[WikiEN-l] Tannin, it seems, has changed lots of articles

[Oliver Pereira]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Tony Wilson wrote:

> Have I changed lots of articles? Too right I have. That is what I am

> SUPPOSED to do here: change articles for the better. And that is exactly
> what I am doing, have been doing for months. Now, can we PLEASE have
> some peace and quiet so that I can go do more of it?

It is good work, but a wiki is not the place to work if you want peace and
quiet either for you or for your work... ;)

Seriously, on a wiki, everyone is going to be nosing through stuff that
other people have contributed all the time, making edits to it, and some
you'll agree with, and some you won't, and well that's just the way it is
round here. Sometimes you just have to live with things that you don't
like. You should relax, and try to enjoy the wonderful collaborative
experience, and not get angry about it. :)

Some people seem to have the attitude that the area of articles that they
work on in somehow "theirs", and that other people who don't generally
work in that area should keep their hands off them. I don't think that
this is at all in keeping with the Wikipedia spirit. Articles are meant
for the whole community of potential Wikipedia users - which basically
means everyone with Internet access.

Obviously, people who work in specialist areas and have all the specialist
publications are going to be, by and large, the people that know most
about those areas, and contribute most to the articles in those areas. But
they are not writing *for* specialists in those areas, and so if
non-specialists say they would like the information presented differently,
then the specialists should listen to them.

This isn't about asking for the facts to be changed in these articles, but
some people would clearly prefer it if the way those facts are presented
were changed. The capitalisation issue is just a presentation thing, and
should be decided by the Wikipedia community as a whole, and not just by
the people who work on those articles.

If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal the "Aardvark", and the
majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then the majority of our
potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So that's what our usual
naming convention says that *we* should call it, too. We shouldn't make
special cases just for one particular group of people without a better
reason than just because that's how they do it themselves.

The case of the Green Gorbalwarbler may be a special case, because we need
to disambiguate it from just any old green gorbalwarbler (I gather there
are eight species). But I think that for common names of animals that have
unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people, then we should use
those unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people.

Now, where did I put my protective suit? ;)

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+