My friends, after talking privately with Lir I feel it is only fair for us to withdraw our objections to his participation on Wikipedia. He has agreed to be good, and that is good for all of us.
I suppose some of us may want a sort of statement from him, or may still want to express concerns. I ask only that you be gentle and considerate, bearing in mind as always that "example is the best teacher".
Uncle Ed, aka Ed Poor
Two people logged in as Jonah and Anne have decided between them to delete every reference in the Wikipedia to all Hebrew texts. I think we've managed to revert all of them so far, but let's keep an eye out, okay? Anne has been here before, and didn't seem to have this problem before today, but Jonah is new.
Zoe
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This is silly.
Zoe is one of the finest contributors Wikipedia has. The fact that a few
people, most of whom have flawed agendas, feel threatened by her being a
sysop should raise an alarm about those people opposed to Zoe more than
anything else.
Besides, being a sysop is not some remarkable surge of power. It simply makes
it easier to revert vandalism. It is pretty obvious to me that Zoe would not
abuse any additional editorial powers she gets.
I suggest that we ask Zoe to reconsider and become a sysop.
Danny
Zoe,
You asked to become a sysop and promised to be on your best behavior, and not act abruptly. Despite one objection from elian and one dire prediction from the Cunctator, everyone else (including me) either supports the idea or thinks it's "not a big deal" anyway.
So, *POOF* you're a sysop.
"Uncle Ed", aka Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales@bomis.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 6:55 AM
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop status
I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.
I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of
people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the
aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical
matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.
I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted
sysop status is a really special thing.
_______________________________________________
Zoe, once again you've taken what I've tried to put across tactfully as
a personal attack. Did you read my post, or just skim it? My first
sentence was that I have no objections, and I think it should have been
clear that I noted that you had an admirable history on Wikipedia. My
comments could have been applied to anyone who wished to become a sysop
in order to have some authoritive control over Lir.
Jesse,
It's not easy to express oneself tactfully when writing on a mailing list. You do well, young Jedi, and all applaud your humility and courage.
Ah, the art of mannerly missives is surely lost in these latter days.
One longs for the leisured prose of yesteryear, books such as Ivanhoe and The Lord of the Rings.
A word of advice, if I may -- learn from one who has been burnt many times by the wax dripping from his own candle, as it were.
Take pains, ye that would be tactful, to emphasize all the wonderful things about those ye would address. Forbear to imply or even hint anything critical about any individual, but express the confidence that all members of this august company are equally ardent supporters of all that is just and good.
Uncle Ed Poor
wikikarma: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Faramir&diff=0&oldid=660116
I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.
I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of
people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the
aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical
matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.
I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted
sysop status is a really special thing.
On Sunday 09 February 2003 02:34 pm, Erik Moeller wrote:
> No, because that name is used neither by scholars nor the public. As I
> wrote, I am not opposed to anglicization, and anglicization is by itself
> not unscientific. (There are reasonable arguments that can be made against
> it in the case of European languages, but I do not subscribe to those
> arguments.) If there exist two different English terms, however, the one
> which is correct should in most cases be used, provided it has already been
> adopted by scholars.
Anglicization is the process by which foreign words are altered and enter into
common usage by English speakers. If you support this form of common usage
then why do you not support common usage when presented with two words which
are already in English?
> I think we need to change our naming convention to use the more correct
> article title if everybody who knows the history of the term in question
> agrees that it is correct; that is, if everybody who has a coherent POV on
> the matter shares the same opinion. In other words, we should use
> academically correct titles, not those which Google prefers.
>
> Examples:
>
> 1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
> latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
>
> 2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
> all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "Dütsch").
>.....
Hm. "more correct article title" Correct to whom? OIC to a small group of
people. That is hardly NPOV. Titles are /nominative/ - and that is their only
role. And as such, they should reflect what most people who are at all
familiar with the subject call it (unless the term is unreasonably
ambiguous).
Academics are harmed the least by this since they most definitely already know
what the common name of subjects are that they are experts on. But the
non-academic isn't going to necessarily know what that academics call the
subject. By extending the logic you propose all animals in Wikipedia should
be under their scientific names, [[Mark Twain]] would be under [[Samuel
Langhorn Clemens]], [[Linda Lovelace]] under [[Linda Boreman]], [[Billy the
Kid]] under [[William Henry Bonney]], [[Eva Peron]] under [[María Evita
Durante de Peron]], [[Marilyn Monroe]] under [[Norma Jeane Mortenson]].
It is also more academically correct to use somebody's real name, right? And
it is even /more/ academically correct to use their entire name, isn't it? Oh
yeah, it is also misleading to call an orca a killer whale since they are not
whales and the term "sea lion" is also misleading since these animals have
nothing to do with lions. Rubbish!
Academics also disagree -- which ones do we listen to? Many also prefer
foreign language forms. Should we use those because some academics think so?
Getting rid of the common usage naming convention opens the floodgates to
these type of arguments. By contrast trying to determine common usage is far
easier in most cases.
Abandoning common usage would make it more difficult to directly link to
articles and find them. Above all else the name we choose should be the one
that will attract the largest number of eyes and fill the largest number of
edit links -- without having to deal with redirects.
We are not writing an encyclopedia for academics and specialists, we are
witting an encyclopedia for use by the masses. As such the subjects they look
for should be at page titles that are recognizable by the largest number of
people (with a reasonable minimum amount of ambiguity). But after a title has
served its /one and only/ purpose (to get a person to the correct article),
/then/ we can explain why academics think why the page title is not correct
and then procede, where appropriate, to use what the academics in that field
think is the best term. So in the [[Linda Lovelace]] article her real last
name 'Boreman' is used, and in the [[Billy the Kid]] article 'Bonney' is used
(although it is not certain whether that is correct though), and in [[Occam's
razor]] we use Ockham's razor.
Page titles should reflect common usage in order to ensure our content is
exposed to the largest possible audience. But once the person has the article
in front of them /then/ we educate them as to why some academics think the
common usage is not correct along with whatever else the article has to say.
So instead of hitting people over the head that are wrong by placing the
article at the academically correct title (giving them a jolt of surprise
when they are redirected from a title they know to a title they don't), we
allow them to land at the page title they know and then gently explain why
academics think the commonly used form is incorrect.
We are also not working with a static set of articles here and each article's
title serves as an example of our naming conventions to newbies. And one
thing I've noticed is that, in general, newbies don't know about or care to
use redirects.
So how about we support the naming convention, that if followed by reading the
naming convention or looking at examples, /naturally/ is the one that a new
contributor is most likely to use when creating a new page? People look for
things by the titles they already know - let's continue to follow this
natural tendency and not work against it, shall we?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma:
[[February 3]] and all year pages linked from there and many of the other
articles.
On Monday 10 February 2003 01:45 am, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Names of people, cities, tribes and so on are decided by popular usage and,
> in case of people, by themselves; academic opinion is of less importance
> here. There is nothing wrong with pseudonyms, and if people are primarily
> known under these pseudonyms, then that is the title we should use. It is
> also the more likely one to be linked. Names that are, however, in error
> (e.g. of historical persons) should not be used where there is a reasonable
> scholarly alternative.
OK so you don't want to do away with the common usage naming convention you
just want to crack it open a bit in some cases. Well that isn't as horrible
as I thought. But this does make naming a much more complicated and
contentious issue. BTW I am offended by your implication in other messages
that the common naming convention is based /solely/ on Google. It is /not/ at
all -- Google is just a useful tool to quickly get a reasonably objective
measure of at least Internet usage. It is just one component to be considered
(granted often an important one), /not/ the determining factor. It is a bit
of an insult to infer that those of us who follow our current naming
conventions bow down to the Google god (as somebody else put it).
> William of Ockham should reside under that title, as he does, which makes
> the fact that "Occam's" Razor is misspelled even more egregious.
Hm. You had to mention a specific case. Which academics are you going to let
decide this one? Many different disciplines lay some claim to the concept of
Occam's Razor and many of these disciplines use one of two different
spellings. Mathematicians and scientists generally use the Latinized spelling
while most historians use the "Ockham" spelling. Which academics do you think
are correct? Yes, this is a historical term but it is also a term which is
central to scientific thought and even to the scientific method. In my
scientific training I have very rarely come across the "Ockham Razor"
spelling. That is just one example where the word "correct" can't be used for
either spelling -- therefore we should fall back to common usage (which is
more objective in this case).
> No, because we should only abandon it in cases where common usage is
> incorrect and we therefore do not want to use the incorrect term for
> linking either. We will usually want to link to [[Marilyn Monroe]] using
> that name, but it is unprofessional to use an incorrect name in other
> articles, and therefore avoided.
I would therefore propose this addition to the common usage convention:
In cases where the common name of a subject is misleading (For example:
[[Pennsylvania Dutch]] is misleading since it really is a dialect of German),
then it is sometimes reasonable to fall back on a well-accepted alternative
([[Pennsylvania German]], for example). Also, some terms are in common usage
but are unreasonably offensive to large groups of people (Eskimo, Black
American and Mormon Church, for example).. In those cases use widely known
alternatives (Inuit, African-American, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day
Saints, for example).
This does not mean that we should avoid using widely-known pseudonyms like
Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Billy the Kid, or widely-known common names of
animals and other things. But it does mean that we need to temper common
usage when the commonly used term is unreasonably misleading or offensive to
one or more groups of people.
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
PS I just did a spell check and "Ockham" came up as a misspelling but "Occam"
did not.
WikiKarma:
Added a bunch of events to [[February 4]]; updated all the year pages and many
of the other articles linked from that page.
I hope that Zoe has not withdrawn her request. In my four months here Zoe
has been one of the most impressive people I have come across, and
considering some of the talent and ability working on Wiki, that says
something. I don't imagine her becoming some sort of mini-Hitler. I missed
(had the luck to miss?) the start of the Lir /children of Lir saga, but I
for one would like to see Zoe get the position. Every so often Wiki does
attract vandals, nutters, nutty vandals, not to mention people who were
obviously in the lavatory when God was giving out charm (DW?) so we need
people like Zoe empowered to deal with them; once she does more of a Kofi
Annan than a George Bush I'll be quite happy.
JT
>From: Zoe <zoecomnena(a)yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
>To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Zoe becoming a sysop
>Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 18:58:16 -0800 (PST)
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>
>As I've said to Jimbo off list, forget it. If I can't be trusted, if I'm
>so disliked, don't give me the damn thing.
>Zoe
> Jesse Alter <jesse(a)snacksoft.com> wrote:No objections here. I'd just like
>to caution others against seeing this
>as an issue of good versus evil. I don't mean to preemptively accuse
>Zoe, as she has, from what I understand, a pretty good track record, but
>I wish to see both Lir and Zoe being held to the same standards. Lir
>shouldn't get any lenience because he/she (I'm confused) is learning
>what constitutes a good contribution, and Zoe should not get any
>lenience because she is in a more authoritative. I hope my comments
>don't seem presumptuous or accusatory. I'm still quite the
>newbie/outsider in Wikipedia terms, I think.
>
>
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