On Jan 24, 2007, at 9:50 PM, geni wrote: Our copyright policy is mostly intuitive, and can be explained in a sentence in such a way that an average person can understand it. It's slightly trickier with images, but only slightly since we've been cracking down pretty hard on "fair use" of late. Copyvio is not nearly as widespread as lack of sourcing. Copyvio is not a newbie- unfriendly concept. -Phil

geni wrote: False. Our fair use policy is rooted in copyright paranoia. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

geni wrote: Fair use is only one small corner of copyright law. In many respects I agree with both of you. International copyright law as we know it is incredibly complex, but adopting a policy based on lowest common denominatior of risk aversion is paranoia at the same time. Risk frightens most people, and they would prefer not to take any at all. It's no wonder that the risk averse will win nearly every time the matter comes to a vote somewhere. That being said, and as important as discussions about copyright are. at this juncture they tend to set this important discussion off on a tangent. The need (or lack of need) to deal with sourcing issues will still be there with or without copyritght material. Ec

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jeff Raymond stated for the record: False. It is rooted in free redistributability. - -- Sean Barrett | Modern art is what happens when painters stop sean(a)epoptic.com | looking at girls and persuade themselves | that they have a better idea. --John Ciardi

On 1/25/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Some people are definitely descending into copyright paranoia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Abramoff_scotland_small.jpg

The Cunctator wrote: What, having your copyrighted work introduced into a trial means your lose all your rights to it? If so, that would be useful, since Disney has been in court a few times. Maybe Mickey Mouse has been PD all this time and we didn't even know it! And haven't there been a bunch of movies involved in court cases too? Free movie uploads tonight! :-) Stan

On 1/25/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Which if I put on my copyright-paranoid hat I would say is insufficient for Wikipedia (aka "FAIR USE ISN'T FREE USE") but taking it off and being a practical Wikipedia I would say is plenty sufficient. In other words I don't think Wikipedia should (in this regard) hold itself to a higher copyright standard than the New York Times.

On 1/25/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: "We did", you mean.

On 1/26/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: We never allowed edit wars. The US flag as our logo? Wha?

On 1/26/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: There were some pretty impressive revert wars though I think it was used at the start of day one since it was the first thing jimbo could get his hands on. -- geni

On 1/26/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: You pre-date me. -- geni

The Cunctator wrote: I don't remember that either, but then I've only been here for five years. Ec

George Herbert wrote: Which is fine, we have a whole set of rules for all that. The original claim was that the picture was a production of the US government, for which the main evidence seemed to be that it was introduced at a federal trial. We still don't know whether the picture was taken by a random person in the group or by a professional, and if the latter, who the professional was working for. Copyright paranoia? Well, I would be pretty angry if someone copied all of my photos, removed my name, and declared them "PD-USGov" on some flimsy pretext. Stan

On 1/25/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Okay, so what's the right tag?

On 1/25/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: Nice to see you standing up for the rights of felons everywhere. :)

Stan Shebs &lt;stanshebs(a)earthlink.net&gt; writes: Curiously enough, the Unabomber is contesting that right now: <http://www.slate.com/id/2158220/> ,---- | Does the government get the copyright when it seizes a prisoner's personal writings? Some legal scholars think it does, although Kaczynski is arguing otherwise. Even if the feds couldn't transfer the copyright on Kaczynski's writings, they'd probably be able to sell them. That's because they're not trying to reproduce them; instead, they're selling the papers as physical objects, along with other items he owned. `---- -- Gwern Inquiring minds want to know.

geni wrote: :-D Some would say that they continue to exist despite the peopl. Ec

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Verifiability is a goal, citations and sources are means to achieving that goal. Getting rid of CITE and RS does not necessarily imply getting rid of the goal of verifiability, it merely means changing the means by which it is achieved. It doesn't even mean getting rid of citations, I don't think anyone's suggesting that they be forbidden. I suspect the "nuke CITE/RS" suggestion comes out of the same sort of desire to loosen the current rules, just a little more extreme. I think the "nuke the policy" position comes from the feeling that incremental changes to existing policy will be too hard to pull off effectively and so it's better to start from a clean slate. I just spent two days trying to preserve a 1911 Britannica citation that was removed because it wikilinked to [[Encyclopedia Britannica]] and "Wikipedia is not a reliable source". When I finally managed (I think) to convince the other editors that it wasn't actually meant to reference our article about EB but rather the encyclopedia itself they removed it anyway because it didn't specify which page in the encyclopedia was being referenced. So I can definitely sympathize with this level of frustration. :)

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Perhaps true if you completely nuke them, but to say that they need to be nuked is really an exaggeration for effect. We don't need to nuke CITE and RS. What we do need is to be less extreme about when they are used.

On Jan 24, 2007, at 9:54 PM, bbatsell wrote: Our policies should not be goals - they should be policies. If we cannot meaningfully implement the policy across all of our pages then it's a bad policy. This isn't actually a problem for most of our policies. [[WP:NPOV]] is actually basically understandable by any reasonably intelligent person, can be kept in mind, doesn't really require extra work. As a result, most of our pages do make a passing effort on NPOV. That is not true for sourcing. There's a difference between having sourcing policies and making it a goal that we have sources and references. A good encyclopedia article should point towards further reading, yes. That's not what [[WP:CITE]] or [[WP:RS]] say, though. This should be something akin to adding images to an article - something we like to do, but not something that we freak out over. Pop onto AfD for a bit. Or to articles on popular culture. Or [[WP:FAC]]. Sourcing disputes are a more or less constant din - both with articles that are accurate being taken to task for not being well-sourced enough (This has become a pernicous flavor of deletionism in the past year or so) and with articles that are complete shit getting a pass because they have sources, even if the sources are bollocks. -Phil

On 1/25/07, Matt R &lt;matt_crypto(a)yahoo.co.uk&gt; wrote: But they are only used for abuse. A simple sentence or two in WP:V and a dose of consensus is sufficient.

If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be any abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with these policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think I'm going to reread those pages and think about rewriting them. Mgm On 1/25/07, Francis Tyers &lt;spectre(a)ivixor.net&gt; wrote:

On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 14:16 +0100, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Agree. If there is a problem with things being deleted, it isn't a problem with policy, but with the people writing them without specifying a source. Fran

On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 08:21 -0500, Jeff Raymond wrote: :) Fran

On Jan 25, 2007, at 8:16 AM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: But this is one of the problems. The burden of citing everything is larger than our editors, especially our casual editors, are willing to undertake. We will never reach a point where people will cite their sources in the first place. Hence the prospect of eternally playing catch-up. -Phil

Steve Bennett schreef: I recently wrote a stub on [[Heliophorus]], a genus of butterflies. It links the existing article on its subfamily with the existing articles of the species. As the subfamily article only lists genera, my new article is the only way to go from the subfamily article to the individual species. It is therefore useful, even though it contains nothing more than a partial list of species. I created this list from wikipedia: it just contains all species that have an article. If I had to list my source, it would have been "Wikipedia", which is Not Acceptable, and would have been removed (I guess). So I left it unsourced. Does this make it a worse article than, say, [[Heliophorus brahma]], which has 6 sources (5 books, 1 journal article)? Note that that article is 1 sentence long. What do you think is more likely; that this one sentence is the only information found about the species by someone who has checked those 5 books; or that the references section has been copied from some other article, and is therefore more or less worthless? I hope that someone will some day add useful information to my stub, and with a bit of luck, he'll add his sources too. But the extra info is woth much more than the sources, IMHO. Adding unsourced information is a good thing. Eugene

Thomas Dalton schreef: In theory: yes. In practice: would everyone recognize it as such? (Hint: it now has a {{unreferenced}} box, for those viewers that have not disabled them in their personal Monobook.css.) Eugene

Thomas Dalton wrote: This seems contrary to a recent thread about a list of people responsible for the death of someone else. O:-) I made the same argument at the time. Accepting that such criteria may be valid in some circumstances should not imply that the requirement should be there for all circumstnaces. Ec

On 1/25/07, Phil Sandifer &lt;Snowspinner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I disagree. Citing is not as difficult as you seem to think it is; if you're in the middle of writing an article based on sources that are sitting in front of you, it really isn't that hard to note down where the facts came from as you write them down (lately I've become a fan of the <ref>Unless otherwise noted, all details regarding [Subtopic X] are drawn from [Source Y], pp. A-Z.</ref> style for citing basic facts with relative ease). It's true that casual editors tend not to cite their contributions, but nobody does at first, and I think that the reason for this has less to do with unwillingness to do so than with the idea simply not occuring to people. Obviously, any statements about this are going to be speculative, but I can say that in my case I started out just writing stuff down from memory and then, after someone told me to cite sources, moved to doing that. It will be very difficult to get Wikipedia into a condition where passerby editors feel that citing one's sources is an integral part of adding information to an article, but I don't think that's a reason to give up the fight. I think that what tends to get lost in these discussions is the incredibly good effect that citing as you go has on the accuracy of writing. I don't know how many times I've flipped open a book to find a quick confirmation of some (seemingly very obvious) fact that I was about to add to an article, only to find the opposite in print and then, after checking a couple more books, to realize that my memory had deceived me. No matter how well people know their subjects, they will make mistakes, and a writing practice that asks you to flip open a book and check what you're saying before you write it down is a good one. -- Robth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)

No, we're not good. That's the whole point. People's memories were reliable enough when Wikipedia first started and nobody actually used it for anything. That's no longer the case. If we want to be a credible encyclopedia, we need our facts to come from reliable sources (citing them isn't the important part, that's just a way to prove the important bit - that the fact came from a reliable source). There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of what "source" means. A source isn't somewhere people can go to verify the fact, it is where the fact came from. Citing sources is easy, because you will always have the source with you when you write the article (if you think you don't, then it means the source is your memory, in which case you aren't using a reliable source and shouldn't add the fact). The problem isn't that people aren't citing reliable sources, the problem is that they aren't *using* reliable sources.

The key underlying principle is making a free encyclopedia available to everyone. "Anyone can edit" is simply a means to an end - it is secondary to the goal of making an encyclopedia. We should be working to make things better for the readers, not the contributors. Relaxing our rules on using reliable sources would be great for the contributors, but makes the website pretty much useless for the readers.

Thomas Dalton wrote: Whether this makes sense depends on how you envision the reader. The endgame of "Anyone can edit" is "Everyone can edit". At that point the reader and the contributor are synonymous. In our goal of making an encyclopedia we are also revolutionizing the notion of an encyclopedia. Our encyclopedia is not just the passive paper encyclopedia of old where the reader could look through a chosen article, and be sated with what he took in. We want readers who will think critically and will leave with questions instead of answers. I would question the consumerist model of an encyclopedia. We need to remember that that model was based on a circumstance where the means of production were not readily available to the users. A simple reversal of that circumstance is having far reaching effects. We can now consider options that the technology did not allow us to consider before. No "fact" is beyond question, and we cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into the false security that having a source means that all's well with the 'pedia. The editors who will do best are those with the skill to thrive in uncertainty, and who perhaps have come to terms with the theology of the trickster. Ec

On 1/25/07, Bogdan Giusca &lt;liste(a)dapyx.com&gt; wrote: Ummm... On 1/25/07, Robth &lt;robth1(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: If you want to fundamentally change the whole concept and policies of the project, why not just start a fork? Isn't that what Citizendium, Wikinfo, Digital Universe, and so on are trying to do?

On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Ahem... WP:CITE and WP:RS are guidelines. But Robth puts it exactly right. There is pretty much a consensus that citations and the use of reliable sources are good things that make Wikipedia better, ceteris paribus. It's an issue of emphasis. No doubt CITE and RS, in some cases, either turn potential contributors off of Wikipedia or inspire the removal of valid information. But they also inspire the addition of sourcing (and perhaps the participation of editors who wouldn't edit in project where sources carried less weight). The goal in writing or re-writing those guidelines should be to strike the optimal balance between the positive effects and the negative effects. But both guidelines are central to the shift in Wikipedia culture over the past year or so, in which we've seen drastic sourcing improvements to the point where most editors realize that sources are expected, not just encouraged. -ragesoss

On 1/25/07, Robth &lt;robth1(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think that this is oversimplifying and polarizing the reality, though it does have a lot of value as a model to explain a change that WP is starting in to. The level of completeness varys wildly from field to field, as does the quality level of articles. I disagree that we don't still need size; as I said earlier, there are whole classes of topics for which articles are missing or sketchy. Beyond poorly covered topic areas, we have whole fields full of stubs for which content needs infilling. I almost want to suggest a graduation system for articles; once it reaches a "good enough" level, then a different set of rules kick in, and changes are required to go through a more rigorous check system, citations become required, etc. This might make a good fork, or could possibly be a change in how WP works. Both reducing the vandalism and raising the expectations for rigorousness in edits, if and only if an article is at an appropriate level to start with. What I very strongly don't want to see is cutting off the informal editing ability which allows articles to reach that level to begin with. That's cutting off our roots and nourishment to spite ourselves. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Phil Sandifer wrote: This is a fundamental problem with volunteer based organizations, particularly ones that are highly democratized. The first wave comes with the visionaries who see what needs to be done to produce a great product. The later wavefills in the blanks, it tries to protect what the first wave produced, but in doing so destroys the vision. The mass of Elvis personators cannot be combined to create a new Elvis. Ec

Leaving citations for someone else is complete nonsense. It shows that you didn't understand the paragraph of mine you quoted. A citation says where you got the source from. If you write and article, and then I come along, I have no idea where you got the source from, it is impossible for me to add the citation. I can add a link to somewhere that says the same thing, but that's not citing sources, because whatever I link to probably wasn't actually the source. Me adding sources to your article is basically me rewriting the article - your work becomes nothing more than copyediting that happened to be done before I wrote the article (and yes, that doesn't make sense - that's the point I'm trying to make).

Thomas Dalton wrote: We are a tertiary resource. If two Wikipedians used different sources to arrive at the same place it makes no difference in the way that it would for a secondary source. Your argument is just strange. It seems to make the specific source more important than the information itself. Ec

On 1/27/07, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I've talked before, about the possibility of an alternate free encyclopedia, starting with the facts (a database, of fact + reference + context / connections), with full tracability of all data in the encyclopedia. Would be very useful to AI researchers, some of whom have done similar things in training AI programs and the like, in addition to a useful public project. As I keep saying: Wikipedia is not, has not been, and should not become that project. If you want to fork off and do it, I'd contribute, but I will fight / argue to the last breath to keep you from turning Wikipedia into that project. Even if it's a good idea to do it, it's not the same as WP, and it's necessary to have a WP type project in the world. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Thursday, January 25, 2007, 10:00:34 PM, George wrote: What's wrong with adding a reference after each sentence? Hoping that your mind won't blow, here's a very well-sourced example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_general_election%2C_1946 Wikipedia's purpose, as said by Jimbo, is not to be a wiki, not to be a community, but to simply create an encyclopedia. The rest are simply means towards a goal. Maybe you are the one on the wrong encyclopedia: Wikipedia requires verifiability as an official policy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability And it's not Nupedia, everyone still can edit it, but one should add the *source* of the addition.

Thursday, January 25, 2007, 10:21:27 PM, George wrote: Do you have any reasons you think so? I don't think there's any policy claiming that Wikipedia articles should be dumbed down. For that, there's simple English Wikipedia. :-)

George Herbert wrote: It is ironic to observe that the relative roles of "Popular Science" and "Scientific American" are reversed from what they were in the 19th century. At that time "Scientific American" was emphasizing newsy reports on new inventions that were going through the US Patent Office; "Popular Science" was producing long thoughtful articles about significant questions in science. The 1873-4 series of articles by [[John Stallo]], "The Priimary Concepts of Modern Physical Science" is only one example in a magazine that is far diffeent from what we know today. Ec

Nothing has changed about people's memories, what's changed is what people expect from Wikipedia. When we were a new site used only by a handful of geeks, most of which were contributors, nobody cared how reliable we were. That is no longer the case. It's necessary to make that distinction in order to point out the flaws in the "let someone else add the sources" arguement. What are you talking about? Are you one of these people that doesn't know the difference between "original research" and "research"? Only if we know who's memory it is. When it comes to Wikipedia contributors, we rarely know who is doing the editing. That's frustrating, yes, but if you're allowed to add true details from your memory, what's to stop me adding made up details? Nothing at all. Sources are a requirement for verifiability.

On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote: Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100% reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good. The model is this: we have thousands of Susans. They do a lot of the heavy lifting on Wikipedia. Then we have a few hundred hardcore users who fix the problems left by the thousands of Susans - they check odd facts that don't seem to jibe, they deal with malicious users, they get involved with edit wars, they delete, they debate policy. Susan does 90% of the work. The hardcore do about 10% of the work, a lot of which is cleaning up after Susan. But that's still a massive net amount of work being done by Susan. Who does not show up on this mailing list to offer her viewpoint, which is why we need to take care to stop and think about Susan (and, of course, the other thousands of casual editors.) -Phil

On 1/25/07, Michael Hopcroft &lt;michael(a)mphpress.com&gt; wrote: It's not an irrational goal; we have goals that, under some circumstances, conflict. Adding things like stable article versions and the like will help de-conflict those goals. I don't recall any serious objections to doing them, just objections that Mediawiki is far from being able to support them. At some point, an encyclopedia project might fork off Wikipedia, enforcing some stricter editing and editor standards, and move more efficiently towards the ultimate goal. But so far, nobody seems interested in doing that, without going as far as Nupedia, who I believe are too far out in that direction. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 1/25/07, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: Yeah, "Just" having created what's arguably the world's best, and at least competitively good encyclopedia in a few years, from scratch, with essentially no budget other than operations, is good enough for me. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Steve Bennett wrote: I bought it too, and it's the full thing - compared sample articles with old and new print editions. I think they only have the resources to update articles that need changing to reflect current events, and no money left over to expand or improve coverage in other areas. They'll get to coast on the name for a while longer. Stan

Phil Sandifer wrote: In the areas I'm familiar with, that's not really how the numbers work. There are lots of articles that I pass across, say "hmm, whole section is probably bogus", but I don't have the time or energy to do anything about it. In fact, it gets so tiresome I rarely even bother to note down the need for factchecking anymore. My time isn't so worthless that I'm willing to spend all of it perpetually cleaning up after the drivebys. Stan

Ray Saintonge wrote: That's not a very good line of reasoning - vandalism sprees must also be good things, because we spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, so we must be enjoying doing so? I don't think so. No, when I clean up after someone who didn't take the trouble to find out if a statement is actually true, that person has just wasted my time. I used to watch a lot of articles (19,000 at the high point), and it was multiple hours of drudgery each day; eventually I cleared the list. Casual editors adding bad material from memory is actually a worse problem for good articles than vandalism, because it's good-faith and often looks plausible; it can get by you and mislead readers for months, and worse, start seeping into connected articles as others "correct" them to be consistent. So even the what-does-it-hurt edit to an already-unsourced stub can have consequences. Driveby editing was a great way to build up WP, but now that we have the vast structure, we also need to think about how to maintain its integrity. Stan

Phil Sandifer wrote: Exactly, we want edits that make improvements. There's almost no chance that a driveby's unsourced addition to a featured article will improve it, for instance. In fact, FA watchers have already adopted an informal practice of reverting many of those on sight, they're simply not willing to spend all their time trying to salvage the marginal. Since we don't have statistics on sourced vs unsourced additions, it's impossible to say whether there are huge numbers of unsourced additions worth salvaging. Anecdotally, I think the crackdown combined with availability <ref> is having the desired effect; I'm noticing that even trivia sections are getting citations now, when such a thing was unheard-of a year ago. Stan

On 1/25/07, Robth &lt;robth1(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You're assuming here that most of us sit down with our references in front of us when we start writing an article. I mostly don't, though there are exceptions - I come across a gap or a misstatement in an article, or a missing article, where I know what the right content is to answer the question, and I start inserting the right content right there. If I can quickly google up a reliable source while doing so I'll cite it then. If not, I try and find something in the library at home, or at work, but I don't worry about it much. Here's the problem. Academic rigor - which I understand, having done refereed papers for conferences and such - is all fine and good for scholarly original research papers. For an encyclopedia, the vast bulk of what we're trying to do is to simply convey the top level survey of a field to the general public. Textbooks are cited, but not nearly as well as research papers. Encyclopedias are generally cited much worse than that, if at all. It's also in conflict with the idea of a Wiki - that allowing rapid, open growth will move in a focused random walk towards better and more accurate articles over time. I have no problem with people who want to write WP articles as rigorously as they would an article for Nature or any professional journal or conference. But if you do that, you work much more slowly than people willing to let it hang out a little. If we look at Wikipedia as the process of getting to really good articles on all the subjects which are notable in the world, rather than the finished product, we need to be encouraging people who know what they're talking about to fill in all the gaps first, and then polish everything off with citations, extra fact checking, corrections of minor goofs etc later. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 1/25/07, Bogdan Giusca &lt;liste(a)dapyx.com&gt; wrote: No, please. That's not what I said at all. very accurate and moderately precise. When I find them in areas for which I'm familiar with the body of knowledge and reliable sources, I will spend time to go find the appropriate citations and sources as time allows, to "back up" the already existing content with appropriate references. The current thread is grossly insulting to the accuracy of the average Wikipedia article and contributor. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: There are more citations per article in Wikipedia than in Brittanica. Is Brittanica an unreliable source? I already know that Wikipedia is not completely reliable. Insisting on source citations isn't going to fix that - someone could put in a citation that's bogus, or put one in that says something other than what they say, or put one in that they misinterpret, because they aren't an expert on the field. All three of these things have happened to articles I have edited at one time or another. I can't trust the citations, because I can't trust the identity and accuracy of the contributors who added them. I'd have to go fact-check every source for an article to be really sure, and that scales pretty horribly. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Thomas Dalton wrote: I think the term for what you say is "double standard". Are Wikipedia editors really that much more prone to Alzheimer's? Ec

It doesn't take Alzheimer's for someone to make a mistake... Britannica is made by employees that went through an interview process and had their CVs examined, etc. Wikipedia is made by anyone and everyone. Britannica may not be any more accurate, but it is more reliable.

On 1/25/07, George Herbert &lt;george.herbert(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, it is an unreliable source. I would never cite Brittanica in an academic paper, nor would I know how to find a reliable source for something I read in Brittanica. On the other hand, there are lots of Wikipedia articles which can point me towards a source I would use in a paper. That's what really matters - can an encyclopaedia article give you a good introduction to a subject and point you towards a truly useful source? If it can't, it's just a toy. I already know that Wikipedia is not completely reliable. Insisting

Bogdan Giusca wrote: You are overstating his case. Academic rigor is a learned skill. For some students it may take the better part of their freshman year to grasp the idea. Demanding this rigor on one's very first article attempt is akin to asking the its full extent on the first day of a freshman class. New editors need to be sympathetically guided through the process rather than punished for not getting it right on the first try. Some do; some don't. Your anecdotal observation does nothing to establish how extensive this problem is. If we are to adopt rigid rules about sourcing information should we not be equally rigid about applying scientific methods to measure accuracy? Of course some articles have wrong facts; that's inevitable in a project this size, but don't delude yourself into believing that just because an article is sourced it will magically cease to include wrong facts. Cited sources are just as susceptible to misinterpretation. Ec

On 1/25/07, Omegatron &lt;omegatron+wikienl(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: That's simply not true. I use them to show people how sources are important to show information is accurate. Citing reliable sources is the only way to show readers the content of an article is accurate and accuracy should be our primary concern. If you know of other ways to verify content, I'm all ears. Mgm

The only people who think that having to cite and verify articles with reliable sources is "abuse" are the kind of people who think "oh no my pokemans character studies are at risk again!" Fran.

Thursday, January 25, 2007, 6:25:38 PM, Ken wrote: What you call "abuse", others call improval of the sourcing and of the verifiability, and of therefore the credibility of Wikipedia. From my experience on Wikipedia, almost all the criticism on the Reliable Sources requirements comes from people who edit mostly articles on anime, webcomics, furry subculture, internet memes and the like. Those areas are not the core of an encyclopedia and protecting those areas should should not result in the compromising the rest of Wikipedia. We can't have two sets of rules: one for cruft and one for the rest. There are plenty of wikis for obscure stuff which fail our current policies on verifiability.

Bogdan Giusca wrote: This is hardly true. There's no reason why an article on an independent rock band should be held to the same sourcing standard as a European king from the 1700s. What's reliable in the humanities is stricter than what's reliable in the entertainment world, and our reliable source guideline fails to understand that. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

On Jan 25, 2007, at 11:58 AM, Bogdan Giusca wrote: This just isn't true. There are plenty of reliable sources issues to be found about academic topics, particularly in the humanities. For example, it is mind-wrenchingly difficult to write a sourced article about [[Jacques Derrida]]. Why? Because one either has to frame his thought in terms of mediocre primers on his work like _Derrida for Beginners_, or one has to try to use the academic debate surrounding Derrida, in which case all of one's sources are aimed at an expert audience and there's no good foothold to explain the basics of Derrida's thought. Furthermore, one is left in a position where clueless political attacks on Derrida get disproportionate time, because lots of people can understand Ann Coulter and thus can add citations to her, but a lot fewer people can understand Julian Wolfreys and add citations to him. There's not a good solution to this from within a source-paranoid culture, because the way to write a decent article on Derrida is to have three or four people who work with Derridean thought write it up, bash out compromises on wording among themselves, write brief bits that explain major debates about Derrida's thought where they can't agree on a generally applicable way of presenting something, and then to have a references section that points to some major work on Derrida. And if someone comes along and says "Dude, this article is crap. Here's a bunch of citations that show that this article totally misrepresents Derrida," we work from there. But there is no good way to write an article on Jacques Derrida that is both a good introduction for a layperson and sourced at every turn. I'd be similarly shocked if one could write a good article on high temperature physics or group theory while being totally dependent on published reliable sources, because those sources were never written for the purpose of being used to explain the concept to novices. Nobody is proposing two sets of rules. What people have frequently proposed is that the rule should be "everything must be sourced to the recognized standards of reliability for that subject," and understanding that the standards are somewhat less rigorous in popular culture. I'll also note that, contrary to popular rhetoric, [[WP:RS]] does very little to help fix pokecruft, because nobody can make a serious argument that Pokemon episodes are not reliable sources for information about what happens in Pokemon episodes. (At least not one that has ever gained any traction, and thank God for that, because it's a damn silly argument that has nothing to do with reliability and everything to do with frantically trying to build an idiot-proof wall against pokecruft by any means necessary, without regard for whether the wall makes sense.) In fact, I suspect we'd have an easier time getting historical out-of- universe information if we let people who knew stuff about the history of Pokemon write articles without demanding they go back and figure out where exactly they read every single fact they're trying to include. Put another way, the demand that every piece of information has a source means that we get a preponderance of information that's low- hanging fruit - that is, information that is easily found online and easily understood by anybody. That does not coincide well with information that is good. Again, this is essentially a design problem. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] fail to consider that they need to be implemented by casual volunteers who are working out of good will. They'd be great policy if Wikipedia were written by paid experts and people who devote huge amounts of time to the project. (Which is who they were written by) But they're crap for someone who finds a problem on a page they're looking at and wants to fix it. Which is the vast majority of our editors. This is the key problem. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] were not written with our actual userbase in mind. They are useful only to people like us - that is, people who are obsessed enough with Wikipedia to join a mailing list for discussion of it. That's not most of our editors. Here's what we need. Picture Susan. Susan is a 40-year-old stay at home mother who majored in English, and still has a fondness for Jane Austen. Susan, one day, is browsing the Internet and reads our article on [[Pride and Prejudice]]. She sees an error. In five minutes, her kid is getting off the school bus. We need a policy that lets Susan fix the problem and then go meet her kid at the bus without having her change reverted. -Phil

On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:36 PM, Stan Shebs wrote: That's the thing, though - Wikipedia was built by Susan. She did the heavy lifting to get Wikipedia to where it is today. We depend on Susan. Now, we also depend on hardcore editors who deal with policy issues and edit wars and get long-term involved - admins and future admins, basically. These people clean up if Susan misremembers. As well as doing a thousand other bigger tasks that Susan isn't interested in. But we need to adamantly resist letting this second pool of users set the rules in such a way that Susan gets squeezed out. Susan should be able to do any small task on Wikipedia. -Phil

On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:53 PM, · Firefoxman wrote: Scroll up - she's a hypothetical stay-at-home mother with five minutes to spend on a Wikipedia article. My contention is that we need to avoid policies that prevent Susan from editing. -Phil

Ray Saintonge wrote: I don't think it has to work that way. The half-hour comes from "wha? where did that come from"; studying article history, looking at editor contribs, comparing to other articles, etc - basically coming up to speed on a suspicious change. The editor making the original edit already knows what and why, so it would take much less of everybody's time to start from a cited reliable source. Fixing mistakes is part of the process, not entirely avoidable, but we don't actually have the capacity to fix up after a "bring it on, do whatever you want" policy (as witness the school articles). Stan

Phil Sandifer wrote: Group theory is math, and I personally have three textbooks left over from my younger days, any of which would be quite suitable. Perhaps the grad student was wishing for one that tied into crystallography applications better. :-) Stan

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 01:58:32PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote: [[Group theory]] is a branch of mathematics. That article has a rather poor paragraph that points to how chemists us it. To a chemist, Group Theory is a study of the symmetry of molecules or of crystals. The latter is used in X-ray crystallography. The former is used in quantum chemistry and molecular spectroscopy. We do not have an article on it and we should. There are plenty of fairly simple (2nd year chemistry undergrad level) books. The most famous is probably "Chemical applications of Group Theory" by F. Albert Cotton (1963) which lead to it being taught to undergrads. Plenty of people have tried to improve on it since but most failed. I may have a go at an article. Brian. -- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

On 25/01/07, Bogdan Giusca &lt;liste(a)dapyx.com&gt; wrote: No. Guidelines on sourcing and citing are good. The actual present content of WP:RS is completely counterproductive shite. - d.

Phil Sandifer wrote: There are issue within the featured article process, I'll grant you that. Apparently one of the issues with the Superman article is that some citations are Harvard style and some are Wikipedia style. I'm of the opinion that the time spent discussing that would be better served ignoring it or fixing it. But hey, it's just one more hoop. Like I say, some people jopin Wikipedia just to find new hoops. I suppose it's a logical progression. You get all your featured articles to one state, so then you look at how to move them on. I'd say you're looking at the wrong end of the telescope though. You should get all your other articles to FA state and then improve the standards. What a hobby we have, ladies and gentlemen. -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.17.10/651 - Release Date: 24/01/07 18:48

Ken Arromdee wrote: Is that still stalled? That's getting silly. When I tried to make it a policy a while back I believe it was removed because someone wanted to satisfy the concerns of one editor. Now I may have that wrong, but I'm worried if we've reached the point on Wikipedia where one editor can prevent something happening. Do we really allow the filibuster? ~~~~ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.17.10/651 - Release Date: 24/01/07 18:48

On Jan 25, 2007, at 9:42 AM, Steve Block wrote: No. That's a crappy stick, because quite frankly, West Coast Avengers #18-24 is a reliable source, and should remain a reliable source. (Because otherwise we get into a whole host of other problems. Primary source research like this is important.) The thing to tell someone who wants an article on Moon Knight's throwing arrows is "No, and stop being stupid." But we're doing a bad job of that, and so we've contorted our sourcing policies to try to cover this, which is a problem, because they do a very bad job of it. POV pushers are often insidiously good at sources - have a look at [[2004 U.S. Presidential election controversy]] for why sourcing doesn't really fix the problem (and if anything makes it worse because POV pushers can resort to "But it's sourced!") Nonsense. Siegenthaler would have been fixed without recourse to sourcing had anybody looked at it. To try to solve a problem with a solution irrelevant to the problem is silly. > Ugh, no. People doubt the validity of? What on earth is validity? > Well, it's stuff that people of note have said, or, well it's stuff > that > is of importance to the subject. It's just more looseness, and > it's too > loose. Wikipedia either has to have standards or throw of the > pretence > of being an encyclopedia and allow original research. Hey, want your > stuff in Wikipedia? Chuck up a web page and then source it. This > applies to popular culture as much as it does any other field. > Want to > posit the idea that reading comics makes you gay? Chuck up a website > and then cite it in Wikipedia. Well no, don't even cite it, just > put it > in and stick to your guns, because hey, it has validity. You seem to be operating under the curious idea that [[WP:RS]] is the source of common sense and judgment in the world, and should it ever vanish everybody editing Wikipedia will become a dithering idiot. If someone puts a claim that reading comics makes you gay into [[comics]] we do not need any policy beyond "editors should exercise good judgment" to go "Ummm, that's an interesting claim you've got there, mate. I'm not so sure I believe it - you mind explaining where you're coming from?" And when the editor points to their website, we do not need a policy to say that they're being an idiot and that's not going in the encyclopedia. Policy is not the source of our ability to remove crap. Policy is an instruction manual for well- meaning editors who don't really understand what we're doing. But [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] don't work as that - they're dense, painfully confused texts that try to oversimplify sourcing and research, which are both very complex topics. And they enshrine rigidity where flexibility, discussion, common sense, and consensus are necessary. > Okay, I realise here I'm going to get shot at, but it is my > understanding that it is not enough for information to be > accurate. It > has to be relevant and it needs to be . Wikipedia is simply too > big now > to be built like it was in the old days. America doesn't operate the > way it did in the Wild West, Wikipedia can't operate the way it did > back > then. Enforce mob rule and then watch as we lose the battle to the > mob. > We're walking a tight line as it is, at the outer edges like > Siegenthaler. I'd hate to see the centre go. One of the most common misconceptions and false attacks on Wikipedia has always been equating the consensus model with mob rule. > Look, I agree that there are issues, but those issues aren't with the > policies. They are with the editors who can't seem to apply, what for > better words I'll call common sense to the policies. They can't > seem to > grasp that there is a need to compromise, a need to facilitate other > opinions and a need to deal. They can't grasp the concept of > collaboration, they can't grasp the idea that life is not black and > white. They can't see the future is reached by groping about in the > dark as much as it is reached by walking clear lit corridors. Too > many > times an obvious decision is delayed due to one person in a far off > field crying out "Process". What we need is a way of enforcing the > idea > that it is the spirit of the rules that are observed, not the words. > Too many people are invested in the fight, not the book in the > hands of > that African kid. The solution is, in part, to get away from a system of rules and towards a system of principles. [[WP:V]] is a good page. [[WP:NOR]] is a good page. That's because they enshrine principles and goals. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] enshrine a hopeless bureaucracy that we can never hope to actually get working. If you want a model where people look at the goal instead of the method, you need policies that are principles and goals, not processes. [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] are the ugly processes we wrote to try to support [[WP:V]] and [[WP:NOR]]. Cut out the process, leave the goal. -Phil

On Jan 25, 2007, at 6:13 PM, Steve Block wrote: Yes. But we have over and over again seen that policy can never cure stupidity. The stupid will break things with or without policy. And policy has usually been largely ineffectual in fixing the stupid. What fixes the stupid is having multiple people going "No, that's stupid" and reverting the changes. That's always been our main line of defense. And the thing is, it works just as well if there's a policy that says "revert the changes" as if there's not. And the best way to stop the idiotic Wikinomic is to take away the process. The main thing that process does is it makes it so that only process wonks get involved. Take away the process, take away the stupid junk. Exactly. And the problem is that the people take the process pages and bite the newbies. Elsewhere in this thread I used the hypothetical example of Susan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ User:Phil_Sandifer/Susan That's the question here. How can we take away the ability of the clueless to bite the newbies. I suspect the easiest answer would be an arbcom with the balls to give a complete pass to a rogue admin who went and nuked about there dozen pages in a two minute time period, and to pass a finding "Admin's actions were completely right, and none of these pages should be recreated." Make the place hostile to the process junkies and get them to fork. Actually, that would be a good policy page. [[Wikipedia:Bite the process junkies]] -Phil

geni wrote: <snip> [[Wikipedia:Ban them all]] -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

Steve Block wrote: The problem with this kind of argument as the very first one in a series of comments is that it makes me feel blackmailed by whatever follows. I am disinclined to read further because because I feel that the motivation for what follows will not be based on the objective issue, but on finding reasons to keep you here. Ec

Steve Block wrote: I don't know if offence was the right word for the way I reacted, but I certainly accept your apology in the spirit in which it was intended. Ignoring the rest of that message was as much as could reasonably be done in the circumstances. I would not have applied this to later messages. Ec