I would be uncomfortable with about blanking articles, if it couldnt do better in telling whether or not something is referenced than the last week or so of deletion nomination has done.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [email protected] wrote:
At 11:06 AM 1/28/2010, Samuel Klein wrote:
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 7:27 PM, Ryan Delaney [email protected] wrote:
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 2:45 PM, phoebe ayers
[email protected] wrote:
Running a mass deletion does have the unfortunate effect that there's no time for anyone to scramble for sources, which folks will do at least some of the time if given a chance. On the other hand, if *all* unsourced bios are deleted, at least no one can claim theirs was singled out for deletion! And hey, it gives a clean slate to start with (she says, somewhat tongue in cheek).
You're right that these are all very bad problems.
Pure Wiki Deletion would be an elegant solution to this, and many other similar snafus.
You and Abd ul-Rahman are right about that.a While PWD is simple and effective, its very lack of process means that it can be less satisfying for frustrated editors (an important engine behind passionate bulk actions). I wonder if there is some way to get the best of both hard and soft solutions.
Thanks. As far as I can see, blanking the article content, particularly with appropriate tags, would satisfy both approaches. It isn't something strange and new, it is how Wikipedia already deals with unsourced information in articles of all kinds, including biographies, it is simply deleted or possibly moved to Talk (by any editor). This is simply applying it the same principle to an article as a whole.
"Satisfying for frustrated editors"? Sure. But deletion must be done by an administrator, and the dubious pleasure of deletion (take that, fancruft!) is not quite respectable for admins, and ordinary editors (or bad-hand accounts for "frustrated" administrators) tend to get themselves banned for indulging too much or too openly in this pleasure.... I'd think that blanking would be reasonably satisfying, while doing much less damage in terms of eventual growth of the project. If a deletionist wants to indulge his or her frustration at cruft and unsourced BLPs by blanking the articles, I'm not offended. It's actually much better and much simpler and much less disruptive than speedy tags and AfDs and all that.
In fact, that was part of the point of WP:PWD, to eliminate the often silly contention over notability at AfD, and instead convert "deletion" into an ordinary editorial decision that can, if conflict arises, go through the gradual escalation of WP:DR, which can, in theory, resolve disputes less disruptively than holding a community discussion right at the outset. For sure, with BLPs with no reliable sources, the content should go, immediately, as long as it goes in a way that makes it easy to recover.
And a bot can do it, very quickly and efficiently. The community is almost certainly not going to allow bots to delete articles! I'm a radical inclusionist, actually, but would have no trouble accepting mass blanking under decent conditions. Particularly conditions where the article, as-is, would not withstand AfD!
PWD also gets harder as speedy deletion criteria expand; now articles are sometimes speedied because they are blank.
That problem would not get worse with PWD as an approach. As unsourced BLPs, they are already totally vulnerable to speedy deletion.
First of all, blanking would create an intermediate option that addresses the BLP issues as well as notability issues. I'd really encourage looking at how PWD could be made effective for all the legitimate purposes behind the various factions in the present flap. The article might not be blanked, it could be redirected to a page on the kind of blanking that was done, giving instructions for how to bring the article back. If problems developed with articles returning without sourcing, the page could be semiprotected and that could even be bot-assisted.
Placing speedy tags should not be done by bot, at least not merely for lack of sourcing, and I see no harm in a blanked article remaining indefinitely; deletion would be requested by a blanked article reviewer who finds that the blanked material was actually of no use whatever, a hoax, or so radically incorrect that it will waste the time of someone who wants to recreate the article. In that case, deletion is exactly appropriate so that a new article starts fresh. But an article where it is easy to verify that the topic exists and some information can be found that is independent, though not necessarily of high quality? The only difference, really, between PWD and standard deletion is the reservation of the ability to read the history of the article to administrators only, which, in fact, increases the load on administrators without a corresponding benefit.
Bots should only do things that are relatively harmless and that can be easily reversed. Deletion cannot be so easily reversed, and overwhelming the speedy deletion system with piles of speedy tags isn't a great idea. Blanking (or blanking with redirection as I'm suggesting) fixes the serious problem immediately, and opens the door to improvement and invites it at the same time. Those who work on improvement will notice useless versions and if they don't have time to improve the article, they can place a speedy tag on it, and a special speedy tag might be created for this situation. The purpose there of deletion is clear: to avoid other editors wasting time trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
Note, however, that someone who finds old content to be useless could remove the content, or if it was partly useless, but something might be salvaged, remove the useless part, save the article, then reblank pending further work.
WP:PWD added an additional feature: redlink display of PWD'd articles. That would require a software change, and it might not be done exactly that way. But this is unnecessary, even if it is possibly desirable. I'm not actually sure which would be better, redlink display or something else, it's possible that redlink would be best. But a person following the redlink, inspired to fix it, would quickly find and be able to read the blanked article, and go from there.
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On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:43 PM, David Goodman [email protected] wrote:
I would be uncomfortable with about blanking articles, if it couldnt do better in telling whether or not something is referenced than the last week or so of deletion nomination has done.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
I've read this five or six times and I can't figure out what you're trying to say. Could you rephrase please?
- causa sui
The proposed deletion, and tagging of articles asserted to be unsourced included a large number of articles that were in fact sourced. The most common reason was that suitable sources were put in the external references section, and merely had to be moved. Next most common was that they had been inserted in the text, but without using reference tags. And then there are the articles being prodded because the sources are not inline, even when they are adequate.
Blanking does less harm than deletion, but it still does harm 1. the usual naïve viewer will not realise there;s an article in the history, no matter what notice is placed. Only the editors know about the page history, and almost nobody reads notices. 2. in the time spent to see if there are sources, a source could be added about half the time. 3. there is no reason to think the unsourced BLPs have more actual problems than the sourced ones, whether minimally sourced or even reasonably sourced. Apart from unsourced statements that are actual problems, many BLP violations (and NPOV violations generally) come from the failure , sometimes the deliberate failure, to include relevant material. Therefore, concentrating on these distracts us from the actual problems here. We don't know how to deal with the demands of doing accurate work in any sort of article, and this project is an irrelevant anodyne.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Ryan Delaney [email protected] wrote:
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:43 PM, David Goodman [email protected] wrote:
I would be uncomfortable with about blanking articles, if it couldnt do better in telling whether or not something is referenced than the last week or so of deletion nomination has done.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
I've read this five or six times and I can't figure out what you're trying to say. Could you rephrase please?
- causa sui
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All right, now it seems that we are getting somewhere. It sounds like you're saying that PWD would make over-aggressive blanking of BLPs less harmful, but not completely harmless. I think that's right, and it's true of all bad edits that they damage the project. The error that PWD corrects is that whereas bad edits are easily reversible, bad deletions are not easily reversible. Most of the time we can easily recover good content that was deleted simply by reverting or going into the edit history and restoring it, but we can't do that with deletion.
So yeah, we'll still have debates about how exactly to interpret the BLP policy in the context of deletion, and we're bound to get it wrong some of the time. The point is that when we do get it wrong, we'll be able to put it right again more easily. I think that's something we could all be on board with.
- causa sui
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 5:29 PM, David Goodman [email protected] wrote:
The proposed deletion, and tagging of articles asserted to be unsourced included a large number of articles that were in fact sourced. The most common reason was that suitable sources were put in the external references section, and merely had to be moved. Next most common was that they had been inserted in the text, but without using reference tags. And then there are the articles being prodded because the sources are not inline, even when they are adequate.
Blanking does less harm than deletion, but it still does harm
- the usual naïve viewer will not realise there;s an article in the
history, no matter what notice is placed. Only the editors know about the page history, and almost nobody reads notices. 2. in the time spent to see if there are sources, a source could be added about half the time. 3. there is no reason to think the unsourced BLPs have more actual problems than the sourced ones, whether minimally sourced or even reasonably sourced. Apart from unsourced statements that are actual problems, many BLP violations (and NPOV violations generally) come from the failure , sometimes the deliberate failure, to include relevant material. Therefore, concentrating on these distracts us from the actual problems here. We don't know how to deal with the demands of doing accurate work in any sort of article, and this project is an irrelevant anodyne.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Ryan Delaney [email protected] wrote:
On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:43 PM, David Goodman [email protected] wrote:
I would be uncomfortable with about blanking articles, if it couldnt do better in telling whether or not something is referenced than the last week or so of deletion nomination has done.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
I've read this five or six times and I can't figure out what you're trying to say. Could you rephrase please?
- causa sui
WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l