Could those of you interested in, and knowledgeable about, political science
and philosophy please have a look at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism ? I have already objected to
the content of that article on the talk page, but people seem to ignore it
and add wrong information.
Kurt Forstner aka KF
On Tuesday 27 May 2003 02:51 am, wikien-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote:
> The bottom of [[fr:Accueil]], the French Wikipedia's home page, contains
> the text "Site gracieusement hébergé par _Bomis_", with a link to the
> website. Loosely translated, it says, "Site graciously hosted by Bomis."
> Should we add something like this to the [[en:Main Page]], e.g., "Thanks to
> [[Bomis]] (www.bomis.com) for hosting the Wikipedia!"? It's awfully nice of
> them to provide for what's probably the last big site on the Internet
> without banner ads and popups; we really ought to say thanks somehow, and
> at the least give them a bit of traffic.
>
> -Geoffrey
I don't have any problem with this so long as Jimbo agrees.
--mav
Hi all -
is there a possibility we could get a non-interested party to step in?
Triton (who may well be DW or Elliot (I say this because s/he is putting
in maps uploaded by one of them, and for which copyright info has never
been given, not because I'm trying to be nasty) has been creating a very
antagonistic atmosphere at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_French_monarchs ,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_French_monarchs/archive_1,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_I,
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Merovingian_Dynasty (and the related
talk and article pages for the last couple).
While I admit to arguing back, I have been (mostly, except for calling
Triton's understanding obscure and his additions misleading) reasonably
polite -- especially given the onslaught of nasty accusations s/he has
thrown my way. I am also not the only person involved -- Tannin, jlk6e
(or john), Derek Ross, KT2, and maybe a couple of others have also
weighed in. Triton refuses to discuss, only to argue (and not in the
sense of well-reasoned argument -- just the simple obstinate kind). He
has also been very nasty to me on a couple of user pages (where I am,
apparently, Ms. Hemp), and threatened to bring in Jimbo to have me
banned. I invited him to do so, and if Jimbo thinks anything I've said
or done is out of line, I'm ready to listen. At any rate, I think we
could all use a break, but obviously I can't freeze the pages. Would
somebody else be willing to read through all this crap and decide
whether it's worth freezing for about a week? Thanks.
Julie
we need to discuss Wiki(p|m)edia's official policy and
charter for when we become a nonprofit. To do that, I
created the following meta page:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_charter
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com
>Instead of blanking articles why not replace the article text with a
>redirect to a boilerplate text with something along the lines of
>"The content of this article is being disputed."
Hmm. But this means links to the article won't be coloured as stubs.
Evercat
--
Allan Crossman
a.crossman(a)blueyonder.co.uk
http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Only two edts from this user, which seem to be OK, but his username -
Mydogategodshat - seems a little beyond the borderline of good taste.
Opinions, good Wikipeople?
Erik Moeller wrote:
> No on the second point. We have already determined that Michael's edits
> are not worth the trouble. Will you go to the search engines and check
> every single date in a discography, every little factoid about a band's
> history? If you're not willing to do this work, you should not talk about
> "bad edits". If you are, make a promise now, and I will hold you to it.
> For every Michael edit and every claim.
I wholeheartedly agree and would like to add that undoing such a revert or
undeleting a page is further enabling the vandal or banned user to subvert
the ban and continue to do the things that got them banned in the first
place. That makes the ban useless and the way I see it, it is more than a
tacit act indicating that whatever the banned user did was OK.
So since I was the recipient of a death threat by a now banned user then
pardon me if I may be a bit perplexed and hurt when that user's post-ban
edits and pages are restored. I know the intent of the person restoring the
edits are to save what they see as useful content but please consider the big
picture and understand that by restoring such an edit you nullify the ban and
encourage the banned user to stick around without having to bother with
reforming their ways.
I know our goal is to build an encyclopedia but the wrong way to do this is to
keep around sloppy, rude and destructive workers who either do not share our
goal of creating a respected, accurate and free encyclopedia or who have
other agendas alltogether.
I would also like to know why if each edit by a banned user is supposed to be
viewed on its own merits then how the hell is this different than any other
edit?
Nobody is compelled to work on enforcing a ban, but please do not work against
those that do. However, preventing innocent people from getting caught in the
crossfire is another matter entirely and /is/ a good thing to avoid and /is/
something that needs to be further discussed. I also find Martin's ideas for
SoftBans to be intriguing as a possible way to deal with troublesome users
before a HardBan is needed.
Jimbo said it best:
"If we don't revert every change made by a banned user, then we implicit
encourage them to keep coming back and pulling their stunts over and over."
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Stan said
you've fallen into the "I'm a
professional" trap
**You are right - on the other hand, when I first started working on the
'pedia (I am testing the waters after a hiatus of about 8 months, but
contributed regularly for a long period before that, and also
collaborated on many of the initial discussions on standards, etc.),
people tended to trust each other's areas of expertise - whether
professional or amateur. The thing I have found is that people who are
interested in good articles can usually tell good work, and a good
professional will often bow to a better informed amateur -- or vice
versa. In the case of these particular articles, I really do suggest
that you read the discussion that's been taking place. You seem to have
gathered that I am in a very small minority, but if you read the
discussions, you will see that I have qualified my discussion, been very
inclusive of other viewpoints, and have provided reasons for my edits.
Stan said:
But it would take some adroit writing and citing to
produce something that wouldn't be mangled by the semi-educated eager
to promulgate the wrong things they were told by incompetent and
biased CS professors, so I don't tend to work on those articles very
much. It's an unfortunate weakness of Wikipedia, but no amount of
fulminating about it is going to change things; what you and I
experience in our respective fields is a predictable consequence of
the rules under which Wikipedia operates. It's motivating me to
ponder ideas for new rules that would address your complaints
better, but it's tricky and I don't have any good ideas yet.
**That's true to some extent, but remember, Wikipedia isn't paper. It
isn't the place for original research, but there are tons of examples
where we make statements that mention growing trends and new approaches.
And if we know more on a subject, don't we have some sort of obligation
to share that knowledge and make wikipedia better than other online
encyclopedias? After all, even the famous Helga did a great deal of
eventual good in that she managed to get articles on issues like the
Heimatvertriebene included and to shake several of us into checking
facts and neutralizing the Polish-German borders. THOSE articles
certainly contain lots of stuff you might not see all in the same place.
Cheers -- JHK
Yesterday, [[Peter Hollingworth]] resigned as [[Governor-General of
Australia]]. I have added an item to [[Current events]] and updated the
Hollingworth and G-G pages. Does this warrant an "In the news" listing
on the main page? I am not a sysop.
Claudine Chionh
Anthere said:
He ! We indeed consider he was the first king of
France when he was made Christian by Saint Rémi (even
though we usually refer to him as King of the franks
...). He was the one who started the history of
France, and we are tought he was chosen by the tribe
of franks to be king, and gave its name to our
country. But, what do we know ? It is just what we
learn in school :-) With no proof he was indeed
considered a king at that time.
Another future info fork between the french and the
english wiki :-)
I respond:
I think this is the root of the problem -- What's in textbooks is not
always accurate! I don't know how it's done in France, but I think it's
similar everywhere in that much is decided by committee. If you
subscribe to some of the H-net mailing lists, like I do, or belong to
the American Historical Association, you know how bad it can be. Here,
the states of Texas and California have a lot of influence on what is
included or omitted, because they buy a lot of textbooks. In fact,
there are cases of textbooks being revised because Texas won't buy -- a
well-known example is a biology text that talked about evolution as
something that happened, rather than as a theory along with creationism.
I think it's not unlikely that many countries provide their children
with history that often does more to uphold a national mythos than
troublesome historical fact!
In the French case, what Anthere says, is kinda, sorta right ;-) Clovis
was the first Orthodox Christian King of a consolidated Frankish kingdom
-- and the name France is derived from Francia, the Latin name for the
Frankish kingdom. Where it gets funny is that Francia is also the root
for the German land of Franken ... or that (and here's where I find it
odd) the Carolingians are much later, yet both Germans and French people
consider Charlemagne "theirs." SO what I've been trying to do is to
explain why the French school version isn't exactly wrong, but that it's
an over generalization -- maybe like remembering that Kozsiuszko
(spelling probably way wrong) and DeKalb were heroes in the American
Revolution and assuming that made them Americans. BTW (pax to Erik), I
was at a conference in March and brought up this issue. There were
scholars there from all over, and they all specialized in the period
between 300 and 800. Not one of them, including the nice lady from the
Sorbonne, said that they would consider the Merovingians to be Kings of
France, or even French.
Back until I run screaming ;-)
Jules