Re: let's be honest then

On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, doc wrote:
> Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
> 
> "We're sorry you had to complain about this.
Regrettably that's the 
> price you pay for our determination to retain as many
articles as we 
> can, even though we can't currently maintain most of
them. You see, if 
> we change things we might upset some of our editors who
might have some 
> of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake.
Basically, we're more 
> concerned with that type of collateral damage than with
wrecking your life.

If that's really a problem, then make a policy specifically
related to
biographical information in articles.

A proposal was made to actively delete *all* unsourced
articles.  As an
attempt to solve your user's probplem, it's massive,
massive, overkill.


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On 3/31/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdeerahul.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, doc wrote:
> > Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
> >
> > "We're sorry you had to complain about this.
Regrettably that's the
> > price you pay for our determination to retain as
many articles as we
> > can, even though we can't currently maintain most
of them. You see, if
> > we change things we might upset some of our
editors who might have some
> > of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake.
Basically, we're more
> > concerned with that type of collateral damage than
with wrecking your
> life.
>
> If that's really a problem, then make a policy
specifically related to
> biographical information in articles.
>
> A proposal was made to actively delete *all* unsourced
articles.  As an
> attempt to solve your user's probplem, it's massive,
massive, overkill.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> WikiEN-llists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Accuracy is nice, but if we have it at expense of a coverage
(a lot of which
is accurate but unsourced) I prefer a wide coverage. It's
easier to fixing
what we have than creating new articles from scratch which
will just
reintroduce creation paranoia (and probably the second time
we hit the
1000000th article). So that's what I will do. Try to promote
fixing the
articles we have.
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If and when stable versions is implemented, I would
recommend that every
single BLP article that has not been approved be
"invisible", or in other
words impossible to find via Google or by using the standard
search box in
Wikipedia and ignored by the mirrors. You'd have to go to an
advanced Wiki
search and intentionally click an "unapproved
articles" check box to search
for them. Nothing would be deleted, but we'd vastly reduce
the probability
of an unsourced, libelous piece of garbage receiving any
kind of attention
from the general public. If we could approve them at a
fairly rapid rate,
our coverage could recover to its prior levels within a
relatively short
period of time, at least when compared to any mass deletion
scheme. Or,
alternatively, just have a gigantic red banner at the top
that says "This
article is unapproved. Any unsourced piece of information is
as likely to be
true as random gossip received from a group of twelve
year-olds. Read at
your own risk. If this article is about you and it contains
ridiculous crap,
please remove it yourself and request that an approved
version be put in
place using <insert whatever method of communication is
decided upon here>."
I don't think it would be necessary to do this about any
other kind of
article (unless possibly those about corporations) because
of the reduced
risk of real-world damage, BLP articles are the only ones I
see causing
enough trouble to make this worth it.

-- 

Dycedarg
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