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Vanity of Article Writers, ...a time to cast away stones |
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Peter Damian |
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I have as much free time as a Wikipedia admin!
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 11th March 2009, 2:10pm) I have been struck lately by the growing smugness of "article writers." Those who avoid wonkery and administraton for the creaton or "improvement" of articles on Wikpedia. To hear them say you would thing they were creating some great works of literature. I got to tell you I don't see it. Even among our FA artistes. They use this activity much in the same way "vandal patrols" or policy wonks use the stuff they do for playing the game that is Wikipedia.
At best I'd say is "Well pretty good for a sand painting made in a sandbox surrounded by pre-schoolers flinging rocks and spraying down the place with pressure hoses...but come back tomorrow." Wikipedia articles, even FAs, are no great shakes. Certainly they don't justify the sense of self-entitlement these prima donnas pretend. Nor do they make up for the many levels or irresponsibilty directed at people outside the project that results from their work.
The only thing of any value in Wikipedia is it partially functions in the the same task Wikia Search fails at, collecting a list of manually generated sources (very imperfectly vetted) and indirectly returning them on the top of search request. You don't need article writers for this task at all.
I think that's a bit unfair. Granted there is a load of crap, but look at the article on the Fourth Crusade e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_crusadeIt neatly summarises the main couple of things you need to know about this crusade, has quite a bit of detail (considering it is probably one of the most obscure of the big crusades). It mentions Geoffrey Villhardouin and has links to an article about him - he is also an obscure character, so well done that article writer - Adam Bishop I think. QUOTE(Emperor @ Wed 11th March 2009, 4:46pm) For a while I made it a game to pick apart the featured article of the day. It wasn't all that difficult to find glaring errors, if I already knew something about the subject. For topics where I had no prior knowledge, Wikipedia articles seemed perfectly plausible. On the other hand, Wikipedia is often better than the other crap on the internet.
As the owner of another website that lives on user-generated content, I can honestly say that I love article writers.
As you say, it is also easy to find stuff that is moderate to complete nonsense.
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UseOnceAndDestroy |
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This point gets buried a lot in the noise of BLP and who's-banning-who: the general quality of wikipedia is awful, so much so its main additions to "the sum of human knowledge" are question marks and negative numbers. Want to know what an MPLS is? Wikipedia will hand you this drivel. Want to help your kid find out why salt melts ice on the sidewalk? Prefer the page at frostburg.edu before you subject the nipper to the mumbling density of wikipedia's treatment. I could go on listing. Maybe it’s a product of writing by self-selected committee, but the dominant style on WP is strangulated and inaccessible, and too frequently makes understanding a topic just a little bit harder. For those editors considering quitting who can write well - I'd encourage you to write independently, you'll do better. For those who can't - for god's sake, just stop.
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Sarcasticidealist |
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Head exploded.
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I'd agree that the overall quality of Wikipedia is not high. In particular, very few FAs meet the nominal FA prose requirement of "engaging, even brilliant" (mine don't). The de facto prose standard for FAs is "competent, free of easily noticable technical faults and without any really terrible stylistic decisions." But for many subjects - including almost all of those that FAs - Wikipedia provides the clearest, most accessible, free online treatment.
Wikipedia is most useful not when it's a substitute for other sources, but when it's a substitute for ignorance.
As for GBG's original point, there's a segment of article writers for whom smugness is endemic. But there's an observer bias there, just as there is for admins: the article writers you notice are the ones prancing around ANI shrieking that the Wikipolitician caste is ruining the encyclopedia, and that everybody should actually be more like them (the article writers).
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Skinny87 |
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As an article writer, and an FA contributor, I don't think I'm particularly vain; I like my articles and think they're quite good, but I'm not going to say they're brilliant. Far from it; my prose is probably average, for example.
I'd agree that wikipedia isn't the font of all human knowledge it's sometimes portrayed as being, but I'd also agree that it's better than nothing at all, and probably the best organized on the internet. My articles aren't comprehensive, even when they're at FA level, they're often lacking (non-vital) sources that I can't access or afford. But I'd like to think that they're as comprehensive as they can be, and that they give the reader a fairly detailed and neutral view of what occurred. Ultimately, they're a starting point - no one should be citing them in an essay or thinking they're the best source of knowledge for that particular topic. A good wiki article should be well-sourced to allow the reader to find those sources for themselves whilst they get at least a general understanding of the topic.
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Obesity |
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I taste as good as skinny feels.
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Give it a rest, GBG. FA writers are the last place you should be directing your idle, pissy and predictable ire. You never struck me as a particularly insightful aesthetic critic, but it shouldn't take Harold Bloom to point out that, Pokémon and Power Rangers paeans excepted, the best Featured Articles demonstrate palpable literary style and substance, especially when compared to entries from, say, World Book (the dumbed-down paper encyclopedia for dummies, which was the only thing I had to read growing up). Must I drag out my favorite article once again as example? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._A._Andr%C3...edition_of_1897This is textbook, well, textbook. It's better than most textbooks. You sound bitter and uninformed to suggest otherwise. And it's not an isolated example. Who, may I ask, besides the inimitable Giano (known slightly more for his over-the-top posturing than for his fluid and witty style) constitutes this insufferable gang of smug, self-satisfied wankers? At this moment, the lady doing the best article work is Moni3. A industrious lesbian oddball from Florida, she is many things, but she is not a prima donna. She did the Harvey Milk article and is currently working on Museum of Bad Art (still a work in progress, but already mildly dazzling and, with a tiny bit of professional editing, would be suitable for a number of magazines). People like Moni3 (or Ceoil, or several others) naturally take pride in their full-time hobby (when you work for free, pride is all you can take), but they can hardly be accused of strutting about cyberspace demanding oblations; you know what they do? They write. A lot. You are what the kids call a hater, and I suspect you couldn't write your way out of a cardboard box (and don't come after me to your tu quoque's; I'm also practically illiterate and almost used the word "ablutions" instead of "oblations," above). People like you and others I won't mention see Wikipedia as Dimension X, or the Bizarro universe, when it in many respects approximates the regular universe more than we care to admit: full of nasty people, stacked to its eyeballs in bullshit, with a few reasonable souls and delightful, distracting baubles to be enjoyed, if you take the time to look for them. Repent. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/thumbsdown.gif) This post has been edited by Obesity:
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Sarcasticidealist |
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Head exploded.
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QUOTE(UseOnceAndDestroy @ Wed 11th March 2009, 6:28pm) It's a recurring wikipedian myth to position wikipedia and "nothing" as the only possibilities. Wikipedia is decidedly not better than a rich and diverse internet of independent sites and documents, created by people who actually understand the topics they're involved in. So why doesn't that network exist? Surely the people who actually understand what they're talking about aren't engaged in editing Wikipedia, so what's stopping them from setting up their own network? I've written three featured articles, all of which are, as featured articles go, of pretty middling quality. But each is the best free access online resource on the subject. That may not be true of all FAs, but it's true of a good many of them. Wikipedia has actually driven the creation of free access online information that, by all the evidence we have, would not otherwise exist in such a form. Besides that, there is utility in Wikipedia's organization, which is actually among its stronger suits; the interconnectivity of Wikipedia articles provides utility to the reader that would not exist from your mostly hypothetical diverse network of sites and documents.
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LuÃs Henrique |
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QUOTE(Emperor @ Wed 11th March 2009, 1:46pm) For a while I made it a game to pick apart the featured article of the day. It wasn't all that difficult to find glaring errors, if I already knew something about the subject. For topics where I had no prior knowledge, Wikipedia articles seemed perfectly plausible. But isn't this part of the problem? When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge. LuÃs Henrique
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Milton Roe |
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Known alias of J. Random Troll
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QUOTE(Sarcasticidealist @ Wed 11th March 2009, 10:27am) Wikipedia is most useful not when it's a substitute for other sources, but when it's a substitute for ignorance.
That's a really good quote. If Wikipedia was smart they would adopt it as a slightly-self-derogatory and helpful motto, like Google's DON'T BE EVIL. Of course, they're not very bright, as an institution. And institutionally, they have very little real ironic self-awareness, either. But I repeat myself... I'm impressed with the fact that Wikipedia has many critics who haven't paid the price to read its content. I mean, it's okay if you've edited little and are complaining about BLP defamation-- that is actively evil. But what about people who complain about content without having put in any work to improve it? Those are the narcissistic and entitled ones, who think information of the best quality should be FREEEEEE and complain if it isn't. Along with all the other necessities of life. Wikipedia here as mother's tit. It's very Freudian, but that's to be expected, since people who want good stuff for nothin' tend to be very childish. Okay, so as Obesity observes, Wikipedia IS very much like the real world: full of crap and assholes and with a lot of mediocrity and only a few gems. Well, it's free so WTF else did you expect?? Really? Being free I'm amazed that it's as good as it is. If we can rid it of the actively evil and malevolent parts, starting with BLP, I will declare myself satisfied. I've put enough work into the thing to read it free the rest of my life. And I don't think I "deserve" to get paid back what I put in. Still, I can say I've done my part and more.
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EricBarbour |
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QUOTE(UseOnceAndDestroy @ Wed 11th March 2009, 10:19am) Want to help your kid find out why salt melts ice on the sidewalk? Prefer the page at frostburg.edu before you subject the nipper to the mumbling density of wikipedia's treatment. nice find, that's one of the most obscurantist articles I've ever seen....while still being accurate. QUOTE You are what the kids call a hater, and I suspect you couldn't write your way out of a cardboard box (and don't come after me to your tu quoque's; I'm also practically illiterate and almost used the word "ablutions" instead of "oblations," above). People like you and others I won't mention see Wikipedia as Dimension X, or the Bizarro universe, when it in many respects approximates the regular universe more than we care to admit: full of nasty people, stacked to its eyeballs in bullshit, with a few reasonable souls and delightful, distracting baubles to be enjoyed, if you take the time to look for them. You both miss the point. For every well-written and useful FA, there's an unknown pile of crap like that freezing-point article. (or, for a random choice, this.) And nobody can even make up a vague statistic of how bad the problem is, because of the construction of MediaWiki's database and the sheer volume of material that has yet to be examined by a live human being who knows something about the subject.....
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Milton Roe |
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Known alias of J. Random Troll
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QUOTE(LuÃs Henrique @ Wed 11th March 2009, 3:10pm) But isn't this part of the problem?
When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge.
LuÃs Henrique
Sure, but you have that problem about most of what you learn in life, since you're hardly ever going to able to get your summaries directly from the greatest experts in the world, Charlie Rose style (how I envy that man his job). In the real world, gaining most knowledge is sort of like learning a new word in your vocabulary. You hear it once, this perfectly cromulent word, but you've never heard it before. Still from the way it's used, you begin to have some idea of what it means. As it's used more and more, you realize that your ignorance does not mean it wasn't cromulent, it must means YOU hadn't encountered it. But now you're aware of it. Studies show that when 3 year-olds are exposed to an articificial word, it only takes about 5 usages for them to hone in on its meaning pretty well, and that they do it rather like tracking an animal by scent. It doesn't start out perfect, but descends through the categories, until they nail it. Again, in the real world, you don't get to find out about iron ore refining from the bored steelworker sitting next to you on some transoceanic flight on which he wants to talk. Instead, you sort of need to know, don't have access to the net, and so you ask the people around you: "Know anything about iron ore refining"? And you get back something like: "A little. I dunno how they get the dirt out, but I know they have to take the iron oxide, mix it with coke in big furnace, and heat the blazes out of it till the carbon takes out the oxygen and molten iron is left. Then they blow pure oxygen through to get rid of more carbon, to get steel." So you still have an incomplete picture, but you know more than you did. Later you find the thing is self-heating and is called a blast furnace. And you learn out they get the dirt out, and so on and so on. That's Wikipedia, too. In some ways, as has been said by many people, one problem is that we expect too much of Wikipedia. If we could just fix the vandalism and defamation, we'd be left with sort of what you get from a very large roomful of decent, random people on any subject. And that's no small thing. It's bound to beat hell out of what you "know" just on your own.
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Jon Awbrey |
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Ï„á½° δΠμοι παθήματα μαθήματα γÎγονε
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 11th March 2009, 6:22pm) QUOTE(Sarcasticidealist @ Wed 11th March 2009, 10:27am) Wikipedia is most useful not when it's a substitute for other sources, but when it's a substitute for ignorance.
That's a really good quote. If Wikipedia was smart they would adopt it as a slightly-self-derogatory and helpful motto, like Google's DON'T BE EVIL. Of course, they're not very bright, as an institution. And institutionally, they have very little real ironic self-awareness, either. But I repeat myself … I'm impressed with the fact that Wikipedia has many critics who haven't paid the price to read its content. I mean, it's okay if you've edited little and are complaining about BLP defamation — that is actively evil. But what about people who complain about content without having put in any work to improve it? Those are the narcissistic and entitled ones, who think information of the best quality should be FREEEEEE and complain if it isn't. Along with all the other necessities of life. Wikipedia here as mother's tit. It's very Freudian, but that's to be expected, since people who want good stuff for nothin' tend to be very childish. Okay, so as Obesity observes, Wikipedia IS very much like the real world: full of crap and assholes and with a lot of mediocrity and only a few gems. Well, it's free so WTF else did you expect?? Really? Being free I'm amazed that it's as good as it is. If we can rid it of the actively evil and malevolent parts, starting with BLP, I will declare myself satisfied. I've put enough work into the thing to read it free the rest of my life. And I don't think I "deserve" to get paid back what I put in. Still, I can say I've done my part and more. Tagged for Web Searches under • Still Clueless After All These Years (WP:SCAATY) •
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Kato |
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dhd
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QUOTE(Obesity @ Wed 11th March 2009, 9:23pm) People like you and others I won't mention see Wikipedia as Dimension X, or the Bizarro universe, when it in many respects approximates the regular universe more than we care to admit: full of nasty people, stacked to its eyeballs in bullshit, with a few reasonable souls and delightful, distracting baubles to be enjoyed, if you take the time to look for them.
That could apply to almost anything. Even Fox News has the odd decent and delightful person involved. Look, when you see Wikipedia as a con-artist's sweatshop, or a plain bully, which are surely reasonable, proven positions to take by anyone's measure, then how else do you expect people to respond? That said, there are some really good articles on Wikipedia. As good as you are likely to get on a topic. Though these are scarce. And I have time for anyone who is in the act of creating something of worth. Months ago, I wrote here that the Art articles are dreadful - you hit the roof. But the plain fact is that they are terrible. Sure, you can point to some quality article on a Bosch painting, but they are few and far between. One needle in a haystack, after how many years now? The "Wisdom of Crowds" hasn't produced anything like the quality Wikipedios would like to believe.
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Jon Awbrey |
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Ï„á½° δΠμοι παθήματα μαθήματα γÎγονε
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 11th March 2009, 6:43pm) QUOTE(LuÃs Henrique @ Wed 11th March 2009, 3:10pm) But isn't this part of the problem?
When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge.
LuÃs Henrique
Sure, but you have that problem about most of what you learn in life, since you're hardly ever going to able to get your summaries directly from the greatest experts in the world, Charlie Rose style (how I envy that man his job). In the real world, gaining most knowledge is sort of like learning a new word in your vocabulary. You hear it once, this perfectly cromulent word, but you've never heard it before. Still from the way it's used, you begin to have some idea of what it means. As it's used more and more, you realize that your ignorance does not mean it wasn't cromulent, it must means YOU hadn't encountered it. But now you're aware of it. Studies show that when 3 year-olds are exposed to an articificial word, it only takes about 5 usages for them to hone in on its meaning pretty well, and that they do it rather like tracking an animal by scent. It doesn't start out perfect, but descends through the categories, until they nail it. Again, in the real world, you don't get to find out about iron ore refining from the bored steelworker sitting next to you on some transoceanic flight on which he wants to talk. Instead, you sort of need to know, don't have access to the net, and so you ask the people around you: "Know anything about iron ore refining"? And you get back something like: "A little. I dunno how they get the dirt out, but I know they have to take the iron oxide, mix it with coke in big furnace, and heat the blazes out of it till the carbon takes out the oxygen and molten iron is left. Then they blow pure oxygen through to get rid of more carbon, to get steel." So you still have an incomplete picture, but you know more than you did. Later you find the thing is self-heating and is called a blast furnace. And you learn out they get the dirt out, and so on and so on. That's Wikipedia, too. In some ways, as has been said by many people, one problem is that we expect too much of Wikipedia. If we could just fix the vandalism and defamation, we'd be left with sort of what you get from a very large roomful of decent, random people on any subject. And that's no small thing. It's bound to beat hell out of what you "know" just on your own. Tagged for Web Searches under • Koolaid Kontact Kontagion •
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EricBarbour |
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QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Wed 11th March 2009, 3:39pm) QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 11th March 2009, 10:32pm) And nobody can even make up a vague statistic of how bad the problem is, because of the construction of MediaWiki's database and the sheer volume of material that has yet to be examined by a live human being who knows something about the subject.....
Number of Featured ArticlesNumber of Good ArticlesArticles with at least one issue needing resolutionThe answer is left as an exercise for the student. That's very nice. Who devised these statistics? Where is the complete list of "good" articles? Define a "good article". Who decided this, and where's the written policy or standard? That count of "good articles" appears to be the work of a bot. Very funny. Skynet, I suppose? Where in this list is the category of "articles that have factual errors, are poorly written or are obscurantist"? This category contains only 126 articles. I'm fairly certain there are tens of thousands more which are not listed here (or anywhere). You want something to do to "improve the encyclopedia", Eva? Delete this.For that matter, where is the Wikipedia policy that says "Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopedia, therefore all articles should be written to answer general-encyclopedia questions, and should avoid obscurantistic specialist jargon when possible."
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Milton Roe |
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 11th March 2009, 4:17pm) QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 11th March 2009, 6:43pm) QUOTE(LuÃs Henrique @ Wed 11th March 2009, 3:10pm) But isn't this part of the problem?
When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge.
LuÃs Henrique
Sure, but you have that problem about most of what you learn in life, since you're hardly ever going to able to get your summaries directly from the greatest experts in the world, Charlie Rose style (how I envy that man his job). In the real world, gaining most knowledge is sort of like learning a new word in your vocabulary. You hear it once, this perfectly cromulent word, but you've never heard it before. Still from the way it's used, you begin to have some idea of what it means. As it's used more and more, you realize that your ignorance does not mean it wasn't cromulent, it must means YOU hadn't encountered it. But now you're aware of it. Studies show that when 3 year-olds are exposed to an articificial word, it only takes about 5 usages for them to hone in on its meaning pretty well, and that they do it rather like tracking an animal by scent. It doesn't start out perfect, but descends through the categories, until they nail it. Again, in the real world, you don't get to find out about iron ore refining from the bored steelworker sitting next to you on some transoceanic flight on which he wants to talk. Instead, you sort of need to know, don't have access to the net, and so you ask the people around you: "Know anything about iron ore refining"? And you get back something like: "A little. I dunno how they get the dirt out, but I know they have to take the iron oxide, mix it with coke in big furnace, and heat the blazes out of it till the carbon takes out the oxygen and molten iron is left. Then they blow pure oxygen through to get rid of more carbon, to get steel." So you still have an incomplete picture, but you know more than you did. Later you find the thing is self-heating and is called a blast furnace. And you learn out they get the dirt out, and so on and so on. That's Wikipedia, too. In some ways, as has been said by many people, one problem is that we expect too much of Wikipedia. If we could just fix the vandalism and defamation, we'd be left with sort of what you get from a very large roomful of decent, random people on any subject. And that's no small thing. It's bound to beat hell out of what you "know" just on your own. Tagged for Web Searches under • Kontact Koolaid Kontagion •Truth hurts, don't it, Jon? (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif) (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)
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GlassBeadGame |
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Dharma Bum
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QUOTE(Obesity @ Wed 11th March 2009, 3:23pm) Give it a rest, GBG. FA writers are the last place you should be directing your idle, pissy and predictable ire. You never struck me as a particularly insightful aesthetic critic, but it shouldn't take Harold Bloom to point out that, Pokémon and Power Rangers paeans excepted, the best Featured Articles demonstrate palpable literary style and substance, especially when compared to entries from, say, World Book (the dumbed-down paper encyclopedia for dummies, which was the only thing I had to read growing up). Must I drag out my favorite article once again as example? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._A._Andr%C3...edition_of_1897This is textbook, well, textbook. It's better than most textbooks. You sound bitter and uninformed to suggest otherwise. And it's not an isolated example. Who, may I ask, besides the inimitable Giano (known slightly more for his over-the-top posturing than for his fluid and witty style) constitutes this insufferable gang of smug, self-satisfied wankers? At this moment, the lady doing the best article work is Moni3. A industrious lesbian oddball from Florida, she is many things, but she is not a prima donna. She did the Harvey Milk article and is currently working on Museum of Bad Art (still a work in progress, but already mildly dazzling and, with a tiny bit of professional editing, would be suitable for a number of magazines). People like Moni3 (or Ceoil, or several others) naturally take pride in their full-time hobby (when you work for free, pride is all you can take), but they can hardly be accused of strutting about cyberspace demanding oblations; you know what they do? They write. A lot. You are what the kids call a hater, and I suspect you couldn't write your way out of a cardboard box (and don't come after me to your tu quoque's; I'm also practically illiterate and almost used the word "ablutions" instead of "oblations," above). People like you and others I won't mention see Wikipedia as Dimension X, or the Bizarro universe, when it in many respects approximates the regular universe more than we care to admit: full of nasty people, stacked to its eyeballs in bullshit, with a few reasonable souls and delightful, distracting baubles to be enjoyed, if you take the time to look for them. Repent. (IMG: smilys0b23ax56/default/thumbsdown.gif) That's the button I wanted to press. Wikipedia is overwhelmingly drivel. It is all that you might possibly be proud of and it is not very good at all. The editing is certainly not up to professional standards, even in FAs. The most typical manner in which this manifests itself is in the almost random level of focus and detail that articles pay to sub-parts. This would be absolutely unforgivable in any professional environment, is endlessly annoying and renders articles unreadable. Go look at a dozen FA articles that have "aged" a year . If this horrible aspect was ever addressed at all it will be back. There is simply nothing that can be done about this. Just one example, but one I know you can't deny. It is also a sin World Book would never commit. You really should have taken that hitch-hike on the triangle between New York, San Francisco and Mexico City. Instead you waste what is left to your youth being a fanboy to wannabe "writers" on a fake encyclopedia.
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Eva Destruction |
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QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 11th March 2009, 11:17pm) That's very nice. Who devised these statistics? Where is the complete list of "good" articles?
Automatically generated from straight counts of WP:FA and WP:GA. QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 11th March 2009, 11:17pm) Define a "good article". Who decided this, and where's the written policy or standard?
Written policy defining "good article" here; the definition is the result of multiple people, all of whom can be seen in the page history. QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 11th March 2009, 11:17pm) Where in this list is the category of "articles that have factual errors, are poorly written or are obscurantist"? This category contains only 126 articles. I'm fairly certain there are tens of thousands more which are not listed here (or anywhere). About halfway down. The categories are split by month; the 126 articles you're seeing are just those that haven't yet been date-sorted. QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 11th March 2009, 11:17pm) You want something to do to "improve the encyclopedia", Eva? Delete this. DoneQUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 11th March 2009, 11:17pm) For that matter, where is the Wikipedia policy that says "Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopedia, therefore all articles should be written to answer general-encyclopedia questions, and should avoid obscurantistic specialist jargon when possible."
Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible
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Milton Roe |
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Known alias of J. Random Troll
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 11th March 2009, 5:06pm) QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 11th March 2009, 7:30pm) The Truth is that All the GAGA articles in All the Wikiapedes do not make up for a single unjust banning, a single false death report, or a single violation of a bio subject's good name and privacy. And there is no better of Proof of the debilitating effect of the Wikipediot Cult on people's ethics and intellects than the fact that you could write the casuistic drivel you wrote above. And Dat's Da Truth.Jon Awbrey Feynman always said "Give me a specific problem." But actually, I'm full of BOTH wise saws and modern instances. And so I play my part.
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Obesity |
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I taste as good as skinny feels.
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QUOTE(Kato @ Wed 11th March 2009, 7:13pm) That could apply to almost anything. Even Fox News has the odd decent and delightful person involved.
I kind of like Fox-News. Especially the blonde bobble-heads in microskirts yammering in raspy, whisky-soaked tones. QUOTE(UseOnceAndDestroy @ Wed 11th March 2009, 5:28pm) It's a recurring wikipedian myth to position wikipedia and "nothing" as the only possibilities. Wikipedia is decidedly not better than a rich and diverse internet of independent sites and documents, created by people who actually understand the topics they're involved in.
Sigh.... does anyone remember how shitty, unreliable and disorganized these richly diverse, independent sites always were before WP came along, how much they suck now and how much they will continue to suck if WP ever loses its prominence. Let's bring back GeoCities, and all our problems will be solved. 99% of the Internet blows. Wikipedia does not boast a superior success rate, but merely sucks in a slightly different key. QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 11th March 2009, 7:44pm) That's the button I wanted to press.
That's actually not the button you wanted to press, but I am grateful for your amusement at my response. If you read your OP, what you were attempting to do, with all of the tiresome and rhetorically sluggish cantankerousness to which we have become accustomed, was conflate WP article writers with a very specific (and now passé) gaggle of martyr-crying attention whores. I assure you that most of the "best" writing is currently being performed by gentle and unassuming people like Karanacs, who are under no delusions that they're creating anything sublime, but still take pleasure in creating something from nothing. I very much doubt these nice ladies "wannabe" any more than they are: geeky, scrupulous hobbyists who are able to string to words together with a perfunctory level of elegance and are pleased to share their work with a number of online strangers. How repugnant! How purposeless! How blind they are to the big picture! Please, GBG, put them in their place; bring those hoity-toity housewives down to earth for all of us. They're just..... so.... smug. QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 11th March 2009, 7:44pm) You really should have taken that hitch-hike on the triangle between New York, San Francisco and Mexico City. Instead you waste what is left to your youth being a fanboy to wannabe "writers" on a fake encyclopedia.
I will mostly refrain from responding to this lowblow outside of the Support Group thread from which the sentiment originated. For the moment, I assure you that Wikipediot "fanboy"-ishness constitutes but a footnote in the comprehensive catalog of unsavory and unproductive dalliances upon my "youth," such as it is, has been squandered. The balance of that catalog is a far greater cause for concern. This post has been edited by Obesity:
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Cla68 |
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Postmaster
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Doubtless, GBG had no intention for this thread to involve discussions of individual FA articles, but I saw one today that was recently promoted which I believe is one of the "gems" that Obesity mentions. This article, about an old railway bridge, is fantastic. The article even includes a radar loop showing the storm that destroyed the bridge as well as a beautiful, recent panoramic photo of the site. Sure, the subject is obscure and perhaps, esoteric, but this shows someone using Wikipedia to benefit the Internet community, as Obesity put it, "Making something from nothing." The article's writer is Dtbohrer who doesn't strike me as a smug, condescending, insufferable ANI troller. I'd say that applies to most FA writers or editors who otherwise do their best to write articles that do their subjects the justice they deserve. This post has been edited by Cla68:
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Obesity |
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I taste as good as skinny feels.
Group: Regulars
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 11th March 2009, 10:09pm) Glad you found your own little piece of heaven on Wikipedia. You will excuse me if I don't see it that way.
Not my piece of heaven, mind you. I don't hang out there at all much anymore (17 edits in February may seem like 17 too many for you, but it ain't many to me). My point was that the decent and harmless people are doing good work--and producing good writing--there with little fanfare. You've just never heard of them. QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 11th March 2009, 10:09pm) The hitchhiking advice was offered in all sincerity, as I thought your solicitation of advice was sincere. But then what you settled for is nice too, I suppose.
Fair enough. And I'm sorry if I twisted or failed to hear your argument in this thread. As I told you before, I'm far too old, too lazy, too fat, too comfortable ( complicit would be a more precise word) for any Kerouac/Guevara-style adventures.
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EricBarbour |
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blah
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QUOTE(Cla68 @ Wed 11th March 2009, 7:21pm) Doubtless, GBG had no intention for this thread to involve discussions of individual FA articles, but I saw one today that was recently promoted which I believe is one of the "gems" that Obesity mentions. This article, about an old railway bridge, is fantastic. The article even includes a radar loop showing the storm that destroyed the bridge as well as a beautiful, recent panoramic photo of the site. Actually, that is a great article. (Although I think the section about the storm is a little overdone.) There are a lot of great articles on WP. Right next to them in the database, there are also many ugly and unreadable lumps of text. Not to mention all the stubs. (The Kinzua Bridge article has links that lead to this. 153 stubs, just for Pennsylvania registered historic places. That we know of.) Which only makes the good ones seem all the more sad and lonely...... So okay, there is a written policy of sorts. That is ignored, apparently on a daily basis, when people write new material. There is such a volume of articles to deal with, I really can't imagine how the existing volunteer editor-force can possibly begin to fix them all. And just how does Wikipedia convince new users to read and follow the "standards" for good writing? Here it is, as Eva was so determined to tell us....... and yet, every day there are new writings posted that ignore this standard. (Hampster Pants, anyone? How about this or this or this? All posted within the last hour.....)
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Somey |
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Can't actually moderate (or even post)
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QUOTE(Sarcasticidealist @ Wed 11th March 2009, 4:43pm) QUOTE(UseOnceAndDestroy @ Wed 11th March 2009, 6:28pm) ...Wikipedia is decidedly not better than a rich and diverse internet of independent sites and documents, created by people who actually understand the topics they're involved in. So why doesn't that network exist? Surely the people who actually understand what they're talking about aren't engaged in editing Wikipedia, so what's stopping them from setting up their own network? Cost, time, energy, liability issues, and all sorts of other concerns, one would assume. The World Wide Web, and to some extent the internet in general, wasn't set up or organized to maximize convenience and reliability in information aggregation. Technically, it was set up to ensure survivability of information in the event of a catastrophic event such as a nuclear war, but for most practical purposes that translates into a system that allows a large number of people to redundantly disseminate information to anyone and everyone with the technical means of accessing it. Things like security, bandwidth, search, and the accountability of site owners/operators were all afterthoughts. It's obviously unrealistic to think that the internet can re-work itself in the short term, but until it does, people who run websites have to deal with ISP's of varying levels of competence, software of varying levels of reliability, and of course, hackers, phishers, identity thieves, spammers, scammers, "script kiddies," "trolls," and (occasionally) lawyers. This doesn't mean Mr. Destroy is wrong - a richer and more diverse internet would be a good thing, and Wikipedia is clearly preventing that diversity from growing by providing a cheap (and anonymous) alternative for people who only want to share a relatively small amount of information, don't feel any need to get paid for sharing it, and don't particularly care who else gets to mess with it after the fact... and, in so doing, handling some (but not all) of the various headaches that come with running a website. The more interesting question, to me, is whether Wikipedia and its sister sites are doing the world a "net-positive" favor by providing that alternative. I'd say they probably would be, if they split the site into a fairly large number of smaller inter-linked ones with separate low-level administrations, operated under a more ethical standard of governance, each with reasonably accountable (and perhaps more identifiable) ownership - a consortium, essentially. As it is though, I'd have to say no. Because of the Google factor and also the nature of domain ownership, Jimbo and the WMF will fight any decentralization or "official mass forking" effort tooth and nail, though they'll probably claim they're not fighting it the whole time they're doing just that. And I'd imagine there are all sorts of additional arguments against that kind of decentralization, not the least of which would be based on pure practicality, not to mention the intimidation factor that comes with being so large and well known... but if WP is ever going to go from discouraging web diversity to encouraging it, that's what has to happen.
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Emperor |
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QUOTE(LuÃs Henrique @ Wed 11th March 2009, 6:10pm) When I read an article about, say, Thailand, or the proccess of refining iron ore, or emphysema, I wonder whether they actually make any sence, as it superficially seems, or if they are full of lies, pranks, urban legends, fantasies, like those about subjects I have some actual knowledge.
Hmm well let's take Thailand. I don't know much about it either, but having two "History" sections seems kind of redundant to me. Also the tone of the material about WWII seems a bit off... Can't they just admit that they were on the wrong side? At least they mentioned that it's the only southeast Asian country never to have been colonized. That's something a normal person might want to know. Refining iron ore - longwinded stuff in both "Smelting" and "Blast Furnace", but maybe better than nothing if you have some patience. Emphysema - The lead sucks for defining it simply as a COPD. Points off again for not mentioning the phrase "loss of elasticity" in the lead, or ever clearly getting the point across in the entire article that air spaces containing the alveoli actually expand. But three points for mentioning smoking in the lead, and 5,000 WikiPoints for mentioning alpha 1-antitrypsin a hundred times. Better off checking Stedman's.
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Cla68 |
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Postmaster
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QUOTE(Somey @ Thu 12th March 2009, 5:28am) The more interesting question, to me, is whether Wikipedia and its sister sites are doing the world a "net-positive" favor by providing that alternative. I'd say they probably would be, if they split the site into a fairly large number of smaller inter-linked ones with separate low-level administrations, operated under a more ethical standard of governance, each with reasonably accountable (and perhaps more identifiable) ownership - a consortium, essentially. As it is though, I'd have to say no.
Because of the Google factor and also the nature of domain ownership, Jimbo and the WMF will fight any decentralization or "official mass forking" effort tooth and nail, though they'll probably claim they're not fighting it the whole time they're doing just that. And I'd imagine there are all sorts of additional arguments against that kind of decentralization, not the least of which would be based on pure practicality, not to mention the intimidation factor that comes with being so large and well known... but if WP is ever going to go from discouraging web diversity to encouraging it, that's what has to happen.
Someone who used to be involved with the WMF emailed me once with the same idea of splitting the english projects into smaller sites with stricter administration. Perhaps that's one reason why that person is probably no longer welcome at the WMF office. I think it's a good idea.
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MBisanz |
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Senior Member
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QUOTE(Cla68 @ Thu 12th March 2009, 7:13am) Someone who used to be involved with the WMF emailed me once with the same idea of splitting the english projects into smaller sites with stricter administration. Perhaps that's one reason why that person is probably no longer welcome at the WMF office. I think it's a good idea.
While that is an idea, I would worry about the impact such a fork would have on the generalist editors. Cla, if I'm right, you have a strong interest in military history, so forking along the Uni model of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Natural Sciences probably wouldn't limit you, since you would focus on Social Sciences. But a large number of wiki functions are performed by editors who don't have a particular topic area. Take for instance my clean up of the File talk: namespace, that crosses all academic fields since it is just clean up. I could probably cover all of the English language wikis, but I like to be able to take a large list and have a large impact quickly. Or look at User:Addbot, that is a bot that substitutes templates to reduce server load. It works well because it can use one rule set to work on a large amount of data. Having to fork it to work on 10 wikis might increase the difficulty to the point that it would not be worth it. Another thing I do is close AfDs. I've noticed there are a large number of professional AfD editors who find and vet sources for nearly all disciplines. For them there is not a gain by forking, since they work well where they have a massive list of 70 things, to which they can apply the same rule set everyday. Even in the FA/GA sphere, take a generalist like Malleus, would he really want to learn 10 different sets of GA rules on 10 different wikis to review 10 sets of 23 articles (he reviewed 228 in the latest GA sweeps)? At some point forking leads to a lot of small wikis without a lot of dedicated editors willing to learn the different rule sets. You can probably best see it at Wikispecies Recent Changes, which is a quasi-natural science fork and lacks a base of generalist cleanup editors and at Memory Alpha Recent Changes, which is so specific that it doesn't attract the variety needed to get cleanup specialists.
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