I was asked to let everyone know about a little experiment that a
reporter for Esquire magazine
and Jimbo agreed to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Improve_this_article_about_Wikipedia
The page is pretty self explanatory. A journalist for Esquire magazine,
A.J. Jacobs, did a story about Wikipedia,
and then posted it on Wikipedia so that Wikipedians can edit it. He
wants to see how his draft is changed
(preferably for the better).
-Mark
Various people wrote:
>> You know, Ill admit there is a certain ambiguity when
>> we talk about "IAR" as a "stick of dynamite,"
>TINC. ... because some people do more work, or are more
>persuasive in their arguments, other people think that they are
>part of some ruling clique, complete with a secret Masonic handshake [*]
>& Get Out of Jail cards.
TINC, IAR, DBAD, AFD, VFU, nn, AOUM...
Will I learn what these mean when I join the Cabal?
Well, Ten-four, good buddies... TTFN...
-30-
Sam Korn wrote:
>I think portals should be the "public face" of WikiProjects. A portal
>should only exist if there is a formal set of users dedicated to
>keeping it maintained. If this is not happening, it should be
>archived or deleted (preferably archived). Pages like
>[[Portal:Cricket]], while potentially just fan pages, actually provide
>an excellent method of navigating appropriate content. If they are
>kept up, they do no harm. If they are not kept up, they look messy
>and a messy portal seems worse than an incomplete article.
It depends. In a contentious area, they can be a way of subtly or
unsubtly pushing a POV, much like bad article series boxes. An example
is [[Template:Scientology]] - the current version is for talk pages
and marks the article as part of WikiProject Scientology, but if
you're an admin then look at the deleted versions - they're article
series boxes that push a critical POV. You could set up a portal for
each POV, but that's just article forks pushed to a higher level.
When writing up [[WP:SCN]], I strongly suggested we not vary Wikipedia
styles and policies at all where at all possible - a project should
IMO be invisible except by its fruits. Similarly, I do think the only
"portal" it needs is [[Category:Scientology]] - which means building a
category tree that presents all relevant viewpoints suitably and
accessibly. The Wikipedia content on the subject should be just as
good for and accessible to the interested Scientologist (CoS or
non-CoS) and the pissed-off critic.
BTW, I see nothing wrong with people going to VFD/AFD and voting
"keep" on their topic area. You know, they might KNOW THE AREA or
something better than nonspecialist VFD regulars. What a thought, eh?
- d.
Andrew Lih wrote:
>I used to tell folks writing for wiki was easy, and the inclusiveness
>of it has to do with not being like a database or data entry system.
>That has changed with templating now being extensively used around the
>Wikimedia projects.
Nowadays I pretty much tell new contributors "just write a few
paragraphs and INCLUDE REFERENCES and don't worry about the fancy
markup for now. Just INCLUDE THE REFERENCES and people will know it's
a real article about a real thing."
(references++)
- d.
> From: Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com>
> is there a point in Wikipedia's size where it's current growth
> will taper off or stop? I don't mean to repeat the old chestnut that
> knowledge is somehow finite: put in different words, is there a
> certain
> point where contributors will find it far easier to work on existing
> articles than to contribute new ones?
Oddly enough, I wonder about the exact opposite. I fear that people
enjoy creating new articles far more than they enjoy editing existing
articles, and that people look desperately for topics that do not
exist yet so that they can be the first to create them. The
Wikipedian equivalent of the Slashdot FIRST POST!!!!
This means that over time a greater proportion of newly created
articles will reflect an artificial attempt to find a topic that
hasn't been "taken," and a smaller proportion will be reflect a
genuine attempt to serve potential readers.
I do not think its growth will stop. The problem is, will the quality
of the articles hold up? There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't,
and no obvious reason why it should.
One reason why it _might_ not hold up is that when Wikipedia was less
famous, contributing to it required a greater interest in the project
and a greater commitment to the project's ideals. As it becomes more
and more familiar, it is possible that we will see an increasing
proportion of new "articles" that are really paragraph-long newbie
tests.
To tell the truth, I think many of the "articles" that land on AfD
are best not regarded as articles at all, but as elaborate newbie
tests OR as badly executed article requests. I'm thinking of substubs
that convey no information at all except the fact that someone either
a) genuinely wanted an article on that topic, or b) simply wanted to
experience the pleasure of creating an article.
I've been casting "votes" recently in AfD that say "delete, and enter
a request for the article." So far, nobody but me seems to think this
is a good idea.
--
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/
Worldtraveller wrote:
>Nah, I disagree with that. I've written several papers in astronomy, and
>a referee's report has even described me as a world leader in my field,
>but I'd hate to see an article about myself. The specific field I am
>allegedly a world leader in does not even deserve its own article,
>although it gets a mention in [[planetary nebula]] (because I wrote that)
>and one of my papers is cited in [[Cat's Eye Nebula]].
>Wikipedia readers are far better served by a brief mention of my field in
>the appropriate context than they would be by any article on my personal
>contribution to that field, and I suspect the same is true for 90% of
>published academics.
Yeah, but it's pretty well established by now that people don't get
any say in the presence or absence of an article on themselves ;-)
(And this is partly because their judgement of their own notability is
skewed. I think Geogre is needlessly harsh on articles on small rock
bands because of his own time in an indie rock band, for example.)
- d.
The List of Caribbean Wikipedians was redirected to the Category:Caribbean
Wikipedians tonight. Thus I learned about Wikipedia:User categorisation.
While I realised that these cats (Wikipedians in Foo) were spreading, I was
shocked to realise that this page was telling people to redirect lists to
categories. Maybe I missed the discussion at the Village Pump, but I could
not figure out what the point of this change was.
The List of Caribbean Wikipedians is a working resource associated with the
Caribbean Wikipedians' notice board. It serves a purpose in the improvement
of Caribbean-related articles. So why must it be removed? In addition,
although there are 17 names on the list, there are only 4 names in the
Category, and over a dozen national sub-categories...sub-categories which
are so badly named that I cannot add myself to one of them (I am not in
Trinidad and Tobago). The best case scenario would leave the names scattered
through over a dozen categories, with no clue as to whether they had any
interest in matters arising from the notice board or not.
Am I the only one who is bothered by projects which set out to remove useful
material? True, some of the lists are too long to be useful, and true, it's
"fun" to be able to add a link to your user page saying that you in Foo (not
from, not associated with...in). But what sort of a project focusses on the
appearance of the Wikipedia namespace instead of focussing on usefulness? Or
is it no longer true that we are here to write an encyclopaedia?
Ian (Guettarda)
> Obviously the "1.0" or rating project is an attempt to
> institutionalize the maintenance of high quality articles.
> But there may be some evolutionary reasons why quality has held up.
My church's Encyclopedia Project will also be helping with "high
quality". We have hired editors who will pay writers substantial fees to
revise existing Wikipedia articles for inclusion in a new work to be
released in 2008. It will be comparable in quality to the Encyclopedia
Britannica, although its word count may be lower.
And of course, all such revised articles will be (must be!) re-released
under GFDL for possible inclusion in Wikipedia. It's not our aim to
create a fork. Think of a river which seems to branch into two wide
streams because there's a long island in it. After the island, the
streams converge again.
> More and more WP articles have taxoboxes, infoboxes,
> templates, categories, and the like, so that when someone
> clicks on "Edit this page" it is more likely now than ever
> before, that they'll be presented with some pretty
> intimidating code. Just check out [[Cat]] for an example.
> There seems to be a higher threshold for older articles once
> these constructs have been placed in the code.
>
> I used to tell folks writing for wiki was easy, and the
> inclusiveness of it has to do with not being like a database
> or data entry system. That has changed with templating now
> being extensively used around the Wikimedia projects.
>
> This is not necessarily a bad thing. As articles have evolved
> through Wikipedia's lifetime, moving them to more complex
> stages of coding has likely kept in check some of the
> spurious newbie editing of these articles one would expect
> with WP's explosive growth. At the same time, it still
> remains easy to start an article, and to do basic essential markup.
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Division of labor, Andrew. Some will write, and these are our core
volunteers! Others are good at spell-checking, copy-editing, mark-up,
taxoboxes, assigning categories, removing bias, etc.
Ed Poor
>From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
>Nowadays I pretty much tell new contributors "just write a few
>paragraphs and INCLUDE REFERENCES and don't worry about the fancy
>markup for now. Just INCLUDE THE REFERENCES and people will know it's
>a real article about a real thing."
That's good. Something like that needs to be in Wikipedia:Your first article.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Korn [mailto:smoddy@gmail.com]
> Sent: 20 September 2005 6:24 PM
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Topic warriors
>
>
> On 9/20/05, Worldtraveller <wikipedia(a)world-traveller.org> wrote:
>> Hm, personally I don't see too much of a link between portals and
>> projects. Astronomy-related projects include telescopes and
>> astronomical
>> objects, neither of which would make a good topic for a portal, while a
>> wikiproject:astronomy would be too broad to work well as a project. I
>> agree with MgM that the portals I listed in my earlier mail cover topics
>> much more suited to a project than to a portal.
>
> On the contrary. I thought the entire intention of portals was to
> provide a comprehensive overview (I don't think that's an oxymoron) of
> a certain area. I think an astronomy portal would be excellent.
> There should be the possibility of a good article every month to
> feature. I guess some of the wikiprojects are too narrow: they should
> combine to form the portal. If there is enough coverage to keep a
> portal going, we should have a portal.
>
> Sam
Sorry - I think I wasn't clear enough in what I was saying. We have an
astronomy portal, and I think it's excellent :) But I think projects and
portals fulfil very different remits. Projects are to improve and
organise content, and I think they work well when they concentrate on
narrow areas (such as telescopes). A wikiproject:astronomy would be too
broad to be very useful. Portals, though, are for displaying all the good
content that's out there, and I think they work best when they cover broad
areas - a portal:telescopes wouldn't be that interesting or viable.
A project:Doctor Who makes sense to me, to provide material which can then
be showcased in a portal:TV programs or suchlike, but a portal:Doctor Who
seems over-specialised and not of great interest to a general reader to
me.
Should there be some kind of mechanism for approving portals before they
are created? And should there be a mechanism for proposing the removal or
merging of portals that are too narrow and specialised?
WT