I am in one sense amused, in another sense astonished, that Ellen
Hambro, the leader of what is effectively the Norwegian Environmental
Protection Agency, up for AFD, and even more astonished to see some long
time contributors voting to delete it.
Here is a fact: Ellen Hambro is covered in a paper encyclopedia, "Store
norske leksikon", which is the largest, and most well-known of all
contemporary general-purpose Norwegian encyclopedias written on 15
volumes of paper.
And yet I see people rejecting this encyclopedia as "not intellectually
independent" and "crypto-official".
I would not be writing this list if this were a one-off occurrence, but
this is the third time in only a few weeks that I have seen encyclopedia
subjects (and this means: has a separate article in a general-purpose
paper encyclopedia) nominated for deletion. The other two are the
articles [[Glamour (presentation)]] and [[Star Shipping]], the latter
which was nominated for *speedy* deletion, and had that speedy tag stuck
on it for several hours.
There comes a point when we need to do a reality check. The reality is
that we are in danger of deleting a subject which a commercial
general-purpose print encyclopedia has deemed notable enough to be
within their limited pages. Deleting any of these articles will be an
action more profound than deleting Mzoli's, Terry Shannon, or Pownce
would ever be.
I fear that the zeal to delete articles in the name of enforcing
policies and the notability guidelines are starting to encroach upon the
fundamentals Wikipedia's mission to be an encyclopedia. We cannot
possibly claim to be comprehensive if we start deleting subjects covered
in the very works we want to surpass. I really don't consider myself an
"inclusionist", but is it really all that "inclusionist" to support
keeping subjects traditionally covered by encyclopedias?
Sjakkalle
Hi. I hope it is ok to raise this issue on this mailing list.
>From my recent observations, the current situation on Wikipedia often seems
to be that as soon a user expresses any concern over an indef block, they
are immediately accused of being a meatpuppet (on AN/I or similar) and in
many cases, blocked themselves. After a recent incident, I have been told
about a number of similar cases. Had it not been for the fact that I've been
a wikipedia editor for over four years, I suspect I too would have been
blocked on the assumption of being a meatpuppet.
I saw some recent posts on this mailing list where the question was asked
"do meatpuppets exist"? I'm pretty much of the opinion that the term itself
ought to be avoided, as it seems all too easily be used to refer to a group
of editors who share a view.
There are various policies on Wikipedia that deal with sockpuppets, but
these seem to have changed over time to include meatpuppets, and it seems to
have become largely ignored as to what the policy said at the point that it
became policy.
The same seems to apply to WP:DUCK. This was originally brought in as
WP:SPADE to allow people to call a spade a spade, i.e. to say that something
is what it is. It was at this point it became policy. Then it somehow got
linked (hijacked?) to become WP:DUCK, which seems to now be used to state
that something must be a duck if it shares a few attributes with a duck.
WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE seem to me to be hugely different arguments. WP:SPADE
is about stating facts, whereas WP:DUCK seems to be about making often wild
accusations based on correlations.
In case an example is needed to back up my above observations, below is a
link of where I was concerned that WP:DUCK and accusations of meatpuppetry
were getting out of hand, and that supervision instead of blocking may have
been more appropriate:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=252571853#Why_is_User:ImNotObama_blocked.3F
Regards,
R E Broadley
This is off-topic for Wikipedia specifically, but on-topic for those
interested in the reliability of academic sources generally:
There's currently a big discussion in the academic science publishing
& library world over the case of M. S. El Naschie, the editor in chief
of "Chaos, Solitons and Fractals," an expensive Elsevier journal. It
appears he's been using the journal to essentially self-publish his
own pet theories (300+ single-author papers), as well as
misrepresenting his own academic credentials. This has been going on
for years, but someone apparently just noticed now. The journal is
typically bundled with subscriptions to other Elsevier journals in big
academic libraries, so a fair number of people in the math community
have access to it.
* Here's a nice summary:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math-editor-controve…
* the original post that broke the story:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie.html
* and the Nature article on all of this:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081126/full/456432a.html
What I find fascinating is that the way the debate is playing out, at
least in public blog posts and comments, is very similar to the way
such debates in Wikipedia play out (and at least one
scientist-wikipedian I know drew the connection, as well) --
accusations of sockpuppetry by Naschie to bolster his own reputation,
a sort of walled-garden of self-citations on Naschie's part,
accusations of failure to properly oversee the process on the part of
Elsevier, and a kind of he-said she-said debate about whether his
credentials are proper or not -- not to mention an interesting
argument over whether his math is legit or not between various experts
in the field ("appeals to authority" don't work when everyone is more
or less an authority, though many people seem to be concurring that
Naschie's work is nonsense).
Of course, what's interesting and troubling for us is that this is a
respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in
setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing
Wikipedia is supposed to use as a "reliable source." But (naturally, I
suppose) the academic publishing process is as open to failure as any
other publishing or reporting process.* And I can't help but think
that in a more open process -- an open access journal, say, or even
Wikipedia -- this would not have gone on for so long or played out in
the same way.
(At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our own
relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy
there).
-- phoebe
* Note this is not a rant about [[WP:RS]]; I <3 reliable sources and
think we should use more of them whenever possible. But a grain or
three of salt is always helpful.
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
Apologies for accidentally over-quoting on my last post :-s
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:22 PM, R E Broadley
<rebroad+wikimedia.org(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On the show, the last thing said (in the mp3) file is "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image".
> Does this mean that:-
> 1) they have just blocked the URL to the actual JPG file?
> 2) they have blocked the URL to the actual article (not just the image file)?
> If it's number 2, I wonder if Susan Robertson would argue it to be correct to say "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image" if the whole of wikipedia.org had been blocked?
> Cheers,
> Rebroad
This has been discussed at some length on this list before (ad
infinitum, as I recall), and people might like to know it seems to
have discreetly moved to the next stage: IFD. This is, what, round
four?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion/2008_D…
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
I feel like this has come up before, but I can't find anything --
Does anyone have recommendations for good video/movie tutorials on how
to edit Wikipedia (or MediaWiki)? A colleague is looking to make some
to augment a class about Wikipedia -- no need to reinvent the wheel if
good ones already exist.
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
For anyone interested. The IP address checks out to National Chengchi
University.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joanne <94356502(a)nccu.edu.tw>
Date: 2008/11/18
Subject: **JUNK** About Participate in Wikipedia - contributing.
To: press(a)wikimedia.org.uk
Dear friend,
We are conducting a study on the motivation of the knowledge sharing
on Wikipedia.
The contributors' experience to Wikipedia is very important to the
design and management of this knowledge platform.
Would you please post the following on-line questionnaire message to
Wikipedia or forward the message to the members?
After the survey is done, we will randomly select twenty persons and
present them with USB 2GB Flash Drives.
Besides, with each valid questionnaire, we will donate US $1 dollar to
the Wikimedia Foundation.
The result of this survey is analyzed in an anonymous way and is only
regarded as the academic use.
Please help us to complete the data collection.
Thanks so much for your help.
Cheers,
Joanne
[The Message content]
Dear friends,
We are conducting a study on the motivation of the knowledge
sharing on Wikipedia. Your experience of the read from and write to
Wikipedia is very important to the design and management of this
knowledge platform. The survey will take about three minutes. We
deeply appreciate your help on answering the following questions.
After the survey is done, we will randomly select twenty persons
and present them with USB 2GB Flash Drives. Besides, with each valid
questionnaire, we will donate US $1 dollar to the Wikimedia
Foundation. The result of this survey is analyzed in an anonymous way
and is only regarded as the academic use. Please feel free to fill out
the questionnaire. Thanks again for your time and valuable input.
May happiness and health be with you everyday!
★ On-line Questionnaire: http://140.119.19.152:8080/wiki/
Shari S. C. Shang
Eldon Y. Li
Professor,
Department of Management Information Systems,
National Chengchi University
Tel.: +886-2-82374038； Fax: +886-2-29393754 ； E-mail: s1213527(a)yahoo.com.tw