I like how explanation was done in the Chagas disease article. Use the academic terms so people learn them for later use, but explain difficult stuff the first time it's mentioned. You get the best from both worlds. The scientists have the academic talk and the "normal" readers still understand it. --Mgm On 7/9/05, Dan Grey <dangrey(a)gmail.com> wrote:

There's an old discussion at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reading_level as well. Tim (BaronLarf)

He has used that argument many times to justify removal of BCE/CE; now that it has been exposed, it will be more difficult to do so. Interesting opinion. Thanks for sharing. Jay.

Considering he campaigned vociferously against BCE/CE, modified the Manual of Style to forbid its use, edited over 700 articles to remove it, "resigned" from Wikipedia and proceeded to remove it from 300 more articles as a IP editor, and has now returned to Wikipedia and continues to remove it, think the "Good faith" well in this particular case has run dry. "Good faith" has reasonable limits. He's used this exact argument to remove BCE/CE from articles before; it's hardly a stretch. Jay.

On 10/07/05, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> wrote: Some of the drug articles are quite inpenetrable. I would not be suprised, however, if most of the people who read the drugs articles are people who've just been prescribed them. Pharmacologists are never going to come looking to WP to read up on drugs. So why write at their level, rather than a laymans? Take, for example, paracetamol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Mechanism_of_Toxicity What the hell does that mean?! It is, frankly, total garbage. Completely correct, no doubt, but meaningless to the vast amjority of people - and a lot of people want to know why paracetamol can kill them so easily. What to do? I have no idea. Info like that can't be binned, of course. Maybe we could have sub-sections for it - "In depth" or something. But we need human-readable explanations too. Unfortunetly, I can't even begin to convert that into something that's actually understandable to, say, my mum, because I barely understand it myself :-). Dan

19 hours ago, according to GMail, I sent identical emails to several different regulars here, asking them to keep "a careful pair of eyes" on the situation in [[Government of Australia]] where an editor with no connection to me whatsoever had highlighted the same error that I had six months previously. I must stress this point. Zero connection. Zero communication. Not a sockpuppet, not a friend, not anything at all. Can I ask that those people take a look at the ongoing situation, summarised below. If they have access to "sockpuppet-detection" tools, I ask that they use them. I would like to know what is going on, because it looks to me like an editor in good faith has been treated very poorly indeed, and that both he and I deserve apologies, especially from the admin who blocked him. I make the point that my last edit to the GofA article was 17:08, 24 May 2005, when I corrected a typo, and to the discussion page on 31 May 2005, shortly before the ArbCom case began at which time I voluntarily ceased making edits to either page. Peter ==Summary== 23:39, 9 July 2005 User:Pwqn edits [[Government of Australia]] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Government_of_Australia&diff=… 23:50, 9 July 2005 User:cyberjunkie reverts User:Pwqn and makes a note on the talk page to this effect, mentioning "the same ridiculousness" and stating that the editor "has a long edit history so I don't think s/he is a sockpuppet" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AGovernment_of_Australia&am… 00:08, 10 July 2005 User:cyberjunkie says: "I don't want to see a return to the frustrations and viciousness that this issue has caused". I can heartily echo this, having been on the receiving end of most of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… 04:17, 10 July 2005 User:Pwqn makes a statement, concisely summarising his case and presenting a list of sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… 20:49, 10 July 2005 Adam Carr states (inter alia): "I will assume for the moment that Pwqn is a good-faith editor" but "there is '''absolutely no way''' this question can be re-opened and re-debated because a new editor has come along and wants to reopen the whole process". http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… 20:53, 10 July 2005 Adam Carr moves a lot of the discussion (including ongoing material) to archives. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… 08:07, 11 July 2005 User:Kangaroopedia (who looks very much like a sockpuppet of someone's) makes an edit entitled "Showcasing Adam Carr's Doublethink". http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… 09:08, 11 July 2005 User:Lacrimosus makes a comment entitled: "showcasing the Skyringers' stupidity" http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… Current revision (as at 10:08 11 July 2005) User:jtdirl states: "You can usually tell Skyring's clones by their ignorance of constitutional law and legal principles" and "He really must think we are a shower of fools not to spot his little games." http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Government_of_Australia&… 04:52, 10 July 2005, Jtdirl blocked Pwqn (expires 04:52, 10 August 2005) (contribs) (sockpuppet of suspended Skyring, or one of the 'people' he threatened to unlease to continue doctoring articles if he was banned.) 08:20, 11 July 2005, Jtdirl blocked Kangaroopedia (expires 08:20, 11 August 2005) (contribs) (sockpuppet of Skyring or one of those he promised to unleash to push his agenda when banned from certain pages) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist User:jtdirl is an admin whose contributions to the article and discussion page are many and lengthy, extending to many thousands of words. He is directly involved in this discussion, and at the very least, I see his intemperate and abusive blocking of a good faith editor as something warranting discussion. -- Peter in Canberra

On 11/07/05, Skyring <skyring(a)gmail.com> wrote: As Peter provided links, the least I could do was go through them, and yes, this does appear to be a case where an admin got it wrong. Jtdirl should have asked an admin who is unconnected with the article to investigate, rather than act himself. Shouldn't be too difficult for another admin to unblock Pwqn. Dan

"MacGyverMagic/Mgm" <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:fb7fdd9c05071105545dabd943@mail.gmail.com... On 7/10/05, Dan Grey <dangrey(a)gmail.com> wrote: That section has, at time of reading, one single wikilink. This presents a very good case for raising the bar on frequency of linking to allow the first instance in any given section to be linked, rather than in the whole article: I don't want to have to scroll up an unknown distance to find where [[conjugation]] might be linked just so that I can find out WTF it means, for example. I wonder if there is also a problem wherein people are afraid to make short, simple articles defining technical terms, which would cut down drastically on duplication and allow wider linking, because of the perceived mania for "getting rid of stubs" and "moving definitions to wiktionary". HTH HAND -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

On 7/12/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is> wrote: Starting from when I was a small child reading them on the living room floor, I've never fully grasped the reasons why an encyclopedia was not just a superset of the dictionary. I understand why dictionaries don't have encyclopedic articles in it; they're more narrowly focused, and don't have the space. But why encyclopedias don't also contain a full dictionary is still a mystery to me. Each good article starts with a general definition of the term already. That said, interwiki links to Wiktionary are a very good thing to have. In the absence of a merged project, I would like to see them used much more. I think a section at the bottom of some articles, with links to definitions of uncommon words used in the article would also be nice. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

This post made me very happy :-) Thank you for sharing, Haukur. It's hard for me to imagine a car with a mouse tail... SJ On 7/12/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is> wrote:

Indeed. We have an article on [[fuck]], though :) Do we have a criterion for determining when a word is notable enough in itself and independently of the phenomena it describes to deserve an article? Regards, Haukur

On 7/12/05, Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu> wrote: Since languages are part of the greater world around them, and words are parts of that world, I still think encyclopedias that do not incorporate dictionaries are falling a little short of what they could be. In your example of a "frog", the dicdef could be the disambiguation page that leads to the encyclopedic discussion of the amphibian, the slang term for a French person, and even the use as a clothes fastener. Every word would be defined, and those with further specific use would be simply have a larger article, or have several child articles linked under them. We already start many (perhaps even most) articles with a definition of the term being discussed. The primary difference I see is that some of these "header definitions" could better serve the readers as less specific disambiguation pages. Although "frog" isn't the best example (and I can't think of a better one on the spot right now), why *wouldn't* we present someone looking up "frog" with the pronunciation and etymology of the word, along with three branches to follow for a fuller explanation? Isn't this much better than having articles "Frog", "Frog (slang)" and "Frog (fastener)" whose title only offers the barest description of what to expect from the link? The word is part and parcel of the overall value of the named concept in the world, and therefore is also encyclopedic. Encyclopedic phrases that define a concept don't belong in a dictionary, but I don't see a valid opposite corollary. I still see a dictionary as a subset of a "true" encyclopedia. I suspect that this hasn't been considered for adoption as part of the larger goal of Wikipedia in part because it is far more difficult (and usually less interesting) to accomplish than producing encyclopedia articles. I don't know for sure where the "not a dictionary" part of [[WP:NOT]] came from, but suspect it came from Mr. Wales. I'd be interested to know *why* being a superset of a dictionary is so taboo. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused

On the broader issue I quite agree, but this particular e-mail wasn't about that. Jay.