Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
On 07/01/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
[sorry for earlier blank]
On 07/01/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
Bah. Untagged - no way an organisation of 250 professionals which runs a six-day film festival is "db-bio", even if all the internal links are red.
I notice it was marked "using NPWatcher" - has anyone experience of using this program? I've noticed it a bit recently, and it seems to be very heavily used for fast automation of tagging, deletion, etc. Which is fair enough, so long as only one person involved is doing it - because the speedy deletion process on enwp has two pairs of eyes involved, there'll in theory be a second person along to read it over before deletion and decide if the tag is in order or not.
But when both are using this sort of thing... well, I saw one user who was running a speedy deletion, on average, *every twenty seconds for an hour* using it. People can't really be giving what they're looking at any attention at that speed, and wrongful tagging will just carry over into wrongful (and wasteful) deletion.
Thoughts on how usefully to solve this? Automation to cope with a task is well and good, but we can't automate out human review where it's there for a reason.
2007/1/7, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy?
No, but it does work the other way around: we need some kind of indication that it is prominent or noteworthy, and cyberspace-presence is one of the easier ways to get such an indication.
See as one example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
When I Google for:
Vikalp "films for freedom"
which would be a quite specific search, I still get 500+ hits. If it were notable,
There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
Well, in the ideal case, the article itself would be enough to judge notability, and a Google search would only be necessary if there were doubts about the actual correctness of the notability claims.
Maybe you're using the wrong search-term. I tried "Vikalp + film" on Google, and got over 800. Results 1 - 10 of about 806 for Vikalp film. (0.16 seconds)
Vikalp ("alternative") is a commonly understandable Indian term, and hence this is the shortened name most often used. "Films for freedom" is not the often-used term. I added the "film", just to make sure that it doesn't draw some other unrelated Vikalps in the net.
On 07/01/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2007/1/7, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
When I Google for:
Vikalp "films for freedom"
which would be a quite specific search, I still get 500+ hits. If it were notable,
The point I am trying to make is that mere cyber presence doesn't imply prominence, and vice versa. In the Third World (a term I prefer to use), there are still many who prefer to focus on the real world rather than on cyberspace.
Also mere cyber presence would not necessarily mean prominence. For instance "Results 1 - 10 of about 136,000 for "Frederick Noronha"." Because my name draws 136,000 hits on Google, doesn't mean that I'm notable or popular... it just probably means that I've been active in cyberspace (for the past 12 years or so... 'early' by Indian standards :-)).
I'm not contesting your point... just saying that there needs to be some discerning criteria. Thanks for your patience! FN
2007/1/7, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
I'm not contesting your point... just saying that there needs to be
some discerning criteria. Thanks for your patience! FN
I don't think there can be any other criterium than common sense. The types of subjects that come up on Wikipedia is too diverse to set a single rule for all of them.
Google can be useful, but a single cut-off value is not. For some subjects a single hit that proves existence is enough, for others 1000 hits are still a very low number. For example, I once saved [[William Gott]] based on a single Google hit of about 30 that existed then (4000 now) - he did indeed exist, and that was enough. On the other hand, getting 800 hits for a web-based program was a 'strong delete' vote.
Maybe even more important than the number of Google hits, is their nature. Suppose you have a current painter. If they have many Google hits, but many consisting of places where it seems the painter could have submitted the material himself, it doesn't count for much. If you have the same number, but with a number of those links being galleries in various countries announcing their expositions, it is a clear reason for keeping the article.
You're right. But much of Asia, Africa and Latin America is simply invisible in cyberspace! So, are we building alternatives, or just carrying on the old (unjust) "information and communication order". FN
On 07/01/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2007/1/7, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
I'm not contesting your point... just saying that there needs to be
some discerning criteria. Thanks for your patience! FN
I don't think there can be any other criterium than common sense. The types of subjects that come up on Wikipedia is too diverse to set a single rule for all of them.
Google can be useful, but a single cut-off value is not. For some subjects a single hit that proves existence is enough, for others 1000 hits are still a very low number. For example, I once saved [[William Gott]] based on a single Google hit of about 30 that existed then (4000 now) - he did indeed exist, and that was enough. On the other hand, getting 800 hits for a web-based program was a 'strong delete' vote.
Maybe even more important than the number of Google hits, is their nature. Suppose you have a current painter. If they have many Google hits, but many consisting of places where it seems the painter could have submitted the material himself, it doesn't count for much. If you have the same number, but with a number of those links being galleries in various countries announcing their expositions, it is a clear reason for keeping the article.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Sunday, January 7, 2007, 4:49:35 PM, Frederick wrote:
Maybe you're using the wrong search-term. I tried "Vikalp + film" on Google, and got over 800. Results 1 - 10 of about 806 for Vikalp film. (0.16 seconds)
Looking at the ghits is useless. I think it's better to look for newspaper references:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22Films+for+Freedom%22+Vikalp&sa...
Interesting what you write, Bogdan. The links you came up with from the Google timeline are also nice. But there is still a problem here.
I did a search for my own name. And compared the hits with what I know.... It depends a lot to *which* newspapers get archived.
There is probably a strong case for finding other criteria of 'prominence' for societies (from the "South" or "developing world") which may still be largely oral societies... forget about being written ... not to speak of being digitised!
Where, for instance, would unrecorded and non-digitised traditional knowledge fit into the Wikipedia? We're having the same problem with patents here in India. Unless something is recorded (and understandable as such to someone in a Western patents office), is it not being considered as "prior knowledge". So the Indian solution is to translate tonnes of traditional knowledge into English, and digitise it! But obviously, the Wikipedia can't follow similar criteria, for obvious reasons. FN
On 07/01/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Sunday, January 7, 2007, 4:49:35 PM, Frederick wrote:
Maybe you're using the wrong search-term. I tried "Vikalp + film" on Google, and got over 800. Results 1 - 10 of about 806 for Vikalp film. (0.16 seconds)
Looking at the ghits is useless. I think it's better to look for newspaper references:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22Films+for+Freedom%22+Vikalp&sa...
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hi there,
Personally, I prefer to prod articles with notability asserted but no way to verify that. In these "cases", I also check if the Wikipedia in the language related to the article (in this case, hi.wikipedia.org) has an entry about this topic.
I haven't, but maybe I should suggest creating an article in the user's native language. In the same way as a Google test fails, an AFD may also fail due the inability of users to check the claims.
Oh, once I even posted a note at WikiProject India to get some feedback about Mair Rajputs :-)
Roberto / ReyBrujo
On 1/7/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hi all, Thank you all for your patience. I'm not being difficult here, but just feel I need to explain how things work in this part of the globe.... not always logically!
Okay, I'm as Indian as they come... my unusual name is because I'm from Goa, the former Portuguese colony.
My wager is that en.wikipedia.org would be far, far more representative of India than, say hi.wikipedia.org Sad but true. And there are reasons for that.
Have you seen the way Indians interact with themselves? If meeting outside the North Indian belt, there's a good chance they (we?) would be taking to each other in English. There are just so much diversity here, that like it or not, English often serves as a link language.
Added to this, many of the Wikipedia contributors would be college/university-educated types, often more comfortable to express ideas in English than, say, in an Indian language. I've made hundreds of edits in English [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fredericknoronha] but am litterally struggling to get a Konkani Wikipedia going (Konkani is India's smallest "national" languages, with between 1.5 to 5 million speakers, depending whose estimates one accepts).
On 08/01/07, Roberto Alfonso rpgrca@gmail.com wrote:
Hi there,
Personally, I prefer to prod articles with notability asserted but no way to verify that. In these "cases", I also check if the Wikipedia in the language related to the article (in this case, hi.wikipedia.org) has an entry about this topic.
I haven't, but maybe I should suggest creating an article in the user's native language. In the same way as a Google test fails, an AFD may also fail due the inability of users to check the claims.
Oh, once I even posted a note at WikiProject India to get some feedback about Mair Rajputs :-)
Roberto / ReyBrujo
On 1/7/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
While working on articles about Singaporean movies, I've encountered a similar problem: difficulty finding references due to systemic bias.
Some seem to have the impression that Singaporean = non-notable. I've seen articles on many Singaporean topics, which no Singaporean would contest the notability of, get nominated for deletion, under the claim of non-notability.
That Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias is not surprising.
On 1/8/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, Thank you all for your patience. I'm not being difficult here, but just feel I need to explain how things work in this part of the globe.... not always logically!
Okay, I'm as Indian as they come... my unusual name is because I'm from Goa, the former Portuguese colony.
My wager is that en.wikipedia.org would be far, far more representative of India than, say hi.wikipedia.org Sad but true. And there are reasons for that.
Have you seen the way Indians interact with themselves? If meeting outside the North Indian belt, there's a good chance they (we?) would be taking to each other in English. There are just so much diversity here, that like it or not, English often serves as a link language.
Added to this, many of the Wikipedia contributors would be college/university-educated types, often more comfortable to express ideas in English than, say, in an Indian language. I've made hundreds of edits in English [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fredericknoronha] but am litterally struggling to get a Konkani Wikipedia going (Konkani is India's smallest "national" languages, with between 1.5 to 5 million speakers, depending whose estimates one accepts).
On 08/01/07, Roberto Alfonso rpgrca@gmail.com wrote:
Hi there,
Personally, I prefer to prod articles with notability asserted but no way to verify that. In these "cases", I also check if the Wikipedia in the language related to the article (in this case, hi.wikipedia.org) has an entry about this topic.
I haven't, but maybe I should suggest creating an article in the user's native language. In the same way as a Google test fails, an AFD may also fail due the inability of users to check the claims.
Oh, once I even posted a note at WikiProject India to get some feedback about Mair Rajputs :-)
Roberto / ReyBrujo
On 1/7/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hi all, I'm from India, a contributor to the Wikipedia. In recent times, the 'mortality' of new Wikipedia entries seems to be higher than usual. While one can understand the need for abundant caution, it's also important to allow for a diversity of concerns and issues in this space.
Should we presume that because an initiative is not very visible in cyberspace (okay, we are under-digitised societies!) that it is not prominent or noteworthy? See as one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikalp This is a campaign against censorship of documentary film in India, one which has the participation of about 250 documentary film-makers.
There must be some way out. Your suggestions would be welcome. FN
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
-- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I agree... What would be worse is if the "systemic bias" follows the traditional fault lines, which we have been so concerned about for so long. After all, the New Media and its bottoms-up approach was meant to make things "different". That's why we have so much faith in it, and would like to invest our volunteer efforts here. Maybe, it is time we recognised this problem and began to deal with it: how do initiatives like the Wikipedia deal with non-English, non-visible, largely non-digitised and oral societies (which have wealth of their own, but not in a traditionally 'recognisable' sense)? To push a topic to Wikia just because *we* can't recognise it's worth is unfair to the topic. We can't also enter the vicious cycle of argument believing that because-it-isn't-there-it-isn't-prominent (how does it become 'prominent' in the first place, if it is being rejected on these grounds)?
Yet, there must be *some* way out. Am optimistic... FN
On 08/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
While working on articles about Singaporean movies, I've encountered a similar problem: difficulty finding references due to systemic bias.
Some seem to have the impression that Singaporean = non-notable. I've seen articles on many Singaporean topics, which no Singaporean would contest the notability of, get nominated for deletion, under the claim of non-notability.
That Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias is not surprising.
Frederick Noronha wrote:
I agree... What would be worse is if the "systemic bias" follows the traditional fault lines, which we have been so concerned about for so long. After all, the New Media and its bottoms-up approach was meant to make things "different". That's why we have so much faith in it, and would like to invest our volunteer efforts here. Maybe, it is time we recognised this problem and began to deal with it: how do initiatives like the Wikipedia deal with non-English, non-visible, largely non-digitised and oral societies (which have wealth of their own, but not in a traditionally 'recognisable' sense)?
There's a kind of village mentality at play. I think it would be reasonable to guess that there are people living in the small rural villages of India who would be frightened to have anything to do with big cities. They are happy with their simple lives. It is nearly impossible to get them to think in bigger terms.
The New Media are indeed bottom-up (not bottoms-up ;-) ), and should make things different ... in theory. An effective bottom-up approach requires an ability to see a bigger picture, and recognizing that there are other villages far away that you will never see but where life is just as important as in your own village. Seeing this involves looking away from one's comfort zone, and risking the possibility that you may encounter other ideas that will turn your world upside down. It forces you to reconsider the paradigms that your ambient top-down culture has worked so hard to inculcate in you while you were a child.
The city has many villages. The net has many villages. It's just that unlike the rural village it's not as clearly defined. But the small village mentality is still there.
Ec
On 08/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
While working on articles about Singaporean movies, I've encountered a similar problem: difficulty finding references due to systemic bias. Some seem to have the impression that Singaporean = non-notable. I've seen articles on many Singaporean topics, which no Singaporean would contest the notability of, get nominated for deletion, under the claim of non-notability. That Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias is not surprising.
This may be worth politely noting on WT:AFD.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 08/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
While working on articles about Singaporean movies, I've encountered a similar problem: difficulty finding references due to systemic bias. Some seem to have the impression that Singaporean = non-notable. I've seen articles on many Singaporean topics, which no Singaporean would contest the notability of, get nominated for deletion, under the claim of non-notability. That Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias is not surprising.
This may be worth politely noting on WT:AFD.
This is unfortunately not just a problem on the English wikipedia but in the Dutch one as well. and I would think in many other big language editions. As soon as something isn't covered by google people unfortunately assume it isn't notable :( .
Waerth
2007/1/8, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net:
This is unfortunately not just a problem on the English wikipedia but in the Dutch one as well. and I would think in many other big language editions. As soon as something isn't covered by google people unfortunately assume it isn't notable :( .
Then again, where's the alternative? I can remember you making a big case of this on the Dutch Wikipedia once. Tracking things down, in all probability you had been reverting the removal of vandalism on the basis of it.
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever. In journalism, it is always easy to make out what is a 'plug' for someone and what is a genuine news-item. Guess Wikipedia could depend on local teams to also offer some cross-checking. FN
On 08/01/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2007/1/8, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net:
This is unfortunately not just a problem on the English wikipedia but in the Dutch one as well. and I would think in many other big language editions. As soon as something isn't covered by google people unfortunately assume it isn't notable :( .
Then again, where's the alternative? I can remember you making a big case of this on the Dutch Wikipedia once. Tracking things down, in all probability you had been reverting the removal of vandalism on the basis of it.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
Maybe this is a rookie opinion, but I think that the AFD process tends to attract people who are focused on keeping wikipedia "uncluttered" and "relevant". They're always going to "err on the side of delete" and that's that. You can present anything to the people at AFD, but its a systemic habit. Those aren't just going to undo because of one person's polite suggestion.
While I happen to think deletionists could be restrained greatly without loss to Wikipedia (since the articles they're deleting are hardly well connected and widely viewed), I'm just one opinion. Over the years I've noticed a kind of institutional insecurity grow in Wikipedia, over fears our pedia is being perceived as full of unverified internet rabble.
-S
On 1/8/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever. In journalism, it is always easy to make out what is a 'plug' for someone and what is a genuine news-item. Guess Wikipedia could depend on local teams to also offer some cross-checking. FN
On 08/01/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2007/1/8, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net:
This is unfortunately not just a problem on the English wikipedia but
in
the Dutch one as well. and I would think in many other big language editions. As soon as something isn't covered by google people unfortunately assume it isn't notable :( .
Then again, where's the alternative? I can remember you making a big
case
of this on the Dutch Wikipedia once. Tracking things down, in all probability you had been reverting the removal of vandalism on the basis
of
it.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
-- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hmmm... some interesting issues being raised below. Just for argument sake: what happens if an "un-notable" entry makes it to Wikipedia? Would it be a grave error? Notability, after all, is mostly related to context. Would Shakespeare have been as "noted" a writer, if he had to be born in, say, Upper Egypt?
I think the problem lies elsewhere. The trouble is: people or institutions being packaged to be what they are not. Or bloated claims about institutions or organisations or individuals.
Rather than just delete entries for being un-notable, perhaps we need to find ways to ensure that what's written is both accurate and tallies with the reality. --FN
On 08/01/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe this is a rookie opinion, but I think that the AFD process tends to attract people who are focused on keeping wikipedia "uncluttered" and "relevant". They're always going to "err on the side of delete" and that's that. You can present anything to the people at AFD, but its a systemic habit. Those aren't just going to undo because of one person's polite suggestion.
While I happen to think deletionists could be restrained greatly without loss to Wikipedia (since the articles they're deleting are hardly well connected and widely viewed), I'm just one opinion. Over the years I've noticed a kind of institutional insecurity grow in Wikipedia, over fears our pedia is being perceived as full of unverified internet rabble.
-S
Heresy!
On 1/8/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hmmm... some interesting issues being raised below. Just for argument sake: what happens if an "un-notable" entry makes it to Wikipedia? Would it be a grave error? Notability, after all, is mostly related to context. Would Shakespeare have been as "noted" a writer, if he had to be born in, say, Upper Egypt?
I think the problem lies elsewhere. The trouble is: people or institutions being packaged to be what they are not. Or bloated claims about institutions or organisations or individuals.
Rather than just delete entries for being un-notable, perhaps we need to find ways to ensure that what's written is both accurate and tallies with the reality. --FN
On 08/01/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe this is a rookie opinion, but I think that the AFD process tends
to
attract people who are focused on keeping wikipedia "uncluttered" and "relevant". They're always going to "err on the side of delete" and
that's
that. You can present anything to the people at AFD, but its a systemic habit. Those aren't just going to undo because of one person's polite suggestion.
While I happen to think deletionists could be restrained greatly without loss to Wikipedia (since the articles they're deleting are hardly well connected and widely viewed), I'm just one opinion. Over the years I've noticed a kind of institutional insecurity grow in Wikipedia, over fears
our
pedia is being perceived as full of unverified internet rabble.
-S
-- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
2007/1/8, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
Hmmm... some interesting issues being raised below. Just for argument sake: what happens if an "un-notable" entry makes it to Wikipedia? Would it be a grave error? Notability, after all, is mostly related to context. Would Shakespeare have been as "noted" a writer, if he had to be born in, say, Upper Egypt?
That's a big hypothetical - if he had been born there, how much and what would he have written? Having somehting un-notable may not be a grave error, but having thousands of un-notable things clogs Wikipedia, makes fact-checking harder and opens the doors wide to usage of Wikipedia for advertisement.
I think the problem lies elsewhere. The trouble is: people or
institutions being packaged to be what they are not. Or bloated claims about institutions or organisations or individuals.
Rather than just delete entries for being un-notable, perhaps we need to find ways to ensure that what's written is both accurate and tallies with the reality. --FN
But what if what is written is that so-and-so once wrote an internet page (that a few hundred people have looked at). Do you really want to just keep that in if you found that he really has done so?
My are these slopes slippery this time of year. And me without my sled.
-S
On 1/8/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
That's a big hypothetical - if he had been born there, how much and what would he have written? Having somehting un-notable may not be a grave error, but having thousands of un-notable things clogs Wikipedia, makes fact-checking harder and opens the doors wide to usage of Wikipedia for advertisement.
Yes, there is a very definite tendency for deletion of anything about a non UK/US person or institution, or an academic, or a classical musician, or someone or something not recent enough to have material on Google. The reason given is always "notability not asserted" and people are actually marking for deletion anything which does not literally countain the word "notability" in the first paragraph. This is worst in speedy, because there are only a few hours at most to review tthe listed items, and there's an ongoing discussion on the talk page of WP:CSD.
Ways to deal with it are well known, but I'm outlining it for clarity. More people must to make the very considerable effort of reviewing at least some of the deletions. For speedys, they're at [[Category:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion]]. Twice a day is not too often. Then there's [[Category:Proposed deletion]] every few days is enough, and similarly at AfD. You'll see me there-- I'm DGG.
AfD is the easy part, because if an article gets to AfD, there are enough people watching to speak up, and enough time to improve the article.
I'm not hopeful on structural change, because no structural change can stand up to people wantonly ignoring the meaning of the rules. But WP is after all a cooperatively edited project, and individual people joining in can make a difference. To return to the original posting, if a number of other people familiar with Indian material support worthy articles, it will work.
For individual articles, the way to do it is to put in a clearly sufficient number of citations. from printed works. (accompanied by English translations if necessary). I've found that specific citations from peer-reviewed journals do help, if they are at all pertinent. So do Ph.d. theses and even Masters theses.
The other specific tactic some like-minded people are using is to write the article on their user page, and invite comment individually from people likely to be active in AfD. Format does matter.
-- David Goodman
On 1/8/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
My are these slopes slippery this time of year. And me without my sled.
-S
On 1/8/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
That's a big hypothetical - if he had been born there, how much and what would he have written? Having somehting un-notable may not be a grave error, but having thousands of un-notable things clogs Wikipedia, makes fact-checking harder and opens the doors wide to usage of Wikipedia for advertisement.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Good. Thank you.
I'm outlining it for brevity:
1) Bookmark and check [[Category:Candidates for speedy deletion]] regularly. Make it part of that hour or so per day when you're aimlessly clicking around the internet.
2) Even though you shouldn't have to, source to the point of compensation.
3) Call for back-up. Deletionists routinely summon their cheerleaders when things aren't going their way. Do the same.
4) Structural change -- fuggetaboutit.
-S
I am curious. About how many articles per day/week do you salvage from speedy del, David?
On 1/8/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, there is a very definite tendency for deletion of anything about a non UK/US person or institution, or an academic, or a classical musician, or someone or something not recent enough to have material on Google. The reason given is always "notability not asserted" and people are actually marking for deletion anything which does not literally countain the word "notability" in the first paragraph. This is worst in speedy, because there are only a few hours at most to review tthe listed items, and there's an ongoing discussion on the talk page of WP:CSD.
Ways to deal with it are well known, but I'm outlining it for clarity. More people must to make the very considerable effort of reviewing at least some of the deletions. For speedys, they're at [[Category:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion]]. Twice a day is not too often. Then there's [[Category:Proposed deletion]] every few days is enough, and similarly at AfD. You'll see me there-- I'm DGG.
AfD is the easy part, because if an article gets to AfD, there are enough people watching to speak up, and enough time to improve the article.
I'm not hopeful on structural change, because no structural change can stand up to people wantonly ignoring the meaning of the rules. But WP is after all a cooperatively edited project, and individual people joining in can make a difference. To return to the original posting, if a number of other people familiar with Indian material support worthy articles, it will work.
For individual articles, the way to do it is to put in a clearly sufficient number of citations. from printed works. (accompanied by English translations if necessary). I've found that specific citations from peer-reviewed journals do help, if they are at all pertinent. So do Ph.d. theses and even Masters theses.
The other specific tactic some like-minded people are using is to write the article on their user page, and invite comment individually from people likely to be active in AfD. Format does matter.
-- David Goodman
On 1/8/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
My are these slopes slippery this time of year. And me without my sled.
-S
On 1/8/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
That's a big hypothetical - if he had been born there, how much and
what
would he have written? Having somehting un-notable may not be a grave error, but having thousands of un-notable things clogs Wikipedia, makes fact-checking harder and opens the doors wide to usage of Wikipedia
for
advertisement.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
For individual articles, the way to do it is to put in a clearly sufficient number of citations. from printed works. (accompanied by English translations if necessary). I've found that specific citations from peer-reviewed journals do help, if they are at all pertinent. So do Ph.d. theses and even Masters theses.
This is the current vogue on Wikipedia: everything should have a gazillion inline citations, and conversely, anything that does not have a gazillion inline citations is bad. This is how very good articles that used to have FA status or ability one or two years ago are now considered "horrible" according to the current fashion.
Now, what this vogue leads to: * We have very good articles (in terms of content and accuracy) on which nobody who knows the topic objects anything is wrong, but which are considered bad because not every statement that any person who have heard about the issue would agree with has a source.
* We have horrific articles, but in which everything is "sourced". Anything goes: trivia, mention of the subject appearing in a Seinfeld episode, quotations from newspapers on fields they are incompetent about (such as science), etc.
Formally speaking, they sound nice, and they please the crowd who thinks that what's important in life is sticking to formal rules and earn good marks for it. However, those articles really are a shame.
In addition, this kind of "sourcing" has a strong bias towards Internet sources (Internet-accessible newspapers, sites, etc.), which, on the other hand, tend to be very inadequate on many topics. I remember recently reading an evaluation of an article on fr: (I think, 'Women in Iran') by a known specialist. What she said: * A lot of relevant literature on the issue is ignored. * On the other hand, Internet sources, often not much good, are overrepresented. * There are numerous errors. But this article nearly made it to "featured" status, because, formally speaking, it had everything! Many citations, photos etc.
To me, the rules that we create, as all rule systems, have this perverse effect that people work more to fulfill the rules ("we should have a photo" even on abstract topics, "we should have a gazillion citations" even if they are low quality) than to fulfill the goal (having good articles that people knowing the subject would agree reflect the various notable points of view in an unbiased way).
-- DM
I'd distinguish between the sources used to establish the notability of the article and those for the verifiablity of details.
The sort of source which helps the most in defending the notability of the article is a book review or product review, and the better known the source for this, the better, but for perfectly good subjects, only non-standard sources are available.
For details, I agree that some of the articles are excessive. This is particularly the case in the sciences, where some of the articles are footnoted as densely as for a scholarly review--which is not WP. But if a fact is challenged it does have to be documented.
I think trying to get FA status (etc) under the current practices not worth the trouble. If you want it, you do have to follow the fashion. If they are going to be on the main page, an illustration is not unreasonable. Otherwise, the answer to someone who asks for a illustration is obvious: go put one in yourself.
I'm more concerned with the substance of articles.
On 1/9/07, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
For individual articles, the way to do it is to put in a clearly sufficient number of citations. from printed works. (accompanied by English translations if necessary). I've found that specific citations from peer-reviewed journals do help, if they are at all pertinent. So do Ph.d. theses and even Masters theses.
This is the current vogue on Wikipedia: everything should have a gazillion inline citations, and conversely, anything that does not have a gazillion inline citations is bad. This is how very good articles that used to have FA status or ability one or two years ago are now considered "horrible" according to the current fashion. Now, what this vogue leads to:
- We have very good articles (in terms of content and accuracy) on which
nobody who knows the topic objects anything is wrong, but which are considered bad because not every statement that any person who have heard about the issue would agree with has a source.
- We have horrific articles, but in which everything is "sourced".
Anything goes: trivia, mention of the subject appearing in a Seinfeld episode, quotations from newspapers on fields they are incompetent about (such as science), etc.
Formally speaking, they sound nice, and they please the crowd who thinks that what's important in life is sticking to formal rules and earn good marks for it. However, those articles really are a shame.
In addition, this kind of "sourcing" has a strong bias towards Internet sources (Internet-accessible newspapers, sites, etc.), which, on the other hand, tend to be very inadequate on many topics. I remember recently reading an evaluation of an article on fr: (I think, 'Women in Iran') by a known specialist. What she said:
- A lot of relevant literature on the issue is ignored.
- On the other hand, Internet sources, often not much good, are
overrepresented.
- There are numerous errors.
But this article nearly made it to "featured" status, because, formally speaking, it had everything! Many citations, photos etc.
To me, the rules that we create, as all rule systems, have this perverse effect that people work more to fulfill the rules ("we should have a photo" even on abstract topics, "we should have a gazillion citations" even if they are low quality) than to fulfill the goal (having good articles that people knowing the subject would agree reflect the various notable points of view in an unbiased way).
-- DM
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
As for what I find, I only look on speedy or prod for things that I can quickly spot as possible without opening them: anything that sounds like real science, any corporate name I recognize, any research organization name I recognize, anything that looks like a non-UK/US author or scientist. These arent many, and I open 20 and get maybe 5 a day worth keeping. The problem is the personal names I do not recognize. If I have time to do them, I find another 5/day . Of these 10, usually 1 is absurd enough that I keep a record of it--the time someone tried to delete JISC (the major UK interuniversity consortium) or James Bonner, the very famous biologist, with 3 honorary degrees and a chair at an ivy. If people with other backgrounds looked, and every one was checked by an intelligent person, I think about 10% would be worth keeping or at least discussing in AfD.
I remove the tag, make a quick fix, say so, and try to notify the main or only editor. There's an automatic template for the purpose, and the person placing the delete is supposed to notify the author--they do about half the time. I add a line or two of suggestions beyond the template
For both speedy and prod, anyone other than the author can remove the tag, and say so with a reason on the edit summary and the talk page. That automatically stops the process. It is not necessary to be an admin.
The problems are that: 90% are 1-line autobios or bios of one's girlfriend or paragraphs naming the teachers in their elementary school; 5% are long meaningless autobio; 5% are worth thinking about.
As for automatic criteria, it isnt even safe to delete the 1-liners because some are a start for a person worth doing. I prefer intelligent humans. All US/UK villages even have long been entered from the census returns. Same could be done elsewhere.
I am not concerned about AfDs. Once something is there, it gets at least a few people. I haven't kept track, but I think most are rightly decided. There's about 100 discussions a day. Join those 1 or 2 you think you could really help. Learn the language that works, be realistic, avoid lost causes, and earn respect from the others.
I do not think structural change is hopeless; but we shoudn't wait for it. Direct action is the way. WP like most large organizations is run by a very small number of the members, but, unlike most, anyone with time to particpate can join in that number. --David G.
On 1/8/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
Good. Thank you.
I'm outlining it for brevity:
- Bookmark and check [[Category:Candidates for speedy deletion]] regularly.
Make it part of that hour or so per day when you're aimlessly clicking around the internet.
Even though you shouldn't have to, source to the point of compensation.
Call for back-up. Deletionists routinely summon their cheerleaders when
things aren't going their way. Do the same.
- Structural change -- fuggetaboutit.
-S
I am curious. About how many articles per day/week do you salvage from speedy del, David?
On 1/8/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, there is a very definite tendency for deletion of anything about a non UK/US person or institution, or an academic, or a classical musician, or someone or something not recent enough to have material on Google. The reason given is always "notability not asserted" and people are actually marking for deletion anything which does not literally countain the word "notability" in the first paragraph. This is worst in speedy, because there are only a few hours at most to review tthe listed items, and there's an ongoing discussion on the talk page of WP:CSD.
Ways to deal with it are well known, but I'm outlining it for clarity. More people must to make the very considerable effort of reviewing at least some of the deletions. For speedys, they're at [[Category:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion]]. Twice a day is not too often. Then there's [[Category:Proposed deletion]] every few days is enough, and similarly at AfD. You'll see me there-- I'm DGG.
AfD is the easy part, because if an article gets to AfD, there are enough people watching to speak up, and enough time to improve the article.
I'm not hopeful on structural change, because no structural change can stand up to people wantonly ignoring the meaning of the rules. But WP is after all a cooperatively edited project, and individual people joining in can make a difference. To return to the original posting, if a number of other people familiar with Indian material support worthy articles, it will work.
For individual articles, the way to do it is to put in a clearly sufficient number of citations. from printed works. (accompanied by English translations if necessary). I've found that specific citations from peer-reviewed journals do help, if they are at all pertinent. So do Ph.d. theses and even Masters theses.
The other specific tactic some like-minded people are using is to write the article on their user page, and invite comment individually from people likely to be active in AfD. Format does matter.
-- David Goodman
On 1/8/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
My are these slopes slippery this time of year. And me without my sled.
-S
On 1/8/07, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
That's a big hypothetical - if he had been born there, how much and
what
would he have written? Having somehting un-notable may not be a grave error, but having thousands of un-notable things clogs Wikipedia, makes fact-checking harder and opens the doors wide to usage of Wikipedia
for
advertisement.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I've been reading some of your meassages or votes for entry deletion, and I'm getting more and more sad.
You are trying to have a 'clean' worthfull encyclopaedia with assurance there is no meaningless article in it. It could be understood in case of written, printed book which looks great in the bookshelf (I like books anyway).
But deletion of entire entries only because they are not so wide known? Wait a moment! It's against spirit and rationale od Wikipedia!
I can present you my own list of drivers which, I hope, stimulated people to support Wikipedia: Here you have it: 1. to have free (no cost) source of information, 2. to work out bias and antagonisms in different national, religious, cultural, philosophical perspectives (in the wake of NPOV), 3. to have much wider scope of entries (with no limits of printing, publishing and paper and timber production - greens beware!), 4. to have more fresh infos before it was even printed in newspapers,
Recapitulating, the corner stone of quality and the competitive edge of Wikipedia as a whole is: * early delivery, * different perspectives, * market verification, * wider scope.
Now some of you are trying to make Wikipedia a digital representation of printed encyclopaedias. Balanced and highly representative. Great apetite and the results...? The results are at no surprise rather mediocre. Wikipedia is not of the same level of quality as printed Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Cleaning-oriented Wikipedians are focusing only on the first driver I've mentioned hereinbefore. They want to have it for free and still of the highest quality. Why it falls short expectations. Because it is only a try to transfer _old paper paradigm_ to completely different _opensource digital world_, where there are no more constraints of: * paper and printing costs, * costs of scalability od delivery, * difficulties in searching, * cost barriers of royalties.
Instead, we need - in my opinion - to exploit in whole new possibilities of this new 'brave' model of knowledge sharing and diffusion.
If I remember, this discussion started with issues from the Third World. Someone has counted entries from different countries and someone another analized it and shouted: "Wait a moment! It's a discrimination of the Third World! There is so great overrepresentation of the developed countries." Yes, indeed, this analyst was right. But... What solutions were proposed?
Here you have a proposal: "In order to balance representations of different nations and cultures, we will delete some articles." I hope I misunderstood it! If unfortunately not, it could be awful act of vadalism of voluntary work of millions Wikipedians. Once again a kind of affirmative action or 'positive discrimination' at cost of the whole community.
I think problem solution should be carefully adjusted to solve the root cause. So: * If you want to support entries from the Third World, do support creating and editing new articles from these area. * If you want to have a highly balanced set of high quality entries to compete with printed Encyclopaedias, find some way to promote quality (featured arcticle is an excellent step in this direction). Maybe the next step would be creating more elaborate quality hierarchy and some new features for quality demanding internauts like searching entries within some quality criteria.
Maybe I'm trying here to invent gunpowder but in my opinion: *The power of Wikipedia is to expand* To expand: in member count, in scope, in presentation form (maps, semantic taxonomies, graphical searching)
There are so many entries to create and so many issues to solve (ideological battles). Deletion of articles which looks like of little meaning is of least importance.
Best regards, Marqoz
Marek makes some great points. I couldn't agree with him more.
If anyone convinces Wikipedia that it needs to be "more like the real thing" (whatever that is, including mainstream, printed encyclopedias or Encarta), it would be a great loss for the attempt to build alternatives. Likewise, it would be hardly helpful if anyone convinces Wikipedia that it should focus on the "standard and quality information" argument (whatever that is supposed to mean!) over all other strengths of the Wikipedia experiment.
For someone like me, the strength of the Wikipedia lies mainly in the fact that it has space also for my village of 8000 to be written about for a global audience (in a factual manner, of course). If things that are important to me are going to be seen as "peripheral" (just because they lack size or not being visible enough in cyberspace), then in what way is it different from the mainstream... that has kept me out in the cold for so long, anyway?
Just the other day, a speaker here in Goa, India was describing "remote" communities, and pointing out that the term is misleading in itself. As he put it, the logic of "remoteness" is always connected to our definition of what is the centre (of the world, of the nation state, or whatever). "For people out there, their own location, of course, is the centre of the world, as far as they go," he said.
Can we encourage the diversity of the planet to flower in the Wikipedia, as it really should? --Frederick "FN" Noronha, Independent Journalist, Goa, India.
On 10/01/07, Marek Najmajer marqoz@wp.pl wrote:
I've been reading some of your meassages or votes for entry deletion, and I'm getting more and more sad.
You are trying to have a 'clean' worthfull encyclopaedia with assurance there is no meaningless article in it. It could be understood in case of written, printed book which looks great in the bookshelf (I like books anyway)....
Frederick, I think one important anchor for third-world topics is interwiki collaboration.
Currently, creation of new Wikipedias is at a standstill...
I'm curious though... why the main page of the Konknni Test WP is not a proper main page but actually the article about Goa, with some sayings at the end?
Some new Wikis are sure to hit the ground running:
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/dsb (Lower Sorbian) http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/stq (Saterlandic) http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/qya (Quenya) http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/kb (Tripuri) http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wp/zb (Uzican)
It tends to be that quality standards on smaller Wikipedias are lower. You may write material unhindered by the deletionists at AfD. Later, this material can be reused to translate or to write new material for en.wp, and can be used as a source in itself if necessary - interwiki links provide some degree of credibility.
Mark
On 09/01/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Marek makes some great points. I couldn't agree with him more.
If anyone convinces Wikipedia that it needs to be "more like the real thing" (whatever that is, including mainstream, printed encyclopedias or Encarta), it would be a great loss for the attempt to build alternatives. Likewise, it would be hardly helpful if anyone convinces Wikipedia that it should focus on the "standard and quality information" argument (whatever that is supposed to mean!) over all other strengths of the Wikipedia experiment.
For someone like me, the strength of the Wikipedia lies mainly in the fact that it has space also for my village of 8000 to be written about for a global audience (in a factual manner, of course). If things that are important to me are going to be seen as "peripheral" (just because they lack size or not being visible enough in cyberspace), then in what way is it different from the mainstream... that has kept me out in the cold for so long, anyway?
Just the other day, a speaker here in Goa, India was describing "remote" communities, and pointing out that the term is misleading in itself. As he put it, the logic of "remoteness" is always connected to our definition of what is the centre (of the world, of the nation state, or whatever). "For people out there, their own location, of course, is the centre of the world, as far as they go," he said.
Can we encourage the diversity of the planet to flower in the Wikipedia, as it really should? --Frederick "FN" Noronha, Independent Journalist, Goa, India.
On 10/01/07, Marek Najmajer marqoz@wp.pl wrote:
I've been reading some of your meassages or votes for entry deletion, and I'm getting more and more sad.
You are trying to have a 'clean' worthfull encyclopaedia with assurance there is no meaningless article in it. It could be understood in case of written, printed book which looks great in the bookshelf (I like books anyway)....
-- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Frederick Noronha wrote:
If anyone convinces Wikipedia that it needs to be "more like the real thing" (whatever that is, including mainstream, printed encyclopedias or Encarta), it would be a great loss for the attempt to build alternatives. Likewise, it would be hardly helpful if anyone convinces Wikipedia that it should focus on the "standard and quality information" argument (whatever that is supposed to mean!) over all other strengths of the Wikipedia experiment.
The value of Wikipedia is as much in the processes that it stands for as its contents. This does not mean that we should embrace clearly inappropriate content, but obscure or remote does not equate to inappropriate. This process does recognize that good content builds up over a length of time with the help of a separate community of editors for each article. A smaller article community implies that the buildup of that article will take longer. There is no need to be impatient about any article.
For someone like me, the strength of the Wikipedia lies mainly in the fact that it has space also for my village of 8000 to be written about for a global audience (in a factual manner, of course). If things that are important to me are going to be seen as "peripheral" (just because they lack size or not being visible enough in cyberspace), then in what way is it different from the mainstream... that has kept me out in the cold for so long, anyway?
When it comes to the size of notable communities, I believe that Rambot has set the standard with his wide selection of United States place names. The standard applied to the Unied States should be taken as a precedent for other countries of the world. I have several volumes published by the Government of India and listing all the post offices in India. From my perspective, if the village is in that publication it is notable. 100 people in a small village in India are just as valuable as 100 people in a small United States village.
Just the other day, a speaker here in Goa, India was describing "remote" communities, and pointing out that the term is misleading in itself. As he put it, the logic of "remoteness" is always connected to our definition of what is the centre (of the world, of the nation state, or whatever). "For people out there, their own location, of course, is the centre of the world, as far as they go," he said.
I have often wondered why Goans that I have met locally here in Canada should become so disporportionately prominent when compared to immigrants from other parts of India.
Ec
To me the issue of notability has always been a bloated one. I'll even go so far as to say that Wikipedia's quality wouldn't change substantially if we could rewind history and expunge notability as an issue ever.
The primary fear is that WP will become "cluttered". However, articles that are objectively not-notable will have very little connectivity with any other articles. Therefore, non-notable articles will only exist within small, obscure pockets.
It's akin to the logic Google uses to determine the weight of a site with its PageRank system, which gives notable weight to sites linked to.
Let's suppose for fun that the burden of notability shifted from article creation to inter-article linkage. So, I could create an article about myself. But when I attempted to inject it into [[Philadelphia]], I'd have to prove that my article was substantially relevant to anyone interested in the subject of Philadelphia. If the decision to link to me was made by philly watchers/readers, I'd venture to guess you're already talking a more diverse and subject-intelligent crowd than the regulars at AfD. Of course, these kinds of edits are routine--they are reverted just as routinely.
So, even in the extreme case that all articles were acceptable, my vanity page would be nothing more than a desolate, unconnected article that nobody would ever find accept by [[Special:Random]]. Of course, the slippery slope folks will tell you that if this were allowed to happen the WP servers would blow up and Larry Sanger's fork would rule the world, and eventually fund a robot army, resurrect Dracula-Hitler-Tyrannosaurus, and end humanity.
-S
On 1/9/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
For someone like me, the strength of the Wikipedia lies mainly in the fact that it has space also for my village of 8000 to be written about for a global audience (in a factual manner, of course). If things that are important to me are going to be seen as "peripheral" (just because they lack size or not being visible enough in cyberspace), then in what way is it different from the mainstream... that has kept me out in the cold for so long, anyway?
This would move the battle from one place to hundreds of places. In general, spreading a problem over more articles is less good than having one central place to discuss whether the article should be included in the main space. More over, it would burden article authors even more in attempting to maintain articles. This is a general habit of of the pedia where arguments at the meta level are dumped on editors because the meta level gets tired of the argument. Editor time is undervalued as it is, spending it to avoid meta-level arguments is a sign of failure at the meta-level.
Notability is, in fact, a two way protection. It protects the quality of the pedia, and it protects the people below the threshold of notability from being attacked in a wikipedia article, and having that vault to the top of a google search. Since people have been denied employment based on google searches, it would not take very long for this to cause a problem.
Finally, one can generate an amazingly large body of objects which cite only each other, and which look like information. In my "random article" edit swaths, a significant fraction have been "Romance of the Three Kingdom" references, which have exploded in popularity because of a computer game based on RoTK. There are hundreds of locations, characters and events mentioned in RoTK. Many of them are documentable historical people, while others are referenced only in RoTK. One article I edited read as if the events mentioned were factual.
Now take some long running roleplaying campaign. There are long running role playing campaigns that have been going for more than thirty years. They have thousands of locations, thousands of characters, and histories that stretch back thousands of years. It is all verifiable, because such campaigns often have web sites, or codifications of history. Now get one person from the campaign willing to put all of this information on wikipedia - it isn't that strenuous to write a python script that will take articles from fan source and dump them into wikipedia.
Wikipedia is ultimately for readers. The question on any article should be "would any reasonable person want to look this up?" For small towns, even very small ones, the answer is "yes". For fancruft which has reached out into the general culture, even if in minor ways, the answer is yes. For self-contained, self-referential worlds, the answer is no.
In an encyclopedia that is still lacking articles, or has only bare stubs, on some of the most influential thinkers in their fields, opening the flood gates to people typing in their high school roleplaying campaign is a poor idea.
On Jan 10, 2007, at 1:06 AM, Steve wrote:
To me the issue of notability has always been a bloated one. I'll even go so far as to say that Wikipedia's quality wouldn't change substantially if we could rewind history and expunge notability as an issue ever.
The primary fear is that WP will become "cluttered". However, articles that are objectively not-notable will have very little connectivity with any other articles. Therefore, non-notable articles will only exist within small, obscure pockets.
It's akin to the logic Google uses to determine the weight of a site with its PageRank system, which gives notable weight to sites linked to.
Let's suppose for fun that the burden of notability shifted from article creation to inter-article linkage. So, I could create an article about myself. But when I attempted to inject it into [[Philadelphia]], I'd have to prove that my article was substantially relevant to anyone interested in the subject of Philadelphia. If the decision to link to me was made by philly watchers/readers, I'd venture to guess you're already talking a more diverse and subject-intelligent crowd than the regulars at AfD. Of course, these kinds of edits are routine--they are reverted just as routinely.
On 1/10/07, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
This would move the battle from one place to hundreds of places. In general, spreading a problem over more articles is less good than having one central place to discuss whether the article should be included in the main space. More over, it would burden article authors even more in attempting to maintain articles. This is a general habit of of the pedia where arguments at the meta level are dumped on editors because the meta level gets tired of the argument. Editor time is undervalued as it is, spending it to avoid meta-level arguments is a sign of failure at the meta-level.
1) I don't see how article maintenance would be slightly changed. People would revert irrelevant additions. How is this different from what happens today? If you're saying that for some reason the load would spike, I'd definitely be interested to hear your reasoning.
2) Its "dumped" on them because they are more likely to be somewhat sufficiently self-informed on the topic. Not because editors upstairs are 'tired' of it. Oh contraire, AfD wouldn't let that 'burden' go without a fight!
Notability is, in fact, a two way protection. It protects the quality
of the pedia, and it protects the people below the threshold of notability from being attacked in a wikipedia article, and having that vault to the top of a google search. Since people have been denied employment based on google searches, it would not take very long for this to cause a problem.
You've taken my 'extreme argument' case as a literal proposition. Tisk tisk. All I meant to illustrate was that the 'notability' issue, even taken to its extreme (All articles are notable) produces very few problems. At present, notability is held as sacred and its defenders fierce.
-S
On Jan 10, 2007, at 1:06 AM, Steve wrote:
To me the issue of notability has always been a bloated one. I'll even go so far as to say that Wikipedia's quality wouldn't change substantially if we could rewind history and expunge notability as an issue ever.
The primary fear is that WP will become "cluttered". However, articles that are objectively not-notable will have very little connectivity with any other articles. Therefore, non-notable articles will only exist within small, obscure pockets.
It's akin to the logic Google uses to determine the weight of a site with its PageRank system, which gives notable weight to sites linked to.
Let's suppose for fun that the burden of notability shifted from article creation to inter-article linkage. So, I could create an article about myself. But when I attempted to inject it into [[Philadelphia]], I'd have to prove that my article was substantially relevant to anyone interested in the subject of Philadelphia. If the decision to link to me was made by philly watchers/readers, I'd venture to guess you're already talking a more diverse and subject-intelligent crowd than the regulars at AfD. Of course, these kinds of edits are routine--they are reverted just as routinely.
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My counter examples are two I ran across while skimming random articles. One was an outright fraud and had been up for months, and had been reflexively linked into other articles on the same topic. The other consists of articles *plural* from RoTK that were linked into Chinese history and linked as China stubs.
There is a great deal of automatic linking in and clean up behavior which is harder to rip out in case of a bad article than even increasingly cumbersome process of deletion. The pedia's community is good at making articles look good. This is a feature. We should not abuse that trust by telling people that they can put anything in it they like.
Editor time is not free, and should not be spent simply because of meta-failure to deal with issues.
On Jan 10, 2007, at 8:51 AM, Steve wrote:
On 1/10/07, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
- I don't see how article maintenance would be slightly changed.
People would revert irrelevant additions. How is this different from what happens today? If you're saying that for some reason the load would spike, I'd definitely be interested to hear your reasoning.
On 09/01/07, Marek Najmajer marqoz@wp.pl wrote:
I've been reading some of your meassages or votes for entry deletion, and I'm getting more and more sad. You are trying to have a 'clean' worthfull encyclopaedia with assurance there is no meaningless article in it. It could be understood in case of written, printed book which looks great in the bookshelf (I like books anyway).
I agree with all of this, but the people doing it aren't reading here. You'd need to get into discussing it on [[:en:WT:AFD]] to reach the people on en:wp who are working this way.
- d.
On 10/01/07 David Gerard answered to Marek Najmajer:
I agree with all of this, but the people doing it aren't reading here. You'd need to get into discussing it on [[:en:WT:AFD]] to reach the people on en:wp who are working this way.
Thank you very much. I hope you didn't take it to your heart. I'm happy I'm not alone. Thank you for pointing where the proper addressee of my 'Declaration of Wikipedicity' is hidden.
Marek
On 09/01/07, Marek Najmajer marqoz@wp.pl wrote:
I've been reading some of your meassages or votes for entry deletion, and I'm getting more and more sad. You are trying to have a 'clean' worthfull encyclopaedia with assurance there is no meaningless article in it. It could be understood in case of written, printed book which looks great in the bookshelf (I like books anyway).
Andre Engels wrote:
2007/1/8, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
Hmmm... some interesting issues being raised below. Just for argument sake: what happens if an "un-notable" entry makes it to Wikipedia? Would it be a grave error? Notability, after all, is mostly related to context. Would Shakespeare have been as "noted" a writer, if he had to be born in, say, Upper Egypt?
That's a big hypothetical - if he had been born there, how much and what would he have written? Having somehting un-notable may not be a grave error, but having thousands of un-notable things clogs Wikipedia, makes fact-checking harder and opens the doors wide to usage of Wikipedia for advertisement.
If Frederick's comments are hypothetical, this response is speculative. We have yet to deal with fact checking to any apprecable degree, and advertising is a completely differnt issue from notability.
I think the problem lies elsewhere. The trouble is: people or
institutions being packaged to be what they are not. Or bloated claims about institutions or organisations or individuals.
Rather than just delete entries for being un-notable, perhaps we need to find ways to ensure that what's written is both accurate and tallies with the reality. --FN
But what if what is written is that so-and-so once wrote an internet page (that a few hundred people have looked at). Do you really want to just keep that in if you found that he really has done so?
Again, this is a straw man argument. It makes a statement about something that many will find unacceptable and tries to apply the same argument to more uncertain situations.
The vandal fighters are doing an important job, but sometimes they seem to get so overrun by the backlog and the size of the task that they just forget to reflect on articles that require it.
Ec
2007/1/10, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
But what if what is written is that so-and-so once wrote an internet page (that a few hundred people have looked at). Do you really want to just
keep
that in if you found that he really has done so?
Again, this is a straw man argument. It makes a statement about something that many will find unacceptable and tries to apply the same argument to more uncertain situations.
Yes. And what's wrong with that? Either we have *some* notability criterium, or we have *none*. If we have none, then what criterium are you going to use to remove articles like the above? If we have some, then apparently you DO agree with me that 'notability' is a good criterium, and what we disagree on is the *level* of notability that is required. Which is a wholely different ballgame.
Andre Engels wrote:
2007/1/10, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
But what if what is written is that so-and-so once wrote an internet page (that a few hundred people have looked at). Do you really want to just keep
that in if you found that he really has done so?
Again, this is a straw man argument. It makes a statement about something that many will find unacceptable and tries to apply the same argument to more uncertain situations.
Yes. And what's wrong with that? Either we have *some* notability criterium, or we have *none*. If we have none, then what criterium are you going to use to remove articles like the above? If we have some, then apparently you DO agree with me that 'notability' is a good criterium, and what we disagree on is the *level* of notability that is required. Which is a wholely different ballgame.
What makes notability a bad criterion is its high degree of subjectivity. It is so broad that it cannot stand alone. What I objected to in my previous message was the temptation to generalize.from obvious cases to more difficult ones.
Ec
Metafailures.
Metafailure type I. the way to avoid junk is screening before inclusion. It has been considered, but rejected because of time required. Possibly this should be re-examined, because we may be spending equal time in removing them afterwards.
Metafailure type II, The way to get articles for areas not adequately covered is to form organized Projects. There are projects for India, for Islam, etc; if a project doesn't have enough members, recruit more. If it's not doing enough, make suggestions there. (These projects can also serve to scree deletions in their subjects.)
DGG David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
What nobody seems to have mentioned is the fact that in AfD discussions admins are *supposed* to look at all the votes and the reasonaing behind them, and make an informed decision based on that (which is exactly what several posts have said should be done). Of course there are probably a fair few who don't, and in any case the informed decision is still liable to have a bit of bias behind it, but just saying "a thousand 'delete, nn' shouldn't count as much as one 'keep, here's a bunch of references'" isn't actually adding anything to the procedure that isn't (theoretically at least) already there.
CM
Some questions.
Is the procedure really failing? Are we all just nava-gazing? Is it as simple as David Goodman suggested several thousand words back when he explained that the important articles can only be saved by active, interested participation? Are we fighting for a hopelessly obscure minority?
-S
On 1/12/07, Confusing Manifestation confusingmanifestation@gmail.com wrote:
What nobody seems to have mentioned is the fact that in AfD discussions admins are *supposed* to look at all the votes and the reasonaing behind them, and make an informed decision based on that (which is exactly what several posts have said should be done). Of course there are probably a fair few who don't, and in any case the informed decision is still liable to have a bit of bias behind it, but just saying "a thousand 'delete, nn' shouldn't count as much as one 'keep, here's a bunch of references'" isn't actually adding anything to the procedure that isn't (theoretically at least) already there.
CM
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It's only hopelessly obscure if you're looking at it from the first world :-)
On 13/01/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
Some questions.
Is the procedure really failing? Are we all just nava-gazing? Is it as simple as David Goodman suggested several thousand words back when he explained that the important articles can only be saved by active, interested participation? Are we fighting for a hopelessly obscure minority?
-S
On 1/12/07, Confusing Manifestation confusingmanifestation@gmail.com wrote:
What nobody seems to have mentioned is the fact that in AfD discussions admins are *supposed* to look at all the votes and the reasonaing behind them, and make an informed decision based on that (which is exactly what several posts have said should be done). Of course there are probably a fair few who don't, and in any case the informed decision is still liable to have a bit of bias behind it, but just saying "a thousand 'delete, nn' shouldn't count as much as one 'keep, here's a bunch of references'" isn't actually adding anything to the procedure that isn't (theoretically at least) already there.
CM
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True enough. But if its really isolated to the third-world than I'm sure someone can produce several examples of wonderful articles nixed by ignorant deletionists. Examples can be made and wrists can be slapped?
-S
On 1/13/07, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
It's only hopelessly obscure if you're looking at it from the first world :-)
On 13/01/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
Some questions.
Is the procedure really failing? Are we all just nava-gazing? Is it as simple as David Goodman suggested several thousand words back when he explained that the important articles can only be saved by active, interested participation? Are we fighting for a hopelessly obscure
minority?
-S
On 1/12/07, Confusing Manifestation confusingmanifestation@gmail.com wrote:
What nobody seems to have mentioned is the fact that in AfD discussions admins are *supposed* to look at all the votes and the reasonaing behind them, and make an informed decision based on that (which is exactly what several posts have said should be done). Of course there are probably a fair few who don't, and in any case the informed decision is still liable to have a bit of bias behind it, but just saying "a thousand 'delete, nn' shouldn't count as much as one 'keep, here's a bunch of references'" isn't actually adding anything to the procedure that isn't (theoretically at least) already there.
CM
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-- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.
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I don't think it would be a grave error, but our opinions about this do not matter. There are people who do think its heresy.
Because these people are so focused on notability and reduction of error, these like minds collect at AFD/Speedy delete. Since Wikipedia is a volunteer effort, people will gravitate towards jobs which fulfill their particular passion. So, I think this rule explains why deletionists are attracted to AFD as a hangout.
Its kind of like the tenant here in American law (and probably elsewhere) that says its better to let 100 guilty people free than to send 1 innocent person to jail. However, the inverse of this is true at AFD.
In the west, where something like an Oral tradition/history is so foreign to us its not hard for us to write it off as hearsay, non-notable, even gossip. And yet any random thing that our news media decides to attend to for the minute becomes instantly notable. There's no way to appeal this because its just what Wikipedia has become. At the very least I hope this discussion is generating rhetoric for you to use in AFD debates against deletionists. It sounds like a lot of very wonderful things are being lost.
-S
On 1/8/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Hmmm... some interesting issues being raised below. Just for argument sake: what happens if an "un-notable" entry makes it to Wikipedia? Would it be a grave error? Notability, after all, is mostly related to context. Would Shakespeare have been as "noted" a writer, if he had to be born in, say, Upper Egypt?
I think the problem lies elsewhere. The trouble is: people or institutions being packaged to be what they are not. Or bloated claims about institutions or organisations or individuals.
Rather than just delete entries for being un-notable, perhaps we need to find ways to ensure that what's written is both accurate and tallies with the reality. --FN
On 08/01/07, Steve subsume@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe this is a rookie opinion, but I think that the AFD process tends
to
attract people who are focused on keeping wikipedia "uncluttered" and "relevant". They're always going to "err on the side of delete" and
that's
that. You can present anything to the people at AFD, but its a systemic habit. Those aren't just going to undo because of one person's polite suggestion.
While I happen to think deletionists could be restrained greatly without loss to Wikipedia (since the articles they're deleting are hardly well connected and widely viewed), I'm just one opinion. Over the years I've noticed a kind of institutional insecurity grow in Wikipedia, over fears
our
pedia is being perceived as full of unverified internet rabble.
-S
-- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.goa-india.org http://feeds.goa-india.org/index.php
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Frederick Noronha wrote:
Hmmm... some interesting issues being raised below. Just for argument sake: what happens if an "un-notable" entry makes it to Wikipedia? Would it be a grave error? Notability, after all, is mostly related to context. Would Shakespeare have been as "noted" a writer, if he had to be born in, say, Upper Egypt?
Quick! Without looking at any references, how many Egyptian authors can you name?
I think the problem lies elsewhere. The trouble is: people or institutions being packaged to be what they are not. Or bloated claims about institutions or organisations or individuals.
In other words marketting. For the institutions selling these ideas, or packaging content with software, the per unit cost of a package goes down as more packages are sold. There is no profit in a package that only a small number of people around the world will even consider buying at a price which they feel is right. The real costs of the package would make pricing on a cost recovery basis unreasonably high.
Rather than just delete entries for being un-notable, perhaps we need to find ways to ensure that what's written is both accurate and tallies with the reality. --FN
Notability has bean a contentios issue ever sincee I became involved. During that time I've seen both No Original Research and Verifiability developed as ways of dealing with the notability problem. Neither solution has succeeded as well as might have been anticipated at the time.
Ec
Steve wrote:
Maybe this is a rookie opinion, but I think that the AFD process tends to attract people who are focused on keeping wikipedia "uncluttered" and "relevant". They're always going to "err on the side of delete" and that's that. You can present anything to the people at AFD, but its a systemic habit. Those aren't just going to undo because of one person's polite suggestion.
Congenital neat-freaks! An interesting study would be to try to correlate the level of neatness around one's computer workspace with one's place on the deletionis/inclusionist spectrum. :-)
While I happen to think deletionists could be restrained greatly without loss to Wikipedia (since the articles they're deleting are hardly well connected and widely viewed), I'm just one opinion. Over the years I've noticed a kind of institutional insecurity grow in Wikipedia, over fears our pedia is being perceived as full of unverified internet rabble.
This kind of sclerosis strikes me as common in the growth of institutions. Sometimes I wonder whether we have enough excape velocity to escape that cycle. Someone starts with a great idea, and has access to enough resources to get it off the ground. When it succeeds more than he ever would have dreamed it takes on a life of its own. More and more people become involved at a point further removed in time from the original idea. They can see the project as an excellent one, and their instinct is to protect it. This kind of smothering risks suffocating the baby.
Ec
2007/1/8, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org:
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever. In journalism, it is always easy to make out what is a 'plug' for someone and what is a genuine news-item. Guess Wikipedia could depend on local teams to also offer some cross-checking. FN
That's definitely a possibility. As said before, I think that mechanically counting the number of links on Google is no good at all. The very least one should do, is set the limits differently depending on the subject - higher for western subjects, computer-related subjects and pop culture, lower for third world subjects or subjects that had their main popularity over 10 years ago.
But even better would be to check not the number but the nature of the links found. Or something similar to your proposal: If the Google search does not give a clear answer immediately, have a list of experts where one or a few can be chosen who should be able to render judgement.
Frederick Noronha wrote:
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever.
The question if a topic is notable enough to deserve an entry, can only be answered with "yes" or "no", and this is pretty much "mechanical", so you cannot really escape the mechanics.
However, the number of Google hits is not the only mechanical input. There are many categories of topics where you can derive a good "mechanical reason" to write an article. For cities, you can claim that each city with more than, say, 50,000 inhabitants deserves an article. The first step would then be to create a list of the largest/biggest/heaviest objects of the category.
As for cities in India, there are 35 listed that have more than one million inhabitants on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_plus_cities_in_India but there are only some 400 cities listed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_India
I don't know if any population limit was set for that list, but I think you could easily expand that list to 2000 cities or so, and start to write articles for each one of them. Then for each city, you could list the two or three most famous people that come from that city, and write articles about them. And so on. All along that chain you would then have a number that proves why this topic is notable, so you won't have to rely on the Google hit count. With time, your articles will define the Google hit count.
This kind of reasoning is not limited to the English Wikipedia or the cities of India, but can be used in the Ukrainian Wikipedia for Hungarian composers with more than 3 symphonies or whatever. I don't know if 50,000 inhabitants or 3 symphonies are good limits for notability, but if you can make such a claim and back it up, then people should be less likely to attack you. At least they will understand that you are not totally clueless or naked.
There are two Swedish proverbs. One says "you shouldn't judge people by the clothes they wear" (man ska inte döma hunden efter håren). The other one says "you will get judged by the clothes you wear" (som man är klädd så blir man hädd). Go figure.
2007/1/9, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
Frederick Noronha wrote:
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever.
The question if a topic is notable enough to deserve an entry, can only be answered with "yes" or "no", and this is pretty much "mechanical", so you cannot really escape the mechanics.
Do I understand correctly that you are saying that yes/no questions can only be answered mechanically? I strongly disagree. Of course you can escape the mechanics, doing it mechanically might make things somewhat easier, but surely Wikipedia editors are able to judge non-quantified arguments on their merits.
This kind of reasoning is not limited to the English Wikipedia or
the cities of India, but can be used in the Ukrainian Wikipedia for Hungarian composers with more than 3 symphonies or whatever. I don't know if 50,000 inhabitants or 3 symphonies are good limits for notability, but if you can make such a claim and back it up, then people should be less likely to attack you. At least they will understand that you are not totally clueless or naked.
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion is that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of 2,000 or 5,000. 3 symphonies sounds like a bad limit because notability of a classical composer in my opinion should not be judged by their output, but by the question how often and by whom their work is played.
Andre Engels wrote:
Do I understand correctly that you are saying that yes/no questions can only be answered mechanically?
No, I wasn't referring to *how* we answer the question. But the *answer* is itself a "mechanic" yes or no. You either have the article, or you don't. This is not a fuzzy thing that can be discussed in terms of feelings or "quality", the existence of the article is only a quantity: 0 (doesn't exist) or 1 (does exist). The question needs an answer, we cannot leave it undecided, because we cannot "maybe" have an article. Since I'm an inclusionist rather than a deletionist, I'm looking for ways to formulate successful arguments for keeping articles, and since the answer needs to be mechanic, it can be helpful to use mechanic reasoning, such as the population of a city. Anyway, that would be better than using the Google hit count. You could try to use other (less mechanical) arguments for keeping an article, but I think it would typically be more difficult.
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion is that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of 2,000 or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
The notability issue is related to another question that I have:
In linguistics, it is known that some words appear more often than others, and useful statistics can be based on a large corpus of text. If we have a dictionary of 80,000 words, we can check it against a corpus of text to see if those are the 80,000 most commonly occurring words or if the dictionary is missing some frequent words that it should contain. I wish we could apply the same kind of statistics to encyclopedias as well. If we have a large corpus of text, how much of its meaning is explained by Wikipedia? Which concepts are more common than others, and is Wikipedia missing some of them? We can do word frequency statistics, but how can we count the concepts that occurr in a text?
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington
Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Aye, but verifiability also allows for third-party peer review.
On 1/9/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my
opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking
of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an
article
about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My
town
and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population
of
1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size
of
mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red
links,
such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no
reliable
sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers
(at
least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing
list
happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be
nice
if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so
we
can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a
library
to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage
:-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
This is true. However, is there a workable solution to that?
I remember when people didn't worry too much about references on Wikipedia. Sure, you were supposed to have them, but as long as you had a nice article, nobody cared.
Well, what if I know the truth, but it is not written anywhere? What if I interview 100 people to make sure they agree, and they do? What if it is common knowledge in my village, which nobody will challenge?
The answer: it will be labeled "unverifiable" or "non-notable" and deleted.
Wikipedia's current message to the world: If it's never been written about, or been mentioned in a sound recording or a film, it's not important.
Well:
1) Not all cultures have writing. 2) Among those cultures which DO have writing, they each place different importance values on it. In my daily life, I am using it constantly. My desk is littered with books with their titles written on them, products with their labels. If I go driving, some of the signs will have writing on them, there are billboards, signs for businesses, all of them using writing. But in some cultures, writing may not be used so extensively. Maybe it is usually just used for poetry, or just for writing letters to people who are far away. The concept of mass communication is foreign to most cultures still, and if you don't need mass communication, writing is hardly necessary, except to write a letter to someone who is not present. 3) Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far, far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make. People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they would have no way to reach their intended audience!
And they say, that the internet will change all this. Well, in these societies, although internet access is on the rise, it is still very, very, low. Even if you do have internet access, it takes a somewhat higher degree of computer literacy to be able to _publish_ on the internet. What? You want to put your knowledge on Wikipedia? Go ahead!
...
Sorry, your knowledge is not referenced. It has been deleted. You know nothing that is worth anything.
We are telling the developing world that they do not matter and that they are stupid.
Mark
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Mark Williamson wrote:
Well, what if I know the truth, but it is not written anywhere? What if I interview 100 people to make sure they agree, and they do? What if it is common knowledge in my village, which nobody will challenge?
The answer: it will be labeled "unverifiable" or "non-notable" and deleted.
NOT NECESSARILY. If an article is based on oral sources, you could at least make a note that "the information is based on interviews with 100 people, made in the village of X between dates y and z. Copies of interviews are deposited at m." Then we'd know what is the factual basis, and the article could be useful as such.
Pekka Gronow
On 09/01/07, pekka.gronow@yle.fi pekka.gronow@yle.fi wrote:
NOT NECESSARILY. If an article is based on oral sources, you could at least make a note that "the information is based on interviews with 100 people, made in the village of X between dates y and z. Copies of interviews are deposited at m." Then we'd know what is the factual basis, and the article could be useful as such.
On en:wp, this will promptly get zapped as original research.
- d.
A very interesting and comprehensive post.
You forgot to mention about the language barrier.
I agree that verifiability is important, but making it compulsory introduces problems such as systemic bias.
Where should we raise this issue for further discussion?
I've been working on an article on a Singaporean movie - I Not Stupid. It's close to GA status, but there is very little referenced information on the production of the film. My friend suggested I interview Jack Neo - my idol, who wrote the movie. Since his child studies in my school, getting an interview is not out of the question. The problem is: how do I publish it?
On 1/9/07, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
This is true. However, is there a workable solution to that?
I remember when people didn't worry too much about references on Wikipedia. Sure, you were supposed to have them, but as long as you had a nice article, nobody cared.
Well, what if I know the truth, but it is not written anywhere? What if I interview 100 people to make sure they agree, and they do? What if it is common knowledge in my village, which nobody will challenge?
The answer: it will be labeled "unverifiable" or "non-notable" and deleted.
Wikipedia's current message to the world: If it's never been written about, or been mentioned in a sound recording or a film, it's not important.
Well:
- Not all cultures have writing.
- Among those cultures which DO have writing, they each place
different importance values on it. In my daily life, I am using it constantly. My desk is littered with books with their titles written on them, products with their labels. If I go driving, some of the signs will have writing on them, there are billboards, signs for businesses, all of them using writing. But in some cultures, writing may not be used so extensively. Maybe it is usually just used for poetry, or just for writing letters to people who are far away. The concept of mass communication is foreign to most cultures still, and if you don't need mass communication, writing is hardly necessary, except to write a letter to someone who is not present. 3) Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far, far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make. People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they would have no way to reach their intended audience!
And they say, that the internet will change all this. Well, in these societies, although internet access is on the rise, it is still very, very, low. Even if you do have internet access, it takes a somewhat higher degree of computer literacy to be able to _publish_ on the internet. What? You want to put your knowledge on Wikipedia? Go ahead!
...
Sorry, your knowledge is not referenced. It has been deleted. You know nothing that is worth anything.
We are telling the developing world that they do not matter and that they are stupid.
Mark
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Yes. If you interview Jack Neo, you should keep a copy of it somewhere online or on your personal computer. You may reference it from the article, but it is of the utmost importance that you can produce a copy of the interview if anyone wants it.
Mark
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
A very interesting and comprehensive post.
You forgot to mention about the language barrier.
I agree that verifiability is important, but making it compulsory introduces problems such as systemic bias.
Where should we raise this issue for further discussion?
I've been working on an article on a Singaporean movie - I Not Stupid. It's close to GA status, but there is very little referenced information on the production of the film. My friend suggested I interview Jack Neo - my idol, who wrote the movie. Since his child studies in my school, getting an interview is not out of the question. The problem is: how do I publish it?
On 1/9/07, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
This is true. However, is there a workable solution to that?
I remember when people didn't worry too much about references on Wikipedia. Sure, you were supposed to have them, but as long as you had a nice article, nobody cared.
Well, what if I know the truth, but it is not written anywhere? What if I interview 100 people to make sure they agree, and they do? What if it is common knowledge in my village, which nobody will challenge?
The answer: it will be labeled "unverifiable" or "non-notable" and deleted.
Wikipedia's current message to the world: If it's never been written about, or been mentioned in a sound recording or a film, it's not important.
Well:
- Not all cultures have writing.
- Among those cultures which DO have writing, they each place
different importance values on it. In my daily life, I am using it constantly. My desk is littered with books with their titles written on them, products with their labels. If I go driving, some of the signs will have writing on them, there are billboards, signs for businesses, all of them using writing. But in some cultures, writing may not be used so extensively. Maybe it is usually just used for poetry, or just for writing letters to people who are far away. The concept of mass communication is foreign to most cultures still, and if you don't need mass communication, writing is hardly necessary, except to write a letter to someone who is not present. 3) Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far, far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make. People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they would have no way to reach their intended audience!
And they say, that the internet will change all this. Well, in these societies, although internet access is on the rise, it is still very, very, low. Even if you do have internet access, it takes a somewhat higher degree of computer literacy to be able to _publish_ on the internet. What? You want to put your knowledge on Wikipedia? Go ahead!
...
Sorry, your knowledge is not referenced. It has been deleted. You know nothing that is worth anything.
We are telling the developing world that they do not matter and that they are stupid.
Mark
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Perhaps I could join Wikinews and add a copy of the interview there?
On 1/9/07, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Yes. If you interview Jack Neo, you should keep a copy of it somewhere online or on your personal computer. You may reference it from the article, but it is of the utmost importance that you can produce a copy of the interview if anyone wants it.
Mark
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
A very interesting and comprehensive post.
You forgot to mention about the language barrier.
I agree that verifiability is important, but making it compulsory introduces problems such as systemic bias.
Where should we raise this issue for further discussion?
I've been working on an article on a Singaporean movie - I Not Stupid. It's close to GA status, but there is very little referenced information on the production of the film. My friend suggested I interview Jack Neo - my idol, who wrote the movie. Since his child studies in my school, getting an interview is not out of the question. The problem is: how do I publish it?
On 1/9/07, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
This is true. However, is there a workable solution to that?
I remember when people didn't worry too much about references on Wikipedia. Sure, you were supposed to have them, but as long as you had a nice article, nobody cared.
Well, what if I know the truth, but it is not written anywhere? What if I interview 100 people to make sure they agree, and they do? What if it is common knowledge in my village, which nobody will challenge?
The answer: it will be labeled "unverifiable" or "non-notable" and deleted.
Wikipedia's current message to the world: If it's never been written about, or been mentioned in a sound recording or a film, it's not important.
Well:
- Not all cultures have writing.
- Among those cultures which DO have writing, they each place
different importance values on it. In my daily life, I am using it constantly. My desk is littered with books with their titles written on them, products with their labels. If I go driving, some of the signs will have writing on them, there are billboards, signs for businesses, all of them using writing. But in some cultures, writing may not be used so extensively. Maybe it is usually just used for poetry, or just for writing letters to people who are far away. The concept of mass communication is foreign to most cultures still, and if you don't need mass communication, writing is hardly necessary, except to write a letter to someone who is not present. 3) Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far, far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make. People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they would have no way to reach their intended audience!
And they say, that the internet will change all this. Well, in these societies, although internet access is on the rise, it is still very, very, low. Even if you do have internet access, it takes a somewhat higher degree of computer literacy to be able to _publish_ on the internet. What? You want to put your knowledge on Wikipedia? Go ahead!
...
Sorry, your knowledge is not referenced. It has been deleted. You know nothing that is worth anything.
We are telling the developing world that they do not matter and that they are stupid.
Mark
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote: > I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion is > that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of 2,000 > or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Written with passion, J.L.W.S. The Special One
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
I've been working on an article on a Singaporean movie - I Not Stupid. It's close to GA status, but there is very little referenced information on the production of the film. My friend suggested I interview Jack Neo - my idol, who wrote the movie. Since his child studies in my school, getting an interview is not out of the question. The problem is: how do I publish it?
Publish it on a site yourself and get someone else to write the parts of the article based on it.
- d.
On 1/9/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
A very interesting and comprehensive post.
You forgot to mention about the language barrier.
I agree that verifiability is important, but making it compulsory introduces problems such as systemic bias.
Where should we raise this issue for further discussion?
I've been working on an article on a Singaporean movie - I Not Stupid. It's close to GA status, but there is very little referenced information on the production of the film. My friend suggested I interview Jack Neo - my idol, who wrote the movie. Since his child studies in my school, getting an interview is not out of the question. The problem is: how do I publish it?
That's an easy one: anywhere that will have it. I personally use [[TOTSE]] for such material. You may then ask how it's verifiable: well, your text file on TOTSE would include your name or at least your Wikipedia identity, and we trust you to be who you say you are bar oddities, so... I would suggest the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg if the two of you were willing to go public domain, but the point is that finding text file hosts online is really not that difficult (how difficult is it to set up a blog, for example?).
And you can always keep a backup in your userspace - if userspace cannot be used for backing up primary materials used in articles and to which you hold the copyright, then IMO we've gone way too far in restricting its usage.
And there's always Wikisource, but I guess you would have to ask someone else to upload it. I think they bar original works created by contributors, but I'm not sure.
--Gwern
gwern branwen wrote:
On 1/9/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
I've been working on an article on a Singaporean movie - I Not Stupid. It's close to GA status, but there is very little referenced information on the production of the film. My friend suggested I interview Jack Neo - my idol, who wrote the movie. Since his child studies in my school, getting an interview is not out of the question. The problem is: how do I publish it?
And you can always keep a backup in your userspace - if userspace cannot be used for backing up primary materials used in articles and to which you hold the copyright, then IMO we've gone way too far in restricting its usage.
And there's always Wikisource, but I guess you would have to ask someone else to upload it. I think they bar original works created by contributors, but I'm not sure.
The latter is a theoretical possibility, vut I'm afraid that this prospect would have a very high noise to signal ratio. Wikisource had to deal with this problem at a very early stage of its development. It took a long time to get rid of some of the attempts that were bing made to archive computer code files that were utterly meaningless in isolation.
Authentic iInterview files would be useful in the circumstances mentioned in this thread, but I'm not sure where; nor do I have any ideahow the real might be sorted from those conducted in a séance or the ones that entirely fictitious.
Ec
Mark Williamson wrote:
- Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live
in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far, far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make. People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they would have no way to reach their intended audience!
Most of us in developed counties would take the costs of producing a small pamphlet for granted. We might consider that spending $20.00 to produce 500 copies of a pamphlet on matters of local concern to be a bargain. In some third world countries that's equivalent to two months of income. 500 copies is already too many to reproduce with [[hectograph]]y. There may indeed not be someone close-by with the equipment to do the job.
Ec
On 09/01/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
Rambot has written articles about towns with zero inhabitants.
This is not a bad thing - it's not like completeness of coverage costs us paper, and we can claim to cover EVERY settlement known to the US Census.
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
One of the reasons for the popularity of en:wp (still 54% of all wikipedia.org traffic) is its breadth. Far too often, I have trouble convincing non-English-native-speakers that their native language Wikipedia is worth their close attention. en:wp's ridiculous breadth seems to add perceptible value in practice.
- d.
Michael Billington wrote:
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper?
Larger libraries pride themselves on extensive newspaper subscriptions, anybody in Boston or London should have no problem finding Sudanese papers. I note this particular list is itself unsourced, so there's no way to tell whether the people are articleworthy, even in Sudan.
It's still the case that I can go to my smallish university library, pick a random volume about an obscure country, and find it covering hundreds of topics not mentioned anywhere in WP. If the information is literally sitting on a shelf downtown being ignored, I don't think we're anywhere close to worrying about oral histories and storing interviews - it's more a matter of getting people to use the books that already exist. And on that note, I have three new books to start working from...
Stan
There's no reason to pit pedia and library against one another, and simply because the possibility exists that you can find said newspaper subscription in a library doesn't create a reason against duplicating that information in pedia. There are interested parties outside Londoners and Bostonians.
-S
On 1/9/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Michael Billington wrote:
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red
links,
such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no
reliable
sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers
(at
least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing
list
happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper?
Larger libraries pride themselves on extensive newspaper subscriptions, anybody in Boston or London should have no problem finding Sudanese papers. I note this particular list is itself unsourced, so there's no way to tell whether the people are articleworthy, even in Sudan.
It's still the case that I can go to my smallish university library, pick a random volume about an obscure country, and find it covering hundreds of topics not mentioned anywhere in WP. If the information is literally sitting on a shelf downtown being ignored, I don't think we're anywhere close to worrying about oral histories and storing interviews - it's more a matter of getting people to use the books that already exist. And on that note, I have three new books to start working from...
Stan
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Steve wrote:
There's no reason to pit pedia and library against one another, and simply because the possibility exists that you can find said newspaper subscription in a library doesn't create a reason against duplicating that information in pedia. There are interested parties outside Londoners and Bostonians.
I think you mistake my meaning - I was saying that books and newspapers are an excellent, if unfashionable :-) , source of information worth adding to WP. Doesn't everybody else type into WP with book propped open in lap, or newspaper spread on floor?
Stan
Oh, well the conversation was reaching so much consensus I guess I had to invent some conflict. =)
-S
On 1/10/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Steve wrote:
There's no reason to pit pedia and library against one another, and
simply
because the possibility exists that you can find said newspaper
subscription
in a library doesn't create a reason against duplicating that
information in
pedia. There are interested parties outside Londoners and Bostonians.
I think you mistake my meaning - I was saying that books and newspapers are an excellent, if unfashionable :-) , source of information worth adding to WP. Doesn't everybody else type into WP with book propped open in lap, or newspaper spread on floor?
Stan
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Stan Shebs wrote:
Steve wrote:
There's no reason to pit pedia and library against one another, and simply because the possibility exists that you can find said newspaper subscription in a library doesn't create a reason against duplicating that information in pedia. There are interested parties outside Londoners and Bostonians.
I think you mistake my meaning - I was saying that books and newspapers are an excellent, if unfashionable :-) , source of information worth adding to WP. Doesn't everybody else type into WP with book propped open in lap, or newspaper spread on floor?
I wish this were true ...... by (insert your deity here) I wish. This was true of myself when I was still writing articles. I even went out and bought more books on the subjects I was writing about to compare the facts. But then you all of a sudden have to defend yourself against some kiddie who only reads websites and found this one site on the net who refutes your claims and because he cannot read books it is impossible to convince him, even though you can quote 10 books as a source and he only one derelict website the other kiddies will side with him because it is on the web so it must be the truth.
This is one of the reasons why I lost faith in community processes. The masses can so many times be convinced of a wrong thing it is unbelievable. Just because the masses say something or believe something it isn't always the truth you see. On wikipedia what the masses think is the truth is the truth.
Waerth
If you don't believe in community processes, why do you still participate at all with Wikipedia?
Mark
On 10/01/07, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Steve wrote:
There's no reason to pit pedia and library against one another, and simply because the possibility exists that you can find said newspaper subscription in a library doesn't create a reason against duplicating that information in pedia. There are interested parties outside Londoners and Bostonians.
I think you mistake my meaning - I was saying that books and newspapers are an excellent, if unfashionable :-) , source of information worth adding to WP. Doesn't everybody else type into WP with book propped open in lap, or newspaper spread on floor?
I wish this were true ...... by (insert your deity here) I wish. This was true of myself when I was still writing articles. I even went out and bought more books on the subjects I was writing about to compare the facts. But then you all of a sudden have to defend yourself against some kiddie who only reads websites and found this one site on the net who refutes your claims and because he cannot read books it is impossible to convince him, even though you can quote 10 books as a source and he only one derelict website the other kiddies will side with him because it is on the web so it must be the truth.
This is one of the reasons why I lost faith in community processes. The masses can so many times be convinced of a wrong thing it is unbelievable. Just because the masses say something or believe something it isn't always the truth you see. On wikipedia what the masses think is the truth is the truth.
Waerth _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Have you seen me contributing at all on articles on any wikipedia? I only participate in discussions in the futile hope to be able to change the minds of the masses.
Waerth
If you don't believe in community processes, why do you still participate at all with Wikipedia?
Mark
On 10/01/07, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Steve wrote:
There's no reason to pit pedia and library against one another, and simply because the possibility exists that you can find said newspaper subscription in a library doesn't create a reason against duplicating that information in pedia. There are interested parties outside Londoners and Bostonians.
I think you mistake my meaning - I was saying that books and newspapers are an excellent, if unfashionable :-) , source of information worth adding to WP. Doesn't everybody else type into WP with book propped open in lap, or newspaper spread on floor?
I wish this were true ...... by (insert your deity here) I wish. This was true of myself when I was still writing articles. I even went out and bought more books on the subjects I was writing about to compare the facts. But then you all of a sudden have to defend yourself against some kiddie who only reads websites and found this one site on the net who refutes your claims and because he cannot read books it is impossible to convince him, even though you can quote 10 books as a source and he only one derelict website the other kiddies will side with him because it is on the web so it must be the truth.
This is one of the reasons why I lost faith in community processes. The masses can so many times be convinced of a wrong thing it is unbelievable. Just because the masses say something or believe something it isn't always the truth you see. On wikipedia what the masses think is the truth is the truth.
Waerth _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Jan 10, 2007, at 1:04, Stan Shebs wrote:
Doesn't everybody else type into WP with book propped open in lap, or newspaper spread on floor?
Stan
Guilty as charged... though I'd like to think Wikipedia would be much better if everybody did this, which negates über-geek feelings.
FUCK YOU! STOP SEND ME E-MAILS THAT I DON"T CARE ABOUT!
Derek Hodgson wrote:
FUCK YOU! STOP SEND ME E-MAILS THAT I DON"T CARE ABOUT!
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Then don't subscribe to the list? You might also read [[WP:NPA]], [[WP:CIVIL]], [[WP:AGF]], and [[WP:DICK]], as they are the most important things ever written.
ST47
On 1/8/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Frederick Noronha wrote:
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever.
The question if a topic is notable enough to deserve an entry, can only be answered with "yes" or "no", and this is pretty much "mechanical", so you cannot really escape the mechanics.
I think the idea that one could come up with a formula, a machine into which one could put an subject and turn the handle and get a 'yes' or 'no' answer, to rule on inclusion in Wikipedia is fundamentally wrong-headed. It reflects a certain 'computer-science' way of thinking that I feel is flawed - as someone said, expecting to be able to fix social problems in software is a loser's game.
To some, I feel, such a definitive process would be desirable since they think it would solve the rancor over inclusion - even if it made some less-than-perfect decisions, they like the speed and finality and definitiveness of such. I think it would only increase the rancor. There is disagreement about inclusion not because we've not yet perfected the formula, but because there is deep-seated division on what we're trying to do and what should be included. Furthermore, inclusion doesn't seem suited to binary logic - it's a problem in which the answers do include definitive 'yes' and 'no' regions but a substantial fuzzy zone of 'maybe'.
Answering that 'maybe' is the hard part. Myself, I feel that the deciding factor, once verifiability is out of the way (and answered positively) is simply whether anyone is interested/able to make a worthwhile article out of it. In practice, well-written, substantial articles rarely get deleted no matter what the subject.
-Matt
If I wanted to write an article on, say, a chess site, but was not sure whether it was notable, is there a place to post a request for others to check whether its notable? If not, perhaps I could propose such a place be created?
I agree that two problems with AFD need to be dealt with: 1) Systemic bias. Articles on American topics are less likely to be nominated than, say, articles on Singaporean topics. In addition, certain topics are more likely to be nominated than others. 2) Anti-elitism. If Wikipedia's article on Xiaxue were to be nominated for deletion, the views of Singaporeans, and those familiar with the blogosphere, should carry more weight. However, this isn't the case.
On 1/9/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/8/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Frederick Noronha wrote:
Maybe we should use some discernment, instead of the mechanical rule of 'number of links' on Google or where-ever.
The question if a topic is notable enough to deserve an entry, can only be answered with "yes" or "no", and this is pretty much "mechanical", so you cannot really escape the mechanics.
I think the idea that one could come up with a formula, a machine into which one could put an subject and turn the handle and get a 'yes' or 'no' answer, to rule on inclusion in Wikipedia is fundamentally wrong-headed. It reflects a certain 'computer-science' way of thinking that I feel is flawed - as someone said, expecting to be able to fix social problems in software is a loser's game.
To some, I feel, such a definitive process would be desirable since they think it would solve the rancor over inclusion - even if it made some less-than-perfect decisions, they like the speed and finality and definitiveness of such. I think it would only increase the rancor. There is disagreement about inclusion not because we've not yet perfected the formula, but because there is deep-seated division on what we're trying to do and what should be included. Furthermore, inclusion doesn't seem suited to binary logic - it's a problem in which the answers do include definitive 'yes' and 'no' regions but a substantial fuzzy zone of 'maybe'.
Answering that 'maybe' is the hard part. Myself, I feel that the deciding factor, once verifiability is out of the way (and answered positively) is simply whether anyone is interested/able to make a worthwhile article out of it. In practice, well-written, substantial articles rarely get deleted no matter what the subject.
-Matt
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I can speak a bit about what we have tried to do on it.wikipedia. I guess a few things are being done on en.wikipedia as well, but since this is not the en.wikipedia ml, other projects may be interested as well. We managed to set some criteria for notability, although not for everything (e.g. a sportsman must have played for a first league team or something like that); however we do allow some flexibility so at the end of the day we still have to discuss, sometimes quite fiercely. We have some kind of bias towards Italy, because our community is much less international than other communities. At the same time, we have also less pressure with "foreign" topics of not so clear notability, mainly because not many people learn Italian as a second language. If we can, we try to contact the communities where it is likely to find someone who knows, I understand this is more difficult for en.wikipedia if the doubt is about a topic related to a Third World English-speaking country. About googlehits, they are useful, but we generally say "Google is not the Bible" (you can substitute with any book that contains rvealed truth). This is particularly true for Third World topics (or possibly even topics that come from a different language with a different script).
Marco (Cruccone)
J.L.W.S. The Special One wrote:
If I wanted to write an article on, say, a chess site, but was not sure whether it was notable, is there a place to post a request for others to check whether its notable? If not, perhaps I could propose such a place be created?
I agree that two problems with AFD need to be dealt with:
- Systemic bias. Articles on American topics are less likely to be
nominated than, say, articles on Singaporean topics. In addition, certain topics are more likely to be nominated than others. 2) Anti-elitism. If Wikipedia's article on Xiaxue were to be nominated for deletion, the views of Singaporeans, and those familiar with the blogosphere, should carry more weight. However, this isn't the case.
On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, J.L.W.S. The Special One wrote:
While working on articles about Singaporean movies, I've encountered a similar problem: difficulty finding references due to systemic bias.
Some seem to have the impression that Singaporean = non-notable. I've seen articles on many Singaporean topics, which no Singaporean would contest the notability of, get nominated for deletion, under the claim of non-notability.
That Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias is not surprising.
I'm afraid I've seen this also. Non-US articles appear much more likely to come up for AfD.
But it's not just geographic. The Maui Cluster Scheduler actually came up for deletion with a result of "no concensus". This is a piece of software that is an integral component of high performance clusters the world over. One voter apparently wanted it deleted because it was not useful for his home PC. At the very best this is parochial.
I'm glad this topic has come up for discussion. IMHO the entire deletion process (including speedy deletion) needs to come up for review. It's too easy for articles to come up for AfD.
It was interesting to sit in a Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group meeting recently and hear people list many (IMHO) reasonable articles that had been deleted. This was a spontaneous discussion. I bet if so many people in Toronto are concerned about the deletion process that we aren't alone.
Rob
The whole problem with the deletion process. Not just on the English wikipedia, is that people who do not know anything about the subject get to judge. So many times you will see reasonings like ... I do not know about it so it isn't notable ... . I know it is impossible, but ideally only people with knowledge about the subjectarea(s) that the articles topic would fall under would be the ones who should judge these things. Not everybody. But unfortunately this will never be the case.
Waerth
I'm afraid I've seen this also. Non-US articles appear much more likely to come up for AfD.
But it's not just geographic. The Maui Cluster Scheduler actually came up for deletion with a result of "no concensus". This is a piece of software that is an integral component of high performance clusters the world over. One voter apparently wanted it deleted because it was not useful for his home PC. At the very best this is parochial.
I'm glad this topic has come up for discussion. IMHO the entire deletion process (including speedy deletion) needs to come up for review. It's too easy for articles to come up for AfD.
It was interesting to sit in a Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group meeting recently and hear people list many (IMHO) reasonable articles that had been deleted. This was a spontaneous discussion. I bet if so many people in Toronto are concerned about the deletion process that we aren't alone.
Rob
Walter van Kalken wrote:
The whole problem with the deletion process. Not just on the English wikipedia, is that people who do not know anything about the subject get to judge. So many times you will see reasonings like ... I do not know about it so it isn't notable ...
"I've never heard about it (but I don't know the topic anyway) and I don't see it much on Google, therefore it's not notable."
And agreed with Waerth, one big problem on Wikipedia is that it makes it too easy for people who lack proper judgment about the worth of their opinions (that is, who think they may have opinions on topics they don't know about) to have a voice in the matter.
Recently I've came across criticism on an article about a French politician: according to the critics, one issue was that many of the references were in French! It's a bit like criticizing an article about physics because the references are to physics books and not to the science column of the local newspaper. Sure, it's less accessible; but it's also probably much more accurate.
Again, this seems to come from a bogus assumption that anybody can judge the worth of any article without knowing the issue, simply by using formal criteria like Google hits or numbers of citations. This just does not work.
"David Monniaux" David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote in message news:45A3923F.1010602@free.fr...
Walter van Kalken wrote:
The whole problem with the deletion process. Not just on the English wikipedia, is that people who do not know anything about the subject get to judge. So many times you will see reasonings like ... I do not know about it so it isn't notable ...
"I've never heard about it (but I don't know the topic anyway) and I don't see it much on Google, therefore it's not notable."
There also seem to be a lot of "Ah! So-and-so thinks we should delete it, and they've made a persuasive argument about it, so I'll add my vote to their cause", without the voter doing any investigation of their own. Perhaps a more structured AFD process, where people fill in table cells would be a good move:
Name Vote Reason for vote Evidence
e.g. HappyDog Delete Non-notable Found no evidence on Google.
Then at least we would know why any item is deleted and avoid lots of votes from different people for the same reason. E.g. if 50 people say 'non-notable' because it is not on Google, and 1 person says 'notable' because it is in a prominenet textbook relating to the subject, then surely it is notable. Without seeing people's reasoning this will simply be 50 to 1, delete.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
As I see it, an "original research" / "nonverifiable" witchhunt started last year. I think there is far too much "Wikipedia Caselaw" justifying removal of content for mere suspicion.
I'm glad as well, and surprised this topic picked up so much steam! I hope the result is a few practical, actionable process changes to afd/speedy.
One thing I caught a lot of flak for was deleting votes that contained absolutely no logic or even comment. My reasoning for this was based on WP:LAW that explained the voting process isn't about a headcount, but about reaching consensus. What consensus was such a voter attempting to reach? (except, of course, technical consensus via majority rule).
-S
On 1/9/07, Robert Brockway rbrockway@opentrend.net wrote:
I'm glad this topic has come up for discussion. IMHO the entire deletion process (including speedy deletion) needs to come up for review. It's too easy for articles to come up for AfD.
It was interesting to sit in a Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group meeting recently and hear people list many (IMHO) reasonable articles that had been deleted. This was a spontaneous discussion. I bet if so many people in Toronto are concerned about the deletion process that we aren't alone.
Rob
Robert Brockway wrote:
On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, J.L.W.S. The Special One wrote:
While working on articles about Singaporean movies, I've encountered a similar problem: difficulty finding references due to systemic bias.
Some seem to have the impression that Singaporean = non-notable. I've seen articles on many Singaporean topics, which no Singaporean would contest the notability of, get nominated for deletion, under the claim of non-notability.
That Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias is not surprising.
I'm afraid I've seen this also. Non-US articles appear much more likely to come up for AfD.
But it's not just geographic. The Maui Cluster Scheduler actually came up for deletion with a result of "no concensus". This is a piece of software that is an integral component of high performance clusters the world over. One voter apparently wanted it deleted because it was not useful for his home PC. At the very best this is parochial.
Not geographic? This could be a recognition that Hawaii is not a state like the others. A clear argument for Hawaiian independence. :-)
I'm glad this topic has come up for discussion. IMHO the entire deletion process (including speedy deletion) needs to come up for review. It's too easy for articles to come up for AfD.
It was interesting to sit in a Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group meeting recently and hear people list many (IMHO) reasonable articles that had been deleted. This was a spontaneous discussion. I bet if so many people in Toronto are concerned about the deletion process that we aren't alone.
I agree. Unfortunately the most zealous deletionists are not the ones participating in this discussion; they're so busy dealing with backlog that they don't have time to discuss improvements to the policy. This whole topic is a recurring theme that we never seem able to escape. The process does need review from the ground up followed by bold action. A very substantial portion of proposed deletions will probably need to happen anyway; most inclusionists recognize that. The ones that are really controversial remain a minority. Giving the benefit of any doubt to support a more detailed review of the article should be the first choice. Tagging uncertain articles so that deletion proposals can be brought immediately to the attention of any relevant WikiProject or Study Group where Wikipedians interested in the subject area can review it in the light of the current state of knowledge in that field would be very helpful.
Ec
Frederick Noronha wrote:
My wager is that en.wikipedia.org would be far, far more representative of India than, say hi.wikipedia.org Sad but true. And there are reasons for that.
Have you seen the way Indians interact with themselves? If meeting outside the North Indian belt, there's a good chance they (we?) would be taking to each other in English. There are just so much diversity here, that like it or not, English often serves as a link language.
Added to this, many of the Wikipedia contributors would be college/university-educated types, often more comfortable to express ideas in English than, say, in an Indian language. I've made hundreds of edits in English [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fredericknoronha] but am litterally struggling to get a Konkani Wikipedia going (Konkani is India's smallest "national" languages, with between 1.5 to 5 million speakers, depending whose estimates one accepts).
Getting a Wikipedia developed in some languages can be difficult until you can build a critical mass of contributors. Sometimes the results are surprising. One would expect that the central role of Hindi would result in it having the biggest Wikipedia in an Indian language, but at this point Telugu with its 26,132 articles has more than twice as many as second place Bengali. Manipuri, Marathi and Tamil also have more articles than Hindi. The growth can be unpredictable.
Your observations are perfectly sensible, and I would understand if many Indians were more resistant to learning Hindi than English. Although there are parallels I think that the issues of systemic biases are qualitatively different than those about the growth of smaller languages. It would be extremely difficult for us foreigners to learn enough of any Indian language to the point where we could write articles in that language, but it is within our grasp to research the notability of many topics about India.
Ec
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