A relatively new contributor, Ellmist, has been adding articles about Robert Heinlein's novels. This is a good thing - Heinlein was an important sci-fi writer, and we should cover his work in some detail.
However, they have added the publication dates of his books to the applicable "Year In Review" articles. Is this such a good idea? Probably not. I doubt that everything Heinlein wrote was so momentous to warrant such a listing.
This is a more general problem with the year in review listing. Unlike virtually everything else in the 'Pedia, these articles are space-limited by their very intention (to provide a concise overview of what went on in the world in that year). Therefore, if we wish to retain them in the current form, we're going to have to exercise editorial judgement as to the things sufficiently important to list there.
The NPOV isn't a great help here. It says we should resolve disputes by by characterising the dispute and letting the differing opinions speak for themselves. I can't see how that helps. Because we are space-limited, we *can't* just list every event that somebody (or even a large group of people) thinks is important, state why those people think it was important, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.
Lists like this are a special case, and so I would argue that we should make special rules to handle it. What those special rules should be I'm not sure. As a "meta-rule" I think we need fairly strict section guidelines on what can go into each section of the Year in Review entry.
Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely. If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they a job for another projct with different rules? Probably not, but it's something to think about.
Opinions?
----------------------------------------------------------- Robert Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Go You Big Red Fire Engine -- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig ------------------------------------------------------------
A suggested rule: a work of art can be (but doesn't have to be) listed on the year of its creation if it won an important award (for sufficiently momentous values of "important"). This would limit Heinlein to four items (none of them short stories): Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Robert Graham Merkel Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 22:05 To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Years in review and the need for editorial judgement
A relatively new contributor, Ellmist, has been adding articles about Robert Heinlein's novels. This is a good thing - Heinlein was an important sci-fi writer, and we should cover his work in some detail.
However, they have added the publication dates of his books to the applicable "Year In Review" articles. Is this such a good idea? Probably not. I doubt that everything Heinlein wrote was so momentous to warrant such a listing.
This is a more general problem with the year in review listing. Unlike virtually everything else in the 'Pedia, these articles are space-limited by their very intention (to provide a concise overview of what went on in the world in that year). Therefore, if we wish to retain them in the current form, we're going to have to exercise editorial judgement as to the things sufficiently important to list there.
The NPOV isn't a great help here. It says we should resolve disputes by by characterising the dispute and letting the differing opinions speak for themselves. I can't see how that helps. Because we are space-limited, we *can't* just list every event that somebody (or even a large group of people) thinks is important, state why those people think it was important, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.
Lists like this are a special case, and so I would argue that we should make special rules to handle it. What those special rules should be I'm not sure. As a "meta-rule" I think we need fairly strict section guidelines on what can go into each section of the Year in Review entry.
Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely. If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they a job for another projct with different rules? Probably not, but it's something to think about.
Opinions?
----------------------------------------------------------- Robert Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Go You Big Red Fire Engine -- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig ------------------------------------------------------------ [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 10:21:24PM -0700, Sean Barrett wrote:
A suggested rule: a work of art can be (but doesn't have to be) listed on the year of its creation if it won an important award (for sufficiently momentous values of "important"). This would limit Heinlein to four items (none of them short stories): Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
That sounds like a reasonable rule. Additionally, I'd think that no more than two creative works per artist would be worthy of recognition in the Year In Review articles, as a general rule.
I gather then you approve of the idea of a set of per-section guidelines for the Year in Review articles?
Robert Merkel wrote in part:
Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely. If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they a job for another projct with different rules? Probably not, but it's something to think about.
My intuition is clear that they are appropriate for encyclopaedias. What happened in a given year is the substance of an article on that year, and the passage of any specific year is a general phenemon, suitable for inclusion in a compendium of the world's knowledge. What Year in Review may be inappropriate for is simply our *style* of encyclopaedia.
Ordinary encyclopaedias judge all the time that a specific point, however correct and neutral, is just too particular to belong in the article. We don't. We include every minor point mentioned, no matter how petty, and even spin off subpages dedicated to them.
Would an ordinary encyclopaedia include a detailed outline of Goedel's original proof of his Completeness Theorem? Of course not, it would clutter up the article on the theorem, which should be about the theorem in more general terms, stating it only roughly (since precisely is complicated) and talking about its effect on logic and mathematics, not getting into the nitty gritty of its minor details. We, OTOH, simply spin this proof off into a subpage. The article [[Goedels_completeness_theorem]] reads well, and [[Goedels_completeness_theorem/Original_Proof]] has the details that somebody decided it was worth the trouble to spell out. Unnecessary, maybe, but not problematic.
So this is what we do with material that is correct and neutral, but still more information than a main article needs. I'm confident that if Wikipedia continues, say, another hundred years, then someday we will have a page like [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]] that lists every book published that year with an article. (And someday that page title will be too broad as well.) Since we agree that Heinlein's books deserve articles, then they'll be there. In [[1962]] itself, we'll list only Silent Spring, but there will be a link to [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]], and Stranger in a Strange Land will show up there.
Ellmist is placing these listings under a new heading of '''Books''', and while I think that it's silly to spend time listing books *now*, someday there will be Wikipedians whose normal Wikipedia activities include checking that every book with an article is in the yearly listings, just as today there are those that sometimes check for births and deaths. When a newbie looks at [[1962]] today, they won't think <How excessive!>; they'll think <How incomplete!>; and if they have enough time to waste, they'll start adding their favorite author's books. While a poor priority, I don't think that this is a bad thing; it'll start out slow, and when it gets to be too much to handle, a simple cut & paste job (maybe aided by a script?) will create [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]] and its ilk, and the future will have arrived.
-- Toby Bartels toby@math.ucr.edu
On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 10:48:44PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote: <snipped good points on nature of Wikipedia that I agree with entirely>
So this is what we do with material that is correct and neutral, but still more information than a main article needs. I'm confident that if Wikipedia continues, say, another hundred years, then someday we will have a page like [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]] that lists every book published that year with an article. (And someday that page title will be too broad as well.) Since we agree that Heinlein's books deserve articles, then they'll be there. In [[1962]] itself, we'll list only Silent Spring, but there will be a link to [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]], and Stranger in a Strange Land will show up there.
Ellmist is placing these listings under a new heading of '''Books''', and while I think that it's silly to spend time listing books *now*, someday there will be Wikipedians whose normal Wikipedia activities include checking that every book with an article is in the yearly listings, just as today there are those that sometimes check for births and deaths. When a newbie looks at [[1962]] today, they won't think <How excessive!>; they'll think <How incomplete!>; and if they have enough time to waste, they'll start adding their favorite author's books. While a poor priority, I don't think that this is a bad thing; it'll start out slow, and when it gets to be too much to handle, a simple cut & paste job (maybe aided by a script?) will create [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]] and its ilk, and the future will have arrived.
I agree that [[List of Books Published in 1962]] and its ilk are completely appropriate. What I am concerned about is maintaining the integrity of the year in review pages in the process by keeping them a) short and thus useful, and b) ensuring that only really important stuff gets on there as we build content so that we keep the integrity of the pages as a reference *now*. In this specifi* case, excluding material is just as important as including it. If we just let everybody list their favourite books, we could quite conceivably end up with a list mainly consisting of Terry Pratchett and Star Wars novels. That would be worse than useless in my opinion - while Star Wars novels and Terry Pratchett books are perfectly worthy of encyclopedia articles, they are *not* in general worthy of Year In Review listings.
So, list all you like elsewhere, but IMHO not on Year in Review.
----------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Go You Big Red Fire Engine -- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig ------------------------------------------------------------
On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 04:11:28PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
I agree that [[List of Books Published in 1962]] and its ilk are completely appropriate. What I am concerned about is maintaining the integrity of the year in review pages in the process by keeping them a) short and thus useful, and b) ensuring that only really important stuff gets on there as we build content so that we keep the integrity of the pages as a reference *now*.
How about the following:
- We make a guideline that says that there should be no more than, say, 10 births / deaths / events on the page and that these should be the most important ones in that year.
- We give some hints on what might be considered important and what not.
- If someone comes along and thinks a very important event is missing but the list is already full then he or she has to remove the least important one.
Of course this will generate some debates but that is inherent in the nature of Wikpedia and these types of pages.
-- Jan Hidders
Jan Hidders wrote in part:
If someone comes along and thinks a very important event is missing but the list is already full then he or she has to remove the least important one.
I can see the value behind this. If we do end up going this route, then people will find it more palatable when their additions are removed if they're placed on [[List_of_people_born_in_1962]] instead of deleted. Then we can get very selective indeed about what goes on [[1962]] itself.
-- Toby Bartels toby@math.ucr.edu
"Jan.Hidders" wrote:
On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 04:11:28PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
I agree that [[List of Books Published in 1962]] and its ilk are completely appropriate. What I am concerned about is maintaining the integrity of the year in review pages in the process by keeping them a) short and thus useful, and b) ensuring that only really important stuff gets on there as we build content so that we keep the integrity of the pages as a reference *now*.
How about the following:
We make a guideline that says that there should be no more than, say, 10 births / deaths / events on the page and that these should be the most important ones in that year.
We give some hints on what might be considered important and what not.
If someone comes along and thinks a very important event is missing but the list is already full then he or she has to remove the least important one.
Of course this will generate some debates but that is inherent in the nature of Wikpedia and these types of pages.
I STRONGLY disagree with this. Who's going to judge what is more 'important' or what to delete? I don't think it's a big deal to have books listed or movies or anything... when the page gets too lengthy then it can be broken up. Then we'll have a ready-made list for a subpage. Of course if you really want to keep them off the year pages what you need to do is to make a template for a 'Published/Produced in this year' page for people to put them on... the wikipedia's supposed to be about completeness after all!
On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 08:20:51PM +1000, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
I STRONGLY disagree with this. Who's going to judge what is more 'important' or what to delete?
The usual suspects.
I don't think it's a big deal to have books listed or movies or anything...
It reduces the usefulness of these pages. It's less interesting to have a page that lists every little thing that happened in a certain year including the death of somebodies favorite goldfish.
when the page gets too lengthy then it can be broken up.
That would mean the format depends upon how much has been added for a certain year.
Then we'll have a ready-made list for a subpage.
Please don't mention the s-word.
Of course if you really want to keep them off the year pages what you need to do is to make a template for a 'Published/Produced in this year' page for people to put them on...
The problem is not that we don't want published works on these pages, but only the ones that are considered very important.
the wikipedia's supposed to be about completeness after all!
Wikipedia as a whole is, yes, but this is not necessarily true for all individual pages.
-- Jan Hidders
On Fri, 28 Jun 2002 20:20:51 Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
"Jan.Hidders" wrote:
On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 04:11:28PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
I agree that [[List of Books Published in 1962]] and its ilk are completely appropriate. What I am concerned about is maintaining the integrity of the year in review pages in the process by keeping them
a)
short and thus useful, and b) ensuring that only really important
stuff
gets on there as we build content so that we keep the integrity of
the
pages as a reference *now*.
How about the following:
- We make a guideline that says that there should be no more than, say,
10
births / deaths / events on the page and that these should be the
most
important ones in that year.
- We give some hints on what might be considered important and what
not.
- If someone comes along and thinks a very important event is missing
but
the list is already full then he or she has to remove the least
important
one.
Of course this will generate some debates but that is inherent in the
nature
of Wikpedia and these types of pages.
I STRONGLY disagree with this. Who's going to judge what is more 'important' or what to delete? I don't think it's a big deal to have books listed or movies or anything... when the page gets too lengthy then it can be broken up. Then we'll have a ready-made list for a subpage. Of course if you really want to keep them off the year pages what you need to do is to make a template for a 'Published/Produced in this year' page for people to put them on... the wikipedia's supposed to be about completeness after all!
Firstly, as I already agreed, it's entirely reasonable to have a complete list of "people who have an entry in Wikipedia who died in 1976" or "books in Wikipedia first published in 1976". My point refers specifically to keeping the main "year in review" pages useful by being a) short enough to read quickly, and b) reflect the actually important things that happened in that year in the area concerned.
If we let people add stuff willy-nilly, you will end up with people listing the fact that series 2 of "Walker: Texas Ranger" first screened in the US in 1994 to the [[1994]] page (if you don't know what that is, be very grateful and just rest assured that there are approximately 27,543 things that happened in the telvision world in 1994 that were more important). Now, two things might then happen. We might already have, or build up a list of lots of things that happened in television in 1994, and after discussion decide that, indeed, Chuck Norris and his buddies second series wasn't really that important. That might cause a bunfight, but the reason for the removal is at least clear.
A more tricky situation, however, is the case where there *aren't* immediately things there replacing it. Now, having an entry for that (and entries in 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 for series 1 through 9), even if there aren't sufficient entries on "television" for it to be causing length problems, is giving a totally misleading indication of the significance of the events.
If you want a more realistic scenario, think popular music and a bunch of fans of some particular musical genre discovering the 'pedia.
Without some guidelines, there's nothing stopping them adding a bunch of listings of events interesting only to a small subculture, and no justification for people to delete the entries (or, as you point out, move them to a [[List of Acid Jazz Albums Released in 1993]] page). I don't have all the answers yet on exactly *what* guidelines we'll come up with yet, but I'm convinced that we need some. As others have pointed out, this is one of the few places in wikipedia where we are space-limited, and we need some extra smarts to deal with it IMHO.
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
The NPOV isn't a great help here. It says we should resolve disputes by by characterising the dispute and letting the differing opinions speak for themselves. I can't see how that helps. Because we are space-limited, we *can't* just list every event that somebody (or even a large group of people) thinks is important, state why those people think it was important, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.
Having no particularly helpful positive contributions of my own to make this morning, I'll just acknowledge that Robert has a very strong point here.
However, it occurs to me that NPOV is not exactly the same thing as "going meta". "going meta" is a useful technique for achieving NPOV, but it isn't NPOV itself.
So special rules of the type Robert is suggesting are actually just new techniques for working towards NPOV, rather than an exception to NPOV.
Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely. If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they a job for another projct with different rules? Probably not, but it's something to think about.
It is something to think about. I really like your approach to thinking about it.
One of our "discoveries" is that people of very diverse opinions can write encyclopedia articles together, using NPOV as a guideline to mediate conflict. It works remarkably well. It would not work for poetry, for political commentary, for fiction, etc.
Therefore, whenever something is "tickling" us as a potential problem for NPOV, we might consider whether or not that something is really an encyclopedia article! That's a neat approach.
But, it seems on the face of it that an article about '1976', telling in neutral terms what happened that year is an encyclopedia article.
--Jimbo
On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One of our "discoveries" is that people of very diverse opinions can write encyclopedia articles together, using NPOV as a guideline to mediate conflict. It works remarkably well. It would not work for poetry, for political commentary, for fiction, etc.
Is this a discovery that is unique to Wikipedia?
Couldn't the same discovery be expressed: "it is possible (no matter who does it) to write articles (in an encyclopedia or newspaper), using NPOV as a guideline, so that no reader would care to protest against the wording of the text".
I think that this is the same approach that has been used by every encyclopedia and newspaper editor, ever. Only they might have called it "factualism and objectivity" rather than NPOV.
Or is this wrong?
Lars Aronsson wrote:
On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One of our "discoveries" is that people of very diverse opinions can write encyclopedia articles together, using NPOV as a guideline to mediate conflict. It works remarkably well. It would not work for poetry, for political commentary, for fiction, etc.
Is this a discovery that is unique to Wikipedia?
Couldn't the same discovery be expressed: "it is possible (no matter who does it) to write articles (in an encyclopedia or newspaper), using NPOV as a guideline, so that no reader would care to protest against the wording of the text".
I think that this is the same approach that has been used by every encyclopedia and newspaper editor, ever. Only they might have called it "factualism and objectivity" rather than NPOV.
Or is this wrong?
Sounds about right to me.
I make no claim that we've discovered anything very original. I do think it is astounding that the wikipedia community works at all, much less as well as it does. I mean, traditionally, with encyclopedias and newspaper editors, there is "control from above". Here, there really isn't. This doesn't mean that there is *no* control, in the sense of wild chaos. And that's a surprise.
Even Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki concept, once said something to the effect that wikipedia wouldn't really be an encyclopedia, but that it would be a wiki. I am not 100% sure that I know what he meant, so I'm not 100% sure if he's been proven wrong. But, I think so, if I understand him.
--Jimbo
Lars Aronsson wrote:
On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One of our "discoveries" is that people of very diverse opinions can write encyclopedia articles together, using NPOV as a guideline to mediate conflict. It works remarkably well. It would not work for poetry, for political commentary, for fiction, etc.
Is this a discovery that is unique to Wikipedia?
Couldn't the same discovery be expressed: "it is possible (no matter who does it) to write articles (in an encyclopedia or newspaper), using NPOV as a guideline, so that no reader would care to protest against the wording of the text".
I think that this is the same approach that has been used by every encyclopedia and newspaper editor, ever. Only they might have called it "factualism and objectivity" rather than NPOV.
Or is this wrong?
The difference is "every encyclopedia and newspaper *editor*". We're giving every crank off the street his own shot at the presses and politely asking him to clean up after the mess the last crank left.
It works surprisingly well. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion VIBBER wrote:
The difference is "every encyclopedia and newspaper *editor*". We're giving every crank off the street his own shot at the presses and politely asking him to clean up after the mess the last crank left.
It works surprisingly well. :)
Yes. I'm telling you, I never cease to be astounded that it works *at all*.
Really, and I've said something similar before, this is the most idiotic and foolhardy way I can think of to run a website. It can't possibly work. Just go onto Usenet or any mailing list, and just imagine if those screaming fanatics could edit each others' work. It's just impossible, and it can't possibly work.
But it does. The experience has changed my perspective on human nature.
--Jimbo
On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Brion VIBBER wrote:
The difference is "every encyclopedia and newspaper *editor*". We're giving every crank off the street his own shot at the presses and politely asking him to clean up after the mess the last crank left.
I agree that this is a big difference. Here everybody is an editor, with very little room for training. (Like throwing people into the water, hoping they will learn to swim.)
But I think the need for objectivity (NPOV) is universal, no matter who the editor is.
We could learn a lot from the experience of traditional encyclopedia editors over the last few centuries, but very few of us would take the time to do so. I've read a biography of Denis Diderot, and "The Professor and the Madman", and have a small collection of old (Swedish) encyclopedia and dictionaries, but that's about all. One conclusion that I've drawn is that they all used to borrow facts and ideas from each other, without too much worry for copyright infringement.
--- Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One of our "discoveries" is that people of very
diverse opinions can
write encyclopedia articles together, using NPOV
as a guideline to
mediate conflict. It works remarkably well. It
would not work for
poetry, for political commentary, for fiction,
etc.
Is this a discovery that is unique to Wikipedia?
Couldn't the same discovery be expressed: "it is possible (no matter who does it) to write articles (in an encyclopedia or newspaper), using NPOV as a guideline, so that no reader would care to protest against the wording of the text".
I think that this is the same approach that has been used by every encyclopedia and newspaper editor, ever. Only they might have called it "factualism and objectivity" rather than NPOV.
Or is this wrong?
Such articles are usually written by one person and edited by another. The editor is then roundly cursed by the author.
Wikipedia articles often have no individual author, but are worked on by people of (sometimes wildly) differing views and opinions. I think what Jimmy is getting at is that a project like this *can* work without breaking down into flame wars. Since everyone who has heard of the project has raised the flame war criticism, it certainly *seems* like a discovery.
-- Stephen Gilbert
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