> On 10/1/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam(a)inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>> OK, now I'm interested. What was the article like when it was
>> deleted? Can't
>> we copy these things somewhere before deleting them? I'd like to
>> include the
>> article in Jnanabase.
I thought you were already running an automated 'bot that pumps all
the articles deleted from Wikipedia into McFly?
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
On 9/30/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/30/05, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Sounds very like an obsessive deletionist who's more concerned with
> > process than product. AFD seems to encourage that sort of thing.
> Have you tried visiting Votes for undeletion lately? I did so recently and
> argued for undeletion of an article. I was asked if I was addressing the
> content or the process. Why the content, of course, I said. I was then
> told that this wasn't what VFU was for. Sure enough, the phrase in the
> undeletion policy that refers to Wikipedia being a better place with an
> article than without was nowhere to be seen on the page. I updated the
> instructions *directly* from the undeletion policy. This was reverted
> several times. Some people claimed that policy had been changed. I pointed
> out, by reference to the actual policy, that it hadn't. Whereupon a
> proposal to change policy was made--to exclude any reference undeletion
> based ona judgement that the content was good for wikipedia.
> At that point I decided it was time to leave people who wanted to play
> silly buggers to get on with it.
That's really breathtakingly stupid behaviour. I suppose I'm going to
have to look and find who these morons are.
- d.
I have to admit to being guilty of oppose-and-run. :(
--Ryan
> From: "Zachary Harden" <zscout370(a)hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball
>
> I would also mention that a group by the name of Featured Article Drive
> (FAD) is also trying to help work on articles to get up to that standard,
> and they have done a good job so far. But, this is a problem where I run
> into and others do: we write about stuff no one cares about. I had some
> FAC's fail because no one would comment on them or they do not want to fix
> things like the grammar themselves. We should try to point out that at FAC
> that though the nominator might say "I think that this article should be FA"
> and those coming to the FAC should work with him all they can, instead of
> just objecting then leave.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zachary Harden
--
___________________________________________________________
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For those around here that like statistics, I have
updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFD_100_days
to include some information on outcomes.
For the cliffnotes version:
100 Days of AFD, June 1 - September 8
11211 AFDs, 75% deleted
86773 votes, 7202 voters
170 individuals closing at least 1 AFDs
The empirically determined threshold for dividing
delete and keep outcomes is 63.5% favoring deletion.
This does not account for any vote discounting that
may have occurred. If one assumes that most socks are
there to vote keep, then this is probably consistent
with the two-thirds majority that most people talk
about as beign required for AFD consensus.
This threshold (63.5%) is enough to predict the
outcome of 94% of AFDs. Suggesting that only about 6%
of AFDs are subject to any significant degree of vote
interpretation from admins.
Inspection of the closing patterns for the most active
admins suggest that none are substantially different
than this, with the exception of Tony Sidaway who
already admits having stronger deletion requirements
than most, i.e.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tony_Sidaway/Deletion/Closing
Curiously there are some admins that like to mostly
close as delete or mostly close as keep, but they
don't seem to be stretching expectations in order to
do so.
I also noted a number of AFDs (about 2%) that
statistically speaking seemed to stretch credibility.
Keep results for AFDs with no apparent keep votes,
Delete results for AFDs with 80% keep votes, etc.
However after inspecting a few of these, I've yet to
find one that really looked like an abuse. Some seem
to be sockpuppet fests (i.e. 23 votes, 5 from
established accounts). Some are cases of my parser
failing to count votes because they are written as
essays or otherwise expressed in strange ways. And at
least one is the result of temporarily brain-dead
admin writing "delete" on a vote he decided to close
as "keep". There are still many many more I haven't
looked at, but I am optimistic that most AFDs are
being closed in a reasonably consistent manner.
Anyway, just a little more fuel for the endless
debate. ;-)
-DF
On 10/2/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> DF wrote:
>
> >For those around here that like statistics, I have
> >updated my automated statistical analysis of AFD,
> >
> >
> This is fantastic, thank you. I would like to call >
everyone's attention to something, though. On your
> table of the most common AFD closers, there is
> User:Jni, who closed 117 AFDs. Of each AFD he
> closed, 100% were deletes, with a 30% estimated
> threshold for delete votes.
>
> If I'm reading this correctly, that means he only
> needed 30% of the votes to be delete to decide that
> there was consensus to delete.
>
<snip other stuff>
Jni is something of a special case. In 117 closes, he
never closed as Keep. Hence at some empirical level,
his threshold might equally well be anything below his
weakest consensus. The algorithm being used picks a
number in the middle of the many equivalent values, so
it may be skewing a lot lower than is sensible. A
more useful column to look at in cases like this is
the "Est. Deviation", this shows how many AFDs he
might have been expected to close differently had he
been using a 63.5% value which is the average. For
Jni, that value is 2, meaning that he closed as delete
roughly two AFDs with less than 63.5% votes for
deletion.
Sorry for the confusion.
-DF
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Crap vfd nominations
>
> I have speedy kept the following vfd nominations, and been threatened
> with a block:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/
> Freehold_Circle
> "Here is another nn traffic circle. Roadcruft. Delete --JAranda | yeah
> 02:40, 28 September 2005 (UTC)"
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/
> Laurelton_Circle
> "I don't normally get into the road wars on AfD, but this is a former
> traffic circle, now converted to a traffic light. Its notability
> derives
> from the notability of the history of the traffic light. Delete. Chick
> Bowen 21:36, 26 September 2005 (UTC)"
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/
> Flemington_Circle
> "This is one of three traffic circles in Flemington, New Jersey, a
> village of 4000 people. Pilatus 18:34, 29 September 2005 (UTC)"
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/
> White_Horse_Circle
> "Oh cmon its a traffic circle nn Delete --Aranda56 01:26, 22 September
> 2005 (UTC)"
>
> What the fuck is with people?
If a nomination is crap, explain why in the AfD. If your explanations
are convincing, people will vote to keep. If nominators notice that
their nomination has been buried by a near-unanimous string of keeps,
they'll be embarrassed and stop making problematical nominations.
This procedure has the great advantage in that it works and that it
does not making people angry thereby provoking counter-responses
directed at your manner rather than at the merit of the topic.
In _any_ AfD discussion, it is much more helpful to address the
_particular_ article under discussion than to pass blanket judgments
on an entire class of articles. Nominations that say "oh cmon its a
traffic circle" and "roadcruft" are not helpful. Neither are
responses that say "all traffic circles are notable." Even if you
believe that all traffic circles should be deleted or that all
traffic circles should be kept, neither of these extremes is a widely
held opinion and repetitive, strident assertions of these general
principles are not going to create a consensus. (Neither do
repetitive, strident assertions that there _is_ consensus in areas
where there actually is not).
When nominating a traffic circle, give reasons why _this particular_
traffic circle shouldn't be kept. Two of the nominations mentioned
above do this, although not in a very coherent way. When arguing that
an article on a traffic circle should be kept, say why _this
particular_ traffic circle is worth keeping. Is the article
particularly good? Do traffic reports in the city reference it?
The reason for doing this has nothing to do with The Principle Of The
Thing. The reason for doing it is that these techniques _work_.
(Another technique that works for keeping articles is to improve them
a bit _before_ entering the nomination discussion).
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
> If only people spent more time reducing the backlog on requested
> articles. Those wouldn't be half as controversial as roads and schools
> and help to improve the coverage of Wikipedia. It's not as if they're
> writing what they know about anyway, or those road articles would be
> near FA instead of stubs.
Instead of fussing about improving the AfD process, I'd like to give
some thought to improving the article _request_ process. Right now
it's actually quite difficult, as you're expected to thread your way
through a deeply nested Roget's-Thesaurus-like logical organization
of the sum of human knowledge to find the place to insert a request.
I'd like _requesting_ an article to be truly as easy as _creating_
one. That is, I'd a link or button which automatically adds your
request to some list somewhere... and lets other people sort 'em out
into categories.
I honestly feel that many problem substubs--the ones which give
virtually no information that is not in their titles--should be
treated either in one of two ways. Many substubs look to me like good-
faith efforts to point out a topic that someone would like covered--
but does not have the time or the skills to make a usable start on.
If a stub is not a usable launching pad for an article, then it does
not serve any function other than pointing out the absence of an
article on a worthy topic. It is, then, not an article, not a stub,
not the start of an article--it is an article request made in an
inappropriate way.
I think the appropriate disposition of such main-namespace-pages is
to delete them from the main namespace and re-enter them as article
requests.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net>
> Date: September 26, 2005 10:56:17 AM MDT
> To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
> Cc: Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net>
> Subject: New Internet Rules in China
>
>
> These new regulations will undoubtedly affect both the English and
> Chinese Wikipedias:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/26/international/asia/26china.html?
>
> Fred
>
On 9/30/05, Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini(a)comcast.net> wrote:
> I think far, far too much attention gets paid to the worst articles on
> Wikipedia - the studs, the vanity articles, the stuff of debatable
> notability (schools!!) while not nearly enough effort goes into making
> crappy articles into good ones.
> -Mark
I agree with this. And so does MacGyverMagic. So in the interests of
1) improving Wikipedia, 2) good clean fun, and 3) cutthroat
competition....
Wikipedia:Article rescue contest -- put your money where your mouth
is, and improve something that survived AfD on the idea that it could
be a good encyclopedic article if only it were cleaned up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_rescue_contest
...because too many articles are put on AfD, kept, and then never
touched again after their survival.
(If this sounds familiar, maybe it should; it was proposed once before
but never followed up on, but now we put an actual date in the rules,
so it's official. And yes, of course it was inspired by Danny's
contest.)
-Kat
[[User:Mindspillage]]
--
http://www.mindspillage.net *** IM: LucidWaking
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escaped the chronicler's mind." --Douglas Adams