Message: 1 Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:39:55 +0000 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation... To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140511140939sb9e3631od43e79d42bb18d18@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
geni wrote:
On 11/14/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
That's absolutely and incredibly not true. They write a verifiable article about something they know, get abusive comments on AFD (for some reason, civility and assume good faith don't work there ... the reason AFD is so damn poisonous to the community is that it blatantly encourages participants to assume *bad* faith) and *leave*.
That would be unusal. More likely they will simply be ignored. Most stuff that lands on afd is not implicetly verifiable.
Case where this happened really badly: webcomics. We now have a project fork, Comixpedia, entirely caused by AFD. You may recall extensive discussion surrounding this on this list a few weeks ago.
Wow, I was totally unaware of this happening. After browsing around "comixpedia" for an hour or so, I have to admit I'm totally mystified and agree with David. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the articles at this "comixpedia" site to differentiate them from any number of articles at other places, except that certain people seemed to think certain articles weren't "notable". But really, come on, less than 1,000 articles, yeah that's *real* threatening. It's *1/10th of 1%* of wikipedia articles. And a large number of these are copies of Wikipedia articles, and a large number of the remaining are actually far from stubs, and many contain some interesting information. What next, every time some people get in their head that there are too many stubs on a subject, we'll just banish them to a fork? Moreover, the move to the fork sets up an artificial barrier to linking to other topics on wikipedia. One of the joys I have found about the project is the ability to begin at one article, and gradually move on to interesting articles in other areas simply by clicking on interesting links 3 or 4 times. It gives a sense of connection and inter-relatedness. The impression given here is that "comics" are somehow beyond the pale of acknowledgement and have to be banished in exile.
Am I just really missing something?? How did this happen? I have a Jonathan Swift suggestion: Why don't we just create 1,000 different forks -- let's have a math fork, a physics fork, a chess fork, a baseball fork. We'll call them "mathpedia", "physicspedia", "chessipedia", and "baseballpedia", they can all have different webpages, different admins, different statistics, different everything. And they can all link to each other via external links. That's a great idea.
BTW, I wonder how many people feel the way I do, but never registered their opinion simply because they weren't even *aware* a debate was going on. (I do remember some posts about webcomics, but I never caught on that an entire fork was being created. And besides, what about people who don't keep up with this discussion list??
darin
On 11/14/05, Brown, Darin Darin.Brown@enmu.edu wrote:
Wow, I was totally unaware of this happening. After browsing around "comixpedia" for an hour or so, I have to admit I'm totally mystified and agree with David. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the articles at this "comixpedia" site to differentiate them from any number of articles at other places, except that certain people seemed to think certain articles weren't "notable".
Can you verify all the claims in them.
But really, come on, less than 1,000 articles, yeah that's *real* threatening. It's *1/10th of 1%* of wikipedia articles. And a large number of these are copies of Wikipedia articles, and a large number of the remaining are actually far from stubs, and many contain some interesting information.
Can it be verifed?
What next, every time some people get in their head that there are too many stubs on a subject, we'll just banish them to a fork? Moreover, the move to the fork sets up an artificial barrier to linking to other topics on wikipedia. One of the joys I have found about the project is the ability to begin at one article, and gradually move on to interesting articles in other areas simply by clicking on interesting links 3 or 4 times. It gives a sense of connection and inter-relatedness. The impression given here is that "comics" are somehow beyond the pale of acknowledgement and have to be banished in exile.
No some comics. We have fairly well worked out inclusion standards for comics
Am I just really missing something?? How did this happen? I have a Jonathan Swift suggestion: Why don't we just create 1,000 different forks -- let's have a math fork, a physics fork, a chess fork, a baseball fork. We'll call them "mathpedia", "physicspedia", "chessipedia", and "baseballpedia", they can all have different webpages, different admins, different statistics, different everything. And they can all link to each other via external links. That's a great idea.
It will happen. I hope it does.
BTW, I wonder how many people feel the way I do, but never registered their opinion simply because they weren't even *aware* a debate was going on. (I do remember some posts about webcomics, but I never caught on that an entire fork was being created. And besides, what about people who don't keep up with this discussion list??
I think things were largely worked out at [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Webcomics]] which would logicaly be the place where people who really care about this topic end up.
-- geni
We simply can't include every webcomic in the world. To avoid people using Wikipedia as a promotional vehicle we have to use inclusion guidelines to keep in stuff that deserves an article - highly popular (verifiably so) webcomics with a not so small run - and stuff that doesn't deserve an article - your average Joe site with 4 comics, a dead forum and no Google or Alexa rank because they don't have visitors.
Of course, Google and Alexa aren't everything, but if those can't be gauged to determine a comic's audience, we need the author to provide the information by other means. If the audience can't be verified it doesn't belong on Wikipedia.
We don't include unremarkable people, forums or ads for businesses. Webcomics should be no different.
How popular a comic needs to be and how many visitors it needs to attract is, of course, up for discussion.
----
Example: We had several webcomics with bad Alexa ranking and dead forums. Someone complained that the forum recently moved. How are we supposed to know if they don't tell it or provide sources for the article. Any edit window asks people to cite sources, yet people fail to do so far too often...
--Mgm
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
We simply can't include every webcomic in the world.
This is an unsupported assertion. We can include every hamlet and township in the US, every sportsperson to play professionally, every ship in the navy, and every music album published by a record label. Why not every webcomic? A few thousand articles will vanish like a drop into the sea of Wikipedia if you're not interested in the subject.
To avoid people using Wikipedia as a promotional vehicle we have to use inclusion guidelines to keep in stuff that deserves an article - highly popular (verifiably so) webcomics with a not so small run - and stuff that doesn't deserve an article - your average Joe site with 4 comics, a dead forum and no Google or Alexa rank because they don't have visitors.
You can include an article about a small, defunct comic without promoting it. It just depends on how the article's written.
Of course, Google and Alexa aren't everything, but if those can't be gauged to determine a comic's audience, we need the author to provide the information by other means. If the audience can't be verified it doesn't belong on Wikipedia.
Verifiability is indeed an important consideration, but separate and different from the "notability" one that's usually named instead in these cases.
On Nov 14, 2005, at 9:29 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
This is an unsupported assertion. We can include every hamlet and township in the US, every sportsperson to play professionally, every ship in the navy, and every music album published by a record label. Why not every webcomic? A few thousand articles will vanish like a drop into the sea of Wikipedia if you're not interested in the subject.
The usual answer is "it makes us look silly."
Personally, I think being a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit makes us look silly, and we've more than risen above that.
-Phil
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Wikipedia doesn't own Yahoo mail. Yet.
Replies work in gmail.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Wikipedia doesn't own Yahoo mail. Yet.
Replies work in gmail.
Yeah, I sent him a gmail invite.
On Nov 14, 2005, at 5:28 PM, geni wrote:
I think things were largely worked out at [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Webcomics]] which would logicaly be the place where people who really care about this topic end up.
Actually, what happened at WikiProject Webcomics is that the people who drove away the contributors proceeded to get into a pissing match and tried to write the guidelines in such a way as to render a comic which had survived an AfD not a week before to be deletable, community consensus on the AfD be damned.
-Snowspinner
On 11/15/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, what happened at WikiProject Webcomics is that the people who drove away the contributors proceeded to get into a pissing match and tried to write the guidelines in such a way as to render a comic which had survived an AfD not a week before to be deletable, community consensus on the AfD be damned.
-Snowspinner
AfD represents community consensus? Even I don't think the system is that flawless.
-- geni
On Nov 14, 2005, at 8:51 PM, geni wrote:
On 11/15/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, what happened at WikiProject Webcomics is that the people who drove away the contributors proceeded to get into a pissing match and tried to write the guidelines in such a way as to render a comic which had survived an AfD not a week before to be deletable, community consensus on the AfD be damned.
-Snowspinner
AfD represents community consensus? Even I don't think the system is that flawless.
In this case, the AfD had substantially more people weighing in on it than the guidelines.
Which tells you something about policy formation these days.
-Phil