What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
Move it to Wikipedia:Geographic references?
On 7/2/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_references
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Sun, 2 Jul 2006 11:15:41 -0400, "John Lyden" rasputinaxp@gmail.com wrote:
Move it to Wikipedia:Geographic references?
Yes. I boldly did just that, reversing the status quo which had a redirect the other way.
Guy (JzG)
On 02/07/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
It's essentially a references section for about ten thousand articles - all the Rambot pages originally linked to it in order to cite the sources for their data. It seems to have been used for similar things afterwards.
Probably not the best way to do it by current standards - if it was done now we'd probably have this stuff in <ref></ref> tags on every individual page - but it worked well enough.
On Sun, 2 Jul 2006 20:47:12 +0100, "Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
It's essentially a references section for about ten thousand articles
- all the Rambot pages originally linked to it in order to cite the
sources for their data. It seems to have been used for similar things afterwards.
Would it be worth actually writing an encyclopaedia article on the references Geographers use?
Guy (JzG)
On 7/2/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
I'm not sure if this is the same one, but I saw something very similar to that recently. It appears to arise from a conflict between two ideas: 1) Link to some information to explain how to interpret the information in the infobox 2) Don't link to wikipedia: space, because that would be a self-reference.
IMHO, the second principle is a bad one. There seems nothing wrong to me with linking to some actual useful information *about the infobox*, rather than a contrived non-encyclopaedic article in the main article space.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
I'm not sure if this is the same one, but I saw something very similar to that recently. It appears to arise from a conflict between two ideas:
- Link to some information to explain how to interpret the
information in the infobox 2) Don't link to wikipedia: space, because that would be a self-reference.
IMHO, the second principle is a bad one. There seems nothing wrong to me with linking to some actual useful information *about the infobox*, rather than a contrived non-encyclopaedic article in the main article space.
I'm the opposite, I think the second principle is very important. Anything that's not in the article namespace, template namespace or image namespace is stuff that's not really a part of the encyclopedia itself - it's just temporary scaffolding and support equipment we're using while writing it. When Wikipedia gets mirrored or otherwise distributed all that non-encyclopedia stuff should be pared away. If there are links to it then those links will automatically become broken.
Far better to switch over to the <ref></ref><references/> system, IMO. The main problem here is that there are tens of thousands of articles to convert. I don't suppose there are any bothandlers who'd be willing to look into doing automated conversion? Rambot articles are probably still fairly standardized in format. I've noticed that the old Rambot reference links use section numbers that no longer match anything in the reference "article", that could perhaps be repaired in the process.
On 7/3/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'm the opposite, I think the second principle is very important. Anything that's not in the article namespace, template namespace or image namespace is stuff that's not really a part of the encyclopedia itself - it's just temporary scaffolding and support equipment we're using while writing it. When Wikipedia gets mirrored or otherwise distributed all that non-encyclopedia stuff should be pared away. If there are links to it then those links will automatically become broken.
Ok, so we have: Article namespace - encyclopaedic articles about encyclopaedic topics. "List of X" is about as far as we stretch. Template namespace - text that gets included into encyclopaedic articles. Plus, random cruft like userboxes. Image namespace - images that get included into encyclaedic articles (plus other cruft) Category namespace (you forgot this one) - meta information about groups of related articles
Now, where the hell does meta information about individual or groups of effectively unrelated articles go? Bizarrely, the category namespace seems like the closest one! What else is there?
Far better to switch over to the <ref></ref><references/> system, IMO. The main problem here is that there are tens of thousands of articles to convert. I don't suppose there are any bothandlers who'd be willing to look into doing automated conversion? Rambot articles are probably still fairly standardized in format. I've noticed that the old Rambot reference links use section numbers that no longer match anything in the reference "article", that could perhaps be repaired in the process.
I don't see how this helps. Putting <ref>s into an infobox is dangerous, as there's no guarantee the including page will actually have a <references> section...
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
Now, where the hell does meta information about individual or groups of effectively unrelated articles go? Bizarrely, the category namespace seems like the closest one! What else is there?
It should go into those individual or groups of articles, IMO. Possibly a template, that's part of the encyclopedia content and is often used for material that is common to a large group of articles.
I don't see how this helps. Putting <ref>s into an infobox is dangerous, as there's no guarantee the including page will actually have a <references> section...
I'm not suggesting an infobox. In the case of these Rambot articles, I'm proposing that the links to the [[Geographic references]] page be replaced (probably by a bot) with the references themselves, wrapped in <ref> tags. A part of this operation would of course be to ensure that there's a <references/> tag in the article to display them. I suppose you could make the individual cites into templates since they'll be so widely used, so that for example the bot would go around inserting the text <ref>{{cite 2002 US census}}</ref> or whatever.
Pretty much all articles should have a references section anyway, so this would be a very positive step IMO.
On 7/3/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'm not suggesting an infobox. In the case of these Rambot articles, I'm proposing that the links to the [[Geographic references]] page be replaced (probably by a bot) with the references themselves, wrapped in <ref> tags. A part of this operation would of course be to ensure that there's a <references/> tag in the article to display them. I suppose you could make the individual cites into templates since they'll be so widely used, so that for example the bot would go around inserting the text <ref>{{cite 2002 US census}}</ref> or whatever.
Pretty much all articles should have a references section anyway, so this would be a very positive step IMO.
Sounds good.
Steve
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Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/2/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
I'm not sure if this is the same one, but I saw something very similar to that recently. It appears to arise from a conflict between two ideas:
- Link to some information to explain how to interpret the
information in the infobox 2) Don't link to wikipedia: space, because that would be a self-reference.
IMHO, the second principle is a bad one. There seems nothing wrong to me with linking to some actual useful information *about the infobox*, rather than a contrived non-encyclopaedic article in the main article space.
Actually, there is a *huge* problem with that. The articles in main namespace are the encyclopedic content. The Wikipedia: namespace is not encyclopedic content, and thus, it isn't included on most mirrors. Having thousands of articles linking to a page that mirrors don't even include is a patently BAD idea.
- -- Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")
~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
They're a warped mirror. People don't expect warped mirrors to work properly. Shit, they don't even expect most web links to work =D
mboverload
On 7/2/06, Ben McIlwain cydeweys@gmail.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/2/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
I'm not sure if this is the same one, but I saw something very similar to that recently. It appears to arise from a conflict between two ideas:
- Link to some information to explain how to interpret the
information in the infobox 2) Don't link to wikipedia: space, because that would be a
self-reference.
IMHO, the second principle is a bad one. There seems nothing wrong to me with linking to some actual useful information *about the infobox*, rather than a contrived non-encyclopaedic article in the main article space.
Actually, there is a *huge* problem with that. The articles in main namespace are the encyclopedic content. The Wikipedia: namespace is not encyclopedic content, and thus, it isn't included on most mirrors. Having thousands of articles linking to a page that mirrors don't even include is a patently BAD idea.
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")
~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (MingW32)
iD8DBQFEqGrZvCEYTv+mBWcRAo16AKCjTiSD9Lu6dRX1coctilAwS9F7/gCgo3qf oaMmlztWFQ/9C4X3hZmkO7c= =RFev -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Just to expand: They don't need to mirror the Wikipedia: content. All they have to do is link back to the actual site. TaDa - problem fixed.
mboverload
On 7/2/06, mboverload mboverload@gmail.com wrote:
They're a warped mirror. People don't expect warped mirrors to work properly. Shit, they don't even expect most web links to work =D
mboverload
On 7/2/06, Ben McIlwain cydeweys@gmail.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 7/2/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
I'm not sure if this is the same one, but I saw something very similar to that recently. It appears to arise from a conflict between two ideas:
- Link to some information to explain how to interpret the
information in the infobox 2) Don't link to wikipedia: space, because that would be a
self-reference.
IMHO, the second principle is a bad one. There seems nothing wrong to me with linking to some actual useful information *about the infobox*, rather than a contrived non-encyclopaedic article in the main article space.
Actually, there is a *huge* problem with that. The articles in main namespace are the encyclopedic content. The Wikipedia: namespace is not encyclopedic content, and thus, it isn't included on most mirrors. Having thousands of articles linking to a page that mirrors don't even include is a patently BAD idea.
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")
~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (MingW32)
iD8DBQFEqGrZvCEYTv+mBWcRAo16AKCjTiSD9Lu6dRX1coctilAwS9F7/gCgo3qf oaMmlztWFQ/9C4X3hZmkO7c= =RFev -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
mboverload wrote:
Just to expand: They don't need to mirror the Wikipedia: content. All they have to do is link back to the actual site. TaDa - problem fixed.
How will that work on a DVD version?
I think it is incumbent on us to _solve_ this problem, not to dump it in our users' laps and say "here, figure out how to clean this up yourself." We now have some nice referencing syntax built into Wikimedia, laziness is no excuse not to use it.
G'day mboverload,
[I'm not even going to bother fixing the top-posting on this one, so 'bye-'bye context. Please, Dan Tobias posted a link explaining this.]
Just to expand: They don't need to mirror the Wikipedia: content. All they have to do is link back to the actual site. TaDa - problem fixed.
Once again, I think you've missed the point. We want Wikipedia to be as accessible as possible. This means:
a) We *want* to be mirrored We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. For that purpose, everything we write is licensed under the GFDL. All our work is *explicitly* available to anyone who wants to take it, provided they abide by the rules set out in the GFDL. In addition, much of the revenue that pays for servers and so on comes from mirrors like answers.com who kick back some of their income (even though they don't have to) as a "thank you" to us for providing free-as-in-speech content. What, you thought our donations were enough to pay for *everything*? Our mirrors owe us. And we owe *them*. We can't just dismiss them.
b) We cannot assume our readers are using Wikipedia itself We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. That means we encourage people to re-use our work. We don't want to limit that by deliberately making life difficult for re-users.
c) We cannot assume our readers are connected to the Internet We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. The result, Wikipedia, is *not* a website: it's an encyclopaedia that happens to be written in hypertext and hosted on the Web. The content would not stop being our content if it were not used in the context of our website. We're taking advantage of the semantic and formatting opportunities available through HTML and CSS, but we don't need to be a website for that. Wikipedia content needs to be able to stand alone as well as any other encyclopaedia's content could.
d) We cannot assume our readers are *capable* of connecting to the Internet Yes, even today, there are people living outside America, and unable to access the technological marvels y'all are privileged with. It's even possible their circumstances differ wildly from what you expect. A version of Wikipedia on CD/DVD, for example, could make it a lot easier for certain users to access our content ...
e) We cannot even assume our readers are using a computer Wikipedia articles are printed all the time. We're probably too big for our articles to be used in a traditional paper encyclopaedia, but there's no reason certain articles couldn't be placed in a book --- a hardcover "Best of Wikipedia" showcasing our featured articles, for example, would be rather nifty. HTML is quite useful, but we should not write our content such that it can only be enjoyed on a computer.
On 7/3/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
G'day mboverload,
[I'm not even going to bother fixing the top-posting on this one, so 'bye-'bye context. Please, Dan Tobias posted a link explaining this.]
Just to expand: They don't need to mirror the Wikipedia: content. All
they
have to do is link back to the actual site. TaDa - problem fixed.
Once again, I think you've missed the point. We want Wikipedia to be as accessible as possible. This means:
a) We *want* to be mirrored We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. For that purpose, everything we write is licensed under the GFDL. All our work is *explicitly* available to anyone who wants to take it, provided they abide by the rules set out in the GFDL. In addition, much of the revenue that pays for servers and so on comes from mirrors like answers.com who kick back some of their income (even though they don't have to) as a "thank you" to us for providing free-as-in-speech content. What, you thought our donations were enough to pay for *everything*? Our mirrors owe us. And we owe *them*. We can't just dismiss them.
b) We cannot assume our readers are using Wikipedia itself We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. That means we encourage people to re-use our work. We don't want to limit that by deliberately making life difficult for re-users.
c) We cannot assume our readers are connected to the Internet We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. The result, Wikipedia, is *not* a website: it's an encyclopaedia that happens to be written in hypertext and hosted on the Web. The content would not stop being our content if it were not used in the context of our website. We're taking advantage of the semantic and formatting opportunities available through HTML and CSS, but we don't need to be a website for that. Wikipedia content needs to be able to stand alone as well as any other encyclopaedia's content could.
d) We cannot assume our readers are *capable* of connecting to the Internet Yes, even today, there are people living outside America, and unable to access the technological marvels y'all are privileged with. It's even possible their circumstances differ wildly from what you expect. A version of Wikipedia on CD/DVD, for example, could make it a lot easier for certain users to access our content ...
e) We cannot even assume our readers are using a computer Wikipedia articles are printed all the time. We're probably too big for our articles to be used in a traditional paper encyclopaedia, but there's no reason certain articles couldn't be placed in a book --- a hardcover "Best of Wikipedia" showcasing our featured articles, for example, would be rather nifty. HTML is quite useful, but we should not write our content such that it can only be enjoyed on a computer.
Thank you for taking the time to write that up, I now understand your position better, and I have another solution =D
If it's so important, just make it a regular article. It doesn't have a lot of that Wikipedia: feel and with some minor rewording it could be put into article space. I know it would be an ugly duckling, but it would work.
mboverload
The article is now a redirect to [[Geographic coordinate system]], and the GR template has been fixed so the redirect to WP:GR is not needed. As always, feel free to change anything I've done if you feel there is a better solution.
-kc-
On 02/07/06, Puppy puppy@killerchihuahua.com wrote:
The article is now a redirect to [[Geographic coordinate system]], and the GR template has been fixed so the redirect to WP:GR is not needed. As always, feel free to change anything I've done if you feel there is a better solution.
Sorry, I've reverted. There's a direct link to [[Geographic references]] from every Rambot-generated article, things like:
As of the [[census]][[Geographic references#2|<sup>2</sup>]] of 2000, there were 1,101 people...
- it's a direct citation of a source. Unless we're going to fix all those links first, we shouldn't be redirecting to an article which isn't the source!
On 7/2/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry, I've reverted. There's a direct link to [[Geographic references]] from every Rambot-generated article, things like:
As of the [[census]][[Geographic references#2|<sup>2</sup>]] of 2000, there were 1,101 people...
- it's a direct citation of a source. Unless we're going to fix all
those links first, we shouldn't be redirecting to an article which isn't the source!
Uh, we shouldn't be citing Wikipedia for census information :/
Steve
Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/2/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry, I've reverted. There's a direct link to [[Geographic references]] from every Rambot-generated article, things like:
As of the [[census]][[Geographic references#2|<sup>2</sup>]] of 2000, there were 1,101 people...
- it's a direct citation of a source. Unless we're going to fix all
those links first, we shouldn't be redirecting to an article which isn't the source!
Uh, we shouldn't be citing Wikipedia for census information :/
It is not a direct citation. It was apparently an attempt in the pre <ref> days (probably even predating templatized footnotes) to indicate the source for the statistices. IMO, all the GR#2 links should be changed to use <ref> tags. A dog lot of work though, but a bot could probably help.
Bkonrad
On 02/07/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/2/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry, I've reverted. There's a direct link to [[Geographic references]] from every Rambot-generated article, things like:
As of the [[census]][[Geographic references#2|<sup>2</sup>]] of 2000, there were 1,101 people...
- it's a direct citation of a source. Unless we're going to fix all
those links first, we shouldn't be redirecting to an article which isn't the source!
Uh, we shouldn't be citing Wikipedia for census information :/
We're not. It's just that rather than have the links for the sources on each and every page, we link to a single central page with the details of the sources. ("census daya is sourced from X, place names are taken from these two databases, etc.")
It's a kludge, and it's not how we'd do it now, but the fact is it's there.
On 7/3/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We're not. It's just that rather than have the links for the sources on each and every page, we link to a single central page with the details of the sources. ("census daya is sourced from X, place names are taken from these two databases, etc.")
It's a kludge, and it's not how we'd do it now, but the fact is it's there.
I don't think that's too bad, but it shouldn't be in the main namespace, as it's not really encyclopaedic information in itself - it's meta information, like a template. I guess we don't have a good way of dealing with these, but imho project namespace would be preferable.
Steve
On 7/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/3/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We're not. It's just that rather than have the links for the sources on each and every page, we link to a single central page with the details of the sources. ("census daya is sourced from X, place names are taken from these two databases, etc.")
It's a kludge, and it's not how we'd do it now, but the fact is it's there.
I don't think that's too bad, but it shouldn't be in the main namespace, as it's not really encyclopaedic information in itself - it's meta information, like a template. I guess we don't have a good way of dealing with these, but imho project namespace would be preferable.
The current database download designed for mirrors contains "Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages." How is a meta-page designated a "primary meta-page"? Would that be an appropriate description of this page?
Anthony
On 7/3/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
The current database download designed for mirrors contains "Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages." How is a meta-page designated a "primary meta-page"? Would that be an appropriate description of this page?
Interesting, no idea what that means.
Steve
On 7/4/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/3/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
The current database download designed for mirrors contains "Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages." How is a meta-page designated a "primary meta-page"? Would that be an appropriate description of this page?
Interesting, no idea what that means.
Steve
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20060702/
There is a special packaged version of the en.wikipedia database (for example), which contains "Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages." It omits most Wikipedia namespace pages.
If Geographic References is going to stay in the Wikipedia namespace, it certainly needs to be included in this database dump, as that is the dump that mirrors are encouraged to use (and Geographic References should be included in the mirrors).
Anthony
On 7/4/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
There is a special packaged version of the en.wikipedia database (for example), which contains "Articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages." It omits most Wikipedia namespace pages.
If Geographic References is going to stay in the Wikipedia namespace, it certainly needs to be included in this database dump, as that is the dump that mirrors are encouraged to use (and Geographic References should be included in the mirrors).
This sounds like the best solution: Wikipedia namespace (as it's not a genuine encyclopaedic article), but marked as being closely related to articles and a "must have" for content reusers.
Steve
As I mentioned (apparently not clearly enough) GR#2 has been removed from the WP:GR article: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Geographic_references&am...
-kc-
Thanks, glad I posted here then. Ok, the template works, but all the gazillion Rambot articles will break. I will undertake the tedious task of changing all the Rambot article links (prior to changing the redirect again) if it is determined that is the best course of action, but would (for obvious reasons) prefer that someone who has and uses AWB or a similar tool do so.
BTW, GR|2 is broken regardless of what we decide to do here, due to edits to GR. Other countries work, though. Does that make a difference in your position? Rambot created primarily US articles, yes?
Anyone have any bright ideas, brilliant fixes?
-kc-
On 7/2/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
What is this page? It's not an article, but it's in the mainspace.
According to speedy deletion criteria, it would be speediable, but it's linked by thousands of articles, so...
Any idea what should we do with it?
It's not an article, but it forms part of many articles. In a sense, it's almost an 'external template' - common reference content for a bunch of articles.
While it's not an article, it's encyclopedia-space content. It should NOT be placed under Wikipedia: space, IMO.
-Matt