Speaking of the ArbCom elections, does anyone know who will be organizing
this year's election? I have contacted Uninvited Company, Danny, and Elain,
who were all organizers of last year's election. UC has indicated that he
will not be organizing it this year, but Danny and Elain have not responded
yet (and they're not that regular on en). I would like to know this for our
Signpost series, if anyone has any idea. (Bit of promo here: in case you
haven't noticed yet, the Wikipedia Signpost (WP:SIGN) is doing a series on
the upcoming elections. Check it out today!)
Thanks very much.
Flcelloguy
>From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
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On 10/5/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Oct 5, 2005, at 11:22 AM, DF wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps this just means we should expand the pool
of
> > Arbitrators and elect 20 or 30 this time around as
> > some people had proposed (though one might have
> > trouble finding enough people to run).
> >
>
> The problem wouldn't be finding enough people to
> run. We had 34 people running last time. The
> problem would be that, if we had taken 30
> arbitrators last time, we'd have six arbitrators
> who are under various forms of arbcom parole,
> including one who is currently banned for a year.
I'm sure I meant to say trouble finding enough
Qualified people to run.
Of course if we went to a system more like Requests
for adminship that wouldn't be an issue since the
questionable candidates would never get through. Of
course we would have to give up the notion that ArbCom
needs to be a fixed size.
On the other hand, since the Wikipedia community has
roughly tripled in size, maybe finding candidates this
December won't be all that hard. Of course it would
help if we could stop scaring them off by making it
look like such a hard and all-consuming job.
On another point, why do we ever lose Arbitrators?
They resign in frustration or their terms expire, but
neither of those issues indicates a lack of faith from
the community. A larger and looser structure could
allow people to have sabaticals and still come back to
help with the work later.
-DF
On 10/3/05, *Tony Sidaway* <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
"I have a different view of Wikipedia's strengths--I think we're really good
at producing so-so, useful but not perfect articles, and that we should
spend energy trying to maximise our production rate at this level. I view
the FA process as masturbatory, self-congratulatory, and of low impace on
the project as a whole."
While you are entitled to your opinion, you are simply wrong. The featured
articles have many-fold benefits. Not only are they wonderful for public
relations (because when people ask "How the hell can Wikipedia produce
something of quality?" we have a ready-made answer), but the featured articles
also encourage people to produce higher quality writing *instead* of medeocre
ones. In other words, it gives us a very visible way of "pushing" the manual
of style and other good writing habits onto people. (If it were not for the
featured articles, who would bother to cite references in an article?)
Turning the FAC into something like the AFD is a perfectly good way of
ruining a well-functioning system. We should instead be exploring ways
to make AFD (which is functionally broken) more like the FAC.
The thing is - let's face it - we have all the bases covered. We already have
articles on more-or-less all the topics you would expect in a traditional
encyclopedia. The big job from now on is going to be improving those articles
into something better. It's easy to write a stub; it's hard to write a
comprehensive, well referenced article (which is what we *should* be aiming for,
not medeocrity).
-Mark
Ouch! Do you mean astronomy is boring, or my writing about astronomy? I
do try to write articles that are interesting for people who might only
have a passing interest in astronomy but it's easy for a scientist to
forget what's interesting to people not in the field. That's partly why I
sought peer review for Herbig-Haro object, because I was half afraid I was
going to spend lots of time on something no-one would be interested in.
Astrocruft, if you like. Please tell me if I'm heading that way!
The general point is that for many featured articles, only one person
might be interested in writing about a subject, but its appeal should be
broad based if it really represents the best of Wikipedia. I'm not
particularly fussed about architects in colonial New Zealand, for example,
but Giano's articles on Benjamin Mountfort etc are interesting enough to
keep me reading right through.
WT
-----Original Message-----
From: Ryan Norton [mailto:wxprojects@comcast.net]
Sent: 03 October 2005 11:32 AM
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
I would argue that featured articles that, say, Worldtraveller, writes
(mostly dealing with advanced astronomy stuff) are about as
interesting as watching paint dry - but they are obviously GOOD
articles - and that's the point. The whole "it's only interesting to
the author" argument is nonsense because its such a relative thing.
Thanks,
Ryan
> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
>
> The 12th edition from 1922 also had 32 volumes.
I was afraid someone was going to mention that.
Yes, but the three additional volumes, which bring the Encyclopaedia
up to date with articles on the World War and the latest developments
in Aeronautics (with a nice diagram of an Immelmann turn), and
developments in architecture such as the Woolworth Building in New
York, are captioned "New Volumes" on the spine, have their own
separate index, and are not integrated into the main text at all.
There isn't even a page of cross-reference stickers to glue into the
main volumes (actually I don't know whether Britannica had those;
World Book certainly did, though).
So IMHO these are not really part of the encyclopedia proper. They
are more like a three-volume Britannica Book of the Year.
I also _think_ that the Britannica 3 has considerably thicker volumes
and smaller print than the Eleventh Edition had. Neil Harris says it
has about 44 million words. The Eleventh edition--someone probably
has an actual word count--has 29 volumes of about 1000 pages each,
with about two columns of fifty lines of ten words per line =
30,000,000 words, so the Britannica has grown more than the count of
volumes would suggest.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
> You attempted to edit, and the autoblocker got you for an additional time
> period. I have unblocked you accordingly. Note: if you do not attempt to
> edit, the blocks will expire by themselves. This is in no way Fvw's fault,
> but actually a feature of the MediaWiki software.
I am still blocked. Figures. -- Silverback
Neil Harris wrote:
>Just for comparison, the current edition of the EB has about 44M words
>in 32 volumes. As of July 13, the English-language Wikipedia contained
>649,000 articles, and a total of roughly 224M words.
>Wikipedia currently has over 750,000 articles, so assuming that article
>size has not reduced, it probably has around 258M words. This is almost
>six times the size of the EB, and would take at least 187 volumes of
>EB-equivalent size.
>In my opinion, an article ranking system would be an ideal way to start
>collecting data for trying to place articles in rank order for inclusion
>in a fixed amount of space.
Indeed!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/En_validation_topicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard/1.0
>One interesting possibility is, in addition to user rankings, using the
>number of times the article's title is mentioned on the web -- the
>Google test -- as an extra input to any hypothetical ranking system.
Now *that*'s a new and potentially useful idea.
- d.
> You attempted to edit, and the autoblocker got you for an additional time
> period. I have unblocked you accordingly. Note: if you do not attempt to
> edit, the blocks will expire by themselves. This is in no way Fvw's fault,
> but actually a feature of the MediaWiki software.
First of all, people often find out about their block through their first attempt to edit, so this facility of the MediaWiki software should not be used to implement this policy if it can't do so correct. Secondly, I did not attempt to edit, I followed a red link to a user page to get to the talk page. As you know, a red link for reason makes implicit assumptions about intent to edit. I would agree that this is not Fvw's fault, it this were the first time this had happened, somehow I doubt that. Knowing better, he could have set a reminder in Outlook or some other software, or perhaps turned the issue over to a more conscientious admin. Using this type of software to implement a temporary block for a mere 3RR violation, is analogous to using a "justice" system that ignores the right to jury trial and the right to compel testimony under penalty of perjury to implement drug prohibition. The system is far more abusive than the violation. Admins should have qualms about using this broken system.
-- Silverback
> -[[en:User:Bratsche|Ben]]
> On 10/4/05, actionforum(a)comcast.net wrote:
> >
> > The 24 hour 3RR block expired 7 hours ago and it still hasn't been
> > removed. If Fvw isn't going to properly implement these things, he should
> > leave it to more reponsible admins.
> > -- Silverback
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Bratsche-It means "viola!"
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
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> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
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Had I been aware of the vote while it was still going on, I would have voted to delete it, mostly because I find Kim to be not all that notable. There are thousands of would-be ninja masters, all with varying degrees of authenticity. Ashida Kim may is just another face in the crowd.
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Dispute resolution attempt in the
> Ashida Kim case
>
> geni wrote:
> > On 10/4/05, Ryan W. (Merovingian) <bigwiki(a)earthling.net> wrote:
> >
> >> I'm ready to get rid of the whole thing right now.
> >>
> >
> >
> > It has survived AFD. I doubt you would get a different desscission a
> > second time around. The article is going no where.
> >
> > The best paralell is probably [[sollog]].
>
> The difference is that Sollog was in fact notable, with newspaper
> articles and so on.
>
> In this case, I feel that many of the 'keep' votes were unfortunately
> emotional reactions to Mr. Kim's hostility and general cluelessness.
> One huge problem with the article is that virtually nothing in it is
> actually verifiable by third-party sources. All we have is back and
> forth flamewars between "bullshido" and Ashida Kim himself. And, let me
> be blunt here, none of them are going to win a Pulitzer Prize for clear
> communication skills.
>
> I will of course defer to the community in this matter; it is not for me
> to say what the limits of notability and verifiability are, at least not
> directly. But I do ask that people set aside any emotional desire to
> fight Mr. Kim's insolence by forcing him to accept that we have a right
> to have an article about him.
>
> Yes, we have a right. But, we don't care. He and his little soi disant
> ninja friends can go off and play their miniscule mock macho games
> elsewhere.
>
> --Jimbo
----
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." -Jimmy Wales, July 2004
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