On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Screamer <scream(a)datascreamer.com> wrote: I think Steven was meaning this generically; 'you' meant all of us, not singling out SV. -Matt

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Screamer <scream(a)datascreamer.com> wrote: You should have Assumed Good Faith ;-) Magnus

Thomas Dalton wrote: Good faith or not, there is no faith assumption with telling folks to shut up. Its rude. The onus is on the poster, not the recipient to ensure messages are not ambiguous. ./scream

Thomas Dalton wrote: In complete seriousness, just shut up and get back to work on the encyclopedia. AGF and all the other values that make this thing great exist because they are a necessity for producing good collaborative articles. The more people focus on the project instead of meta discussion and the personalities, the more they see how AGF isn't just a nice idea...it's indispensable. "In complete seriousness, just shut up and get back to work on the encyclopedia. " Maybe I did misunderstood, maybe I Should have assumed good faith, but, the message seems clear and with unambiguity here. ./scream

will not be >helped. Don't be arrogant. The reason someone responded that way is because they are tired of talking in circles about the general problem with the community, not necessarily because they have their head's in the sand. On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:

this, please state it. I already did. I agree, but it's completely inappropriate for anyone to have the moralistic pretension to assume that anyone who doesn't want to discuss it on the mailing list is a naysayer. IMO, part of the thing that's screwed up about the community is this mailing list. So naturally, it makes sense to me that other wouldn't want to discuss it here. On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:

On 06/03/2008, Ron Ritzman <ritzman(a)gmail.com> wrote: The strength of "Assume Good Faith" is that it's a good heuristic for life in general. Almost all people mean well and are sincere in their actions - that's why they're so hard to sway from them. And *shit happens*, but people are unwilling to accept that it's possible - they ignore the ridiculous fucked-up complexity and emergent behaviour of evolved systems and keep looking for someone to blame. It's the same place conspiracy theories and witch-hunting come from. (I'm looking for a reference to an experiment I read of: birds being fed or not at random when they pressed a lever. The chance of being fed was determined only by chance, but the birds constructed all manner of increasingly elaborate rituals before pressing the lever, timing, etc. in an attempt to make the food come more reliably. Does anyone know the one I mean?) - d.

I read about it in a book by Derren Brown - I've just found the page and he says it was done by B. F. Skinner in 1948.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote: Even today, as a vetern user of a couple years, I find it very easy to edit articles and only run into helpful, friendly people. I just follow a few simple rules. Don't choose articles to edit by hearing about them on enwiki-l Don't choose articles to edit by hearing about them on WP:AN or WP:AN/I Don't choose articles to edit by hearing about them on User_talk:Jimbo_Wales Don't choose articles to edit by hearing about them on wikipediareview.com (.org?) Just go edit something you're interested in, know a little about, and be polite. Almost everyone will be very nice to you. Editors just seem to gravitate towards ZOMG DRAMAZ centres as they gain experience - but if you deliberately go the other way, you'll find those centres are only a tiny part of our universe. Cheers WilyD

On 06/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Maybe but rather a lot of that 2 million was built on knowledge people held in their heads. Very few people with solid internet access hold information about the unfilled entries in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_name:_F In their head (indeed I suspect even professional linguists won't offhand know much about rather a lot of those). Thus we are moving from what people know to what people can find out. This is problematical since while there are a reasonable number of people online prepared to write about what they know about there are rather fewer who are interested in digging through dead tree sources to see what they can find out. Incidentally we need a sound recording of the proper pronunciation of "!kung". -- geni

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 06/03/2008, David Gerard wrote: Definitely. See the following for just some of the subjects "at arms' length": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons A selection: *"The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects searchable online." *"The British Library is known to hold over 150 million items." *"Genbank, an online database of DNA sequences from over 165,000 species , has over 46 million entries" *"The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) GEOnet Names Server contains approximately 3.88 million named" *"Thomson-Gale's Biography Resource Center contains over 1,335,000 biographies." *"31 million CAS registry numbers have been allocated for chemical compounds." *"the Internet Movie Database claims to have records on 549,131 titles and 2,280,301 names." - -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: I do. Are we running out of server space? To be in a catalogue, some minimum of information has got to be known on an object.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 5:40 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Geni Probably more than that. I'd expect an article that looks more like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%289926%29_1981_EU41 to pick the last item out of my edit history. It's just a stub, but it has a decent amount of usefull information. Beyond that, this doesn't seem to answer my question. Cheers WilyD

On 06/03/2008, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Those are now held by the British museum. 150 million is books and book like items (pamphlets and maps for example) IMDB is kinda dicey see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_IMDb -- geni

On 07/03/2008, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Commons does not support whatever Blender stores it's files as which would be about the only open format for such data I can think of. Getting access to the vaults of museums is an area where realistically we need functioning chapters backed with some foundation influence.. Sure technically there are ways a private individual could get into them but only limited areas and the amount you could so in a session would be limited. In any case we haven't finished mining what is on public display yet. With the even standard digital camera getting better low light capabilities working through the whole of say the [[Pitt Rivers Museum]] could be an option if we could put together a large enough party of wikipedians. Other attack lines are university collections where we should be able to find students at the university to get things moving (universities may not like students taking an interest but there isn't much they can do about it). -- geni

On 07/03/2008, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: With museums like Pitt Rivers you just photograph everything in the display cabinets wait a few years and repeat. Need a decent low light camera mind. We are not experts in preservation and don't have the funds to support it. Scanning records a separate issue and requires a different approach. Photographing something without damage is fairly easy. Scanning without damage is hard. While technically the Hasselblad H3D-39 can take photos of A2 sized objects with a resolution of about 300DPI the price tag is over $30K. The upshot of this is that we are mostly going to be limited to scanning fairly common stuff or stuff that we or friends and relatives actually own since most collections are likely to be worried about damage. -- geni

This has topic-drifted like mad, so please excuse this as being a collection of utterly unrelated material. One of the things that has bothered me is the way in which Wikipedia has tended to attempt to take over from more specialized efforts which are surely more authoritative than anything we can produce. I've seen this in a lot of science and transportation subjects, as (for instance) the tendency to write articles on every train station that ever existed, and then put in all information short of actual arrival and departure times. This stuff is high maintenance and particularly where there is an official site, any sensible person should prefer that over us. It would be nice to come up with some way to turn ourselves into a portal to the good (meaning reliable) stuff for these subjects. As far as AGF is concerned: someone way up the chain hit the main reason. In decades of on-line discussion, I've found no principle more destructive than the "sovereign right to take offense". Even true trolling is not as bad (and it seems to me that most of what is called "trolling" these days is actually the SRtTO). In order to for you to make rational discussion, it is necessary for you to view your opponent as someone you could discuss things with rationally. The flip side is that the visibility of Wikipedia means that there are way too many people who have something (malign) to gain from gaming it. The obvious result is that bad faith is increasingly abundant; the less obvious result is that the resulting urge to conduct a crusade against bad faith leads people to self-righteous responses. There are a lot of subjects which one probably shouldn't edit over long periods, because the POV warring is so strong that it is eventually possible not to be contaminated by it. Which leads me to something that will undoubtedly rub some people the wrong way. Wikiprojects attract people who love the subject in question. This is always a recipe for some bias, as (for example) people in the Trains Wikiproject are likely to have positive leanings towards trains, and perhaps especially the trains of their native land/region/railroad. I don't know how much we can do about that, as banning projects or other overt associations isn't going to stop people from associating. The ones that worry me are those that are formed around advocacy points, and especially those addressing current controversies. For instance, one can go to the Intelligent Design project page and see complaints that it (and therefore the articles under its sway) are owned by committed secular Darwinists. We also have project on LGBT studies and on animal rights which surely must function as rallying points for those who support the same. Argument about how accurate these perceptions are is a bit beside the point; if the projects themselves are free of bias, there are surely subcommunities of editors who aren't. I don't have a nice summary to tie all this together, so I'll just top here.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Spell it out, then. My sense on a lot of these topics is that we are simply a mirror inferior to the original. I greatly disagree. Our ability to organize data is limited by our presentation structures. Database-like presentation of tabular data is something we cannot do, but people will continue to write a page on each datum involved because that's what our structure encourages. Regardless of its accuracy, IMDB will probably be a better source, because it is specialized for that particular field. The same is inevitably going to be true of many other fields. Right now we're talking about converting the article on US lighthouses into a sortable table. The problem we are going to run into is that there are well over a thousand entries. There are already several other such directories out there, and about the only thing I can really say that we offer over them is legally plagiarizable text and the correction of certain inaccuracies.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 06/03/2008, Steve Bennett wrote: According to [[Guide Star Catalog II]], "998,402,801 coordinate entries... and has positions, classifications, and magnitudes for 455,851,237 objects". Each one also has imaging data associated with it. So that's hundreds of millions of viable article subjects. As geni said, these are "books and book like items". A good percentage make viable article subjects. Names of geographical objects. Again, presumably many of their structures are known (to know that they are molecules), their names, their discoverers, their context, &c. - -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: Kurt, If it exists... it may not be a legit subject if it does not meet the requirements for inclusion, and / or the community does not want it included (via our AFD, for example). This is how our project works as of the moment. ./scream

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: I'm going to start a bio on myself... lets see how long that stays. I, as a subject won't meet the inclusion standard and would be deleted shortly. Just an example. ./scream

Screamer wrote: But that would not be because you're illegitimate. BLP and COI might be more important factors. Ec

Just what is the difference between "does not meet the requirements for inclusion, " and " the community does not want it included..." ? Perhaps you mean, whether or not it means the requirements that the community has put into formal guidelines, and whether or not it meets the idiosyncratic feeling at the time? On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

Screamer, you seem to have confused a number of things. The assertion of notability requirement for does not apply specifically to BLPs--it applies to any articles about people or some kinds of groups or web content that do not assert or indicate some plausible notability or importance. Meeting it does not provide that the article be kept, it just provides that it not be speedily deleted as obviously impossible altogether. It can further be contested by anyone except the author. It's just a shortcut requirement to get things quickly deleted that do not warrant a discussion. What you are probably thinking of is the provision for summary deletion of BLPs as "Any administrator, acting on their own judgment, may delete an article that is substantially a biography of a living person if they believe that it (and every previous version of it) significantly violates any aspect of the relevant policy. " as enacted by arb com at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Badlydrawnj… On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:29 PM, Screamer <scream(a)datascreamer.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

David Goodman wrote: David, And you seem to be confused about my example. I'll clarify, an article about myself won't at this time meet the a requirement for inclusion, because at this time, it won't assert any notability. I'm not a notable person, I've done nothing to make myself notable. There are no sources about me. This was my very specific example to answer your question. La boule est dans votre cour. ./scream

You tempt me to give you my name. I'd be interested in an independent test. But I live a small life, maybe sometimes in the future, I can do something notable. :) ./scream David Goodman wrote:

On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw(a)armory.com> wrote: No if a reasonable amount has be written about it then is may be the subject of an article? No if someone has written a reasonable amount about it then maybe otherwise no. How much do you know about modern organic synthesis? -- geni

On 07/03/2008, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: The problem is that due to modern organic techniques it is quite possible to create very large numbers of chemicals in a very short length of time. This is generaly used in combination with very narrow screening so unless you think "Chemical X does not inhibit cell function y" is a valid article you can't write articles on every single chemical. What you instead do is white about chemical families. You start with say bycyclo[2,2,2]octane then you have an article about the bycyclo[2,2,2]octane derivatives that contain biphenyls and then if there is enough info derivative of those. What you don't attempt is to write an separate article for every single chemical. -- geni

On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw(a)armory.com> wrote: Because perma-substubs are pretty much useless and if the article reads "Chemical X has a positive dielectric anisotropy of 0.1" then for fairly obvious reasons the chemical is unlikely to be the target of future research so little hope for expansion. An article about the family of chemicals it is part of is far far more useful. -- geni

On 07/03/2008, James Farrar <james.farrar(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes but individual articles are not a useful way to present the info. General form of presentation in journals tends to be some form of table. -- geni

Apologies for the double post. Gmail said it hadn't sent it the first time... On 07/03/2008, James Farrar <james.farrar(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw(a)armory.com> wrote: This is quite an extremist opinion, with which many people would have huge problems. I exist. But I'm not a legitimate subject for an article. --Oskar

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: Are you aware of our policy and guidelines regarding , for example, notability? Additionally, if the community does not want an article included, say via AFD, is it still a legit article? How do you address that? ./scream

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: And the sky is not *really* blue tinted. Forgive my parallel. The policy has weight, and is enforceable. We have IAR, yes, but largely - the policy is enforceable. Until it is changed. Perhaps you could start a talk page discussion with the suggestions, I would go comment on it. AFD outcomes are always wrong? How do you address this? ./scream

Oldak Quill wrote: It's great that some people recognize the size of the task at hand. I would add that a single monthly periodical publication that lasts for a century at 100 pages per month will generate 120,000 pages of material during that time. At 200 words per page that's already 24,000,000 words. That's alrady bigger than the /"Enciclopedia universal <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_universal_ilustrada_europeo-americana>". /All our notability debates do nothing to cope with the massive amount of data that is available. I've lately been buying up bound 19th century periodicals very cheap; One of the latest ones has been about 50 annual reprint volumes of "Gentleman's Magazine" at roughly $1.00 each . Libraries can't keep up with the storage, and the smart ones at least salvage a little cash by selling them on line. With many others it's a short trip to the dumpster. Material that lacks notability is mostly harmless. Some of it can be the seed for some future bigger article in the distant future when it gets someone wondering. In the big scheme of things it does not take up a lot of disk space, but the arguments about deleting it take up far more disk space. When presented in a respectful way that gives everyone a chance to respond, there is no argument over notability. In an atmosphere of trust nobody feels so beset by rapid-fire tagging, because they are confident that the deletion proposals have been carefully reviewed by humans with a sense of judgement. They don't have to feel like Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory. A rule of thumb for the deletionists might be: For every article that you delete you must add one. Given the professedly high standards upon which someone relies for deletion, one should be able to expect that that person's inclusion standards will be just as high. Ec

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 11:14 AM, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: OK - remove copyright violations and blatant spam and nonsense, then. -Matt

geni wrote: If it was only about copyvios we would probably not be having this discussion. I don't mind even narrowing my criteria down to deletions for lack of notability. Ec

We have a lot of causes of harm to our public image, and as far deletion and inclusion are concerned, there is really no way that we can win public approval. Our notability debates reflect those in the real world, and we will always be criticized for being elitist and indiscriminate. I do think that "Wikipedia is not a directory" is not being taken seriously enough. Between all the football players, census data, and other such directory data, we are creating an unmaintainable mess. Wikipedia's model rewards people who create new articles, as you can tell by reading AfD. Whether it will reward the considerable work needed to keep all these articles up to date is at the very least questionable. The angst over the fair-use-rationale image deletion crusade suggests that it won't. On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 2:28 AM, quiddity &lt;blanketfort(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Oskar Sigvardsson wrote: That's what commitment is all about, but I think we lack leadership and vision. Jimbo provided this when the project was younger, but the project has gone well beyond that. NPOV, open access, and inclusiveness are great principles but in the absence of leadership and vision these are more difficult to accomplish. Perhaps what some of us see as a more fractious environment is more an inability to see where we are going. This is a very interesting observation. Since last month's newbie wasn't here in 2004 he judges the norm by what he see now, without any reference point in what it used to be. Templating, strict referencing and boilerplate image tags were not there in those days. The newbie's norms are different since they include them from the beginning. A person returning now after 3 or more years of absence would find the environment much different from what he knew. The 18-month burnout, which AFAIK is only anecdotal, has a ring of truth, and could be the basis for an interesting sociological study. The old dogs are the ones who have managed their way through the 18-month crisis, and still stick around. Ec

on 3/6/08 9:23 AM, Relata Refero at refero.relata(a)gmail.com wrote: Sarah, The above post by Relata Refero is a good example of what you are up against asking the questions you are asking. And, unfortunately, it's all too typical: People having a much more comfortable time dealing with 1s & 0s than with other people. Marc Riddell

That's because, Marc, 1s and 0s matter more to Wikipedia than people do. Some scandal splits the community? Half of everyone leaves in despair? Doesn't matter, we can just draft in new populations - probably of higher quality than the current population, too. Besides, I doubt whether there really was a time when the community ever did march unitedly behind the banner of one set of "ideals". It's obvious that, even from the start, our founders had different visions of what Wikipedia was - and what Wikipedia should become. No point harking back to an imaginary Golden Age. CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. _________________________________________________________________ Free games, great prizes - get gaming at Gamesbox. http://www.searchgamesbox.com

On 3/6/08, Christiano Moreschi &lt;moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk&gt; wrote: Yay, meat-puppets! No, seriously I've tried to introduce new people to Wikipedia, but the invariable response was "looks pretty stupid". The ability to motivate others has never been a personal strength of mine, and the ability to keep people from quitting in disgust has never been a strength of the project. But we should still aspire to do both. —C.W.