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Charles Matthews

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  1. They are therefore guilty of taking the material produced by people free of charge (often stolen from other people's websites). Jimmy Wales cannot put advertising on his own website because people would understandably complain that he is making money from his volunteers. However, there is nothing to stop Answers, paying Wales money for taking Wikipedia material. Would be nice of them. Under the GFDL license (Wikipedia's form of 'public domain') the material from Wikipedia can freely be used by others, as long as the source is properly acknowledged. Nothing 'stolen' should remain on Wikipedia. I have posted before about copyright violation.
  2. To clarify: this policy change at the English Wikipedia ('no follow' used to apply only to Wikipedia's Talk pages) is not intended to affect the usage of outgoing links. Such links should remain. The 'no follow' is only a traffic sign put up that search engine spider programs will follow. Human users will notice nothing. The point is to deter spammers who are only after better page ranking for their own sites. Wikipedia being an almost entirely volunteer operation, 'editors can deal with spammers' is true only up to a point. By the way, the Answers.com mirror site (one of many WP mirrors) is run by a NASDAQ-quoted company: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers.com
  3. Try concision. Works wonders. It certainly beats bloat. Strangely enough, anyone is allowed an opinion on anything at Wikipedia. We don't, for example, require them to plough through the neokantian works of Rickert, Windelband or others of that school of late-nineteeth century philosophy, that stated that historical facts were different in kind from scientific fact, before editing the site. Wikipedia has procedures that allow it to operate with an open door. The fact that you clearly do not accept the result of one instance of the application of those procedures does not invalidate them.
  4. What I described was not a "page move." It was a significant title change to propagate a CIA fiction. Propaganda by redefinition of terms is also a CIA gimmick. 'Title changes' are only carried out by 'page moves' on Wikipedia. You can't edit titles. I'm using the correct terminology, and you are not. Can you support your contention? What was said was that the length put it in the top 100 articles. Therefore leaving 99.99% of articles shorter. Not a single actual example was given, only claims that the sources "didn't adequately support the claims." So post an actual example instead of simply repeating a false claim, and I'll be happy to discuss and document facts, not answer recitations of generalized and unsupported allegations. That's what injustice thrives on.You don't want to champion such egregious injustices, surely. I had a look. One book was cited 24 times, without a single page reference. That's creating a labyrinthine task for anyone. That was reference 94 cited. Another false and unsupported allegation. Repitition of false generalized charges don't make them any more true today than they did in Salem in the seventeenth century. Same tactics, different day. Come now. I was merely summarising the relevant page and what was said there. I thought we had a truce on religious allusions, also. Looking at the article I see plenty of 'asides' that would likely count as OR.
  5. (1) There were no "Watergate burglaries" (plural). That's the entire point: There was no "first break-in." Apparently you don't yet comprehend even the most fundamental material fact at issue. <snip> (2) Wikipedia has allowed the very title of the original Troth article to be changed so even the title now is a complete fiction. It's willful deceit. That's all. And that's always indefensible. That's always difficult to answer. The appropriate response from any responsible organization devoted to factual information would be alarm at learning that they were peddling fiction as fact and effective action to get it corrected—not blasé, supercilious one-liners. (3) I expect in response more blasé, supercilious one-liners. (4) Speaking of which: Regarding the Remote Viewing Timeline, you wrote: One man's "due process" apparently is another man's lynch mob. I've seen that page of drooling hysteria, thanks. There isn't a single valid comment anywhere on it, and the timeline was deleted anyway. You could usefully put the vitriol away, also. (1) I was requesting the exact title of the article about which you had the beef, was all. (2) Page moves happen all the time. They can be requested or contested at Wikipedia:Requested moves, if they are contentious. In other words, a forum is provided to discuss the point. (3) I can do defence-in-depth, too. I have found that less useful, at times. (4) Actually there is plenty to be gleaned from the deletion discussion there. There was essentially no support for keeping the article as was. The issue of length was raised: at 145 K the article was four times as long as the level (32 K) where a warning comment kicks in on length. The issue of sources was aired: it was felt that the cited sources didn't adequately support the claims, and that the article was tarnished with 'original research' (WP term for synthesis going beyond the sourced material). One person was suggesting a rewrite, from scratch though. In other words it didn't look like an encyclopedia article, to almost all the folks discussing it there; bear in mind that the AfD procedure is not delegated to anyone, it is open to the 'community' (as we say). Some suggestion that there was an encyclopedia article in there, struggling to get out. A skilful editor used to WP expectations on style and tone might have saved the day for that article. General advice: learn the ropes at Wikipedia before getting to edits of contentious material. I did that for quite a time; and I'd had a year of solid editing at another wiki, before arriving at WP.
  6. You don't exactly make it easy to reply: you probably mean the Wikipedia article [[Watergate burglaries]]. You probably mean User:Beek100, but you don't give the exact name. User:Huntley Troth hasn't edited enWP since May 2006, it seems. There is a deletion debate with due process at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...iewing_Timeline. With 1,500,000 articles on enWP, it is frankly more than a full time job to reply to everyone's beefs about everything.
  7. You might be interested in a post today to the wikien mailing list: slightly edited it reads "I've been made to feel small a lot in my life by "experts", simply because I didn't have one or two pieces of paper. It's all good now and I love my career and life, but Wikipedia is important to me because it's pretty much the opposite of my past." "People respect my skills and insight here. It's greatly improved my confidence level on all fronts. In fact (why yes, it's quite ironic), I'm planning on going back to school and getting my long-lost bachelor's and masters in Human Services as a direct result of my time here (among other things - my job plays a big part in it too)." "Some of the editors that I've come to respect the most on Wikipedia are not only non-experts, they're teenagers. My teenage collaborators have been extremely active, and have gotten references to things no one else could find. They're also knowledgeable, helpful, and kind. When I say teenagers, I'm talking 14-15, not 18-19. They've impressed me in their editing and insight more than any "expert"." That's from an American (black) woman; the entire mail thread will appear archived on the Web shortly.
  8. (1) All versions are anyway kept in the Page History (assuming the article was not deleted). (2) I have commented before on the Disclaimer. (3) Any chance of keeping religion out of this?
  9. That is to misapprehend how it actually works. (It is all well and good to second-guess WP now there is such a thing, and probably inevitable tha people will assume that some other model would work just as well. Fact is that the 'proof of concept' was five years of the efforts of thousands of people in coming.) No, WP operates with the flattest possible hierarchy compatible with getting the job done. It turned out that our expert on the English aristocracy was 16 years old and living in New Jersey. We have plenty of teenagers doing high-quality work. The initial postings do not equate with the final state of articles. There are concepts, such as 'soft security' and 'post-moderation', into which I could go, that explain why the unobvious solutions can work better than rigid doorkeeping.
  10. At the grand strategy level, Wikipedia is putting its faith in systematic referencing of all its content, to improve quality and thereby credibility. I can't see it moving to 'real names only' as a policy for editors. I use my real name, but I respect the reasons others have for not doing that.
  11. Short summary of the position: the article was started March 2006 by an IT teacher at the IST (as far as we know). This brings the article within the guideline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest on 'conflict of interest' of Wikipedia editors. This covers most of the ground (and actually cuts both ways). To be fair, this guideline was only put together six months later. It does make the point clearly that edits by employees or others acting for an institution are deprecated, when the article is immediately about their employer or client. It also indicates that creating an article about an institution or company is double-edged: critical material may be posted. Further, the creation of an article doesn't confer any sort of control or ownership. What is more, a declaration of interest doesn't mean that one is entitled then to be an 'advocate' on one side. What is well within the guideline is the removal of inadequately sourced defamatory material. The section on the same guideline entitled 'Campaigning' would make it difficult for someone running a campaign on one side of an issue to contribute successfully. Ideally, in a controversy, partisan editing is confined to the Talk page, and third parties make a version incorporating factual corrections and expansions. The position right now at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International...ool_of_Toulouse is that there is a short 'Controversy' section with one external link to an open letter in the Jones-Nerzic case. The path to this situation can be followed in the Page History: not the ideal way to get there, but the recent editing has largely been co-operative.
  12. None and none, is the straight answer. We have plenty of qualified people (we have academics at the equivalent of Nobel Prize level); but there is no _institutionalised_ structure giving them an oversight role.
  13. The rationale is the goose and the golden eggs. Internal debate has always raged on just this issue: but the point that has always won out is this: the mission statement is 'write the encyclopedia', with everything else subordinated. People have numerous reasons for guarding their privacy: some are Internet-related, i.e. general things such as child protection apply. One you might not have thought of is this: junior untenured academics wanting shelter if they disagree with senior academics, who one day will have decision-making power over their careers. The new Citizendium site is set up much more on a traditional academic model. The jury is still out on whether they'll be able to make it work. (They have more cash than Wikipedias has ever seen.)
  14. Well, you'd be right that there is no interest in changing the pseudonymous character of editing at Wikipedia. The standard explanation is this: the editing process is entirely transparent, in that all changes are logged. Editors at the site have little difficulty in assigning 'reputations' based on track record. This is not the academic way, but then it is all more interactive: when puzzled, you can go and ask anyone why they wrote something, do they have a source for those facts, and so on. As far as I'm concerned, there is no 'hidden hand'. There are plenty of editors who have some agenda, but the whole thing is too big (and spread over too many languages, also) for much major manipulation, though people are constantly trying for petty advantages. As for Google, their PageRank algorithm is a secret in the legendary Coca-Cola formula class. The only thing I heard about this was a while back, when it was being said that Google wanted Wikipedia to be ahead of its mirror sites (i.e. the same material posted elsewhere). I have no idea what foundation there was for that rumour. The more people linked directly to Wikipedia, the higher it would climb anyway.
  15. I should make a technical comment, to help clarify the position. "External links" (Wikipedia jargon) occur embedded in pages in quite a number of ways, but there are really two types. Type I is as a Source. Examples are - inline link: topic - endnote link: the upmarket version of inline, topic<ref>+comment</ref>, producing an endnote whereever the <references/> tag is placed - in a section headed Sources or References (myself I keep References for paper sources, but not everyone agrees) Type II is as Further Reading; good practice is to place these links at the end in a section headed External links. Now, if a link is used as a supporting source (Type I), it is treated very seriously if someone just removes it, leaving the topic unreferenced. Editors can get into big trouble for that (other things being equal: of course if the whole topic is going, it's another matter, but well-sourced material has plenty of protection in policy). Type II links are another kettle of fish. It is one of those areas where you can't expect everyone to agree on exactly what should be included.
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