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Daniel R. Tobias | 1 Feb 2006 01:22

Re: Policy on putting email addresses on wiki pages

On 31 Jan 2006 at 13:04, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa@...> wrote:

> On 1/31/06, Tom Steinberg <tom@...> wrote:
> >
> > Is it permissable to put email addresses on wikipedia, if they're
> > already public?
> 
> Of course it is! How on earth are people to be able to communicate
> with one another if their email addresses are hidden?
> 
> I profess profound distaste for the practice of concealing, mangling,
> and distorting email addresses.  I myself have had an email address on
> my userpage for well over a year and can count the amount of spam that
> has gotten though on the fingers of one hand, so there's no excuse.

Me too... I've got a strong dislike of all the various types of 
address munging used online, which I find extremely bothersome and 
unaesthetic; and I haven't changed this opinion despite getting spam 
by the ton (metric or imperial).  This includes the whole panoply of 
techniques from turning it into an image, spelling it out in 
increasingly creative ways (people seem to find "user at something 
dot net" too simple, so they come up with ever more convoluted ways 
of saying it, like "username 'user' with an at sign followed by the 
hostname in the top level domain 'net' of 'something'), or messed-up 
addresses where they have to tell you to "Remove the NOSPAM", and so 
on.

--

-- 
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
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Daniel R. Tobias | 1 Feb 2006 02:09

Re: Here's an interesting one

On 31 Jan 2006 at 15:13, Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> wrote:

> I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
> deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
> instantly by any admin.

...and then likely re-deleted by yet another admin, and then 
precipitate a big, acrimonious battle between proponents and 
opponents of keeping the article, possibly with attempted action 
taken against the undeleting admin as being a "rogue" who 
disrespected rules and process.

--

-- 
== 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/

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Fastfission | 1 Feb 2006 04:04
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Re: Re: US Congress Staff Editing Wikipedia

On 1/31/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia@...> wrote:
> Now there's a question - if the US government offered us money, no
> strings attached, how would people respond?

Why, they'd probably hitch up a saddle to their pigs and fly around the city!

FF
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Jimmy Wales | 1 Feb 2006 05:09
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Re: The deletion paradox

Steve Bennett wrote:
>>I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an
>>absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a
>>minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).
>
> It can be really hard to tell the difference when you're not familiar
> with the subject matter.

It can be, yes.  But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there are cases
where there is an unsourced negative claim that anyone could easily spot
and remove.  You don't need to be an expert in anything to know that
claiming someone was briefly suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy
assassinations requires a source and should be instantly removed if
there is no source.

> Another reason why chants of "don't just
> report the bad articles, fix them!" aren't helpful - if you assume
> that whatever is in the article is mostly correct but just needs
> reformatting, you end up making matters worse.

Totally!  What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of
having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the
same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.

> In my recent sample, I changed an "External Links" section to
> "Sources". Then something bothered me, I ended up checking out the
> links, and realised that the whole article was a puff piece for a
> probably non-notable Indian journalist. But I really have no expertise
> in determining whether someone is notable, or whether writing for the
> Times in India is significant or not. So I tagged the thing
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Jimmy Wales | 1 Feb 2006 05:09
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Re: The deletion paradox

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> wrote:
> 
>>In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
>>stub.  We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
>>article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
>>existing company.
> 
> 
> Actually that has long been one of our criteria for speedy deletion,
> and I believe that it has always been implemented aggressively.

I'll present some counter-examples in a day or two (have to ask other
people to help me remember them), and we can analyze what went wrong.

--Jimbo
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Michael Snow | 1 Feb 2006 05:25
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Re: US Congress Staff Editing Wikipedia

Tim Starling wrote:

>Michael Snow wrote:
>  
>
>>Tim Starling wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Michael Snow wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Bryan Derksen wrote:
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>>>My secret dream is to see the United States Congress hauled up before
>>>>>the Arbitration Committee. Maybe we could get them to pass clearer
>>>>>fair-use legislation as part of their parole.
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>Clearer fair use legislation is not likely to do us any good. What we
>>>>want is *more generous* fair use legislation.
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>US fair use legislation is already among the most generous in the
>>>world. Coupled with US-centric
>>>Wikipedia policy, this has the effect that anyone attempting to
>>>distribute Wikipedia offline outside
>>>the US risks being sued for copyright infringment. I'd prefer it if US
>>>fair use legislation was
>>>brought into line with the rest of the world, i.e. made more
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Jimmy Wales | 1 Feb 2006 05:36
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Re: Here's an interesting one

geni wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> wrote:
> 
>>Steve Bennett wrote:
>>
>>>Wikipedia suffers more from an incorrect deletion than from an
>>>incorrect keep. Sort of how society suffers more from the execution of
>>>an innocent person than the incorrect non-execution of a guilty one.
>>
>>I don't agree with your perception of the balance.  An incorrect
>>deletion of an article is nearly nothing to us -- it can be undeleted
>>instantly by any admin.
> 
> 
> No it can't. Or do you wish to rethink the entire role of admins?

I think a few people have gotten quite confused about the role of admins
due to the excessive rules lawyering.  Maybe they are the ones who need
to rethink it.

--Jimbo
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Jimmy Wales | 1 Feb 2006 05:37
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Re: Here's an interesting one

Delirium wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 
>> And it's better to have nothing on a marginal topic than to have
>> something that is embarassing to us in any way at all.
>>  
>>
> I strongly disagree with that; eventually producing a good encyclopedia
> ought to take precedence over immediately gaining good PR (or avoiding
> bad PR).

Eventually producing a good encyclopedia is _exactly_ what I'm talking
about.  That's why it's better to delete crap than keep it.  Having tons
and tons of junk articles does not help us create a good quality
encyclopedia; it encourages more of the same.

--Jimbo
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geni | 1 Feb 2006 06:15
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Re: The deletion paradox

On 2/1/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > On 1/31/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> wrote:
> >
> >>In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
> >>stub.  We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
> >>article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
> >>existing company.
> >
> >
> > Actually that has long been one of our criteria for speedy deletion,
> > and I believe that it has always been implemented aggressively.
>
> I'll present some counter-examples in a day or two (have to ask other
> people to help me remember them), and we can analyze what went wrong.
>
> --Jimbo

Hmm some historical ones are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Substub&oldid=32649995

--
geni
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geni | 1 Feb 2006 06:18
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Re: Here's an interesting one

On 2/1/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales@...> wrote:
> I think a few people have gotten quite confused about the role of admins
> due to the excessive rules lawyering.  Maybe they are the ones who need
> to rethink it.
>
> --Jimbo

The tradition of no big deal was never consistant with capabilities
allowed by the softwear. However process limts how and when those
powers can be used. Take that away and admins become very powerful
indeed.

--
geni
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Gmane