Brion wrote:
>The particular case of [[Film Noir]] (a redirect to [[Film noir]]) is
>perhaps less important if the search is case-insensitive, but I see
>little point to excising it. You click it, you get the right article, no?
Well, yes. Ok, then I guess that solves it. :-)
kq
On Tuesday 24 September 2002 01:15 am, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> >I am glad that everybody's seems SO happy by how
> >quickly that issue was settled.
>
> After the issue had been around for some days, and with a lots of "red
> links" against very few (two, I think I saw before I made the change),
> and the change being less work than this email, I just leaped into action
> ;)
I think that it was a /very/ important point that the two objections came
from members of different Wikipedia projects. Remember, this is the English
mailing list and just because we agree to do something doesn't mean that we
should force this decision upon the other projects against their wishes.
Even though we have numerical superiority in terms of users Anthere is right
in saying that the rights of minorities must be respected.
This is why it would be a good idea to have different default display setting
tables for each of the different Wikipedias. That way each project can decide
what defaults they want to set (big deal if the French use ?, the English use
red underlined links, and the Germans use red links that are not underlined
-- readers will figure it out).
Different cultures have different ideas about color and style so we should
have some flexibility in this regard. In the interim, this could be manually
set the way you changed it in CVS for each language Wikipedia as it goes
online. The default display settings table can come later (otherwise this
feature would have to be manually "patched" each time a language gets its
software updated).
I still /strongly/ support having red links as the default for the English
Wikipedia.
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Wikipedia is now indexed by OneLook.com. I've asked
Doug to change the credit from my name to "the
Wikipedia project".
Stephen G.
--- Doug Beeferman <doug(a)dougb.com> wrote:
> Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 14:35:26 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Doug Beeferman <doug(a)dougb.com>
> To: Stephen Gilbert <canuck_in_korea2002(a)yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: Wikipedia/OneLook
>
>
> Hi Stephen,
>
> Thanks for pointing me to that report page on
> Wikipedia. It will work for
> the time being; I configured my OneLook update
> engine to download the
> article names monthly using a limit of 1000 articles
> per fetch, so that
> amounts to just 80 or so requests per month, which I
> hope will be a pretty
> negligible burden on Wikipedia's server(s). You're
> right that this isn't
> ideal as an export mechanism. Something like a
> single XML/RDF feed would
> be best, I think.
>
> I think Wikipedia makes a great addition to OneLook,
> especially for its
> breadth in many categories (famous people, event
> names, places) that
> aren't well-covered by conventional online
> glossaries/dictionaries.
>
> In the import rules I excluded a handful of types of
> article names that
> aren't "lexicographic" in the sense that they're not
> written the way
> people would look them up. Like "Academy
> Awards/Visual Effects" or the
> nodes beginning with "Talk:" or "Image:" There were
> 61412 terms retained
> in total.
>
> I've credited you on the dictionary's "info" page on
> OneLook; let me know
> if there's some person/entity that is more
> appropriate to credit.
>
> And by the way, lest I forget to give you the pitch
> I give to every
> dictionary provider I talk to -- OneLook might be a
> useful "fallback" site
> to reference when Wikipedia users do a search that
> comes up empty. For
> example, while "Phil Hartman" produces no article
> matches on Wikipedia,
> it does turn up in one of the 804 dictionaries
> indexed by OneLook, a
> biographical dictionary. ( See
> http://www.onelook.com/?w=phil+hartman )
>
> Take care,
> Doug
__________________________________________________
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I know I'll get in trouble for this, but in the spirit of "be bold" I
deleted the [[Fuck]] article. It just seemed pointless to have an
article called f***.
If someone wants to write an article on obscenity or censorship, and
treat the problems the term f*** has had, fine. But I don't want to see
every dirty word (or word that's gotten the dirty end of the stick) have
its own article.
Ed Poor
An "old fart"
wikipedia-l-request(a)nupedia.com wrote:
>I believe that this proposal would be very helpful to all of us.
>The Cunctator will be able to rest easy knowing that
>no information has been lost when Andre deletes a page,
>and Andre will be able to delete truly useless pages
>
André is deleting truly useless pages, so is Mav and so am I. We are
trying to do what we think is good for Wikipedia - if we wanted to do
harm, there's far easier and better was than to delete ultra-crappy
pages with no content. If I have to explain every single move and
deletion and addition I make here and have it approved by all
Wikipedians, we might as well stop the entire project. I'm doing this
while thinking reasonable. If you think that deletion was wrong: go
ahead and write a great article about the subject - don't make such a
noise out of it.
Jeronimo
Fred Bauder wrote:
>Precisely the point. An aggressive campaign against stubs and a policy
>which results not only in deletion but them being irrecoverable is not
>that. Stubs are not only a bit of information, but a seed planted, a part
>of the more general structure of knowledge.
>
If you'd bother to read what we write, you'd see that we are NOT
campaigning against stubs. I repeat: we are not campaigning against
stubs. In my vocabulary, with the current context, a stub is something
that is not the real thing, but that does perform some part of what the
real thing is expected to do (in analogy with, for example, developing
software). For an encyclopedia article, that means that a stub performs
some of the required functionality (explaining some term) but not fully.
In a sense, almost all Wikipedia articles are stubs, as they do not tell
everything there is to be told about a certain topic. However, in normal
usage, stubs are those articles that merely contain a short definition;
but it is still an article. The pages that we are talking about here are
not stubs. They're less than that.
On Monday 23 September 2002 11:00 pm, you wrote:
> André is deleting truly useless pages, so is Mav and so am I. We are
> trying to do what we think is good for Wikipedia - if we wanted to do
> harm, there's far easier and better was than to delete ultra-crappy
> pages with no content. If I have to explain every single move and
> deletion and addition I make here and have it approved by all
> Wikipedians, we might as well stop the entire project. I'm doing this
> while thinking reasonable. If you think that deletion was wrong: go
> ahead and write a great article about the subject - don't make such a
> noise out of it.
>
> Jeronimo
Of course I agree. I would also like to see /many/ more micro-stubs being
fixed by those people who think they are useful. But since the rate of
micro-stub creation is so high I think this is a hopelessly uphill and
ultimately futile battle. In a way the creation of unreviewed and unedited
stubs is an emergency situation now. I remember a time several months ago
when few pitiful stubs drooped off of Recent Changes without getting fixed.
Now that happens at an alarming rate daily.
It takes me less than 10 seconds to delete a useless stub that took somebody
else less then 10 seconds to write and submit, but it takes me at least 10
minutes to write a decent stub on a topic I know zippo about (let alone care
about). So when I come across a couple dozen of these useless micro-stubs in
my twice weekly clearing of the new page list I delete them and work on
fixing stubs that are easily fixable.
If the poster didn't bother working on their entry for more than 10 seconds
then there is /no/ reason I should spend 10 minutes of my time fixing their
"work" (or even 1 minute of my time posting it on the deletion queue for that
matter -- which BTW somebody else has to spend time reviewing and then either
delete or fix by starting from scratch). If all I did was fix every
micro-stub I saw then I wouldn't have time to do anything else.
If the micro-stub lovers aren't keeping up with fixing these useless pages
then I don't think they have much room to complain about others that are
taking care of the useless stub problem for them. I and the other micro-stub
deletors are just trying to keep up with this onslaught by doing some stub
triage; fixing the ones with decent definitions and deleting the ones that
don't have decent definitions.
However, due to the fact that whatever I say here will not convince a vocal
few, I support the compromise idea of having a type of recycle bin that keeps
a "de-linked" page's history intact and lists it on a log page. Any links to
that page title in the database will be replaced with an empty edit link.
This may be as easy as creating a user interface that would allow users to
see deleted pages and their histories and also allow users to edit those
pages (hitting save at that point would return the page, with its complete
history, to the database -- but please, don't return crap to the database).
This will give the micro-stub lovers more time to convert their cherished
useless pages into real stubs and will also give the rabid deletion death
squad peace of mind that the database is not being filled with useless crap.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
The Wikipedia is a garden, and we are its cultivators. Sometimes
brilliant prose flows readily from one's pen, but many excellent
articles started from the most pathetic of stubs.
What is the purpose of creating, tolerating, and/or deleting a stub?
Do we hate stubs because they are not "real" articles? They pollute our
article count, so we can't claim to have 50,000 or 100,000 articles.
They're embarrassing, because something like '''Herman Melville''' is
the author of ''Moby Dick'' doesn't come up to par.
Do we love stubs because they get the ball rolling? Someone writes a
stub like '''Muggles''' are non-magical people in the [[Harry Potter]]
books, and someone else adds [[Hagrid]]'s first use of the term, and
someone else mentions the infringement suit; and the seed grows into a
tree bearing fruit.
I worry that excessive deletion of stubs is like birds pecking at the
seeds which the farmer had just planted. I also worry about stubs that
never blossom into full flower.
I don't think there is a suitable automatic way to deal with this. There
is no substitute for human judgment, and if Mav and Andre and others are
dedicated enough to devote 5 or 10 hours a week to pruning weeds, I'm
not going to complain about excessive zeal.
Ed Poor