Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Admins' Edit Log

This page is specifically targeted to meet the needs of admins and experienced editors, although anyone is welcome to join the discussion. The following is intended to be a discussion and log of all the editing actions in February and March in robotics articles taken by people who have a good feel for the issues involved, so that they can be categorized and discussed in one place. The only goal here is the convenience of everyone involved...suggestions are welcome, we're all friends here. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:38, 7 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Revised Article Guidelines Please review new section "Article Inclusion Criteria for WikiProject Robotics" and provide any feedback to its talk page. Thanks.   - Jameson L. Tai   talk  ♦  contribs   23:05, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

The biggest news of the week is that the reaction we got at the Admin's Noticeboard and the Manual of Style Talk Page was much more positive than some of us expected, and we have incorporated what was said there (and especially, what wasn't said!) into our Article Guidelines. So, friends, before you rip into us for encouraging new editors to create articles even if they don't have a lot of references and even if the articles are technical or of interest to a specific group, please read and digest the following. These are excerpts that don't leave out anything relevant to these conclusions, but you're welcome to follow the links and read for yourselves.

At Administrators' noticeboard/Archive125, I brought up the point that Wikipedians are often uncomfortable with roboticists, because everyone is annoyed by technology and scared about the future of robotics. There was full support for the idea that roboticists deserve more respect on Wikipedia. The argument continued:

... Roboticists (at least, the ones I listen to) will tell you that most academic and journalistic reviews of new commercial robots are completely unreliable, it's much better to get a report from an individual or group that you know to be reliable who has tested the product. But "Joe over at Engadget says..." is not the kind of cite that WP likes to rely on. This problem has similarities to the problems lawyers face when using "precedent" to argue a case about satellites or intellectual property law...it's well-known that you get some very silly results. Likewise, if we tag robotics articles because they don't cite the same kinds of sources that would be appropriate for history articles, we're going to get some silly results. I don't really expect to have any great difficulty with this issue, but I am inviting comment ... - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:08, 2 February 2008 (UTC) Google news search is a good way to find reliable sources for...those things that can be reliably sourced. In the case of Lawnbott, it works well: articles in the Christian Science Monitor and Sacramento Bee. Incorporate what those articles say, add them to the references, and your article should be safe. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:01, 2 February 2008 (UTC) If you cite the journal articles and publications from which the article is drawn, that normally satisfies the notability requirement in the process. Unless the only sources are press releases and company publications, in which case the article may be doomed anyway. Guy (Help!) 09:41, 2 February 2008 (UTC) Thanks for the cites, and I completely agree. Hopefully the combination of newspaper articles sufficient to comply with WP:SOURCE plus informed debate among users (for commonly available robots) or experts (otherwise) will get the job done. Things are going well at the moment. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 13:51, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

What's really important there is what was not said. In a room full of people who are very comfortable saying "no" (visit WP:AN and see), not a single person spoke in opposition.

Another hard-nosed group at Wikipedia (because that's their job, they're actually nice people) are the guys (male and female) who enforce standards for what is "encyclopedic". Some hang out at the WP:WikiProject_League_of_Copyeditors, some belong to WP:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check, but one group in particular that has some very tough standards are the editors of Manual of Style and related pages. This was my argument in reference to a discussion about letting mathematicians say "we" in encyclopedia articles:

... The reason for my passion is that building an encyclopedia (in my case, mostly about robotics) is only half of my reason for putting enormous amounts of time into Wikipedia. The other half is that I actually want to see people benefiting from robots in the home...we desperately need them before all the baby boomers retire, and the developing world needs them to help provide food and power. I see both goals, building an encyclopedia and building robotics community, succeeding or failing together. I believe that both goals will fail if expert roboticists are not comfortable here. They won't be comfortable if their articles are reverted on the grounds that they don't sound right, when they know perfectly well that the articles are using language acceptable for their field...language that MoS editors aren't familiar with and didn't bother to ask about. I have some familiarity with manuals of style from a previous life, and this is most of the reason I'm trying to get up to speed on as much of MoS as I can...because the roboticists are very unlikely to care, and are likely to simply go back to the communities they came from in the first place if they feel disrespected here. Uninformed criticism of language is a great way to make someone feel demeaned. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:33, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

With apologies, there are one or two more points that are essential in this argument. Two months ago, I saw nothing wrong with the argument that "nothing technical needs to be in Wikipedia, that's for Wikibooks or Wikiversity". After two months of talking with students, hobbyists, academics and professionals, I realize that I was completely wrong. There is no, none, zilch, desire among these people to stop their productive pursuits long enough to go write a book on Wikibooks. Wikipedia is the top .org site in the world and has enormous cachet, enough to pull people in and get them involved. Either we make them feel welcome here, or we never get an encyclopedic treatment of robotics. (This is in no way a criticism of the many fine robotics articles here. Details are best left to WP:WikiProject Robotics.)  Also, I have enormous respect for the incredibly large number of incredibly talented editors around here who would do a bang-up job on, say, an article about using a robotic vacuum for a general audience. But there is already solid support for inclusion of articles dealing with, for instance, path-finding algorithms used by robotic vacuums...you'll find similar articles through the AI Portal. But these articles should be written with the readers in mind who will actually be reading them...that is, they should be written at their level, using concepts they understand and language they are comfortable with. A MoS-aware editor, who might in all other respects be an incredibly talented and feted Wikipedian, but who has never read such an article before, would probably not be the right person to decide what to revert in such an article, and might, if successful, harm the community that some of us are trying very hard to build here. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 04:20, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

And this was the reaction, I'm not leaving anything out:

You're preaching to the choir. I agree Wikipedia needs highly technical articles. In fact, both Trovatore and I know Heine-Borel [the theorem we were talking about] and stuff like that and write and edit very specialized articles. Your suspicion regarding who wrote Manual of Style (mathematics) does fortunately not reflect reality. It is written by people who write scholarly maths articles and who are perfectly aware that "we" is used there (including myself). Nevertheless, this group decided that "we" should be avoid[ed], for the following two reasons: journal articles and textbooks are written in a less formal style than encyclopaedia articles, and it is jargon (as you say, it sounds funny). I agree that the latter reason is not really relevant for specialized articles, but the former one still stands. I don't want to sound dismissive. Personally, I don't care about the "we" issue, I just want to clear up a contradiction. Perhaps we should discuss the use of "we" again and see whether the consensus shifted. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:42, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

You don't sound dismissive at all, you sound supportive, which is nice, given how argumentative I was (it didn't sound that way to me last night, now it does). Glad that you guys are on top of this. The context for my argument is that I am going around saying the things that I feel need saying to the relevant audiences, attempting to be honest about what connections I do and don't have and how my goals do and don't differ. I love the occasional "archness" of MoS discussions, it's a guilty pleasure, and I very much want to stay up on MoS discussions because I don't think anyone else in WikiProject Robotics will, and we need to be able to play by the same rules everyone else does. I honestly don't expect the community of MoS-aware editors to be the problem, the roboticists themselves are much more of a handful at the moment, and some past arguments made by admins seem less than helpful, and we seem to have an order of magnitude more vandalism than I would expect, given that we rarely have heated arguments. Still, I'd just like to say: people are invited to read my argument above, and if you have any serious disagreement, I'd appreciate it if you could record it here so that I can post it over at WP:ROBO/AEL. My thesis, I suppose, is: we (the copyediting or MoS-aware community) should go a little bit easy on new editors who have technical skills that we very much need here, especially when a new WikiProject like WikiProject Robotics is starting up, and...despite the fact that there's more in WT:MoS and the relevant archives than anyone can ever know...we should accept the additional burden of learning a bit more about how various technical communities talk, and how to use language to make them feel welcome. We should do it because we can. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 17:34, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

So let me elaborate a hair on my objection to "we". It has nothing to do with technical usage; I think technical usage is fine, though articles should of course be written to be as accessible as possible given their subject matter. It's a question of tone. "We" is too discursive, too narrative. It's what you say when you're presenting your own material, or when you're teaching a subject (as in a textbook). Wikipedia on the other hand is a reference work, and needs to be written in a more "just the facts" kind of style. --Trovatore (talk) 18:53, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

That's it, there was no objection. There is advice here on how we should write articles, advice that is relaxed enough to allow people to write with technical language or language aimed at a particular audience, as long as we're careful to make the language as clear and understandable as possible, avoiding "jargon". There was no hint here of "robotics articles have to sound like every other Wikipedia article", that violates the sense of support that I've gotten from everyone who has commented...and also from the people who gave assent with their silence. Obviously this can all be rediscussed at any time, and I will post something here immediately if I ever hear any re-interpretation, but this is how things stand so far. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:38, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Assessment issues at WP:ROBO
Upgrading the language and content of our articles is important, as long as we still welcome the participants who don't speak English well or are new to Wikipedia. This is because English is even more universal for technology and robotics than it is for other purposes, so that even people who could read technology articles in Wikipedia in their own language often prefer to do it here, because they expect we have broader and more up-to-the-minute coverage (and they're probably right). Also, the German Wikipedia and some others tend to have tougher guidelines and fewer articles. There's no need for "Simple English" but be aware that many of our readers prefer simpler English.

Bill shared some experience with the assessment process:


 * If I understand what Jameson is saying, then I agree that we ought to be ambitious and go for as many articles with high classifications as we can get. This is based on my (very limited!) experience with Nausea (novel) last week. Maybe I'm totally delusional, but here's how it looks to me: I showed up, at the end of the month, for the Novels project Collaboration of the Month, hoping to get some training working along with more experienced novels editors. (I hadn't read Nausea or thought about it in years.) Guess what? Nobody else shows up. I get kind of frustrated, so I go to my bookshelves and start looking up Sartre in the index of everything I have on novels -- and I search Amazon Reader similarly. Pretty soon, I've got a pile of citations. So I just start rough-sorting them into the text of the article, while periodically restructuring to keep the result halfway coherent.  Outcome? After 5 days of sweat and hard work, the WP:DYK editors compliment me, put my hook on the Main Page, and tell me I ought to be looking into WP:GA. And, if you want my own honest opinion, I think the article looks like a mess that was thrown together with too much work over too short a period of time -- but I also think it will clean up well.  I'm pretty positive I can get GA -- after a thorough cleaning. Then, after a Peer Review, I'm pretty positive I can get FA not too too long from now. (Please do bear in mind, though, that I myself have so far only gotten to DYK.)
 * Moral of story: If you start out with a reasonably rich pile of references and are willing to work very hard, then getting a decent article is fairly inevitable.


 * However, I also agree with you [Dan]. The process I just described requires a tremendous amount of housework and wikitechnique. I agree that it's hard to imagine that a lot of domain experts in robotics are going to want to put themselves through it or will succeed very well if unaided.  Therefore, we've got to be prepared to provide a lot of support.


 * What I (newbie that I am) would like to suggest is slightly different. I think that -- absolutely(!) without in any way discouraging people who really only want to write a stub or a start class -- we should encourage people to try for DYK then GA then FA -- and we should support them with copyediting and housekeeping. (Assuming that enough copyeditors will sign up and not too many copyeditees ask for help.) Rather than letting them self-assess and then drop their article off at start or B class for us to take it the rest of the way, we should make it their responsibility (and their pride in their work) to take the article from beginning to end -- but we should actively help them do it (within reason).


 * I actually wrote up a proposal along these lines earlier today -- and it's in my sandbox. I wasn't really sure it's what I wanted to propose -- and, even if so, I wasn't sure I like my present, verbose, pompous, overly detailed wording -- so I wasn't ready to release it.  But, since you ask . . . William P. Coleman (talk) 05:17, 9 February 2008 (UTC)


 * (reply to William, copied to JamesonTai) It's true, if you put some work in, it's possible to get the higher ratings...and if you want to help people in WP:ROBO do that, that's fantastic. I want to say again, in case it wasn't clear...I have only one "passion", and that is that we don't lose newbies that I bring in...for all other issues, goals and people, I don't feel passionate, we can do whatever you guys like, and I'll help.  I think Jameson is wondering if I'm going to screw things up by trying to keep things so simple and transparent for my newbies...but an easy fix would just be not to direct my newbies to the front page, to give them a link of their own in the project.  I don't think the link should say "newbies", because of course they'll be oldbies before long, I think it just depends what they want to work on...I'll ask around! - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:18, 10 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Dan, I know you're disappointed with my response. We (all of us) need to talk more until we work out some vision that's exciting, focused, and practical.
 * Please don't doubt for a single minute that I agree with and support 100% your basic, core instinct that
 * We need to attract people who are experienced with robots and passionate about them -- not just library researchers and catalogers.
 * We can't scare them away with the typically preposterous amounts of Wiki-obstruction.
 * However, I was trying to temper that with three thoughts:
 * It seems clear to me that the easy way to eventually get GA or FA is to start out with the references, get a bunch of quotes, organize them, and then fill in the blanks. If you start the other way -- trying to expand a stub or a start-class that's unreferenced -- it can be extremely difficult, not to mention painful.
 * You seem to want me to help people, but I'm being honest about my personal limitations. If you asked me to turn a stub about poetry, novels or visual arts into a GA, then I'd pull books off my own shelves, check a few more out of the library, and look in Amazon Reader. But, when it comes to robotics, I personally don't know jack and wouldn't know where to start. I can help a lot, and am willing, but I can't supply raw material or expertise.
 * You yourself have already made a big, big contribution by working with the MOS and FA about what, for robotics, would constitute a reliable source.
 * Many of the good or better articles on WP:ROBO now seem to be general overviews. Or am I missing them? Maybe what we (Jameson, you, me, others) need to do is start a group project ourselves to create/expand a few articles on specifics: for example, a specific robot, then a specific manufacturer, then a specific anime.  We'd try to get them at least to GA.  Then maybe that experience would help us arrive at consensus about how to usefully publish guidance and models for the newer people we'd like to attract.


 * Generally, I'm saying, "?????"


 * --Bill
 * William P. Coleman (talk) 17:33, 10 February 2008 (UTC)


 * On the contrary, Bill, if you're willing to help us improve articles, and if that gets us Good Articles and Featured Articles, fantastic. Better articles would be fantastic regardless of assessment.
 * On the subject of not having robotics skills...we could actually have cost-effective robots in every home and yard (starting off as vacuums and lawnmowers, but market competition will inevitably lead to more) without a single advance in robotics ... although of course that's our focus here. But as a group of people, as opposed to a WikiProject, what we need to get all this stuff to work for us in real life is to bring in people with different skills...people who are good at building communities, people who know how to use interior design and architecture and gardening software, people who talk the language of the scientists, engineers, technicians and mathematicians who have relevant skills, people who write fiction that explains to the public what is possible better than prose can...etc, etc.  I'm not sure if I've ever thought of a skill that isn't relevant to the eventual goal of providing affordable robots to people in the U.S. before the baby-boomers all retire, and to developing nations so that they can grow food and purify water and protect themselves (and do it all cheaply, using smaller versions of the same machines that currently make those things cheap in the developed world...i.e., robots). - Dan Dank55 (talk) 23:13, 10 February 2008 (UTC).

Deletion of Spyder (lawnmower): An "outsider's" response
I nominated this article for deletion as spam, and another editor concurred and deleted. Dank55 was, of course, unhappy, and raised some good questions on my talk page. I'm not robo-hostile; I don't have to be told how to spell R. Daneel Olivaw, nor do I have to have the difference between real-world robotics and bad Will Smith movies explained to me; but I want to give my perspective at length, as the evil deletionist b****** in question. This project is full of enthusiasts, and I can respect that. The fact remains: one of the primary criteria here is notability. A project may be cool beyond description; it may be a promising lead to "cost-effective robots in every home and yard"; but that doesn't make it notable in the here and now. Everyone involved in this article must try to understand that we are under constant pressure to include articles on every cool thing in the universe, as the hundreds of thousands of editors involved with this project define "cool." Wikipedia is not a Guide to the Cool; it is a boring reference work, containing fully sourced articles about topics of established notability. It is not a venue for publicizing the latest promising developments in robotics (the counterpart of the "it's an up and coming band, famous all over Montauk, we're gonna get a contract real soon, WE'RE THE NEXT BIG THING" articles that we regretfully but rapidly delete every day). I hate to tell you this, especially if you have the evangelical fervor of "I actually want to see people benefiting from robots in the home...we desperately need them before all the baby boomers retire, and the developing world needs them to help provide food and power" crippling your objectivity. "Promising" does not constitute notability; and if it's a commercial project, the article is going to be looked at as advertising, even when it isn't written by the manufacturer. We reject articles on noble enterprises, promising artists, worthy charities, and fascinating people every day; because we have to set some kind of standards. Those will continue to apply to robotics, just as they do to every other field. I am sorry if that makes me seem like Magnus, Robot Fighter. -- Orange Mike  |  Talk  14:23, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I responded at WP:AN. I apologize, my post in WP:AN came two hours after this post...I didn't see it, I was looking at the 3 userpages where we had been discussing it.  I want to stress to everyone that Orangemike is only doing his job here, and I think he made some eloquent points, and this was the right forum for these points.  I didn't copy these points over to WP:AN because in that forum, people are all up to speed on this stuff. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 20:17, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Update
Guys, I did some minor editing for grammar and a little simplifying in Article Guidelines. I think we should all feel free to cut a sentence in half if it seems like we can use clear, fairly simple English and a shorter number of words and still keep the meaning clear, since we will have (potentially, hopefully) a lot of ESL (English as a second language) readers. (But not here at ADMINLOG, there's too much here to worry about the language.) On the assessment page, I put back in the full table (with FA, A and GA), except that I left my "simplified" language in the bottom half of the table, I think it's easier to understand even for English speakers. If you look at the edit history, you'll see the original table language 2 edits down, so that you can compare if you like.

I am actually in quite a good mood today, which is a shock, considering yesterday was a really, really bad day...I thought that I had failed at all my goals and screwed up everything. I really, really wanted to pull some of the good robotics communities over to Wikipedia, and to do that, it was necessary to at least try to negotiate with admins and with Jameson, and I wasn't successful at either. I know what a few robotics communities want, and we can't possibly give enough of it to them here for them to see this as a major part of what they do. But...today that seems okay, we'll just deal with the editors we've got. Now that I've given up on that goal, I'm not aware that any of my goals are different from the goals of Jameson or anyone else here or the goals of any admins. If I'm wrong, and any of my edits seem wrong to you guys, please tell me right away.

Speaking of being in sync with admins...I (Dan) would appreciate it, if someone wants to create an article about a specific consumer robot, that you check with me first. We will get a bad reputation with the admins if we try creating articles about "non-notable" robots, and as far as the admins are concerned, most robots aren't notable. I think I've got an idea what they want and I have a few I can plead with, so run it by me. For other kinds of articles, obviously you don't need to check with me first. For sources: even though you'll read some places that you might not need references for a stub or start-class article, don't believe it. If you're working on an article, keep it in a subpage of your userpage until you have two good sources. For us, that probably means the main newspaper of a reasonably large town, or a mention on a TV program, or a very well-known and highly-regarded online review site (but not if they sell anything or have mostly press releases). Of course, journal articles, books and most magazines would work too, but robotics is often so "up-to-the-minute" that those sources may not have anything you need, for some articles.

I am toying with the idea of creating a second Wikiproject, one that would cater to people who are definitely not roboticists. That is, all they know is that the floor needs to get vacuumed and the grass needs to get cut, and they're wondering what's the minimum they need to know to get the robot to work. They might see technology as suspect...and there's good reason for that. Did you know that the government requires cell phone companies to provide them with the GPS information from everyone's cell phones so they'll know where you are...just in case you turn out to be a terrorist? Things like this really make some people upset, and it's another reason they're suspicious of robots, so they'd like to read about the privacy issues concerning robots and home automation. Since there are a lot of these people on Wikipedia, and since they take a very different view than people who are genuinely interested in robots, it might make sense not to try to lump all these people into the same Wikiproject. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 05:03, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm still a little uneasy about our site...read WP:KISS and WP:CREEP and maybe some of the links from WP:CREEP and you'll understand why. Bottom line: a common mistake that people make when setting up a wiki project is thinking that people are going to actually read this stuff...they generally don't, they just start doing things...unless you make it really easy to follow, and to find what you're looking for. So I'm always in favor of reducing the number of words (except here in ADMINLOG, lots of words are useful here, that will help keep the very casual readers from seeing what we're up to :) - Dan Dank55 (talk) 05:06, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

On the Article Guidelines page, I'm uncomfortable with the last (DRAFT) section because it overlaps with stuff above it, and also because I'm not sure how much we want to encourage people to do fictional stuff. I don't mind it, but there's a really good chance that fictional stuff is already done, much better, somewhere else. Can we delete some of that? Or do we want to encourage fictional stuff? Maybe at the other wikiproject, the one for people who aren't really interested in robotics per se?

Do we want the "assessment" link above to go to Version 1.0? Why not just put all useful assessment information in the main assessment page? - Dan Dank55 (talk) 05:15, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm glad that the article assessment table is fixed. I have created a task force for your home automation side project. Regarding the 911 tower-triangulation/GPS readings, it's more of a policy issue with the current patriot act rights as well as the extension of the reach of the federal government in general. Moreover, the 911 GPS feature may be turned off on the CDMA devices you're mentioning. Most GSM phones the major American carriers are carrying do not have on-board GPS chips for this purpose. Instead they use the standard tower triangulation or use the hex-triangulation method, which pretty much accomplishes the same thing. I believe your efforts should be coordinated with the Technology, Mobile Phones, and any other applicable WikiProject on this. I'm just not sure it is a good idea starting a task force or a WikiProject for something this specific.  - Jameson L. Tai  talk  ♦  contribs   06:36, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

DNE Nomination
For General Housekeeping purposes, I will nominate this page for WP:ROBO/DNE. This page will be archived to its talk page as it redirects. If there are no objections, I will perform this action ASAP.  - Jameson L. Tai   talk ♦  contribs  22:09, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Robotics Team
I am on a FIRST Robotics team and when I saw this I was so happy because not a lot of people know about FIRST. You will be seeing more of me so enough. Tony_Battlebot