User:SmokeyJoe/snippets

Snippets I have found interesting and may want to use or just think about
This quote from a user on a recent AfD is an example of the problem as I see it: "Being mentioned in the series isn't notability. Being mentioned in third-party critical analysis by reliable sources is notability." Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (writing about fiction)/draft revision 03:56, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

committed Wikipedians are usually active on a range of articles, and their aim is to see a balanced growth in articles and in the encyclopedia as a whole 05:37, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

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I believe the most painful deletion experience is when a page you've written (or worked on a lot), or one that you really like, gets axed without your knowledge, and you discover it only when you try to go there and it just ain't there anymore. For newcomers that can be especially traumatic, since they don't know that they may be able to resurrect the page, first by looking up the deletion debate to see why it was deleted and whether or not it is fixable, second by requesting of an admin that he or she copy it (from the deletion graveyard) to their user page for repair/editing, and third by fixing it. 06:03, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

At WT:N An article's subject is appropriate for Wikipedia if sufficient secondary source coverage is available to write a comprehensive, non-stub article on it. All articles written on subjects which do not fit this guideline should be merged into a parent topic or deleted as appropriate. Seraphimblade Talk to me Please review me! 14:31, 6 March 2007 (UTC-8)

Wikipedia
Jimbo at Wikipedia is not here to make people sad. So we want to respond in a helpful and loving way.

Long-term Unsourced Articles

clarification of your ruling on a recent AfD debate
You recently closed the AfD debate at Articles for deletion/List of massacres (2nd nomination) with a ruling that the list should be kept, but renamed: List of events named massacres. This has been done, but due to on going debate I need to ask you for a clarification.

Editors are debating the following: 1) the name change means that an event that is cleary named "massacre" in reliable sources can be included, or 2) the change means that only events that are named "massacre" in their Wikipedia articles (ie in the title or in BOLD in the lead) are to be included.

The prime example of this debate is whether to include the Tiananmen Square Massacre... called such in numerous reliable sources, but not called that in the lead of our Wikipedia article on the topic - Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (note, however, that it is called a massacre later in the text.)

It would be helpful if you, as the closing admin of the AfD, were to pop over and clarify your intent as it relates to this issue. Blueboar (talk) 15:23, 1 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your note: see my explanation at Talk:List of events named massacres. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:56, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi,

Thank you for the detail you put into the difficult closure of Articles for deletion/List of massacres (2nd nomination) and for your subsequent explanation.

One issue on which you didn’t comment was the merits of the article for navigation purposes. I feel that more navigation aids are needed, but that we wikipedians are having trouble with summary articles for contentious subjects. Other examples include Articles for deletion/Psychiatric abuse (second nomination), which in the end was judged too much a POV target, and Animal testing, which through the controversy is coming along pretty well. Search functions are of limited use when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for. Categories are a rather dry way to browse. Navigation boxes are good if you are already close to where you want to be. Pages like List of events named massacre, to me, serve usefully like navigation boxes for broad subject areas. I’d be interesting in your thoughts. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:13, 4 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your note, Joe.
 * I honestly don't think that there is any easy answer to that one, because the usefulness of navigational aids may conflict with the policy of WP:NPOV.
 * Off the top of my head, I could think of many navigational aids which some readers would find useful: List of atrocities committed by the United States under Republican presidents, List of British Labour Party politicians in financial misconduct scandals, List of wars in which France was the aggressor, List of heads of state alleged to have been war criminals ... and on we go. All of those would undoubtedly be useful navigational aids for some readers, but because their premise is decidedly biased, they clearly fail the neutrality test.
 * Lists like this can end up being rather useless as navigational aids, because their selection criteria are somewhat arbitrary. Whatever the arguments for keeping List of events named massacres, I don't see that it's much help as a navigational aid; it's more an object of curiosity, a pointer to one aspect of the issues around naming of mass killings, focusing solely on one particular emotive term amongst many possible labels, some of them similarly emotive.  For example, List of events named massacres omits all of the incidents known as Bloody Sunday, which makes it pretty useless for anyone looking for a navigational aid to the subject of mass killings.
 * I'm sure that a very good encyclopedic article could be written discussing how these events are named, and why e.g. the Rape of Nanking got that name, or how American scholars, politicians and American media handled the labelling of My Lai Massacre as a "massacre" rather than using a more benign term such as "incident". Similarly, neutral lists could be constructed as good navigational aids by using neutral inclusion criteria: a List of wars involving France rather than a List of wars in which France was the aggressor, a List of ethical issues in psychiatry rather than a List of psychiatric abuses.
 * With regard to mass killings, I think that there many ways in which neutral lists could be created by focusing on clearly defined aspects of the spectrum of events defined as "massacre": List of mass killings of civilians in war, List of mass killings of civilians in defeated siege towns, List of mass killings of captured soldiers, List of mass killings of civilians other than in war, and so on. (Those examples may be flawed, but I hope that the intention is clear; inclusion criteria which are not designed to further any particular perspective, and which are reasonably capable of being applied objectively).
 * I hope that helps. I'm all in favour of navigational aids, and WP:CLS rightly stresses that all the different tools can have their uses. But editors building these tools do need to be careful to construct these navigational aids in ways that are clearly neutral and not arbitrary, otherwise their work risks being deleted. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:52, 4 March 2008 (UTC)


 * "The battle for Wikipedia's soul", The Economist, March 6, 2008.

The fact that you might have to dig to find sources is the nature of the beast. We are an encyclopedia, a tertiary source, and our material must be written from already published sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Notability&curid=13313193&diff=203267453&oldid=203245721

Limits on blocking
An administrator is expected to refrain from issuing blocks in response to personal attacks directed at themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Tango#MeatBall:DefendEachOther Referenced at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Le_Grand_Roi_des_Citrouilles&oldid=221802049

Thoughts on RFC/U
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct (2nd nomination)

Deletion means deletion
'''Deletion means deletion. The deleted page archives ARE TEMPORARY TO FACILITATE UNDELETION OF PAGES WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DELETED and are subject to being cleared or removed AT ANY TIME WITHOUT WARNING. --brion 00:50, 19 January 2007 (UTC)'''

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&diff=101684983&oldid=101671249

Wikipedia:Civility/Poll
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ACivility%2FPoll&diff=300547875&oldid=300546241 copy of page