Tannin, it seems "has changed lots of articles"
My word I have.
I have taken countless stubs and turned them into carefully researched, accurate and (dare I ray it) reasonably well-written articles.
Plus made lots of new ones.
In the last fortnight, I've driven well over 1000 kilometres especially to take pictures of flora and fauna for the 'pedia - and spent a considerable sum of money on it, I might add.
How about we make that phrase above "and Tannin has WRITTEN lots of articles", guys?
How many fauna articles have the people who suddenly have so much to say on this issue written and/or contributed to in a substantial way? Go on, I challenge you - list them here.
Here is *my* faunal Wikikarma. I suggest that readers go through the entries listed below looking for errors of fact, or horrible little stubs (you'll find a couple of stubs, no doubt, but only a couple, and *they* won't last for long).
ratites
emu
cassowary
kiwi
Little Penguin
Anseriformes
Anatidae
Freckled Duck
storm-petrel
Wedge-tailed Eagle
buzzards
bronzewing pigeons
Brolga
Pelecaniformes
Pelican
Australian Pelican
Ciconiiformes
Threskiornithidae
Megapodidae
Malleefowl
Blue Crane
R�ppell's Vulture
Southern Boobook
Psittaciformes
cockatoos
Lorikeets
Paradise Parrot
pygmy parrot
Southern Boobook
Caprimulgiformes
owlet-nightja
kingfisher
kookaburra
Piciformes
Maluridae
Tui
Pardalotidae
pardalote
Petroicidae
cisticola
Austrakian Magpie
currawong
Mudlark
White-winged Chough
lyrebird
Willie Wagtail
fantai
species
subspecies
Australian birds
Australasian birds
list of extinct Australian animals since 1788
Dasyuromorphia
Thylacine
Planigalinae
Long-tailed Planigale
Common Planigale
Phascogalinae
Numbat
marsupial mole
Tasmanian Devi
Peramelemorphia
bilby
Pig-footed Bandicoot
Diprotodontia
possum
Common Brushtail Possum
Honey Possum
Leadbeater's Possum
Sugar Glider
Feathertail Glider
diprotodon
macropod
kangaroo
Eastern Grey Kangaroo
Western Grey Kangaroo
Red Kangaroo
wallaroo
Parma Wallaby
tree kangaroo
Quokka
wombat
Koala
hopping mice
Fawn Hopping Mouse
Dusky Hopping Mouse
Spinifex Hopping Mouse
Dingo.
Platypus
echidna
Virginia Opossum
Monito del Monte
Aardvark
Carnivora
Procyonidae
shrew
otter
Black-footed Ferret
Hare
Short- finned Eel
whale
rorqual
beaked whale
Bryde's Whale
dolphin
skunk
jerboa
rat kangaroo
Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working conditions.
And those above are just the entries I have made *substantial* contributions to, never mind the many hundreds of smaller contributions. And I'm not even the most prolific contributor to the fauna section - Jim Frost outproduces me by a factor of two or three.
Have I changed lots of articles? Too right I have. That is what I am SUPPOSED to do here: change articles for the better. And that is exactly what I am doing, have been doing for months. Now, can we PLEASE have some peace and quiet so that I can go do more of it?
Tony
(Tannin)
From: "Tony Wilson" list@redhill.net.au Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 02:55:50 +1000 To: "WikiEN" wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Tannin, it seems, has changed lots of articles
Tannin, it seems "has changed lots of articles"
rat kangaroo
Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working conditions.
And those above are just the entries I have made *substantial* contributions to, never mind the many hundreds of smaller contributions. And I'm not even the most prolific contributor to the fauna section - Jim Frost outproduces me by a factor of two or three.
Have I changed lots of articles? Too right I have. That is what I am SUPPOSED to do here: change articles for the better. And that is exactly what I am doing, have been doing for months. Now, can we PLEASE have some peace and quiet so that I can go do more of it?
Good work, but that still doesn't give you the final word.
Fred
Tony Wilson wrote:
Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working conditions.
Nobody is denying your productivity, but disagreeing with you hardly qualifies as an "attack" - it's just a disagreement, one among the many that are inevitable in a large group of people with disparate opinions. If you're mistaken in your position, then changing lots of articles is not making them better, it's making them worse, so it should always be a fair question to ask about the authority justifying those changes, just as we do for history, and higher taxa, and other tricky subjects. As I'm sure you know, part of scholarly discourse is identifying points of contention and talking about the evidence for and against, and outside of the bird arena, which is known to be a special case, I have yet to see anything that requires wholesale capitalization of species' common names. We're having good discussion on the naming conventions page though, and I hope that will continue until we have a solid result.
I don't much care about the outcome either way, but without a convention based on authority so great that no rational person would ever dare challenge, the argument is going to come up over and over. In fact it will likely get worse, if we succeed in attracting large number of new editors and are not able to convince them all to go along with the established conventions.
Stan
On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Tony Wilson wrote:
Have I changed lots of articles? Too right I have. That is what I am
SUPPOSED to do here: change articles for the better. And that is exactly what I am doing, have been doing for months. Now, can we PLEASE have some peace and quiet so that I can go do more of it?
It is good work, but a wiki is not the place to work if you want peace and quiet either for you or for your work... ;)
Seriously, on a wiki, everyone is going to be nosing through stuff that other people have contributed all the time, making edits to it, and some you'll agree with, and some you won't, and well that's just the way it is round here. Sometimes you just have to live with things that you don't like. You should relax, and try to enjoy the wonderful collaborative experience, and not get angry about it. :)
Some people seem to have the attitude that the area of articles that they work on in somehow "theirs", and that other people who don't generally work in that area should keep their hands off them. I don't think that this is at all in keeping with the Wikipedia spirit. Articles are meant for the whole community of potential Wikipedia users - which basically means everyone with Internet access.
Obviously, people who work in specialist areas and have all the specialist publications are going to be, by and large, the people that know most about those areas, and contribute most to the articles in those areas. But they are not writing *for* specialists in those areas, and so if non-specialists say they would like the information presented differently, then the specialists should listen to them.
This isn't about asking for the facts to be changed in these articles, but some people would clearly prefer it if the way those facts are presented were changed. The capitalisation issue is just a presentation thing, and should be decided by the Wikipedia community as a whole, and not just by the people who work on those articles.
If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal the "Aardvark", and the majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then the majority of our potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So that's what our usual naming convention says that *we* should call it, too. We shouldn't make special cases just for one particular group of people without a better reason than just because that's how they do it themselves.
The case of the Green Gorbalwarbler may be a special case, because we need to disambiguate it from just any old green gorbalwarbler (I gather there are eight species). But I think that for common names of animals that have unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people, then we should use those unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people.
Now, where did I put my protective suit? ;)
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
--- Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote:
If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal the "Aardvark", and the majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then the majority of our potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So that's what our usual naming convention says that *we* should call it, too. We shouldn't make special cases just for one particular group of people without a better reason than just because that's how they do it themselves. Oliver
If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS", should we? "DOS" means *any* disc operating system, even certain versions of Linux. And same with IM. In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no information whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter. We just need to be consistant. In my opinion, we should be scientific and capitalise when we are talking about a specific species (like Bald Eagle), but not when talking about general, non-scientific general things (like eagle).
--LittleDan
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS", should we? "DOS" means *any* disc operating system, even certain versions of Linux.
Well, I did make a qualification:
"animals that have unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people"
Note the word "unambiguous". If there is a term which means different things to different people, we should mention those different things in the article for that term. In [[DOS]], we should mention that "DOS" is often used to refer to MS-DOS, as indeed we do. But this is getting away from the point...
In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no information whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter. We just need to be consistant. In my opinion, we should be scientific
Ahem. Being scientific is following the [[scientific method]]. It has nothing to do with orthography.
and capitalise when we are talking about a specific species (like Bald Eagle), but not when talking about general, non-scientific general things (like eagle).
As I pointed out to Tannin, this would require calling dogs "Dogs" throughout the whole Wikipedia. Even he admitted that that "looks funny". But that's what you'd have to do for consistency.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
At 01:34 PM 6/4/2003, you wrote:
--- Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote:
If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal the "Aardvark", and the majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then the majority of our potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So that's what our usual naming convention says that *we* should call it, too. We shouldn't make special cases just for one particular group of people without a better reason than just because that's how they do it themselves. Oliver
If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS", should we? "DOS" means *any* disc operating system, even certain versions of Linux. And same with IM. In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no information whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter. We just need to be consistant. In my opinion, we should be scientific and capitalise when we are talking about a specific species (like Bald Eagle), but not when talking about general, non-scientific general things (like eagle).
--LittleDan
Yes, I agree. I think we have a responsibility to use the more correct name.... *cough* [[Talk:Occam's Razor]] *cough*
I actually have no opinion on this bird issue, I just wanted a chance to dig up and old battle that I lost and try to win it anew. ;)
----- Dante Alighieri dalighieri@digitalgrapefruit.com
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of great moral crisis." -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 17:11, Dante Alighieri wrote:
Yes, I agree. I think we have a responsibility to use the more correct name.... *cough* [[Talk:Occam's Razor]] *cough*
I actually have no opinion on this bird issue, I just wanted a chance to dig up and old battle that I lost and try to win it anew. ;)
The whole problem is that "correct" is not an objective term. We can have a wokring definition which we follow within the confines of Wikipedia, but need to recognize it as such. Our working definition has been by and large pretty conservative, but flexible. Which seems to me to be reasonable.