Bwuh? What could possibly be your basis for believing that?

To be fair to Jayjg; within the strange internal logic of WP, home-made graphs could be used to make political points that far exceed the touted brief of "neutrality".

I also very much doubt that any credible encyclopedia would include ad-hoc graphs and charts that forward political positions on controversial matters - unless they were used to illustrate that position itself and with extreme caution.

An "encylopedia" such as Wikipedia, which lacks credibility from the start, should probably steer clear of them like the plague.

You mean like global warming?

If I make a drawing of CO2 levels from 1857 to 1957 done by chemical means by different chemists, and it comes out looking like Johnny's crayon drawing on the wall, does that count as "handmade" to advance a position? How about if some advocacy group does the same?

Graphs are useful, because sometimes you can just look at one and say "That must be bullshit data; no natural process would do that." The human mind can't do that with a table of numbers.

If people are capable of writing neutrally then they are capable of both creating neutral graphs and identifying non-neutral ones.


How does that enter into this debate? No one is asking that POV pushing graphics be sanctioned.

I think better advice for encyclopedia writers would be to avoid cliches like the plague.

This is Wikipedia. People aren't even capable of writing neutrally about Hummus.


What is a "POV pushing graphic"? Or more to the point, what isn't a "POV pushing graphic"?

As used on the 'Earths Atmosphere' article, I'd say this isn't a "POV pushing graphic".

needs references, however.





Or how about this chart, one of the most famous ever drawn;

I once had an argument with a user who wanted to include a chart, but didn't have any units along with it to describe the numbers in it. What's hilarious, in retrospect, is that the mediator who showed up even needed to ask me why I objected.

Some people just see these charts and graphs as a way to inject their opinion.

Interesting, I've seen people do the same with words. Should words be banned from Wikipedia too?

Yes.

In fact, for everyone's sake, just remove the damn mess of a site already. It is failing society's need for credible, reliable information.

I like graphs. I like the graphs in the Global Warming article. They look attractive and make it easier to understand what the numbers are supposed to be saying. Of course, whether the graphs' messages are true or not is another thing. That's for the people who look at the graph to decide, presumably by checking the source of the data if they need to.

The point here is that most of us apparently don't understand why Jayjg and SlimVirgin appear to be trying to keep any mention of graphs out of the NOR policy. I guess I could go to the policy talk page and propose some wording, but I have better things to do, like go watch the Japan vs Korea World Baseball Classic game, which I believe is on now. Instead, I hope that Jayjg will knock off his games on that policy talk page and try to reach a compromise.

Apropos of nothing, there's a bit of silliness happening on that particular policy page, with someone claiming to be "Parvez Sagar" insisting on inserting biographical info about himself right into the middle of the WP:NOR policy.

Aside from that, the WP:NOR policy currently states that...

It seems to me that this is the crux of the issue, in that this bit seems reasonable until someone actually goes to the talk page and runs into whatever editor or group of editors has staked out their territorial claim to the article in question.

In cases like the now-famous Global warming (T-H-L-K-D) "hockey stick" graph, there's probably no way you're going to get people to stop warring over things like that, other than the traditional method of banning the opponent with inferior numbers and/or less admin support. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing in that particular case, but there's almost no denying that that particular graph, while technically accurate, has a very narrow y-axis. I mean, at the risk of sounding like a GW skeptic, it's actually parts-per-million - so if the y-axis were zero to 1 million, you'd obviously just see a straight line, not a hockey stick. So the real problem is convincing people that a rise of 70 ppm, and a predicted further rise of 100 ppm in the next 40 years or so, is potentially catastrophic. Maybe the graph helps to do that, but it seems to me that skeptics can point to the hockey stick and say that their opponents are manipulating the visuals in a propagandistic way, all while other (and potentially more immediate) environmental problems like deforestation, water toxicity, moronic land-use and agricultural policies, and general human overpopulation (the biggest problem of all) are pushed aside in the media, etc., etc.

Anyway, one thing I might suggest is to clarify the text above to make it clearer that images, including photographs, should not be used to violate the NPOV policy, which itself is woefully unclear on the issue of accurate, yet still potentially misleading, images. IMO, simply removing the words "nor forbid displaying data in a graph" from the "Routine Calculations" section doesn't really help much one way or the other - it just makes the person who's removing the wording look nit-picky. (Not to mention that since it's coming from Jayjg, it also looks rather suspicious.)

Why not try wording along the lines of what you proposed before?:

That seems like an excellent compromise to me.

Try to understand, Lar, The Wikipedia Review is not some kind of annex to Wikipediot Chat Pages. Wikipediot Tenets Of Faith are not taken for granted here. Indeed, it is a continual insult to the intelligence of Real World denizens to act as though your most peculiar Wikipediot premisses are somehow automatic.

Those of us who have been paying attention to the progress of critique and deconstruction at the Review know what Wikipediot Policy means in Practice. It's a crock from top to bottom and nothing can be built on it.

It is not the job of The Wikipedia Review to resolve the incoherencies of Wikipediot Doctrine. Go waste your own time somewhere else trying to do that. Not here.

Jon Awbrey

You forgot the smiley. That indicates that you're kidding.......

'Cuz, damn, you coulda fooled me. Certain people here damn well do treat WR like
an annex, where they can say things that will get them in trouble onwiki.

If WP ever puts up its OWN lightly moderated forum, WR is gonna get reeeeeally quiet.

Looks like I have to do it myself …

Don't let's knock quiet … quiet lets you hear the music … and the music helps you think …

Thing is, as tol-e-rant as we all like to be, that doesn't mean we oughta forget our purpose. The one thing we learned from HFO's mighty attempts to e-viscerate this thread was that there must be something really Kabal-Krucial going on here. It's all De Ja Vu to me, of course, so I have a good guess at what that might be — and no, it's never something so petty as some sort of Inter-Semitic Rivalry — but I do get the feeling that even some long time Re*Viewers still have their gnoses too far up a knot-hole to see the tree. 4get the 4est. Of course, spending long hours being wiled away by HFO's emails and pmails probably doesn't do a lot for their probity.

Jon

Free the MOOG:SYNTH reprobates!


All we are saying...
Is give music a chance

For my part, I was talkin bout the Music of the Spheres, but whateva ticks your tock …

Jon

Hey, just like IRL!


Interesting point.

I have no doubt about that, but is it likely to be something specific, like an effort to remove a particular chart or group of charts from some article (or series thereof), or is it just a general dislike of graphs, given that they're more difficult to change and/or get rid of if the article-owner (be it Jayjg or whomever) doesn't like them? I personally don't think this is likely to be part of an effort to remove a specific chart, or remove all charts from a specific article or set thereof.

For one fairly obvious example, look at the WP article on The Holocaust (T-H-L-K-D). There are three tables in the Victims and Death Toll section that could conceivably be made into charts, though this one submitted by Crum375 (T-C-L-K-R-D) , really makes more sense as-is (i.e., a table). In particular, there's one showing that the estimated number of Jews murdered by the Nazis peaked in 1942 and declined somewhat sharply in the years thereafter. I can see why Jayjg would object to this data being presented graphically, and I could even see how particularly sensitive Jewish folks might think any graph of that nature might tend to "trivialize" the Holocaust and therefore be offensive. (The first table, a breakdown of the numbers of Holocaust victims by demographic category, was originally a table of non-Jewish victims only - apparently the Jewish victim-count was added to the top of the chart, and the table moved higher up in the article, only a few months ago.)

But if we're going to try and find that one specific instance of someone trying to insert a chart into a Jayjg-owned article to which he objected, we could be at it for quite some time, unless someone just happens to remember it off the top of their head. I still tend to think we're making more of this than is really justified - it could very well be that Jayjg just happened to notice that (somewhat recent) addition to the WP:NOR page on his watchlist, remembered some unpleasant experience he had a while back with some chart he objected to, reacted by removing the wording, and then got all huffy when challenged on it. Typical Jayjg behavior, really, except that he doesn't seem to have banned the opponent yet.

Why is a table an image? Especially a table that was clearly originally created using mediawiki markup? There is actually a guideline against that.

It has to be a deliberate attempt to reduce the amount of edit-warring over the numbers, right? If you look at the history of the article, a significant portion of the edits are from people trying to insert new ethnic/social groups into the list of victims (chiefly Serbs, Bosnians, Muslims in general, Russian POW's, and Rom people, or whatever the plural is for Rom people), or increase the numbers for one or more of those groups. Maybe even the majority of the edits, at least within the last year or two.

Don't get me wrong, though - an subject/article like that, and specifically a section like that one, is a no-win proposition for pretty much everyone, at least in an actively open-wiki context. There's just no way to avoid it, without ongoing article "protection" or some other lockdown methodology.

[edit for more verbiage that doesn't really merit its own post] I did suspect something like that, to be honest - that (and my general inactivity) is why I didn't charge in waving the manual of style at people... but there's got to be a better solution.

Put the table in a template and protect that - although... the image isn't even protected, and images have one-click revert for everyone. I guess it's a barrier to entry via obscurity though (but having it as a template with no navlinks would work much the same way)

You know what they say —

Think Global … Act Loco …

Of course there's always some hill to take, some concrete bit of desert sand at any given moment in time, and of course a peculiar entity like Jayjg will always have his peculiar fixations, but the Kabal could hardly hold together if that's all there was.

I tell you again, it's about the prototyping of a medium, a system with a particular set of properties.

Gomi had it close enough with his highlighting of power. We are talking about a mercenary force — taken as a whole they have no side but the Kabal side. They would be perfectly happy selling arms to both sides of any given conflict — they are like a phone company in that — but it's hard to get away with playing both sides at the same moment in time, so they will settle for selling the greatest service to the highest bidder.

Good grief, they are even using the exact same language to cook the Charts & Graphs issue as they used to cook the Primary Source issue.

It's a terrible burden being the only one here with any LTM, especially at my age.

Jon Awbrey

Well at least it's sortable!

Heh.

[My monthly one-word reply quota--Just think this is an unusually funny observation.]

Another good comment that deserves framing for future reference —


Folks who were not born yesterday are probably hearing echoes about now —

Are primary sources easier or harder to misuse than secondary sources?

So what in the devil is really going on here?

Jon Awbrey

Yeah, I wonder if nobody actually thought of putting it in a template and protecting the template instead.

Well to be fair, errors in images require more skill to fix than errors in text. The Holocaust statistics table-image illustrates that well actually. Not to directly question the veracity of the research, but let's just suppose one of the numbers was discovered to be high or low by a few thousand, enough to require urgent correction. Text would be a lot easier to work with.

If it can't be done as html (because we want pie charts or rotated text or jagged lines or whatnot), Wikipedia should at least use the SVG format so that bad data can be corrected by somebody not in possession of the excel spreadsheet or whatever the original was exported from, and without having to re-create the graphic from scratch.

Per Theodore Roosevelt, I'm sure they'd accept Tweedledee if you agree to call it Tweedledum.

We have all kinds of templates for data on Wikipedia all over the place. Look at the chemistry elementboxes, for instance. Every one is an original synthesis of data about the chemical element, and every article on every chemical element has one. Whoop dee do. Tag them for deletion, Jayjg. They don't all have the same properties for each element, but just the coolest ones. Somebody who likes carbon fixed up a the allotropes of carbox template box, too. Damn, a walled-garden. Look at that fun box of properties for diamond. A gem. Too bad it must go.

It's true. Density is on the football team going out with boiling point (but everyone says she's a slut). Molecular weight is in debate, glee club, and valedictorian. Meanwhile, heat of fusion and electronegativity are on yearbook. Moh's hardness writes depressing poetry to himself, when people notice he exists. Nobody ever talks to triple point though.

Well, Density is on the football team, but I think it's Electronegativity that writes depressing poetry. Moh's hardness is because he can't stop thinking about Heat of Fusion.....

This seems to be a difficult subject for Wikiapologists to face, so they naturally look for anything else to talk about. When I began editing Wikipedia pages in December of 2005, it was possible to imagine that Wikipedia's main policy pages retained some semblance of normal scholarly definitions and practices. That is no longer the case. Looking into WP:NOR again this week after a very long time away, it reads like a cross between a cub reporter's fantasies about journalism, a personal essay on epistemology by a third-rate disciple of Ayn Rand, and a deliberate program to reduce credibility to whatever the Cabal says so this minute. In other words, the hand of SlimVirgin is visible in every jot and tittle.

Jon Awbrey

The whole Wikipedia rules amount to an exercise in replacing Mandeville's "private vices, public benefits" with a "private ignorance, public wisdom" slogan.

Luís Henrique

Two miles only? Good!