From: "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" macgyvermagic@gmail.com
I think it's only deletionist when you delete such claims that could be true instead of giving people the chance to verify it. Only when you can falsify it, it can be removed.
Once a "citation needed" tag is in place, there's no need to do anything in a hurry. The reader is adequately warned, other editors are informed.
Depending on the situation, I will usually let them sit for a week to several months. I'll usually make at least a quick, half-assed effort to find a source myself before removing it. And when I do remove it, I don't just delete it, I put it on the talk page.
Not infrequently, someone will find a source and take it out of the talk page and put it back in the article. I love it when that happens.
The people I don't understand are the people who object to the tag being placed in the first place. I'd be all in favor of trying to find a less obtrusive tag, but, yes, I sometimes think the people who complain about "citation needed" tags are using it as a mask for opposition to the verifiability policy itself.
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Once a "citation needed" tag is in place, there's no need to do anything in a hurry. The reader is adequately warned, other editors are informed.
In many many cases, this is true. But not in all.
The one that is absolutely imperative for all editors is to recognize that "If this claim would be libellous if false, it is absolutely not acceptable to simply put a 'citation needed' tag and hope for the best."
It is extremely painful to see those. "Lord John Doe was a porn star in 1943. <citation needed>" In such cases, being a citation nazi is the right thing to do.
That is not the only case, but that is the one where it is absolutely imperative.
On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:50:57 -0700 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
By the way, when we're talking about other wikis and whether or not their policies are superior:
Uncyclopedia is tagged as satire. Therefore it is relatively safe from legal problems regarding libel and slander. These legal issues, I believe, are the #1 threat to Wikipedia, or rather, the foundation. Continuing like this, it is just a question of time.
It might be worth considering calling Wikipedia satire just to avoid legal problems. A lot of people call it worse things already, none of which gives WP legal advantages.
-- I stevertigo@wikipedia.org wrote:
" Thats an issue for the software developers, and theyve solved a number of problems over the years with regard to this very issue."
I do so love proofreading my own posts only *after* Ive hit the send button. Eugh.
--- Dabljuh dabljuh@gmx.net wrote:
It might be worth considering calling Wikipedia satire just to avoid legal problems. A lot of people call it worse things already, none of which gives WP legal advantages.
OMG. ROFL. I thought I had clicked on one of Jimbo's comments when I read this.
Given a context of an exaggerated paranoia of legal threats to WP, its eerily hard to disagree with this statement Dabljuh. However most of us dont have such fears, and believe either 1) the goodness of mankind to promote free information or 2) the craftiness of upstart technologists to figure out how to eventually make Wikipedia decentralized and therefore unattackable.
But putting fear and futurism aside, what would be the point of calling ourselves "satirists" if that would only defeat our opinion of ourselves as "encyclopedists."
-Stevertigo
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On 8/16/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
The one that is absolutely imperative for all editors is to recognize that "If this claim would be libellous if false, it is absolutely not acceptable to simply put a 'citation needed' tag and hope for the best."
*THAT* is the sentence that needs to be at the top of WP:LIVING, not:
-- Articles about living persons require a degree of sensitivity and must adhere strictly to Wikipedia's content policies. Be very firm about high-quality references, particularly about details of personal lives. Unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should be removed immediately from both the article and the talk page. Responsibility for justifying controversial claims rests firmly on the shoulders of the person making the claim. --
That sentence up there is actionable, workable and simple enough for all editors to understand. We can even simplify it further:
Any claim about a living person that would be libellous if proven false must be referenced with a high quality source or removed *immediately*.
Can we do something to elevate this above the normal "everything should be verified" and "be sensitive with living people" yada yada?
Steve
On 16/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/16/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
The one that is absolutely imperative for all editors is to recognize that "If this claim would be libellous if false, it is absolutely not acceptable to simply put a 'citation needed' tag and hope for the best."
*THAT* is the sentence that needs to be at the top of WP:LIVING, not:
Articles about living persons require a degree of sensitivity and must adhere strictly to Wikipedia's content policies. Be very firm about high-quality references, particularly about details of personal lives. Unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should be removed immediately from both the article and the talk page. Responsibility for justifying controversial claims rests firmly on the shoulders of the person making the claim. -- That sentence up there is actionable, workable and simple enough for all editors to understand. We can even simplify it further:
I believe I tried rewriting WP:LIVING in that manner, but it seems to have become long-winded and didactic - and hence bloody useless - since then. Could people please hack at it with a guide to *ease of use*? Thanks ever so much.
- d.
On 8/16/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I believe I tried rewriting WP:LIVING in that manner, but it seems to have become long-winded and didactic - and hence bloody useless - since then. Could people please hack at it with a guide to *ease of use*? Thanks ever so much.
Maybe our policy pages need to be divided into "policy" and "discussion". The policy bit, which should never be more than a page, should say "do this, and don't do that". The discussion can have the reasoning why, the special cases, and all that other crap that always gets in there.
Steve
G'day Steve,
On 8/16/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I believe I tried rewriting WP:LIVING in that manner, but it seems to have become long-winded and didactic - and hence bloody useless - since then. Could people please hack at it with a guide to *ease of use*? Thanks ever so much.
Maybe our policy pages need to be divided into "policy" and "discussion". The policy bit, which should never be more than a page, should say "do this, and don't do that". The discussion can have the reasoning why, the special cases, and all that other crap that always gets in there.
The reasoning is the most important *part* of any policy. This is because rules only exist to make you think before you break them; when you know the reasoning behind a particular rule, it's so much easier to think along the right lines, so you don't needlessly break an appropriate rule or needlessly uphold an inappropriate one.
The cruft (and I *do* mean cruft) that fills many policy pages, including for a time [[WP:IAR]][0], is not the sort of reasoning I mean. It's not "this is why we made this rule". It is instead, "here's some musings on how I'd interpret the exact wording of the rule, combined with the musings of a dozen other people, all of whom wouldn't give a rats about the real reasoning here but have conflicting views about what the best loopholes are".
For the potentially Clueful searching our policy pages, this sort of thing only acts to obscure the truth about how Wikipedia works. For the eager newbie trying to learn how to behave according to what he's heard about Wikipedia's arcane lore, this cruft is confusing and harmful to his education. For the seasoned newbie who thinks he's not a newbie anymore, the cruft provides a valuable weapon for the beating up of more Clueful individuals while screaming ancient and evil spells corrupted, as many things are, by the Chinese Whispers Effect.
The cruft that builds up on policy pages is a terrible thing, and I can fully understand why David wants to take a machete to it. However, I'm not sure that restriction policy pages to: "the rule" and "a short piece where the long-winded discussion used to go" would be helpful. I dare say if we did that, the reasoning would vanish completely[1] and be replaced by the useless cruft.
[0] Fair dinks! There was a longish discussion about the rules which applied when one wanted to invoke IAR.
[1] Rather than being, like the reasoning behind Gratiano's wayward tongue, "as two grains of wheat hidden in two bushels of chaff".
On 8/17/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
The cruft (and I *do* mean cruft) that fills many policy pages, including for a time [[WP:IAR]][0], is not the sort of reasoning I mean. It's not "this is why we made this rule". It is instead, "here's some musings on how I'd interpret the exact wording of the rule, combined with the musings of a dozen other people, all of whom wouldn't give a rats about the real reasoning here but have conflicting views about what the best loopholes are".
Yeah you're probably right about all this. Most of the "cruft" is probably written by the half-clueful. Those who are grasping to understand what the policy is really about, and have to put it in more concrete terms, which may not really be true in all instances.
Though I don't really know how to bridge the gap from a purely abstract ideal like "verifiability" to a useful set of guidelines, without coming up with bullshit rules like "don't quote from blogs".
Steve
Mark Gallagher wrote:
The reasoning is the most important *part* of any policy. This is because rules only exist to make you think before you break them; when you know the reasoning behind a particular rule, it's so much easier to think along the right lines...
Indeed. Very good point.
But this reminds me of an idea I had yesterday for ordinary pages, which might apply to policy and other project-space pages too. Right now, for every page, there's an associated talk page. What if every page had *two* associated pages, "Talk" and "Rationale"? Talk would be as it is now, but Rationale would be a mostly-static (or at any rate as static as the main page) description of *why* the main page says what it says, and why it does not say the things it does not say. That is, it would contain the distilled consensus of everything you'd want a would-be editor of the article to see, but which mere readers would have no need for.
Today, talk pages sort of perform this function, but they're so free-wheeling, and so subject to various ad-hoc kinds of archiving, that it's an arbitrarily hard problem for a new editor (who's trying to be responsible) to discover whether there's any precedent or prior argument behind a change he's about to make, that might be controversial or have been tried before and decided against.
(Adding these hypothetical Rationale pages would be a sweeping change, of course, and I'm not seriously proposing doing it, but it's an idea to think about.)
On 8/17/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
But this reminds me of an idea I had yesterday for ordinary pages, which might apply to policy and other project-space pages too. Right now, for every page, there's an associated talk page. What if every page had *two* associated pages, "Talk" and "Rationale"? Talk would be as it is now, but Rationale would be a mostly-static (or at any rate as static as the main page) description of *why* the main page says what it says, and why it does not say the things it does not say. That is, it would contain the distilled consensus of everything you'd want a would-be editor of the article to see, but which mere readers would have no need for.
Doesn't a <!-- comment --> up the top of the page serve that purpose very well? I'm always impressed when I see good ones, that explain "No, point X does not need to be made, it's linked in paragraph 3" etc.
Today, talk pages sort of perform this function, but they're so free-wheeling, and so subject to various ad-hoc kinds of archiving, that it's an arbitrarily hard problem for a new editor (who's trying to be responsible) to discover whether there's any precedent or prior argument behind a change he's about to make, that might be controversial or have been tried before and decided against.
You can also segregate that kind of long term standing agreement to a special section up the top of the talk page.
Steve
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Once a "citation needed" tag is in place, there's no need to do anything in a hurry. The reader is adequately warned, other editors are informed.
In many many cases, this is true. But not in all.
The one that is absolutely imperative for all editors is to recognize that "If this claim would be libellous if false, it is absolutely not acceptable to simply put a 'citation needed' tag and hope for the best."
It is extremely painful to see those. "Lord John Doe was a porn star in 1943. <citation needed>" In such cases, being a citation nazi is the right thing to do.
That is not the only case, but that is the one where it is absolutely imperative.
The fallacy in this presentation is that it leaves the impression that the situations requiring urgent action dominate. Libels against living persons clearly need urgent action, and even comments that would bring disrepute onto the deceased should receive swifter action despite the fact that one cannot legally libel the dead.. I'm sure that there are also other areas which require such attention as well, but let's not blow them out of proportion; they are a minority of situations.
We would do better supporting a relaxed atmosphere in the general case, and limitting urgency to enumerated situations.
Ec
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
The one [case] that is absolutely imperative for all editors is to recognize that "If this claim would be libellous if false, it is absolutely not acceptable to simply put a 'citation needed' tag and hope for the best." It is extremely painful to see those. "Lord John Doe was a porn star in 1943. <citation needed>" In such cases, being a citation nazi is the right thing to do.
1) I dont think anybody can disagree with this, but its important to recognise that not everyone *can* tell the difference, (just as with images - see "fakes" thread above) and yet such people may be quite capable in other areas. Its not useful to think of it as an epidemic, but as a limited skillset.
2) Another dimension to this is ease of editing. (!) Wiki through web page forms is probably somewhat cumbersome for casual readers who are capable but not active. (Lazy bums, yes). Iv'e got some ideas for how to deal with that, but thats for a different list which I dont really read anyway.
-SV
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