throw it at the researchers, etc., to work out what it all means, we can then gather data in a more useful way.
- How is such data going to be reinput to work on the
wiki to produce results?
That's what we can't know until we see what shape the data takes.
- d.
The only problem I was seeing with the validation feature is large-scale vandalism on large articles and no way to detect it.
On 11/22/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
stevertigo wrote:
Open question:
- How is the validation feature supposed to work?
Read:
[[m:Article validation feature]] [[m:En validation topics]] [[m:Article validation possible problems]]
- How is it to be refined?
- How is the data to be used and processed?
The current plan is to gather the data and ... do nothing with it. All ratings will be visible, exactly as all edits are visible. Nothing will be done with the numbers for now except a numerical average per revision ID.
The thing is that we don't know what shape the data will take, what anticipated problems will eventuate, whether we actually *need* to separate anon (reader) and logged-in (editor) votes, etc. So if we gather the data *then* throw it at the researchers, etc., to work out what it all means, we can then gather data in a more useful way.
- How is such data going to be reinput to work on the
wiki to produce results?
That's what we can't know until we see what shape the data takes.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- ~Ilya N. http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
Consider a bot (or many humans) going into the validation system and sending totally bogus (or even offensive) entries into it.
On 11/22/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Ilya N. wrote:
The only problem I was seeing with the validation feature is large-scale vandalism on large articles and no way to detect it.
Uh? I don't understand what you mean ...
- d.
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-- ~Ilya N. http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
On 23/11/05, Ilya N. ilyanep@gmail.com wrote:
Consider a bot (or many humans) going into the validation system and sending totally bogus (or even offensive) entries into it.
My understanding of the validation feature was that it was a "0,1,2,3,4,5 - pick one" type system, rather than a "Please leave comments" one, meaning that whilst you could game it with a bot - and no doubt that'll be attempted by a rather cunning linkspammer or three - you couldn't fill it with offensive entries. (Or will there be a comments field? My connection seems to be a bit unfriendly with meta. this morning, and I haven't been checking lately...)
But that's what the testing phase is for. We _want_ people to try and spam it, try to vandalise it, do all this stuff. Then we can figure out what's good in the validation system and what's bad - perhaps we could only make comments visible to logged-in users, or to admins, if there's a problem with junk filling them up, or implement a filter to only show "useful" comments.
(How do we define "useful"? I don't know. Maybe we have a problem with people spamming links in comments fields, so only make anything without a URL publicly visible. Maybe we have a problem with people just writing "fucking crap", so we put in a seven-words filter. We don't know yet, but it doesn't seem beyond the wit of man to solve what results...)
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Without having read anything specific yet (why speak from knowledge, when I can speak for the much larger opposing constituency):
The arbitrary functional values and how to process them are not really significant as long as they remain consistent within the timeframe that they are active. But because changes in the processing directly and immediately alter the nature of the program, its not a trivial problem that a data collection test would be drastically different from an actual implementation.
I kind of agree with Brion's criticism in this regard, that having some data doesnt do anything useful and therefore lacks purpose. In that regard, such a thing in and of itself can be dangerous to even test -- if only because it sours the concept in people's minds without actually putting into a functional implementation. Even if vandalism isnt the problem, its still a problem of a proposed major functionality being in actuality only 'free spinning wheels without any traction.'
Its clear that there are some general ideas for how to use the data, but what to do with the data is something that needs to be part of the test implementation; What's the point of taking a car to the test track if its just a shell with suspension, and the engine still back at the shop?
Ie. its not clear that any effort spent now on pushing it uphill wouldnt just end up with it rolling further back down the hill. The first point of any test run is to test the engine -- the other stuff is secondary. Such a 'spinning wheels' test wouldnt even be suitable for simple -- meta maybe -- and would be expected to fail in giving any accurate results which could be applied to a functional model.
Stevertigo
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stevertigo wrote:
Without having read anything specific yet (why speak from knowledge, when I can speak for the much larger opposing constituency):
That's really stupid. You've probably wasted half an hour and several paragraphs on something you've given good reasons to ignore.
(This is an assumption of good faith, AGF being a rephrasing of "don't assume malice when stupidity will suffice.")
-d.
--- David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
That's really stupid. You've probably wasted half an
hour and several
paragraphs on something you've given good reasons to
ignore.
(This is an assumption of good faith, AGF being a rephrasing of "don't assume malice when
stupidity will suffice.")
I tend to lead with an admission of bias toward the majoritarian view, which is largely skeptical and uninformed. A "fresh view" if you like. If you can't get past any humorous introductory self-deprecations to whatever was written, and instead choose to tread over WP:DBAD, then that would show a flaw in your design --perhaps not unrelated to the actual topic -- and not just in my rare sense of humor.
By the way, thanks Stevertigo
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Andrew Gray wrote:
On 23/11/05, Ilya N. ilyanep@gmail.com wrote:
Consider a bot (or many humans) going into the validation system and sending totally bogus (or even offensive) entries into it.
My understanding of the validation feature was that it was a "0,1,2,3,4,5 - pick one" type system, rather than a "Please leave comments" one, meaning that whilst you could game it with a bot - and no doubt that'll be attempted by a rather cunning linkspammer or three
- you couldn't fill it with offensive entries. (Or will there be a
comments field? My connection seems to be a bit unfriendly with meta. this morning, and I haven't been checking lately...)
There's a comment space too.
But that's what the testing phase is for. We _want_ people to try and spam it, try to vandalise it, do all this stuff. Then we can figure out what's good in the validation system and what's bad - perhaps we could only make comments visible to logged-in users, or to admins, if there's a problem with junk filling them up, or implement a filter to only show "useful" comments.
Yep. This is why we haven't fixed the rules of this game of Calvinball.
- d.
The current plan is to gather the data and ... do nothing with it.
There are heaps of things we can do with rating data!
For example, we could generate regular lists of articles that haven't been rated, ensuring that all articles eventually get a rating.
Then we could generate regular lists of articles with the lowest ratings, allowing us to improve where we fare worst.
Then we could generate regular lists of articles with the highest ratings, allowing us to find suitable featured-article candidates. Maybe we'll find that with the validation feature the featured-article process becomes redundant!
Then we could combine any of the above with categories, so users with narrow interests can chip in, but confine themselves to their pet topic.
Last but not least, we could make it prepare tea! Well, maybe not. Timwi
Timwi wrote:
The current plan is to gather the data and ... do nothing with it.
There are heaps of things we can do with rating data! For example, we could generate regular lists of articles that haven't been rated, ensuring that all articles eventually get a rating. Then we could generate regular lists of articles with the lowest ratings, allowing us to improve where we fare worst. Then we could generate regular lists of articles with the highest ratings, allowing us to find suitable featured-article candidates. Maybe we'll find that with the validation feature the featured-article process becomes redundant! Then we could combine any of the above with categories, so users with narrow interests can chip in, but confine themselves to their pet topic.
Exactly. We release the data and people should then dive upon it and find applications for it.
Last but not least, we could make it prepare tea! Well, maybe not.
Yeah, that'll have to wait for 1.8.
- d.
On 11/22/05, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Heck, let them do it through an article validation feature.
Open question:
- How is the validation feature supposed to work?
- How is it to be refined?
- How is the data to be used and processed?
- How is such data going to be reinput to work on the
wiki to produce results?
SV
some predictions and some comments that relate to above;
1) the current validate feature is a prototype design. Once it is turned on it will be played with, improved, revised and redesigned several times before being used for its intended purpose. Turning on the feature will help this process move forward.
2) Wikipedia needs a way to identify article versions that are high quality and vetted, possible as part of a release system, or something similiar. Reliability is one of our biggest problems. If we don't address this someone else will. A validation feature if a good first step.
Yes, I think you sum up the basic issues pretty well, Puddle Duk. But I can think of certain specific reasons for why the approaches you've represented have had only tepid support. I understand the idealistic notions underlying the Wikipedia 1.0 idea, but the concept of 'article validation' is only one aspect of the overall value metrics that need to be worked out:
The relationship between article valuation (AV) and editorial valuation (EV), though distinct enough to be treated as separate, are far too interdependent to be considered unrelated. And relevant to this discussion, AV and EV aren't even operable without the other, IMHO. The current idea seems to be a confusing mixture of both AV and EV questions, but one which ignores or avoids utilizing any synergy between the two, and avoids EV ratings entirely. Hence, where's the Yin-Yang?
With the final plans for Single Log-in being ironed out, the next big thing wants to be AV/EV, but convincing critics seems to depend on establishing a clear plan for how the internals will work. Some explanations of likely heuristic approaches would help, and some consensus towards a general direction might also help. IMHO, the 'lets mine this turnip and hope we find gold' approach won't work. It's a Murphy's Law, or something like it. Testing to see what crap floats is indeed only useful for Calvinball.
That's the value-context for any critical comments here, be it coming from a developer or not. Criticism brings things to focus.
-SV
--- Puddl Duk puddlduk@gmail.com wrote:
some predictions and some comments that relate to
above;
- the current validate feature is a prototype
design. Once it is
turned on it will be played with, improved, revised
and redesigned
several times before being used for its intended
purpose. Turning on
the feature will help this process move forward.
- Wikipedia needs a way to identify article
versions that are high quality and vetted, possible as part of a release
system, or something
similiar. Reliability is one of our biggest problems. If we don't address this someone else will. A validation feature
if a good first step.
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stevertigo wrote:
IMHO, the 'lets mine this turnip and hope we find gold' approach won't work. It's a Murphy's Law, or something like it. Testing to see what crap floats is indeed only useful for Calvinball.
Yeah, just putting new toys online to see what happens is really a stupid idea.
Thankfully, we never tried such nonsense at Nupedia. Who knows what we would have ended up with, instead of the twenty-plus high-quality articles we now have after years of hard labor.
Magnus
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Yeah, just putting new toys online to see what happens is really a stupid idea.
Thankfully, we never tried such nonsense at Nupedia. Who knows what we would have ended up with, instead of the twenty-plus high-quality articles we now have after years of hard labor.
Magnus
Well I supose we could have a go at guessing in advance:
Validation wars with forums ganging up to vote for/against certian articles. evidence (no way should it be rated that high:
http://newgrounds.com/portal/view/276616
Trolls will follow around users they don't like rateing their articles to zero.
An equiverlent of schoolwatch will turn up and start rateing all of a certian type of article to exelent
The anglo-american spelling war will use article validation as a new battle field.
We will disscover that our articles on pokemon and explodeing wales are our most valued.
at least one arbcom case will result from the switching on of this feature.
So all in all bussiness as usal and nothing to worry about (well no more than there normaly is). People will use it to cause trouble but unless we lock the database people are always going to be able to cause trouble.
-- geni
geni wrote:
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Yeah, just putting new toys online to see what happens is really a stupid idea.
Thankfully, we never tried such nonsense at Nupedia. Who knows what we would have ended up with, instead of the twenty-plus high-quality articles we now have after years of hard labor.
Magnus
Well I supose we could have a go at guessing in advance:
Validation wars with forums ganging up to vote for/against certian articles. evidence (no way should it be rated that high:
http://newgrounds.com/portal/view/276616
Trolls will follow around users they don't like rateing their articles to zero.
An equiverlent of schoolwatch will turn up and start rateing all of a certian type of article to exelent
The anglo-american spelling war will use article validation as a new battle field.
We will disscover that our articles on pokemon and explodeing wales are our most valued.
at least one arbcom case will result from the switching on of this feature.
So all in all bussiness as usal and nothing to worry about (well no more than there normaly is). People will use it to cause trouble but unless we lock the database people are always going to be able to cause trouble.
All of the above *might* happen. Which is why we have a test phase. If the voting trolls really turn out to be a problem, we could restrict viewing of the individual votes to admins (to check for bot abuse and the like). Or each user could chose to hide his/her votes individually.
In the test setup, everything goes. Even anons (or whatever they're called now :-) can vote. This might or might not be a good idea in the long run. But there's only one way to find out.
By trying.
Magnus
P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
All of the above *might* happen. Which is why we have a test phase. If the voting trolls really turn out to be a problem, we could restrict viewing of the individual votes to admins (to check for bot abuse and the like). Or each user could chose to hide his/her votes individually.
In the test setup, everything goes. Even anons (or whatever they're called now :-) can vote. This might or might not be a good idea in the long run. But there's only one way to find out.
By trying.
Magnus
oh it all those things will probably happen. But we will be able to handle it (we've pretty much managed to deal with everything else).
P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?
Because it would mean they were not that interested in our articles on canals.
-- geni
On 24/11/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?
Because it would mean they were not that interested in our articles on canals.
There's an awful lot of articles on the net about canals. There's entire academic courses at MIT you can go and read about canals, or a thousand and one good bits of writing, pitched at the right level, discussing canals. There's one good article on the net about exploding whales.
Why be ashamed we have that one good article that they *can't* go elsewhere and read?
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 11/24/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/11/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?
Because it would mean they were not that interested in our articles on canals.
There's an awful lot of articles on the net about canals. There's entire academic courses at MIT you can go and read about canals, or a thousand and one good bits of writing, pitched at the right level, discussing canals. There's one good article on the net about exploding whales.
Why be ashamed we have that one good article that they *can't* go elsewhere and read?
Because you can never have too many pages on canals.
this site appears to provide a reasonable level of information
http://www.theexplodingwhale.com/
-- geni
geni wrote:
On 11/24/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/11/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?
Because it would mean they were not that interested in our articles on canals.
There's an awful lot of articles on the net about canals. There's entire academic courses at MIT you can go and read about canals, or a thousand and one good bits of writing, pitched at the right level, discussing canals. There's one good article on the net about exploding whales.
Why be ashamed we have that one good article that they *can't* go elsewhere and read?
Because you can never have too many pages on canals.
Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past!
Magnus
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past!
Magnus
I'm working on it. Just not very quickly.
-- geni
geni wrote:
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past!
Magnus
I'm working on it. Just not very quickly.
Damn, I was trying to get the last word on this by suggesting you write [[Root canal]], but it's already there :-)
Magnus
Magnus Manske wrote:
geni wrote:
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past!
Magnus
I'm working on it. Just not very quickly.
Damn, I was trying to get the last word on this by suggesting you write [[Root canal]], but it's already there :-)
Magnus
Sorry, I didn't read this before I made my comment on this important topic. :-)
Ec
From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Magnus Manske Sent: Friday, 25 November 2005 06:51 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How is validation supposed to work?
geni wrote:
On 11/24/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past!
Magnus
I'm working on it. Just not very quickly.
Damn, I was trying to get the last word on this by suggesting you write [[Root canal]], but it's already there :-)
Is there a redirect from [[Birth canal]] or is this just an Australian joke?
Pete, possibly barking up the wrong tree
Magnus Manske wrote:
geni wrote:
On 11/24/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/11/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?
Because it would mean they were not that interested in our articles on canals.
There's an awful lot of articles on the net about canals. There's entire academic courses at MIT you can go and read about canals, or a thousand and one good bits of writing, pitched at the right level, discussing canals. There's one good article on the net about exploding whales.
Why be ashamed we have that one good article that they *can't* go elsewhere and read?
Because you can never have too many pages on canals.
Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past!
Obviously the one on root canal should be a candidate for feature article. :-)
geni wrote:
Well I supose we could have a go at guessing in advance:
I've added this to [[m:Article validation possible problems]].
So all in all bussiness as usal and nothing to worry about (well no more than there normaly is). People will use it to cause trouble but unless we lock the database people are always going to be able to cause trouble.
Indeed :-)
- d.
--- Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
stevertigo wrote:
IMHO, the 'lets mine this turnip and hope we find gold' approach won't work. It's a Murphy's Law, or something like it. Testing to see what crap floats is indeed only useful for
Calvinball.
Yeah, just putting new toys online to see what happens is really a stupid idea.
Thankfully, we never tried such nonsense at Nupedia. Who knows what we would have ended up with, instead of the twenty-plus high-quality articles we now have after years of hard labor.
Point taken (and thats certainly my kind of sarcasm :]) but you also make My point: The use /discovery /application of the wiki software to the purpose of creating an encyclopedia was a relative fluke. You can't expect that kind of breakthrough to happen again in the same manner to the same general group of people in a newly developed application toward the same idea.
In fact the conditions are greatly different than Nupedia, as Wikipedia was a separate experimental fork which was started from absolute scratch. Im sure your'e far more aware than I how Wikipedia is not a 'lets throw it up and see what it does' kind of environment anymore. Im sure thats not the way many other non-coders see it, who contribute largely through the established "normal" wiki processes, and see the value of Wikipedia in the hard work put into it by countless people.
The AVF idea is about drastically changing the way that Wikipedia articles are edited (ideally in a way which conforms to and mirrors the egalitarian and meritocratic openness of Wikipedia that has brough success thus far). There's a philosophical base and a history of discussion about the idea which newbies and even oldbies need to understand, in order for it to really work IMHO, but I understand if ATP your'e just looking at it from the basic 'will this code work for something' point of view.
All of the above *might* happen. Which is why we
have a test phase. If
the voting trolls really turn out to be a problem,
we could restrict
viewing of the individual votes to admins (to check
for bot abuse and
the like). Or each user could chose to hide his/her
votes individually.
In the test setup, everything goes. Even anons (or
whatever they're
called now :-) can vote. This might or might not be
a good idea in the
long run. But there's only one way to find out.
No, all of the above can be *expected* to happen in a 'test phase' for an app which in fact does not yet work and for whose immediate results are explained to be meaningless. If written to solicit help, the T'Pol wiki will probably give you pretty much the same kind of results. All that said, Ive read Timwi's explanation of what to do with the first batch of cookies and Im somewhat more hopeful. Yes, baby steps -- I understand.
Stevertigo
__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
stevertigo wrote:
Point taken (and thats certainly my kind of sarcasm :]) but you also make My point: The use /discovery /application of the wiki software to the purpose of creating an encyclopedia was a relative fluke. You can't expect that kind of breakthrough to happen again in the same manner to the same general group of people in a newly developed application toward the same idea.
I think we can. I was talking to people at the UK meet today who *already* are thinking of things to do with this data. The point is not to make the data too special-purpose too early.
"Build it and the applications will come" is a pretty safe bet here IMO because they're already slavering for it.
- d.
On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
My first edit was on 2 January 2002. Boy was the place a mess (have you seen UseMod ; ugly ; en.wikipedia had less than 20,000 articles and Larry Sanger was still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do. Almost every article I saw was obviously a work in progress. We were still working out basic rules and conventions. WikiProjects were just getting underway. Just about anybody could have a major influence on policy formation and the direction of WikiProjects.
At the time we thought it would take us 5 years to to reach our initial goal of 100,000 articles. All the focus I saw was on development, not use in the near to mid term. I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could have dreamed we would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
Now when I look around, most articles that cover subjects encyclopedias should cover look fairly complete. Articles on technology, popular culture, and current events are even better on average.
Wikipedia becoming useful; well, that is something that kinda snuck up on me while I was helping make it useful. I'm sure it also surprised many other old timers as well. The idea seemed too far in the future to even think about.
I haven't been around as long as Mav (I still kinda consider him one of the "authentic original Wikipedians"), but much of what he says above could be my words.
But if I could build on what he wrote, one thing worth noting is the speed of change in this project. I've mentioned in the past the problem that some important policies are proposed & adopted before some of us who have been on Wikipedia for a while notice. Usually there is no problem: give me a little time to understand & adjust, & I will accept any new proposal that is based on common sense.
Another point is that I feel compelled to defend the quality of Wikipedia because, in part, it is my baby, but also because I know that the professional experts are guilty of more acts of botched analyses & bad writing than they want to admit to. Wikipedia is not only reinventing the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia: while our structure makes it easy for cranks, kooks & partisans to push their own agendas here, it also frees us from the abuse of authorities who expect us to accept their biasses as profound new discoveries or insights.
Perhaps most of these changes will have worked their way out in the ten years that Andrew mentions above. I can only hope that, unlike Moses, I will be permitted to enter that Promised Land when they have finished, & see what this experiment has led to.
Geoff
Geoff Burling wrote:
On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
My first edit was on 2 January 2002. Boy was the place a mess (have you seen UseMod ; ugly ; en.wikipedia had less than 20,000 articles and Larry Sanger was still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do. Almost every article I saw was obviously a work in progress. We were still working out basic rules and conventions. WikiProjects were just getting underway. Just about anybody could have a major influence on policy formation and the direction of WikiProjects.
At the time we thought it would take us 5 years to to reach our initial goal of 100,000 articles. All the focus I saw was on development, not use in the near to mid term. I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could have dreamed we would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
Now when I look around, most articles that cover subjects encyclopedias should cover look fairly complete. Articles on technology, popular culture, and current events are even better on average.
Wikipedia becoming useful; well, that is something that kinda snuck up on me while I was helping make it useful. I'm sure it also surprised many other old timers as well. The idea seemed too far in the future to even think about.
I haven't been around as long as Mav (I still kinda consider him one of the "authentic original Wikipedians"), but much of what he says above could be my words.
But if I could build on what he wrote, one thing worth noting is the speed of change in this project. I've mentioned in the past the problem that some important policies are proposed & adopted before some of us who have been on Wikipedia for a while notice. Usually there is no problem: give me a little time to understand & adjust, & I will accept any new proposal that is based on common sense.
Another point is that I feel compelled to defend the quality of Wikipedia because, in part, it is my baby, but also because I know that the professional experts are guilty of more acts of botched analyses & bad writing than they want to admit to. Wikipedia is not only reinventing the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia: while our structure makes it easy for cranks, kooks & partisans to push their own agendas here, it also frees us from the abuse of authorities who expect us to accept their biasses as profound new discoveries or insights.
I've been here only slightly less long than Mav, and I amaze myself to know that I have stuck it out for nearly four years. Like Geoff and Mav I have bought into an idea that is both an encyclopedia and more than an encyclopedia. I would probably call myself an eventualist, but around here eventually comes around awful fast. I am concerned about the quality of Wikipedia, but I'm not worried about it. I don't read into the presence of an embarassingly bad article a projection of a huge number of such bad articles. Considering the resource restraints we have an excellent product. I don't feel that the quality is brought down by having a few seemingly trivial articles. I do not see obsessive rulemaking as the solution to our woes.
Paradigm shifts are not brought about by repeating experiments of the past. Rules want to put the new paradigm into a bottle so that it can be marketted, but you can no more do that than you can put a lit candle into a closed bottle without have it go out for lack of oxygen. When others dwell on having the perfect article, or on setting up Wikiversity with the same educational patterns of courses, exams and essays I'm left with the impression that they don't understand the paradigm shift at all. A real paradigm shift is painful for a society, because the old ways don't work anymore; those who relied on old ways for sustenance can no longer do so. I sometime find the cranks and kooks easier to deal with than the people who are trying to set up elaborate systems for dealing with those same cranks and kooks.
Ec
"Geoff Burling" write
Wikipedia is not only reinventing the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia
Is that the right comparison? I thought we were doing 'distance learning', really. Hey, if we offered degrees in two weeks, like other Florida institutions, we could charge enough to buy servers ...
Charles
On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, charles matthews wrote:
"Geoff Burling" write
Wikipedia is not only reinventing the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia
Is that the right comparison? I thought we were doing 'distance learning', really. Hey, if we offered degrees in two weeks, like other Florida institutions, we could charge enough to buy servers ...
I'm sorry, Charles that I didn't see your response sooner. For some reason the subject line on this thread got changed, then when I looked in the WikiEN-L archives, I couldn't find any trace of my original post -- probably because I misremembered the name on the thread.
But to answer your question. Originally, when I spoke of "acadmia", I was thinking of the model some of my professors presented of their profession, which was one where they & their peers were engaged in an ongoing dialogue over important topics or new findings; the education of young minds or certifying their credentials was merely a secondary, but necessary, part of performing the first task. I think this is covered, after a fashion, by the saying "publish or perish".
(For the record some of my other professors did not embrace this model, but only a few seemed to show that their first interest was to teach.)
But as I started to write this delayed response, I remembered one aspect of Wikipedia tht seems to get overlooked, its opportunity for hands-on education. Or maybe I'm the only person to notice that to write a useful article on a subject, one needs to know how to research, to distill what is found, then to write about it in a clear & readable manner. And the dynamics of a Wiki provides fairly quick feedback whether one has achieved those goals: contributing to Wikipedia has a number of similarities to an ongoing education program.
Of course there is the perennial problem of the stereotype of an immature 15-year-old, who argues with experts over subects he doesn't understand. To this, all I can say that if the expert is guilty of making hasty generalizaions without supporting citations or clear writing, then who is the immature party in the dispute? Sometimes I forget that there are kooks on Wikipedia who will argue with anyone over data & conclusions that they don't agree with, but these kooks are everywhere; we somehow make an unconscious assumption that because they have a computer, they are somehow more of a threat than the bore next to you at a bar who insists he alone has the solution to all of our problems.
Geoff
What is going on with the server? It has been a nightmare tonight? One minute it is down. The next up. The next down again. I finally got an article I had to write off WP onto WP but 10 seconds later when I tried to add in a second I couldn't - it would take so long my browser would time out.
Sometimes I'm told that my article has not been saved, but then when I look on my watchlist there it is. Other times I save something but it isn't on anything.
At this stage one can forget about using the preview button (oh look another timed out message on my other screen!) to make sure everything is OK. It is a matter of saving in case in a few seconds the damn thing goes down yet again. (Oh lookie, its back again.) *sigh*
Better go and use it before it goes for the 28th time.
Thom
--------------------------------- Win a Yahoo! Vespa NEW - Yahoo! Cars has 3 Vespa LX125s to be won Enter Now!
See Domas report here : http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Hardware_and_hosting_report
Ant
Tom Cadden wrote:
What is going on with the server? It has been a nightmare tonight? One minute it is down. The next up. The next down again. I finally got an article I had to write off WP onto WP but 10 seconds later when I tried to add in a second I couldn't - it would take so long my browser would time out.
Sometimes I'm told that my article has not been saved, but then when I look on my watchlist there it is. Other times I save something but it isn't on anything.
At this stage one can forget about using the preview button (oh look another timed out message on my other screen!) to make sure everything is OK. It is a matter of saving in case in a few seconds the damn thing goes down yet again. (Oh lookie, its back again.) *sigh*
Better go and use it before it goes for the 28th time.
Thom
Win a Yahoo! Vespa NEW - Yahoo! Cars has 3 Vespa LX125s to be won Enter Now! _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
A bit more here http://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log
Ant
See Domas report here :
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Hardware_and_hosting_report
Ant
Tom Cadden wrote:
What is going on with the server? It has been a nightmare tonight? One minute it is down. The next up. The next down again. I finally got an article I had to write off WP onto WP but 10 seconds later when I tried to add in a second I couldn't - it would take so long my browser would time out. Sometimes I'm told that my article has not been saved, but then when I look on my watchlist there it is. Other times I save something but it isn't on anything. At this stage one can forget about using the preview button (oh look another timed out message on my other screen!) to make sure everything is OK. It is a matter of saving in case in a few seconds the damn thing goes down yet again. (Oh lookie, its back again.) *sigh* Better go and use it before it goes for the 28th time. Thom
Win a Yahoo! Vespa NEW - Yahoo! Cars has 3 Vespa LX125s to be won Enter Now! _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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"Andrew Gray" wrote
As you say, there's no quick answer... and by the time we've got one, god
only knows what else the project will have developed into.
I would say that Wikipedia itself (as distinct from its Wikimedia sister projects) has found its niche. We Wikipedians have by now a pretty good idea of its strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side: good at documenting factual things and gluing them into an intensely-hyperlinked and presentable, categorised form, miles ahead of the 'web directory' approach. Particularly strong at rehashing what is already out there to be googled, or in the mainstream media. Weaknesses: always been over-ambitious and searching for a style, rather than already possessed of one. To call WP's role a 'niche' is a bit like calling the [[Mariana Trench]] a shallow ditch, though. The Web contains things like 'shopping mall', 'personal webspace', 'blogosphere'. Wikipedia is the cuckoo in the nest of the 'wikisphere', certainly to the extent of redefining it.
Charles
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
I'm not much wikiolder than you are, but one observation I think I've made is a relatively sudden decline in eventualist attitude in 2005.
In 2003 I think most if not all Wikipedians were still of the mindset that yes, we want to be an encyclopedia, and yes, we know we're not there yet and we have a long way to go, but we're confident that we'll make it and we don't care how long it will take. Now in 2005 we suddenly realise we've come way farther way quicker than we thought we would, and in particular we are suddenly being used as an actual reference left and right while at the same time being scrutinised (if not criticised) for (lack of) accuracy and reliability. The mailing list threads that take place regularly now about average article quality and readability, have never occurred before 2005 (at least not with anywhere near this frequency).
I've become less active as a Wikipedian and I think it's because I liked the eventualist atmosphere more. It gave us more room for mistakes, and it allowed us to worry less and be more relaxed. I think eventualists tend to assume good faith more, precisely because they are less worried and more relaxed. The more someone worries about Wikipedia's quality or reputation, the more likely they are to intervene vocally when they perceive some change as detrimental, giving a somewhat higher chance of generating an unpleasant environment.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
I'm not much wikiolder than you are, but one observation I think I've made is a relatively sudden decline in eventualist attitude in 2005.
That's a very good way of putting it.
I think eventualists tend to assume good faith more, precisely because they are less worried and more relaxed. The more someone worries about Wikipedia's quality or reputation, the more likely they are to intervene vocally when they perceive some change as detrimental, giving a somewhat higher chance of generating an unpleasant environment.
There's a request for arbitration on this issue right now, concerning assumption of bad faith and the promotion of assumption of bad faith in the course of trying to clean house RIGHT NOW. The generation of an unpleasant working environment is precisely what's at issue, and whether this is acceptable behaviour.
- d.
On Nov 26, 2005, at 12:49 PM, Timwi wrote:
I'm not much wikiolder than you are, but one observation I think I've made is a relatively sudden decline in eventualist attitude in 2005.
I would agree with this wholeheartedly, except I would also note that the push to "get it right now" is all too often turning into a push to get it wrong - the move away from eventualism seems to me to be accompanied by a dramatic lowering in our standards for ourselves. As I commented on #wikipedia last night, if Larry Sanger submitted the Larry's Text articles now, they'd get AfDed in a heartbeat. That's... ummm... bad.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
On Nov 26, 2005, at 12:49 PM, Timwi wrote:
I'm not much wikiolder than you are, but one observation I think I've made is a relatively sudden decline in eventualist attitude in 2005.
I would agree with this wholeheartedly, except I would also note that the push to "get it right now" is all too often turning into a push to get it wrong - the move away from eventualism seems to me to be accompanied by a dramatic lowering in our standards for ourselves. As I commented on #wikipedia last night, if Larry Sanger submitted the Larry's Text articles now, they'd get AfDed in a heartbeat. That's... ummm... bad.
-Phil
I would agree, despite my moderate immediatism. Wikipedia is still very much a work in progress, and people seem to be devoting more effort to deleting bad material than improving it. Unfortunately, as geni has pointed out, when you're on RC patrol, things are taxing enough already. Still, I suppose it's alright to delete plain useless CSDs. It's another thing to spend so much effort (IMO) on AFDing something when you might as well have Googled it and improved it to stub level.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
On 26/11/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
I'm not much wikiolder than you are, but one observation I think I've made is a relatively sudden decline in eventualist attitude in 2005.
Now that you mention it, I've certainly noticed this. I just don't know if I realised it!
(...)
I've become less active as a Wikipedian and I think it's because I liked the eventualist atmosphere more. It gave us more room for mistakes, and it allowed us to worry less and be more relaxed. I think eventualists tend to assume good faith more, precisely because they are less worried and more relaxed. The more someone worries about Wikipedia's quality or reputation, the more likely they are to intervene vocally when they perceive some change as detrimental, giving a somewhat higher chance of generating an unpleasant environment.
This is a very good point. The West-African-Country article naming dispute recently is a good example - long, acrimonious, pissed off a good number of people... and all for something that reflected entirely on the _current state of the article_, and (as someone pointed out, I think), would have been decided by a single layout editor one morning when preparing a print version, and with no-one having particular problems over this fact.
We've stopped putting off a lot of things, but the honest problem is that there's often no need to fix them now, and we're just annoying each other trying to. Let "final" users tweak them as they see fit, to search-and-replace petrol with gasoline, Gdansk with Danzig... or quietly delete all school articles, or Pokemon articles, or stubs, or whatever.
The more I think about eventualism the more I like it. We're in this for the long haul, not to produce an encyclopedia for a 2006 deadline.
Wikipedia can do exceptional things in a short deadline - a favourite example, not counting the major "current events", is the fortnight-long crunch to create articles on all 650ish UK constituencies in time for election night this year. (It worked, mainly thanks to two or three dedicated users, of whom I was not one). The missing-articles lists can clear up at a pretty good clip, when they get attention. But we shouldn't mistake our ability to do this for the need to do this - we can go slow on a lot of things, take our time and a bit of care.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 11/28/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
The more I think about eventualism the more I like it. We're in this for the long haul, not to produce an encyclopedia for a 2006 deadline.
On the other hand eventualism resulted in the current mess we have with image lisences.
-- geni
On 11/28/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand eventualism resulted in the current mess we have with image lisences.
I would disagree. It is not eventualism, but right-now-ism, that leads people to use an unfree image instead of waiting for a free-licensed one to appear. It's not eventualism that leads people to decry free, amateur-produced images as 'not professional enough'.
It's not eventualism that caused people to, for a very long time, utterly ignore the warning on the image upload page stating quite clearly that uploading meant placing under the GFDL and not to upload material you didn't have the rights to. For a very long time, the image upload page implicitly disallowed fair use images, yet people chose to ignore that.
-Matt
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
It's not eventualism that caused people to, for a very long time, utterly ignore the warning on the image upload page stating quite clearly that uploading meant placing under the GFDL and not to upload material you didn't have the rights to. For a very long time, the image upload page implicitly disallowed fair use images, yet people chose to ignore that.
-Matt
Becuase eventaulism ment that we didn't have to fix the problem of people uploading such images right now. So the problem was allowed to build up.
-- geni
On 11/28/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Becuase eventaulism ment that we didn't have to fix the problem of people uploading such images right now. So the problem was allowed to build up.
I'm not sure that's eventualism, though - it's 'laziness' as in having too much else to do to get round to everything. And a lack of appreciation as to the scale of the problem. And a process for dealing with them having not been established.
All of this was, in retrospect, a mistake. But I'm not sure it can be chalked up to 'eventualism', rather than other causes.
-Matt
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/28/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Becuase eventaulism ment that we didn't have to fix the problem of people uploading such images right now. So the problem was allowed to build up.
I'm not sure that's eventualism, though - it's 'laziness' as in having too much else to do to get round to everything.
Eventualism allows you to deal with the problem latter.
and a lack of appreciation as to the scale of the problem.
I knew I assume others did
And a process for dealing with them having not been established.
In theory WP:CP would have been the process early on. As the sitution grew special measures became required.
All of this was, in retrospect, a mistake. But I'm not sure it can be chalked up to 'eventualism', rather than other causes.
-Matt
By the same token imitatism can't be shown to have any downsides either. The problem with eventualism is that in most cases I can show it supports both sides of the debate.
-- geni
On 11/28/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
The problem with eventualism is that in most cases I can show it supports both sides of the debate.
& thus is not the problem.
-Matt
geni wrote:
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote
All of this was, in retrospect, a mistake. But I'm not sure it can be chalked up to 'eventualism', rather than other causes.
By the same token imitatism can't be shown to have any downsides either. The problem with eventualism is that in most cases I can show it supports both sides of the debate.
That sounds like a description of NPOV.
Ec
On 12/1/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
geni wrote:
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote
All of this was, in retrospect, a mistake. But I'm not sure it can be chalked up to 'eventualism', rather than other causes.
By the same token imitatism can't be shown to have any downsides either. The problem with eventualism is that in most cases I can show it supports both sides of the debate.
That sounds like a description of NPOV.
Ec
NPOV should not support either sie of the debate. It should present both sides.
-- geni
Matt Brown wrote:
On 11/28/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On the other hand eventualism resulted in the current mess we have with image lisences.
I would disagree. It is not eventualism, but right-now-ism, that leads people to use an unfree image instead of waiting for a free-licensed one to appear.
Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image.
On 11/28/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image.
True. Although a position one could describe as 'extreme eventualism' would state that the comics will eventually fall into the public domain and then be usable ...
-Matt
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/28/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image.
True. Although a position one could describe as 'extreme eventualism' would state that the comics will eventually fall into the public domain and then be usable ...
-Matt
The other posibilty is that the companies publishing comics will decide that it is in there interest to release some publicity material under the GFDL. This might speed up if people stoped useing fair use.
-- geni
geni wrote:
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/28/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image.
True. Although a position one could describe as 'extreme eventualism' would state that the comics will eventually fall into the public domain and then be usable ...
The other posibilty is that the companies publishing comics will decide that it is in there interest to release some publicity material under the GFDL. This might speed up if people stoped useing fair use.
Given the nature of derivative works, that is very doubtful.
That would be a pretty radical form of extreme eventualism. Nothing has fallen into the public domain in the U.S. on account of copyright expiring for a long, long, long time due to continual copyright extension acts. And I think there is probably little hope that this situation will change over time -- there is simply too much money invested in works created in the late 1920s, too little monetary and political force to remind Congressmen of the "temporary" in the phrase "temporary monopoly".
FF
On 11/28/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/28/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image.
True. Although a position one could describe as 'extreme eventualism' would state that the comics will eventually fall into the public domain and then be usable ...
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Matt Brown wrote:
On 11/28/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image.
True. Although a position one could describe as 'extreme eventualism' would state that the comics will eventually fall into the public domain and then be usable ...
No, I think extreme eventualism would acknowledge that, the way copyright law is moving, there will be no public to have domain when that happens. When Mickey Mouse is in public domain, I'll believe it is possible.