User talk:Philcha/Archives/2010/September

Road to Europe
I responded a long time ago to your review, so please respond. -- Pedro J. the rookie 15:35, 6 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I've just looked at WP:PR and can't see the review - can you see the review and, if so, the last time you saw it. --16:38, 6 September 2010 (UTC)


 * In fact you should not have a GA review and PR review at the same time, so the PR review lapsed. I'm afraid 3 GA reviewers (including me) thought Road to Europe was not of GA standard. If you look at the comments in the GA review, you should be able to improve the article and hopefully pass the next GA review. --Philcha (talk) 16:57, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Master of Orion II
Please have a look at the bottom of Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares/1. --Philcha (talk) 08:14, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Done. "The game had a GAR and passed, by Teancum" is inaccurate: Teancum opened a community GAR, and improvements to the article satisfied his/her concerns; that does not mean the article passed GAR, because it was not an individual reassessment. Your suggestion to improve the article using a 1996 review and 2000 (retro)review are good. Articles can be renominated at any time, so you do not need to rush. Geometry guy 00:41, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Copy of Geometry guy 00:41, 25 August 2010

--Philcha (talk) 06:40, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Geometry guy says at [User_talk:Geometry_guy&oldid=381149701 Six days] that "I'm trying to comment from the perspective of what a curious reader may want from the article". That is what I've always aiming for with Master of Orion II.

I'm reinstating this item in my Talk, I don't know how it was removed. --Philcha (talk) 14:30, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Writing style
Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (i.e. aimed at laypersons, especially fairly young ones) and is mainly presented on the Web, the well-known principles of writing for the Web apply - see for example Web Style Guide: If anyone thinks that's "dumbing down", they're sadly mistaken - communicating complex ideas in simple language is quite possible but is also hard work. The practices I've advocated are in line with Make technical articles accessible, WP:NOT PAPERS and Explain jargon. Anyone who has difficulty understanding these WP policies should read logorrhoea and Sokal affair.
 * use the simplest possible language,.
 * avoid long passages of prose. See How Users Read on the Web - published 1997! Jakob Nielsen is the most renowned usability expert.
 * avoid jargon where possible and provide / link to definitions where jargon is necessary.
 * use (sub-)headings and other devices to give the reader as many up-front clues as possible to the structure.
 * use images where appropriate but not so much as to make pages load slowly.
 * link to anything that's relevant - but only to what's relevant.
 * aim for a fog index of about 12, similar to mags like TIME and around the reading level of a high school student.
 * Kathy Henning's Writing for Readers Who Scan advises: Delete every unnecessary word; Keep sentences short and simple; Include only one idea per paragraph; Use subheads, and make sure they're clear and relevant, Subheads allow scanners to skip over chunks of copy that don't appear to have a direct relationship to their needs; Bullet-point parallel words, phrases, or clauses -- especially information that's important, Bullet points not only cut down on words and organize content but also stand out from surrounding text and get read; Put important information at the beginnings of sentences and important sentences at the beginnings of paragraphs; Use transition words whenever possible, such as "but," "so," "and," "also," and "because"; Choose shorter words whenever possible, for example, "lie" for "prevaricate" or "recline"; Avoid circumlocutions (e.g., "at a later time" for "later"); Whenever possible, use the active voice.
 * See also Sun Microsystems'        	  	 		                                                         Writing for the Web

Spelling
I'm a Brit, and I understand that most readers and editors of Wikipedia will be more familiar with US English. Feel free to correct any spelling inconsistencies or terms which may cause confusion to US English users. In turn I suggest US editors should use international rather than US terms where possible. --Philcha (talk) 22:09, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Surely that mainly applies to topics outwith the US? ;-) . . dave souza, talk 22:18, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think several terms used in the US are probably confusing to some non-US readers. "Fall" (season), especially for readers in the southern hemisphere; and the short liquid measures, e.g. gallon. --Philcha (talk) 09:07, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

About reliable sources
I support the principle of Wikipedia's insistence on reliable sources, to keep out flamers,  people with axes to grind,  disruptive editors and other nuisances. However the current wording of Wikipedia's guideline on reliable sources is too biassed towards academic and corporate sources. There are some valid Wikipedia subjects in which these rules don't work very well. For example in chess the quality of books varies enormously, (ex-)top players are reliable commentators on play but not on the history of the game, and most chess content these days is on the Web, which is well down WP:RS's scale of reliability. In computer games most articles in "big name mags" are reviews of individual games written under tight deadlines and sometimes subject to commercial pressures, while most of the thoughtful stuff is in the best blogs, including those by game designers and developers. Non-academic book and magazine publishers have being cutting back on the expensive activity of fact-checking for several years, and are only starting to reverse this slide because of lawsuits - which means that for several years non-academic books have been less reliable than WP:RS assumes. Traditional newspaper publishing is in trouble, and a faster-moving, Internet-based model is likely to do less fact-checking. WP:RS's reliance on a "reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" is just an assumption that has not stood up well under testing. The "fact checking" WP:RS thinks so highly of aims mainly to avoid being bankrupted by lawsuits, and often stops there, because commercial media exist to make a profit and therefore need to minimise costs. WP:RS shows no understanding in the differences in the structure of ecomonic incentives between academic and other publishing.

Even WP:RS's gold standard, peer-reviewed articles in academic and professional journals, is no guarantee. For example on 9th October 2008 The Economist published an article Publish and be wrong describing how almost a third of 49 papers in leading journals that had been cited by more than 1,000 other scientists had been refuted by other studies within a few years. The risk was highest in papers that made spectacular claims, which for commercial reasons are the most likely to be published. The original paper, Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science, is even more worrying.


 * A Checkered Present (1999)
 * How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvigorate Journalism (2007)
 * Counting the Errors of Modern Journalism (1995)

Discussions

 * I've had a lot of enjoyable, productive discussions with people who see things differently from me. Usually I learn something from them, which I think is a good outcome.
 * I try to be considerate of "newbie" suggestions or questions, however naive. If someone's read a Wikipedia article with enough interest and attention to raise a question or suggestion, that's a success for Wikipedia.
 * Unfortunately there are a few bullies around. If I see such behaviour I'm prepared to fight fire with fire.

GA, FA, etc.
So far my experience is that Good Article reviews generally lead to improvements. However everything I've heard suggests that going for Featured Article status is not worth the time and trouble. In the words of one editor with whom I enjoy collaborating:
 * I try not to play the "featured article" game any more. I once brought an article to that standard, and spent probably three times as long "jumping through hoops" as I did adding useful content to the article.  My current philosophy (which I'm not very good at abiding by) is that one should only spend one's valuable time adding useful content to the Pedia, and leave it to the hordes of (stereotype deleted) with nothing better to do to fight over whether your quotes should be curly or not, and other such Important Issues.  Or in other words - if it doesn't matter, ignore it!

Or, to quote another editor I respect and like:
 * ... the FA-review where they will tell us all our sources are crap and we have to rewrite everything because it does not comply with their brand new policy on the colour of vowels.

Another editor with 4 FAs on the resumé:
 * The MOS thing has gotten me to the point where I don't want do FAs anymore. Time was when I could slip articles past  FAC based on whether they were any good or not. But after a mammoth FA last year I lost the will to do them anymore. If there were legions of copyeditors out there willing to do all the pedantic b...s..t then it wouldn't be a problem, but there aren't. And my time would be better spent dragging a subpar start class article up to B class than fixing ndashes and making sure that numbers and the following words have the right kind of space between them in the reference section

Or, if you have time to spare, User_talk:Iridescent/Archive_8 and another discussion started by the same editor. Or User:Physchim62/Situation Normal: All FACked up. If you need a library of pages about FA, try Juliancolton's. Or an external critique.

If you think the The Manual of Style is far too finicky, have a look at Category:Hyphen Luddites - if you agree, add

at the bottom of your User page.

A species of WikiDragon?
I may be a sort of WikiDragon. If so, I'd like to think of myself as a member of a more recent species, Wikidraco scholasticus, with a voracious appetite for academic journals and other WP:RS, which it uses to: identify targets; improve its agility by frequent intellectual exercise; increase its sustainable production of dragon-fire and other munitions (see image); and block the lunges of clumsy WikiKnights with hefty tomes. W. scholasticus retains the ancestral traits of boldness, loyalty and a taste for medium-rare flambé deletionist, especially if coated in crunchy armor. See Articles for deletion/Precambrian rabbit for an example.

Deletionist, inclusionist or what?
I'm certainly not a deletionist (burp). But I don't think I could be a full-on inclusionist, because I'm not in  favour of including all sorts of trivia, and dislike the habit some editors have of creating stubs on their pet subjects and then expecting others to do the real work.

On the other hand I don't want to be labelled a delusionist - especially if it's true! But I can't call myself a precisionist, because I don't think it's possible for policy to "be precisely clarified to avoid future disputes". Perhaps I should join the militantly moderate Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist. But that's a heck of a mouthful, even for a Wikidraco scholasticus.

Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies
Must read Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies some time and see if any of the options fits me.

How to deal with vandalism
During the vote about whether we should  try out  Flagged revisions, I used the test page to log in without "reviewer" privileges, edit & save, view the page, log out, and view the page again as an unregistered IP user. My edit was visible when I was logged in, but not after I logged out.

I'm not happy about flagged revisions because hiding unregistered IP's edits violates the idea of "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and will discourage the many IP users who do useful things like typo-fixing and copy-editing - sometimes clearig up my errors. It also introduces another layer of bureacracy, which will divert resources from useful things like improving articles.

We need a tougher policy against vandals:
 * Block longer, and after fewer acts of vandalism - I suggest a maximum of 3. Admins may of course block earlier in serious cases, including those that may expose Wikipedia to legal action, page-moves (e.g. to "H A 6 6 E R") and vandalism perpetrated by the use of scripts or bots - more than 1 per minute is a give-away.
 * Don't be in such a hurry to wipe the slate clean. At present a user's vandalism count appears to be reset after a month. I suggest acts of vandalism should continue to be counted for 3 months.
 * Treat shared IPs that vandalise the same as any other vandals. If their admins can't control their users, that should be their problem, not ours. In any case users affected by such blocks can still register - provided the IPs have not been blocked from creating accounts, which happens if they have been used to create accounts that have vandalised Wikipedia pages.

The following was shouted down by admins at Wikipedia_talk:Vandalism:
 * 1) Vandals should be blocked after at most the third act of vandalism in any 3-month period. Admins may block earlier than this if they consider it necessary, for example in cases of persistent or sneaky vandalism, or where the vandalism exposes Wikipedia to legal action, for example by violating WP:BLP.
 * 2) The minimum durations of blocks should be increased to a minimum of 1 week for the first offense, 1 month for the second, 3 months for the third, 1 year for the fourth and indefinite for the fifth. Admins may block for longer periods if they consider it necessary.
 * 3) Without exception IP vandals, i.e. unregistered users, should be treated the same as registered users who vandalize. In other words there should not be more lenient treatment for shared IP addresses. If schools, ISPs, etc. do not control their users, it should be their problem and not ours. Users of shared IP addresses that are blocked should be invited to register.

I think we need admins who are tougher on vandals, and that we should ask at each RfA:
 * After how many acts of vandalism in what period would you block a proven vandal?
 * For how long should previous acts of vandalism be taken into account when deciding what to do with the most recent?
 * For how long would you block on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th offences?
 * Would you give shared IP addresses that have been used for vandalism more lenient treatment than is given to other vandals?

We should also be tougher on Randy in Boise.

Anything else

 * User:Art LaPella/Devil's Dictionary of Wikipedia Policy already says it all.
 * WikiSpeak covers anything Art LaPella hasn't got round to yet.
 * User:Balloonman/Why I hate Speedy Deleters
 * Majorly's spoof of teh dramaz at  the real and terribly serious business of vetting candidates for the position of  administrator on Wikipedia.
 * After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust? by New Scientist - reports concerns that the proliferation of policies and guidelines is deterring newbies and threatens WP's long-term survival.