User talk:Mlm42/archive1

Feel free to contact me personally with any questions you might have. The Village pump is also a good place to go for quick answers to general questions. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~.

Be Bold!

Sam [Spade] 11:14, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

C v E
At your suggestion, I took a look at the creation/evolution debate page, and began editing, but it's just too much for me; most of that would have to be cut, and I'm sure that all sorts of passions and hackles would be inflamed in the process. I'm not sure that there even ought to be such an article; if there is, they'll have to come to an agreement about just what is being debated... now it just seems like a dump for any argument or citation that's remotely in the vicinity. My hat's off to you if you want to take that on. --BTfromLA 08:57, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Re: hey steve
Hey, you got me all right. I had no idea I was so scary to Steph, but I guess my nerd aura is pretty strong, and she seemed a bit weirded out by the espresso machine. Erm, should I know who you are? --Saforrest 07:52, August 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * Nevermind, just figured it out. Man, now you're all graduated 'n everything.   I feel old. --Saforrest 08:05, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

Chemistry Portal
Why did you make the edit to the featured article part? The earlier version looked OK to me. --Bduke 23:36, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the response. The portal is so important I think that such a change would best be debated on the portal talk page before making the change. However, I have to run off to uni now, so I have no time. --Bduke 23:44, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Verifiablity
Your points on verifiability are well taken, but the examples you raise seem to touch on a slightly different issue to the one covered in the verifiabilty policy. What we have here is an inhearantly unverifiable topic: college legends and traditions. There is no compendium of these legends, as they are part of an oral culture, and no ordinary encyclopedia or guide to Cambridge would list them due to space restrictions (see Wikipedia is not a Paper Encyclopedia). In other words, the conflict here is not between verifiabilty and truth, but verifiablity and completeness. Acording to this official policy, almost this entire section should be removed holus bolus from the article, along with much of the other information on Wikipedia. I beleive this would be a loss and would engender very little increase in accuracy as such facts as these are checkable, even without reference to a newspaper or magazine (and indeed are being checked and debated all the time). Dreadnought1906 17:37, 15 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Not precisely. What I'm saying is that the policy is inaplicable and, in fact, not applied, to the vast majority of wikipedia 'facts'.  Indeed, if there doesn't even seem to be a standard or commonly used Wikipedia 'footnote' system, which I would suppose to be the very cornerstone of such a verifiability system.  So whether or not most of the information on the site is 'verifiable' (and I would guess that most of it isn't), almost none of the information is actually verified.  If I wanted to be snarky, which I honestly don't, I might say that it is not me, but the whole wikipedia community who take the policy 'lightly'.


 * I think, your suggestion of pluming college histories will not work as a) they include few of the oral history elements in the article and b) they are merely one step removed anway, being written by the same people sort of people contributing to the article in the first place (which may fit the wikipedia policy better, but is fundementally intelectually dishonest). In fact, what we have operating here is a much more powerful, much more 'internety' way of maintaining casual knowledge.  Rather than refering to non-peer reviewed books as some kind of 'authority', the section is being maintained by constant review on the part of people living among and experiencing the oral culture it describes.  Many eyes on the page is having the effect of ironing out inaccuracies without driving it down to a bland agreement of truth.  This remarkable effect is the way that wikipedia actually seems to work, whether or not the founders choose to formulate a theoretical framework that works on other lines.


 * Obviously this argument cuts to the very heart of what wikipedia is, and naturally tends towards an argument for changing the verifiabilty policy itself. I do not feel it my place to do so.  I am a causal reader of wikipedia, who occasionally feels he has a contribution to make.  I am  not a core member of the community and am not party to much of the community's discussion and intelectual development.  Indeed much of what wikipedians of long standing and good reputation do is mystifying to me.  So I am not the person to go challenging fundemental rules.


 * If you want to take out the sections on Corpus myths, go ahead and do so. I, personally, feel it would make the article poorer but this is your playground, not mine.


 * [Oops! Sorry, forgot to sign!] Dreadnought1906 12:54, 16 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your response. If you don't want to argue this, that's fine, we can drop it and I'll let you have the last word in reply to this. However I'm finding this an interesting discussion, so if you want we can carry on.


 * I think the problem here is that I feel the verifiability policy really is wrong. I say this, not as a wikipedia user, but as a professional historian.  Please understand that historians face analagous problems to this all the time, and we have very sophisticated systems for dealing with them.  The Wikipedia verifiablity policy would never be accepted by serious historians for three reasons: a) because it patently ignores most of the best sources for information on a lot of issues (eg. oral history, see below), b) because it explicitly privilages media sources (the emphasis on 'newspapers and magazines') which are, as you know, very unreliable and c) because it makes no provision for mandatory citation.  A project to fact check Wikipedia is laudable and good but a) if it's based on the standards in the verifiability policy it will always be broken and b) it will be systemically unable to check most of the facts in Wikipedia anyway, due to the nature of local and oral knowledge.


 * Now, I understand that these policies are put together by wise people who have thought it through a lot, and maybe I'm wrong. But the way historians think about verifiabilty and evidence has, I respectfully submit, been thought about for a lot longer.  Most troubling to me is the lack of mandatory citation, without which verifiability is completely impossible. Without such a system, and I'm talking source and page number here, one could say whatever came into one's head and simply invent sources to pretend to back it up.


 * You rightly point out that Wikipedia has prepared a style guide to suggest how citation might take place, but that style guide is conspicuously unused in the vast majority of articles. I would argue, and I realise that this is contraversial, that if a policy is almost never used, that policy can not be considered the norm.  Sure it may be up there on the policy pages, but it's not actually how Wikipedia really works in real life.  Another example of this might be the deletion of 'trivial' articles.  The policies you've brought to my attention specifically say that there should be no effective limit on the number of topics covered by Wikipedia.  But, you and I both know that well respected members of the community take it upon themselves to trawl through articles, proposing article deletion on the basis of their 'triviality' (vis. the Leckhampton article).  This tendency to have a set of rules that say one thing and a 'real' set of unwritten rules which say quite another is well known among students of organisational culture.


 * As for oral history... well that's a bit of a slip of the tounge. I meant to say 'oral culture', which is a slightly different concept from oral history.  From you're many converstations with me, personally, I'm sure you've notised my tendency toward noun substitution.  Of course I used the term 'oral history' becuase it's a much more natural phrase for me, given it's (partly) what I do for a living.  So, you see, I dissagree with your somewhat offhand dismissal of this indispensible and sophisticated investigative technique, despite what the opening sentences of the wikipedia article might say.  My thesis, for example, inovlves interviews with historical actors, as does the work of my supervisior, and almost all of my collegues.  Historians working in earlier periods constantly use sources that are essentially written accounts of oral sources, and oral history work has been successfully conducted on the basis of transmitted oral traditions.  Oral history is legitimate; oral culture is important.


 * Now, finally, I can get to something we can agree on. Yes, I agree that verifiability is a really good way of conducting dispute resolution.  In fact, I was going to put that in my previous comment, but it didn't really fit (something along the lines of 'verifiability sucks as a prerequisite for inclusion, although it is useful for dispute resolution').  Even so, one must still keep in mind the credibility and bias of sources, the nature of the information and the virtual inevitability of ambiguity.  One must also note that different people are sure to have different assessments of which sources are the most credible, etc.  Not all texts are made equal.


 * So all this comes down, in my mind, to one question: do we follow the wikipedia offical guidlines, or do we follow the normal and accepted practice of wikipedia users? I argue that the wikipedia official policies are wrong, in this respect, and the normal practice of wikipedians is (if not exactly right) highly effective.  While Wikipedia might consider Fox News a credible source and the Master of Corpus Christi College not, I stand by the principle of peer review by known and recognised knowledgable people which is, in a sense, what we have here in this article. Dreadnought1906 01:22, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Phobos vandalism
Mark, I suggest you place a warning message in the vandal's talk page, looking at this user it seems vandalism is all he has done to date, yet he has no warning message. Thanks, Crum375 13:55, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Leckhampton
Well, says he grudgingly, if the Bridge of Sighs gets its own artickle then Leckhampton might qualify. Must provide a link to the University official map - same like 'Location' in the info box for the collidges. -- RHaworth 11:40, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC) (you may guess which is my college)