On 10/3/09, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ok, here's a hypothetical. Let's say out of any twenty given AfD's that close as "delete", it turns out we get one "wrong". Is that acceptable? Deletion is hardly the end of the world in itself... Steve

Come join the talk at deletion review if you think its so easy to restore articles. People cant even se ethem to work on without asking an administrator. (though there are some, including myself, who will always userify for a good faith editor). I think it's more likely that of the 20, not 1, but 10 could be rescued--and some have already been, in some cases by merging. Of the contested afds, I think that's probably the proportion. since we keep fewer than half of the contested ones, we are losing the potential for 50 articles a day, 18,000 a year. I do not consider that trivial. The deletion of improvable articles because the small number of participants at AfD who are interested and willing to rescue them is one of the reasons for people losing the interest in Wikipedia. Who after all actually wants to come to articles for deletion, but those who want to delete articles. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: I realize it isn't one of your options, but if I really had such a crack team? I'd dispatch them to AfD. A crack team can only do so much, and is limited. But if each member can be responsible for making an editor's experience better, for being the cause of an editor staying and not leaving in a huff because some people unfamiliar with his pet subject didn't like the few sources he had thrown together, then that's a big multiplier. AfD is exactly the area where a crack researcher can zoom over, see what 'looks' valid yet not very good, and drop some 5000lb bombs of references and citations down onto the delete votes. All the other areas are ones where effort would be repaid with no multipliers. In a way, if an article hasn't been created on an old topic yet (your red links, your topic lists), then that alone shows it isn't important. Likewise, if a longstanding article needs work, then doesn't its longstandingness show that it isn't apparently all *that* awful because someone would've fixed it up if it was so bad and they cared about it? Worse is Better. Nobody will think better of Wikipedia if some old article gets a dozen references and some tags removed. But the editors of an article *will* remember it if an angel swooped in and saved their article and laid the groundwork for improvements. -- gwern

In reality, we have actual editors, with their own interests, and it is very difficult to get them to work on anything but what they want to work on, especially for things that need a serious referencing effort beyond the googles. Most of them do have access to a library with at least some books and some commercial databases, but it's proven almost impossible to persuade them to use anything beyond arm's reach--or to even use what material their local library has put within arms reach to its community. Many of the topics not presently included are very important--I came here primarily to work on some of them, before I got diverted to immediate rescues--and now just defending articles long enough to let people rescue them. If prospective deletors did follow WP:BEFORE, we could free up the half-dozen or so people who now mainly do fixes on articles that should have been improved, rather than nominated for deletion, but this is many fewer people than are needed The only effective way to get these topics worked on is to attract users who want to work on them. Some of the other language Wikipedias seem to have been more successful in this regard. Perhaps they have a friendlier attitude towards article writers and a more mature environment, or perhaps article writers in those communities are more willing to write in a way that does not display ownership and arouse hostility from other editors. Discouraging the people who want to work on popular culture will just discourage those who might develop into editors on other topics also. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Oh. OK, then, I'm fine with it being '(d)' if you are. Shh - don't tell the deletionists that! I would say, as a general approximation over more than 3 million articles, my assertions are more true than false. Important articles, with lots of traffic, will tend to fix up important issues (with enough eyes...); that's the wiki model. If you care about the latter, you will prioritize the former. Which came first, the editor or the reader? Readers go wherever Google & other readers tell them to go, and that's where maintained content is. How do you get maintained content? Editors. Take care of the editors, and the readers will follow. Same ultimate goal (the point of the wiki is to be *used* after all, not play nomic), but very different emphasis in the means. -- gwern

At 04:34 AM 10/8/2009, Ray Saintonge wrote: For a while, I would try to fix articles that I thought could be rescued, then I noticed that sometimes, too often, finding reliable source had no effect at all on the discussion, and, in spite of hours of work finding sources and thus improving the article, it would be deleted. Writing an article that meets the high standards of scrutiny that are often applied at AfD can be a lot of work. The wiki model was that, you know about a subject, you write an article, at least that was half of it. The other half was someone went to a library and created an insane number of half-assed articles that were sourced, all right, but written, too often, by someone who didn't understand the topic.... Ideally, these two streams would merge and articles that were good to someone who knows the subject would also be sourced, but if the article is deleted first, the process can't happen. The original wiki model didn't even contemplate deletion beyond what Sarsaparilla/Absidy/etc. called "Pure Wiki Deletion." Which is simply blanking, an ordinary editorial decision, leaving everyone free to see the article who wants to. I gave up. Eventually I came across a controversial topic that particularly interested me, where I had the background to understand the sources and where my research radically changed my mind. So I started working on it, I even bought a pile of books about it (on all sides of the controversy), and a major recent and very expensive mainstream work on it was donated to me, and I became much more vulnerable as a result, since I now had an opinion and a POV, based on reading the sources, and I started asserting content based on the most reliable of the sources, especially peer-reviewed secondary source. The information necessary for my major shift of POV is much more than most editors could absorb with some light reading. There exist secondary sources that cover the field that, if editors would trust them, would make it easy, but .... they don't trust these sources, even when published by independent, non-fringe publishers, since what they say contradicts the easy positions of ignorance. After all, doesn't everybody with a background in science know....? Reliable source guidelines, if followed, would address the problem, but are useless against entrenched opinion, because editors will invent this or that excuse for disregarding them, so that the article doesn't fall into their view of undue weight. So ... I'm no longer a Wikipedia editor, I'm now working off-wiki, with real knowledge and research in the field that interested me, and, as well, on the kind of voluntary structure that I see as the only way out of trap that Wikipedia has fallen into. It's much easier, though, of course, it all takes time. I still have an account, and the block will expire, and I'm not burning any bridges, but .... once I realize that a wall definitely exists, I don't butt my head against it. I walk around it or dig under it or climb over it, if I actually want to get to the other side, or I do something else.

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 11:46 AM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: Good point. I've often thought something like 'jury duty' for newcomers, after your first few weeks editing but before you stop being flagged as a 'newb' by the site software, might involve a few days of sharing your common sense at AfD. Though I still like the idea of changing the name to Articles for Review, encouraging eveyryone who likes cleanup to hang out there, and turning AfD into the much faster-process group that figures out /how/ to properly delete articles that have no other option. [so anyone could close an AfR discussion, but only people with delete rights could close AfD; they'd have to know how to decide whether or not to delete talk pages, &c &c. ] Ryan Delaney opines: Now that's a lovely perennial idea. There's no point in hard deleting any article save to protect private information in the history. You can pure wiki delete; or even pure wiki delete and protect the blank page; but removing the work done from view of interested passers-by is wholly unnecessary. SJ

Ryan Delaney wrote: The main argument is rationalisation: if you ever thought that it was a valid idea to rationalise the scope of the project at any point, you'd probably start with the thought that with hundreds of thousands of articles deleted every year and most of that material being at best thoroughly marginal to what we are trying to do, then (you might argue that) having it all around is on balance not really helpful. So against that you can argue that WP doesn't need rationalisation of any kind: it can just go on growing how it likes given the resources. People seem to draw their own conclusions on this debate. Mine are based largely on the kind of focus or lack of it you see in people who want to search through those millions of deleted words, rather than anything else they could be trawling through. Charles

Ryan Delaney wrote: Wiktionary meaning (3) for "rationalization" is "A reorganization of a company or organization in order to improve its efficiency." Which of course is sometimes euphemistic. More detail in [[rationalization (economics)]], which seems to me also to be more tendentious in what it is saying. I was mainly thinking of the kind of discussion where you try to draw the line between "bells and whistles" and "core activities". Charles

Ryan Delaney wrote [[Wikipedia:Pure wiki deletion system]] says various things, including that it is unclear why deletion is not reversible. (I'd say that is clear enough.) But however you formulate the discussion about blanking pages versus deletion, what you end up talking about is various databases within the database. The current "solution" is roughly that there are a public database "articles for creation" that is held outside the main namespace, and a database of deleted pages (histories in some cases purged by the OverSight tool) accessible by admins. My comment really was that if we had the further "database" of some millions of "blanked" pages, most of which was admittedly junk, and some of which would certainly be at least as troubling for BLP reasons as the live pages considering that it might concern many thousands of people who are not "notable" and yet about whom we make postings available, we might be having the discussion the other way round: wouldn't it just be easier to concentrate on what we are good at, making encyclopedia articles on topics that can support them? We now live on Wikipedia, I think, with a fuller consciousness of our finite if very large human resources, and (at least as I see it) the "pure wiki" approach is mainly a distraction from the mission "write the encyclopedia". Hence my use of the term "rationalisation" for the attitude that we should very much focus on the core mission. Charles

Ryan Delaney wrote: I wasn't saying we shouldn't discuss deletion process: I think in fact we should probably look at why PROD is underused. I think that having the deleted articles off the site (unless you're an admin) does make people not spend time looking at deleted material that has an intriguing title but isn't worth reading, an activity that would probably involve a great deal of duplicated effort. I simply disagree with (b) - it seems like a proponent's view, and the history of the relevant project page seems to indicate that most people lost interest in 2006 (when BLP began to loom). Like I say, you seem to be arguing from a rather lonely perspective here. Cha

I freely admit I have an issue with fictional categories. I find them somewhat in the face of what categorisation was intended to do, or at least my thoughts on what it was intended to do, which was to classify as unambiguously and as relevantly as possible. I'm prompted into this steam-letting by the discovery that Schrödinger's cat is categorised as a fictional cat. I'm half tempted to slap a citation needed on that one. It's an interesting conundrum which for me highlights the issues with categorising fictional elements. It's a problem I guess we at the comics project face more than some, although not as often as others. It has been a battle avoiding category bloat on Batman especially. The problem is where to stop. We have characters by nationality, which to me seems absurd since you find Mandarin (comics) nestling in Category:English people because his mother was English. Now sidestepping the fact that a fictional character doesn't exist, let alone have a mother, how can we know this character identifies as English? Gosh darn it's a tricky beast. One day I'll write an essay on the matter. Apologies for ranting. Now, can someone set up a bot which will add or remove Schrödinger's cat to the fictional cat category every other day please.

David Goodman wrote: The point I am making is more that this is a dangerous path we are on. I would have no difficulty providing a source that Santa Claus or God etc are a fiction. However, given that Schrödinger's cat is categorised in Category:Thought experiments, what does Category:Fictional cats add to the article, and should string theory or string (physics) therefore be categorised in Category:Fictional science? I think we need to be very careful what we categorise when it comes to fiction, and what we are mixing up in our categories which categorise things which are fictive and things which are theoretical. Schrödinger's cat does not exist in a work of fiction, it exists, as you say, in a theroetical argument, which is different from a work of fiction. Another good example is Higgs bosun, or whatever it is that big collider can't find. Mind you, I notice The Lady, or the Tiger? is in Category:Fictional tigers, although not in Category:Fictional females, which implies there are even more flaws in the system.Especially when The Monkey and the Hunter avoids both Category:Fictional monkeys and Category:Fictional hunters. Hope I've better outlined the issue as I see it.

Schroedinger's cat very definitely is fictitious; it's not an experiment you can actually do and get an alive/dead cat that you can actually see, you would get either an alive cat, or a dead cat. The Higgs boson is supposed to be a *real* particle; it is not fictitious, it is hypothetical, it's believed to exist, and there's an experiment under way to attempt to find it. Thought experiments can be about fictitious items or real items, just because it's in a thought experiment doesn't make it fictitious or not. On 04/11/2009, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- -Ian Woollard

On 04/11/2009, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Schrodinger's cat is a fictitious cat that is in the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. It is fictitious because it is not a factual cat; it is countrafactual. It is notably in "Schroedinger's cat" thought experiment. That's what a thought experiment is; it's a made up story about what would happen if you did X,Y,Z which is used to illuminate aspects of physics. -- -Ian Woollard

Ian Woollard wrote: I would be inclined toward keeping it in the category, but mostly because of subsequent references in works of science fiction. In common usage there is a tendency to ignore the difference between "fictitious" and "fictional". With reference to the original concept of Schrodinger's cat it is fictitious because it is imaginary; it is not fictional because it is not part of a work of fiction. Ec

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes...but we don't have an article about "Schrodinger's cat" itself. Only about the thought experiment. I'm not sure that's a sufficient definition of "fictitious" here. Surely it must also mean "appearing in fiction". Steve

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Hold on. Schroedinger's Cat is not actually a fictional cat (its more of a hypothetical cat), but that does not mean that its categorization there is improper. Sometimes these things can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The idea of categorizing a hypothetical cat within the context of a fictional cat is not too far out of bounds, and does not represent any agenda other than to increase its visibility. Someone who might be interested in cats might find the usage of a cat in a science metaphor interesting, and perhaps find it an introduction to the science behind the hypothesis - in this case the necessity to regard superpositions as actual phenomena. -Stevertigo "Fireflies illuminate our play...

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: Isn't mentioning spoiler warnings (again) a kind of mini-Godwin's Law for this list? :-) Carcharoth

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 6:41 AM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: (I haven't read the PWD proposal, but it seems self-explanatory.) Deletion is good because it totally dispenses with junk. Average article quality goes up when we ditch bad articles. It prevents people from spending time on really bad articles. Having deleted articles readily available would interfere with all that. There are places on the internet for all kinds of junk, regardless of quality or value. Wikipedia is not one. Steve

Ian Woollard wrote: Yes, but (I say) the solution to that is not to keep all deleted material forever on the site. There are clearly people who feel that this _is_ the solution, but I'm not one of them. It may be a weakness of AfD that deletions do occur, not because the topic is unsuitable for the encyclopedia (which, let us not forget, remains the main reason for deleting an article), but because the article is not in great shape. But the way to fix up that weakness is not permanent public storage of stuff that really is mostly junk. Charles

Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Parsing... "Destruction = [qualitative superlative] because [destruction] [completely destroys] [things that need destroying]." Please let us all pledge to henceforth refrain from employing circular logic in our arguments. And likewise let us pledge to point and giggle at these circulars whenever we have to see them. -Stevertigo "...and I thank his sword

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Some people think junk isn't junk. Or rather, one's person's junk is another person's treasure. Not that obscure articles that can be rescued are really treasure, but you get the point. I do like DGG's point that by working on new articles, you help educate new users. That is a very important part of bringing new editors into the community. Not everyone learns by watching, and some that learn by watching are watching the wrong people. Carcharoth

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com> wrote: You're right that the original proposal failed to achieve it's goals, but I think this is a good idea, and that it has passive support from people now but isn't on people's minds. It's always hard to get people to implement a plan significantly different from the status quo... I'm not sure we are closer to that tipping point now than before, meaning that it would take someone to campaign for such a change, and address complaints and challenges levied against it. SJ

Steve Bennett wrote: How about I raise you one and say we might have got *two* wrong out of 20? Personally I am on the fence about the article about replicas of the White House. Most likely the decision to delete is valid, but it is very certainly a threshold case. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Carcharoth wrote: While that is most likely mythical, the case of Alcibiades and Socrates is quite certainly real and historically valid. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen