Hello list! I'm new to the list, so perhaps a short intro is in order. My
name is Finlay and I am known to WP as Cantara. I've been a Wikipedian since
sometime in 2004, but have only become really active in the last few months.
I joined the list at the suggestion of CComMack, who thought that an idea I
had (see below) might want input from people knowledgeably about policy and
so forth.
My idea is this. We all know that Wikipedia is great and all, repository of
the world's information, &c. However, there are people who disagree, who
think that Wikipedia is inaccurate because it is written by people who are
not experts and because it lacks oversight (or whatever it is they're saying
now). When considering these two things together, I realized that there is a
kind of information that Wikipedia seriously lacks, and that is
bibliographies. If you've written a research paper lately (I'm writing two at
the moment, myself) you know that the list of books that the author has read
is just as valuable as whatever the book itself is about. However,
Wikipedians don't really make an effort to include "further reading" as part
of the entry, beyond what they list as citations.
I wanted to start a project to focus on getting that store of information
into Wikipedia, and once I get around to it I'll list it on Proposed
Projects. However, as mentioned about, a fellow editor suggested that a
project like this might have repurcussions in other areas (and I hope he
responds to explain what they were - something about the manual of style?).
Discuss, then, and if you'd like to help, I'll have information up somewhere
on my userpage fairly soon.
Yours,
Cantara
On Sun Mar 26 19:08:45 UTC 2006 Steve Bennett stevage at gmail.com wrote:
> On 3/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I find it very curious that of all the things they can attack
> > wikipedia for, the fact that wikipedia is not censored is the one they
> > focus on. Very strange indeed.
>
> All the more reason to tag Wikipedia articles as kidsafe/worksafe.
It occurs to me that this entire debate about tagging articles is
entirely moot. If a school or workplace wishes to filter Wikipedia
content by articles, we have already provided the means for them to
identify unwanted material: use the article category.
It should be a straightforward task for any computer technician to create
a filter to keep out all of the articles marked [[Category:Sex]],
[[Category:Porn star]], & even [[Category:Pokemon]], if a school or
workplace desires. Explicit metatags duplicate information that is
already part of the article & thus is unneeded -- unless some person
starts making contributions that confuse this categorization, for example
adding pictures of naked bodies to articles like [[Triangle]] & [[George
W. Bush]]. In that case these edits would be vandalism & dealt with
accordingly.
The means to bar information on Wikipedia that is not safe for children &
the workplace already exists. How they could make this work is thankfully
not our concern.
Geoff
(I'm copying this to wikien-l since the issue of whether the English
Wikipedia needs its own "meta" is probably better discussed there. See
<http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-March/thread.html>
for previous mails.)
Alex Schenck <linuxbeak(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> A.) It would be heavily based upon most of the policies from en.wikipedia.
> Some things can change, but it will be a site designed with the purpose of
> being an extention of en.wikipedia instead of an entirely separate project.
> Meta2 will exist for Wikipedia instead of being a standalone project.
Does the community on the English Wikipedia need or want to be
expanded in this way?
There has always been some opposition to moving anything to meta
(though perhaps single login will alleviate some of the concerns).
There is currently confusion about what should be on the English
Wikipedia and what should be on meta. "Don't be a dick" is on meta,
but "Wikipedia:Complete bollocks" is on Wikipedia. Recentism is on
Wikipedia, deletionism is on meta.
Is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_essays
supposed to be different to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Essays ?
Are chess, quizzes, and humor pages supposed to be on meta or en?
(They're currently on both).
Are you suggesting that all of this stuff would move to Meta2? Is
there any advantage to that? Is there likely to be any agreement about
it within the English Wikipedia community?
Angela.
I agree that the adminship process is broken and has been for quite some
time. People become admins by making a sufficient number of edits over a
span of some months without making a career-limiting mistake. It helps
to participate in IRC and to be part of a mutually reinforcing group of
people who are also seeking adminship, and there are certain purely
mechanical requirements involving edit summaries, minor edits, and
participation in various housekeeping tasks.
The amount of time and number of edits requirements are now high enough
that they have little to do with understanding Wikipedia. They are as
high as they are just to be sure that potential admins have had
sufficient opportunity to make a career-limiting mistake, if they are
prone to that sort of thing by their nature.
While RFA is more or less functional at a basic level of being effective
in getting admins promoted that have received some sort of vetting,
there are problems with the ill will it generates and the fact that the
project could benefit from more admins than are being promoted
presently. Though rare, there have also been some admins that have
slipped through that were, in hindsight, clearly not suitable. The
fact that RFA has become politicized is also a problem because it means
that admins as a group are more predisposed to behave politically than
was once the case.
Tyrenius is an example of the problem we face. It's clear from the RFA
page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Tyrenius)
that he is unaware of the "RFA culture" which is rife with unwritten
rules, such as the unwritten rule against attempted rebuttal of an
oppose vote, the unwritten rule that you really ought to vote on a
bunch of RFAs before nominating yourself, and the unwritten rule that
self-noms in at least some peoples' minds must be well qualified.
While I don't necessarily believe that Tyrenius should be an admin at
this time, I do believe that he is justified in feeling unfairly
treated by the project. The lack of consensus on a minimum number of
edits, and the ever-growing minimum in the minds of many, is
particularly a problem. We used to require 500 edits.
I'm not sure what all the answers are but the two thoughts that come to
mind are the sequenced granting of rights, which I've proposed in the
past (in general, granting deletion, undeletion, and rollback first and
the other privs more or less automatically after a six month or yearlong
"apprenticeship" period), and a sponsorship and mentoring system where
existing admins take responsibility for shepherding new editors through
the process.
uc
>Sure, improve it, but that's no reason to lambaste its
>community, or make false claims about it. (David, you still haven't
>addressed my questioning of how historical pages make Meta unusable).
Because you can't tell what on earth is active and what isn't. e.g. Is
[[Meta:Babel]] active? It's supposed to be the Village Pump of Meta. I
see tumbleweeds blow past. e.g. Is [[m:RFA]] checked at all on any
regular basis? The bureaucrats were notable by their complete absence
until Linuxbeak ran for bureaucrat, which appeared to cause a sudden
flurry of activity and declarations that there were enough bureaucrats
on Meta, even though there was visibly no-one minding the store. That
sort of thing. I've given both these examples before on the wiki,
though not here (my apologies).
Note, by the way, that everyone listed on [[WM:OM]] are individuals -
despite, e.g. Anthere answering one person [1] with a reply to what
someone else said [2]. So, e.g., Linuxbeak's list of things he wants
isn't mine (e.g. an en: only meta).
I will note also that the incumbents have successfully driven out at
least some of the "insurgents" [3]. Are you proud? If not, why?
- d.
(I'm giving references because people are too often claiming not to
know what I'm talking about in this discussion.)
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta_talk:MetaProject_to_Overha…
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta_talk:MetaProject_to_Overha…
- I do agree this was inappropriate, but it does help not to answer
the wrong person, as if everyone involved is a single entity.
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meta:MetaProject_to_Overhaul_Me…
There exists in the UK a small - politically insignificant at present
- movement known as the traditional counties movement.
The two largest groups are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_British_Countieshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Watch
There is zero news coverage of ABC that I can find.
Looking at :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_counties_of_the_British_Isles
and its linked articles, you could be forgiven for thinking that:
* the term traditional county is usually ascribed to these (it is not
AFAICT actually generally used much at all other than by the
traditional counties movement)
* that they are the sole and indisputable historic counties (they
aren't, boundaries have shifted a number of times and there have been
a lot of legislative changes too)
* that there is widespread recognition of these as the "true" counties
(in fact most Brits don't actually care, and it's only really
significant in some areas like parts of Yorkshire and former Rutland)
I have a serious problem with the assertion that these are
"traditional" counties, since there are other arrangements both before
and after them; the ones the traditional movement claim existed from
the 16th to the 19th Centuries, with some boundary changes - the only
thing on which all sources appear to agree over time is the
approximate locations, county towns and the names.
There have been edit wars over the Scottish infoboxes re the wording:
"traditional", "historic" or "former" county - deeply contentious
here, as Fife for example was historically the Kingdom of Fife, as my
friend Eric will tell you at every opportunity.
Now, I don't really know much about this apart from what I've seen in
the edit wars, but it does look to me as if some peer-review is
necessary. Barrows are being pushed.
So the question is: where is the best place to take this? Article
RfC? Peer review? NPOV tags and the Cleanup Squad? What's likely to
get the best and most informed result, I do not want to get into forum
shopping.
Thanks,
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
Hi,
you will find a newly created mailing list about the OLPC programme at
http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/content which is described as
follows:
Content -- Discussions of OLPC content, both software and booklike.
We expect content to be both pretty conventional ebooks, but also
educational software to encourage/enable children to construct
interesting things that will engage them in the learning process.
If you go through the archives, you will both find favourable comments
about wikipedia from Negroponte and if I remember correctly, Jimmy has
also expressed his support for the OLPC.
I am pretty certain that Wikipedia might be one interesting piece of
content that could be included into the OLPC. While there are technical
issues (for example for some languages due to space problems), all the
other debates about child-safe-correct-npov-aspects also apply.
I would love to see some Wikipedians, Wikibookians, etc. who are
interested in joining this list if they want to participate in this project.
There are more mailinglists at
http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo which might also be
interesting for other aspects, such as technical stuff or
portugese/brasilian related things.
Greetings,
Mathias
An organisation exists which makes certain claims. These claims are
at odds with informed opinion on the subject. They are not published
in any peer-reviewed journals, and can be demonstrated to be false or
at best questionable by reference to primary sources.
Most credible authorities do not deign to reply to these claims,
because the organisation is mainly dismissed as cranks (or rather, a
lone crank) and many of the claims are considered absurd, but they
have a popular resonance among certain groups who desperately want to
believe them. The person who runs the group is a talented
self-publicist and gets his claims in the news, but declines all
invitations to submit the claims for peer-review. As unpublished
work, there are therefore no published rebuttals, and most reputable
authorities simply dismiss the group.
Some of the group's claims have a basis in published research, but
constitute an extreme interpretation of that research. This
interpretation is, in some cases, strongly contested by the
researchers themselves.
Supporters of the group are vociferous; this is in many cases the sole
source for what they really want to believe, so they promote it
assiduously.
So: the group is notable by reference to news coverage. The existence
of the group's claims come from reliable sources, the group's own
materials which are reliable in the context of documenting the group.
Rebuttals do not come from reliable secondary sources because the
secondary sources have published neither the claims nor the rebuttals.
Opposition to the claims is therefore denounced as uncited and "weasel
words" because the opponents are not named, although there is not one
single reputable authority which supports the claims.
How best to handle this?
I am personally involved in one side of a dispute on this, as is
patently obvious from the way I have phrased the above :-) In the end
I want the article to be a good one because every article should be a
good one. Another user, DeFacto, has been effective in challenging
opposition from me and others, and thus tightening up this and other
articles on subjects related to motorist activism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Speed is the article in question.
There now exists a groundswell of motorist activists who sincerely
believe that Paul Smith has "proved" that speed cameras cost lives.
How can we demonstrate that this is a false claim, as [[WP:NPOV]]
requires we must, without straying into original research?
This is also a problem because their claim that cameras cost lives has
now been repeated in other Wikipedia articles. That is a serious
concern to me. It is a claim which Smith actively refuses to put up
to peer review.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG