The other day, the last American World War I veteran, Frank Buckles, died.

Now, can anyone explain the point of all this for the rest of us?

And when you're done, this looks even more pointless.

Obviously, Wikipedia wants to be the war to end all wars.

Probably some sort of Parimutuel Survivor's Club Stakes …







And a lot of money riding on the outcome …

Jon

That's called a "tontine", actually:

What are you asking, Eric? Are you suggesting that nobody cares about non-American veterans of World War I so now there are no Americans left the list is pointless?

You'll be no-doubt-pleased to know that said Archer episode is already listed in the WP article on "tontine".
Wiki-Dorks do love their cartoons.


That AFD is a joke. I'm wondering why no one else can see that.

Context. There's been a history of gods-own warring between people who want to see bios of the world's couple hundred oldest people (those older than 110 or so, of which the names of fewer than a hundred are known and their ages verified), and people who don't think that a 110 year old person is notable just for being 110 years old. Some of the archives are up to 15 pages long.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal...s_Oldest_People

The above gives only a taste. Ther was an astoundingly witch-trialish arbcom case that eventually resulted in one editor (a rather obscressive and nasty deletionist) being banned for a year, and another editor topic-banned from longevity articles. The last one was a world expert. Nobody wanted to leave HIM in charge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arb.../Case/Longevity

Following which Arbcom put the question of what are "reliable sources" back into the hands of the people at the RS noticeboard, following which the argument continues THERE.

This is amusing as the argument goes something like:

The Struldbrug Website is not a reliable source, because it's self published!

So are most newspapers and websites; selfpublished refers to blocks of single cranks.

But they aren't academically peer reviewed!

Neither is the Guinness Book of World Records. But the Guinness Book is notable, that's all we need.

Well, the Struldbrug Website is notable: it's been used by Guinness in the past and many newspapers.

But they shouldn't be doing that because it's not reliable.

Neither are websites for high schools that post team scores.

Yes, they are, yes they are!

Who says so?

I don't care who says so, you're just bringing up high schools, but it won't work because but OTHERSTUFFEXISTS.

Yes, and also Pokemon.

Pokemon are notable!

And also dead minor royalty like the 7th Earl of Buttcrackovia who ided in infancy and his brother took the title.

All royals are intrisically notable. You're trying to confuse this issue and edit warring about it.

====
And so on, into increasing WP:LAME ness.

In the distant past, some admin named BrownHairedGirl (who should long have been a Dick of Distinction candidate) RfD's a bunch of longevity bios (most of them NOT BLPs) and got pwned. She's had her knives sharp ever since, even though she herself is a major WP:ROYAL bio freak on WP. The people who actually spend their spare time keeping track of the world's oldest WW I veterans, oldest people, and the like, are somewhat like people who keep track of Babylon 5 characters, but (unlike B5 addicts) for some reason have to fight a bunch of IDONTLIKEIT deletionists, who can't abide this topic of longevity, for some reason. The banned witchhunter, at least, was known to be a major biblical literalist, who apparently had decided that the life spans of Methuselah and Adam and other antedeluvans, were really as reported.

Here's how bad it is: at one point the inclusionists noted that some data was published in the Journal of Longevity Research, and the deletionists then attacked that journals's academic standing. Consider this in the context of porn, Power Rangers, minor sports website data, and other stuff that actually makes up a large part of Wikipedia. At some point, somebody wanted to use US census data as a source of longevity figures. Somebody suggested it wasn't any more reliable than any self-reported data, and the only difference was that it had been published by the government, without any attempt to fact check it at all (true, BTW). No, came the response. It doesn't matter if census data is reliable-- it's verifiable. Publication by the government confers notablity.

And here we go again.

It's common practice to believe that stuff published by the government is notable. In a sense, I can understand why and I sorta agree. I mean, what makes other sources more notable than census-like data from government databases? The issue with arguing the notability of such is that it throws out the notability of anything else as well.

You miss the point. Some things WP has decided are intrinsically "notable" just because they have fond memores of them (their own high schools for example-- see WP:ILIKEIT). For the rest, WP has no way of judging "notability" except (usually) by pointing to it as being published in a verifiable source (often because somebody else LIKEDIT). That means something you can find and look up-- it has nothing to do with reliability per se. Verifiability is a "can I look it up someplace?" issue. Reliability (RS) is a TRUTH issue.

There are reliable sources that aren't verifiable, like your birthday (like Jimbo's famous birthday). WP deprecates these because they can't be checked to see if they are "real" (not the same as "true") by third parties. If you tell the census worker an incorrect birthdate for your demented grandmother who lives with you, there's not going to be any fact checking-- the government simply takes that as data. Their publication of it (even if they wait a century to publish the details, like her name) doesn't make it any more reliable than it was in the first place.

Anybody who knows the government doesn't fact-check census data (it would simply take too much effort) should realize this. If you're a historian, you find cases of people telling census workers in the late 19th-century stuff that isn't (wasn't) true, all the time. And is clearly a lie, like the state in which were born, how old they are, and who they are married to (sometimes they don't want anybody know the truth-- people living with people not their spouses, or who are older than they claimed, or fugitives on the lamb from some past). It doesn't match up with the facts from available birth certificates, death certificates (which have their own problems) and other vital statistics records. But we historians find that out, only long after they are dead. This turns out to be the same for people claiming to be 130 years-old. Some of these people are still drawing social security checks!

The independent fact-checking by subject matter experts, in peer-reviewed scientific journals and even the best newsjournals, is what makes them reliable (ie, likely to print stuff that is true as per present consensus of experts). Not that they've been published. Newspapers don't fact check all of their data (most of what's in obituaries, for example), and even their AP stories aren't fact-checked as well as academic journals. Newspaper (or government) publication of non-fact-checked stuff, doesn't confer instant reliability on it! Nor should it. Paper isn't magic. Even if that obit of your granny gets published in the local newspaper, it's no more reliable than if you stuck it instead on your refrigerator. However, it does confer VERIFIABILITY on it, and thus Wikipedian NOTABILITY also.

WP doesn't deal with these issues very well, even for those who understand the differences here.
What the POLICY WP:V says in its RS section about "reliablity" (that you have to look at each field for its own standards) is actually wiser than what you read in the full WP:RS guideline--- a tortured screed which actually attempts to try to try to go partly down that RS path FOR you, in case you don't know what you're doing. Which last, in my view, is a sure sign that you shouldn't be writing in that area. But Wikipedia is famous for having a crew of people who don't know what they don't know, and (worse still) think it doesn't matter what they know, since their sources will fix that problem all up for them.

Alas, figuring out what sources to use in the first place, takes expertise all by itself-- you can't just go and read WP:RS and come out knowing where to find out the likely truth. WP:RS won't tell you, largely because it wasn't written by knowledge-experts and librarians, either! A metaproblem which makes all this kind of amusing and ironic. But WP is nothing if not intrinsically amusing and ironic. It's an enterprise run by mental children, after all, so how could it not be amusing and ironic?

No doubt when the last veteran dies, some wikidiot will create List of World War I veterans who lived in the 21st century.

So? It's a hell of a lot more interesting that lists of Power Rangers.

One of the still living survivors was a waitress, very interesting.

Is she a fan of anime or manga?

There are people over 100 years old who like those comics?

I'll bet if there are, the Japanese have a word for them. And that Wikipedia would soon have an ill-sourced but finely illustrated article about them.

Croaktaku?

There's this section of the Centenarians article, but since it turns out most of the people in question had already died and in some cases were being exploited as corpses by their relatives for their pension income, I think we have to assume they were into more traditional artforms like Kabuki theatre and Nihonga (T-H-L-K-D).

Thanks, I was hoping someone would point out that disgusting Arbcom case.

They banned an actual academic expert in the field.
I'll say this, when Wikipedia (and especially Arbcom) does stupid, they do it big.

Wikipedia is to publishing as the Tea Party is to US politics.

Very frustrating. As soon as I see a claim about 'Fringe Science' editing (which Young is accused of), I want to understand whether it is fringe science or not. I checked out what Young says on his user page, and I will check on his publications shortly. There are a number of basic checks I use, e.g. general coherence and consistency of the argument, publications in reliable sources, peer review, all that sort of stuff.

Then I turn to the Arbcom case, and I learn nothing. All I see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adm...XfD_discussions is allegations of sockpuppetry, meatpuppetry, off-side canvassing, incivility. Guys, this is irrelevant. What does this tell you about whether he is any good or not? Incredible.

Um, since when did you think anybody at WP cares if he's any "good" or not? They don't if he threatens their control.

There was recently a spat in the policy pages about whether or not a "reliable source" on WP:RS and WP:V actually meant one likely to be TRUE. No consensus was reached, but one editor was adamant that the word "reliable," as used here, had nothing to do with "truth", but was really only about "neutrality." Since WP is not about "truth" (per the first sentences of WP:V), even though the policy on WP:V itself talks (eventually) about "fact-checking" and "accuracy."

To me, as a scientist (albeit one who labors mostly in the cat litter-box development field), "fact" and "accurate" have to do with truth. I'm what philosophers call a "naive realist," which means that I assume that there is an objective world out there that exists independently of how we think about it. I think human ideas approximate truth about that world (the "facts") more and more nearly with time, and while they don't reach it (or can't be sure they have if they do-- see the problem of induction), they do make progress, by eliminating clear error and becoming more and more reliably predictive of the future. Which is why electronics works and we have our nice modern techno-world. (Try explaining the success of modern engineering otherwise; I dare you).

On Wikipedia, a fair number of people cynically take the conveniently power-amassing position of philosophical idealists who either think that truth is a complete social construction, or else that EVEN if it's something more, that in any case all thinking about truth (correspondance of language to objective reality) has no place in the discussion of how to write Wikipedia. It's a very basic perversion, which eliminates any direct discussion of "facts." Now, you're desciended to difussing documentary evidence of fats, like two people locked in a windowless library basement trying to settle an argument. And once you've gone down that road, the question of whether or not you're kicking out editors with genuine expertise in some subject or other, is no longer important. So that's how they deal with THAT.

Of course, all of this is hypocrisy on the level of sophomoric philosophy. Nobody who survives driving in bad traffic really disbelieves in objective reality and the ability of our brains to model it with a certain degree of accuracy. Anyone who does not is what we call "crazy" and is soon enough what we call "dead." But in the virual world of Wikipedia, you can at least pretend to be an armchair social-constructivist when it comes to "turth," as much as you like.

So, how do decent WP articles get written at all in such an atmosphere? Well, in two ways. One is that some articles really are written about worlds that are mostly or entirely social constructs, like aesthetics, religion, law, literature. If you're writing about the Star Trek or Star Wars "universes" what consequences if you get something "wrong"? Moreover, much of this material is directly accessable to editors without need of training or translation. If a slight variation in view survives on WP or Wikia, and enough people come to believe it's "canonical" (ala some newly-proposed Catholic position on the way to becoming "doctrine") it BECOMES true by virtue of broad assent or consensus. Needless to say, that doesn't work too well in engineering, but it does sometimes work in politics. All things that are true merely by virtue of social agreements ("consensus") really are pure contructs of the mind, and need not have reference to nature.

In the topical area of the sciences (natural, applied, and formal) good articles on WP get written by ignoring the rules. Often by experts who donate their time and know very well that they are breaking the rules. And that gets ignored by people who really want to amass influence on WP and (though WP) effect changes in public perception, and who realize that good science (including math) and history articles help in that cause, by giving WP a patina of being objectively reliable in places where it's necessary. But (as is the case with politicians and lawyers) the people at WP will fire the scientists and engineers in a second if they feel their power threatened.

Incidently, that's often how the non-WP world works, as well (a lesson typified for me by the J. Robert Oppenheimer security hearing). None of this should be very shocking or surprising. It's just that out in the real world, the space shuttle blows up, or some giant manufacturing business disappears (poof) with all of its jobs, that tends to (temporarily) concentrate the minds of lawyers and policitians, who then must pay a little lip service to truth. On Wikipedia, such corrections happen far more rarely.

MR