2009/8/7 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com>om>: We should really be giving publication date (which usually equates to print date, if only because the newspapers fudge it accordingly) anyway, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. If someone's quoting news stories without saying where they're from, hit them. ;-) It's interesting to note that we don't tend to find this with scholarly sources - I don't think I've ever noticed anyone removing JSTOR links or the like because "I can't see them", whilst people *will* happily remove links to commercially locked news stories. I think the expectation there is that we are used to one being restricted-access, but we expect the other to be accessible, so if it's not we assume something's wrong or it ought to be replaceable. If news goes routinely to paid-access, well, we'll change our expectations accordingly! More broadly, there's a good side and a bad side to this. The bad side, yes, a lot of our existing references will break, and it'll be a bit harder to write good, robustly cited, articles in the future. On the plus side, it might help wean us off an over-reliance on news stories and (often slapdash) journalism as our preferred sources, and that's got to be beneficial. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Gwern Branwen wrote: I don't think that Murdoch's proposal is viable in the long run. Who will be wanting to pay for so much ephemeral material. What would it say of readers who bind themselves to one site because that is all they can afford only one subscription? How are they to know that they are not being told about alternative perspectives on the same story? I think that the entire news reporting industry is in deep trouble, and that citizen journalism and crowdsourcing have not yet built up the strength and credibility to pick up the slack. Ec

2009/8/7 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com>om>: Reuters to Murdoch and AP: "Go ahead and kill yourselves. Idiots.": http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-believe-in-the-link-eco… - d.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 9:09 PM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, I'm inclined to believe the link economy works.... with a caveat after the next paragraph. I'm surprised that I get some full stories in my Google RSS Reader: I have little to no reason to visit the site. I wonder why they allow this. OK, if it's a Blogspot thing and the person writing doesn't seek ad revenue, understandable. But some of the posts I see in the reader ARE funded by ads, yet they give me everything I need in order to avoid them. Weird. And this is the "after" para: I use AdBlock in Firefox. I can't remember the last time I saw an advert on a site. An animated one, at least. Sometimes I feel bad about this. But it makes me feel a lot less bad than trying to read with an animation in my peripheral vision.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Surreptitiousness<surreptitious.wikipedian(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Apparently the people that work on The Guardian have a long-standing enmity with the people that work for The Observer. So perhaps, in that little world of internal politics, whoever has their hands on the purse strings is on The Guardian's side. I haven't read these links, I've just been hearing the story here and there, but you can find out more through (maybe, somewhat ironically) through Google News: http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&ned=uk&cf=all&ncl=d4Ouas3…

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Charles Matthews<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: ...unless it's a BLP, right?

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Charles Matthews<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Looks like you're right. You know there's a bit of text that appears when you're in editing mode between the edit window and the 'submit' button? I seemed to remember that it said something different when you edit a BLP than when you edit say 'donkey' or 'saucer'. But it doesn't. Don't know where I got that idea from.

I agree, every bit helps. As for ignoring issue: I have a (somewhat badly formatted) edit notice telling people to please use the {{talkback}} temp, and sign/date their message. I finally put a message behind my user name telling people to use the {{talkback}} temp, since I suspected some people weren't even looking at my talk page, never mind edit it, and new people still don't sign their message. *sigh* Any solution for BLPs? Emily On Aug 7, 2009, at 9:52 AM, KillerChihuahua wrote:

David Goodman wrote: Quite. But then the traditional solution has been ... compile an encyclopedia (since the 17th century). The cream of scholarly info without all the underlying scholarship. The fact that we have extremes of scepticism, often driven by divisive or ideological or partisan starting points, should not eclipse the fact that _we_ offer a solution to the inequities of access to basic information. As they say, if not us, who? Those of us who have been around here a while have seen the ultra-verificationist perspective spread out from the most vexed areas to appear as a problem all over the 'pedia. (Not without justification.) But let's keep things the right way round: if we post the facts, and they are verifiable, and the verifying sources are behind subscription walls, the readers are still better off than without the info. Charles

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:20 PM, FT2<ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Nicely done, sir. Yes, as someone who patrols Recent Changes using Huggle [[WP:HUGGLE]] I come across "referenced" edits that turn out, when you click the attached link, not to tally with the statement at all. For example, a recent one I saw I knew looked funny from the outset in that the statement was quite specific but the citation was to the too general sounding www.f1.com (the front page of the Grand Prix website). I searched to see if I could drill down and confirm and replace the citation but failed. I will be in a world of frustration and hurt if I am confronted with "please subscribe for $5 to access this article". I wouldn't *remove* the citation because, as a previous poster indicated, my failure to access is not cause to disregard "good faith". That's an interesting idea. Could work. I have a feeling they might ask us to sacrifice Wikinews and stop covering current events as their price, though. I would if I were them. Wikinews is not only direct competition but it does (and don't hate me for this) leech off all their sources. I see no good reason why they should support their potential competition, no matter how tiddly Wikinews is in terms of online news. Wikinews might have to be the sacrificial goat. We may have to say goodbye to great articles like Hurricane Katrina and say that we'll create articles that refer to things 12 months gone.

2009/8/8 <wjhonson(a)aol.com>om>: Not at all. Quite expensive limited-run books or journals are suitable for citation if they're good sources; the same would apply to news articles. - d.

2009/8/8 <wjhonson(a)aol.com>om>: That still smells like a novel constraint. Though I do agree it's way less than as verifiable as I'd like. - d.

You have completely ignored the requirement that I am here *solely* referring to items which live, online, behind subscription walls. If the item is free, then it does not. So that removes the majority of your counter-argument. -----Original Message----- From: Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 4:55 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 12:44 AM, <wjhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: I'm sorry, you've completely and utterly confused me... so let's look: But many articles could live exclusively online AND be free (free to WP readers, the advertiser is paying). stay. But the verbosity could be a trick. I'll pretend you didn't say verbosity. I'l l pretend you said "specified". But I think we hit a very big problem here. It's one thing to patrol Recent Changes. It's quite another to print out "referenced" edits from the last 5 minutes at Recent Changes and... well, good luck trying to find all the material: and when you *have* there will have been another 30,000 items in Recent Changes. limited WHAT!? What's WRONG with finding the material at the link!? Provided it's a Reliable Source? Weird. I think I'm far from lazy. But I can't understand your methodology at all. I think I must be grossly misunderstanding what you're saying, because I have no doubt that you're - like me - trying to do everything for the best. But I can't follow your logic. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

You're right. Several years ago, we had discussed this very issue. That nothing "free" is really free is you have to pay to travel *to* it. IIRC we basically agreed that traveling about, is just part of your normal life. Perhaps the advent of the internet people's only recourse to "free sources" was to go to the library. Using that as our basement, we can truly state that we're not making it harder than it was. We're making it easier, in most cases, or even just in some cases. On the other balancing arm, we're creating a work with thousands of footnotes, which may be difficult to verify. Most people will be able to verify some of them. Some people will be able to verify most of them. But probably nobody is going to be able to verify all of them. So there you go. Now what? At some point, we had a project page where you could list your services to do lookups in various sources. I don't really know if that got a head of steam or died the death of obscurity. I thought I had posted myself there, but I've never gotten a request for anything. However, that might solve the problem. I personally don't like the idea of requesting or requiring a wikipedian to upload images of their source. It sounds an awful lot like that would violate licensing agreements here and there. And possibly copyright issues. *However* perhaps we could create a tag, coincidental with20{{fact}} something like {{verify?}} which would cross over to a page like "Verification Requests By Date". Any established Wikipedia could take a request, do the lookup, and clear the tag. It is entirely possible that the number of requests would swamp the number of clearances, but it's a possible solution. I'd be willing to clear say five or ten a day. Will Johnson -----Original Message----- From: Bod Notbod &lt;bodnotbod(a)gmail.com&gt; To: English Wikipedia &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 6:12 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:04 AM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: I'm honestly not trying to ignore any point. But that does not mean that I am not ignorant. It's been a long day. But I guess what you're referring to is this bit of what you said: If that's the case (and I'm by no m eans sure), then you didn't mention (or, perhaps, reiterate) subscription walls. And that's where I got confused. < pauses for thought > Yes, I think you felt that the 'subscription wall' bit went without saying because of the context of the argument, but I just took you as if your words were in a new realm. Still, it raises another interesting question... My local library may be free. With access to microfilm for the newspaper archives. But my local bus fair is £2. And I need a bus to get to the library. And back. So that's £4. Murdoch's subscription might charge me 10 pence to look at the article. But anyway... I'm taking us very off track. I'm sorry, I did misunderstand you. I see where you're aiming at now. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Yes! There I am! # A Brief History of Byzantium Wjhonson (talk) 04:35, 7 February 2008 (UTC) So I wasn't dreaming it. And here is the "request a lookup page" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Resource_Exchange/Resour… This page however seems to be "can you find me anything more about subject X" as opposed to "Can you look in publication Y and tell me if it says Z?" This is a great resource evidently, but we couldn't hijack it for verification purposes I'd think. Will Johnson -----Original Message----- From: Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; To: English Wikipedia &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 6:33 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:27 AM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: <snip> services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Resource_Exchange The shortcuts to remember are WP:RESOURCE and WP:LIBRARY. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe=2 0from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:27 AM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: Now, that works for me. FT2

The below was a reply to "As far as when to remove citations to subscription web-sites and when to leave them intact as convenience links, I use the following rule: Part A or 1) *If* the article lives exclusively online, then it gets removed. We should not be requiring or pandering for, commercial activity, we as verifiers should have a choice in the matter. There must always be a "free" alternative of some sort." from will johnson David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 9:38 PM, David Goodman&lt;dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:30 PM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: I think that's somewhat naive. I found a new article the other day and it was all about this guy who was described as "the greatest child genius the world has ever seen". There was a long list of verifications although not enough to cover most of the points made in the article. I smelled a rat and stuck a "hoax" banner on it. There was (IIRC) one editor. There were pictures. The citations were all to books with no online click-thru. The whole thing just smelled wrong. I wish I could remember the article now... Just combed back through my last 500 contribs. Can't find it. If an article had been deleted would it disappear from my contribs? I guess what I'm saying is: it's quite easy to "make up" a book. But perhaps I'm wrong in that. You mention "worldcat.org"... it's not something I'm familiar with: is it your sense that worldcat.org is comprehensive enough to rumble invented books? And even if it is... could I not just choose an obscure book at random and attribute a claim to it?

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 12:52 AM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: OK, thank you. I expect I'll be spending a lot of time on that site: it might give me some ideas of stuff I can find at Gutenburg and Librivox. I think my other problem still stands though: misrepresenting (inventing!) what a book says in pretty good knowledge that I won't be found out. And, hey, if I were an anonymous user, what do I care anyway? I suppose I should say: like my email address, I'm User:Bodnotbod. Nice to meet you.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:15 AM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: It's not a great problem I've found patrolling Recent Changes. I see a lot of people changing numeric things like sports player's stats. I loathe sport. So when someone changes an 8 to a 9 I think.... "aaargh". But [[WP:Huggle]] allows you to retrieve the contributions and you often find the previous three contribs are: "Suck my cock!" "Is Yo Mama!!!" and "This stinks ass!!!" So I change the 9 back to an 8 and leave in the edit summary "bad faith user making numeric edit." Sorry, I'm getting off the point: we're talking about /referenced vandalism/... hopefully we don't get too much of that. I fear the really sneaky guy, though. Most anons are very transparent and easy to deal with.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:31 AM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: Agreed. The average vandal doesn't look at policy. They simply look at a page and want to mess with it in some way. Oftentimes it's just writing their name or swearing. I'm telling you stuff you already know... And if it's not in worldcat.org. As you say. Yeah, fair enough. I think it's just that sometimes I think "what would I do if I really wanted to fuck with Wikipedia?" But I've been with the project for 4 years or more. And someone that just wants to make mischief is hardly going to want to spend 4 researching how to piss off an important project. And *even* *if* *they* did*... I guess there would be that *one* *wrong* *move* that would lead to *all* of their previous edits being examined. I think I'm just being overprotective and paranoid. I am a paranoid person: I even have a prescription. Seriously, alas. I care about Wikipedia. Huggle shows me all the time how people piss about with it. But I have little to no indication that anyone's buggering about with references. And in all my years of working on WP I've only bumped into one user that went to ArbCom (and got soundly castigated). Thinking about my experiences patrolling Recent Changes most changes are made to current figures. It's never "Physics" or "Plato" it will tend to be about a local High School or a current rapper or sports team. I shall try to sleep soundly tonight.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 12:44 AM, Bod Notbod&lt;bodnotbod(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Yes. 05:24, 30 July 2009 David Eppstein (talk | contribs | block) deleted "James Cornelius Leach" ‎ (G3: Vandalism: Blatant hoax with possible G10 aspects) By the way, you have a very scary picture on your user page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bodnotbod Carcharoth

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Bod Notbod&lt;bodnotbod(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It is the third or fourth page I've see where someone's posted a picture of themselves drunk. I read in the newspaper that this sort of thing is very common now, on Facebook as well and other places. Not to make myself seem too old (I'm only in my early 30s) it does seem, well, strange! :-) As I saw someone else say - why not pictures of people doing some charity work or on holiday, or doing some useful community service. That would get you barnstars! BTW, did you see the link I posted in the other post? That hoax article was "real", just the wrong name. Carcharoth

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:12 AM, Carcharoth&lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, the intro is. Definitely. Then I think the hoaxer played around with the other bits, probably adding in his own biography (or that of a friend). Then made up all the references too (which were not clickable). How can you see those things then? Is that admin power or are you higher than that? Bodnotbod

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Carcharoth&lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: Thanks Carcharoth. I was curious. Yes, I think of becoming an admin. But there's so much work to do without being one... Do you get the sense that wp:en *needs* more admins? If not, I'm happy where I am, really.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:46 AM, FT2&lt;ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, it really truly does. I hadn't thought about in those terms. Looking at it that way, I don't think I need to be an admin to do my stuff. As you say, if you're constantly butting up against situations where not having the admin powers leads to frustration, then go for it. But I haven't felt that way yet. When I give a user a warning beyond their final one I notice they get blocked very quickly. I can't ask for more than that. Before tonight I hadn't had a situation where I wanted to look at a deleted article, so one time in four years doesn't seem worth making a big change for. Thanks FT2.

I'm not really seeing any solution in your words. Would you then change policy to state that if an item is behind a subscription wall, then it cannot be cited at all, regardless of whether others can access it freely (with an existing subscription, library card, or on site). Is that what you'd propose? If not, then what? Regardless of how many items go behind a subscription wall (provided there is also a non-subscription way to access them in some manner), there will always be some who have the subscription. In those cases, the online link is only a convenience for those who can use it. Will Johnson -----Original Message----- From: FT2 &lt;ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; To: English Wikipedia &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 5:21 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:30 PM, &lt;wjhonson(a)aol.com&gt; wrote: specify "published" should Bora Agree with facts, disagree with conclusions. Policy exists to serve the project. So we can't argue "from policy" on this one, the aim is still high quality content and policy is still the ever-evolving way to get it. At present a high proportion of cites are checkable online. Not all, but enough to be viable if a proportion are not. Change that, and it may no longer be viable, because too many cites will be not readily checkable. The issue I'd expect is much more, mis-citing - statements not in the text, or mischaracterized, that linger weeks or months because now click-and-check isn't operational and very few people will look up "New York Times 19 July 2009 P.4B" (however theoretically they can find a copy) whereas many would click the link. So the /policy/ (if its in principle verifiable then it's fine) would not adequately support the /project need/ (mis cites can usually be detected fairly quickly in practice) and it would be policy that needed to change. FT2 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 1:21 AM, FT2&lt;ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Same applies to references to books. Those only get checked thoroughly when the article reaches featured article candidacy status. And I shudder to think of the duplicated effort in checking references. It would be great if you could look through an article and see that 5 people you trusted had ticked off most of the references as "verified". You could then check the rest, plus spot that some vandal who managed to get the "permissions level" had wrongly marked a bogus reference as "verified". Trouble is, that sort of system (kind of a "flagged revisions" for references) would be rather complicated. Carcharoth

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Bod Notbod &lt;bodnotbod(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Thing is, I expect most people don't keep newspapers, but people do have plenty of books, easily accessible in libraries and in their homes (and easy to buy). I don't know the case for other people, but in my "local" library old local newspapers are kept on microfilm, which makes accessing them really tedious, especially if you don't know when whatever you're looking for occurred. At least books are generally easily accessible. Newspapers more often than not are chucked away by most people, which makes citing them difficult if News Corp does this and other news sites follow suit. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

Carcharoth wrote: Newspapers (especially local ones) remain most useful and reliable on things that don't get into books. They are often information that is not controversial at all. Obituaries, for example, may be the only way to establish that an author has died when we are researching the copyright status of his works. Sometimes local circumstances about a national issue are completely ignored by the wider circulation press. Newspapers can more easily distort information they receive from press services. This can be done quite innocently as a style improvement that changes the meaning of the information. Ec

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ray Saintonge wrote: You've tested this? :-) - -- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

I have access to a newspaper library through my library card, don't other Wikipedians have a similar access, or at least realise such things exist? This idea that newspapers will lose utility as a source if they go behind pay-walls is a non-starter as far as I can make out, because that would imply we stop spourcing from books that people can't readily access, which would rule out huge swathes of stuff. And anyone who removes a source because they can not access it wants shooting, you ask me.

Cary Bass wrote: My wife wishes I hadn't so often. Ec