[WikiEN-l] Proposal: limited extension of semi-protection policy

Tue May 30 21:22:17 UTC 2006

On 5/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
> > >
> > > It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
> > > announce the death of Wikipedia.  Apparently, 154 articles
> > > semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
> >
> >
> > Not that your argument through statistics is in any way meaningful.
> > 154 /1,151,768 is more than 100 ppm; 100 ppm of carbon monoxide,
> mercury,
> > arsenic, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, vinyl chloride, formaldehyde,
> > benzene, ammonia, etc. would kill you dead. Or at least give you any
> number
> > of horrible cancers.
> >
> > Water is fluoridated to 1 ppm.
> >
> > Motorcycles cause 0.22 deaths per million vehicle miles. New Zealand has
> 100
> > maternal deaths per million births. Drugs kill about 100 per million
> people
> > in US urban areas.
> >
> > In other words, that 154 articles are semiprotected out of a population
> of
> > 1.2 million could be insignificant, great, or terrible.
> >
> > But on its own it's just a factoid, not a counterargument.
>
>
> This is pretty rich coming from someone who just complained that we
> shouldn't argue with appeals to emotion. If comparing semi-protection
> to mothers dying while giving birth to babies isn't an appeal to
> emotion, I don't know what is.
>
> All your analogies are useless. The chemistry ones are just
> ridiculous, there is no analogy between how poisons damage the body to
> how semi-protection damages the encyclopedia. There's to much science
> you're ignoring, the way chemicals work.
>
> The deaths per millions analogies are not only pretty cheap shots,
> they are also just as flawed. The reason why 100 maternal deaths per 1
> million births is not a tragedy because it's such a high number
> (because it isn't), it's a tradgedy because people are *actually*
> dying. 1 death per million would be tragic. 1 death per billion would
> be tragic. The numbers are meaningless.

I was only pulling out death statistics because they're easy to find and
because death is the topic. I stuck in the floridation example. I could have
(and probably should have) put in more random stats, say of how much zinc we
need.

I wasn't attempting to make any analogies between semi-protection in
floridation or motorcycle crashes. I don't think there's any equivalency. I
was merely pointing out that being "vanishingly small" is dependent on the
situation.