I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere" pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.
People who are fighting the good fight here are sometimes threatened with a trip to ArbCom. They need our support, though.
--Jimbo
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
Fred
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Sarah
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
That would leave a major hole in our coverage. There has been talk of deleting articles about people that are only slightly notable at their request, but that just results in arbitrary definitions of how notable you have to be to not be allowed to have your article removed.
On 3/29/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
That would leave a major hole in our coverage. There has been talk of deleting articles about people that are only slightly notable at their request, but that just results in arbitrary definitions of how notable you have to be to not be allowed to have your article removed.
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on a definition.
Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems. The published bios would establish notabilty and would act as sources for our own bio, so we've have fewer errors.
Below that is the option to allow all living bios to be deleted on request.
The most drastic would be to stop publishing living bios of any kind.
The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.
Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on a definition.
Largely because IMO such a thing is impossible to define in anything like an objective manner.
Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems.
It would leave at least one really massive problem though; we'd lack coverage of everyone who doesn't already have a bio published by a reliable source (for whatever value of "reliable source" gets settled on). For a resource that's claiming to be a general encyclopedia this would be a _massive_ omission.
The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.
If that's the worst option you can think of you're suffering from a drastic lack of imagination. We could get rid of BLP entirely, for example, and start encouraging original research into geneology. :) Also, I'd like to know how you know that there's a "huge number" of vanity articles and attack pages on Wikipedia. We already have a lot of policies and a lot of editors working against those things, most of the problems I've seen slip through the cracks have been pretty trivial cases (like this one).
On 3/29/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
If someone with money were to sue Wikipedia for having damaged him -- or were to finance a lawsuit brought by someone else -- it could end up costing a great deal because of the global distribution of the content, and perhaps also because we've not shown ourselves to be deadly serious about getting rid of defamation. Unlike news organizations Wikipedia has no libel insurance so it could put us out of business.
The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on a definition.
Largely because IMO such a thing is impossible to define in anything like an objective manner.
We could come up with an imperfect working definition.
Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems.
It would leave at least one really massive problem though; we'd lack coverage of everyone who doesn't already have a bio published by a reliable source (for whatever value of "reliable source" gets settled on). For a resource that's claiming to be a general encyclopedia this would be a _massive_ omission.
It would be an omission for sure. It would mean only truly notable people got WP bios.
The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.
If that's the worst option you can think of you're suffering from a drastic lack of imagination. We could get rid of BLP entirely, for example, and start encouraging original research into geneology. :) Also, I'd like to know how you know that there's a "huge number" of vanity articles and attack pages on Wikipedia.
I don't know how many there are, and I've not kept any kind of records. I know that I've encountered a large number of problematic bios, or biographical material inside other articles, where people with grudges have inserted false material maliciously, or for a laugh. And the problems of vanity articles are well known, though less pressing.
We already have a lot of policies and a lot of editors working against those things, most of the problems I've seen slip through the cracks have been pretty trivial cases (like this one).
We had a case that went on for months, despite complaints to Jimbo, where someone inserted into an article about a news organization that a certain journalist (who was a critic of that news organization) had had an affair with his secretary, or words to that effect. In the grand scheme of things, it was small potatoes, but it might have been enough to end his marriage. I managed to get rid of it eventually, but only after a revert war, lots of personal attacks from the people who had added it, and so on. The journalist didn't make a giant fuss, and so it didn't become one of our well-known cases (and I suspect that's why he didn't make a fuss).
I'm guessing that this kind of thing goes on a lot under the radar, and that one day we're going to do it to the wrong person. I'd like to see an imaginative solution before that happens.
Sarah
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
If someone with money were to sue Wikipedia for having damaged him -- or were to finance a lawsuit brought by someone else -- it could end up costing a great deal because of the global distribution of the content, and perhaps also because we've not shown ourselves to be deadly serious about getting rid of defamation. Unlike news organizations Wikipedia has no libel insurance so it could put us out of business.
Okay, I guess I'll accept it as a hypothetical worst-case scenario. So Wikimedia Foundation goes out of business. The database is GFDL, we can set up a new foundation and resume editing elsewhere. A major hassle but IMO better than compromising the fundamental goal of writing a comprehensive free encyclopedia.
I don't consider this scenario likely, though. We _are_ serious about removing libel, we've got powerful policies to that effect, and the site is laden with disclaimers in case we temporarily miss some. I have faith that the legal system is not _completely_ insane, as evidenced by the fact that numerous other sources that could be much more damaging have yet to be sued out of existence.
The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on a definition.
Largely because IMO such a thing is impossible to define in anything like an objective manner.
We could come up with an imperfect working definition.
It would result in unending conflict. I'd rather look for ways to sidestep the issue by improving the maintainability of even "borderline notable" bios.
Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems.
It would leave at least one really massive problem though; we'd lack coverage of everyone who doesn't already have a bio published by a reliable source (for whatever value of "reliable source" gets settled on). For a resource that's claiming to be a general encyclopedia this would be a _massive_ omission.
It would be an omission for sure. It would mean only truly notable people got WP bios.
Based on an admittedly imperfect definition of who's notable, though. In this case _very_ imperfect since there are plenty of people who a lot of editors would consider obviously notable who haven't had biographies published about them. Lacking articles on them would (IMO rightly) be seen as a flaw in Wikipedia.
Also, I'd like to know how you know that there's a "huge number" of vanity articles and attack pages on Wikipedia.
I don't know how many there are, and I've not kept any kind of records. I know that I've encountered a large number of problematic bios, or biographical material inside other articles, where people with grudges have inserted false material maliciously, or for a laugh. And the problems of vanity articles are well known, though less pressing.
Well, my subjective experience has been the opposite of yours. Lacking an objective measure of some sort I guess there's not much more to be said on this one.
I'm guessing that this kind of thing goes on a lot under the radar, and that one day we're going to do it to the wrong person. I'd like to see an imaginative solution before that happens.
I think the best way to approach this would be to get better radar. Our existing policies and practices should be just fine, it may simply be a question of applying them properly.
On 3/30/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
If someone with money were to sue Wikipedia for having damaged him -- or were to finance a lawsuit brought by someone else -- it could end up costing a great deal because of the global distribution of the content, and perhaps also because we've not shown ourselves to be deadly serious about getting rid of defamation. Unlike news organizations Wikipedia has no libel insurance so it could put us out of business.
Okay, I guess I'll accept it as a hypothetical worst-case scenario. So Wikimedia Foundation goes out of business. The database is GFDL, we can set up a new foundation and resume editing elsewhere. A major hassle but IMO better than compromising the fundamental goal of writing a comprehensive free encyclopedia.
And the assets of all the individuals involved would be pursued, as would the assets of the new foundation. It would get very messy, would cost a fortune, and would go on for years if someone determined and wealthy enough went after us. All I'm arguing is that it's irresponsible to continue year after year on the same course knowing that these are real possibilities and relying only on luck to see us through. No mainstream publisher or responsible business would do it. And that's not even to mention the moral issues, which I think are paramount for most editors.
I don't consider this scenario likely, though. We _are_ serious about removing libel, we've got powerful policies to that effect, and the site is laden with disclaimers in case we temporarily miss some.
Disclaimers make no difference, and I disagree that we're serious about removing libel. We remove it when we see it, assuming the individual editor or admin can face the fight that's often involved, the personal attacks, and the risk of being taken to the ArbCom. But we know there's stuff out there that we don't see, and we know that some of it sits there for months before anyone notices. We *could* do something about it site-wide, we *know* the consequences for some individuals might be serious, and yet we're choosing not to change our policies. I can see someone try to argue that this constitutes gross negligence.
Sarah
On 30/03/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
And the assets of all the individuals involved would be pursued, as would the assets of the new foundation. It would get very messy, would cost a fortune, and would go on for years if someone determined and
Um, before you speak in quite such apocalyptic terms of the legal d00m that shall rain down upon Wikimedia if it continues its present course ... has the Foundation actually spoken on the subject?
I believe the last I heard from an actual Florida lawyer on the subject was that we would most likely *not* be promptly liable in this manner. Which is why the golfer claiming defamation went after the owner of the IP the libel was posted from - he knew damn well that suing the Foundation directly would fall at the first hurdle.
If you wish to continue putting forward this view of likely legal apocalypse, please substantiate it in a manner that answers Brad's previous posting on the subject.
- d.
On 3/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/03/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
And the assets of all the individuals involved would be pursued, as would the assets of the new foundation. It would get very messy, would cost a fortune, and would go on for years if someone determined and
Um, before you speak in quite such apocalyptic terms of the legal d00m that shall rain down upon Wikimedia if it continues its present course ... has the Foundation actually spoken on the subject?
I believe the last I heard from an actual Florida lawyer on the subject was that we would most likely *not* be promptly liable in this manner. Which is why the golfer claiming defamation went after the owner of the IP the libel was posted from - he knew damn well that suing the Foundation directly would fall at the first hurdle.
If you wish to continue putting forward this view of likely legal apocalypse, please substantiate it in a manner that answers Brad's previous posting on the subject.
The issues will be judged by the courts, not by lawyers, and a lot will depend on how much money the plaintiff is willing to spend arguing his case, as well as which jurisdictions he initiates the complaint in, what his complaint is, and what he wants. All I'm arguing is that we shouldn't rest on our laurels.
What we should be asking is whether what we're doing is reasonable. Is it reasonable to host pages about living persons that can be edited by any anonymous person of any age in the world, when we have no clear way of patrolling those pages to make sure anything negative or unfair is removed immediately? And when, even when such pages are spotted, getting rid of the bad stuff often involves a giant fuss, with admins unsure of what action they're allowed to take, because if they go too far they risk being desysopped?
My argument is that the man on the Clapham Omnibus would not find this reasonable.
If you want me to address Brad's previous posting, I'll certainly try if you show me where it is.
Sarah
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/30/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 30/03/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
And the assets of all the individuals involved would be pursued, as would the assets of the new foundation. It would get very messy, would cost a fortune, and would go on for years if someone determined and
Um, before you speak in quite such apocalyptic terms of the legal d00m that shall rain down upon Wikimedia if it continues its present course ... has the Foundation actually spoken on the subject?
I believe the last I heard from an actual Florida lawyer on the subject was that we would most likely *not* be promptly liable in this manner. Which is why the golfer claiming defamation went after the owner of the IP the libel was posted from - he knew damn well that suing the Foundation directly would fall at the first hurdle.
If you wish to continue putting forward this view of likely legal apocalypse, please substantiate it in a manner that answers Brad's previous posting on the subject.
The issues will be judged by the courts, not by lawyers, and a lot will depend on how much money the plaintiff is willing to spend arguing his case, as well as which jurisdictions he initiates the complaint in, what his complaint is, and what he wants. All I'm arguing is that we shouldn't rest on our laurels.
What we should be asking is whether what we're doing is reasonable. Is it reasonable to host pages about living persons that can be edited by any anonymous person of any age in the world, when we have no clear way of patrolling those pages to make sure anything negative or unfair is removed immediately? And when, even when such pages are spotted, getting rid of the bad stuff often involves a giant fuss, with admins unsure of what action they're allowed to take, because if they go too far they risk being desysopped?
My argument is that the man on the Clapham Omnibus would not find this reasonable.
If you want me to address Brad's previous posting, I'll certainly try if you show me where it is.
Sarah
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I don't know Florida Law - but if my knowledge of UK law would say that if harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an action, and it is reasonable to take steps to prevent it, then a failure to do so is culpable negligence. We know the harm, we could do something, but we don't.
But I say again, legal concerns are not the biggest worry.
There is publicity. How long before the media get wind of a case of some innocent person who gets screwed by Wikipedia? Stressful reputation-wrecking libels lie for weeks - John Doe eventually sees them and complains - the complaint lies for days on OTRS - the material is removed - but nothing credible done to prevent its replacement three days later. - Then how do we fancy the headline: "Wikipedia-induced suicide: in a final note John Doe blames the on-line encyclopedia"?
Then forget about the publicity and ask yourself about the ethics of all of this. As a byproduct of the encyclopedia, we are hurting real people, can we not do more to prevent it?
On 3/30/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
But I say again, legal concerns are not the biggest worry.
There is publicity. How long before the media get wind of a case of some innocent person who gets screwed by Wikipedia? Stressful reputation-wrecking libels lie for weeks - John Doe eventually sees them and complains - the complaint lies for days on OTRS - the material is removed - but nothing credible done to prevent its replacement three days later. - Then how do we fancy the headline: "Wikipedia-induced suicide: in a final note John Doe blames the on-line encyclopedia"?
Then forget about the publicity and ask yourself about the ethics of all of this. As a byproduct of the encyclopedia, we are hurting real people, can we not do more to prevent it?
Aside from the legal and moral issues, the public may not want to keep on giving money to an organization that's seen to have caused preventable harm to individuals.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know Florida Law - but if my knowledge of UK law would say that if harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an action, and it is reasonable to take steps to prevent it, then a failure to do so is culpable negligence. We know the harm, we could do something, but we don't.
UK and US law split over 200 years ago. There are significant differences. Read through Barrett v. Rosenthal.
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know Florida Law - but if my knowledge of UK law would say that if harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an action, and it is reasonable to take steps to prevent it, then a failure to do so is culpable negligence. We know the harm, we could do something, but we don't.
UK and US law split over 200 years ago. There are significant differences. Read through Barrett v. Rosenthal.
And how would that decision help us, Geni? ~~~~
On 3/31/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know Florida Law - but if my knowledge of UK law would say that if harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an action, and it is reasonable to take steps to prevent it, then a failure to do so is culpable negligence. We know the harm, we could do something, but we don't.
UK and US law split over 200 years ago. There are significant differences. Read through Barrett v. Rosenthal.
And how would that decision help us, Geni? ~~~~
The foundation appears to me to be pretty safe. There are a number of court rulings that I believe support that position. Additional the foundation is in a better position than us to judge it's legal situation and until it says otherwise I believe we should assume that they are fine. However one long term worry that isn't often considered is the situation of editors who edit articles with problem claims and don't spot and remove them.
Barrett v. Rosenthal is the case that I know of that appears to come closest to addressing their situation under US law and thus should be of interest.
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Barrett v. Rosenthal is the case that I know of that appears to come closest to addressing their situation under US law and thus should be of interest.
So far as I can see, it addresses only one aspect of the issues we might face. What are the issues it deals with, Geni, that are relevant to us?
On 3/31/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
So far as I can see, it addresses only one aspect of the issues we might face. What are the issues it deals with, Geni, that are relevant to us?
Being sued for libel under US law for the content of articles you have edited over information that was placed in the article by someone else.
It's useful as an extreme case since it shows how far courts may interpret section 230.
geni wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know Florida Law - but if my knowledge of UK law would say that if harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an action, and it is reasonable to take steps to prevent it, then a failure to do so is culpable negligence. We know the harm, we could do something, but we don't.
UK and US law split over 200 years ago. There are significant differences. Read through Barrett v. Rosenthal.
As I said, legal concerns should not here be paramount. The civil law only exists to punish those who are not doing the Right Thing, and compensate those who are their victims. So the paramount question is not legality, it is are we doing the Right Thing? Is this responsible?
Doc
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
As I said, legal concerns should not here be paramount.
Given that they are a fairly direct way people might be legally able to take rapid action against us they should be.
The civil law only exists to punish those who are not doing the Right Thing, and compensate those who are their victims.
I haven't really studied jurisprudence.
So the paramount question is not legality, it is are we doing the Right Thing? Is this responsible?
Unless you define your terms the question is impossible to answer.
geni wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
As I said, legal concerns should not here be paramount.
Given that they are a fairly direct way people might be legally able to take rapid action against us they should be.
I humbly suggest that the code "do no harm" is older and more virtuous than any statue book. I obviously do not share your belief in legal positivism. Some things are wrong, even if we can't be sued.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I humbly suggest that the code "do no harm" is older and more virtuous than any statue book.
However it conflicts with things like NPOV and "wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
Information is almost always harmful to someone
I obviously do not share your belief in legal positivism. Some things are wrong, even if we can't be sued.
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Wow, Geni. :-(
On 3/31/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Wow, Geni. :-(
There is no code of ethics mentioned in the registration form.
Which system of ethics would you have me adopt?
Those of the APA:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rorschach1.jpg
those of Islam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
those of Catholicism I don't know if we have any of the works listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum on wikisource but...
I've already delt with the Wicca do no harm approach so what is it to be?
In a situation where a universally agreed system of ethics is likely to be impossible we must to an extent fall back on other more pragmatic approaches. The law is one. Preventing inaccuracy is another.
On 31/03/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Wow, Geni. :-(
There is no code of ethics mentioned in the registration form.
Which system of ethics would you have me adopt?
Those of the APA:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rorschach1.jpg
those of Islam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
those of Catholicism I don't know if we have any of the works listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum on wikisource but...
I've already delt with the Wicca do no harm approach so what is it to be?
In a situation where a universally agreed system of ethics is likely to be impossible we must to an extent fall back on other more pragmatic approaches. The law is one. Preventing inaccuracy is another.
Perhaps one could think of our NPOV policies as necessitating a rationalist morality based on observable and measurable parameters. Anything outside this relies on belief and is POV.
In this manner, the kind of morality produced is indeed pragmatic and could be seen as quite similar to that employed by much of science today.
on 3/30/07 9:39 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps one could think of our NPOV policies as necessitating a rationalist morality based on observable and measurable parameters. Anything outside this relies on belief and is POV.
In this manner, the kind of morality produced is indeed pragmatic and could be seen as quite similar to that employed by much of science today.
The only science who's ethic does not include "do no harm" is the science of warfare.
Marc
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
The only science who's ethic does not include "do no harm" is the science of warfare.
Every chemist have released dangerous substances into the atmosphere at some point or another. Physicists have exposed people to radiation. Every time a new medicine is tested on humans for the first time there is a chance you will kill them. Deaths do indeed result from time to time.
on 3/30/07 10:21 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
The only science who's ethic does not include "do no harm" is the science of warfare.
Every chemist have released dangerous substances into the atmosphere at some point or another. Physicists have exposed people to radiation. Every time a new medicine is tested on humans for the first time there is a chance you will kill them. Deaths do indeed result from time to time.
But, the prevailing ethic is still - do no harm.
Marc
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
But, the prevailing ethic is still - do no harm.
If there was a prevailing ethic we wouldn't need ethics committees. Minimise the amount of harm you do would be somewhat closer to the approach adopted but even that isn't quite correct.
Still if you want to follow that principle on wikipedia try listing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
for deletion. Generally providing information on how to build nuclear weapons is considered harmful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(attorney)
is likely damaging. Are you going to list that for deletion?
geni wrote:
On 3/31/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Wow, Geni. :-(
There is no code of ethics mentioned in the registration form.
Which system of ethics would you have me adopt?
Those of the APA:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rorschach1.jpg
those of Islam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
those of Catholicism I don't know if we have any of the works listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum on wikisource but...
I've already delt with the Wicca do no harm approach so what is it to be?
In a situation where a universally agreed system of ethics is likely to be impossible we must to an extent fall back on other more pragmatic approaches. The law is one. Preventing inaccuracy is another.
WTF? That we can't set ethics down in a nice tidy process for you with no shaggy edges is an excuse to say "well we can just bugger everyone, unless we might get sued"?
Let's do all we possibly can to ensure that Wikipedia contains as few articles that are biased, untrue or privacy-violating isn't that difficult to comprehend no matter your religious affiliation or ethical code! We are under an ethical obligation to do that - and all process and policy should be reflecting that. Imaging that, it isn't hard if you try.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good <s>men</s> Wikipedians do nothing."
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
WTF? That we can't set ethics down in a nice tidy process for you with no shaggy edges is an excuse to say "well we can just bugger everyone, unless we might get sued"?
I suggests that ethics are a poor base to build from.
Let's do all we possibly can to ensure that Wikipedia contains as few articles that are biased, untrue or privacy-violating isn't that difficult to comprehend no matter your religious affiliation or ethical code! We are under an ethical obligation to do that - and all process and policy should be reflecting that. Imaging that, it isn't hard if you try.
No. There is no need to introduce ethics into the system thus we should not do so. We have certian shared values yes (first tell no lies) but that does not translate into a system of ethics.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
WTF? That we can't set ethics down in a nice tidy process for you with no shaggy edges is an excuse to say "well we can just bugger everyone, unless we might get sued"?
on 3/30/07 10:14 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I suggests that ethics are a poor base to build from.
Incredible! :-(
Let's do all we possibly can to ensure that Wikipedia contains as few articles that are biased, untrue or privacy-violating isn't that difficult to comprehend no matter your religious affiliation or ethical code! We are under an ethical obligation to do that - and all process and policy should be reflecting that. Imaging that, it isn't hard if you try.
No. There is no need to introduce ethics into the system thus we should not do so. We have certian shared values yes (first tell no lies) but that does not translate into a system of ethics.
"Tell no lies" (like "do no harm") is a system of ethics.
Marc
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
WTF? That we can't set ethics down in a nice tidy process for you with no shaggy edges is an excuse to say "well we can just bugger everyone, unless we might get sued"?
on 3/30/07 10:14 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I suggests that ethics are a poor base to build from.
Incredible! :-(
Let's do all we possibly can to ensure that Wikipedia contains as few articles that are biased, untrue or privacy-violating isn't that difficult to comprehend no matter your religious affiliation or ethical code! We are under an ethical obligation to do that - and all process and policy should be reflecting that. Imaging that, it isn't hard if you try.
No. There is no need to introduce ethics into the system thus we should not do so. We have certian shared values yes (first tell no lies) but that does not translate into a system of ethics.
"Tell no lies" (like "do no harm") is a system of ethics.
Not quite. I suppose you could say that science aims to limit harm but harm is acceptable to achieving certain ends (a form of utilitarianism, perhaps). It is acceptable, according to some, to perform pain testing on monkeys to learn about treating chronic pain in humans. This is starting to go off-topic though.
on 3/30/07 9:24 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Wow, Geni. :-(
There is no code of ethics mentioned in the registration form.
Which system of ethics would you have me adopt?
Those of the APA:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rorschach1.jpg
those of Islam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
those of Catholicism I don't know if we have any of the works listed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum on wikisource but...
I've already delt with the Wicca do no harm approach so what is it to be?
In a situation where a universally agreed system of ethics is likely to be impossible we must to an extent fall back on other more pragmatic approaches. The law is one. Preventing inaccuracy is another.
This whole post is a bit scary, Geni.
Marc
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Wow, Geni. :-(
Perhaps I'm missing some context here, but I think that's a reasonable statement.
If we are really trying to encourage the broadest participation, then demanding that all participants agree to some particular set of values conflicts with that.
Naturally, some sets of values work better with our goals than others. But I'd rather focus on the goals, where I think we have some hope of agreement.
William
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Slim Virgin wrote:
Wow, Geni. :-(
on 3/31/07 1:37 PM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:
If we are really trying to encourage the broadest participation, then demanding that all participants agree to some particular set of values conflicts with that.
Naturally, some sets of values work better with our goals than others. But I'd rather focus on the goals, where I think we have some hope of agreement.
The issue here is not "values" but "ethics". Can we please stop confusing the two?
Marc Riddell
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 3/31/07 1:37 PM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:
If we are really trying to encourage the broadest participation, then demanding that all participants agree to some particular set of values conflicts with that.
Naturally, some sets of values work better with our goals than others. But I'd rather focus on the goals, where I think we have some hope of agreement.
The issue here is not "values" but "ethics". Can we please stop confusing the two?
You are welcome to replace one for the other in my comment above if that will help you along. Regardless, my point stands: we'll be more effecting focusing on shared practical goals then achieving mental conformity.
William
on 3/31/07 4:07 PM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:
we'll be more effecting focusing on shared practical goals then achieving mental conformity.
Sharing (and achieving) goals requires a shared code of ethics as well as a set of common values. And, "achieving mental conformity" is the very last thing I would advocate.
Marc
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 3/31/07 4:07 PM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:
we'll be more effecting focusing on shared practical goals then achieving mental conformity.
Sharing (and achieving) goals requires a shared code of ethics as well as a set of common values. And, "achieving mental conformity" is the very last thing I would advocate.
Sorry, but I'm working from the notion that chosen values and codes of ethics are mental attributes. Requiring people to conform to participate would inevitably push towards increased mental conformity. I'm saying it's more effective to focus on conformity to behavioral norms, and there only the minimal set that are required by our shared goals.
As to the first bit, that's demonstrably untrue. Hunter and hunting dog share neither values nor ethics, but achieve the goal jointly. The people I work with have many reasons for coming to work; what they have in common is coming to work. You and your banker have the shared goal of you paying off your mortgage, but neither shared ethics nor values are necessary for that.
I think that a group can be more effective when values are shared, but in my experience that's not something you achieve by fiat. By fiat, the best you can do is chase off the group who has the least power. And then you've created an environment that encourages people to lie about their actual values, which is very hard to undo.
Better that we let people be who they are, and accept all contributions that push Wikipedia forward, whatever their values, and whatever their ethics.
William
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I humbly suggest that the code "do no harm" is older and more virtuous than any statue book.
on 3/30/07 8:57 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
However it conflicts with things like NPOV and "wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
"Do no harm" is not a "point of view" - it is a standard of behavior, and must prevail. And, if Wikipedia's identity as an encyclopedia does not include "do no harm", it needs to rethink that identity.
Information is almost always harmful to someone
And, therefore?
I obviously do not share your belief in legal positivism. Some things are wrong, even if we can't be sued.
on 3/30/07 8:57 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't recall signing up to a system of ethics when editing wikipedia.
Did you not have your own? And if you did, what was it? And, if not, why not?
Marc Riddell
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I humbly suggest that the code "do no harm" is older and more virtuous than any statue book.
on 3/30/07 8:57 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
However it conflicts with things like NPOV and "wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
"Do no harm" is not a "point of view" - it is a standard of behavior, and must prevail. And, if Wikipedia's identity as an encyclopedia does not include "do no harm", it needs to rethink that identity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide as it stands harms turkey. If we were to change it to reduce this harm we could potentially harm the Armenians as well as producing an article that would be against the law in France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology)
Harms Scientology but not publishing it could harm people if Scientology were ever to reactivate that policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Browne
Harms the subject of the article. But if we change it so it did not the article would be in error
And, thereforeŠ?
Do no harm is not useful as an ethical foundation for wikipedia.
Did you not have your own? And if you did, what was it? And, if not, why not?
I'm not going to explain my entire system of ethics here. It isn't really relevant in any case.
on 3/30/07 10:04 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I humbly suggest that the code "do no harm" is older and more virtuous than any statue book.
on 3/30/07 8:57 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
However it conflicts with things like NPOV and "wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
"Do no harm" is not a "point of view" - it is a standard of behavior, and must prevail. And, if Wikipedia's identity as an encyclopedia does not include "do no harm", it needs to rethink that identity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide as it stands harms turkey. If we were to change it to reduce this harm we could potentially harm the Armenians as well as producing an article that would be against the law in France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology)
Harms Scientology but not publishing it could harm people if Scientology were ever to reactivate that policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Browne
Harms the subject of the article. But if we change it so it did not the article would be in error
And, thereforeS?
Do no harm is not useful as an ethical foundation for wikipedia.
Did you not have your own? And if you did, what was it? And, if not, why not?
I'm not going to explain my entire system of ethics here. It isn't really relevant in any case.
From a human point of view, which is my point of view, this response is
chilling.
Marc Riddell
On 3/30/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/30/07 10:04 PM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide as it stands harms turkey. If we were to change it to reduce this harm we could potentially harm the Armenians as well as producing an article that would be against the law in France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology)
Harms Scientology but not publishing it could harm people if Scientology were ever to reactivate that policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Browne
Harms the subject of the article. But if we change it so it did not the article would be in error
And, thereforeS?
Do no harm is not useful as an ethical foundation for wikipedia.
Did you not have your own? And if you did, what was it? And, if not, why not?
I'm not going to explain my entire system of ethics here. It isn't really relevant in any case.
From a human point of view, which is my point of view, this response is chilling.
Marc Riddell
I don't know about that. Geni has pointed out something very obvious, that we can't please everybody. And Geni's assertion that to a certain extent it is unwise to graft ethics into the encyclopedia is, unfortunately, true when you consider that acting on beliefs such as "do no harm" runs into real trouble when you have facts that, if you wish to preserve truth, may be harmful to some people.
I would re-phrase this all as "Why censor ourselves?". All fact is not positive, and trying to do away with those that are negative is inherently un-wiki-like to me (those last two words added because interpretations of Wikipedia's ideals will, of course, vary).
--Ryan
Marc Riddell wrote:
From a human point of view, which is my point of view, this response is chilling.
Doesn't seem that way to me. Geni is taking a relativist position, basically saying (if I interpret him correctly) that if we pick one of the many different ethical systems out there and make it an official policy we're going to bias Wikipedia and add lots of considerations that aren't directly related to our goal. For example, "do no harm" could require us to take out or modify articles about homeopathy, or marijuana, or maybe even certain political or religious ideologies - and "harm" is subjective so different editors would want to take these things in different ways. It's a huge and unnecessary kettle of fish to open.
This seems like an application of NPOV taken to a meta level. What's chilling about it?
On 3/30/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Marc Riddell wrote:
From a human point of view, which is my point of view, this response is chilling.
[snip much explanation] This seems like an application of NPOV taken to a meta level. What's chilling about it?
In this one, I agree with Bryan and Geni. Adopting 'do no harm' as a policy higher up than NPOV - which is what in effect several contributors are suggesting, if I read them right - is a fundamental change to Wikipedia's mission and objectives. Adopting it as a guideline at lower level than Wikipedia's core principles is acceptable to me, but I find its adoption at a higher level of policy than that to be troubling. Especially since many things can be considered harmful, including many things many of us might consider important.
Heck, some people (e.g. Brandt) consider Wikipedia unfixably harmful.
-Matt
on 3/31/07 2:23 AM, Bryan Derksen at bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Doesn't seem that way to me. Geni is taking a relativist position, basically saying (if I interpret him correctly) that if we pick one of the many different ethical systems out there and make it an official policy we're going to bias Wikipedia and add lots of considerations that aren't directly related to our goal. For example, "do no harm" could require us to take out or modify articles about homeopathy, or marijuana, or maybe even certain political or religious ideologies - and "harm" is subjective so different editors would want to take these things in different ways. It's a huge and unnecessary kettle of fish to open.
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we, as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
And, as far as "choosing a system of ethics" for WP: I don't believe it is something you shop around for. But, rather, it develops, and is agreed upon, by the Community of persons in WP itself.
Marc Riddell
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we, as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
"Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we, as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
"Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be unacceptable.
Marc
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we, as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
"Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be unacceptable.
But as several other people have posted, NPOV content *can* do harm and, for the sake of NPOV, this is acceptable.
How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset? I'm sure most of us consider it somewhere close to the latter. If a religious person reads a few of our articles on God and religion and is thrown into existential crisis (hoping too much?), is this mental upset "harm"?
on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?
To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.
Marc
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?
To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.
This is not a definition of harm I recognise.
The Oxford English Dictionary on "harm": 'To do harm (to); to injure (physically or otherwise); to hurt, damage. Orig. intr. To be hurtful, with dative (like L. noc{emac}re), which was sometimes in ME. expressed by to, but generally became a simple object, making the verb trans.'
on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.
on 3/31/07 1:24 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a definition of harm I recognise.
It is, however, most precise.
Marc
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.
on 3/31/07 1:24 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a definition of harm I recognise.
It is, however, most precise.
Precise, but, by the dictionaries I have, inaccurate.
Perhaps while discussing things on a big mailing list you could stick with the common definition of words? Or failing that, to warn people when you're going to use an old word in a new way? It would save a lot of this back-and-forth stuff, which doesn't seem to be advancing the discussion much.
William
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/31/07 12:00 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
How do you even define "harm"? Physical damage? Mental upset?
On 31/03/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
To cut someone's head is to hurt them - this will heal.
To decapitate someone is to harm them - this will not heal.
on 3/31/07 1:24 PM, Oldak Quill at oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a definition of harm I recognise.
It is, however, most precise.
Putting this back into the context of en.wikipedia, the worst we could do to someone does not come close to your definition of harm.
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the
concept of
"do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information
we,
as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was
that
to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
"Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be unacceptable.
Marc
If I'm not mistaken, there is a lot of bitterness in the Armenian community about the Turkish genocide. Doesn't having an article about the Turkish massacre of the Armenians harm the Turks by supporting the Armenian bitterness against the Turks? Hell, doesn't having any article which objectively states facts that aren't to the liking of somebody harm that entity?
I still fail to see why "Do no harm" should be elevated to the status of a pillar of WP, or above that. It's a good principle, but if it means throwing out NPOV or accuracy, I know what I'd go with.
Johnleemk
John Lee wrote:
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the
concept of
"do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information
we,
as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was
that
to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
"Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be unacceptable.
Marc
If I'm not mistaken, there is a lot of bitterness in the Armenian community about the Turkish genocide. Doesn't having an article about the Turkish massacre of the Armenians harm the Turks by supporting the Armenian bitterness against the Turks? Hell, doesn't having any article which objectively states facts that aren't to the liking of somebody harm that entity?
I still fail to see why "Do no harm" should be elevated to the status of a pillar of WP, or above that. It's a good principle, but if it means throwing out NPOV or accuracy, I know what I'd go with.
Johnleemk
This is ridiculous. I did not suggest 'do no harm' was to be a pillar of wikipedia. I merely suggested that when we are considering policies for improving wikipedia, that simply looking to what might get us sued is insufficient. We should also consider organising ourselves to minimise the damage we may do to individuals by having POV articles, attack pages, or allowing malicious people to post any crap about them. Here we have a moral as well as a legal responsibility to minimise harm. We are human beings, we don't need [[Wikipedia:TheSermonOnTheMount]] to tell us that thinking about others, and the impact our project has on them, is a Good Thing. Doc
On 4/1/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
John Lee wrote:
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 3/31/07 10:43 AM, Ken Arromdee at arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Marc Riddell wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the
concept of
"do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what
information
we,
as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was
that
to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a
biographical
article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
"Do no harm" and "do no unnecessary harm" are *vastly* different.
Harm - in any form - no matter how it is phrased - should be
unacceptable.
Marc
If I'm not mistaken, there is a lot of bitterness in the Armenian
community
about the Turkish genocide. Doesn't having an article about the Turkish massacre of the Armenians harm the Turks by supporting the Armenian bitterness against the Turks? Hell, doesn't having any article which objectively states facts that aren't to the liking of somebody harm that entity?
I still fail to see why "Do no harm" should be elevated to the status of
a
pillar of WP, or above that. It's a good principle, but if it means
throwing
out NPOV or accuracy, I know what I'd go with.
Johnleemk
This is ridiculous. I did not suggest 'do no harm' was to be a pillar of wikipedia. I merely suggested that when we are considering policies for improving wikipedia, that simply looking to what might get us sued is insufficient. We should also consider organising ourselves to minimise the damage we may do to individuals by having POV articles, attack pages, or allowing malicious people to post any crap about them. Here we have a moral as well as a legal responsibility to minimise harm. We are human beings, we don't need [[Wikipedia:TheSermonOnTheMount]] to tell us that thinking about others, and the impact our project has on them, is a Good Thing. Doc
I wasn't responding specifically to you - I was responding to Marc, who seems to think otherwise.
Johnleemk
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 3/31/07 12:30 PM, John Lee at johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
I wasn't responding specifically to you - I was responding to Marc, who seems to think otherwise.
If you believe this, you simply were not listening to me.
Funny, but I thought I was listening, and I had the same impression.
Since you're anxious to avoid doing harm, I should point out that blaming the other guy for a communications failure often harms discussions.
William
"I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about the last two lines"
These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims about certain activities.
On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure they didn't happen. I may have lied.
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.
Over time we hope to correct articles like this, although, at current rates of growth we'll have ten times as many by then and still won't be able to cope.
We have fixed the article, but please be aware that this incident may well reoccur. We'll do our best to try to avoid that (providing it doesn't interfere with our determination not to change our basic way of operating).
Disclaimer: the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 and so takes no responsible, and the Wikipedia Community has not signed up to any ethics code.
PS. You might like to know that the objectionable content has probably been picked up by our mirrors by now. You can either live with that, or contact them yourself.
Yours sincerely etc."
Doc
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
{{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]] every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
If the *community* is not willing to pull together to maintain such articles, the community's desire to have them "kept and cleaned up" is rather futile.
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
{{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]] every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
{{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]] every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.
Doc is not on the sidelines; this is a complaint from the coalface! He's one of the people who doesn't scale - I know where he's coming from, as I was doing much the same before I partly burned out.
There are no shortage of crap articles thast the community vaguely feels we ought to have, but where no-one steps up to maintain neutrality and they just sink back into hideousness. We need to figure out what to do, and just having a committee say "keep, cleanup" every six months isn't it.
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
{{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]] every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.
Doc is not on the sidelines; this is a complaint from the coalface! He's one of the people who doesn't scale - I know where he's coming from, as I was doing much the same before I partly burned out.
I see this mailing list as being "the sidelines" in a way, though I'm not sure I can explain precisely why, which suggests I used a wrong metaphor in the first place.
But seriously, the kind of rant that kicked off this thread wouldn't be out of place at Review. If Doc is that unhappy with what he's doing, I can most heartily recommend he steps back from it.
On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
But seriously, the kind of rant that kicked off this thread wouldn't be out of place at Review. If Doc is that unhappy with what he's doing, I can most heartily recommend he steps back from it.
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OTRS is stressful to say the least. I speak from my own experience and it probably got worse since I was last there. If everyone who gets unhappy and stressed about OTRS steps down it will get even more clogged than it already is. We should find a way to retain people rather than encouraging them to stop.
Mgm
On 31/03/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
OTRS is stressful to say the least. I speak from my own experience and it probably got worse since I was last there. If everyone who gets unhappy and stressed about OTRS steps down it will get even more clogged than it already is. We should find a way to retain people rather than encouraging them to stop.
In general, but there's a point beyond which staying in the job not only does the volunteer no good, it does the project no good either.
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
But seriously, the kind of rant that kicked off this thread wouldn't be out of place at Review. If Doc is that unhappy with what he's doing, I can most heartily recommend he steps back from it.
I did. It didn't help. The project is still stupid about the same things, though I feel a little less stressed now.
Basically, the problem is not that we have people burning out by dealing with complaints; that's to be expected. The problem is that they're burning out because the community as a whole is being actively counterproductive; it's a symptom of the problem we need to solve, rather than the problem itsel.f
We can keep throwing clueful editors at the problems, but if we don't fix the root problems all we do is keep setting ourselves up to burn more people out. Which is even less helpful.
On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.
I spent two hours earlier this week dealing with *one* complaint from a corporation who was unhappy with their article on Wikipedia. This is pretty typical for those of us who are NOT on the sidelines. Unfortunately, the people in the bleachers seem unable to see us, and pretend that we're not actually doing anything.
Thanks for the support, though.
Kelly
Kelly Martin wrote:
Unfortunately, the people in the bleachers seem unable to see us, and pretend that we're not actually doing anything.
Thanks for the support, though.
Maybe it's that the people in the bleachers are actually unable to see you? In which case, they're not pretending anything. And wouldn't treating sincere people as fakers make the situation worse?
Andrew Gray wrote:
Basically, the problem is not that we have people burning out by dealing with complaints; that's to be expected.
Not the whole problem, surely, but could that be part of the problem?
It seems to me like both Wikipedia as a whole and this list in specific have a hard time taking upset people very seriously. If they are outsiders, then they end up on the road to sanctions, moderation, and bans. If they are insiders, it's a different path, but still seems to lead to marginalization.
Taking that as a given for a moment, it seems like we guarantee permanent problems when we put editors in a situation that a) we don't hear much about, and b) leads to burnout.
I don't think we can change the dynamic, but could we get out of this by making the rot problems more visible, so that it's not just an unfortunate few who see the need to change?
William
On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
{{sofixit}} quite often involves a clueful editor or two camping on the article for months, reverting attempts to turn it into a hatchetjob. Which is fine; it's what we do with [[George W. Bush]] every day. But we only have so many clueful editors with time to spare, and this process simply runs out after a time.
Indeed, but carping on the sidelines doesn't help either.
This isn't carping on the sidelines, James, it's trying to persuade the community that something needs to change.
On 31/03/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
it's trying to persuade the community that something needs to change.
Is this community particularly susceptible to persuasion by rant?
On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
it's trying to persuade the community that something needs to change.
Is this community particularly susceptible to persuasion by rant?
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See [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Doc glasgow#Outside view by Newyorkbrad]] for my own take on not only articles that contain false or unsourced negative information about living people, but also unnecessarily embarrassing information about non-public information that editors insist on keeping just "because we can, and Wikipedia is not censored" with no thought for the effect that we have on real people's lives.
IMHO, this is one of the two most pressing issues facing Wikipedia.
Newyorkbrad
On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
Is this community particularly susceptible to persuasion by rant?
The sensible part of the community is susceptible to persuasion by rational discussion. The insensible part is not susceptible by persuasion by any means. My recommendation is that the sensible part needs to accept that it needs to exclude the insensible part from the community entirely, and proceed to do so. Unfortunately, as of yet the sensible part is still too caught up in the belief that everyone should have a chance to participate to accept that this simply isn't the case.
Kelly
James,
Quoting James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
If this worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Jkelly
On 3/31/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
{{sofixit}}, quite frankly.
Where {{sofixit} != speedy deletion when the article has already been kept after an AfD.
Let's be entirely clear: by sending an email to the official contact address for Wikipedia, the complainant was *trying* to fix the article, in the best way that s/he could figure out. Simply because someone is trying to fix something and they don't know the official, arcane process for doing so, doesn't mean we should take their complaint less seriously, or that it is not valid.
Doc, in answering this email, was liasoning between the official OTRS process and the official deletion process -- in other words, he was just fixing it -- but sadly, Doc doesn't scale well, and it's hard and irritating work (imagine complaints just like this by the dozens every day). He is bringing up a real issue -- not OTRS burnout, but the fact that often there's no good, satisfying answer to give to readers about harmful or bad article content. (We don't want to distribute slander or misinformation, and we certainly don't want to get sued for it, but we also often have a difficult time really preventing it). The mailing list *is* a place to widely discuss how to deal with potentially harmful article content, and it's a topic that every serious editor should spend time thinking about.
-- phoebe
Outrageous claims that are in fact libellous should indeed go. Unless the article consists entirely of such claims this can be fixed without article deletion. Unfortunately, people who wish to retain such text know where to find it while editors like me don't.We should find some way for OTRS people to get vandal hunters and other editors to keep an eye on such articles to avoid such material from being reinserted.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
"I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about the last two lines"
These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims about certain activities.
On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure they didn't happen. I may have lied.
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.
Over time we hope to correct articles like this, although, at current rates of growth we'll have ten times as many by then and still won't be able to cope.
We have fixed the article, but please be aware that this incident may well reoccur. We'll do our best to try to avoid that (providing it doesn't interfere with our determination not to change our basic way of operating).
Disclaimer: the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 and so takes no responsible, and the Wikipedia Community has not signed up to any ethics code.
PS. You might like to know that the objectionable content has probably been picked up by our mirrors by now. You can either live with that, or contact them yourself.
Yours sincerely etc."
Doc
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On Mar 31, 2007, at 2:43 PM, doc wrote:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.
Oh stop being ridiculous. This is straw man argumentation at its most needlessly outlandish.
Nobody, to my knowledge, is advocating unchecked expansion of articles and the maintenance of bad information. Nobody doesn't want libelous and false information to be removed.
However...
1) The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error- free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones is foolish. 2) The statements "we need to improve the accuracy of our articles" and "we should begin large-scale deletion of the content that made us so prominent in the first place" are in no way equivalent.
There are ways to demonstrate a commitment to improving accuracy without sacrificing the process that developed a very good resource. I tend to think that WIkipedia is pretty good. Needs improvement, but is pretty good. I wouldn't care if it weren't. So I tend to be skeptical of solutions that seem to involve throwing a lot of it out.
The biggest problem is not unsourced information - it's false information. It's appallingly libelous shit that anyone who looked at the article would see if only people looked at the article. But with one million articles, we can't afford to look at the article. But adding sourcing requirements won't change that, because no rule will suddenly increase the number of eyes on articles.
Hence the need for stable versions to be implemented. And for a time- out where we work on creating stable versions of as many of the million as we can manage before we proceed with new material.
-Phil
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
The biggest problem is not unsourced information - it's false information. It's appallingly libelous shit that anyone who looked at the article would see if only people looked at the article.
Acutally, the biggest problem is the appallingly libelous shit that someone who looked at the article would think was true.
Obviously false statements look bad, but really aren't harmful except from a PR standpoint. As I understand it false statements aren't even considered libelous if no one in their right mind would believe them.
In that sense, sourcing requirements *will* help, and they *will* increase the number of eyeballs on articles, because a sourced statement is faster and easier to check than an unsourced one. A rule alone might not suddenly increase the number of eyeballs, but a rule that's enforced would certainly make the eyeballs more effective.
Stable versions could probably help too, if implemented properly.
Anthony
On 31/03/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
In that sense, sourcing requirements *will* help, and they *will* increase the number of eyeballs on articles, because a sourced statement is faster and easier to check than an unsourced one. A rule alone might not suddenly increase the number of eyeballs, but a rule that's enforced would certainly make the eyeballs more effective.
We already have sourcing requirements.
The stupidest thing about this thread is people proclaiming the need for rules we already have, that aren't being followed. Just what makes you think a new rule will?
- d.
What I said: Encourage people to follow the existing rules and find some way to make proper sourcing of articles easier with new Wikipedia programs and bots where they can help.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/03/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
In that sense, sourcing requirements *will* help, and they *will* increase the number of eyeballs on articles, because a sourced statement is faster and easier to check than an unsourced one. A rule alone might not suddenly increase the number of eyeballs, but a rule that's enforced would certainly make the eyeballs more effective.
We already have sourcing requirements.
The stupidest thing about this thread is people proclaiming the need for rules we already have, that aren't being followed. Just what makes you think a new rule will?
- d.
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On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
The biggest problem is not unsourced information - it's false information. It's appallingly libelous shit that anyone who looked at the article would see if only people looked at the article.
Acutally, the biggest problem is the appallingly libelous shit that someone who looked at the article would think was true.
Obviously false statements look bad, but really aren't harmful except from a PR standpoint. As I understand it false statements aren't even considered libelous if no one in their right mind would believe them.
In that sense, sourcing requirements *will* help, and they *will* increase the number of eyeballs on articles, because a sourced statement is faster and easier to check than an unsourced one. A rule alone might not suddenly increase the number of eyeballs, but a rule that's enforced would certainly make the eyeballs more effective.
Stable versions could probably help too, if implemented properly.
Anthony
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Yes, I'm desperately waiting for stable versions and we should also find some way to ensure each newly created article gets an extra set of eyeballs in case the creator leaves. Bot work?
Mgm
On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Stable versions could probably help too, if implemented properly.
Since stable versions finally actually seem to be just around the corner, with a live alpha version running on the developer's test wiki, we should probably start talking about what "implemented properly" will mean. If I understand the technical parts correctly, it will enable a pretty open-ended version flagging system, so that article versions can be flagged (by editors with the appropriate permissions) "non-vandalized", "checked for accuracy", and whatever other levels of certification we want to create. The decision of which is the minimum display level (what non-editors see) can (I think) be set on a per-article basis. So it would make sense to have a higher bar than just "non-vandalized" for all biographies of living people.
The questions are, what should that bar be?, and how big a portion of the editor pool should have the ability to so certify articles?. The easy way would be to pick some edit count and time requirement (500 edits, 3 months?); otherwise, we would have to create some kind of "clueful editor" status aside from admin.
-Sage
On 3/31/07, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
The questions are, what should that bar be?, and how big a portion of the editor pool should have the ability to so certify articles?. The easy way would be to pick some edit count and time requirement (500 edits, 3 months?); otherwise, we would have to create some kind of "clueful editor" status aside from admin.
-Sage
Whatever clueful is supposed to mean in this context, we should remember to doublecheck any entries someone tagged as stable if after some time someone turns out at arbitration or otherwise lose this status.
We also need to make sure that whatever we do, this status is given to trustworthy people and and that such a process is scaleable. This is where the biggest problem lies. These two can bother each other. To ensure scalability you need to give the permission to more people, but at some point you run out of trusted editors who are experienced enough to handle this feature.
We need to put careful consideration into this, because if someone turns out to muck up these priviliges it takes a lot of work to undo the damage.
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
Whatever clueful is supposed to mean in this context, we should remember to doublecheck any entries someone tagged as stable if after some time someone turns out at arbitration or otherwise lose this status.
Multiple tagging would be beneficial at all times. The more tags, the stronger the rating on the article. Whether everything needs to be checked in the circumstances that you describe is not clear. It will likely depend on the circumstances of the dispute or loss of status. People tend to behave quite normally until they hit a wall of some kind. I suspect that only later taggings might need to be reviewed, but even then, only if they were the last or only person to tag.
We also need to make sure that whatever we do, this status is given to trustworthy people and and that such a process is scaleable. This is where the biggest problem lies. These two can bother each other. To ensure scalability you need to give the permission to more people, but at some point you run out of trusted editors who are experienced enough to handle this feature.
Multiple tagging could deal with some of that problem. Automatic trust should be preferred after passing clear, sensible and simple qualifications; we don't want the kind of zoo that now prevails at RfA. Some bad actors are bound to get through, but we mustn't be stifled by that possibility.
We need to put careful consideration into this, because if someone turns out to muck up these priviliges it takes a lot of work to undo the damage.
Maybe not as much as you suspect.
Ec
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error- free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones is foolish.
This is a false dialectic. It's not a binary choice; please stop presenting it as one. Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.
Kelly
On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error- free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones is foolish.
This is a false dialectic. It's not a binary choice; please stop presenting it as one. Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.
Almost all of us would. Now, how can that be done? Preferably a way which doesn't involve randomly or automatically (via bot) deleting articles.
Find some errors, and get rid of them, would be the most direct approach. Find potential errors (i.e. unsourced statements), and get rid of them, would be a bit more drastic one. But both of these are already policy. So what's the next step?
Maybe an open mailing list for non-confidential complaints, to complement the closed OTRS for confidential complaints? Mailing lists are probably kind of inefficient for this, though.
Code would be great, of course, but as I'm not currently able to contribute any myself I'll leave that part out. Abolishing AfD would probably free up a lot of people's time.
Does anyone have a list of figures of the magnitude of the problem? Number of biographies, number of unsourced biographies, results of a study of how many errors there are on average, blah blah blah?
Anthony
On Mar 31, 2007, at 7:24 PM, Kelly Martin wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error- free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones is foolish.
This is a false dialectic. It's not a binary choice; please stop presenting it as one. Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.
Did you actually read the rest of my e-mail? Yes. Obviously we want to reduce errors. But trying to create iron-clad procedures is just going to cause more problems. "Let's remove all the unsourced information/delete all the unsourced articles" isn't an attempt to reduce error. It's an attempt to eliminate it, and it will backfire grotesquely.
-Phil
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, doc wrote:
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.
If that's really a problem, then make a policy specifically related to biographical information in articles.
A proposal was made to actively delete *all* unsourced articles. As an attempt to solve your user's probplem, it's massive, massive, overkill.
On 3/31/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, doc wrote:
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your
life.
If that's really a problem, then make a policy specifically related to biographical information in articles.
A proposal was made to actively delete *all* unsourced articles. As an attempt to solve your user's probplem, it's massive, massive, overkill.
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Accuracy is nice, but if we have it at expense of a coverage (a lot of which is accurate but unsourced) I prefer a wide coverage. It's easier to fixing what we have than creating new articles from scratch which will just reintroduce creation paranoia (and probably the second time we hit the 1000000th article). So that's what I will do. Try to promote fixing the articles we have.
If and when stable versions is implemented, I would recommend that every single BLP article that has not been approved be "invisible", or in other words impossible to find via Google or by using the standard search box in Wikipedia and ignored by the mirrors. You'd have to go to an advanced Wiki search and intentionally click an "unapproved articles" check box to search for them. Nothing would be deleted, but we'd vastly reduce the probability of an unsourced, libelous piece of garbage receiving any kind of attention from the general public. If we could approve them at a fairly rapid rate, our coverage could recover to its prior levels within a relatively short period of time, at least when compared to any mass deletion scheme. Or, alternatively, just have a gigantic red banner at the top that says "This article is unapproved. Any unsourced piece of information is as likely to be true as random gossip received from a group of twelve year-olds. Read at your own risk. If this article is about you and it contains ridiculous crap, please remove it yourself and request that an approved version be put in place using <insert whatever method of communication is decided upon here>." I don't think it would be necessary to do this about any other kind of article (unless possibly those about corporations) because of the reduced risk of real-world damage, BLP articles are the only ones I see causing enough trouble to make this worth it.
On 3/31/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
If and when stable versions is implemented, I would recommend that every single BLP article that has not been approved be "invisible", or in other words impossible to find via Google or by using the standard search box in Wikipedia and ignored by the mirrors. You'd have to go to an advanced Wiki search and intentionally click an "unapproved articles" check box to search for them.
If this is done I think I'll create a mirror consisting solely of such unapproved articles, which is, of course, indexable by Google. Should get me a lot of traffic, at least until others figure out what I'm doing and do the same.
Or, alternatively, just have a gigantic red banner at the top that says "This article is unapproved. Any unsourced piece of information is as likely to be true as random gossip received from a group of twelve year-olds. Read at your own risk. If this article is about you and it contains ridiculous crap, please remove it yourself and request that an approved version be put in place using <insert whatever method of communication is decided upon here>."
Seems more reasonable.
Anthony
On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
If this is done I think I'll create a mirror consisting solely of such unapproved articles, which is, of course, indexable by Google. Should get me a lot of traffic, at least until others figure out what I'm doing and do the same.
You really think a dumping ground of everything Wikipedia won't publish because there's a good chance it's crap will be that popular? But really, even if it was, it wouldn't be Wikipedia publishing crappy unsourced libel. It would be some random internet person publishing information deemed by Wikipedia to be too unreliable to have on the main part of its site. That would probably play better in the media.
On 4/1/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
If this is done I think I'll create a mirror consisting solely of such unapproved articles, which is, of course, indexable by Google. Should get me a lot of traffic, at least until others figure out what I'm doing and do the same.
You really think a dumping ground of everything Wikipedia won't publish because there's a good chance it's crap will be that popular?
Define a "good chance". Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands of unapproved biographies. If I went through and picked 100 at random, how many do you think would be "crap"? 1 or 2 maybe?
And then define "popular". I pretty much know such a site would get a lot of traffic. I know this because I used to run such a site. I stopped working on it because it was difficult to maintain. But if a couple hundred thousand biographies suddenly drop out of google, getting traffic using those biographies would be child's play.
Finally, estimate how quickly you think Wikipedians can approve 100,000 articles.
But really, even if it was, it wouldn't be Wikipedia publishing crappy unsourced libel. It would be some random internet person publishing information deemed by Wikipedia to be too unreliable to have on the main part of its site. That would probably play better in the media.
My comment wasn't meant as a threat. If the Wikimedia foundation decides it'd like to get out of the content distribution business when it comes to unapproved biographies of living people, that's fine with me (*). I was merely pointing out what will be one of the unintended consequences of doing so.
Anthony
(*) In fact, I think the Wikimedia foundation should get out of the content distribution business altogether. Let the mirrors distribute *all* of the content, and let the foundation focus on building the content. But as the very mission statement of the foundation states otherwise, it's not a point I actively argue for.
Dycedarg wrote:
If and when stable versions is implemented, I would recommend that every single BLP article that has not been approved be "invisible", or in other words impossible to find via Google or by using the standard search box in Wikipedia and ignored by the mirrors. You'd have to go to an advanced Wiki search and intentionally click an "unapproved articles" check box to search for them. Nothing would be deleted, but we'd vastly reduce the probability of an unsourced, libelous piece of garbage receiving any kind of attention from the general public.
In the same way banning cars from the road would prevent automobile accidents. People would still be able to own cars as long as they left them in their garages or driveways.
If we could approve them at a fairly rapid rate, our coverage could recover to its prior levels within a relatively short period of time, at least when compared to any mass deletion scheme. Or, alternatively, just have a gigantic red banner at the top that says "This article is unapproved. Any unsourced piece of information is as likely to be true as random gossip received from a group of twelve year-olds. Read at your own risk.
I have consistently supported the stable version concept, and would have something even more sophisticated than what is currently proposed. In the short term, however, it would just be nice to see anything implemented about this. Your comments in this part are more realistic than in the earlier part of the message. A simple banner which doesn't need to be too gigantic is fine. Rud = not approved; green = approved.
If this article is about you and it contains ridiculous crap, please remove it yourself and request that an approved version be put in place using <insert whatever method of communication is decided upon here>."
Encouraging participation by the subject would be a great step forward. It would address the frustration that many of them feel.
I don't think it would be necessary to do this about any other kind of article (unless possibly those about corporations) because of the reduced risk of real-world damage, BLP articles are the only ones I see causing enough trouble to make this worth it.
BLP's would dominate this class of articles, but there are others as well where a similar approach would be fruitful.
Ec
On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 21:37:12 -0700, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
In the same way banning cars from the road would prevent automobile accidents. People would still be able to own cars as long as they left them in their garages or driveways.
This is a good idea. Provided, of course, that an exception is made for *my* car, since I am far more important than all those other plebs out there.
That's the fundamental problem with tendentious editing: most biased editors do not really believe they are biased, or if they do, they do not see it as a problem.
As always we are trying to think of a technological solution to a human problem.
Guy (JzG)
On 4/5/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
That's the fundamental problem with tendentious editing: most biased editors do not really believe they are biased, or if they do, they do not see it as a problem.
A good observation. If you questioned them, most would say 'I am biased towards the truth".
As always we are trying to think of a technological solution to a human problem.
All too easy for us to fall into - especially for those of us technologically biased in the first place.
-Matt
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
"I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about the last two lines"
These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims about certain activities.
Did you check?
On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure they didn't happen. I may have lied.
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.
Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
"I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about the last two lines"
These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims about certain activities.
Did you check?
On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure they didn't happen. I may have lied.
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your
life.
Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
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Not if we lack the eyes to ensure the material they fix (or ask to have fixed) doesn't return.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
Angela
It doesn't prevent them editing such articles. It even gives them tips on how to handle it properly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_...
On 3/31/07, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
Angela
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On 4/1/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them.
It doesn't prevent them editing such articles. It even gives them tips on how to handle it properly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_...
The literal words may not prevent people editing articles, in theory. But many are prevented from doing so in practice when certain users react to *anyone* who may have some connection with the subject by screaming "conflict of interest".
Just like the problem of unsourced content, it's a problem of people, not of policies.
Stephen Bain wrote:
Just like the problem of unsourced content, it's a problem of people, not of policies.
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that. Doc
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that.
Outside of the current issue of BLBs, the three best "policies" I see are summed up in this userbox... User:Lawilkin/UBX/Trifecta
It's really pretty simple -mind NPOV- -don't be a dick- -ignore all rules-
<semi flip flop on my part> Unfortunately, on the issue of BLPs it's just too easy to insert plausible sounding bullshit into articles about real living people and such bullshit can potentially hurt them in meatspace. Therefore it looks like you are right that we have to get Nazi about anything unsourced in BLPs even if we ourselves are 99% certain such "facts" are correct.
One example of this is a few months ago, I added "Mr. T" to the list of people who are afraid to fly because I "knew" he himself, and not just his character on "A Team", was afraid to fly. The problem was that even though this was common knowledge back in the 80s, there are really no good citable sources for it so it was removed as it should have been. Other editors might not be so understanding about this and they get really miffed when you take out stuff that they just "know" is the truth.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that.
Because changing policies does no damn good. Most undesirable things are already prohibited.
-Matt
Matthew Brown wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that.
Because changing policies does no damn good. Most undesirable things are already prohibited.
-Matt
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So wikipedia is doomed to keep having its sordid downside? We're doomed to always be fighting a losing battle against libels and lies? We're doomed to go on consoling victims with empty words? And there's nothing we can do about it? No way we can make the system even a little better? It isn't even worth the attempt?
I refuse to be that pessimistic or that cynical. The day I am, I will really quit.
Doc
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Matthew Brown wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that.
Because changing policies does no damn good. Most undesirable things are already prohibited.
-Matt
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So wikipedia is doomed to keep having its sordid downside? We're doomed to always be fighting a losing battle against libels and lies? We're doomed to go on consoling victims with empty words? And there's nothing we can do about it? No way we can make the system even a little better? It isn't even worth the attempt?
I refuse to be that pessimistic or that cynical. The day I am, I will really quit.
Doc
I don't think about quitting, but I'm with Doc that we have to improve our performance in this area. Unfortunately, I'm bereft of brilliant ideas for doing it.
Newyorkbrad
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
So wikipedia is doomed to keep having its sordid downside? We're doomed to always be fighting a losing battle against libels and lies?
I wonder just how much of these "libels and lies" are real malice? I suspect that much of it consists of things that "they just know", "everybody knows" or "I read it in a blog/Usenet post". It's reinforced by reading them in a lot of such posts. Who made that quote about repeating a lie so many times that it becomes the truth? On top of that, people can be very obstinate about things that "they just know".
I good essay idea would be "Wikipedia is not for stuff read on the net one day" followed by examples of places where you have to "read about something" before you can put it into Wikipedia.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
So wikipedia is doomed to keep having its sordid downside? We're doomed to always be fighting a losing battle against libels and lies? We're doomed to go on consoling victims with empty words? And there's nothing we can do about it? No way we can make the system even a little better? It isn't even worth the attempt?
I refuse to be that pessimistic or that cynical. The day I am, I will really quit.
Wikipedia cannot be perfect. Wikipedia can get better. IMO, Wikipedia is a lot less bad, percentage-wise, than it seems to someone who spends a lot of time trying to clean up biographical articles or reading OTRS complaints.
I am fearful of the rush to 'do something' without the examination of likely consequences. I am pessimistic about more rules being the cure for current rules being ignored. I am cynical about the prospects for success of any solution that starts with drastic over-reaction and ignoring the reasons why Wikipedia is as successful as it is.
-Matt
On 01/04/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Matthew Brown wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that.
Because changing policies does no damn good. Most undesirable things are already prohibited.
So wikipedia is doomed to keep having its sordid downside? We're doomed to always be fighting a losing battle against libels and lies?
Yes.
And there's nothing we can do about it? No way we can make the system even a little better? It isn't even worth the attempt?
Anything we do stops us doing something else; it's a zero-sum game. Hence, given that it won't be possible to eliminate the problem entirely, we have to determine whether the amount by which we can reduce the problem is worth the effort that would be expended, considering that the said effort then cannot be used to improve Wikipedia in other ways.
doc wrote:
So wikipedia is doomed to keep having its sordid downside? We're doomed to always be fighting a losing battle against libels and lies? We're doomed to go on consoling victims with empty words? And there's nothing we can do about it? No way we can make the system even a little better? It isn't even worth the attempt?
This is excessively dramatic. Over-the-top solutions are as much a problem as what they are trying to cure. They arouse the concern of people who would never ever think of vandalizing or libelling, because they see that the literal wording of the proposal could as easily work against honest articles as it does against the real problems.
Ec
doc wrote:
Stephen Bain wrote:
Just like the problem of unsourced content, it's a problem of people, not of policies.
However, being realistic, our community is too large and impersonal for us to be in the business of reforming people - all we can do is change policies. But I get yelled at every time I suggest that.
That's perfectly understandable when it appears that you are determined to change the way that _others_ do things. The size of the community has nothing to do with it. It's the idea of setting out to reform people that is wrong, even in a much smaller community. The very idea of reforming people, whether through personal command in a small community or elaborate policies in a large one is what makes that community impersonal.
Policy changes would go more easily if proposers began paying attention to the collateral effects of those proposals.
Ec
on 4/6/07 1:13 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge@telus.net wrote:
It's the idea of setting out to reform people that is wrong, even in a much smaller community.
Yes! I agree completely!
The very idea of reforming people, whether through personal command in a small community or elaborate policies in a large one is what makes that community impersonal.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this one, but to reform (or, better, re form) anyone into something someone else thinks they ought to be - is to engage in robotics.
Marc Riddell
Marc Riddell wrote:
The very idea of reforming people, whether through personal command in a small community or elaborate policies in a large one is what makes that community impersonal.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this one, but to reform (or, better, re form) anyone into something someone else thinks they ought to be - is to engage in robotics.
I'm glad to clarify what I meant. In a small community there remains a tactical practicality in addressing people individually when you want to boss them into doing what you want, and thus to "reform" them. In a large community the tactic shifts to policy writing, but the effect is the same.
Doc appears to see the difference as substantive, while I see it as tactical.
Ec
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
It doesn't prevent them editing such articles. It even gives them tips on how to handle it properly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_...
No sane Wikipedia newcomer is going to read that section and think they are permitted to fix their own article about themselves. If you squint at that section long enough, you might realize that it doesn't in fact prohibit editing where there is a conflict of interest, but this is a very non- obvious reading that is not what anyone's going to think of when the first thing the article says is that a conflict of interest is strongly discouraged. A newcomer simply will not have the sophistication to understand that "discouraged" actually means "encouraged in some cases".
Allowing people to fix errors in articles about themselves won't work unless you make it *utterly clear* that they can do so. Having an article which sounds like it says they cannot, but which upon very careful examination reveals that it is after all allowed, will not let them know.
In that case COI needs rewording to encourage the proper sort of feedback from subjects on talk pages.
Mgm
On 4/1/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
It doesn't prevent them editing such articles. It even gives them tips on how to handle it properly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_...
No sane Wikipedia newcomer is going to read that section and think they are permitted to fix their own article about themselves. If you squint at that section long enough, you might realize that it doesn't in fact prohibit editing where there is a conflict of interest, but this is a very non- obvious reading that is not what anyone's going to think of when the first thing the article says is that a conflict of interest is strongly discouraged. A newcomer simply will not have the sophistication to understand that "discouraged" actually means "encouraged in some cases".
Allowing people to fix errors in articles about themselves won't work unless you make it *utterly clear* that they can do so. Having an article which sounds like it says they cannot, but which upon very careful examination reveals that it is after all allowed, will not let them know.
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Ken Arromdee stated for the record:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_...
No sane Wikipedia newcomer is going to read that section and think they are permitted to fix their own article about themselves.
I agree with Ken. If I were a non-Wikipedian who had just found nasty stuff in my biography, I would interpret that section to be saying, in brief, "you're screwed."
A box highlighted for emphasis taunts our hypothetical non-W who's feeling wronged by the errors in her article "...you have no right to control its content, and no right to delete it outside our normal channels. Content is not deleted just because somebody doesn't like it. Any editor may add material to the article...."
Now someone is going to point out all the weasel words in that section and claim that they weaken the prohibitions so that they are actually encouragements. Go for it.
- -- Sean Barrett | That would have worked if you hadn't sean@epoptic.com | stopped me. --Dr. Egon Spengler
Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
It doesn't prevent them editing such articles. It even gives them tips on how to handle it properly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#Editors_who_may_...
No sane Wikipedia newcomer is going to read that section and think they are permitted to fix their own article about themselves. If you squint at that section long enough, you might realize that it doesn't in fact prohibit editing where there is a conflict of interest, but this is a very non- obvious reading that is not what anyone's going to think of when the first thing the article says is that a conflict of interest is strongly discouraged. A newcomer simply will not have the sophistication to understand that "discouraged" actually means "encouraged in some cases".
Allowing people to fix errors in articles about themselves won't work unless you make it *utterly clear* that they can do so. Having an article which sounds like it says they cannot, but which upon very careful examination reveals that it is after all allowed, will not let them know.
I very much agree. The fact that the Connflict of Interest page has drawn the seemingly contrary interpretations that have appeared on this thread shows that it certainly lacks clarity. I'm inclined to believe that having a section in a biography article where the subject would be free to express the "truth" about himself would be very popular with both subjects and readers. Perhaps it could be done in some kind of protected template. It would make complaint calls easier to handle if you could tell the complainers where they can set the record straight without facing a major battle. Wiki or not, we don't really need for everyone to be able to edit absolutely everything. The readers could feel that what is said there is really what the subject believes. Subjects might even be inclined to provide free photographs of themselves.
This could not happen without a few rules, but these do not need to be elaborate.
Ec
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 22:36:02 +0100, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
It should not do. Where is the absolute prohibition on correcting errors of fact on an article about yourself?
Guy (JzG)
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
It should not do. Where is the absolute prohibition on correcting errors of fact on an article about yourself?
A newcomer--the type of person most likely to be concerned about problems with their own article--is not going to think "oh, it really strongly discourages it, but it doesn't absolutely prohibit it, so I guess I'll do it then".
To anyone who is not a pedant who has been around for a while on Wikipedia, that COI policy says you can't edit your own article, regardless of whether its prohibition is not absolute when you look at the fine print.
To anyone who is not a pedant who has been around for a while on Wikipedia, that COI policy says you can't edit your own article, regardless of whether its prohibition is not absolute when you look at the fine print.
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:20:01 -0700 (PDT), Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
A newcomer--the type of person most likely to be concerned about problems with their own article--is not going to think "oh, it really strongly discourages it, but it doesn't absolutely prohibit it, so I guess I'll do it then".
A newcomer is not even going to know about the existence of that page.
Guy (JzG)
Angela wrote:
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
One big problem is that this is no longer true. WP:COI prevents correction of articles by those most motivated to correct them.
Well, I wouldn't say it prevents it.
As a guideline, I think it discourages it, but if a freshly-arrived person with a conflict of interest actually corrects an article (as opposed to the more common COI-driven "improvements") I'd be very surprised if somebody undid it solely out of process worship. Especially if what they're correcting is uncited defamatory material of the sort that apparently ruins lives.
William
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Someone whose life is wrecked by a Wikipedia article THEY THEMSELVES CAN CORRECT has bigger problems than the entry itself.
But will it stay corrected?
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 19:43:02 +0100, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims about certain activities.
Morbid curiosity: do you have a ticket number for that? I entirely agree, though.
Guy (JzG)
The problem is not specific to Wikipedia, people seem to regard the Internet as being outside society and beyond all authority. They thus don't take responsibility for what is put online, because you are free to say whatever you like. And people wonder why governments are trying to restrict online freedoms.
Quite frankly, in some ways I hope they succeed. Wikipedia should not be allowed to absolve itself of any wrongdoing. It's simply untenable to continue publishing unverified information, however quickly someone may fix it. And if you believe fixes are quick in general, you're living in cloud cuckoo land - much of Wikipedia remains unchecked content that someone just saw fit to put there. Mostly harmless, and often correct, but not an acceptable situation nevertheless.
Zoney
on 3/31/07 12:16 PM, doc at doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
We should also consider organising ourselves to minimise the damage we may do to individuals by having POV articles, attack pages, or allowing malicious people to post any crap about them. Here we have a moral as well as a legal responsibility to minimise harm. We are human beings, we don't need [[Wikipedia:TheSermonOnTheMount]] to tell us that thinking about others, and the impact our project has on them, is a Good Thing.
YES!!!
Marc
doc wrote:
This is ridiculous. I did not suggest 'do no harm' was to be a pillar of wikipedia. I merely suggested that when we are considering policies for improving wikipedia, that simply looking to what might get us sued is insufficient. We should also consider organising ourselves to minimise the damage we may do to individuals by having POV articles, attack pages, or allowing malicious people to post any crap about them. Here we have a moral as well as a legal responsibility to minimise harm. We are human beings, we don't need [[Wikipedia:TheSermonOnTheMount]] to tell us that thinking about others, and the impact our project has on them, is a Good Thing.
But this is all already accounted for in our existing set of policies and guidelines. POV articles, attack pages, and allowing malicious people to post any crap they want are already "against the rules", we don't need to make things more complex by adding in additional considerations.
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we, as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
And, as far as "choosing a system of ethics" for WP: I don't believe it is something you shop around for. But, rather, it develops, and is agreed upon, by the Community of persons in WP itself.
Editors from English--speaking and European countries do operate under more or less the same ethical system, which promotes freedom and fairness, and all the arguments we have are only about where the balance should lie in any given case. The ethical system was famously described by John Rawls in his "original position" in A Theory of Justice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position I doubt there are many editors from Western countries who don't subscribe to it, whether they know it or not, and Rawls himself argued that it was in fact universal.
For anyone not familiar with it, imagine a bunch of people sitting round a campfire. They're there to make decisions about the type of society they want to live in (but it can be adapted for practically any kind of moral decision). They have only a small amount of information about themselves. I forget what this is, but basically they know they are human beings, and they have basic information about the kinds of things that hurt human beings. But they don't know whether they're male or female, black or white, rich or poor, healthy or ill, talented or not, beautiful or not. They're behind what Rawls called the "veil of ignorance."
Using this veil of ignorance, they have to decide what would be fair in any given situation, knowing that they may actually turn out to be the poor person in a wealthy society, or the woman in a misogynist one, or the budding entrepeneur in a socialist one, the black person in a racist one, and so on. This forces them to place themselves radically in the shoes of each set of characteristics they consider, and by carefully considering all positions -- as if considering their own -- they're able to arrive at a just decision.
Geni, John Rawls would have said that this is your system of ethics, and that it's buried deep within you as a set of instincts, even if you feel you've rejected it. :-)
On 3/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
This is in response to several recent posts. For the record, the concept of "do no harm" I was presenting to in WP was related to what information we, as editors, choose to include in biographies of persons. My point was that to consciously include gratuitous, tabloid-like junk in a biographical article is unnecessarily harmful to the person.
And, as far as "choosing a system of ethics" for WP: I don't believe it is something you shop around for. But, rather, it develops, and is agreed upon, by the Community of persons in WP itself.
on 3/31/07 7:05 PM, Slim Virgin at slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Editors from English--speaking and European countries do operate under more or less the same ethical system, which promotes freedom and fairness, and all the arguments we have are only about where the balance should lie in any given case. The ethical system was famously described by John Rawls in his "original position" in A Theory of Justice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position I doubt there are many editors from Western countries who don't subscribe to it, whether they know it or not, and Rawls himself argued that it was in fact universal.
For anyone not familiar with it, imagine a bunch of people sitting round a campfire. They're there to make decisions about the type of society they want to live in (but it can be adapted for practically any kind of moral decision). They have only a small amount of information about themselves. I forget what this is, but basically they know they are human beings, and they have basic information about the kinds of things that hurt human beings. But they don't know whether they're male or female, black or white, rich or poor, healthy or ill, talented or not, beautiful or not. They're behind what Rawls called the "veil of ignorance."
Using this veil of ignorance, they have to decide what would be fair in any given situation, knowing that they may actually turn out to be the poor person in a wealthy society, or the woman in a misogynist one, or the budding entrepeneur in a socialist one, the black person in a racist one, and so on. This forces them to place themselves radically in the shoes of each set of characteristics they consider, and by carefully considering all positions -- as if considering their own -- they're able to arrive at a just decision.
Geni, John Rawls would have said that this is your system of ethics, and that it's buried deep within you as a set of instincts, even if you feel you've rejected it. :-)
Thank you very much for contributing this.
And, Geni, Slim's right - trust your gut.
Marc Riddell
The video for the interview with Ellen Fanning will be on the Sunday web site soon:
http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/feature_stories/article_2167.asp
On 3/30/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I don't know Florida Law - but if my knowledge of UK law would say that if harm is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of an action, and it is reasonable to take steps to prevent it, then a failure to do so is culpable negligence. We know the harm, we could do something, but we don't.
In the US a negligence requires a [[duty of care]] in addition to the conditions you outline.
It's also unclear what reasonable steps could be taken to prevent these things from happening. I guess biographies of living people could be banned, but that doesn't seem reasonable.
On the other hand, it could be argued that it would be reasonable to delete the article about Brandt, for instance. So in some instances of specific individuals that have complained to the Foundation about their article, maybe you have a point. But you'd still have to show a [[duty of care]], and I'm not well versed enough in tort law to discuss that part further.
Here's a hard-line rule that might satisfy the more risk-averse among us, but still answer the question of "what if George Bush asks for his article to be deleted". Any article about a living person is removed upon request unless that person has a biography in a major encyclopedia. ????
Anthony
Slim Virgin wrote:
What we should be asking is whether what we're doing is reasonable. Is it reasonable to host pages about living persons that can be edited by any anonymous person of any age in the world, when we have no clear way of patrolling those pages to make sure anything negative or unfair is removed immediately?
Is that the worry exactly? It seems like almost anybody who hosts anything runs this risk. Geocities and MySpace are prominent examples. Pretty much any wiki or low-budget hosting operation qualifies too.
I think the thing that's unique with Wikipedia is that there's a higher expectation of quality. Ironically, this comes mainly because we have a higher level of quality.
If we believe that it's hard to raise the floor of our BLP quality, could we lower the expectation? For example, we could add a header on every BLP article that makes clear what anybody on this list already knows.
William
On 3/30/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
What we should be asking is whether what we're doing is reasonable. Is it reasonable to host pages about living persons that can be edited by any anonymous person of any age in the world, when we have no clear way of patrolling those pages to make sure anything negative or unfair is removed immediately?
I'd say yes, it is reasonable. Every free webhosting site on the Internet does exactly what you described. And I'd note that the only way *not* to have the situation which you describe would be to disallow anonymous editing or to run every edit through a review board.
And when, even when such pages are spotted, getting rid of the bad stuff often involves a giant fuss, with admins unsure of what action they're allowed to take, because if they go too far they risk being desysopped?
That's unreasonable, but I think you'd have a hard time blaming the WMF for such a situation.
Anthony
On 3/29/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/29/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose
a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
If someone with money were to sue Wikipedia for having damaged him -- or were to finance a lawsuit brought by someone else -- it could end up costing a great deal because of the global distribution of the content, and perhaps also because we've not shown ourselves to be deadly serious about getting rid of defamation. Unlike news organizations Wikipedia has no libel insurance so it could put us out of business.
Safe harbor, as long as we take it down. ~~~~
On 3/30/07, gjzilla@gmail.com gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
Safe harbor, as long as we take it down. ~~~~
I don't know whether taking something down as soon as we see it would be enough if it's been up for ages and it's already done damage. But anyway, I know of situations where we *didn't* take problematic things down when we were made aware of them. It's all very hit and miss.
On 3/30/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, gjzilla@gmail.com gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
Safe harbor, as long as we take it down. ~~~~
I don't know whether taking something down as soon as we see it would be enough if it's been up for ages and it's already done damage.
Sorry; I was thinking of copyright violations. But I think it still might apply...
But
anyway, I know of situations where we *didn't* take problematic things down when we were made aware of them. It's all very hit and miss.
Can you name some examples? If we hadn't, then we should have.
--~~~~
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/30/07, gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
Safe harbor, as long as we take it down. ~~~~
I don't know whether taking something down as soon as we see it would be enough if it's been up for ages and it's already done damage. But anyway, I know of situations where we *didn't* take problematic things down when we were made aware of them. It's all very hit and miss.
You can't take something down if you don't know it's there. With 1.7 million articles it's very easy to not know that something is there. This is why notice to the ISP is so important. It's not a notification if some person who is not directly affected expresses the belief that something is problematic. That is merely one person's opinion, and who's to say that that person's opinion is any more valid than an exactly opposite opinion honestly held by another reader. As for damages the plaintiff has the burden of proving the damages that resulted directly from our actions. In some countries truth is an absolute defence to libel.
The biggest hurdles for a successful suit lie with the plaintiffs. It is much easier to defend when the plaintiffs have defined the suit, and cannot introduce new issues or theories. An effective plaintiff needs to forsee ALL the possible arguments that the defence could raise, and I'm afraid that most lawyers are not that smart.
This isn't meant as justification to doing the wrong things. In almost all instances we will have the opportunity to mitigate the problems long before there's a court battle. Being unduly alarmist about such things only hurts us.
Ec
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
It's too easy to imagine a lawsuit, imsgine losing it, and use those baseless imaginary results as the foundation for newly restrictive policies. Such defeatism ignores all the intermediate mitigating events that would need to take place on the road to a successful lawsuit.
Ec
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Sarah
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Regrettably I think Sarah is right. Any individual case can usually be solved with a creative use of existing policy, a little common sense, and the occasional use of the pointy stick.
However, our quality control is not upscaling - nothing like. And we have a moral, if not a legal, duty to consider that. We simply cannot protect the subjects of the biographies we are allowing from nastiness that they should not be subjected to.
I'd not be as drastic as disallowing living bios. But we do need to except that the eventualism that has so well served wikipedia in other areas doesn't work here. If vandalism or POV hangs around on our article on Quakerism - really only our credibility suffers. Not so with a living person - on whom this may be the only comprehensive listing on the internet.
The problem is with the marginally notable. We recognise and revert crap on famous people quickly - and in any case no-one will form their opinion of George Bush based solely on our information.
The solutions: #Disallow living bios altogether - far too drastic #Drastically raise the notability thresholds on bios - possible #Restrict anon editing etc in Wikipedia, or require some scrutiny of editors - possible, but the whole project will suffer #Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho') - should be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining eventualism on the rest.
For now, I'll predict we'll simply tweek existing rules - but I will also prophecy that before too much longer we will adopt one of the above. I just hate to think of the crisis - wrecked life or bad publicity - that will be the thing that forces us to do it.
Doc
The solutions: #Disallow living bios altogether - far too drastic #Drastically raise the notability thresholds on bios - possible #Restrict anon editing etc in Wikipedia, or require some scrutiny of editors - possible, but the whole project will suffer #Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho') - should be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining eventualism on the rest.
#Use stable versions in some way - I think this is our best option. Once the stable versions software is finished we should be able to use it to make fact checking more feasible.
doc wrote:
#Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho') - should be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining eventualism on the rest.
You mean tough rules "there"?
It's an intriguing idea, and I can't say for sure at this point whether I support or oppose it. How would this affect articles which though not about a person still contain considerable indirect biographical details about a person's involvement?
Ec
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Wouldn't really work though, because people would just add the problematic material in other articles. I don't have any bios on my watchlist these days, but still see additions of hearsay about celebs visiting cities and national parks, music video shoots in the desert, and the like.
Stan
I like the "raise the notability bar" idea that Doc has, and perhaps Slim Virgin's threshhold might be the right course. I recently stumbled into a biography stub on a person I would certainly have thought was not particularly notable. The article required about five minutes of work to clean up - and thought that would be the end of it. As it turns out, it was loaded with commercial links and open proxy editors (some of whom were apparently being paid to add the commercial links). So what started out to be a five minute project took several hours of work. I am sure there are thousands of articles like this, and it is demotivating to editors to have to work this hard to clean up an article that is of questionable value in the first place.
Risker
On 3/29/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration
committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Wouldn't really work though, because people would just add the problematic material in other articles. I don't have any bios on my watchlist these days, but still see additions of hearsay about celebs visiting cities and national parks, music video shoots in the desert, and the like.
Stan
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 3/30/07, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I like the "raise the notability bar" idea that Doc has, and perhaps Slim Virgin's threshhold might be the right course.
Not really.Because that means that con artists and the like will simply spend weeks argueing they are nn.
And of course there is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source, so a policy of "instantly nuke any unsourced statements" would have failed to catch this. It would instead be covered by a "nuke any statements that the cited sources reveal to be false" policy, which I'm pretty sure we already have in spirit even if not in letter.
James Duddridge could have checked the source that was right there in the article, I have no idea why he felt the need to ask Ian McCartney for confirmation instead.
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source
A student email directory? In what way is that not original research?
Guy (JzG)
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source
A student email directory? In what way is that not original research?
Original research would have been if someone "pieced together" what university she went to through indirect clues - for example finding one source that says she lives in that city and another source that says she's a student and concluding that that she therefore goes to that _particular_ university.
In this case the reference is a primary source that says "these people go to this university." A perfectly good reference to cite when saying "this person goes to this university." That's hardly a creative act of information synthesis.
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:36:39 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
In this case the reference is a primary source that says "these people go to this university." A perfectly good reference to cite when saying "this person goes to this university." That's hardly a creative act of information synthesis.
*Provided* there is only one person in the world with that name, and provided that the source actually does say they go to that university rather than being, say, a bare list of names. Oh, hey! It's a bare list of names that doesn't actually say they are studying there. Helloooo novel synthesis :o)
Guy (JzG)
On 30/03/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:36:39 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
In this case the reference is a primary source that says "these people go to this university." A perfectly good reference to cite when saying "this person goes to this university." That's hardly a creative act of information synthesis.
*Provided* there is only one person in the world with that name
That might be a more general problem, though, might it not?
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:36:39 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
In this case the reference is a primary source that says "these people go to this university." A perfectly good reference to cite when saying "this person goes to this university." That's hardly a creative act of information synthesis.
*Provided* there is only one person in the world with that name, and provided that the source actually does say they go to that university rather than being, say, a bare list of names. Oh, hey! It's a bare list of names that doesn't actually say they are studying there. Helloooo novel synthesis :o)
I assume you're also one of the folks who supports removing Angela Beesley's birthdate from her article because although the birth register for her hometown's hospital listed an Angela Beesley born on the same date she claimed was her birthdate, there could have been _another_ Angela Beesley born on the same day and in the same hospital as her? This level of synthesis is not a novel creative act, IMO.
Besides, the basis of this particular subthread is that the source didn't actually support the statement, so whether it's original research is moot. We don't need more stringent policies on sources to deal with it, just people who actually click the links and _check_ them.
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:10:25 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I assume you're also one of the folks who supports removing Angela Beesley's birthdate from her article because although the birth register for her hometown's hospital listed an Angela Beesley born on the same date she claimed was her birthdate, there could have been _another_ Angela Beesley born on the same day and in the same hospital as her? This level of synthesis is not a novel creative act, IMO.
No, that's a fact stated by the individual and corroborated from public record, that's fine. How many Angela Beesleys would have been born in that hospital on that day to parents with names matching those of her mother and father? Not many.
This is different. It is a name, just a name, and a place, and no actual detail of the link between the two (could have been a prank by the IT people), no additional data to link the two, it's not corroborating any other source.
Besides, the basis of this particular subthread is that the source didn't actually support the statement, so whether it's original research is moot. We don't need more stringent policies on sources to deal with it, just people who actually click the links and _check_ them.
That's even more of a problem of course :o)
But if we found a Jaffar Amin in a directory somewhere, would we immediately assume, without checking, that it is Idi's son? OK, a pretty singular name to Western eyes, but is it that uncommon?
And there's another thing: did Amin have 40 children, or was it 22? Google is inconclusive.
Guy (JzG)
On 30/03/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
And there's another thing: did Amin have 40 children, or was it 22? Google is inconclusive.
The OxDNB says "thought to have fathered some fifty children"...
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:10:41 +0100, "Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
The OxDNB says "thought to have fathered some fifty children"...
Pick a number. I changed the article to say that sources differ, with estimates up to 50 or more. That will do us, I guess. All part of the mythos.
Guy (JzG)
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 30/03/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
And there's another thing: did Amin have 40 children, or was it 22? Google is inconclusive.
The OxDNB says "thought to have fathered some fifty children"...
He could have named them all Idi in the way that George Foreman named all his sons George. Both were boxers!
Ec
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:10:25 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I assume you're also one of the folks who supports removing Angela Beesley's birthdate from her article because although the birth register for her hometown's hospital listed an Angela Beesley born on the same date she claimed was her birthdate, there could have been _another_ Angela Beesley born on the same day and in the same hospital as her? This level of synthesis is not a novel creative act, IMO.
No, that's a fact stated by the individual and corroborated from public record, that's fine. How many Angela Beesleys would have been born in that hospital on that day to parents with names matching those of her mother and father? Not many.
Well, last I checked the information was still excluded from the article on that basis, so I'm reassured to find at least one spot where we're on the same side here. Makes it less likely that one of us has simply gone loony.
This is different. It is a name, just a name, and a place, and no actual detail of the link between the two (could have been a prank by the IT people), no additional data to link the two, it's not corroborating any other source.
It's not even corroborated by the original source, making this an increasingly hard-to-analyze situation. :)
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:21:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Well, last I checked the information was still excluded from the article on that basis, so I'm reassured to find at least one spot where we're on the same side here. Makes it less likely that one of us has simply gone loony.
What, you mean Angela freely states that she was born on X date in X hospital, and we have the record, and they still won't let it in? Or is it that someone has gone looking based on their own research?
Guy (JzG)
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:21:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Well, last I checked the information was still excluded from the article on that basis, so I'm reassured to find at least one spot where we're on the same side here. Makes it less likely that one of us has simply gone loony.
What, you mean Angela freely states that she was born on X date in X hospital, and we have the record, and they still won't let it in?
Not quite in that level of detail (I don't think she's identified what hospital she was born in and I haven't registered for an account with ancestry.co.uk to view the details it gives), but along those lines.
The removal was here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Angela_Beesley&diff=112748679&... And the reasoning was given on the talk page: "The register of births and deaths is not an acceptable source for Ms Beesley's birthdate for the reason that it confirms only that _an_ Angela Beesley was born in the year given. Please find a source that gives _this_ Angela Beesley's birthdate."
The source where Angela gave her own birthdate was previously rejected because it was an edit she made to Wikipedia itself, and therefore either "self-published" or a "reference to Wikipedia". Detailed discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Angela_Beesley#For_Bramlet
I decided it was totally not worth getting involved in this argument since I don't really care all that much, but this is the sort of legalistic nitpickery that makes me really hate having a detailed RS guideline. If Angela were to have given her birthday in an interview that got published on some other webpage I doubt there would have been any complaint about using it even though it's no more reliable.
The issue is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WP:LIVING#Privacy_of_birthdays
Just because you can look up birth records in primary sources doesn't mean Wikipedia should list everyone's birth date.
Angela
Angela wrote:
The issue is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WP:LIVING#Privacy_of_birthdays
Just because you can look up birth records in primary sources doesn't mean Wikipedia should list everyone's birth date.
The year of birth was taken out too, though (it's still in the infobox template because apparently Grace Note thought removing it would break the infobox and so deleted the whole thing, which was reverted). The year is perfectly acceptable and the reasons for rejecting the sources for it were IMO silly. This is my basic objection here.
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Angela wrote:
The issue is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WP:LIVING#Privacy_of_birthdays
Just because you can look up birth records in primary sources doesn't mean Wikipedia should list everyone's birth date.
In that case, don't include it. But we already have a rule that says not to include it. Don't try to stretch different rules to do so. It's not an unreliable source, and it should not be banned as self-published. Stretching the wrong rule to cover a situation can cause really bad problems in the future when the stretched rule is now considered the rule's natural meaning.
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:02:07 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
What, you mean Angela freely states that she was born on X date in X hospital, and we have the record, and they still won't let it in?
Not quite in that level of detail (I don't think she's identified what hospital she was born in and I haven't registered for an account with ancestry.co.uk to view the details it gives), but along those lines.
Ah, right. So it *is* a matter of editors joining the dots from disjoint facts, rather than a citation to support a fact available from another source. Not surprising it's been removed, then. Seems a bit [[WP:STALK]]ish anyway. Who cares?
Guy (JzG)
Bryan Derksen wrote:
I assume you're also one of the folks who supports removing Angela Beesley's birthdate from her article because although the birth register for her hometown's hospital listed an Angela Beesley born on the same date she claimed was her birthdate, there could have been _another_ Angela Beesley born on the same day and in the same hospital as her?
I would like to know exactly what kind of lunatic would look up Angela's birth date in a hometown hospital register, and why we should let them edit Wikipedia rather than having a quiet debate about whether Angela's safety would be enhanced by reporting the person to the authorities.
--Jimbo
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would like to know exactly what kind of lunatic would look up Angela's birth date in a hometown hospital register, and why we should let them edit Wikipedia rather than having a quiet debate about whether Angela's safety would be enhanced by reporting the person to the authorities.
Some lunatic who believes what he has been told about Wikipedia rules, and thus goes out and searches for a source?
Jimbo, this same argument can be applied in spades to the free images argument. It's been pointed out many timesthat saying that it's "possible to get a free image of" a person simply because they are alive encourages behavior that in other contexts would be seen as stalking.
"I'd want to know what kind of lunatic would follow a person and surreptitiously take a free picture of them, and why we should let them edit Wikipedia rather than have them arrested".
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I would like to know exactly what kind of lunatic would look up Angela's birth date in a hometown hospital register, and why we should let them edit Wikipedia rather than having a quiet debate about whether Angela's safety would be enhanced by reporting the person to the authorities.
Angela had previously publically posted her own birthdate herself, right on Wikipedia, so it obviously wasn't something she was trying to keep private. However, trying to use that as a source was rejected on the basis of it being "self-published" and/or a "reference to Wikipedia", so presumably the person who dug that up was merely trying to find corroborating evidence from an alternate source that would be accepted.
IMO the rejection of the original "self-published" source was the greater lunacy. If Angela were to have announced her birthday in an interview that was published on some other site it would be no more or less reliable, she could be lying in either event.
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:31:02 +0900, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I would like to know exactly what kind of lunatic would look up Angela's birth date in a hometown hospital register
Slightly more blunt than my version, but what I was really thinking all along...
Guy (JzG)
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source
A student email directory? In what way is that not original research?
Original research would have been if someone "pieced together" what university she went to through indirect clues - for example finding one source that says she lives in that city and another source that says she's a student and concluding that that she therefore goes to that _particular_ university.
In this case the reference is a primary source that says "these people go to this university." A perfectly good reference to cite when saying "this person goes to this university." That's hardly a creative act of information synthesis.
No, I don't agree... even if this is what happened, and I think this description is charitable in the extreme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=85665104&am...
Cites one page, which apparently does not now and never did mention the name "Bona Mugabe" as if it has been changed, but suggests that behind the login page you could still see the name.
Additionally, the name "Bona Mugabe" is likely not unique in the world, so appearing in a list of students... how does that prove anything?
This is exactly why we have a strong ban on original research.
--Jimbo
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
Of course, if this was introduced overnight, we'd simply have people that like deleting things tagging 400,000 articles, and we'd have no chance of saving the easily sourced ones. I'd suggest a phased approach, each phase introduced at a 2week to 1 month interval.
The phases could be:
1) Any article *totally* unreferenced and uncategorised may be tagged as such, and if not fixed, deleted after 7 says. (Trial phase, putting people on notice, most things would get saved by a simple, and perhaps crap, cat or ref being added - little would actually deleted)
2) Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
If we did it properly, we'd allow time to save most most of the good things - and end up with a policy that said "all unsourced articles get deleted"
Eventually we could tighten it further to demand some quality in the sources.
It isn't a panacea, but it is a start - and it begins a process of making inclusion dependent on article quality and not just the notability of the subject. We need a thin end to our wedge here - something workable and broadly acceptable to our more inclusionist elements. Thoughts?
Doc
I agree with the idea of gradually deleting unsourced material. But 7 days is too soon, for a lot of articles there's not really a hurry. People could tag stuff they don't like without even making an effort to find sources. And there's no doubt some large articles that require detailed research that takes time - much longer than 7 days.
I'd like to see a safeguard that proves at least attempts were made to source it before deleting articles. Instead of deleting the unsourced articles, focus should be on organizing processes and projects to source material. Properly sourced articles are better than deleted ones.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
Of course, if this was introduced overnight, we'd simply have people that like deleting things tagging 400,000 articles, and we'd have no chance of saving the easily sourced ones. I'd suggest a phased approach, each phase introduced at a 2week to 1 month interval.
The phases could be:
- Any article *totally* unreferenced and uncategorised may be tagged as
such, and if not fixed, deleted after 7 says. (Trial phase, putting people on notice, most things would get saved by a simple, and perhaps crap, cat or ref being added - little would actually deleted)
- Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the subject's own
pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
- Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own
pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
If we did it properly, we'd allow time to save most most of the good things - and end up with a policy that said "all unsourced articles get deleted"
Eventually we could tighten it further to demand some quality in the sources.
It isn't a panacea, but it is a start - and it begins a process of making inclusion dependent on article quality and not just the notability of the subject. We need a thin end to our wedge here - something workable and broadly acceptable to our more inclusionist elements. Thoughts?
Doc
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MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I agree with the idea of gradually deleting unsourced material. But 7 days is too soon, for a lot of articles there's not really a hurry. People could tag stuff they don't like without even making an effort to find sources. And there's no doubt some large articles that require detailed research that takes time - much longer than 7 days.
I'd like to see a safeguard that proves at least attempts were made to source it before deleting articles. Instead of deleting the unsourced articles, focus should be on organizing processes and projects to source material. Properly sourced articles are better than deleted ones.
Mgm
Generally, I agree that time should be given for good sourcing. But if the creator gives no source - and nothing at all can be found after 7 days - then I see no need to keep the article hanging about.
What you say is right in principle - but in practice it has resulted in a lot of crap hanging about.
Note, I'm not suggesting we delete things where the sourcing needs improving - I'm suggesting we delete things where no sources whatsoever are being supplied.
We can always have a policy of any admin undeleting if someone comes along with a source later.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I agree with the idea of gradually deleting unsourced material. But 7
days
is too soon, for a lot of articles there's not really a hurry. People
could
tag stuff they don't like without even making an effort to find sources.
And
there's no doubt some large articles that require detailed research that takes time - much longer than 7 days.
I'd like to see a safeguard that proves at least attempts were made to source it before deleting articles. Instead of deleting the unsourced articles, focus should be on organizing processes and projects to source material. Properly sourced articles are better than deleted ones.
Mgm
Generally, I agree that time should be given for good sourcing. But if the creator gives no source - and nothing at all can be found after 7 days - then I see no need to keep the article hanging about.
How are you going to determine if nothing can be found in 7 days? Perhaps no one knew the article existed after the creator posted it and left. We need a fail safe that ensures an effort is being made.
What you say is right in principle - but in practice it has resulted in
a lot of crap hanging about.
Note, I'm not suggesting we delete things where the sourcing needs improving - I'm suggesting we delete things where no sources whatsoever are being supplied.
I know what you suggested, but what I meant is that we need to make a difference between no sources have been found and no one has tried yet because they haven't noticed the article.
We can always have a policy of any admin undeleting if someone comes
along with a source later.
People are unlikely to come up with a source if they don't know it was deleted in the first place.
I think stable versions would help a lot. Simply don't approve an edit when no sources are provided, but I'd also like to see a program that lists articles that have been created recently and are still in need of sources. A sort of extended NP watcher. If we extend your 7 days to 1 or 2 months, the program can assign people the task of fixing articles as they come in and give their interests (perhaps have SuggestionBot weigh in). Such a bot could also do tagging if assigning an article to a certain number of people haven't prompted action for over 2 months.
That way you ensure "Crap" doesn't keep laying around after it outstayed its welcome and you simultaneously make every effort to get things sourced and ready.
I also believe that a difference should be handled between existing articles and new ones. It's worth saving old articles because people may have looked them up before and are expecting to find them again. We can be a bit more lenient with those as a lot of them have been around for ages with barely any trouble. New articles however have a clear message near the edit box that says they need to be verifiable.
We also have bots that send people messages about mistagging images or not giving their source. We should have a similar bot that warns people their new articles need sources.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I agree with the idea of gradually deleting unsourced material. But 7
days
is too soon, for a lot of articles there's not really a hurry. People
could
tag stuff they don't like without even making an effort to find
sources. And
there's no doubt some large articles that require detailed research
that
takes time - much longer than 7 days.
I'd like to see a safeguard that proves at least attempts were made to source it before deleting articles. Instead of deleting the unsourced articles, focus should be on organizing processes and projects to
source
material. Properly sourced articles are better than deleted ones.
Mgm
Generally, I agree that time should be given for good sourcing. But if the creator gives no source - and nothing at all can be found after 7 days - then I see no need to keep the article hanging about.
How are you going to determine if nothing can be found in 7 days? Perhaps no one knew the article existed after the creator posted it and left. We need a fail safe that ensures an effort is being made.
What you say is right in principle - but in practice it has resulted in
a lot of crap hanging about.
Note, I'm not suggesting we delete things where the sourcing needs improving - I'm suggesting we delete things where no sources whatsoever are being supplied.
I know what you suggested, but what I meant is that we need to make a difference between no sources have been found and no one has tried yet because they haven't noticed the article.
We can always have a policy of any admin undeleting if someone comes
along with a source later.
People are unlikely to come up with a source if they don't know it was deleted in the first place.
I think stable versions would help a lot. Simply don't approve an edit when no sources are provided, but I'd also like to see a program that lists articles that have been created recently and are still in need of sources. A sort of extended NP watcher. If we extend your 7 days to 1 or 2 months, the program can assign people the task of fixing articles as they come in and give their interests (perhaps have SuggestionBot weigh in). Such a bot could also do tagging if assigning an article to a certain number of people haven't prompted action for over 2 months.
That way you ensure "Crap" doesn't keep laying around after it outstayed its welcome and you simultaneously make every effort to get things sourced and ready.
I also believe that a difference should be handled between existing articles and new ones. It's worth saving old articles because people may have looked them up before and are expecting to find them again. We can be a bit more lenient with those as a lot of them have been around for ages with barely any trouble. New articles however have a clear message near the edit box that says they need to be verifiable.
We also have bots that send people messages about mistagging images or not giving their source. We should have a similar bot that warns people their new articles need sources.
Mgm
In other words, I'd say take the technical approach to this and let some
program collect stats about how well it works.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
"No sources" != "crap". I disagree with speedy deletion. However, making the text of the various "no references" tags a bit more stern and adding a warning sign might be a good idea. For example, instead of:
"This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources."
It could say:
"(!) This article lacks citations. This is is an article written by volunteers, and you should not rely on it unless and until sources are provided for all key statements. Please improve this article by adding references and removing questionable statements."
For obvious crap, we have existing deletion procedures.
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
"No sources" != "crap". I disagree with speedy deletion. However, making the text of the various "no references" tags a bit more stern and adding a warning sign might be a good idea. For example, instead of:
"This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources."
It could say:
"(!) This article lacks citations. This is is an article written by volunteers, and you should not rely on it unless and until sources are provided for all key statements. Please improve this article by adding references and removing questionable statements."
For obvious crap, we have existing deletion procedures.
Utterly inadequate. We've got real quality problems and just stiffening tags without any teeth, isn't going to make any difference.
No unsourced != crap. But if it isn't crap, it should at least be able to be given a rudimentary source.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step
towards
saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
"No sources" != "crap". I disagree with speedy deletion. However, making the text of the various "no references" tags a bit more stern and adding a warning sign might be a good idea. For example, instead of:
"This article or section does not adequately cite its references or
sources."
It could say:
"(!) This article lacks citations. This is is an article written by volunteers, and you should not rely on it unless and until sources are provided for all key statements. Please improve this article by adding references and removing questionable statements."
For obvious crap, we have existing deletion procedures.
Utterly inadequate. We've got real quality problems and just stiffening tags without any teeth, isn't going to make any difference.
No unsourced != crap. But if it isn't crap, it should at least be able to be given a rudimentary source.
There are excellent articles that lack sources, and utter crap with hundreds of sources. If you say "this will be deleted if not sourced in 7 days" people will google the topic and add a few random sources. This will create a sourced article...whose sources don't actually support the content. Since a sourced article looks more authoritative than an unsourced one, sticking in sources for the sake of sticking in sources can actually make an article look more misleading. Sources need to support the statements made in the article, not simply show that a topic exists.
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote: <snip>
It isn't a panacea, but it is a start - and it begins a process of making inclusion dependent on article quality and not just the notability of the subject. We need a thin end to our wedge here - something workable and broadly acceptable to our more inclusionist elements. Thoughts?
There's a lot of value in this proposal, especially regarding the biographies. I think that we've proven on numerous occassions that, as this point in time, Wikipedia as a whole just simply isn't able to build decent biographies on most living people. There are several exceptions of course, articles that are well sourced and balanced. But the majority? We simply don't seem to have have the right procedures or ways of thinking in place that make *sure* that we don't mess up - and biographies are NOT an area that we should be experimenting in like there are no consequences. I've handled and seen plenty of OTRS tickets that show the effects of where we're failing at the moment - and it isn't pretty.
So, we'd delete an unsourced bio after a week. Where's the harm? If we delete, and kindly explain to the creator of an article like that that we need sources, and why, they shouldn't be too upset. Especially as restoring if someone can provide decent sources for what they wrote can be done with one single click...
We need to re-educate our current and new editors - but we can't be too 'soft' about this any longer - it has real life consequences too often.
Kind regards,
JoanneB
Joanne Benson wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
<snip> > It isn't a panacea, but it is a start - and it begins a process of > making inclusion dependent on article quality and not just the > notability of the subject. We need a thin end to our wedge here - > something workable and broadly acceptable to our more inclusionist > elements. Thoughts?
There's a lot of value in this proposal, especially regarding the biographies. I think that we've proven on numerous occassions that, as this point in time, Wikipedia as a whole just simply isn't able to build decent biographies on most living people. There are several exceptions of course, articles that are well sourced and balanced. But the majority? We simply don't seem to have have the right procedures or ways of thinking in place that make *sure* that we don't mess up - and biographies are NOT an area that we should be experimenting in like there are no consequences. I've handled and seen plenty of OTRS tickets that show the effects of where we're failing at the moment - and it isn't pretty.
So, we'd delete an unsourced bio after a week. Where's the harm? If we delete, and kindly explain to the creator of an article like that that we need sources, and why, they shouldn't be too upset. Especially as restoring if someone can provide decent sources for what they wrote can be done with one single click...
We need to re-educate our current and new editors - but we can't be too 'soft' about this any longer - it has real life consequences too often.
Kind regards,
JoanneB
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You hit the nail on the head. Everyone is so worried that if we change things we may end up deleting some things that *could* be sourced or otherwise fixed.
The fact is, with regard to biographies at very least, we are now tfar too high profile for the eventualism that says we must keep awful, pov, unsourced stuff, because in theory we could fix most of it. That's now simply unacceptable.
On aggregate, we are not fixing it. Our quantity is such that our quality control is not up to it. And so the only responsible thing we can do is to change our liberal inclusionism.
We either do that by
1) drastically lifting notability thresholds to reduce the number of biographies to a level we can manage to maintain and monitor.
OR
2) introducing a strong quality threshold, where we don't include, or swiftly delete, articles that aren't currently up to it. Yes, in theory they can be fixed, and if someone is actually willing to do it, then fine; but most wont be fixed and should not hang around 'because in an ideal wiki we'd fix them'
We need a reality check here, folks. Doc
doc wrote:
The fact is, with regard to biographies at very least, we are now tfar too high profile for the eventualism that says we must keep awful, pov, unsourced stuff, because in theory we could fix most of it. That's now simply unacceptable.
And there is a different form of eventualism which works quite well. It's ok to delete a horribly crappy unsourced article, OR ANY PART of such an article, because EVENTUALLY we will be able to add more information, with sources, in the right way.
For a small wikipedia it can be ok to say: we are desperate for volunteers, we are desperate for growth, and so it is best to put up with a fair amount of unsourced stuff that is mostly right, just to build up a base of work for the future.
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
--Jimbo
On 3/31/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
doc wrote:
The fact is, with regard to biographies at very least, we are now tfar too high profile for the eventualism that says we must keep awful, pov, unsourced stuff, because in theory we could fix most of it. That's now simply unacceptable.
And there is a different form of eventualism which works quite well. It's ok to delete a horribly crappy unsourced article, OR ANY PART of such an article, because EVENTUALLY we will be able to add more information, with sources, in the right way.
For a small wikipedia it can be ok to say: we are desperate for volunteers, we are desperate for growth, and so it is best to put up with a fair amount of unsourced stuff that is mostly right, just to build up a base of work for the future.
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
Any proper measure of quality for Wikipedia also includes comprehensiveness.
On 31/03/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
Any proper measure of quality for Wikipedia also includes comprehensiveness.
Yes. These proposals to produce a polished Wikipedia by razing the existing works in progress to the ground completely fail to take into account that en:wp's ridiculously broad spread of articles is one of its greatest strong points and a reason for its massive popularity.
- d.
On Mar 31, 2007, at 8:34 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
Then what the hell was the point in writing all the stuff in the first place?
I mean, I've made a good number of contributions based on personal knowledge and on primary sources of philosophical and theoretical texts in the humanities. Stuff that doesn't fit the current "independent secondary sources or bust" model at all. I'm appalled at the idea that these contributions - contributions I made admin on the basis of, and contributions that my ability to make was part of why I fell in love with the project - are now part of a steaming pile of shit that needs to be cleared out.
If we want to get serious about quality, there are ways to do it without starting to destroy what we've already built. But this idea that we should feel guilty because you got slammed in a television interview is ridiculous. Of course Wikipedia has inaccuracies. It always has. You know full well we haven't fixed them all. And we've had a defense in line for that for years too - "it's a work in progress. We don't recommend using Wikipedia as the only source for serious research. We recommend using it as a starting point, with care, and looking at the sources and other resources provided." I know being slammed in a TV interview isn't fun. But, well, if you want to be able to go on TV praising a project that's done and accurate and wonderful, Wikipedia probably isn't the project to go on TV about. It doesn't lend itself to that. It lends itself to having to be defended, over and over again, against the same objections. It lends itself to waiting for two or three years at which point we'll be better. It lends itself to recognizing that we hit the big time well before we were ready to. You of all people should know that. So stop trying to guilt the community because the job of evangelizing Wikipedia isn't as easy as you'd like.
-Phil
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 8:34 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
Then what the hell was the point in writing all the stuff in the first place?
I mean, I've made a good number of contributions based on personal knowledge and on primary sources of philosophical and theoretical texts in the humanities. Stuff that doesn't fit the current "independent secondary sources or bust" model at all. I'm appalled at the idea that these contributions - contributions I made admin on the basis of, and contributions that my ability to make was part of why I fell in love with the project - are now part of a steaming pile of shit that needs to be cleared out.
If we want to get serious about quality, there are ways to do it without starting to destroy what we've already built. But this idea that we should feel guilty because you got slammed in a television interview is ridiculous. Of course Wikipedia has inaccuracies. It always has. You know full well we haven't fixed them all. And we've had a defense in line for that for years too - "it's a work in progress. We don't recommend using Wikipedia as the only source for serious research. We recommend using it as a starting point, with care, and looking at the sources and other resources provided." I know being slammed in a TV interview isn't fun. But, well, if you want to be able to go on TV praising a project that's done and accurate and wonderful, Wikipedia probably isn't the project to go on TV about. It doesn't lend itself to that. It lends itself to having to be defended, over and over again, against the same objections. It lends itself to waiting for two or three years at which point we'll be better. It lends itself to recognizing that we hit the big time well before we were ready to. You of all people should know that. So stop trying to guilt the community because the job of evangelizing Wikipedia isn't as easy as you'd like.
Hear, hear!
It should come as no surprise that those most concerned about Doc's proposals and similar trends are people who have participated on the projects for a considerable time. These are not the people who are about to wilfully add libellous or other illegal content. When they do so by inadvertance they are the ones who will review the situation fairly once it is brought to their attention. Their commitment to the project is too great to support either the kind of National-Enquirer silliness that some would add to the project or the equally silly framework of broad-stroke rules that ravages the ecology in a by-catch of useful efforts. An ecology can withstand trolls much better than drift nets.
The long-term participants have always been serious about quality, just as much as those who are now proposing rules. They also incorporate a vision that goes far beyond what may be found in any individual article, good or bad. Vision does not come from looking at a limited problem, and setting out to find a specific solution that will easily solve the problem without regard to other effects that the solution may have.
The vision of a compendium of human knowledge that anybody can edit remains valid even if it does get messy around the edges. The desire for accuracy has always been a part of the vision despite the antics of those whose understanding of accuracy and neutrality is particularly limited. The vision is what made Wikipedia what it is to-day. The openness that told the prospective contributor that he had to say was important, that he was important, that his ideas were just as important as those of the professional, that lifted his spirit- this is what made Wikipedia. The fact that it is now the world's single biggest reference source remains an afterthought. It was inevitable that Wikipedia would include material that is mind-numbingly trivial, that it would include articles about people whose claim to notability is dubious at best, that ideas of perpetual motion machines would be in perpetual motion, but all this is perfectly harmless. Most of it will go completely unnoticed, and the amount of space that it takes up in the databse is inconsequential for as long as there is no debate about its value.
As a collector of old books I encounter a surfeit of material that has fallen into a well deserved oblivion, but I'm glad it's there. Like much of our "non-notable" material nobody notices it's there, and I wonder whether the editors of that day had the same arguments as we now have.
Try this experiment at Wikimania: Set up two meetings where people are asked to comment broadly to identical questions about their views of Wikipedia. The difference between the two would be that the participants in the first would have joined during the first half of Wikipedia's existence, and the participants in the other in the second half. Compare the results.
I think it's important to trust the instincts of those who have endured for a long time. Picking up on Phil's theme that Wikipedia is a work in progress, once it is out of progress it will be something else.
Ec
I'm not sure "older is wiser" necessarily applies, though. Sometimes, it's the opposite-the "old guard" gets stuck in a past that no longer exists, and it takes some "fresh blood" to come along and make some changes. I'm not saying that -is- happening here, but I'm not sure why a lot of people seem to think we'll necessarily be well-served by doing things the way it was done when the project was a tenth its size. Sometimes that may be, but in a lot of cases, changes may be required. You can run a town of 1,000 or perhaps even 10,000 in a pretty informal, ad-hoc manner. The same is not true of a city of 1,000,000.
Seraphimblade
On 4/5/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 8:34 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
Then what the hell was the point in writing all the stuff in the first place?
I mean, I've made a good number of contributions based on personal knowledge and on primary sources of philosophical and theoretical texts in the humanities. Stuff that doesn't fit the current "independent secondary sources or bust" model at all. I'm appalled at the idea that these contributions - contributions I made admin on the basis of, and contributions that my ability to make was part of why I fell in love with the project - are now part of a steaming pile of shit that needs to be cleared out.
If we want to get serious about quality, there are ways to do it without starting to destroy what we've already built. But this idea that we should feel guilty because you got slammed in a television interview is ridiculous. Of course Wikipedia has inaccuracies. It always has. You know full well we haven't fixed them all. And we've had a defense in line for that for years too - "it's a work in progress. We don't recommend using Wikipedia as the only source for serious research. We recommend using it as a starting point, with care, and looking at the sources and other resources provided." I know being slammed in a TV interview isn't fun. But, well, if you want to be able to go on TV praising a project that's done and accurate and wonderful, Wikipedia probably isn't the project to go on TV about. It doesn't lend itself to that. It lends itself to having to be defended, over and over again, against the same objections. It lends itself to waiting for two or three years at which point we'll be better. It lends itself to recognizing that we hit the big time well before we were ready to. You of all people should know that. So stop trying to guilt the community because the job of evangelizing Wikipedia isn't as easy as you'd like.
Hear, hear!
It should come as no surprise that those most concerned about Doc's proposals and similar trends are people who have participated on the projects for a considerable time. These are not the people who are about to wilfully add libellous or other illegal content. When they do so by inadvertance they are the ones who will review the situation fairly once it is brought to their attention. Their commitment to the project is too great to support either the kind of National-Enquirer silliness that some would add to the project or the equally silly framework of broad-stroke rules that ravages the ecology in a by-catch of useful efforts. An ecology can withstand trolls much better than drift nets.
The long-term participants have always been serious about quality, just as much as those who are now proposing rules. They also incorporate a vision that goes far beyond what may be found in any individual article, good or bad. Vision does not come from looking at a limited problem, and setting out to find a specific solution that will easily solve the problem without regard to other effects that the solution may have.
The vision of a compendium of human knowledge that anybody can edit remains valid even if it does get messy around the edges. The desire for accuracy has always been a part of the vision despite the antics of those whose understanding of accuracy and neutrality is particularly limited. The vision is what made Wikipedia what it is to-day. The openness that told the prospective contributor that he had to say was important, that he was important, that his ideas were just as important as those of the professional, that lifted his spirit- this is what made Wikipedia. The fact that it is now the world's single biggest reference source remains an afterthought. It was inevitable that Wikipedia would include material that is mind-numbingly trivial, that it would include articles about people whose claim to notability is dubious at best, that ideas of perpetual motion machines would be in perpetual motion, but all this is perfectly harmless. Most of it will go completely unnoticed, and the amount of space that it takes up in the databse is inconsequential for as long as there is no debate about its value.
As a collector of old books I encounter a surfeit of material that has fallen into a well deserved oblivion, but I'm glad it's there. Like much of our "non-notable" material nobody notices it's there, and I wonder whether the editors of that day had the same arguments as we now have.
Try this experiment at Wikimania: Set up two meetings where people are asked to comment broadly to identical questions about their views of Wikipedia. The difference between the two would be that the participants in the first would have joined during the first half of Wikipedia's existence, and the participants in the other in the second half. Compare the results.
I think it's important to trust the instincts of those who have endured for a long time. Picking up on Phil's theme that Wikipedia is a work in progress, once it is out of progress it will be something else.
Ec
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On 4/5/07, Seraphim Blade seraphimbladewikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure "older is wiser" necessarily applies, though. Sometimes, it's the opposite-the "old guard" gets stuck in a past that no longer exists, and it takes some "fresh blood" to come along and make some changes. I'm not saying that -is- happening here, but I'm not sure why a lot of people seem to think we'll necessarily be well-served by doing things the way it was done when the project was a tenth its size. Sometimes that may be, but in a lot of cases, changes may be required. You can run a town of 1,000 or perhaps even 10,000 in a pretty informal, ad-hoc manner. The same is not true of a city of 1,000,000.
Crazy talk. Listen to the crusty old contributors! Ignore the newbies!
Grrr. In my day...
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
You hit the nail on the head. Everyone is so worried that if we change things we may end up deleting some things that *could* be sourced or otherwise fixed.
The fact is, with regard to biographies at very least, we are now tfar too high profile for the eventualism that says we must keep awful, pov, unsourced stuff, because in theory we could fix most of it. That's now simply unacceptable.
Not every article is a biography of a living person. I am therefore unwilling to delete large amounts of EXISTING WORK simply because biographical articles are problematic.
I am quite happy with a process whereby all articles on living people MUST be sourced by a certain date, or within X days of being tagged. Perhaps we should identify other categories of article that need to be sourced to a deadline as well.
I am also happy with a process that says that all new articles after a specified date must be sourced within X days - although I fear that the process-happy will turn that into 'all new articles must be sourced FA-style with inline references for every three words'.
I'm also happy with turning on some kind of stable versions feature that makes all unsourced articles default-invisible to browsing readers - but even then, I would wish a 'We have no stable article on this topic, but we do have an unchecked work-in-progress. Do you want to see it?' thing for those articles. Remember, the vast majority are not libellous or harmful, just incomplete or unsourced. In fact, the attack article many times WILL be sourced.
I am not happy with any process that sends OK articles on non-contentious subjects to the trash without a conscientious attempt to find sources.
-Matt
Not every article is a biography of a living person. I am therefore unwilling to delete large amounts of EXISTING WORK simply because biographical articles are problematic.
I am quite happy with a process whereby all articles on living people MUST be sourced by a certain date, or within X days of being tagged. Perhaps we should identify other categories of article that need to be sourced to a deadline as well.
I am also happy with a process that says that all new articles after a specified date must be sourced within X days - although I fear that the process-happy will turn that into 'all new articles must be sourced FA-style with inline references for every three words'.
I'm also happy with turning on some kind of stable versions feature that makes all unsourced articles default-invisible to browsing readers - but even then, I would wish a 'We have no stable article on this topic, but we do have an unchecked work-in-progress. Do you want to see it?' thing for those articles. Remember, the vast majority are not libellous or harmful, just incomplete or unsourced. In fact, the attack article many times WILL be sourced.
I am not happy with any process that sends OK articles on non-contentious subjects to the trash without a conscientious attempt to find sources.
-Matt
OK, so let's go simply with biographies of living people, and see how it pans out.
What about:
"any biography of a living person, which altogether lacks sources (other than webpages directly connected with subject), may be tagged us such. If no sources are added within seven days, the article may be deleted. However, such a deletion shall be without prejudice to a sourced re-creation at a later time [i.e. G4 will not apply, unless the re-creation is still unsourced]"
We could initially start tagging articles, but suspend deletions for, say, a month - that would allow time for cleaning up of the current stock. The tagging would create a large category of 'unsourced BLPs' which people could start sourcing to minimise deletions.
Bear in mind this policy is simply asking for a source - any source - so it is a very low threshhold. But it would perhaps start to change how we think about quality and inclusion.
Doc
If the intial treshhold for keeping bios is low and deletion is suspended for a significant amount of time, we're going in the right direction without being too drastic.
I'd like to see some study done that checks how many people would actually participate in a massive spring-like cleanup that would involve sourcing lacking articles.
I know I want to help out with such a project, but I have limited time, limited access to sources, limited language skills (foreign sources are not preferred but acceptable) and a limited article subject interest. To effectively source all the articles (in this case bios) that run the risk of deletion we need to attract the right audience to fix them.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Not every article is a biography of a living person. I am therefore unwilling to delete large amounts of EXISTING WORK simply because biographical articles are problematic.
I am quite happy with a process whereby all articles on living people MUST be sourced by a certain date, or within X days of being tagged. Perhaps we should identify other categories of article that need to be sourced to a deadline as well.
I am also happy with a process that says that all new articles after a specified date must be sourced within X days - although I fear that the process-happy will turn that into 'all new articles must be sourced FA-style with inline references for every three words'.
I'm also happy with turning on some kind of stable versions feature that makes all unsourced articles default-invisible to browsing readers - but even then, I would wish a 'We have no stable article on this topic, but we do have an unchecked work-in-progress. Do you want to see it?' thing for those articles. Remember, the vast majority are not libellous or harmful, just incomplete or unsourced. In fact, the attack article many times WILL be sourced.
I am not happy with any process that sends OK articles on non-contentious subjects to the trash without a conscientious attempt to find sources.
-Matt
OK, so let's go simply with biographies of living people, and see how it pans out.
What about:
"any biography of a living person, which altogether lacks sources (other than webpages directly connected with subject), may be tagged us such. If no sources are added within seven days, the article may be deleted. However, such a deletion shall be without prejudice to a sourced re-creation at a later time [i.e. G4 will not apply, unless the re-creation is still unsourced]"
We could initially start tagging articles, but suspend deletions for, say, a month - that would allow time for cleaning up of the current stock. The tagging would create a large category of 'unsourced BLPs' which people could start sourcing to minimise deletions.
Bear in mind this policy is simply asking for a source - any source - so it is a very low threshhold. But it would perhaps start to change how we think about quality and inclusion.
Doc
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MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I'd like to see some study done that checks how many people would actually participate in a massive spring-like cleanup that would involve sourcing lacking articles.
Sadly I think what you would attract is those who would prefer to spend 5 seconds pasting "DELETE THIS UNSOURCED MONSTROSITY NOW!!!" over each and every article rather than the few who could afford to spend much longer actually finding proper sources and formatting them sufficiently to appease the citation police.
We would be in the position where we were overwhelmed by articles tagged for deletion, rather than by those tagged for sourcing, and much less time in which to attempt to deal with them.
Phil Boswell wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I'd like to see some study done that checks how many people would actually participate in a massive spring-like cleanup that would involve sourcing lacking articles.
Sadly I think what you would attract is those who would prefer to spend 5 seconds pasting "DELETE THIS UNSOURCED MONSTROSITY NOW!!!" over each and every article rather than the few who could afford to spend much longer actually finding proper sources and formatting them sufficiently to appease the citation police.
We would be in the position where we were overwhelmed by articles tagged for deletion, rather than by those tagged for sourcing, and much less time in which to attempt to deal with them.
Then too when simplistic policies are adopted that offer a panacea to some major problem there is no shortage of idiots willing to enforce the policy literally and strictly.
If Jimbo speaks of "crap unsourced articles", the idiots will immediately draw the conclusion that all unsourced articles are crap.
Ec
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
We either do that by
- drastically lifting notability thresholds to reduce the number of
biographies to a level we can manage to maintain and monitor.
OR
- introducing a strong quality threshold, where we don't include, or
swiftly delete, articles that aren't currently up to it. Yes, in theory they can be fixed, and if someone is actually willing to do it, then fine; but most wont be fixed and should not hang around 'because in an ideal wiki we'd fix them'
Both options rely on removing content. Option 1 would lead to deletion of perfectly sourced content that needs little maintainance just to make things manageable which would greatly affect our coverage and not neccesarily get rid of problem material.
Option 2 focuses on removing material instead of fixing it. We shouldn't let stuff lie around for years waiting for fixes, but a certain amount of eventualism is certainly desireable.
There's plenty of less drastic solutions that will move towards the goal at a slower pace without disrupting the current encyclopedia. If quality control isn't scaling, quality control in a short time period isn't going to work any better. I believe the solution to be improving quality control in Wikipedia through targetted WikiProjects, bots and anti-vandalism type programs like VandalProof aimed at fixing new articles as they come in.
I offer you: Option 3) Stem the tide of new unsourced material by monitoring new articles and organizing a long term effort to cite all existing articles.
And I also offer a question. How much time would it take to give all currently tagged articles sources? Long articles require more research and more time and articles about old subjects may require hard to get sources and library trips to dusty archived books. I don't think it's realistic to expect all this to get cleaned up in anything less than a year unless every active Wikipedian pitches in. We need to answer this question before we can build any kind of realistic time plan.
Mgm
This sounds quite a lot like the WP:PRODUS proposal I made some time ago (which, in turn, came from some of the discussion that took place at WP:CSDUA). It was rejected at the time, but maybe it's time to restart the discussion? Also, I was considering a process where new unsourced articles would be userfied to their creator after a period of time with no sources, and placed in a category, with the resulting redirect speedied as cross-namespace. This way, anyone could userfy content after time's up, and tag the redirect (though an admin would eventually be needed to delete it), and those wishing to work on sourcing articles could look through that category and move it back into mainspace once it's got some sourcing behind it.
Seraphimblade
On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
We either do that by
- drastically lifting notability thresholds to reduce the number of
biographies to a level we can manage to maintain and monitor.
OR
- introducing a strong quality threshold, where we don't include, or
swiftly delete, articles that aren't currently up to it. Yes, in theory they can be fixed, and if someone is actually willing to do it, then fine; but most wont be fixed and should not hang around 'because in an ideal wiki we'd fix them'
Both options rely on removing content. Option 1 would lead to deletion of perfectly sourced content that needs little maintainance just to make things manageable which would greatly affect our coverage and not neccesarily get rid of problem material.
Option 2 focuses on removing material instead of fixing it. We shouldn't let stuff lie around for years waiting for fixes, but a certain amount of eventualism is certainly desireable.
There's plenty of less drastic solutions that will move towards the goal at a slower pace without disrupting the current encyclopedia. If quality control isn't scaling, quality control in a short time period isn't going to work any better. I believe the solution to be improving quality control in Wikipedia through targetted WikiProjects, bots and anti-vandalism type programs like VandalProof aimed at fixing new articles as they come in.
I offer you: Option 3) Stem the tide of new unsourced material by monitoring new articles and organizing a long term effort to cite all existing articles.
And I also offer a question. How much time would it take to give all currently tagged articles sources? Long articles require more research and more time and articles about old subjects may require hard to get sources and library trips to dusty archived books. I don't think it's realistic to expect all this to get cleaned up in anything less than a year unless every active Wikipedian pitches in. We need to answer this question before we can build any kind of realistic time plan.
Mgm _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 3/31/07, Seraphim Blade seraphimbladewikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
This sounds quite a lot like the WP:PRODUS proposal I made some time ago (which, in turn, came from some of the discussion that took place at WP:CSDUA). It was rejected at the time, but maybe it's time to restart the discussion? Also, I was considering a process where new unsourced articles would be userfied to their creator after a period of time with no sources, and placed in a category, with the resulting redirect speedied as cross-namespace. This way, anyone could userfy content after time's up, and tag the redirect (though an admin would eventually be needed to delete it), and those wishing to work on sourcing articles could look through that category and move it back into mainspace once it's got some sourcing behind it.
Seraphimblade
Looks like a good thing to try. I'll make my own proposal later today which should also improve the referencing of articles (new and old).
Mgm
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
7 days is draconian, but hey, I figured Wikipedia would start to be a mostly unfriendly project for contributors in 7 years from its conception, so we're right on schedule.
If we are to have such a policy, 6 months seems like a reasonable time to me.
If we are to have such a policy, we should also grandfather in articles.
Also, if we were to have some kind of policy like this, the sourcing requirements should be light. In other words, it should not be the case that someone can litter an article with [needs attribution] and then delete it the next week.
If we are to have some sort of policy, these certainly should be totally undeletable by just about anyone (not just admins) without any need for review.
As a followup, doc's suggestion presupposes that unsourced == crap most of the time, which is not true.
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
7 days is draconian, but hey, I figured Wikipedia would start to be a mostly unfriendly project for contributors in 7 years from its conception, so we're right on schedule.
If we are to have such a policy, 6 months seems like a reasonable time to me.
If we are to have such a policy, we should also grandfather in articles.
Also, if we were to have some kind of policy like this, the sourcing requirements should be light. In other words, it should not be the case that someone can litter an article with [needs attribution] and then delete it the next week.
If we are to have some sort of policy, these certainly should be totally undeletable by just about anyone (not just admins) without any need for review.
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
As a followup, doc's suggestion presupposes that unsourced == crap most of the time, which is not true.
Doc said unsourced does not equal crap. I didn't see anything about "most of the time". Even if it's true some of the time, this idea would lead to deleting non-crap. And doing that even once is one time too many. That's what I believe to be the point, although doc glasgow's mileage may vary.
Mgm
On 3/31/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
As a followup, doc's suggestion presupposes that unsourced == crap most of the time, which is not true.
Doc said unsourced does not equal crap. I didn't see anything about "most of the time". Even if it's true some of the time, this idea would lead to deleting non-crap. And doing that even once is one time too many. That's what I believe to be the point, although doc glasgow's mileage may vary.
Doc said:
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
This is a non sequitur unless you make the assumption that unsourced==crap.
On 31/03/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
I did this some time ago for the contents of [[Category:Rapists]] and its ilk; unsourced claims were removed, and in the few cases where they constituted the entirety of the article, were replaced with a prod tag saying "no verifiable assertion of significance is left after defamatory unsourced assertions removed, so a contentless article", or words to that effect.
I suspect I had about a one in three success rate and a lot of people screaming about disruption... and sourcing their articles.
"Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com writes:
On 31/03/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap,
if it is
still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article
that
remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is
deleted". It
sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not
articles? No, it
will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable
step towards
saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment
than a
crap one.
I did this some time ago for the contents of
[[Category:Rapists]] and
its ilk; unsourced claims were removed, and in the few cases
where
they constituted the entirety of the article, were replaced with
a
prod tag saying "no verifiable assertion of significance is left
after
defamatory unsourced assertions removed, so a contentless
article", or
words to that effect.
I suspect I had about a one in three success rate and a lot of
people
screaming about disruption... and sourcing their articles.
--
- Andrew Gray
I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that - people are willing to *briefly* do heroic feats of editing, if they feel it will satisfy one maniac and just get him off their and their articles' collective backs, but to expect them to do it again and again as a routine matter of course is quite a stretch.
Gwern Branwen wrote:
"Andrew Gray" writes:
I did this some time ago for the contents of [[Category:Rapists]] and
its ilk; unsourced claims were removed, and in the few cases where
they constituted the entirety of the article, were replaced with a
prod tag saying "no verifiable assertion of significance is left after
defamatory unsourced assertions removed, so a contentless article", or
words to that effect.
I suspect I had about a one in three success rate and a lot of people
screaming about disruption... and sourcing their articles.
I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that - people are willing to *briefly* do heroic feats of editing, if they feel it will satisfy one maniac and just get him off their and their articles' collective backs, but to expect them to do it again and again as a routine matter of course is quite a stretch.
The category that Andrew chose to work on is one where one could reasonably expect a lot of unsourced nonsense. This would not be so easy in a more respectable category where more good but unsourced material may be found.
Ec
On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
I did this some time ago for the contents of [[Category:Rapists]] and its ilk; unsourced claims were removed, and in the few cases where they constituted the entirety of the article, were replaced with a prod tag saying "no verifiable assertion of significance is left after defamatory unsourced assertions removed, so a contentless article", or words to that effect.
I suspect I had about a one in three success rate and a lot of people screaming about disruption... and sourcing their articles.
A quick analysis - I prodded 11 articles this way. Two were deleted; nine survived. Of those, eight are now sourced and one is still unsourced. The prodded people were entirely those whose notability depended solely on an unsourced assertion of criminal behaviour. This doesn't include a half-dozen more sportsmen, etc, where defamatory unsourced claims were removed and the article still asserted notability.
I did a swathe of "non-notable criminals" at the same time - people who had been convicted of some offence or another, ranging from rape to 'abuse of trust', and were being listed in Wikipedia, The Sex Offender Registry You Can Edit, albeit with sources. About one in three of those were deleted, which isn't bad going.
The whole argument about deleting unsourced articles ignores the experience we have had with image uploads - being forced to pick a license tends to push people towards just picking any one license.
I came across an unsourced (and unwikified) article about a town in Trinidad today. It was only a one-sentence article, so I fixed it up a little, but didn't really expand it. I looked around for some references online, but couldn't find any quickly. What I did find was mention of a book at documentary about the town, done by a notable historian. I feel confident that the book covers the information in the article (there's so little, and much of it is commonsense), so it would be pretty safe to cite the book as a source. Safe, but dishonest, since I have never seen the book.
In addition, the presence of a source is no guarantee of accuracy. If I had known the book well enough, I could have added it as a reference. Then suppose someone else came along and added some more material. Someone else comes along later, checks the page history, and realises that some of the material came after the source. There is no way for them to determine if the person who added the source had seen the new material (and left it, because it was in keeping with the source), or if they missed the edit, and have no idea that this material has been added to the article. A casual reader never even looks at the page history, so they see both the original statements and the additions, and they seen a reference.
Sure, stable versions could fix this. Deleting unreferenced articles, on the other hand, could not fix this (and would encourage people to add spurious references, just to prevent the article from being deleted).
On 4/1/07, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
The whole argument about deleting unsourced articles ignores the experience we have had with image uploads - being forced to pick a license tends to push people towards just picking any one license.
I came across an unsourced (and unwikified) article about a town in Trinidad today. It was only a one-sentence article, so I fixed it up a little, but didn't really expand it. I looked around for some references online, but couldn't find any quickly. What I did find was mention of a book at documentary about the town, done by a notable historian. I feel confident that the book covers the information in the article (there's so little, and much of it is commonsense), so it would be pretty safe to cite the book as a source. Safe, but dishonest, since I have never seen the book.
This also shows how pushing too hard on the Sourcing issue promotes a bias against the third world and the like which have a lesser internet presence.
In addition, the presence of a source is no guarantee of accuracy. If I had
known the book well enough, I could have added it as a reference. Then suppose someone else came along and added some more material. Someone else comes along later, checks the page history, and realises that some of the material came after the source. There is no way for them to determine if the person who added the source had seen the new material (and left it, because it was in keeping with the source), or if they missed the edit, and have no idea that this material has been added to the article. A casual reader never even looks at the page history, so they see both the original statements and the additions, and they seen a reference.
Sure, stable versions could fix this. Deleting unreferenced articles, on the other hand, could not fix this (and would encourage people to add spurious references, just to prevent the article from being deleted). _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how about blanking them?
More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged, replace the article with a template saying "This article has been removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by editing the previous version and adding sources."
That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.
On 31/03/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how about blanking them? More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged, replace the article with a template saying "This article has been removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by editing the previous version and adding sources." That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.
Probably not on living bios, but if those who wish to raze much of Wikipedia to the ground in order to save it have their way, this would be better than utter destruction.
- d.
Probably not on living bios, but if those who wish to raze much of Wikipedia to the ground in order to save it have their way, this would be better than utter destruction.
I don't see any need for living bios to be singled out. This policy would be in addition to WP:BLP.
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Probably not on living bios, but if those who wish to raze much of Wikipedia to the ground in order to save it have their way, this would be better than utter destruction.
I don't see any need for living bios to be singled out. This policy would be in addition to WP:BLP.
Living bios draw the most complaints, and have the greatest potential for libel. Why not wait until the situation is stabilized in BLP before expanding the scope of these activities.
Adding a source-needed tag to an article, deleting it or blanking it are all very easy tasks that take no research whatsoever. A large number of such actions can be done in a single hour. Only a fraction of them can be properly researched and sourced in the same amount of time. Those who are pushing these extreme measures would be more credible if they committed themselves to finding sources instead of just putting up tags and generating work for others to do.
Ec
On 3/31/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how about blanking them?
More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged, replace the article with a template saying "This article has been removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by editing the previous version and adding sources."
That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.
That would certainly deal with the fact that regular editors can't help in sourcing deleted entries. Of course, we should avoid articles reaching deletion stages to begin with. We should focus more on how to fix them than how to get rid of non-fixed work (except perhaps in cases where inaccuracy can lead to significant problems like biographies).
On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:58 AM, doc wrote:
- Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the
subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days. 3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of very messy stitching together.)
The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I just learned something from it!)
-Phil
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:58 AM, doc wrote:
- Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the
subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days. 3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of very messy stitching together.)
The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I just learned something from it!)
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for that..... so it is a poor example.
Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net impact on the project, not one or two cases.
Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.
Doc
On Mar 31, 2007, at 12:41 PM, doc wrote:
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for that..... so it is a poor example.
But what would a second citation add to that article? Or, more to the point, how is the lack of a second citation something so bad that the article should be deleted unless it gets one?
Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net impact on the project, not one or two cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorran_Democratic_Centre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5 (Only source is the primary source) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_University_Press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_on_the_Family_Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ferguson_%28organist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Institute_for_the_Certification_of_Computing_Professionals
Would you like me to find more? Now, mind you, I don't know for 100% certain that, for instance, the Focus on the Family Institute is notable. But all of these articles are short, descriptive articles that rely entirely on a primary source.
I also am pretty certain that instead of gutting bad articles what would happen here is that articles on politicians in non-English speaking countries would get gutted. We would lose our coverage on the non-English speaking world rapidly. For instance, that first link - the Andorran Democratic Centre? None of our articles on Andorran political parties would survive this proposal. Neither would our Peruvian politicians.
The need to improve sourcing does not outweigh the need to have some, albeit stubby, coverage in these areas. And putting a seven day timeline on fixing that is not useful - it's a double or nothing gambit that's far, far too likely to leave us with nothing. We cannot allow our sourcing paranoia to gut entire major areas of the encyclopedia.
Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.
Sure it is. We have a pretty good encyclopedia. It's improving. I see little reason to gut its content. Deleting to write a better encyclopedia is like fucking for chastity.
-Phil
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 12:41 PM, doc wrote:
Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.
Sure it is. We have a pretty good encyclopedia. It's improving. I see little reason to gut its content. Deleting to write a better encyclopedia is like fucking for chastity.
At least something good would come from the latter.
On Mar 31, 2007, at 12:57 PM, Phil Sandifer wrote:
Would you like me to find more? Now, mind you, I don't know for 100% certain that, for instance, the Focus on the Family Institute is notable. But all of these articles are short, descriptive articles that rely entirely on a primary source.
Sorry - never finished that paragraph. It should end:
And that's not a glaring problem with any of them. They're descriptive, they're useful starts for further research, they're useful starts for further expansion. They're stubs. We like stubs.
-Phil
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 12:41 PM, doc wrote:
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for that..... so it is a poor example.
But what would a second citation add to that article? Or, more to the point, how is the lack of a second citation something so bad that the article should be deleted unless it gets one?
Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net impact on the project, not one or two cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorran_Democratic_Centre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5 (Only source is the primary source) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_University_Press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_on_the_Family_Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ferguson_%28organist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Institute_for_the_Certification_of_Computing_Professionals
Would you like me to find more? Now, mind you, I don't know for 100% certain that, for instance, the Focus on the Family Institute is notable. But all of these articles are short, descriptive articles that rely entirely on a primary source.
I also am pretty certain that instead of gutting bad articles what would happen here is that articles on politicians in non-English speaking countries would get gutted. We would lose our coverage on the non-English speaking world rapidly. For instance, that first link
- the Andorran Democratic Centre? None of our articles on Andorran
political parties would survive this proposal. Neither would our Peruvian politicians.
This proposal didn't suggest deleting something because it was foreign. If it's a legitimate Andorran political party, there will be secondary sources although they are in French. English sources are preferred but French or Peruvian ones are acceptable if those are the only ones the editor working on it can find or understand.
Mgm
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:58 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
This proposal didn't suggest deleting something because it was foreign. If it's a legitimate Andorran political party, there will be secondary sources although they are in French. English sources are preferred but French or Peruvian ones are acceptable if those are the only ones the editor working on it can find or understand.
You miss the point - it's not that these articles can't get sources. It's that they don't have sources now and have a very small pool of editors working on them who would be overwhelmed, if not driven off entirely, by the demand to source all of the articles or see them deleted.
-Phil
On 31/03/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:58 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
This proposal didn't suggest deleting something because it was foreign. If it's a legitimate Andorran political party, there will be secondary sources although they are in French. English sources are preferred but French or Peruvian ones are acceptable if those are the only ones the editor working on it can find or understand.
You miss the point - it's not that these articles can't get sources. It's that they don't have sources now and have a very small pool of editors working on them who would be overwhelmed, if not driven off entirely, by the demand to source all of the articles or see them deleted.
Indeed. Should this blithering idiocy go ahead, please at least make sure there's a known-good dump of en:wp available first.
- d.
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:58 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
This proposal didn't suggest deleting something because it was foreign. If it's a legitimate Andorran political party, there will be secondary sources although they are in French. English sources are preferred but French or Peruvian ones are acceptable if those are the only ones the editor working on it can find or understand.
You miss the point - it's not that these articles can't get sources. It's that they don't have sources now and have a very small pool of editors working on them who would be overwhelmed, if not driven off entirely, by the demand to source all of the articles or see them deleted.
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
That's why I propose to make the referencing WikiProject more extensive and attractive as per the thread I just posted myself.
Mgm
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:58 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
This proposal didn't suggest deleting something because it was foreign. If it's a legitimate Andorran political party, there will be secondary sources although they are in French. English sources are preferred but French or Peruvian ones are acceptable if those are the only ones the editor working on it can find or understand.
You miss the point - it's not that these articles can't get sources. It's that they don't have sources now and have a very small pool of editors working on them who would be overwhelmed, if not driven off entirely, by the demand to source all of the articles or see them deleted.
The demand is not simply to source all those articles, but to do so in a very short time.
Ec
doc wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of very messy stitching together.)
The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I just learned something from it!)
-Phil
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for that..... so it is a poor example.
Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net impact on the project, not one or two cases.
Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.
It likely took you a minute to write your last comments. You could just as easily taken the same time to find the second citation yourself.
Ec
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:58 AM, doc wrote:
- Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the
subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days. 3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
Which is exactly why only sources from the subject are not enough. People and companies are notoriously bad at determining their own notability, so to do that (and avoid uncontestable deletions of good information) you need at least one outside source to determine notability.
Mgm
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:46 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
Which is exactly why only sources from the subject are not enough. People and companies are notoriously bad at determining their own notability, so to do that (and avoid uncontestable deletions of good information) you need at least one outside source to determine notability.
And that's fine(ish). But this amounts to an incontestable speedy deletion for articles of questionable notability. That's not OK.
-Phil
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 3:46 PM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
Which is exactly why only sources from the subject are not enough. People and companies are notoriously bad at determining their own notability, so to do that (and avoid uncontestable deletions of good information) you need at least one outside source to determine notability.
And that's fine(ish). But this amounts to an incontestable speedy deletion for articles of questionable notability. That's not OK.
I'm not saying such deletions are okay, I'm just countering the claim that only primary sources shouldn't be enough -- in the long run.
Mgm
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source
A student email directory? In what way is that not original research?
Let's be even more clear about it. EVEN WHEN INSERTED, the claim was that the name used to be at a certain page (quite probably a flat out lie), and NOW is behind a login page.
I am a little ashamed to admit something here, but I will. A while back, I thought about Robert Mugabe, whose story I used to follow in the news quite regularly, and I went and read our article about him. I remember reading this about his children not being subject to a travel ban. I did not follow the link to see the source (I was not editing at that moment, I was just reading Wikipedia like any other consumer of information).
A little bell went off in my head that this was a link directly to a student directory, but I ignored it. That's a real shame, because if I had been reading with a little more intensity about BLP issues, I would have removed it.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I am a little ashamed to admit something here, but I will. A while back, I thought about Robert Mugabe, whose story I used to follow in the news quite regularly, and I went and read our article about him. I remember reading this about his children not being subject to a travel ban. I did not follow the link to see the source (I was not editing at that moment, I was just reading Wikipedia like any other consumer of information).
Consumers of information should also be checking the sources if they intend to be using the information in any remotely serious manner (standing up in the British House of Commons and asking a question based off of it, for example). Wikipedia has strong disclaimers to this effect.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
I don't see it as a good example, myself. The edit in question was referenced with an appropriate and well-formatted external source, so a policy of "instantly nuke any unsourced statements" would have failed to catch this.
This was in no way an appropriate external source. It was, at very best, original research, but apparently it was not even that, but a flat out lie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=85665104&am...
I am sure you will agree with me that a link to a list of students, which did not even at that time contain the name, along with a link to a login page which is alleged to contain the name, does not constitute an "appropriate external source".
So I think you just didn't read it closely enough.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I am sure you will agree with me that a link to a list of students, which did not even at that time contain the name, along with a link to a login page which is alleged to contain the name, does not constitute an "appropriate external source".
_Obviously_ a link to a list of students that doesn't actually contain the name in question is a bad reference to support the statement that a person is a student there. It's a reference that doesn't support the statement, there a bad reference, but it's still a reference.
The problem is that this is not obvious unless one actually _checks_ the reference. This statement would not have been touched by a "nuke any unreferenced statements" policy, so it is not a good example to use in support of implementing any such policy.
On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:50:08 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
_Obviously_ a link to a list of students that doesn't actually contain the name in question is a bad reference to support the statement that a person is a student there.
Even if the name *was* on the list, it's *still* not a good source. It could be a different person by the same name, it could be a distance learning student, it could be a hoax, it could be a typo, it could be a mistake. Above all, it does not say that any of these people are actually students studying at the campus.
Guy (JzG)
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
Wow. Just wow. This is both exhilarating and frightening - exhilarating in that what we do on WP can have a tremendous effect on the world, and frightening in that in cases like this, this can be a tremendous negative effect.
I think raising the notability bar without moving our bios of living people offWP will be far too controversial and chaotic. I would be in favour of doc's proposal to create a separate wiki for living people - it could be a Wikia wiki or something run by WMF. The point is to divert this offWP so as to get people specialising in this sort of thing to make the policies for articles on living people. (Specialisation of labour seems to be a good idea here.) Then we will be free to raise the notability bar on WP as arbitrarily as we like without worrying that we will be getting rid of useful information.
Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.
Johnleemk
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.
Yeah but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs.
geni wrote:
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.
Yeah but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs.
Shouldn't cause a problem for stable versions, which I assume will at the very least not be flaggable by anonymous editors.
On 3/30/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
geni wrote:
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.
Yeah but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs.
Shouldn't cause a problem for stable versions, which I assume will at the very least not be flaggable by anonymous editors.
We don't have stable version.
geni wrote:
On 3/30/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
geni wrote:
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.
Yeah but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs.
Shouldn't cause a problem for stable versions, which I assume will at the very least not be flaggable by anonymous editors.
We don't have stable version.
No, but John was suggesting that when the feature is implemented it will help with this sort of thing. I thought your comment "but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs" was objecting to that, I couldn't see anything else it might be referring to.
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
Wow. Just wow. This is both exhilarating and frightening - exhilarating in that what we do on WP can have a tremendous effect on the world, and frightening in that in cases like this, this can be a tremendous negative effect.
I think raising the notability bar without moving our bios of living people offWP will be far too controversial and chaotic. I would be in favour of doc's proposal to create a separate wiki for living people - it could be a Wikia wiki or something run by WMF. The point is to divert this offWP so as to get people specialising in this sort of thing to make the policies for articles on living people. (Specialisation of labour seems to be a good idea here.) Then we will be free to raise the notability bar on WP as arbitrarily as we like without worrying that we will be getting rid of useful information.
How do you figure that raising the notability bar will not get rid of useful information? Raising the bar will lose useful articles depending on the criteria that are being used. It doesn't matter if it's located on WP or elsewhere.
Mgm
On 3/30/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
Wow. Just wow. This is both exhilarating and frightening - exhilarating
in
that what we do on WP can have a tremendous effect on the world, and frightening in that in cases like this, this can be a tremendous
negative
effect.
I think raising the notability bar without moving our bios of living people offWP will be far too controversial and chaotic. I would be in favour of doc's proposal to create a separate wiki for living people - it could be
a
Wikia wiki or something run by WMF. The point is to divert this offWP so as to get people specialising in this sort of thing to make the policies
for
articles on living people. (Specialisation of labour seems to be a good idea here.) Then we will be free to raise the notability bar on WP as arbitrarily as we like without worrying that we will be getting rid of useful information.
How do you figure that raising the notability bar will not get rid of useful information? Raising the bar will lose useful articles depending on the criteria that are being used. It doesn't matter if it's located on WP or elsewhere.
Mgm
Of course - what I meant is that we won't be deleting the content forever - we will be just outsourcing it to another wiki that specialises in bios because we aren't equipped to handle such articles, which probably need to be treated differently from other encyclopaedia articles anyway. When the subjects of these outsourced articles reach the bar set by WP for notability, we can just move them back to WP.
I think the bar for notability should be based on what our policies can handle without creating significant loopholes. I like the idea of limiting on-WP bios to only subjects with a biographical secondary source.
It's undeniable that such a policy would lead to useful articles moving off WP. But weighing the costs and benefits, it seems to me that BLPs (specifically living people who aren't famous enough to be on a few people's watchlists) are in a class of their own, and need special handling in a different wiki, which can specialise in solving the problem of writing and maintaining such bios.
Johnleemk
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
BLP won't solve that problem.
We have no shortage of articles that are not about living people that could cause diplomatic issues if an error in them spread beyond wikipedia. The various country X and weapons of mass destruction articles. The various articles on nuclear power plants . It would be fairly trivial to slip say "Russia has supplied plutonium from this reactor to Iran" into [[BN-600 reactor]]. not true of course but believable if you don't know the difference between selling fuel grade uranium (which Russia has offered to do) and selling plutonium.
Ripping out "person X is has some negative trait" from articles on schools and villages is another pretty common activity.
While articles on countries are rather better watched "this town is home to a bio weapons lab" could well get missed.
geni wrote:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
BLP won't solve that problem.
This is exactly the kind of negative information without valid sources that I am strongly encouraging people to remove on sight. So, except for unrealistic definitions of the word "solve", I think BLP does in fact help a great deal.
The notability bar is controversial enough as it is. Requiring the subject to have a published biography for example is a bad idea.
We shouldn't be punishing the people who follow the rules by using other reliable sources for the actions by people who refuse to follow the rules and don't use ANY sources at all. We should simply make it easier to remove or not post unsourced material in the first place and Stable versions will help with that.
Mgm
On 3/30/07, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I like the "raise the notability bar" idea that Doc has, and perhaps Slim Virgin's threshhold might be the right course. I recently stumbled into a biography stub on a person I would certainly have thought was not particularly notable. The article required about five minutes of work to clean up - and thought that would be the end of it. As it turns out, it was loaded with commercial links and open proxy editors (some of whom were apparently being paid to add the commercial links). So what started out to be a five minute project took several hours of work. I am sure there are thousands of articles like this, and it is demotivating to editors to have to work this hard to clean up an article that is of questionable value in the first place.
Risker
On 3/29/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration
committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long
as
they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people
who
resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before
it
comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Wouldn't really work though, because people would just add the problematic material in other articles. I don't have any bios on my watchlist these days, but still see additions of hearsay about celebs visiting cities and national parks, music video shoots in the desert, and the like.
Stan
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Stan Shebs wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Wouldn't really work though, because people would just add the problematic material in other articles. I don't have any bios on my watchlist these days, but still see additions of hearsay about celebs visiting cities and national parks, music video shoots in the desert, and the like.
Not to mention that incorrect information about living people is neither the only nor the most damaging sort of incorrect information we can have in our articles. The potentially most damaging and inflammatory information is generally incorrect allegations in articles relation to nationalist disputes. So, in addition to removing all biographies on living people, I'd suggest we remove all biographies on currently active disputes, recent wars, and of course currently extant countries, ethnic groups, and religions.
-Mark
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Delirium wrote:
Not to mention that incorrect information about living people is neither the only nor the most damaging sort of incorrect information we can have in our articles. The potentially most damaging and inflammatory information is generally incorrect allegations in articles relation to nationalist disputes. So, in addition to removing all biographies on living people, I'd suggest we remove all biographies on currently active disputes, recent wars, and of course currently extant countries, ethnic groups, and religions.
The difference is that ethnic disputes are widely discussed; the Wikipedia article is only a small part of the discussion and won't have much of an effect that thousands of books, magazines, and web pages can't.
For marginally notable people, Wikipedia may be the #1 source for information about that person.
On 3/29/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee
will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
I know, let's just shut Wikipedia down!
That would TOTALLY solve all our problems.
I hope that proposal was an early April Fool's.
On 3/29/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
I know, let's just shut Wikipedia down!
That would TOTALLY solve all our problems.
This is the problem, of course. We've developed this way of operating--we make mistakes eventually we, we fix them, it doesn't really matter. If I write something slanderously untrue about some guy 2,000 years dead, who cares? But when it comes time to deal with real people, who apply for jobs, get searched for on google (that fascinating new form of contemporary voyueurism), or whatever else, a mistake that lasts a day can be incredibly harmful. And when we decide to put our "wiki philosophy", or whatever the hell it is that you're appealing to here, ahead of the concerns of the people our articles effect, we've created a project many of us don't want anything to do with. And over the last few months, it's become very clear to me that many Wikipedians have exactly that order of priorities.
I guess that's why they put exit signs on doors.
Robth wrote:
On 3/29/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
I know, let's just shut Wikipedia down! That would TOTALLY solve all our problems.
This is the problem, of course. We've developed this way of operating--we make mistakes eventually we, we fix them, it doesn't really matter. If I write something slanderously untrue about some guy 2,000 years dead, who cares? But when it comes time to deal with real people, who apply for jobs, get searched for on google (that fascinating new form of contemporary voyueurism), or whatever else, a mistake that lasts a day can be incredibly harmful. And when we decide to put our "wiki philosophy", or whatever the hell it is that you're appealing to here, ahead of the concerns of the people our articles effect, we've created a project many of us don't want anything to do with. And over the last few months, it's become very clear to me that many Wikipedians have exactly that order of priorities.
I guess that's why they put exit signs on doors.
Also the exit doors swing out from public buildings. They have mechanisms that swing the door back shut when the person has exitted, and no outside handles to allow the door to be reopened.
Ec
On 3/30/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee
will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Sarah
Offering subjects to delete on request is a bad idea IMO. If they can't handle sourced criticism, we can't possibly have neutral articles on anyone. We should wait for stable versions and get some BIO patrol to vet new content before it goes live to avoid unsourced stuff ever entering the biography.
Mgm
On 3/30/07 1:13 AM, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Offering subjects to delete on request is a bad idea IMO. If they can't handle sourced criticism, we can't possibly have neutral articles on anyone.
The problem often is not that "they can't handle sourced criticism." The problem is that an article about a borderline-notable person consists of a stub written by a detractor, which contains nothing but negative minor minutia about their marriage or the one time they had a DUI, rather than what the person's actually done to be encyclopedic.
Adding positive sources does nothing to fix the problem - the problem is that their marriage or their DUI has absolutely nothing whatsoever with why they're encyclopedic. Biographies of living persons should not be scandal sheets. The details of personal lives - who they had an affair with, why they got fired from a job, etc. - are generally irrelevant and should not be on Wikipedia unless there is a compelling reason which makes those details encyclopedic.
We have too many people who spend too much time hunting down negative stuff to write about people who have Wikipedia articles, so that their articles can be "balanced." That is not balance - that is sensationalism. If someone's article reads like vanity, tone it down and clean it up - don't go Lexis-Nexis-searching for that one time he wound up in the local paper when he injured someone in a car wreck 20 years ago. That doesn't help the encyclopedia.
-Travis Mason-Bushman
On 3/30/07, Travis Mason-Bushman travis@gpsports-eng.com wrote:
On 3/30/07 1:13 AM, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Offering subjects to delete on request is a bad idea IMO. If they can't handle sourced criticism, we can't possibly have neutral articles on
anyone.
The problem often is not that "they can't handle sourced criticism." The problem is that an article about a borderline-notable person consists of a stub written by a detractor, which contains nothing but negative minor minutia about their marriage or the one time they had a DUI, rather than what the person's actually done to be encyclopedic.
Instead of giving subjects the option to have their article deleted, we should focus on developing rules about irrelevant unduly weighted criticism of the type you describe here.
On 30/03/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Instead of giving subjects the option to have their article deleted, we should focus on developing rules about irrelevant unduly weighted criticism of the type you describe here.
We have them - they're called [[WP:BLP]]. If people aren't following an existing rule, adding another rule isn't going to change that.
- d.
Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
On 3/30/07 1:13 AM, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Offering subjects to delete on request is a bad idea IMO. If they can't handle sourced criticism, we can't possibly have neutral articles on anyone.
The problem often is not that "they can't handle sourced criticism." The problem is that an article about a borderline-notable person consists of a stub written by a detractor, which contains nothing but negative minor minutia about their marriage or the one time they had a DUI, rather than what the person's actually done to be encyclopedic.
Simple deletion on request is not the way to go because it leaves the impression that such a request will work whenever the subject doesn't like the article. This has nothing to do with whether the article is good or bad, however those terms are defined. We delete articles because they are bad, not because the subject asked.
Adding positive sources does nothing to fix the problem - the problem is that their marriage or their DUI has absolutely nothing whatsoever with why they're encyclopedic. Biographies of living persons should not be scandal sheets.
Yes.
The details of personal lives - who they had an affair with, why they got fired from a job, etc. - are generally irrelevant and should not be on Wikipedia unless there is a compelling reason which makes those details encyclopedic.
More or less yes.
We have too many people who spend too much time hunting down negative stuff to write about people who have Wikipedia articles, so that their articles can be "balanced." That is not balance - that is sensationalism. If someone's article reads like vanity, tone it down and clean it up - don't go Lexis-Nexis-searching for that one time he wound up in the local paper when he injured someone in a car wreck 20 years ago. That doesn't help the encyclopedia.
What you describe is an eccentric view of NPOV: that an article which does not mention criticisms somehow fails the NPOV criterion. In reality people can still be encyclopedic without ever having done anything wrong.
Ec
Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
A strict approach to not allowing article subjects to edit articles about themselves only compounds the problem.
.Ec