Talk:Current events/Archive 8

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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Duplicated List of Recent Deaths

I seriously question the value of listing recently deceased persons in 2 places, once on this page, and once again under the relevant month/year page. This will inevitably lead to names being shown on only one of the pages (in fact this has already happened - Andrian Nikolayev was listed on this page but not on the July 2004 page, so I fixed it). As a result, users cannot rely on either of the pages to provide a complete list of recent deaths shown in Wikipedia; they cannot be assured of getting all of the names unless they actually look in both pages. It should not have to be up to sharp-eyed contributors to pick up such omissions. There should certainly be a link on this page to the relevant month/year page, but listing the same people all over again on this page is simply creating new problems. It seems designed to reduce users' workloads by exactly 1 mouse-click, but in so doing it creates a much greater amount of work in requiring them to enter the same information twice, and also creates the entirely new but unnecessary issue of potential omission. Can we please go back to the old system of showing deaths only on the appropriate month/year recent deaths page. What do others think? JackofOz 05:53, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

To clarify, July 2004, redirects to here, Current events. The duplication is on Recent deaths and current events. Unfortunately I can't suggest a template solution as the current events page only lists days and name, whilst recent deaths lists day, age, name and notability. I personally would have no list on this page, merely a link to recent deaths and allow very high profile deaths to have their own entry as regular current event. (maybe Francis Crick would come into this high profile category). Pcb21| Pete 10:18, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC) [This comment was true when it was July 2004, please replace with the current month in your mind]

OK, here is a PERFECT EXAMPLE of what I'm talking about. This page tells readers that there have been "no deaths reported so far" in August 2004. But a quick check on Recent Deaths for August 2004 lists 3 deaths. Clearly, people making these changes are changing only one page, when according to this current system two pages need to be changed for each death. This system is UNWORKABLE and cannot survive. JackofOz 23:14, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Well, Jack, I'd argue that the list here is for more noteworthy names, and the list at Recent deaths is intended to be exhaustive. That's just my impression though. I don't think the system is "UNWORKABLE", though I admit it probably could be improved. In the meantime, though, it just needs a few of us to check both pages every now and then. I don't think that's disastrous. I just added Arturo Torentino to this page as I think his death probably is "noteworthy" -- if I'm incorrect, or if I should have added the other names at RD, well, someone either needs to cut my edit, or add the others. Sorry if I acted improperly. Jwrosenzweig 23:27, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It's not a question of you or anybody else acting improperly. It's a structural issue. What's "noteworthy" to me may not be to you, and vice-versa. For example, I would seriously question listing the death of dogs (I kid you not) in this area of Wikipedia. But somebody recently thought it was important to record such a canine passing, so good luck to them. But I digress. If the page is only meant as a "teaser", ie. with only "noteworthy" deaths mentioned here and all others mentioned on the other page, this raises some questions: (A) If a particular death is not "noteworthy" enough to be mentioned here, why would it be "noteworthy" enough to be mentioned anywhere else? (B) Why create this artificial division in the first place? Are we invited to conclude that a name listed on the other page, but not on this page, is "trivial", "unimportant", "insignificant", or whatever? And if so, why are they listed anywhere at all? (C) In the early part of the month, when no "noteworthy" deaths have been listed, the caption "No deaths reported so far" is (as I've already pointed out) quite misleading and should at the very least state that the relevant month/day page may well include other deaths that for whatever reason didn't qualify for inclusion here. Cheers JackofOz 00:31, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You are getting your knickers in a twist over not very much. Does it equally worry you that only some the stories on this page are selected for "in the news" on the main page? There are degrees of notability. Pcb21| Pete 13:28, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You've missed my point entirely, and the way you went about communicating that says quite a lot about you. The issue is that the current system CREATES PROBLEMS. It INCREASES the possibility of introducing NEW INACCURACIES to Wikipedia. See my further comments below under "Julia Child: Date of Death".

So far from me "getting [my] knickers in a twist", your coarse and ill-bred comment bespeaks an inadequate appreciation of the manifold ways in which misinformation can quickly become established in the public mind as "holy writ". I'm not interested in an information resource that purports to be accurate and credible, but that doesn't contain every possible reasonable precaution against inaccuracy within its inherent limits. Your indifference to the truth is anathema to true believers. JackofOz 06:17, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Does an RSS Feed Make Sense for Current Events?

I am posting this more as a question to get people thinking about this idea. I have browsed the archive and I am fairly certain that I didn't find anything. There was an interesting related discussion, however, regarding Maintenance of the current events page.

I use RSS a lot and I think it would be awesome to have a quick link in to what wikipedia's current events are. I could write one myself, but I am not the best programmer in the world by any means and I certainly can't imagine that my implementation would be useful for others. --Jpittman 14:17, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think the idea of an RSS feed is a good one, however I am unsure (given Wikipedia's nature) that it would be easy to work with. The RSS feed reader that I happen to use gets in an awful fankle if entries changed between accesses of the feed. In my particular case it does one of two things - it either marks the entry as unread if it can work out that an entry it has is the same as a recently received one, or it created duplicate entried for the same item. On the other hand RSS feeds of the watch list would be fairly easy and unabiguous for a feed reader to cope with at the list just extends as edits are made. I would certainly be most pleased if I could access an RSS feed of my watchlist.
Out of curiosity when you said "I could write one myself", I don't understand what you want to write - the server end or the client end?
--Colin Angus Mackay 23:18, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Colin, I was actually thinking of writing both. I would generate the rss dynamically on the server side before I needed it and would then translate it into a component of html. Basically, I use RSS on certain web pages that I maintain in order to provide updated information. I feel like RSS is really the perfect mechanism for that and it allows me to generate my own css for the pages.
--Jpittman 14:56, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)


Good idea however as mentioned the frequent insertion and modification of material at diffrent point may make this difficult. One way to avoid this would be to create a rule to assign a unique wikipage for every event, perhaps Event:Name, and force people to only link from the Current Events to the Event namespace. In the Event namespace we add an Event Summary section to each page that is automatically used on event listing pages (Current Events, Events in x-timeframe, etc.) and to generate RSS feeds, etc. It would be a bit of a hassle converting some existing pages, but it would be great to seperate events.
Another solution would be to drop the Events namespace proposal and to just create tags that can be added to the top of existing pages. For example ((Event:Date|type?|other info?)). That way events lists could be automatically generated. Then again I guess people have been through this thought process before. Adding ((Birthday:date)), ((Death:date)), etc. to all the people pages would also be cool .. but I've read somewhere the argument against too much markup as putting off new users. I think in the end this is inevitable though.
--prat 01:38, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
It all comes down to a simple question, really: what is Wikipedia for? Personally I wouldn't use current events as an RSS feed, as I'd rather get my news from the BBC. But adding article metadata would, I think, add an awful lot of value to Wikipedia. The category system is a tiny, clunky, broken first step towards this. In Wikipedia_talk:Categorization/Archive_3#Ontologies_and_OWL I tried to make the case for a much richer way to make Wikipedia part of the semantic web but I don't think anyone was listening...
I've also toyed with the notion of event markup. Trying to avoid NIH syndrome I found HEML, which could probably be adapted for use on Wikipedia with a great chunk of effort. There'll always be the argument about putting off new users, but you could say the same about lots of the current wikisyntax - table markup, interwiki links, etc.
Personally I'd put all article metadata in a different namespace (displayed as a "meta" tab in the default skin) - for example, Meta:Abraham Lincoln. That's where you'd say that the article's about a person, include standard personal data (birth, death, etc), and relate the article to others (family relations, offices held, quotes in wikiquote, etc, etc). You could argue whether events involving this person belong here or elsewhere (would the assassination event go in this article or the assassin's?), but perhaps the best solution here is an Event namespace. Event:Assassination of Abraham Lincoln would reference the event participants (people, places) as well as time and date. (In most if not all cases you'd want multiple events per Event-namespace article, for efficiency reasons.)
Anyhow, those are my half-formed thoughts... -- Avaragado 11:33, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I think that the wiki markup is definitely a little off-putting to someone just starting, but that is whay wikipedia has a sandbox. And, I personally think that this type of information would be fine to add in. If someone adds it, great. If it is not in there, you could have a little bot that goes and searches for it and adds a little ((attention)) marker so that users of the page would see it and update it.
BTW, is this the right place for me to bring up a discussion about this? I wasn't sure if this question belonged here or at the pump.
--Jpittman 14:56, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

NYT

I understand the desire to remove NYT links. I also understand the desire to remove stories without links. When an NYT link is the only link and it is removed another person might remove the story because it has no link. This results in Wikipedia having less information rather than more. SO please, when there is only an NYT link. Find another or let it remain. Cna we reach a consensus on this point...that it is better to have the story at the cost of a NYT link than not to have the story at all? Lance6Wins 19:13, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

We did - it's a comment on the page itslef: "PLEASE DO NOT LINK TO SUBSCRIPTION-ONLY SITES SUCH AS AOL, WSJ OR THE NYT (except in the unlikely event that a story is covered there substantially better than anywhere else)". Andy Mabbett 19:34, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I have not seen ANY OTHER LINK to the story. Does that address the above consideration? Lance6Wins 19:37, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The discussion above seems to be that no one likes registration only sites, but that some are too important to ignore...would that be a valid reading of Viajero(!), David Gerard and others at the top of this page? Andy, might you be in the minority on this one from the above discussion? Lance6Wins 19:40, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I uncommented the link. Either that or delete the article. RickK 04:54, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)

Mass-murder over XBox

I'm not sure if this would be considered international news necessarily, but apparently 4 people were arrested in Deltona for beating 6 people to death over an XBox. [1] [2] --NeuronExMachina 01:54, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Archived pages

Shouldn't the archived Current events pages, i.e. January 2002 – July 2004, be reversed in order to indeed be chronological? It seems strange to me for a historical timeline to go backwards (Timeline of the Second World War doesn't, for instance). Of course it would be a little work to turn them all around, but it's a task I would gladly get on top of, if I'm not alone in my opinion. -- Jao 09:47, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)

Sounds eminently logical to me. The only danger I can see is Jao getting bored with the jobs he's so willingly volunteered for sometime around August 2008 and leaving us with the problem. That, and the possibility of a finger-slip during one of 30 manual cut-and-pastes -- could it be done semi-automatically instead, by means of a script? Ultimately in favour, in any event. –Hajor 18:03, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)


Error on Page?

Why is there a link to one other news wikipedia page from within the news box (at the bottom) whereas all the others are in a box on the side? Did a friend from Minnan put it in the wrong place and it not get noticed or am I missing something? --BozMo|talk 09:31, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The interwiki links to Minnan don't seem to be working properly. There's nothing wrong with the way the link has been set up in the article. -- Arwel 12:30, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Julia Child's date of death

Here it's the 12th; but on her own page and on the Recent deaths page, it's the 13th. What is the correct date?? Another good reason not to have such a list of deaths on this page at all, just a link to the complete list at Recent deaths. Cheers JackofOz 05:09, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

More thoughts. There's got to be a better way we can control the veracity of obituary dates, at least within Wikipedia. I know there are issues with this. Sometimes the date is not clear cut to begin with. To ensure privacy, representatives of the dead often give out little information beyond the fact of the death, or they provide information that is open to different interpretation. To compound that, even where there no issue about the date, the media will often be far from scrupulous about reporting the correct date. We'll often be told something or other occurred "overnight" or "yesterday", when I might have actually heard or read the same story from a different source 48 or more hours previously, supposedly before the event occurred. Such liberties are taken no doubt to make news sound more immediate, but they do nothing to ensure historical accuracy. Then, to make matters even worse, the same person can appear in many different places in Wikipedia; these won't always include birth and death details, but they often do. Many different Wikipedians are contributing to these entries, and they will have obtained their information from many different sources, almost all of whom, in any given case, will not be a primary source. So, I could create a list somewhere of "Great cooks of the world" (say), add Julia Child to it, and proclaim that she died on "31st January 2003" (say), and unless a reader of that page had any indpendent reason to doubt that information, or happened to read about Julia Child elsewhere and noticed a clash of dates (such as I have), that information would be accepted at face value. And just as confusion breeds confusion, misinformation (however well intentioned) breeds misinformation (however well intentioned). There has to be a simple way of setting up some automatic check-response mechanism whenever a person's date of birth or death (or any other significant date about them for that matter) is entered anywhere in Wikipedia. Thus, if I were to edit a page and enter a new date of death, but conflicting information existed in some other place on Wikipedia, the system would not wait for a Wikipedian to notice the problem before it could be fixed, but it would at least alert them to a conflict. What is done about the conflict is another question. There's got to be a way. JackofOz 05:52, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

In the instance cited, the information initially released by Julia Childs's relatives mistakenly said she died on Thursday the 12th; this error was corrected by later press release indication that she had died at 2:50 AM on Friday the 13th. There's no mechanism that could protect Wikipedia from getting it wrong between the two releases. Perhaps what is needed is a program of reverification after the dust has settled. - Nunh-huh 06:34, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. Since you put that message up (about 40 hours ago), nobody has seen fit to correct Julia Child's entry on this page to say 13 August. If nobody has noticed it has been wrong for that long, I suggest this information is irrelevant to this page - because apparently nobody reads it anyway (except me). I will now correct it (but apparently only for my own benefit). Cheers JackofOz 23:17, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)