On 08/10/04 16:08, Timwi wrote:
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>> Hey, everybody, in the excitement of the recent discussion over Mav &
>> Timwi & Angela's idea of version marking, we seem to have overlooked
>> something!
>> Magnus Manke has quietly developed a full-fledged scheme of his own, and
>> you can see a Working Demo of this at:
>> http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Validate&mode=list_page
> This validation system Magnus Manske developed is indeed quite
> impressive. However, it is too bulky to use as a simple Recent Changes
> patrol system. It is infinitely more suited for long-term voting on
> which articles are good, which articles require attention, etc. etc.
> I view the two things as separate features which both serve different
> purposes.
Certainly. Though viewing your 'Validated' as a tick-box in Magnus' scheme
would give useful information at a glance.
That said ... after pushing so hard for a validation/review scheme, I'd
like to see a lot more discussion on it :-) Specifically:
* is it appropriate to all Wikipedias in its present form? (What works
on en may not be the right thing on de or sr.)
* What should the fields be?
* What bad effects could this have?
(For the last, let me suggest: vote spamming for a partisan version.)
I'd love to see actual discussion of problems, big or small, before it's
implemented, so as to make it as workable as possible before it goes live.
As such, I've crossposted and set followup to wikipedia-l, because this
would affect every Wikipedia.
- d.
Ok, so it finally came down to this: a few people say that some thing
has to be done one way, while many other people say it has to be done in
another way. Whatever the discussion, whatever the results of a poll,
whatever the arguments, the minority can always say that they are being
trampled upon if things are done the way the majority prefers. The net
result is that no amount of effort can result in breaking this deadlock
in any civilised way, because the very fact that a majority thinks
differently than the minority is being challenged.
Imposing the majority's view over the minority will no doubt result in
some negative emotional responses from the minority, but isn't this
preferable to having negative emotional responses from the majority? If
I rename that article I will be both bashed about for "making unilateral
decisions" (they are not unilateral, the majority supports this
decision, but the minority will scream that they are being treated
unfair, as explained above). Also, this would most certainly result in a
bloody edit war (well, "renaming war" would be the proper term in this
case, but I'll use "edit war" for consistency).
So, what are the Wikipedia recommendations in this case? Danutz,
practically the sole proponent of the minority view on the Romanian
Wikipedia, explicitly refuses to acknowledge any support /at all/ for
the majority (BOR spelling) on this mailing list, in the
"Minority/majority question" thread. The trick is that the Romanians'
views are by default tainted with POV in his opinion, therefore he will
not accept any decision made by the majority on the Romanian Wikipedia.
He seems however somewhat willing to accept as NPOV the decision of
other Wikipedians.
Is there any reasonable way to settle this in an objective, quantizable
way (for instance with a poll) on other Wikipedias? Here is what Danutz
is calling for (translated from
http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discu%C5%A3ie:Isus_Cristos which is in
Romanian): "I propose [to decide on the main spelling by] asking someone
who can preserve NPOV, from several international Wikipedias, with
experience in such problems, not only the English one (I propose the
Portuguese, Spanish, French and German), but not to the Arbitration
Committee which you [, Gutza] are a member of."
Personally I find these requests unreasonable, but at the end of the day
there are three possible solutions to this problem:
1) Status quo, the minoritarian version is preserved with the current
spelling both for the naming and in the article, probably with a note
acknowledging the majority spelling;
2) I or anyone else renames and changes the spelling in the article,
inserting a note acknowledging the minority spelling;
3) All of Danutz's requests are granted and we act based on the outcome
of that vote.
Both 1) and 2) will result in flames, edit wars, protection wars (both
Danutz and I are administrators), and probably banning users. I don't
find this reasonable either. So, what do we do? You people are the only
hope for a peaceful solution, whichever it may be. So please answer and
make suggestions, we would both appreciate that! Thank you for your
patience and interest.
Have a nice Sunday!
Gutza
Hi.
I posted this to wikien-l, but actually I meant to post it here. So here
it is again.
I have just written a new feature which I hope will be useful to users
interested in a Recent Changes Patrol system. I wrote:
New feature: Recent Changes Patrol. All edits and new pages are
now highlighted on Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages
until someone "marks" them as "patrolled" using a special link.
For new pages, this link appears at the bottom of the article if
the link in Recent Changes or New Pages is followed. For all
other edits, this link appears only in the diff and only if the
diff link is followed from Recent Changes. (Might need to add
this functionality to Watchlist too; haven't done that yet.)
THIS FEATURE IS NOT YET LIVE on the real Wikipedia (or any other
project). I'm only announcing it here so that you no longer need to
discuss this topic and talk about hypothetical alternatives. Maybe
someone will put this feature live on a test server, and then you can
have a go at it.
Greetings,
Timwi
"Academia" is the name for a huge institutionalized process of peer
review. Wikipedia is peer review on steroids, so you'd think that
academics would be clamoring to contribute to Wikipedia, especially since
academia and Wikipedia both love free expression and open discourse. The
difference is, academia is peer review with competition for prestige and
resources, and Wikipedia is not.
If Wikipedia creates a space into which academic competition can expand,
then scholars will fill it. As soon as some scholars see a way to
pad their CVs or increase their prestige in their field through
contributing to Wikipedia, they will.
How do you create a space where scholars can compete? Since the prizes in
academia are relevance and prestige, and since relevance/presitge are
measured by the number of people who are citing your work, Wikipedia could
allow users to cite scholarly works in articles, and track those
citations competitively. For example:
- Allow users to upload read-only versions of their papers.
- Give users the ability to cite and link to these uploaded read-only
papers from within the text of the Wikipedia article.
- The author of each paper should have his/her own profile. This is where
score is kept. There you'll find:
- the user's "Area of Expertise": a list of the Wikipedia articles which
cite the user's papers.
- A list of users who have similar Areas of Expertise, base.
Just as Wikipedians keep each other honest by checking each others' work,
scholars (and non-academic Wikiepdians) will keep each other honest by
reviewing each others' citations in articles.
The first scholar to cite his work in a wikipedia article will be the
expert on that subject. But, there's no point in being an expert if no
one knows about it, which is why word will spread, and others will follow.
If a subject that applies to a scholar's work does not exist as an
article, then the scholar will have an incentive to write it, in order to
include his/her citation and increase or refine his/her area of expertise
relative to others. Since scholars who are similar can see each other,
once a scholar writes a new article, the others can add their own
citations, to stay competitive on those topics.
Another way scholars can compete is by answering questions from users.
Google's pay-per-use "Ask Google", is interesting, and useful, but
terribly centralized. If Wikipedia allowed users to ask questions to
scholars through Wikipedia, then allowed users to rank the responses from
scholars, then scholars could be ranked relative to each other based on
their ability to answer questions in certain fields. All questions and
answers would be saved and searchable by keyword, or browseable by the
articles it is categorized under, therefore available to other users.
The result would be information on scholars' areas of expertise and
information on scholars' ability to answer questions in that area, which I
think would be important information when competing for jobs.
My basic assumption behind this is: once academics have the opportunity
to get credit for their work, in a way that ranks them competitively to
others in their field, the will do so.
What do you think?
Abe
Hi Jimmy, expect you're sick of speaking to reporters but I'd really
appreciate a quote from you for my SCMP tech column Technopedia. Only
seems fair as I steal from the Big W all the time. Could you say what
it offers that Encarta and Britannica don't please?
David Wilson
350 Lyons Road
Russell Lea [nr Five Dock]
Sydney, NSW
Australia
+61 [0]2 9712 7616
+61 [0]41 456 87 67
Sorry - there have been about 6 million speakers at the height of usage of
Old English. I guess it's like Latin in being a dead language, but just as
deserving of a Wiki.
James
_____
From: James R. Johnson [mailto:modean52@comcast.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 11:31 PM
To: 'wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org'
Subject: Wikipedia for Old English
Hello all,
I would like to request and start a wikipedia for Old English. The ISO
code is ang, and there are 3 mailing/discussion lists for the language. If
anyone could help me out in getting it started, I'd appreciate it.
James
Hoi,
Can pictures that are given to be used within Wikipedia and outside Wikipedia only in combination of the Wikipedia articles, be used. The things that come to mind are business logo's and material that the giver wants to restrict in order for it to remain within a resticted band of use.
In my opinion this is a valid restriction that does allow for our own use and allows for the distribution of material to copied versions of wikipedia's.
Any reason why this can not to be done in this way ?
Thanks,
GerardM
Hi,
according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/DE/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm,
we should have 900.000 articles in all the wikipedia languages.
According to the average groth, we will have 1.000.000 articles in
September.
Wouldn't it be nice to have that during the Linz Ars Electronica Festival?
Mathias
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
> Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
>
>> The second thing was about the language "Nauru". According to http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose it is called Nauruose in that language. As all languages are indicated by their local name, this needs fixing. To me it looks like something systeme if not I would like to know where to fix it.
>>
>
> I don’t understand.
>
> Hungarian is called magyar in Hungarian.
> Interwiki is thus always “Magyar (%hungarian-in-the-language-of-wiki%)”
> Page about the Hungarian language is Magyar nyelv in wp:hu, but it should never be that in the English wikipedia. It should be called “Hungarian (language)” with or without parentheses, whichever is preferred.
>
> With this example, on wp:na, Nauruose is a perfectly good article title, and on wp:en “Nauruan language” (with or without parentheses), is again perfectly valid.
>
> I don’t think I understand your problem.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
The interwiki links say Nederlands for nl: or Deutsch for de: or 日本語 for ja: and therefore they should say "Nauruose" for each na: interwiki.
Thanks,
GerardM
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx wrote:
> Austin Hair wrote:
>
>> There's a reason we use XHTML and CSS to begin with; while my beef is so
>> minor as to be inconsequential, certain design choices strike me as
>> being a bit ironic.
>>
>
> And the XHTML+CSS way is to “display: none;” what you don’t want to show.
>
> Screen readers and Braille consoles don’t support it, that’s correct. Gives people a great way to place Skip the menu links on their sites :) Why, though, is it an ugly message? Because of the word Nauri? In that case it would be better to focus on getting the article renamed to “Nauruan language”. I don’t know any other reasons.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
Sorry, I did this awfull thing; two things in one message. Everyone has reacted to the ugly bits, they are fixed by the looks of it. Thanks.
The second thing was about the language "Nauru". According to http://na.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauruose it is called Nauruose in that language. As all languages are indicated by their local name, this needs fixing. To me it looks like something systeme if not I would like to know where to fix it.
Thanks,
GerardM