"David Goodman" wrote
To say all food served should be edible is begging the question. Food by definition is things suitable to be eaten. To say something needs to be verifiable without saying what it means is not much help in practice. Just like "notable" or "encyclopedic"
On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:47:33 -0800, "jossi fresco" jossif@gmail.com wrote:
I spy a dangerous fallacy. It may be that you can't _define_ Verifiability without defining "reliable source". But we can certainly _agree_ to Veriability without defining "reliable source". And in fact we have.
(One can agree that food served in a restaurant should be edible, without defining "edible".)
My point entirely, though. We have a "question begging" culture. "Notability" begs the question "noted by whom?". We cope.
The other extreme is a wikilawyering culture. The correct answer to the "you haven't defined your terms" is: cui bono? Does making things more black-and-white in an area help the project, or (as here) help pettifogging editors who are going to raise source criticism to such an art that only access to a huge academic library will allow people to contribute? "Duck tests" for verifiability make a lot of sense, actually.
What we do is to make operational decisions, such as allowing AfD to cut through notability imponderables. This is for the best.
Charles
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There are three problems to relying on AfD alone 1. the load on AfD is everything has to come there because there are no clear guidelines for people trying to write articles in good faith 2. the impossibility of holding a rational discussion on AfD without some rules to refer to in the argument--it all becomes a matter of whether ILIKEIT. 3. lack of consistence (and we deal with this by actually saying we dont need to be consistent, the tell-tell sign of a immature system that has defined neither its practices or its principles.)
On 11/22/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"David Goodman" wrote
To say all food served should be edible is begging the question. Food by definition is things suitable to be eaten. To say something needs to be verifiable without saying what it means is not much help in practice. Just like "notable" or "encyclopedic"
On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:47:33 -0800, "jossi fresco" jossif@gmail.com wrote:
I spy a dangerous fallacy. It may be that you can't _define_ Verifiability without defining "reliable source". But we can certainly _agree_ to Veriability without defining "reliable source". And in fact we have.
(One can agree that food served in a restaurant should be edible, without defining "edible".)
My point entirely, though. We have a "question begging" culture. "Notability" begs the question "noted by whom?". We cope.
The other extreme is a wikilawyering culture. The correct answer to the "you haven't defined your terms" is: cui bono? Does making things more black-and-white in an area help the project, or (as here) help pettifogging editors who are going to raise source criticism to such an art that only access to a huge academic library will allow people to contribute? "Duck tests" for verifiability make a lot of sense, actually.
What we do is to make operational decisions, such as allowing AfD to cut through notability imponderables. This is for the best.
Charles
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On 22/11/2007, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
There are three problems to relying on AfD alone
- the load on AfD is everything has to come there because there are
no clear guidelines for people trying to write articles in good faith 2. the impossibility of holding a rational discussion on AfD without some rules to refer to in the argument--it all becomes a matter of whether ILIKEIT. 3. lack of consistence (and we deal with this by actually saying we dont need to be consistent, the tell-tell sign of a immature system that has defined neither its practices or its principles.)
Hah, indeed. 3. is the key point. And "notability" (in the sense of the Wikipedia jargon term, rather than any meaning the word may have in generally-used English) is an attempt to arbitrarily force-mature the argument, which of course fails to solve it.
Anyone got an instant solution to AFD on noting the above? We clearly need a deletion system of some sort, but this one is second only to living biographies as a public relations disaster for Wikipedia. Has anyone got a grand unified theory to hand that could solve it? (Hopefully not based on [[E8 (mathematics)]].)
- d.
On 11/23/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We clearly need a deletion system of some sort, but this one is second only to
Not really. I've brought this up before, but basically there are two issues: 1) Content deletion 2) Topic deletion
We don't need AfD for the first. Anyone can delete any content from any article. What we need is a clear understanding of what content we actually want, and how much of it we want. IMHO, technical solutions like enforcing a maximum article length for certain types of subjects would help.
For the second, all we have to establish is whether Wikipedia wants an article on a given topic or not, totally independently of what content is currently at the article. If the topic is bad, make it a redirect. If the topic is really really bad, RfD it.
We don't need AfD to deal with really crappy articles that violate thirty policies and guidelines on subjects that we do want - someone just needs to stub it.
Steve