Wikipediocracy

Willbeheard

Unfortunately, the projects to overthrow dictators, particularly the externally-directed ones, often turn out to be more pernicious than the dictators. For example, consider Obama's Libya and Syria operations, or George Soros' "color revolutions." You forgot Egypt. On the other hand, Iraq was on ba...

Willbeheard

But as I understand it, there is more than one version of the theory, and strict Darwin version is problematic. That's like saying that the classical view that the Earth is a perfect sphere was discredited in the late 17th century, and it was discovered in about 1960 that the polar flattening is ma...

Willbeheard

Of all the graphs available on commons to represent the decline in active administrators, this one would appear to me to be the most appropriate for this discussion: That graph is already slightly out of date. It looks from other graphs as if there was a slight rise in August, followed by a continu...

Willbeheard

I do wish you would stop calling me your "good friend" You mean ... you've dumped me? :jawdrop: As for Jimmy Wales' net worth, your opinion of its value is relatively worthless I gave it clearly as just my opinion: "Frankly, I don't care two hoots about Jimbo's net worth". I never tried to pretend ...

Willbeheard

If anybody wants to do a study of "very active Wikipedians" on english WP, this voter list is probably a pretty fair sampling, I'm guessing. That all depends on how you define "very active Wikipedians". Presumably, you mean people who get embroiled in the behind the scenes stuff on AN/I and CfD. So...

Willbeheard

The days of copy-paste from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica are long, long, long gone. RfB You keep saying this, and I keep saying that, yes, they are gone in the sense that all the 1911 articles have been copied over. In the sense that they are still there, mostly uncorrected, those days are not ...

Willbeheard

Total net assets = $ 34,929,000 (that is, enough to run without a single cutback for a 363 days) I have no wish to defend the WMF, but that is eminently sensible. The UK Charity Commission recomments that all charities should have reserves of at least their annual turnover, and the WMF have apparen...

Willbeheard

I’d love to ban all Mormons from editing those articles due to bias

It would certainly make things a lot easier if only people on one side of the argument were allowed to edit in controversial areas. Think what it would do for climate change.

Willbeheard

Certainly 10k is quite a high threshold. Looking through a biographical dictionary, I'd estimate that many of the articles there are around 2k, but tell you all you need to know about someone fairly obscure. To puff them up to say 12k, even if it can be done, you'd be filling them with trivia. Copyv...

Willbeheard

If anybody wants to do a study of "very active Wikipedians" on english WP, this voter list is probably a pretty fair sampling, I'm guessing. That all depends on how you define "very active Wikipedians". Presumably, you mean people who get embroiled in the behind the scenes stuff on AN/I and CfD. So...

Willbeheard

He's a very sensitive sort about BLPs in which the subject squeaks, about 95% of his limited edits in mainspace relate to such things, I'm guessing. Jimbo is very sensitive to the public image of Wikipedia, far more so than other leading Wikipedians such as David Gerard or Fae for example. Rightly ...

Willbeheard

Hey, I'll jump on board with that, when Jimbo's BLP includes his net worth information from his public, reported divorce papers. Lots of people were interested in an article about Carolyn Doran, but the people were not permitted to have one. As always, my good friend Greg makes excellent points. Ho...

Willbeheard

Isn't deciding what will interest readers part of the definition of "editor"? Obviously, if someone contributes an article to WP it's because he's interested in the topic. It's fair to say that if one person is interested, others might be. And I think that in most major reference works, the criteri...

Willbeheard

I'd be more concerned about this if I'd heard of Jason Brock, or even if he had his own WP article. As it stands, this is only one of innumerable silly pieces of vandalism. Can we have a catch-all thread for such things?

Willbeheard

I think this depends on the alphabet of the original language. If it's say French or Turkish, where they use basically the Latin alphabet plus c-cedilla and so forth, there's a good case for retaining these diacritical marks, although they're a pain to type with an English keyboard. But if it's say ...

Willbeheard

Sorry, I had to abridge the headline; it's "Are People Who Donate to Wikipedia Just Better People in General?"

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/12/wi ... eople.html

I was going to stick in an extract, but the whole thing is so much Jimbojuice that you have to read it all.

Willbeheard

lilburne wrote:Yet again we see that on wikipedia "reliability not truth" will always trump logic.

Shouldn't that be "verifiability not truth"? Verifiable meaning that it's in a reliable source, and of coursse "reliable" meaning "supports what I want to say".

Willbeheard

Is this true...can an individual influence world opinion on an issue more via Wikipedia than they can by being the best network administrator, college professor, accountant, etc? I think that's the wrong question. We should ask, can an individual influence world opinion on an issue more via Wikiped...

Willbeheard

What's the relation between this and the Wikia search engine Jimmy was on about a while back? As I understood it, the Wikia engine would have searched the whole Web, and used editor input to improve the quality of the results. This tool would just search Wikipedia. What'sthe point? You can already ...

Willbeheard

So we've established that the reliable First Folio has a different text from the unreliable First Quarto.

Vindication is such a good feeling. Thank you, Lonza.

Willbeheard

I think it is more interesting that Dominique Strauss-Kahn does not have any mention of his famous: " http://mondoweiss.net/2011/07/strauss-kahn-israel-every-morning.html,I wake up every morning and think about how I can help Israel ". That's because it's Wikipedia, not Wikiquote. There are very fe...

Willbeheard

Did you have an actual Lone Star perpetrator in mind, or are you just waving your hands dramatically, to compensate for your jealousy that you add so much less productive information to this forum than I do? I believe the person I had in mind is or was in Washington State, but I don't know anything...

Willbeheard

Anroth wrote:Well that was suitably one-sided.

Interesting that only 31 votes were cast for president but 33 for the other posts. Why did two people abstain?

Willbeheard

There was this guy William Shakespeare who wrote this little play called The Merchant of Venice . In that play, one of the characters says: truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but at the length truth will out . Twice in one evening I am amazed by Greg. I have The M...

Willbeheard

I got this image.

Willbeheard

Sorry to hear your lawmaker is protecting a scofflaw. I am amazed that Greg, whose posts are usually so full of wisdom, expertise in arithmetic and insight into the number of televisions in the USA, has made such an obvious error. Mr O'Dwyer was not a scofflaw. He did not break any criminal law in ...

Willbeheard

The Joy wrote:What if the others refuse to let him sit or mass resign?

That will be enough to accompany several packets of popcorn.

I suppose that in that case, Jimbo could assert his Louis XIV powers and appoint several admins at random; Raoul, anyone?

Willbeheard

This meme – that the fundraiser is a drive to keep Wikipedia ad-free – is quite a porker of course. There is no risk of Wikipedia getting ads; the community would not stand for it. And how exactly could the community stop it if WMF started placing adverts? They could froth and scream all they like ...

Willbeheard

DebbieG wrote:I would say that I'm skeptical of the Melanie Phillips line that Gaza is a paradise on earth created by Israel

I don't think Melanie Phillips is real. I think she's a drawn-out parody. Surely nobody could hold the views she does without attracting the attention of the mental health authorities.

Willbeheard

The list's nothing like complete.

Willbeheard

A possible solution to this problem would be a Wiki-junior website, where the pages are tailored to a 10-15 yr old level. As an example, if a kid wants to know why the sky is blue, they probably don't need to know the precise refractive index of high altitude atmospheric components, they just need ...

Willbeheard

You'd better get in touch with your M.P. right away. My good friend Greg always gives such helpful advice. It had not occurred to me that it might be necessary to contact my MP about that act, given that he voted against it and is lobbying hard to protect Mr. O'Dwyer. Of course, it would be an impr...

Willbeheard

That's not really fair. I think WP does a very good-to-excellent job nailing vandalism and hoaxes. There are content issues, definitely, and not everything malicious or patently stupid gets nailed, obviously, but if one was making a list of Wikipedia's biggest problems, uncorrected vandalism wouldn...

Willbeheard

Michaeldsuarez wrote:Pending Changes protection is being used on a small group of pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:StablePages

Wow! Nine pages and nine test pages! What progress.

Willbeheard

It's all part of this nonsense that an encyclopedia can be written by "anyone that can edit". It can't. It really really really can't. The trouble is that it takes some expertise to know what is fringe science and what isn't. I'm sure it is easy enough to find apparently "reliable sources" to suppo...

Willbeheard

It's from California State Polytechnic University

http://iplocationtools.com/134.71.143.10.html

Surely a university is a reliable source.

Seriously, this shows the folly of trying to control nrewpapers while Wikipedia and its ilk can carry on unfettered.

Willbeheard

If he's committed an offence in England, let him be tried in England and serve his sentence in England. How could the offense be uniquely committed in England if some of the victims and transactions were elsewhere? I don't think you've thought this through, Willbeheard. OK, I should have said "He's...

Willbeheard

But as open as Wikipedia is, it does have an army of vigilant and proactive volunteers policing the site Yes, that's true. The fact that most of these volunteers have no clue what they're on about is just unfortunate. Well, they may be vigilant about new pages, but a http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/...

Willbeheard

Ha, it only takes a majority of active non-recused arbiters to vote to turn an issue into an issue that requires a supermajority of active non-recused arbiters to pass.... Where is my sick bucket... Why would they do it? If it's to stop the motion passing, surely a simple majority can do that on th...

Willbeheard

Wikimedia Germany once put out http://www.amazon.de/Das-WIKIPEDIA-Lexikon-einem-Band/dp/3577091029/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354167948&sr=1-4,an abridged Wikipedia in book format , in collaboration with the Bertelsmann publishing group. It tanked; but of course it was treeware. Does that make...

Willbeheard

You expect this type of crime from places where people have trouble getting enough to eat, but this little shit was a university student in a rich nation. The world was his oyster, and he chose thievery. Come off it. University students are rarely millionaires. He was no doubt racking up tens of th...

Willbeheard

Well, the last couple of days http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics,pulverised all previous records . They sure did. So the aggregate so far is still a whisker behind last year ($10.4 million against $10.8 million), but I'll bet it will overtake tomorrow, and it's more th...

Willbeheard

I don't suppose there's any big deal. He gave up seven years ago, but on two occasions since then, he's had an itch which hes's scratched by making one or two edits. I'd be surprised if he's unique. I never said he was unique. I said I thought he might make an interesting blog post if we could trac...

Willbeheard

Every year Wikipedia's critics seem to think that the fundraiser will fall flat, and every year they're proved wrong. Most people here don't seem to realise that there's one born every minute,so there will always be plenty of mugs happy to contribute to the "Buy Jimbo a castle" fund. And here's one ...

Willbeheard

I don't suppose there's any big deal. He gave up seven years ago, but on two occasions since then, he's had an itch which hes's scratched by making one or two edits. I'd be surprised if he's unique.

Willbeheard

Surely there are hundreds of thousands of very short articles anyway. It would be fairly easy to find articles that deserve to be longer than they are, judged by serious academic standards.

Willbeheard

Anroth wrote:So today's FA is on poisonous mushrooms.

Number 5 on the BBC websites top five shared articles? Mushroom Soup kills four.

Amusing. To me anyway...

If you find four people being killed amusing, fair enough. I suppose it's insignificant in the scheme of things.

Willbeheard

But as open as Wikipedia is, it does have an army of vigilant and proactive volunteers policing the site

Yes, that's true. The fact that most of these volunteers have no clue what they're on about is just unfortunate.

Willbeheard

Now no standard reference works have articles on 9/11 conspiracy theory, or moon landing hoaxes, or scientology. Why should they? :blink: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/528983/Scientology I'd say that anything as prominent as scientology really ought to be covered by any serious referenc...

Willbeheard

Now, in my opinion, articles that contain small errors (e.g. the wrong tense) but cite a reliable source are better than no article at all - and if all such pages were deleted from WP the encyclopaedia would probably shrink by a factor of two. Can you imagine a better summary of at least half of wh...

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