User talk:Jappalang/Policy and guidelines stuff

"professional editorial standards"?

I've noticed you're one of the people that others listen to when discussion the reliability of online sources, and I'm hoping you can answer a question for me. According to WP:RS, to be considered "reliable" a source must have "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy"; elsewhere you state the same, the source "must show itself to have professional editorial standards and a reputation." But how exactly can this be shown? It seems to me that we rely on certain heuristics: it's declared "reliable" if it's closely associated with a dead tree publication or major media company, if it has been around for a while and makes enough money that people get paychecks as writers and editors, (sometimes) if it's run by someone well-known for writing for dead tree publication or other reliable sites, or (sometimes) if it happens to be credited more than a few times by other "reliable" sources; otherwise, it's declared "unreliable". A source that does have fact checking and accuracy but lacks the big-name endorsement seems to have little hope of surviving once the "wrong" people come around. I will watch here for replies. Anomie⚔ 00:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I kind of doubt I am one of those people listen to (nor do I have specific expertise in this area) ... Anyway, I do agree with what you say. On this project, reliable tends to mean association with a paper publication or major media company; however, the predisposition of the authors and reviews of books have also been used to declare some of them as unreliable (evidenced mostly in military and historical subjects). I believe the policies and guidelines are tailored to this method, as it is the most convenient form to get agreement and is the common practice in academics and business. The project passes off the judgment of accuracy to the "bigger party" because getting bogged down in disputes over reliability of so-and-so especially in obscure fields of study would prove to be non-productive. Imagine the edit wars and incivil incidents, especially for pop-culture subjects in this period of "free" publishing over the Internet, if the project has to debate over every source used in an article, or has to simply accept them all. The "filter" of commercially-judged reliability, biased or not, helps to cut down the arguments. It is unfortunate for the personal sites of the dedicated hobbyist, who has taken meticulous measures to ensure accuracy in his or her work but is unrecognized by the "commercial" sources. Jappalang (talk) 01:24, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I've been watching the discussion at WT:VG/S, your opinions seem well-regarded there. It just disappoints me sometimes that there are some popular culture topics we simply cannot write about because the mainstream media doesn't think its worth covering. For example, Final Fantasy (video game) used to contain a short paragraph about what was changed in each remake, which seems to be a question that a lot of people ask in forums elsewhere. But we had to remove just about all of it, because all any "reliable" source mentions is that graphics were changed and a few extras added.

WP:RS is heavily biased towards academic subjects and mainstream news, as you said. I wish there were some way to keep the standards there while at the same time not eviscerate the non-academic, popular culture articles where peer-reviewed journals don't exist and major media doesn't care. In many cases we can't even use the "expert in the field" clause to get around it, because even if the author knows everything about the topic there is nothing in "the field" to establish experthood. And even if there were a good way to recognize the dedicated hobbyist's experthood (I for one have no ideas there), it would never get consensus past those who would prefer every speck of popular culture be deleted from Wikipedia. Anomie⚔ 03:11, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

We cannot totally blame the mainstream for this. Part of popular culture thrives on sensationalism, and academics and other "serious" studies frown on statements that try to play on the human emotions (several history books have derided ancient historic records for exaggerating accounts, and tried to downplay the events chronicled in ancient scripts for a more accurate re-telling). There is also the pervasive thought that "games are only for kids". I believe WP:ANIME also suffers from this reliable source issue, so WP:VG is not alone in this. A contributing factor to this is the rampant "fanboy-ism" that one faces on casually browsing through the web for anime or video game stuff. One thing the projects can hope is for there to be academic studies that are strictly objective that targets the mainstream audience instead of the niche crowd. I believe this is happening with greater publications (mostly books), but as with all starting ventures, the effects are slow and require time to change perceptions. We might not see it in effect now, but perhaps 20–30 years later... In the meantime, we could work along Wikipedia policies and guidelines, slowly expanding the pool of reliable sources that cannot be casually disputed and increasing the reputation of the project. Jappalang (talk) 09:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Date_formatting_and_linking_poll/Autoformatting_responses

Regarding your comments in opposition to date autoformatting, I'd like to point out that one of the core features of any proposed replacement for the current autoformatting was that unregistered ("anon") users see a consistent format within any given article. That feature was actually implemented in several different patches and demo systems that were created over the past few months of discussion, so it's entirely possible to have autoformatting that doesn't result in a mix of formats. --Sapphic (talk) 00:34, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry if you took offense to my message here. I wasn't trying to change your mind, I was trying to get you to make your reasons for opposition as clear as possible. As originally stated, they simply weren't applicable and left open the possibility of your opposition !vote being discounted as "confused" about the situation. And a demo system was working, and tested by several users at MOSNUM, before the developer (UC_Bill) threw a fit elsewhere (unrelated to date issues) and quit the project. It was available for download from his site for a while, and somebody may still have a copy.. but in any case, it wasn't that hard to develop, and it should be easy to reproduce, if the community decides they want that. Cheers, --Sapphic (talk) 01:30, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Date autoformatting poll

Hi there, Jappalang. I noticed that like me, you are opposed to any form of dates autoformatting. I have created some userboxes which you might like to add to your userspace to indicate your position. Having one in your userspace could deter unwanted canvassing on your talk page. ;-) You will find the boxes here. Ohconfucius (talk) 06:35, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. Actually, anons will see, in many cases, different formatting from the privileged few editors who insist on selecting a single month-day or day-month order. I dont' know where User Sapphic got this idea that these patches/article tags will make all uniform for all users. Tony (talk) 06:37, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

guideline discussion

I'm contacting a few people who took an interest in the video games WikiProject guidelines last year, to let them know of a project I'm working on. It's strictly in the interest of collecting information, but I think that information could prove useful for refining our guidelines and policies.

Please check in at this discussion, if you find a moment. Thanks in advance, Randomran (talk) 19:17, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Flags

Thanks for continuing to discuss this; I think it's important a consensus is reached about how to use flags within F1 articles. For me, the most important thing is the prose part of the article, so while I can offer my opinion I'm not going to argue passionately as some do. Regardless, thank you for your ongoing support. Apterygial 05:28, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Rollback

I was surprised to see that you don't have rollback yet? Are you interested? It does make vandalism reversion easier. Let me know. Karanacs (talk) 02:42, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Free use

Could you check this website to see wether we can copy and past text from there into wikipeida. 207.233.70.79 (talk) 19:04, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Notability-based restrictions for infobox credits?

I've brought up a new discussion about this here. Since you were involved in the old one, I figured I should invite you over. Prime Blue (talk) 16:17, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Template:Football squad player

Hi there. I've done some development based on the changes you wanted to make. A demonstration of all of them at work can be found at User:WFCforLife/Sandbox 4, although there are one or two minor issues. The "Vice Captain" one isn't a problem per-se, but a visual demonstration of the possible knock-on effect of narrowing the player name field.

The page above has wikilinks to the sandbox template source codes- feel free to edit any of them. Regards. --WFC-- 02:48, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Whats going on with this? I've had a look at the discussion on it, but I don't really understand. I'm only really concerned about the changes in relation to the Manchester United F.C. article; my understanding is that some changes have been made to the template, but how do I update these on the article so that it is MOS compliant? Thanks, Tom (talk) 13:50, 22 July 2010 (UTC)