Steve Block wrote
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > In general, we should be more selective with what external links we
> > provide, and how we present them.
>
> We already do.
>
> > We should distinguish between:
> >
> > - Sources of the information in the article
>
> These should be placed in the References section, not the External links
> one.
I looked at [[Wikipedia:Citing sources]] on this, and I don't think that guideline is optimal. It is much better, if you need a weblink as reference for something specific, to make an inline link or make a note. In fact a note is much superior, because you can attach a comment or point up some specific phrase used.
If you just put raw weblinks in a References section, and don't specify the relevance, how can anyone tell that the link is playing a reference role?
Charles
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Ray Saintonge wrote
> Yes, but once a hypothetical equilibrium is achieved there is nothing
> left to do. Stagnancy will have been accomplished ... just like in EB.
Ah, but I think that's exactly where people have different visions of the future. We have steering and non-steering folk, teleologists and those who just want to let it rip.
Charles
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> > A set of templates with a different look-and-feel
> > and perhaps an appropriate disclaimer, on the other hand,
> > might be better. We often already have plain old external links
> > anyway, though, so I'm not sure it's needed.
>
> I think there's an important line to be drawn between an external
> link and those boxes, though. The external link clearly demarcates
> its contents as something that isn't in Wikipedia. Something like a
> Wikiquote link, on the other hand, serves as a sort of extension of
> the article.
>
> I want to treat the fan-centric links as extensions, because it's
> clear that many editors and many readers expect that material to be
> in Wikipedia. And so we shouldn't just say "Go away." Or even "Go
> somewhere else." We should say "Look, here's where we've found that
> gives you this sort of information." And we should make that easy and
> well-integrated into our overall organization and navigation, because
> there's clearly demand for it.
>
> I don't see the issue of those sites not having NPOV or V - neither
> Wikiquote nor Wikinews have similar verification standards in
> practical place to Wikipedia, for instance. I think we shouldn't link
> to articles that suck or don't add anything. That seems to me to be a
> case-by-case decision, though.
Sorry to get in on this discussion a bit late. For those who don't know me,
I'm the founder of WikiFur.com, the furry fandom encyclopedia. I've been
dealing with for the last year or so, and I thought I'd share what I've done
in a particular instance.
Of late, we've had a lot of people shouting "furcruft" over at Wikipedia's
AfD over some articles about topics that are of interest to the furry
fandom, but which are not seen to be in the general interest by most users.
It's often hard to defend against that kind of thing, because there's
nothing you can really do to improve an article on a topic that people just
don't think is worthy of recording, even if there is no doubt about the
truth of it.
In this particular case, articles about several furry conventions were up
for deletion. It was suggested that a central article about the general
topic of furry conventions, with links to more information for each
convention, would be more suitable. The trouble is, where should we point to
for that information? WikiFur was suggested as the appropriate place for
this information to reside (Actual words: "Best kept to the somewaht scary
environment of the furry wiki"). But WikiFur is not Wikipedia, and allows
both original work and unverifiable material.
What I ended up doing was having about half of the article be a general,
referenced Wikipedia article about the topic. I then included a list of
conventions that had very short summaries of information, with links to the
websites, and with interwiki links to each WikiFur article. The list was
prefaced by a note explaining that target of the links could contain
unverified and original material. All the names of the conventions were
redirected to this page.
You can see the result here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_convention
I think this method works. It lets people use Wikipedia to look up
information on a topic, in the case that Wikipedia doesn't actually want to
cover that topic but "knows" a good place to go for coverage. It ensures
that users get to the relevant information rather than a blank page, and
that they are given appropriate notification of it being on a different
site. It's probably not what a regular encyclopedia would do, but then
Wikipedia is trying to be more useful than a regular encyclopedia.
The method above is not ideal for single links, and it would be good to have
a better way of doing those than bare interwiki links (which I have used on
occasion, for topics covered by WikiFur which are - in my best judgment -
definitely out of Wikipedia's "notability scope"). In cases where there is a
short article on Wikipedia covered in more depth on Wikipedia, I have tended
to put interwiki links into See also/External links/Further reading, but
only when our articles actually have something relevant to add.
Going forward, it would be cool to get some kind of wiki linking via search
to topics that don't have matches on Wikipedia (with appropriate "you're
going off Wikipedia" warnings). This would be useful for topics which may be
featured articles elsewhere but deleted on Wikipedia for a lack of general
relevance or verifiability, as I doubt Wikipedia wishes to implement
automatic wiki redirects for such things! I don't know how practical that
is, though.
--
Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry
http://greenreaper.co.uk - http://wikfur.com
"Gregory Maxwell" wrote
> I believe that while bringing in people who like X to write about X is
> a good start, it will not be enough to produce even coverage.
I think it's important to point out (a) WP has grown largely by word-of-mouth, (b) it has worked and indeed snowballed; and so (c) we want to continue on the basis of _good_ WoM.
Which is why our reputation matters.
Charles
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"David Gerard" wrote
> I'm thinking of a conversation with a feminist friend who considers
> Wikipedia hopelessly patriarchally biased and useless to harmful.
Interesting. I mean, potentially interesting if there is a feminist critique at the level of policy.
'Systemic bias' hasn't really got that far in elaborating a theory. We do know that 'no original research' effectively cuts out ethnographic material, thus excluding many 'undocumented' things. But that's a fairly obvious point. We tend to import public domain material that comes with a slant from at least 80 years ago. But I'm not aware of a serious and general analysis that is relevant.
Charles
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"David Gerard" wrote
> I suspect our solution to systemic bias in article coverage will be to
> bring in people interested in those subjects. Because they complain
> the most about the lack of coverage.
Correct, to the extent that 'equilibrium' is that the topic coverage is balanced in the same way as the interests of the community. On the other hand, WP is not in equilibrium, has never been in equilibrium, and (if ever in some sort of equilibrium) would become a quite different animal.
We basically started with a 'stub' of a really comprehensive encyclopedia. Respect for stubbiness as a state is the tribute we pay to comprehension of the non-equilibrium nature of the 'management' issues.
Charles
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"Gregory Maxwell" wrote
> A side effect of NOR is that completely disinterested parties should
> be able to do a job of similar quality to our interested writers,
> although perhaps with a somewhat greater expenditure of energy.
Yeah, well, that's only true 'on paper'. It would be useful to have a name for the fallacy involved: it's 'nominalism' or 'the minus oneth law of thermodynamics' (empathy never needs to increase at all). Or something.
When I write about mathematics, I do have a reasonably full range of insights; when I write about poetry, not. Does it make a difference? Undoubtedly. I can do better dropping a bit of history and context into mathematical articles, because I have some gut feeling about it all. NOR is (under the current and basically philistine reading) supposed to stop me putting spin in when I do that. OK, but that assumes I forget NPOV, and I think I don't.
Charles
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> From: "James Hare" <messedrocker(a)gmail.com>
>
> Yeah, I find that annoying, too.
>
> Like this one time when I found an excellent article from the Mayo
> Clinic
> about Tinnitus, so I run over to the Wikipedia article about it and
> find a
> detailed article. Aww, so much for that!
I've read a few articles about tinnitus and one thing which none of
them (including ours) explain is why the word is "tinnitus" when
you'd think it ought to be "tintinnitus."
(Oh, the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, the
tinnabulation of the bells... see what I mean?)
Puppy wrote
> Women are emailing me telling me how intimidated they feel - they don't
> want to post their concerns to this list because they also feel
> intimidated here.
Membership of this list has historically been open (just as Wikipedia has been). Personally I'd like to see a cull. It takes a _lot_ to get anyone thrown off. Can we have the bar lowered on that, please?
Charles
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