User:Collect/thoughts

Thoughts

Many of the following notes are right or wrong. Most are likely neither.

Precepts:

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. (Twain)

First, do no harm. (Hippocrates)

WP is best served by being cautious in attacks, generous in praise, solid in facts. (Me)

The system which requires the least added volunteer time would have the greatest probability of actually getting sufficient volunteers. (Me)

No encyclopedias can hold, nor ought to hold, every iota of information. They should describe subjects without judgment, leaving the judgments to the reader who can look at the references provided. Articles which fail to do so are apt to end up in POV arguments.

Wikipedia has far too many articles on fairly marginally notable topics. Far too many of them are excessively long articles. Far too many of the long articles have too many references. Far too many of these references are used to push opinions which should not be in the article in the first place. Too many of these articles have sub-articles, for which the standards are incredibly loose. At a rough estimate, cutting WP's size in half would more than double its quality.

Quotations should always be full and placed in context. Use of the old movie ad system of handling quotes as single words to be pasted in sentences is unfair to the reader.

Original Research is not nearly as bad as policy states. The issue really is people doing research with a preconceived outcome, rather than taking the mass of known facts, and reasonably arranging them to reach a non-fallacious conclusion. We likely should separate research scientific matters from research on other matters entirely.

Talk pages can be misused by those who keep repeating the same material. When a consensus is reached on a definable issue, that the summary only be retained, and remain on the current talk page so the issue does not get brought up anew. Long archives are rarely consulted, making their utility minimal, and they do not appear to keep topics from being repeated.

Canvassing is an extraordinarily vague concept in WP. Clearly making posts to batches of editors is unwise -- even if they are officially neutral, the person making the post may well have a non-neutral view when deciding to whom to send the post. Rather, why not allow a person to post to all editors who have edited a main article page within a reasonable period of time automatically" Opt out, of course, for editors who do not wish to be contacted. By having the software make up the list, there would be no question of "improper canvassing."

Behavior:

Editors should place enough biographical information on their own page lest they come across as a total stranger when being talked with or about. Many misunderstandings arise from not looking at who the other person really is. Alternate personas" are common on Wikipedia.

The concept of a block was riginally intended to be like the pillory -- once dine, it was not to be discussed over and over and over. Now people use block logs as though they were lists of felonies. By and large, such a view is absurd, especially since many blocks are made without regard to much more than whim of the moment, rather than a full look at all the facts. Wikipedia would be well-served by wiping block logs clean after (say) four months. Sooner if the person doing the blocking is desyssopped by abuse of sysop tools.

Templates are a shortcut for informing people of almost anything. Usually a short, real note conveys the same information in a manner more conducive to the results one seeks. If half the templates were to disappear overnight, it would not make a sound.

Short posts convey more than long ones do. Marathon posts, sometimes fifty or more lines, are frequently unread. While that is great if one is trying to hide something in a post, that should not be the common case.

Proposed "Collect's Law": 100% of a post's valid content can be said in ten lines. A post of 100 lines only has 10% of the valid content of a ten line post, and a post of 1000 lines only has 1%.

Perhaps:

Religion and Politics: articles on these have a disproportionate number of contretemps. One rule of thumb which would alleviate this is to allow a maximum of three negative issues to be raised in an article. The fourth one would require the least important of the first three to be deleted. Shotgun lists of negative issues convince no one -- if the top three issues don't make a person change his or her mind, then that is fine. It also will make the editing more intellectually rigorous, to be sure.

Alternatively, place political articles in separate groupings (such as Republican political leaders, Democratic leaders, Foreign conservative leaders, foreign labour leaders, and so on.) -- and not have editors crossing the lines between them, rather in the nature of a firewall. Block editors who appear to be coordinating with others to circumvent the wall.

Notability is a continuous bone of contention. Some feel "once famous, always famous" but I disagree. Where a person appears to be of short-lived fame, there should be a deliberate position taken that the article should primarily deal with the reason they are notable, and not have people do deep research into their individual lives. Notability does not properly include traffic tickets.

Eloquence

Kind words spoken in eloquence mean a lot to many people. Perhaps they will sway no one, but we all know when true eloquence shows its face. Who among us does not remember Jimmy Stewart on the floor of the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or Ronald Colman as Sidney Carton? Eloquence is not fancy words, but plain words which touch us, and WP needs a lot more of them.

Opinions

The polite fiction of "neutral point of view" is really found only in articles on the number 17 and the like, and maybe not even there. Opinions creep in, especially on anything remotely controversial. Huge edit wars are fought over opinion. Sometimes over the use of a single word. All because WP has no good way of handling opinions. One obvious solution: Deliberately set up opinion pages on issues, with an expiration date of, say, 2 months apiece, and set up at least two pages for each issue so folks on each side would not have to try editing the other side's page. Remove libelous stuff etc. but otherwise -- free intercourse of opinion with no fear the other side will try removing your side's arguments. Each side will be absolutely as far from NPOV as it wishes, and the energy spent in those pages will not be spent on editwars in other areas. First two articles "Big End of Egg" and "Little End of Egg."

People have differing opinions. Sometimes people will try bullying everyoine else by doing an editorial equivalent of "holding their breath." Sometimes they will use the old schoolroom tactic of calling in the principal on you. Fortunately on WP, the principal is other editors who have seen most of it all before. Unfortunately, most of them will not bother to read the whole story. The only problem is that you have to keep up with, sometimes, dozens of delaying tactics aimed at grinding you down. I would suggest thanking them, but I was told by some that they objected to it.

An Opinion of another editor

I'd like to quote Oshaughnessey's book, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction: the “empirical” scientific request for “'proof' is often an argument deployed to conceal the sins of government”p.121 “Propaganda is the denial, as well as the provision, of information...propagandists seek a truth rather than the truth”p.204

Somehow I disagree, but this is a real justification used by a real editor.

How to handle political articles

Election Day is past, but the silly season moves on.

First suggestion: If you are a contributor or volunteer for a campaign, stay away from edits for any campaign involved. Your guy or the other guy. There are enough others around to do the edits, trust me! If you are found to be such and edit srticles closely related to your own contributions, then you should be blocked from the entire category of political articles. Actual campaign workers have been known to wreak havoc in WP, in some cases seeking to drive out those who are not in their group.

Second suggestion: "When in doubt, leave it out" applies to more than commas. It should also apply to negative information on any topic. This should stop some of the idiocies which creep into articles. If people want dirt, let them go to sites which specialize in dirt. If they want today's polls, let them go to newspapers. WP should as stick to material which will be correct in 5 years, not stuff from the National Enquirer or the like.

Third suggestion: Side issues aimed at being negative about a person do not belong in articles. Period. There are plenty of blogs you can write in, plenty of places to vent. WP is not it.

Fourth suggestion: Editors who contact each other off-Wiki to do edits other than through the article talk page should be held accountable just as though they were an official sockpuppet. Right now, the practice is rampant.

Fifth suggestion: All "warnings" should be vetted by at least two editors. The use of warning templates is out of control, and vulnerable to deliberate misuse. By requiring a "second opinion" the misuse should be greatly reduced.

Sixth suggestion: Edit summaries should not refer to other editors. They are used for indirect attacks and not always just to indicate the simple nature of the edit.

I do not come up to ten, so Mount Sinai this is not.

How to tell if an article is too long

When an article has more footnotes than there are members of the UN, it is too long.

When an article has more than a dozen sections, none of which is directly related to the name of the article, the article is too long.

When an article causes IE to seize up due to download time, the article is too long.

When a speedreader takes more than five minutes to wade through the article, the article is too long.

On the issue of non-immediate edits of contentious articles

There is, at the time of writing, a discussion on how best to handle edits of BLPs. One system is to require vetting of changes before they become generally visible ("flagged revisions"), Another is to just use the current system of "semi-protection." A third proposal is to have some official "experts" do the real editing. None of these systems is ideal.

Perhaps setting a flag on any article which attracts more than ten edits a day would help. Simply put in a "time delay" of two days for such edits. During that time the edits could be reviewed, but not require that such edits be approved prior to them taking effect. This would greatly reduce the need for lots of administrative or expert time being used to vet the articles, and, with any luck, reduce massive vandalism attacks as well.

More can be found at the discussions on "Flagged Revisions."

Found these orphans from others

Tacet, vita brevis, caveat tyrannis presented as a lesson to a new editor (more or less)

Be silent. -- this is what Niedermuller talked about. Silence is not always golden.

Life is short. (too short to worry about what any article has in it) -- forgets the key part "Art is long", what we leave behind us is our art, and that is more important than the brief enjoyments of being care free and ignoring matters which we feel are important. :Let us die to make men free" should not be reworded as "let us go on vacation -- Jeff Davis will free the slaves someday."

Beware of tyrants "let those who demand to be in charge have their way" -- while it actually means "Tyrant beware" and means that those who seek to be tyrants live under the sword of Damocles.

The lesson as claimed was that one should be a good boy, not rock any boats, ignore real issues and make hundreds of edits on some minor place in the world, and let others rule the roost. An interesting lesson, but not one which would have been followed by Martin Luther King, Jr., or any other person I might want to emulate. It is more the lesson of James Buchanan, and of Neville Chamberlain than of Abraham Lincoln.