User:Dpbsmith

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The Time Is: 12:34

Personal website at dpbsmith.com

AKA b:User:Dpbsmith

First edit 06:11, 6 Sep 2003, to Jack London

For making me laugh when reading VFD. 13:15, 19 Jan 2005
For making me laugh when reading VFD. 13:15, 19 Jan 2005

Contents

[edit] If people relied on Wikipedia articles to choose colleges...

...this is how the college selection process would go.

[edit] Quotations

Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall ... is an elderly man, red-faced, white-haired, and choleric. His passion is for the British law, and he has spent a large fortune in litigation. He fights for the mere pleasure of fighting and is equally ready to take up either side of a question, so that it is no wonder that he has found it a costly amusement. Sometimes he will shut up a right of way and defy the parish to make him open it. At others he will with his own hands tear down some other man's gate and declare that a path has existed there from time immemorial, defying the owner to prosecute him for trespass. He is learned in old manorial and communal rights, and he applies his knowledge sometimes in favour of the villagers of Fernworthy and sometimes against them, so that he is periodically either carried in triumph down the village street or else burned in effigy, according to his latest exploit. He is said to have about seven lawsuits upon his hands at present, which will probably swallow up the remainder of his fortune and so draw his sting and leave him harmless for the future.—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.—Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh

[edit] Don't let folks get apoplectic. Use Hegelian dialectic!

  In time of need call on the editor's creed:
      Thesis, antithesis, synthesis!
  If you think what you read should be NPOV-ed,
      Thesis, antithesis, synthesis!
  So plant a good seed
  And do a good deed
  And don't ever stop until all have agreed
  And then they will call you a real Wikiped-
  Ian.
      Thesis, antithesis, synthesis!

—Me, August 20, 2004

[edit] Current Wikistress level

Image:Dpbsmith_wikistress_low.jpg

Low

[edit] Notability not a criterion for deletion?

I'm confused; please help me out here. On the VfD pages, just about the most-cited reason for deletion is that the subject (or even the article) is "not-notable". Fair enough. Yet in Wikipedia:Deletion policy, the words "notability" or "notable" aren't even mentioned, and in Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, it only applies to memorials of people. What's going on here? Are we all suffering from mass delusions, or is there some unwritten policy that states "non-notability" is a valid criterium criterion for deletion? If the latter, wouldn't it be a good idea to turn it into written policy instead? Thanks. --Plek 20:21, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

(Dons asbestos suit)
It's not worth fussing about.
Wikipedia is the sum of what WIkipedians actually do. What actually happens is: sysops look at VfD discussions. For the most part, they base their actions on whether people vote "delete" or "keep." Written deletion policy is an effective tool that Wikipedians can use to influence the votes of other Wikipedians.
There was, last year, an attempt by a sysop to consider, when judging consensus, only those "delete" votes for which he judged the stated reasons for deletion to be in accord with the written policy. This attracted criticism, and as a result of the criticism he stopped exhibiting that behavior. So, I repeat, the de facto behavior of sysops is that a sincere expression by a non-sock-puppet user that an article should be deleted counts as a delete. Currently, in VfD a sockpuppet vote is invalid, but a real vote citing bad reasons or no reasons is valid.
References to "notability" in VfD are the interplay of people trying to influence each other. Since many people, regardless of written policy, believes that notability should play some role in VfD decisions, votes are affected by that and it is a de facto criterion. Notice that there although there is a very wide range of opinion, it is very rare for things that are ridiculously non-notable to survive VfD. I could write a factual article about the fire hydrant on my street and I assure you it would be voted for deletion and deleted, even though it's not a biography, even though there are a few überinclusionists who would defend it on principle.
The big problem with notability is that nobody can come up with good objective bright-line definitions of what constitutes notability. People hate to admit that the content of Wikipedia is, in fact, the product of the consensus opinion and judgement of Wikipedians. So, absent a good definition for notability, some argue that it should not be considered at all.
The reality is that this is an area of no consensus. Therefore, judgements and behavior are consistent for extremely notable and extremely non-notable topics, but the zone in which there is argument and inconsistent behavior is wide.
Another reality is that many Wikipedians think that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and notability is a criterion for inclusion in anything else you can point to that calls itself by that name.
So, with regard to notability, I don't expect to see it turned into written policy. And I don't expect to see observations that it is not policy to change the behavior of people voting in VfD, or the behavior of sysops who act on those votes. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:00, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Citing sources

Traditionally, encyclopedias are not well-referenced. They sometimes provide what might be called "selected bibliographies," things the writer thinks you might want to read next. But references, in the sense of "here's where I got it," no.

Many, but by no means all of the articles in the EB 11th have a set of contributor's initials (which you can look up in a table). Odd, since it doesn't save that much space; the editors don't really want you to focus on the contributor. Well, knowing the name of the contributor is not that helpful anyway. When it's someone like Ernest Rutherford, well, you probably can figure they knew what they were talking about. For the rest, their credibility basically rests on the jumble of letters after their name and the miniature who's-who-like description.

Have I ever heard of "Arthur Dendy, D. Sc., F.R.S., F.Z.S., F.L.S., Professor of Zoology in King's College, London, Zoological Secretary of the Linnean [sic] Society of London. Author of memoirs on systematic zoology, comparative anatomy, embryology, &c?" No. Do I think he knows his stuff when it comes to sponges? Well, yeah, sure, sounds like it, probably. Most of my profs didn't have that many letters after their name. I have no way of knowing whether he was a POV-pusher, though, and you'd better believe you can have letters after your name and still be a POV-pusher. Big-time.

But Wikipedia is different from print encyclopedias, because basically it's all written by anons, registered or not.

I haven't been following the "bad reference/good reference" stuff but I find the whole idea baffling. The purpose of a reference is very simple. You're telling people where you got your information. It's not a question of good or bad, it's a simple statement of fact. If I got my "facts" from The National Enquirer, and I say I got them from the National Enquirer and I give the date and page number, that's a good reference. The only bad reference would be an untruthful reference—if I got them from the National Enquirer but said they were from The New York Times.

But, either way: if I give the reference, I'm giving people reasonable assurance that I didn't just make the statement up—unless I'm a total liar and fraud, and there aren't that many of them contributing to Wikipedia.

And a specific reference is verifiable. If I lie about it, I will eventually get caught. If someone says that The New York Times published an article about a 400-pound eight-year-old girl who was inseminated by a space alien and gave birth to a two-headed unicorn, on page 7, July 16th, 2000, well as it happens I can go online courtesy of my local public library and find out in about sixty seconds whether there's really such an article. (I'll leave you in suspense as to the answer).

If someone says "I got it from the National Enquirer, page 1, April 1st, 2000," that's a good reference. First of all, a lot of people will be able to say right of the bat, "The National Enquirer? then I won't believe it."

Furthermore, I can check the context. Maybe it says "It is said that the natives of some remote Canary Islands have an ancient legend that a 400-pound, etc." The chain of traceability is broken. Vanished into the mists of the Canaries.

But maybe it says "Dr. Fargo M. Seneca, chief obstetrician at St. Mary's Hospital in Madison, said that a 400-pound etc." Cool! Another source citation! I can call up St. Mary's and say, I'm writing an article for Wikipedia, I'm tracing a statement by Dr. Seneca in a news report. Could I speak to him, please?

(By the way: I've had very good luck contacting "press" contacts by email or phone, and saying "I'm editing an article in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, and I was trying to check thus-and-such fact..." I always give Wikipedia's URL. Sometimes I even explain that anybody can edit Wikipedia. So far, I've gotten respectful and helpful treatment every time).

So, I say, cite your sources. If you got it from a secondary source, just say so. The important thing is to say where you got it and maintain a chain of traceability.

P. S. True story about how this works. In grad school, a bunch of us were having a bull sessions about whether or not UFOs were real. One guy was very impressed by a book written by someone from APRO or NICAP or something, and, in particular, by a statement that appears in it that said that some pieces of an alien craft had been analyzed and were of some substance of a purity that was never seen on Earth and couldn't occur on Earth as the oxygen would degrade it within a few weeks. He was a chemist, IIRC, and knew that indeed any substance that pure couldn't have been terrestrial in origin.

So I said, "OK, let's take this as our test case. How do we know the author of the book wasn't just making it up?" The book that said that the scientist who did the analysis was something like "Dr. Ortega Perez-Guillermo of the Metallurgy Department, University of San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia."

I went to grad school at a big state university with a fine library. I did a bit of poking around. Guess what? Our library had quite a lot of material from the Universidad de San Andrés, including several faculty directories spaced over the last ten or fifteen years. It turned out that the Universidad de San Andrés didn't even have Departamento de la Metalurgia. And in any case, it didn't have anyone named Dr Ortega Perez-Guillermo in any department.

I asked whether we should write to the university, but it was generally agreed that it didn't seem as if that story was very credible.

Source citations are heap big medicine.


[edit] Brag list

Significant contributor to:

VfD rescues (I did significant editing of these pages subsequent to their having been listed on Votes for Deletion)

[edit] A book reference template example

(for my own cut-and-paste use)

{{cite book | last = | first = | authorlink = | coauthors = | year = | title = '''REQUIRED''' | publisher = | location = | id = ISBN }}

{{gutenberg|no=2383|name=The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems ''by Geoffrey Chaucer'}}