Hi folks,
I've made a proposal on how we present the [[Main Page]] on April Fool's Day
to address some concerns we had last year.
You can read the proposal here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fool%27s_Main_Page
I'd appreciate any feedback that you may have.
Thanks!
Hi all,
Now for something completely different: I think I may have broken my
monobook.js file. When I try and edit, the screen goes completely
white, and I can't actually edit. When I'm not logged in, I don't have
the problem.
So, would some kind admin mind hacking my file so I can edit again?
Feel free to set it back to default if necessary. I'm assuming that
I'm not capable of editing it at the moment with this problem...so if
there's another way...?
Thanks,
Steve (stevage on EN)
I've finished my review of the 100 randomly-selected articles I surveyed
back in November: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100 Of the
original 100, seven have been deleted, and another three have been turned
into redirects.
Over the past three months, there were 1,121 edits to the articles on the
list, giving a mean of 11.56 edits per non-deleted article.
Not much happens on most articles: of the 93 articles remaining in the
survey, the median number of edits was 3. Nine articles were completely
unchanged since November, and all but 18 of the articles had fewer than ten
changes. About 99% of the edits were minor things: adding interwiki links,
fiddling with categories and stub tags, adjusting wikilinks, and
spelling/grammar fixes. Only a few edits added a paragraph or more of
information.
At the other extreme of editing are the four articles with 100 or more
edits. Unfortunately, this does not neccessarily translate into an increase
in article content. Of the four articles, only [[Midfielder]] was expanded
significantly. [[Aleksandr Pushkin]] and [[Lawrenceville School]] were
cleaned up, with some addition of information. [[List of Barney & Friends
stage shows]] merely suffered prolonged vandalism.
Overall, quality has improved, but not by much. Out of the original 20
substubs, five have been deleted, and four have improved to "stub" status.
Three articles originally classified as "low" have improved to "good". None
of the stubs has improved beyond stub status, and there are still no
articles considered "high" quality. No article declined significantly in
quality.
The sourcing situation hasn't changed much: two articles gained sources,
while one article is now unsourced. [[General Semantics]], the messiest,
most over-referenced article in the previous round of the survey, gained
another three sources, for a total of 17. Fortunately, it also gained a
great deal of improvement.
The image situation has changed significantly. Originally, free images
outnumbered non-free ones by 2:1, with only a few images of unknown
copyright situation. The ratio of free to non-free images hasn't changed,
and the total number of images has gone up. Of the six unsourced images in
the original survey, all of them have been sourced or removed. However,
there are also 17 images with apparently-incorrect free-license tags: 16
images from Commons with disputed PD-self tags, and a GFDL tag on an image
that is probably not eligable for copyright.
--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]
The message below has set me thinking about an article I had nominated for deletion sometime back, [[Taran Adarsh]]. He is a film critic, widely loved and hated in the online community and his reviews are picked up and amplified by several blogs. He gets 35,000 hits on google but none of the first 100 hits has anything except his name - some of them have opinions about him but none of them have any biographical data. The afd closed as no consensus to delete, because people say that the no. of hits implies notability. Even if that is taken as a measure of notability, the article does not contain anything related to the biographical data of the person as no such information appears to be available easily and the person remains non-verifiable. Any thoughts on how to deal with such issues??
regards,
Gurubrahma
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 08:16:09 -0000
From: "charles matthews"
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability - Case Study II
To: "Wikien list"
Message-ID: <000301c63f63$e6340980$99ac0656@NorthParade>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original
This is about [[Mark Steyn]]. There are two types of major issue with this
page.
(I) Scope for scepticism. As it now says immediately after the lead, there
is actually a dearth of personal details on Steyn. No date nor birth nor
place of birth; no educational details, beyond the fact that he supposedly
left school at 16. How do we even know he's really Canadian? This is one
for SlimVirgin then; given no reasonable way to check, do we need to see his
passport? :Plenty of Google hits for "Mark Steyn, a Canadian". I'm not
going to worry about this, and sourcing it; are the fanatics for
verification, though?
As for the rest of Steyn's life, it is about his media jobs and association
with Conrad Black and Hollinger, which is all fairly straightforward.
(II) Issues around NPOV. This is where the real meat is. Quoting directly
from Steyn's columns is easy, but on its own is not enough for a WP article
about a figure who revels in controversy. Just about every whisper of
criticism of Steyn on the page has been subject to close attention from fans
of his, who tend to cut first and ask for sources afterwards. There have
been also some insertions by critics which were not well sourced.
Breaking it down by topics:
(a) USA and Europe. There is not much left of this, just the one quote from
[[Peter Preston]] towards the end, sourced from The Observer. There used to
be more about Steyn on Europe's attitudes to armed forces post-WWII. It was
cut a while ago and not replaced.
(b) Steyn's long-standing claims that Bin Laden is quite obviously dead.
This is mentioned in the terms that Private Eye satirises him for that.
Someone on the Talk page said that he had dropped this, which dates from
2002 or so; no source provided, and I showed him still at it in 2004. He's
clearly not going to retract, so how long can we claim that he continues to
think Bin Laden is dead? Strictly, we can't. I don't think we really need
to reference issues of Private Eye in which he is mocked for this, but
perhaps others disagree.
(c) Allegations of Islamophobia. There are three typical areas about this,
and the material on the page appears to revolve. The points are
- claims that Steyn reported as factual some wild rumours about Muslims in
New York shortly post-9/11, and supporting critical column by Johann Hari,
with web reference on the latter (we have had some edit-warring on whether
direct, sourced critical quotes from Hari should be on the page)
- Steyn's use of ancient anti-Islamic quotes from Winston Churchill
(seemingly from Churchill's impressions of fighting in the Sudan pre-1900)
- aggressive comparisons by Steyn of Anglospheric and Islamic cultures, in
sweeping terms.
These can all be properly sourced, so really this should be respectable NPOV
coverage and allowed to stand without mauling around. I expect more
drive-by edits, though.
(d) 'Commitment to Democracy questioned'. This is the active area, with a
paragraph cut out recently by User:Mitchberg (discussion on Talk page).
It was alleged in an earlier edit, that 'critics of Steyn' have questioned
his commitment to democracy; because relative to Bush-Kerry, Steyn had said
Kerry was foolish to have said that Bush should have propped up Aristide in
Haiti. The quote from Steyn was provided, and says just that. It was a bit
selective of that column, which has to be read in full to see what Steyn was
arguing (Martha Stewart was innocent, so state power needs opposition from
'civil society' to be legitimate).
The debate itself is for politics buffs (so, we have to say Hamas and Fatah
is more about democracy, than Aristide and the downtrodden Haitians?). The
verifiability issue is like this, though: to claim that 'critics of Steyn'
alleged something we should source those critics. What are the criteria?
Well, random bloggers are not really up to the current standards. We don't
need to doubt that people do criticise Steyn this way; but undoubtedly we
get a better article by being specific about this, and giving at least one
respectable example of such a critic.
That's why the para on this is not back on the page. Since Steyn is such a
vocal pro-US-Republican writer, it is certainly a shame that the one quote
on the page that refers directly to US domestic politics has gone. Could
the bit about 'critics of Steyn' be just omitted? Yes, but then it reads
oddly, and there really does need to be a more developed discussion about
what Steyn's views are (he gets called a neocon, but this is not properly
entered into).
There are secondary points, and what User:Mitchberg says on the Talk relates
to those. He's (I assume male and) a self-confessed newbie, so he makes one
mistake, in that he tries to refute the criticism of Steyn. That's not a
reason for cutting out criticism (in the way that the lack of a proper
source actually is). He also doesn't really take the point that the quote
is selective. He goes on to say that he has interviewed Steyn, and knows
from that that Steyn is committed to democracy. To do him justice, he isn't
putting that wrongly as an argument; but he is also apparently not seeing
that if he has an interview, and has published it, that would constitute a
proper source for the article.
This discussion is a bit stalled right now. I don't really want to spend
for ever researching the critics of Steyn, and there is the rhetorical point
about whether 'commitment to liberty' now trumps 'commitment to democracy'
for American conservatives (with the implications for 'civil society' as a
prerequisite). This is interesting stuff, but needs first-rate sources. So
there is the verifiability issue in practice, again, of What Is An
Acceptable Source?
Charles
---------------------------------
Jiyo cricket on Yahoo! India cricket
Yahoo! Messenger Mobile Stay in touch with your buddies all the time.
My username, user:Please Don't Block, has been banned from editing on wikipedia either for having an inappropriate username or for "vandalism." I encourage any administrator to look into my editing history (which includes numerous excellent edits), I have vandalized no one's page. I left a comment at someone's userpage that offended another user, and therefore I was blocked. However, leaving unpleasant comments is not banned according to wikipedia policy. My username is additionally not offensive. I demand to have the block removed immediately or some explanation as to why I am blocked.
Please Don't Block
I've decided to recuse as a clerk in this one, mostly in order to say
this: this case is about userboxes.
More specifically, it is about the extremely destructive but widely
denied effects on our community of the creation in template space of
very large numbers of templates that have as their sole purpose the
viral propagation of political opinions and the linking together of
Wikipedians according to those opinions. Sometimes the highly
politicised templates contain links to categories, which have the
effect of linking the users of these templates in a network according
to political opinion. This network is incompatible with Wikipedia's
principle of neutrality and has been openly used (for instance in the
Catholic Alliance case) in deliberate and conscious attempts to
subvert that policy.
There is nothing that can be said in a template that cannot already be
said by keying or pasting into a page the equivalent sequence of wiki,
html and css code. There is no meaning that cannot be conveyed by such
sequences of code . Therefore these political templates, by
facilitating the replication of their contents, and through the
category and whatlinkshere mechanisms, have as their sole function the
systematic destruction of the neutrality policy.
The arbitration committee must decide whether its principal purpose is
to uphold and defend the culture that has gotten us this far, or
merely to enforce some of the written rules that are being used to
mock and trample that culture. Whether to preside over the recovery of
Wikipedia from one of the most massive challenges to its neutral,
welcoming culture, or to read its death sentence. --Tony Sidaway
14:16, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
And now... for something completely different.
The GFDL is a document with great goals, great principles, and I agree
with all of the basic elements of Free Content. Let's just get that on
the table first. I've read quite a lot of Stallman's texts, and works
by other players in these sorts of debates like Lessig, Raymond,
Boyle, etc., and I think I understand the terms of the debates over
this, and some of the legal aspects, though I don't claim to be an
expert in either domain.
But there are some ways in which it is not ideal in its
implementation. Some of these have been gone over in some detail on
here, but the basic summary is that it is a license made primarily for
software manuals and is not always best adapted for Wikipedia's
specific technical and informational purposes. There are, to say the
least, sections which could be clarified, improved, or dropped
altogether. And there are also places where we could imagine
improvements added (such as allowing authors to be dis-associated with
re-used content if used in a way which would be defamatory to them --
the old case of the Holocaust deniers using our articles as a base for
their own literature and then claiming that Jimbo was an author).
But how to escape? The GFDL is viral -- once you license something as
it, you can't undo it. What is made GFDL stays GFDL -- that's the
purpose anyway. And, in principle, I agree with that: the goal of this
is to make sure that what was "free content" not only stays "free
content," but generates more "free content." And it improves
Wikipedia's credibility to be committed to a license maintained by an
external source: nobody can claim that someday WP will turn around,
change its license, and suddenly have proprietary content. In order to
accomplish that at present, we'd have to do a hostile takeover of the
Free Software Foundation. Let's assume, our of the principles of
practicality and good faith, that this will never be an option on the
table.
So how to escape?, he asks again. I've been puzzling over this for
some time (think of it as on of my hobbies, the sort of thing I muse
about in the shower). Here are some thoughts I had.
The idea of multi-licensing has been pursued on the project at
different times, whereby contributions are indicates as being
licenseable under the GFDL or another, similarly "free" license (i.e.,
CC-BY-SA or CC-SA). There was also the big push, awhile ago, to get
users to put templates on their user pages indicating that their
present, future, and, I think, *past* contributions were
multi-licensed as well -- I believe it had to do with making certain
articles compatible with WikiCities' license. The basic idea was to
run a bot to find all of the "authors" the articles in question and
see if they would agree to this. I don't know how this worked out, but
it was an interesting idea.
Based on this principle: can one really ask users to
re-(multi)-license their PAST contributions? That is, can I say, "All
those contributions I said were under the GFDL? Well, now I want them
to also be GFDL or CC-BY-SA." Legally, I'm suspicious, but I'm also
not a lawyer.
If this principle works -- couldn't we change the terms of use? That
is, instead of every edit being licenseable under the GFDL, couldn't
we change it to say that "this contribution, and any other
contribution I have previously made, is licenseable under the GFDL or
any other similarly 'free' license"? It wouldn't necessarily get *all*
of the content out of the GFDL but, if we assume that many of the
editors now were editors previously, it would potentially "free up" a
very large amount of content. If an individual editor objected to this
for some reason (I can't imagine why, but let's just say they did),
then they'd be prohibited from editing, the same way we do when people
suddenly claim that the intent to retain copyright on their edits.
It is just a thought I had -- the only one I could come up with which
seems really plausible, aside from the possibility of the FSF being
convinced to make updates to the GFDL (which I suspect they would be
very dubious about, especially if the edits were primarily to benefit
Wikipedia).
Just a thought, not a clarion call. Getting out of the GFDL may not
even be necessary, but I think thinking about it as an option might be
worthwhile (though again, not because I disagree with its principles
in the slightest, just some aspects of its implementation).
I'm very interested in what others will have to say about this, and
hopefully it will be seen in the spirit I intend it, which is more on
the level of inquiry than policy.
FF
...who has to close this mess:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Robert_Baden-P…
A whole article devoted to speculation in a couple of books on the
sexuality of the founder of Scouting, apparently because nobody could
agree how little of it should go in the main article.
The word count given to such speculation between the two articles, is,
according to my rough and ready count, more or less equivalent to the
combined count for his military career AND the founding of the Scout
Movement. Can we say "undue weight"?
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
XaosFluX wrote:
> This policy may need some review, but as an admin I've
> {{usernameblock}}'ed on sight new accounts such as "Another wiki
> cheese-ology vandal". Users declaring their intenet to vandalize the
> project in their username should be clear enough.
I don't see any problem with it when the intent is that obvious. There
was some controversy a while back about user names that announced
themselves to be "trolls", since that may suggest a variety of things
and even if people can agree that you're talking about an [[internet
troll]], they may not agree on what behavior is implied and whether it
warrants blocking. However, as I'm quite certain that nobody from a
Germanic tribe of Late Antiquity will be editing Wikipedia, anyone
announcing themselves as a vandal can and should be blocked.
--Michael Snow