We have a real problem with unsourced defamatory biographies.
This morning, while working on the Help desk, I responded to a letter from Lucianne Goldberg, who wrote seeking a deletion or correction to what she considered to be two highly offensive paragraphs in her biography. I looked at the article and saw that there were severe problems with some of the material in it.
I have edited the article and sourced it as well as replying to her attaching a copy of the article as rewritten by me. I am awaiting her advice as to the specific information that was of concern to her. Once I have the specifics, I will advise further on the matter.
However, the matter that I believe likely to be of most concern was in the original version of the article and has survived for nearly two months with multiple edits. There were no sources provided for the allegation. Frankly, this problem has the potential to be another big problem with Wikipedia.
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures. In particular, we need to ensure that our articles are scrupulous in citing sources. We need to give instructions to recent changes patrollers to be on the lookout for biographies making negative claims without proper sourcing.
Regards
Keith Old
Keith Old
Keith Old wrote:
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporarybiographies especially of controversial figures. In particular, we need to ensure that our articles are scrupulous in citing sources. We need to giveinstructions to recent changes patrollers to be on the lookout forbiographies making negative claims without proper sourcing.
Regards Keith Old
I agree. After the biography of David Hager was categorized as rapist in error, I began a _quick_ survey of crime related articles. I am looking for deliberate misclassification that might be called a hoax or grudge, as well as good faith misreads of the categorization criteria. I’ve given special attention to articles about living people and those with no obvious evidence of conviction. After about 14 days, I’ve surveyed Category:Rapists, Category:Incest, Category:Child sexual offenders, Category:Cannibalism, Category:Executed murderers, Category:Child killers.
On the whole, the quality of the crime articles are the same as other types of articles. Overall, I think it is reasonable to assume good faith. Some articles are part of projects and are above average. The biggest problem is lack of sources. I fixed some of the articles, but most I tagged as unreferenced. Some of the time, I put requests on User pages for sources, even stubs. So far, most of the tagged articles are still unverified. Nevertheless, I think this task is not futile because editors are responding to the tags and requests.
Still many more crime categories to go. And all these articles need to be fact checked.
Sydney
To excise all defamatory bios I would tend towards deleting any defamatory material which is not properly cited (and cannot be with a quick Google/Google news search, just to avoid these kinds of problems. They can always be reinserted if sourced, but potentially libellous material should be allowed to stay if not sourced.
Mgm
On 12/18/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
We have a real problem with unsourced defamatory biographies.
This morning, while working on the Help desk, I responded to a letter from Lucianne Goldberg, who wrote seeking a deletion or correction to what she considered to be two highly offensive paragraphs in her biography. I looked at the article and saw that there were severe problems with some of the material in it.
I have edited the article and sourced it as well as replying to her attaching a copy of the article as rewritten by me. I am awaiting her advice as to the specific information that was of concern to her. Once I have the specifics, I will advise further on the matter.
However, the matter that I believe likely to be of most concern was in the original version of the article and has survived for nearly two months with multiple edits. There were no sources provided for the allegation. Frankly, this problem has the potential to be another big problem with Wikipedia.
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures. In particular, we need to ensure that our articles are scrupulous in citing sources. We need to give instructions to recent changes patrollers to be on the lookout for biographies making negative claims without proper sourcing.
Regards
Keith Old
Keith Old _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Hello, Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category "Living person", to do so? Then we could at least start the laborious process of visiting every living person page and detecting potentially libellous material and removing it (eg, turning it into a comment asking for sources). Once we'd caught up there could be a revolving door type process to ensure every page gets looked at every month or so.
"Random page" is a nice button. But what might be even nicer might be "next unchecked bio", that takes you to the "next" living bio that hasn't been edited in a month or so. Random selection is pretty inefficient.
Steve
-----Original Message-----
However, the matter that I believe likely to be of most concern was in the original version of the article and has survived for nearly two months with multiple edits. There were no sources provided for the allegation. Frankly, this problem has the potential to be another big problem with Wikipedia.
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures. In particular, we need to ensure that our articles are scrupulous in citing sources. We need to give instructions to recent changes patrollers to be on the lookout for biographies making negative claims without proper sourcing.
On 18/12/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category "Living person", to do so?
Hum.
For all bios with categories, then if it's in [[Category:xxxx births]] where xxxx is greater than 1890, but not in any [[Category:yyyy deaths]], they're either alive or need updated.
We can catch another batch by searching anything with a bio-stub tag and categorising them, then rechecking. Anything else we have no real way of finding, since there's nothing to define an article's content without actually reading it.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Maybe we can have User:Humanbot programmed to cycle biographies and have people read them as a check?
Mgm
On 12/18/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 18/12/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category "Living person", to do so?
Hum.
For all bios with categories, then if it's in [[Category:xxxx births]] where xxxx is greater than 1890, but not in any [[Category:yyyy deaths]], they're either alive or need updated.
We can catch another batch by searching anything with a bio-stub tag and categorising them, then rechecking. Anything else we have no real way of finding, since there's nothing to define an article's content without actually reading it.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 18/12/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe we can have User:Humanbot programmed to cycle biographies and have people read them as a check?
Excellent use for this sort of thing. There's a lot of articles that are obviously biographies - I happen to be looking at [[Reginald of Durham]] just now - but which aren't categorised by birth/death simply because they're not known. However, it's equally obvious that he is, in fact, dead...
Hmm. Moving back to a more general theme...
[[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Dead people]] [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title) [[Category:Fictional people]]
Assume for a second we have the manpower to go and slap one of these on every biography we can find - so anything with death or life cats, anything categorised "as a person", anything with a stub notice that makes it look like an individual. Great.
1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those cats will certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.
2) What would this achieve? We've got some good basic metadata, but... among other things, it doesn't address the problem of someone inserting violently libellous material *elsewhere*, which can be just as bad - say, in an article on that person's company, or political party, or hometown, or whatever. Or tangential libel in *another* biographical article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if parsed as a reference to someone else...
3) But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler articles? No categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a bio by anything short of a human reader stumbling across the damn thing and checking it. Are we going to have eyeballs check every article, in case they're a missed biography? The man-hours are really mounting up...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Hi,
[[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Dead people]] [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title)
[[Category:Schrödinger people]] ? Kind of appropriate when you're talking about...
death or life cats...
:)
- Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those
cats will certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.
They would be better as "flags", except that flags don't exist. Better because no one would necessarily want to browse that whole category...
- What would this achieve? We've got some good basic
metadata, but... among other things, it doesn't address the problem of someone inserting violently libellous material *elsewhere*, which can be just as bad - say, in an article on that person's company, or political party, or hometown, or whatever. Or tangential libel in *another* biographical article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if parsed as a reference to someone else...
It is marginally better because it directly addresses the "Oh my god what happened to Seigenthaler is awful I'm going to go and check my entry right now- EEK! EEK! where's my lawyer?" situation.
- But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler
articles? No categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a bio by anything short of a human reader stumbling across the damn thing and checking it. Are we going to have eyeballs check every article, in case they're a missed biography? The man-hours are really mounting up...
Also very few incoming links. Could we perhaps automatically label these pages (as I suggested somewhere) and have a "report libel" button? That way the few users who do end up on the page can be used to give it a quick "this looks contentious" review. We're not asking them to fact check it, but just to report to us the possibility that it's libellous. That could work, by reducing the burden on the anon user, while filtering down immensely the number of pages to only the few that are reported.
Steve
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:
There's a lot of articles that are obviously biographies - I happen to be looking at [[Reginald of Durham]] just now - but which aren't categorised by birth/death simply because they're not known. However, it's equally obvious that he is, in fact, dead...
Hmm. Moving back to a more general theme...
[[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Dead people]] [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title) [[Category:Fictional people]]
Assume for a second we have the manpower to go and slap one of these on every biography we can find - so anything with death or life cats, anything categorised "as a person", anything with a stub notice that makes it look like an individual. Great.
- Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those cats will
certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.
I'm sometimes amazed at how much work various people are willing to expend on categorizing & recategorizing stubs. I can't help think that the effort expended on moving an article labelled {{bio-stub}} to (say) {{German-bio-stub}}, then {{German-scientist-bio-stub}}, then suplimented with tags like {{biologist-stub}} & {{European-woman-stub}}. Having a project like this for these kinds of people to expend their need for organization would be A Good Thing.
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
- What would this achieve? We've got some good basic metadata, but...
among other things, it doesn't address the problem of someone inserting violently libellous material *elsewhere*, which can be just as bad - say, in an article on that person's company, or political party, or hometown, or whatever. Or tangential libel in *another* biographical article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if parsed as a reference to someone else...
I would assume that insisting that people provide sources for allegations that would be considered derogatory by a prudent person would solve much of this kind of trouble. Even if it's "common knowledge" that a given person is a criminal, unless one can provide clear proof of the allegations the subject may sue just to dissuade the next person. (A guy by the name of L. Ron Hubbard was notoriously successful with this tactic.)
- But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler articles? No
categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a bio by anything short of a human reader stumbling across the damn thing and checking it. Are we going to have eyeballs check every article, in case they're a missed biography? The man-hours are really mounting up...
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
Then again, I've added an article or two which one could make a plausible case they should have been deleted on sight. I haven't noticed anyone pulling the trigger on them yet.
Geoff
[*] This is not to blame David. I admit that sometimes I am likely to hear criticism where none is meant; yet sometimes Wikipedia is a far more critical environment than it is a supportive one.
Geoff Burling wrote:
I'm sometimes amazed at how much work various people are willing to expend on categorizing & recategorizing stubs. I can't help think that the effort expended on moving an article labelled {{bio-stub}} to (say) {{German-bio-stub}}, then {{German-scientist-bio-stub}}, then suplimented with tags like {{biologist-stub}} & {{European-woman-stub}}. Having a project like this for these kinds of people to expend their need for organization would be A Good Thing.
We have one.
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find there.
That is: the sort of stub is actually as important as that it's a stub.
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
- d.
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find there.
Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many more reasons:
-- having multiple stubs looks ugly -- multiple stub notices gives the impression that we don't value the intelligence of our readers (viz., "Hey, this is a stub, & I'm warning you that you might not find all of the information you expect here! Hey, this is a stub, & you might not find all of the information you expect here! Hey, this is a stub, & you might not find all of the information you expect here!" Some of us get the message the first time it's said.) -- just how many people actually look for stubs in their area of interest? I've seen anecdotal evidence that few people bother to chase down stubs. (When I am on the hunt for a topic to work on, I'm as just as likely to look under the more broad categories as under the stubs.) -- this confuses meta-information (which should be on the Talk page) with warnings to the reader (which should be on the article page) I believe this falls under the category of "instruction creep". If an there is a reason an article needs more than one stub notice, then shouldn't they go on the talk page?
And last, & perhaps most important: -- just exactly when was this policy dreamed up, debated, & voted on? I I believe this is one of those situations where the Wikipedia directive [[ignore all rules]] applies & AFAIK, this isn't even a rule.
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
[snip]
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
Geoff
G'day Geoff,
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find there.
Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many more reasons:
<snip reasons />
Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all but one template? Or even some new text --- if there's more than one template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something. Or perhaps that's too difficult.
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to be "missing" from an article?
Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS. Not our problem. If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort it out. If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}. It's not to deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing, and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).
I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?
[snip]
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
It depends how you define "drek". If "drek" means unsalvagable, then I'd agree, no more than 20-30%. If it means "crap", then (before anon users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not necessarily nuking from orbit.
Cheers,
Mark Gallagher wrote:
Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS. Not our problem.
Indeed :-) If they want to organise every short article, I'm happy to let them!
If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort it out.
I must confess that I do this too ;-)
If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}. It's not to deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing, and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).
It's not entirely clear to me why some admins seem to regard SPUI as target practice. He's brash and forthright and bold (sometimes too bold), and is an ex-GNAA we borged, but as per the bottom of [[WP:NPA]], no-one is fair game and boldness isn't a block-on-sight offence.
It depends how you define "drek". If "drek" means unsalvagable, then I'd agree, no more than 20-30%. If it means "crap", then (before anon users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not necessarily nuking from orbit.
Before anons creating articles was switched off, 2000 out of 4000 new articles a day were getting speedied. What are the numbers now?
- d.
On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Mark Gallagher wrote:
G'day Geoff,
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find there.
Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many more reasons:
<snip reasons />
Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all but one template? Or even some new text --- if there's more than one template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something. Or perhaps that's too difficult.
That is something I have often wondered. Some kinds of stubs lend themselves to more than one category -- but were it possible to simply add something like {{subst:stub}} to an article, & send a flag to all of the categories that this article needed attention!
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to be "missing" from an article?
Naw, I'm too preoccupied with other things to waste time edit-warring. And I have found that the best tactic when faced with this kind of confrontation is to walk away -- then make my changes several months later, after the miscreant has gotten her/himself banned.
Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS. Not our problem. If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort it out. If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}. It's not to deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing, and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).
I suspect that most of them aren't too keen on multiple stub templates for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere. Until now, no one's even noticed what I've been doing.
I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?
I've been trying to corral a decent sampling of articles for [[Wikipedia:Good articles]]. And I've written a few biographical articles on Ethiopian people. Why do you ask?
[snip]
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
It depends how you define "drek". If "drek" means unsalvagable, then I'd agree, no more than 20-30%. If it means "crap", then (before anon users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not necessarily nuking from orbit.
By "drek" I meant new articles David described in another email as "shoot-on-sight". People complain that many -- if not most -- of our articles are mediocre: there are times when I feel many articles on notable subjects aren't even _that_ good.
Geoff
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
You may want to consider the fact that it takes more time and effort to add stubs than it does to remove them.
Personally, I see stubs as being like throwing out a lifeline to some relevant community that you don't even know yet. It's like saying, "Hey, I created this short article about an Australian rock star/politician, for god's sake can someone who knows about Australian rock stars or Australian politicians come along and clean it up!" Removing the politician half, for example, would reduce significantly the number of people who might find it and fix it.
IMHO, stubs are vulnerable because they have so few links to them or from them, and are so likely to get "lost". More links increases the chances that some kind person will stumble upon it and fix it. I never actively seek out stubs to work on - but if I hit one, I occasionally flesh it out a bit.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
IMHO, stubs are vulnerable because they have so few links to them or from them, and are so likely to get "lost". More links increases the chances that some kind person will stumble upon it and fix it. I never actively seek out stubs to work on - but if I hit one, I occasionally flesh it out a bit.
Every type of stub I've seen so far has some sort of corresponding non-stub category that the article can be placed in, so whenever I remove extra stub templates I make sure the article's properly categorized. They don't get "lost" that way.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Every type of stub I've seen so far has some sort of corresponding non-stub category that the article can be placed in, so whenever I remove extra stub templates I make sure the article's properly categorized. They don't get "lost" that way.
Hmmm... instead of having a hierarchy of 'categories' and a parallel hierarchy of 'stub categories' it might make sense to just have one hierarchy and a single generic stub notice. Only drawback I can see is that there isn't currently a simple way to identify 'articles in this category with a stub notice' or 'articles in category-1 AND category-2'. Still, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to have category views with 'display only articles also in the Stub category'. Would cut the categorization and sorting work significantly.
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Every type of stub I've seen so far has some sort of corresponding non-stub category that the article can be placed in, so whenever I remove extra stub templates I make sure the article's properly categorized. They don't get "lost" that way.
Hmmm... instead of having a hierarchy of 'categories' and a parallel hierarchy of 'stub categories' it might make sense to just have one hierarchy and a single generic stub notice. Only drawback I can see is that there isn't currently a simple way to identify 'articles in this category with a stub notice' or 'articles in category-1 AND category-2'. Still, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to have category views with 'display only articles also in the Stub category'. Would cut the categorization and sorting work significantly.
One of the reasons for stub sorting was that [[Category:Stub]] had tens of thousands of entries and this was enough to start making things go funny. It also made it almost impossible to say "hmm ... think I'll go expand some stubs" unless you're really fond of topics starting with A.
The stub categories are not parallel; each is under a non-stub category.
- d.
Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Every type of stub I've seen so far has some sort of corresponding non-stub category that the article can be placed in, so whenever I remove extra stub templates I make sure the article's properly categorized. They don't get "lost" that way.
Hmmm... instead of having a hierarchy of 'categories' and a parallel hierarchy of 'stub categories' it might make sense to just have one hierarchy and a single generic stub notice. Only drawback I can see is that there isn't currently a simple way to identify 'articles in this category with a stub notice' or 'articles in category-1 AND category-2'. Still, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to have category views with 'display only articles also in the Stub category'. Would cut the categorization and sorting work significantly.
A slightly more advanced search function might help that.
Ec
Geoff Burling wrote:
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
I've also been doing this for probably more than a year now and have never had anyone complain about it, so it doesn't seem to be causing any obvious problems. I always try to leave the "most relevant" stub notice for those who actually use such things to find articles to work on.
Geoff Burling wrote:
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find there.
Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many more reasons:
-- just how many people actually look for stubs in their area of interest? I've seen anecdotal evidence that few people bother to chase down stubs. (When I am on the hunt for a topic to work on, I'm as just as likely to look under the more broad categories as under the stubs.)
I don't know about others, but I look through [[Category:Scientology stubs]] when I'm bored.
-- this confuses meta-information (which should be on the Talk page) with warnings to the reader (which should be on the article page) I believe this falls under the category of "instruction creep". If an there is a reason an article needs more than one stub notice, then shouldn't they go on the talk page?
That's a good idea, actually. Would you be averse to moving second and third stubs to talk pages instead of just deleting them?
And last, & perhaps most important: -- just exactly when was this policy dreamed up, debated, & voted on?
People started doing it presumably because they found it useful.
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
Well, I can't stop you :-) But if you could please move them to talk so they're still findable by interested editors (presumably with a note of why), that'd be good.
I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
Although it's still a horrible percentage. I wonder what the numbers are like now.
- d.
On 12/20/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories.
It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template. Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a stub..." notices on one article? Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688 with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177, for example.
Angela.
This seems like a good middle ground. I have to admit that after creating a new stub biography, and finding it tagged with three stub templates -- which took up more space on the page than the article itself -- I removed some of them impulsively. Still, I very much think it makes the article look silly to have more stub templates than content. Adding the article to the categories without using every template could be the best of both worlds.
Ryan
On 12/22/05, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/20/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub
tag
attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories.
It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template. Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a stub..." notices on one article? Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688 with < http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177%..., for example.
Angela. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
"Angela" beesley@gmail.com wrote in message news:8b722b800512210536t474b01acy39d04cdf3a23f410@mail.gmail.com... [snip]
It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template. Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a stub..." notices on one article? Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688 with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177, for example.
If you don't like stub notices, isn't it possible to fix your personal CSS so they don't show up?
I'm sure there's instructions somewhere, or if necessary, plenty of people who would be more than happy to help.
HTH HAND
Angela wrote:
It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template. Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a stub..." notices on one article? Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688 with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177, for example.
Who on Earth can remember the one trillion stub types? Not me. WikiProject Stub Sorting are the ones who know them.
For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable - they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely assume it was an error and fix it.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable - they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely assume it was an error and fix it.
I remember actually trying this way back when and I got yelled at for it. I remember this quite clearly because that's the exact time I shrugged my shoulders and thought "I'll just delete the extras completely, then." :)
Bryan Derksen wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable - they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely assume it was an error and fix it.
I remember actually trying this way back when and I got yelled at for it. I remember this quite clearly because that's the exact time I shrugged my shoulders and thought "I'll just delete the extras completely, then." :)
Do the people who like all these stub labels ever try to fix these problems, or do they just have a personal passion with finding work that others can do? :-)
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Do the people who like all these stub labels ever try to fix these problems, or do they just have a personal passion with finding work that others can do? :-)
They leave them for those of us with an interest in the content area :-)
- d.
On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Angela wrote:
It's possible to add a stub category without adding a stub template. Perhaps this would be a suitable compromise between those who need the categories to be there and those who don't want multiple "this is a stub..." notices on one article? Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27617688 with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambrosius_Stub&oldid=27615177, for example.
Who on Earth can remember the one trillion stub types? Not me. WikiProject Stub Sorting are the ones who know them.
For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable - they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely assume it was an error and fix it.
You had me until that last sentence. I'm gonna continue with my "delete all but one stub template per article" ways until one of the folks from the Stub Sorting group decides to have a talk with me.
And before anyone thinks I'm in the process of irreparably destroying Wikipedia with my lawlessness (okay, as much destruction as removing stub templates can cause), let me state that on average I modify about one article a week for this reason. Some days, when I'm on a rip, I might strip stubs from as many as two or three articles. So it's not as if I'm attempting to imitate some grand scheme like Wik did, monitoring the changes on thousands of pages & reverting each one where he did not approve of the edit.
And I admit that I agree for the most part with that WikiProject's goals: one fat collection of articles under {{stub}} was just not workable. It's just that some times I have to wonder if all of the energy sorting these stubs wouldn't be better applied to making them into full-length articles, especially after Angela's example with [[Ambrosius Stub]] -- although now that I've had a moment to think about it, I suspect someone was having too much fun adding {{stub}}'s to Mr Stub's article.
However, I often encounter some real head-scratchers, such as [[Ibn Yasin]], whose article is marked with a {{philosopher-stub}} & an {{Islam-stub}}: just how many philosophy wonks are going to make a substantial change to an article about a West-African Islamic mullah? (At the moment, the most serious problem with this article is neither philosophical nor religious, but the least obvious: the date of his death. This article says it was 1059, another article 1056, & a book I borrowed from the local library says it was 1057. If I had more confidence in the book, I'd be bold & change them all to conform with it.)
What I see is the problem here is that eager new editors, who are looking for something easy to do, start adding every stub template or category label that fits the article they can think of. I know I've been overly enthusiastic in the past with some of my edits, so unless the WSS people insist that I stop my stub pruning or be hauled before the ArbCom, I'm assuming that most of these multiple stubs are the work of newbie editors who will outgrow this habit in a month or two.
Geoff
P.S. Had I known my email would have generated so many follow-ups, I would have changed the subject line. But I doubt I could have improved on Mark Gallagher's "stubification to the max!"
Geoff Burling wrote:
It's just that some times I have to wonder if all of the energy sorting these stubs wouldn't be better applied to making them into full-length articles,
This sounds like the fallacy that volunteers can be told to do something other than what they're interested in. I cannot imagine ever having the patience to go stub-sorting, but those on WSS can. They're doing useful work and they feel like they are.
P.S. Had I known my email would have generated so many follow-ups, I would have changed the subject line. But I doubt I could have improved on Mark Gallagher's "stubification to the max!"
Done ;-)
- d.
--- David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
This sounds like the fallacy that volunteers can be told to do something other than what they're interested in. I cannot
imagine ever having the
patience to go stub-sorting, but those on WSS can.
They're doing useful work and they feel like they are.
Volunteers may not be "interested" in it, but it may be useful to point out that not all volunteers are considered equal. Some volunteers for example have checkUser access (and indeed 'who checked who' should be open knowledge, [redacting IPs of course]).
Other volunteers are Arbcom members who have been elected (or appointed) to hold decisive authority over other volunteers. IOTM, that if this small group was the least bit creative, they could apply that decisive power toward the completion of goal-oriented tasks. Not all Arbcom "remedies" should be drastic; indeed the Arbcom could be charged with being useful.
Stevertigo
__________________________________ Yahoo! for Good - Make a difference this year. http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005/
stevertigo wrote:
Other volunteers are Arbcom members who have been elected (or appointed) to hold decisive authority over other volunteers. IOTM, that if this small group was the least bit creative, they could apply that decisive power toward the completion of goal-oriented tasks. Not all Arbcom "remedies" should be drastic; indeed the Arbcom could be charged with being useful.
Last time we tried getting creative with remedies, it was widely regarded as my worst idea ever ...
- d.
On Dec 22, 2005, at 8:55 PM, David Gerard wrote:
stevertigo wrote:
Other volunteers are Arbcom members who have been elected (or appointed) to hold decisive authority over other volunteers. IOTM, that if this small group was the least bit creative, they could apply that decisive power toward the completion of goal-oriented tasks. Not all Arbcom "remedies" should be drastic; indeed the Arbcom could be charged with being useful.
Last time we tried getting creative with remedies, it was widely regarded as my worst idea ever ...
There is some reason to take wide regard as being a bad idea as a good thing, at this point.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
On Dec 22, 2005, at 8:55 PM, David Gerard wrote:
Last time we tried getting creative with remedies, it was widely regarded as my worst idea ever ...
There is some reason to take wide regard as being a bad idea as a good thing, at this point.
No ... that was a bad idea!
The AC assigning people homework would not work in any way I can think of. These are volunteers, with pride. Even the difficult ones.
- d.
On Dec 22, 2005, at 9:20 PM, David Gerard wrote:
Philip Sandifer wrote:
On Dec 22, 2005, at 8:55 PM, David Gerard wrote:
Last time we tried getting creative with remedies, it was widely regarded as my worst idea ever ...
There is some reason to take wide regard as being a bad idea as a good thing, at this point.
No ... that was a bad idea!
The AC assigning people homework would not work in any way I can think of. These are volunteers, with pride. Even the difficult ones.
Well, yes, but it's so hard to find a remedy that properly says "You're a petulant child and should go away."
-Phil
--- Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Well, yes, but it's so hard to find a remedy that properly says "You're a petulant child and should go away."
Well, thats only one kind of remedy, and its not appropriate in most cases - everyone, even some of our most controversial editors, being volunteers who have contributed usefully in one way or another. In that context, its a bit more petulant to be the one to say "go away," and thats why wiser people learn to not say it.
Given the above situation and just the general fact that circumstances change, what may have been a "bad idea" a year ago might be a good idea today --particularly in the context of finding remedies that are something other than absolutist decrees or embarrasingly indecisive punts to other authorities. Varied degrees of punishment -- community service -- what radical concepts!
Stevertigo
__________________________________________ Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less. dsl.yahoo.com
G'day Geoff,
<snip />
And I admit that I agree for the most part with that WikiProject's goals: one fat collection of articles under {{stub}} was just not workable. It's just that some times I have to wonder if all of the energy sorting these stubs wouldn't be better applied to making them into full-length articles, especially after Angela's example with [[Ambrosius Stub]] -- although now that I've had a moment to think about it, I suspect someone was having too much fun adding {{stub}}'s to Mr Stub's article.
I sometimes wonder if all the energy spent writing about minor characters in /Star Wars/ or /Pokemon/ wouldn't be better spent improving our articles on minor Australian politicians, but, as a number of Wikipedians I hold in high esteem (inc. David Gerard, Tony Sidaway, and of course Jimbo) have pointed out, you can't make people do the stuff they aren't interested in by taking away the stuff they are. Stub-sorting is a worthwhile effort; I don't think it's as useful as the WSS believe it is, but we're better off having those users concentrating on WSS matters than leaving altogether.
<snip />
What I see is the problem here is that eager new editors, who are looking for something easy to do, start adding every stub template or category label that fits the article they can think of. I know I've been overly enthusiastic in the past with some of my edits, so unless the WSS people insist that I stop my stub pruning or be hauled before the ArbCom, I'm assuming that most of these multiple stubs are the work of newbie editors who will outgrow this habit in a month or two.
Worl, User:Grutness and User:Mairi are definitely not newbies; Grutness has been around since before the dinosaurs started smoking and doing drugs, and Mairi was recently made an admin.
But as a general rule, I think you could be right. A lot of easy tasks (well, easier than editing, anyway) tend to attract newbies like so many annoying but unbiteable blowies. This even includes AfD, where teaching new editors that "AfD isn't a vote and even if it was the presumption that keep votes are worth twice as much as delete votes isn't 'unfair'[0]" is an ongoing effort.[1]
P.S. Had I known my email would have generated so many follow-ups, I would have changed the subject line. But I doubt I could have improved on Mark Gallagher's "stubification to the max!"
<bows />
[0] Or whatever it translates to. I'm not well-known for my maths.
[1] Speaking of which, a few more people trying to improve the culture of AfD wouldn't go astray. It'll be more useful, but probably less emotionally satisfying than bitching on the mailing list about those deletionist vandals ...
"Mark Gallagher" wrote
Stub-sorting is a worthwhile effort; I don't think it's as useful as the WSS believe it is, but we're better off having those users concentrating on WSS matters than leaving altogether.
IMNSHO, it's useful, but I myself would give priority to categorising articles without good category. Which must increase the chances of getting articles improved by a greater factor.
Charles
On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Mark Gallagher wrote:
[quoting me; keeping attributions is always a good thing]
And I admit that I agree for the most part with that WikiProject's goals: one fat collection of articles under {{stub}} was just not workable. It's just that some times I have to wonder if all of the energy sorting these stubs wouldn't be better applied to making them into full-length articles, especially after Angela's example with [[Ambrosius Stub]] -- although now that I've had a moment to think about it, I suspect someone was having too much fun adding {{stub}}'s to Mr Stub's article.
I sometimes wonder if all the energy spent writing about minor characters in /Star Wars/ or /Pokemon/ wouldn't be better spent improving our articles on minor Australian politicians, but, as a number of Wikipedians I hold in high esteem (inc. David Gerard, Tony Sidaway, and of course Jimbo) have pointed out, you can't make people do the stuff they aren't interested in by taking away the stuff they are. Stub-sorting is a worthwhile effort; I don't think it's as useful as the WSS believe it is, but we're better off having those users concentrating on WSS matters than leaving altogether.
I have a feeling that we're talking past each other here, & not realizing that we're in general agreement on this matter, so let me just re-emphasize my primary criticisms with the WSS, which are two: the first is the creation of possibly unnecessary sub-categories of stubs, & the second is adding more than one stub to articles.
Now concerning the needless creation of sub-categories, I will admit that I can't think of a specific example, although whenever I encounter an existing stub moved to yet another new stub category my first reaction is that this was wasted effort. However, after a few days as I discover the usefulness of this change my opinon changes; it's a first impression that I admit I will always have, but try to keep to myself unless I find evidence that clearly confirms my suspicions.
As for the second criticism, as I wrote above, I can't help but believe it is a newbie error, because it demonstrates an misunderstanding of the usefulness of stub tags: I see similar abuse with category tags. What is really the value of adding the categories of "Ethiopia", "Rulers of Ethiopia", & "Members of Ethiopia" to [[Haile Selassie I]]? These categories link to each other, & fail to add useful content to the article. Only someone knowing that Haile Selassie was an important Ethiopian would misuse these categories to emphasize his importance -- a mistake I assume only a newbie would make.
In short, my criticism is not with the idea of a stub tag, but with how it is used -- or IMHO, abused.
What I see is the problem here is that eager new editors, who are looking for something easy to do, start adding every stub template or category label that fits the article they can think of. I know I've been overly enthusiastic in the past with some of my edits, so unless the WSS people insist that I stop my stub pruning or be hauled before the ArbCom, I'm assuming that most of these multiple stubs are the work of newbie editors who will outgrow this habit in a month or two.
Worl, User:Grutness and User:Mairi are definitely not newbies; Grutness has been around since before the dinosaurs started smoking and doing drugs, and Mairi was recently made an admin.
I can't comment on the other two you've mentioned, but I've occasionally followed Grutness' efforts, & I haven't seen him add multiple stub tags to articles. He once even explained on his Talkl page his rationale for creating new sub-categories -- which in my opinion means I'll accept his decisions without question unless I think they are clearly in error. However, I haven't seen his name attached to examples of articles with multiple stub tags, so my suspicion that this is a newbie mistake still stands.
But as a general rule, I think you could be right. A lot of easy tasks (well, easier than editing, anyway) tend to attract newbies like so many annoying but unbiteable blowies. This even includes AfD, where teaching new editors that "AfD isn't a vote and even if it was the presumption that keep votes are worth twice as much as delete votes isn't 'unfair'[0]" is an ongoing effort.[1]
The one easy task I often indulge in is the creation of new links within articles; & I've noticed that there is a faction who believes that is often abused. There is a skill to the successful execution to even these "easy tasks", one that is not immediately apparent.
Geoff
"David Gerard" fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote in message news:43A9AA56.4030305@thingy.apana.org.au... [snip]
For those revolted by multiple stubs (and I agree that they have all Geoff's listed points against them), the talk page could be workable - they wouldn't be blots on the article warranting {{toomanyboxes}} and they'd still be findable in the relevant stub category. WSS would need collective persuasion that this was a good idea, else they would likely assume it was an error and fix it.
I suspect that the WSS crüe will be amongst the most happy recipients of Magnus' workflow extension.
I forsee the speedy creation of a bot which converts stub notices to tasks :-)
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 04:14:33 +0100, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
<snip>
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
<snip>
Obviously *redundant* stub templates can be removed and replaced with more spesific ones. For example if an article is tagged with {{US-bio-stub}},{{writer-stub}} and {{US-related-stub}} then the "proper" thing do to is to remove all those and add the more spesific {{US-writer-stub}} that transport all the same info and those 3 would (that's pretty much what the stub sorting project is all about). However if the subject of the stub belong in 2-3 different categories it should most defenently have a stub tag for each, unless it's a completely trivial thing. For example if a politician have also written an auto-biography (haven't they all) that only sold 500 copies and no one have ever heard about I would naturaly not suggest putting a {{writer-stub}} tag on a stub about him/her.
I agree the number should be kept down, but outright removing all but one template seems exessive, and is actualy counter productive with the goal of having the stub turned into an article. If the choice is between a stub with multiple "ugly" tags and a nice clean stub that less people are likely to find and expand then I'd go with the ugly stub any day.
On 18/12/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We can catch another batch by searching anything with a bio-stub tag and categorising them, then rechecking. Anything else we have no real way of finding, since there's nothing to define an article's content without actually reading it.
It's a bit silly isn't it, that the stub sorting project is doing better at categorising stubs than the rest of the project is at categorising articles? I'm not sure exactly how many stubs vs articles there are totally, but that sort of metholodogy, where they try to generally categorise what sort of topic something is in, for everything, rather than randomly adding categories like "Category:People who met JFK" and suchforth, seems to be working really well.
So I wonder if we could find a way to use this sort of methodology, of sorting things into more specific categories when needed, for regular articles. Obviously this would be done as well as the existing bottom-up approach.
But it would be a really useful feature to be able to tell progamatically whether an article (any article) is about a place, or a person or a group or a concept, or whatever. And the current model has no way of doing that - even recursively looking inside [[Category:People]] doesn't work because then you end up finding [[Category:John Lennon]] and then get to things like [[251 Menlove Avenue]], which is evidently not a person.
-- Abi
How about building up 'keywords': e.g. "defrauded". It is very easy to Google the site for such a thing.
Charles
On 18/12/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 18/12/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category "Living person", to do so?
Hum.
For all bios with categories, then if it's in [[Category:xxxx births]] where xxxx is greater than 1890, but not in any [[Category:yyyy deaths]], they're either alive or need updated.
We can catch another batch by searching anything with a bio-stub tag and categorising them, then rechecking. Anything else we have no real way of finding, since there's nothing to define an article's content without actually reading it.
To point out the problems with the latter; the deleted form of the Seigenthaler article wasn't categorised by anything, wasn't tagged as a stub, and wasn't phrased in the standard fashion for a biography ("[name] (year-year) [is/was]")... so there's no obvious automated way of picking it up.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Hi,
To point out the problems with the latter; the deleted form of the Seigenthaler article wasn't categorised by anything, wasn't tagged as a stub, and wasn't phrased in the standard fashion for a biography ("[name] (year-year) [is/was]")... so there's no obvious automated way of picking it up.
On the category, you have just defined a "suspicious article" haven't you? Particularly the "wasn't categorised by anything" bit.
Steve
On 18/12/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
To point out the problems with the latter; the deleted form of the Seigenthaler article wasn't categorised by anything, wasn't tagged as a stub, and wasn't phrased in the standard fashion for a biography ("[name] (year-year) [is/was]")... so there's no obvious automated way of picking it up.
On the category, you have just defined a "suspicious article" haven't
Yes and no. I've defined a suspicious article. I haven't at all defined a *suspicious biography*, though, which is the key here...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
"Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote in message news:f3fedb0d0512181443q5805d6fdq@mail.gmail.com...
On 18/12/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category "Living person", to do so?
For all bios with categories, then if it's in [[Category:xxxx births]] where xxxx is greater than 1890, but not in any [[Category:yyyy deaths]], they're either alive or need updated.
I was going to suggest that {{lifetime}} and/or {{lived}} could be modified so that the death date was optional, and lack thereof would put the article into [[Category:Living people]], but given the recent furore over conditional templates, maybe now is not the time...:-(
Also, I note that these templates have been listed for instant Substitution, so the information wouldn't actually stick anyway :-(
Phil Boswell wrote:
I was going to suggest that {{lifetime}} and/or {{lived}} could be modified so that the death date was optional, and lack thereof would put the article into [[Category:Living people]], but given the recent furore over conditional templates, maybe now is not the time...:-(
Also, I note that these templates have been listed for instant Substitution, so the information wouldn't actually stick anyway :-(
What? Why, and where? The whole reason I use those templates instead of just putting in categories is for their potential future mutability, for _exactly_ the possibility you just mentioned.
"Bryan Derksen" bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote in message news:43A6F5E0.7040809@shaw.ca...
Phil Boswell wrote:
I was going to suggest that {{lifetime}} and/or {{lived}} could be modified so that the death date was optional, and lack thereof would put the article into [[Category:Living people]], but given the recent furore over conditional templates, maybe now is not the time...:-( Also, I note that these templates have been listed for instant Substitution, so the information wouldn't actually stick anyway :-(
What? Why, and where? The whole reason I use those templates instead of just putting in categories is for their potential future mutability, for _exactly_ the possibility you just mentioned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_substitution#Article namespace
I discovered it when I found myself converting a pair of birth/death categories in the saem article again, and discovered that a bot was goind around SUBSTituting them according to the guidline on that page.
Let discussion ensue :-)
HTH HAND
On 12/18/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures.
This is so head-poundingly obvious that I'm quite shocked that it's being described as "another problem looming for Wikipedia." It's a constant problem for any information conduit, whether a magazine publisher, a corporate email system, or a radio station.
What do you do? You run a help desk, you take notice of complaints. If your operation has American users, you make sure nobody who thinks he has a first amendment right to keep on inserting unfounded nonsense into articles remains able to do so.
Every publishing concern the size of Wikipedia has been sued. Often.
Raise a legal fund.
On 12/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/18/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures.
This is so head-poundingly obvious that I'm quite shocked that it's being described as "another problem looming for Wikipedia." It's a constant problem for any information conduit, whether a magazine publisher, a corporate email system, or a radio station.
What do you do? You run a help desk, you take notice of complaints. If your operation has American users, you make sure nobody who thinks he has a first amendment right to keep on inserting unfounded nonsense into articles remains able to do so.
Every publishing concern the size of Wikipedia has been sued. Often.
Raise a legal fund. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Folks,
I think that the problem has been sorted out. Nevertheless, it could have been a sizable problem for us.
Nevertheless, we have a responsibility to ensure that our processes are as good as we can get them. Taking notice of complaints is not always sufficient. Jimmy Wales took notice of the Siegenthaler matter as soon as he became aware of it. Nevertheless, it didn't stop it from becoming a problem for us in the media. While a legal fund is worthwhile, we don't want to spend money on defending cases in court that could go towards buying more servers.
We need mechanisms to pick up problem articles as soon as possible. Further, we need to look at warning people about inserting defamatory material into Wikipedia every time they edit.
Regards
*Keith Old*
Keith Old