On 5 Jun 2007 at 06:51:04 -0700, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.com>
wrote:
> I would assume that he is referring to how we handle BLP-style facts.
> Consider the home address and school attended by, say twelve-year-old TV
> actors [[Sullivan and Sawyer Sweeten]]. We have collectively agreed
> that those facts should be suppressed, even if we could reliably verify
> them.
Since when do we give home addresses of anybody, living or dead, in
our bios? One of the things that we're WP:NOT is an address book.
The only exceptions I can think of are the rare cases where the home
location is actually a historic site of some sort (like it's a
building on the register of historic places, or some significant
noteworthy event took place there and received news coverage that
noted its exact location). Thus, we can note the location of the
Dakota Apartments where John Lennon was killed, and the location of
the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia (a historic site open to the
public), but not the home locations of just anybody even if the
person is notable (their house generally isn't).
--
== Dan ==
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William Pietri wrote:
> BJAODN is a great example of people taking something annoying and
> making it fun.
This is one of the better justifications for it, and one that's pretty
directly relevant to the state of the encyclopedia. I know the
suggestion has been made that the existence of a trophy wall only
encourages the vandals. But it also encourages the vandal-fighters, by
giving them an outlet and additional motivation to spend time doing
their grunt work in the trenches. Arguably our articles overall are
better off for its existence.
--Michael Snow
I just got a note from a user who was upset that we had deleted an
article that he had recreated. We even salted it after this deletion,
because it had been recreated repeatedly. However, he didn't know that
he was recreating something that failed an AfD; it just looks like
[[Desktop Tower Defense]] was a favorite game and he was excited nobody
had written about it yet.
He's absolutely right that it was rude not to tell him that we had
deleted the article before. He wasted a lot of time and we could have
saved his goodwill for something else. Plus, we had to clean up the
mess. A bad situation all around.
What if we change the article creation page to explicitly say that a
page has been deleted before, either including the deletion logs
directly or giving them a link for it? Right now the fact that an
article might be have been previously deleted is buried in the second
sentence of the sixth bullet point. Instead I'm thinking a pretty
warning box would be more appropriate, one that only appears when the
article has actually been deleted in the past.
Thanks,
William
G'day KP,
> On 5/31/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > I did an entire museum a little while ago - the trick I used was
> to do
> > two seperate sets of photos, the good camera taking high-res
> shots of
> > every artifact and the small compact running off lots of context
> > photos ("here is the entire cabinet") and pictures of labels,
> etc. Put
> > the two sets together, sort by timestamp, and you're done.
> >
> > [Or would be had I not forgotten to set one of them to daylight
> > savings. Still, it was a nice first attempt...]
>
> Yeah, I do this if I'm shooting in gardens, take two cameras,
> shoot the
> label and broad shot, then shoot the images I want with my good
> camera.Also for my art. For me the flowers don't always come with
> signs, except
> for the ones I'm growing. When I shoot in the field I take a
> cheap sketch
> book and a marker and write a sign and shoot it. But yes, with
> air shows
> the signs are often also crowded with the other folks at the air
> shows, and
> not usually are they the one shot of the plane you want (cutting
> off nose
> and tail)--still, it can be useful.
One of the features I really like about my (otherwise quite poor)
digital camera is that it also allows for taking video and sound
recordings. There's even a setting you can use where it will take
the photo, then switch to audio mode, and you speak a short
description of what you've just photographed.
Very handy.
<snip/>
--
[[User:MarkGallagher]]
As the big "attack sites linking" debate has flared up yet again on
WP:NPA, it's unfortunate, and ironic, that some participants in this
debate are unable to refrain from making personal attacks in their
edit summaries. Some choice recent examples:
"you know you're only trying to stir up trouble as you always do" --
SlimVirgin
"not much to dispute, unless your an ED or WR partisan" -- MONGO
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
On 2 Jun 2007 at 18:12:05 -0500, "Philippe Beaudette"
<philippebeaudette(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Seriously, I know copyright is critical, but I can't help but think it was used as a means to the desired end in this case.
Yeah... they should have just declared BJAODN to be an Attack Site.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
G'day Gabe,
> On 5/30/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Not at all. My point in all this is the one I've made elsewhere in
> > this thread, or maybe there are two threads going about this, namely
> > that I feel uneasy about seeing people promoted who've racked up
> high> edit counts by using automated or semi-automated scripts,
> but who have
> > very little article-talk interaction.
>
> But you do not use the admin tools to interact in article-talk. They
> *are* used for vandalism-fighting and protection. ~~~~
The most important job for an admin is to interact with people on
talk pages. Rightly or wrongly, admins are perceived to have
special status on Wikipedia, and their words and actions will often
have more impact on editors than the words and actions of an
ordinary editor might.
Admins[0] can mediate a dispute and prevent the need for blocks
or protections. They can convince users to stop vandalising or
spamming and become good contributors. They can calm users
who have been improperly accused of vandalism or spamming.
They can explain our policies and encourage users to become
Clueful.
They can also drive users away from the project. They can
convince a tester that Wikipedia is not really a very nice place,
and cause him to become a vandal. They can offend a good
faith user by calling him a "spammer". They can spread
misinformation about our policies and encourage users to
become Clueless.
Sooner or later, an administrator will interact with other users
on their talkpages. We need to know: is this bloke an
insensitive jerk? We do not know this if all that user has done
is revert vandals, post to AIV, and use those silly {{testN}}
templates.
And that's before you even look at the concern SlimVirgin raised.
I had not considered it, but it is true: if we don't know what the
"voice" of an admin candidate "sounds" like, it's much easier for
a Trojan admin to slip through unrecognised.
[0] Any user, most of the time, but admins are more likely to be
successful, because people pay more attention to us.
--
[[User:MarkGallagher]]
Jeff Raymond wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
>> a) Should we start considering whether or not the subject is a public
>> figure in deciding whether or not the article is appropriate? There
>> is, of course, no clear bright line...
>>
>> b) If not, why not? (Bonus points for giving an ethical argument)
> Because the line between "public" and "private" in non-legal purposes
> no longer exists.
Thinking of it as a line of demarcation, instead of a continuum, is part
of the difficulty people have in dealing with this.
> You don't get to choose whether you're public or private is the
> greater point. It's sort of like "marginal" or "minimal" or
> "slightly" notability, or being "a little bit pregnant." You may not
> *want* to be noteworthy or public or known or pregnant, or want others
> to be, but it happens and that's that.
Whether someone is a public figure is only the binary question you
present it as in the most superficial sense. Many people are
limited-purpose public figures. Some, though not all, are involuntarily
so. But it's not just about their choice, and it's overly simplistic to
elevate the denial that their choice matters into the determining issue.
Chosen or not, their limited status as a public figure in one context
does not mean that you can choose for them, and make them a public
figure for additional contexts. People trying to connect additional dots
and effectively doing original research and analysis is a serious
concern here.
The status of limited-purpose public figures will depend on such issues
as the significance of the issue in which they were involved, the extent
of coverage, the prominence of their role and whether they sought it
out, and their ability to make their personal viewpoints heard. All of
this goes into where they figure in the continuum from private to public.
Inherent in someone's status as a limited-purpose public figure are
limitations in how we can appropriately cover them. Sometimes it will be
fundamentally impossible to cover these people neutrally in a
stand-alone biographical article. Where to discuss their particular
situation, whether to name them in that discussion, and whether to have
their name be a redirect to that destination, are all legitimate
editorial issues.
> If we want to write a general interest encyclopedia, we need to be
> able to disconnect from our personal perspectives and situations and
> instead look at these issues dispassionately.
Indeed. But looking at issues dispassionately is not the same as
slavishly bowing to prerogative or process, either.
--Michael Snow
On 3 Jun 2007 at 17:11:38 -0500, "Slim Virgin" <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 6/3/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
> > [[User:Ptmccain]] seems to be another victim of this.
>
> Dan, with respect, I'd advise you to review all the diffs carefully
> before posting further. It will take you awhile, but you'll see for
> yourself that what you're saying is demonstrably false and misleading.
I've already apologized for my earlier confrontational tone and
failure to assume good faith. I'll try from now on to stick to facts
and logical opinions, not assumptions and grudges.
Nevertheless, and even after looking at more materials on that
particular user, I still think his permanent ban was an overreaction.
Yes, he made some mistakes (in some ways similarly to the user that's
on self-RFC now), but he's also done lots of productive contributions
(including contributing many freely-licensed images), and was clearly
not a troll or a sockpuppet. He's just one of several users who
wandered into a heated dispute and ended up touching the third rail
of Wikipedia politics, which is to do anything that can (by assuming
bad faith) be construed as being on "the same side" as the banned
troll WordBomb. If you assume good faith instead, his actions (which
included restoring a set of talk comments that included not only a
message from a sockpuppet of the banned user, but also a response
from Fred Bauder that seemed supportive of that user's claims in this
instance... so it can easily be construed as constituting an admin's
warning which is improper to remove from a talk page) had a
reasonable explanation that didn't necessarily involve enabling
trolling.
Even an evil troll can be right sometimes, and it's wrong to kill the
messenger who points that out.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
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