> From: MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com>
> AFD only doesn't scale for people who want to vote on all listed
> articles.
> Only vote for articles that need the votes and to ones where you can
> add something to the discussion.
This is pretty much what I do. My interest in AfD waxes and wanes,
but if I look at AfD at all, you may take it as given that I have
glanced at every discussion for an entire day. I probably participate
in less than one in ten.
*I don't participate if there is already obvious consensus and it's
clear which way the discussion will go. (But if it's important to me
I will put it on my watchlist).
*I don't participate if I truly am indifferent to the outcome of the
particular nomination.
*I don't participate if I am not in a position to make an informed
judgement, _and_ the subject is of so little interest to me that I
can't spare ten minutes to start to educate myself about it.
*I _do_ participate if it's something that is _almost_ a speedy and
there are only a couple of votes there already. (FIRST POST!!!!)
*I _do_ participate if I'm aware of possessing some relevant fact
about the article or topic that has not already been mentioned by
another participant.
*I _do_ participate if I click on the article and it makes a very
different impression on me than it made on the nominator.
*I _do_ participate if the article arouses my curiosity. (I enjoy
improving/rewriting/"rescuing" AfD's _if it's a topic that happens to
pique my interest_.)
*I'm afraid that I _do_ participate if I see a number of "votes" that
give no rationale, or a bad rationale. These are probably my least
useful comments.
--
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/
Mark Pellegrini wrote:
> 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.
People who are not familiar with Jacobs may wish to check out the
Wikipedia article on him and note the subject of his most recent book.
You can also get a quick synopsis of the book's impact on Wikipedia and
the blogosphere from a recent Signpost article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-01/Votes_…).
By the way, nobody seems to have asked what should be an essential
question for us while we're collaborating on a journalism project, which
is, "What's our deadline?"
--Michael Snow
"Is it supposed to be a secret that the magazine is Esquire? The the page
doesn't mention it and user "notafish" is being coy about it on the talk
page."
Um, oops. I must have missed that memo.
-Mark
*sigh* it only sent it to mgm.
On 9/20/05, Phroziac <phroziac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> ..if you look at the test, you will see that it's not blank, but has a
> nice template explaining what the deal is, and has a link to both
> versions on it. That's not very hard to find the content..
>
> On 9/20/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Right all a disgrunted POV warrior needs to do is cause a fuzz and we
> > need to click through different versions to see which is the one we're
> > looking for. Have you thought about how a blank page looks to the
> > public. If they've got problems reading headers on the Help desk, I
> > don't expect them to look any further when the page is blanked. We'd
> > get daily complaints that things are missing.
> >
> > --Mgm
> >
> > On 9/20/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 9/20/05, Phroziac <phroziac(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I have written a proposal which basically suggests blanking protected
> > > > pages, and leaving a template on them that kinda combines
> > > > {{protected}} and {{twoversions}}. You can see it at [[WP:NVP]], or
> > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_version_protection
> > > >
> > > > Please keep discussion of this on the relevant talk page, to avoid
> > > > fragmentation.
> > >
> > >
> > > I support this proposal only if we link to both versions of the
> > > article in question, thereby giving all parties in the dispute the
> > > perfect opportunity to go fork themselves.
> > >
> > >
> > > OK, that wasn't serious at all. No discussion here, I'll save it for
> > > the project page.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Michael Turley
> > > User:Unfocused
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > > WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
> > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> > >
> >
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Korn [mailto:smoddy@gmail.com]
> Sent: 20 September 2005 5:49 PM
> To: macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com; English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Topic warriors
>
>
> On 9/20/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> True. We should have portals for television shows, video game and
culture, instead of the portals you mentioned. That's what
>> WikiProjects were made for. Maybe we should have such portals moved to
a subpage of their respective projects?
>
> 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.
>
> Sam
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.
WT
Somewhat related to this, I have to say I question the value of quite a
few of the portals that have been created. I imagined that portals were
supposed to be pretty high level and aimed at general readers, but a lot
now seem to be aimed mainly at fans of games and TV programs, or are so
narrow that I can't see what a portal provides that an article doesn't.
Examples of the former are portals for Doctor Who, Final Fantasy, James
Bond, Oz, Stargate, the Simpsons and Warcraft, while for the latter
there's Ancient Germanic culture, Eastern Christianity, Scientific Method,
Utah and Bucharest.
Personally I think portals as fan areas such as the ones above are a bad
idea. Just wondered what anyone else though?
WT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel P. B. Smith [mailto:dpbsmith@verizon.net]
> Sent: 16 September 2005 11:09 AM
> To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Topic warriors
>
>
> We all know about "POV warriors." I'm fortunate or wimpy enough not
> to have been involved in articles with serious long-standing POV
> wars, but my impression is that _for the most part_ these things seem
> to stay under reasonable control.
>
> On the other hand, I think we are developing "topic warriors" who
> feel that a specific subject area deserves very detailed coverage,
> systematically watch VfD for any cases where articles on their pet
> topic are nominated for deletion, and oppose deletion of _any_
> article on their topic on principle, regardless of the quality of the
> article.
>
> Unlike POV, a relatively small number of topic warriors CAN
> effectively achieve their goal. (And, of course, they are assisted by
> Wikipedians who do _not_ accept the premise that "Wikipedia is not an
> indiscriminate collection of information.")
>
> NOTE NOTE NOTE ---> topic wars are FAR, FAR less damaging to
> Wikipedia and FAR less of a concern than POV wars.
>
> Some Wikipedians undoubtedly feel that topic wars do not damage
> Wikipedia at all. My feeling is that they do, because they
> deliberately _create_ systemic bias, and create an area in which the
> average quality of the articles is lower than the rest of Wikipedia.
>
> They certainly damage the Wikipedia community by factionalizing it,
> creating an "us versus them" mentality, and, in some cases, publicly
> gloating over their "success."
>
>
> --
> 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/
If WP:IAR were deleted, people would not suddenly say "Oh, my goodness, I see
that the policy has changed, I will now start slavishly following the rules."
So there's no particular reason to delete it.
But if WP:IAR were deleted, people would still be bold and occasionally
ignore the rules. So there's no particular reason to have it.
Wikipedia is a community of people that have the technical capability of
performing certain operations within Wikipedia. Wikipedian policy is whatever
it is that Wikipedians customarily do. "Policy" statements inform, they do
not coerce.
It would be appropriate to delete WP:IAR if there had, in fact, been a sea
change in general Wikipedian conduct, toward the direction of rigorously and
literally following written policy at all times.
Should we consider deleting "Wikipedia:Be bold"?