[to WM UK and comcom]
Just woken by a call from a Telegraph journalist, who got my number
off the front page of wikimedia.org.uk (so that's probably my first
direct call from that).
His main question was "were the Jimmy Wales quotes from the Chronicle
of Higher Education about not using Wikipedia as a reference true?" I
said I hadn't seen the quotes, but chatted for a while about how we do
strongly recommend against using Wikipedia - or any encyclopedia - as
a primary source at university/college level, so if Jimmy said that
then yes, that's our position. All encyclopedias are secondary
sources, ideally - we have a rule of "no original research", so we
certainly *shouldn't* be the primary source, even if an article is one
of the best available on the subject.
The other subject was explaining semi-protection. I said how the NYT
article was good, but got the semiprotection thing more or less
backwards - that it wasn't a lockdown, but it allowed us to open to
editing articles that had previously spent a lot of time locked, and
gave [[George W. Bush]] as the usual example. "It's always a balancing
act, but we try to keep things open because that's been the secret of
our success." I stressed that semi-protection means you have to have
been an editor for about four days, and that saved us from a lot of
drive-by idiocy.
I wasn't particularly coherent and didn't drop loads of quotable
quotes as I usually try to, but I hope I did OK at getting things
across :-)
Two factual questions:
* Is [[George W. Bush]] still the most edited article on en:wp, by a
factor of about five? What articles are second and third?
* Is it still about four days before a new user can edit a
semiprotected article on en:wp?
- d.