"Jtkiefer" wrote Aren't. It takes Wikipedian blinkers to imagine the Guardian is hostile. Charles

On 11/21/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

Andrew Gray wrote: 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.

--- Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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 __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

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 __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

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(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: -- ~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(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: -- ~Ilya N. http://w3stuff.com/ilya/ (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)

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 __________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page! http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

--- David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote: hour and several ignore. 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 __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

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

On 11/22/05, stevertigo <vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com> wrote: 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.

stevertigo 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

geni 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 P.S.: What's so bad about knowing that people like our article about exploding whales?

On 24/11/05, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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(a)dunelm.org.uk

geni wrote: Relating to a recent thread on wikipedia-l, I hereby demand an article on every canal in the world, present or past! Magnus

geni wrote: Damn, I was trying to get the last word on this by suggesting you write [[Root canal]], but it's already there :-) Magnus

Is there a redirect from [[Birth canal]] or is this just an Australian joke? Pete, possibly barking up the wrong tree

geni wrote: I've added this to [[m:Article validation possible problems]]. Indeed :-) - d.

stevertigo wrote: 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.

Geoff Burling wrote: 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

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, charles matthews wrote: 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

See Domas report here : http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Hardware_and_hosting_report Ant Tom Cadden wrote:

"Andrew Gray" wrote 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

Timwi wrote: That's a very good way of putting it. 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.

Philip Sandifer wrote: 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 11/28/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote: On the other hand eventualism resulted in the current mess we have with image lisences. -- geni

On 11/28/05, Matt Brown <morven(a)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. -- geni

On 11/28/05, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: Eventualism allows you to deal with the problem latter. I knew I assume others did In theory WP:CP would have been the process early on. As the sitution grew special measures became required. 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

geni wrote: That sounds like a description of NPOV. Ec

Matt Brown wrote: Sadly, though, in some instances, i.e. for illustrating articles regarding comics, you will never get a free-licensed image. -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.362 / Virus Database: 267.13.8/184 - Release Date: 27/11/05

On 11/28/05, Matt Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

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(a)gmail.com> wrote: