I guess I can withstand anger better than you. ;-)
Really, by that token, we should keep as "articles" pages with nothing more than "L3337 HAX0r 0WnZ u" and "x person is a jackass." What's the point? "Hubba hubba hubba" is an encyclopedia article exactly why? /Any/ well-titled page vandalized to contain content, where it previously had none, could become an article just by virtue of the title. So what? I'm not against subpar work, which IMO can always be improved, but I am against deliberate dreck.
We certainly need to clarify that rule on deletion--does it condone it or not? Why would it not? (Suppose we get a scripted /vandalism/ attack? Will we just blank all the pages?)
kq
Andre wrote:
>Someone got angry with me because I deleted subjects that could become
>articles. So I resurrected them. Now people get angry at me because I did
>that. So, what should I do then? It seems that the only way not to do
>something wrong is to do nothing at all.
>
>Please, either have a SINGLE set of rules that at least has no rules that
>are conflicting, or have no rules at all. This is making me angry and sick
>(literally).
Oh. I thought it was coming out in September, but I last checked in July. I'll look for it too. :-)
kq
>I read that your homonimous movie is out on dvd,
>so I'll probably rent it when I see it in my local
>video store.
>
>AN
On Wednesday 28 August 2002 12:01 pm, you wrote:
> Hm, we talked about this briefly in April. I didn't remember that until I
> saw a comment I left on that page above. see the following for my
> question, Magnus' response, and Jimbo's:
>
> http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001763.html
> http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001765.html
> http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001787.html
>
> kq
Yeah, I remember that too and I'm pretty sure it was me who changed the
wording to reflect what I saw to be the policy change. However, the same
issue has cropped up again and is distracting us from other policy discussion
-- thus the call for a vote. However, that will not be necessary if everyone
just drops the issue and accepts the current policies as written (it still
might be necessary to clarify some things).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>Tim Marklew wrote:
> > LDC - could you comment on how potentially dangerous this function is in
> > terms of slowing down the site for others? If a query results in a big
> > table, this can slow down the server. Is there an upper limit for how
> > long a query can take, or the size of a table, before it would time
> > out? If so, how big is the limit?
Brion Vibber wrote:
>Umm, not that I know of....
>On that note; currently the MySQL server is running at 99.5% CPU.
>Whatever it's doing, it's slowing the wiki to a trickle; I can't even
>get a connection through.....
>The IP address on this query looks suspiciously like yours, Tim! Exactly
>what query did you run?
It looks like it was me that brought the server to a standstill yesterday.
I would like to apologise to everyone who was inconvenienced.
This at least unequivocally answers the question about how dangerous direct
database queries can be - it is quite possible for a sysop to bring
Wikipedia to a complete standstill by accidentally entering an inappropriate
database query.
That said, the direct database queries can be really useful when done right.
I suggest that anyone who wants to experiment with them asks Lee Daniel
Crocker for sysop access on the Wikipedia test site
(http://www.piclab.com/newwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page). That way you
can test that things work as they should before trying them out on the main
Wikipedia site.
Again, sorry to everyone for any hassle caused.
Tim (Enchanter)
_________________________________________________________________
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One of the guidelines on [[Wikipedia:Policy on permanent deletion of pages]]
(currently #6) says for the most part:
Generally speaking, delete pages that simply will
never become encyclopedia articles, e.g.,
with titles that will never be misspellings,
that represent completely idiosyncratic non-topics, etc.
I've interpreted this differently from most of the other guidelines,
in that it says to delete a page, while most say to *not* delete.
But others have interpreted it to say to *not* delete pages
that have titles that might become the titles of articles.
(For examples, see the listings that The Cunctator has removed
from [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]].)
I think that this needs to be straightened out,
and the language on the page may need to be clarified.
IMO, pages with no content but with reasonable titles
are the worst of all, when they are linked from other articles.
The reader wastes time following links to useless pages;
the writer doesn't write an article that might be sorely needed.
[[Special:Mostwanted]], in particular, becomes skewed.
What is the opinion of the list?
-- Toby Bartels
<toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu>
>> I didn't see an article with the second title in the archive.
>> There's one just titled ".../World economic effects", but it has
>> no content at all.
> Did it use to have content? Or did that entry just hit the ether
> and disappear?
Deleting an article puts all its old versions in the archive; I
see no evidence that this article ever had any content, so it may
be that it was created under UseMod and the old versions, if any,
are gone; or else it was created as a placeholder for future use
and never filled in.
I today openned the list of short articles where the blank article on
[[Daithi Ó Connaill]] caught my eye. It is linked from a single article
on the [[Continuity Irish Republican Army]]. All the work on this has
been done by numbered workers. The thing that struck me was that Ó
Cnnaill's name and a few others look different. On the edit page these
names had the usual double square brackets but beyond that each name was
enclosed in the HTML <code>, </code> instruction. This may very well
the effort of a newbie who didn't yet trust the function of Wiki code.
This suggests the possibility that we could use this command to indicate
a useless link that needs to be worked on.
Eclecticology
On Wednesday 28 August 2002 04:06 am, Karen wrote:
> Gibberish is not an article. Blank pages are not an article. And
> nonsense phrases posted by a casual passerby are not an article. They
> just take up space that a real article could use. If it was a real
> article it would say something like 'Kate Hudson is (blah blah blah)'.
> Leaving this doesn't encourage the writer to make real contributions -
> if anything it encourages them to leave more nonsense to clutter up the
> space!
I totally agree - and thank you for making the distinction between and
article and a mere page.
A BLANK OR GIBBERISH PAGE IS NOT AN ARTICLE. So there isn't any reason why it
shouldn't be voted for deletion if not deleted outright (of course, if it
looks like a non-malicious newbie experiment we shouldn't be harsh when we
delete the page -- at least say hi in the delete summary).
Stubs on encyclopedia or almanac topics that have decent definitions /should
not/ be deleted however -- these are the beginning of articles. So long as a
subject is adequately defined (something I find to be a non-trivial task --
"a large city in Texas" DOES NOT cut it though), then passer-bys can
incrementally build the definition into a proper stub and then into an
article based on their incomplete knowledge of the subject.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)