User talk:Mikeblas/Archives/2008/January

Disputed fair use rationale for Image:EDN.jpg
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Disputed fair use rationale for Image:CDSError.PNG
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Disputed fair use rationale for Image:IEEESoftware.jpg
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Cellular Phones in Wikipedia
Looking over the numerous AfDs, as well as the almost overwhelming number of cell phone articles that seem to have come up in Wikipedia, I'm starting to see your name quite a bit. I'm wanting to somewhat bounce a few ideas off you here, to see if someone who is fairly well in the middle of this issue (and a well-established editor on the whole), may be able to give me a little guidance here, or possibly advise me to just leave well enough alone before I develop a case of foot-in-mouth-itis (if that's the case, don't soften the blow, I prefer to be grounded in reality).

What it comes down to, is it seems that many of the discussions that I've seen have started to develop just about the same pattern, and it seems to come down to a back and forth dialog of notability, and there really seems to be no consensus at all on these articles. To me, it seems fairly obvious that there are issues in these articles insofar as WP:NOT for these articles on the whole, and in many cases meeting WP:N and WP:RS seem to be very borderline, the main issue there being whether or not launch reviews and editorials on open-commentary sites would meet such guidelines. The reasonable thing, I would think, would be a new or additional category of guideline for this case, being that there are so many different phones and that phones are becoming so commonplace now; however, as best I can discern, an attempt to add a guideline here would be construed as nothing more than an attempt to introduce instruction creep into the Notability guidelines.

I understand, there's no easy way about this, but certainly, obtaining a consensus would help in reducing the workload on handling AfDs and such on the whole, even though there would still be those who would oppose it and divisiveness would still exist on the issue, but which way to go with it (if there really is one at this point in time) is a bit of a pickle. Any thoughts? Aeternitas827 (talk) 09:48, 7 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi, Aeternitas! This issue is kind of odd. If you hang out at AfD, you know that multiple AfDs usually fail because people want to vote individually. And individual AfD issues result in feedback about the workload, or the tedium. I guess this tells us nothing more than that Wikipedia's procedures are incapable of handling Wikipedia's workload. It's trivial to create an article, and lots of inappropriate articles can be created very quickly; but it takes far too long in comparison to remove (or fix, even!) inappropriate content.


 * I think there's already consensus on the issue. WP:N and WP:RS tell us that substantial reliable sources need to be available, and these phone articles (and articles for lots of other products that I've pushed through AfD) just don't have it. Reviews don't cover it, and sales don't cover it, either. Further, WP:CORP tells us about products and how they need to be notable. I don't think capsule and comparative reviews are references that are substantial enough to support notability; neither are the press release-derived "articles" that are cited so often.


 * If cell phones need some special referendum above these existing polices, I'm happy to participate. But unfortunately I'm ignorant at how to initiate a drive for such consensus. And I'm not sure I have the time to do so, either. Filing AfDs doesn't take a very long time. Working through the long, tedious discussions at Wikipedia:policy pages is much more time consuming, and since Wikipedia talk pages are such a poor communication mechanism, it's quite difficult to keep up.


 * It would seem that we'd avoid "instruction creep" by cementing better guidelines for products at WP:CORP, or by making a new WP:PRODUCT that WP:CORP references.


 * Let me know if you can help drive the process. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:54, 7 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Largely, I think there's a bit of indifference to WP:CORP altogether, reviewing it again (this was a piece I was missing in this puzzle, and actually gives me a bit more direction to go with on this), in addition to the loose construction given to RS with regards to given sources. Getting it all discussed in one place rather than one-by-one, as AfDs do, would grant a fair amount of perspective to the issue and get better guidelines going--that seems to be where this will ultimately need to end up, and get the AfD workload decreased a fair bit.


 * What I'm going to probably do is get my ducks in a row and bring this up over at the village pump, and get people involved that maybe aren't seeing things as large. It'll take a day or so to research previous AfDs on these going back a few months, but for now, that's probably the best starting point.  The goal of it that I'd put out there would be to a) get a clearer guideline for products under WP:CORP, or a WP:PRODUCT-like guideline constructed that would be able to be used for later discussion; from there, it would require separating the wheat from the chaff out of the remaining articles, as I'm sure there are some that are workable in their own right, and in some cases just possibly articles related solely to a family of phones may be a suitable condition to work within. Aeternitas827 (talk) 22:13, 7 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The discussion is added to VP here, if you're interested in adding your two bits. Aeternitas827 (talk) 09:08, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I did. So, uh, now what? -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:18, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Mos burger.gif listed for deletion
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Orphaned non-free media (Image:Mos burger.gif)
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Phones
You continue to nominate mobile phones for deletion. This sporadic process seems inefficient. Since the articles tend to be quite similar, would it not be better to propose a group deletion so that we can resolve it once and then move on? Colonel Warden (talk) 19:10, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I thought about doing a group deletion, but there are a few reasons I haven't. All of the group deletions that I've witnessed have not ended well. Almost invariably, they involve someone saying that the involved set is too disparate, and that they can't possibly be all considered together. (Of course, when articles are listed separately, people cite the very existence of other articles that might have made the set as a reason to keep the subject article.)
 * On the other hand, the problem with non-notable products in general needs to be addressed, too. I've taken a run at starting discussions about WP:CORP directly, but there doesn't seem to be much action on that front.
 * Listing them all hardly lets us move on; there are always new articles created with dubious notability or intent, and therefore always plenty of articles that need to go through AfD. -- Mikeblas (talk) 22:32, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Multimeter impedance

 * Digital meters will generally have less input impedance than analog VOMs. A typical DMM has an input impedance of one megohm, while the best VOMs have input impedances between 50 kilo-ohms and 100 kilo-ohms.

Aren't the figures saying the DMM has more impedance? MilesAgain (talk) 17:16, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Ugh! Seems like I always get that inverted. Good catch. It's fixed now. Thanks! -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:24, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

(year) in New Zealand pages and referencing:
Hi, I noticed that you placed and  on a few of the 200-odd Year in New Zealand pages, e.g. 1930 in New Zealand. Note that these pages, created as part of Wikiproject New Zealand are primarily collections of information that is already on Wikipedia, which should be fully referenced in the linked articles. We do require references when information is added from offline sources such as almanacs (which we are now starting to do) and in sections such as events where there is often no separate article on the event. This policy helps keep the pages at a managable length - many of the pages are already more than 32KB and still have a long way to develop. dramatic (talk) 01:13, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Hello!
 * I'm a little confused -- is the "we" you're referring to the New Zealand project group, or Wikipedia editors as a whole? I'd have to assume it's the latter, as a group that would override Wikipedia's own guidelines.
 * Those guidelines don't allow Wikipedia to serve as it's own reference. In fact, Wikipedia is not a reliable source at its own proclamation. Further, Wikipedia's verifiability guidelines require references for facts be placed in the article where they appear.
 * I'm surprised that you'd assert keeping articles of a manageable size (whatever that actually means) is more important than working to make a reliable, well-referenced corpus by following the well-established guidelines for verifiability. Wikipedia is not paper, so size is of less concern than correctness.
 * Considering the pages you're specifically referencing, it should be easy to see that the required references simply aren't there. A large number of assertions on these pages are red links, which means no article exists at all -- not to mention a well-referenced ones. Even where linked articles are available, footnotes aren't available in most of them, and specific references are almost universally lacking. That is, while the material "should be" referenced in the linked articles, it almost always isn't so.
 * I can't find a policy that says that self-referencing is verboten, but I think it's a bad idea to spread poorly-referenced material throughout the encyclopedia; either by compiling it into lists or translating it into other languages, and will continue to work to tag and remove material that isn't properly referenced. -- Mikeblas (talk) 02:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)