User:Wowaconia
Remember the Wiki-guideline:WP:NOT#PAPER
“Although Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it is not bound by the same constraints as a paper encyclopedia or even most online encyclopedias. The length, depth, and breadth of articles in Wikipedia is virtually infinite. As Wikipedia grows, so will computing power, storage capacity, and bandwidth. While there is a practical limit to all these at any given time, Wikipedia is not likely to ever outgrow them.
Founder Jimbo Wales has stated his desire that Wikipedia should not become yet another discussion forum. But it definitely is something different from a paper encyclopedia, and Wikipedians should take advantage of that fact.
The most obvious difference is that there are, in principle, no size limits in the Wikipedia universe. It is quite possible, for example, that when you finish typing in everything you want to say about poker, there might well be over 100 pages, and enough text for a full-length book by itself. This would certainly never be tolerated in a paper encyclopedia, which is why Encyclopedia Britannica has such limited information on the topic (and on most other topics).
But there is no reason at all why Wikipedia should not grow into something beyond what could ever possibly be put on paper. Plain text takes up an almost negligible amount of disk space. At seven letters per word, a 100 GB hard drive that costs around $70 US can hold 15 billion words. That's two million words per penny!”
If you wish to limit the definition of "poker pages" to be just those explaining how the game works there are currently 132 pages on poker. There are 76 pages in the [Category:Poker gameplay and terminology]. There are 9 pages in [Category:Poker hands]. There are 4 pages in the [Category:Poker strategy]. There are 26 pages in [Category:Poker variants]. There are 5 pages in [Category:Draw poker]. There are 8 pages in [Category:Stud poker]. There are 4 pages in [Category:Texas hold 'em]. There are also 226 page in the [Category:American poker players] alone and there are 51 other subcategories at [Category:Poker players] each containing more pages. The [Category:Poker companies] has 34 pages dedicated to it. There are also other Poker subcategories that I haven’t listed.
WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE is not a liscense to delete information. The wiki-standard states “current consensus is that Wikipedia articles are not simply …Lists of Frequently Asked Questions; Travel guides; Memorials; Instruction manuals; Internet guides; Textbooks and annotated texts; Plot summaries; Lyrics databases; Things made up in school one day.” If an article is not any of those things the guideline does not support massive deletions based on an individual editor's arbitrary judgement.
Make sub-pages not deletions t long pages Wikipedia:Article_size#No_need_for_haste No need for haste Do not take precipitous action the very instant an article exceeds 32 KB. There is no need for haste. Discuss the overall topic structure with other editors. Determine whether the topic should be treated as several shorter articles and, if so, how best to organize them. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage; certainly, size is no reason to remove valid and useful information.
Let's all keep in mind the Wikipedia Standards on blogs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Sources_of_dubious_reliability
- (emphasis added) “Sources of dubious reliability: In general, sources of dubious reliability are sources with a poor reputation for fact-checking or with no fact-checking facilities or editorial oversight. Sources of dubious reliability should only be used in articles about the author(s).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:V#SELF
- (Emphasis added) "Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources. Self-published material may be acceptable when produced by a well-known, professional researcher in a relevant field or a well-known professional journalist. These may be acceptable so long as their work has been previously published by reliable third-party publications. However, exercise caution: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BLP#Reliable_sources
(Emphasis added) “Any assertion in a biography of a living person that might be defamatory if untrue must be sourced. Without reliable third-party sources, a biography will violate No original research and Verifiability, and could lead to libel claims. Information available solely on partisan websites or in obscure newspapers should be handled with caution, and, if derogatory, should not be used at all.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BLP#Biased_or_malicious_content
- (Emphasis added) “Editors should be on the lookout for biased or malicious content in biographies or biographical information. If someone appears to be pushing an agenda or a biased point of view, insist on reliable third-party published sources and a clear demonstration of relevance to the person's notability.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Biographies_of_living_persons
- (Emphasis added) "Biographical claims about living people need special care because of the effect they could have on someone's life, and because they could have legal consequences. Remove unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living persons immediately and do not move it to the talk page."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden_of_evidence
- (emphasis added) "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material. Any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged needs a reliable source, which should be cited in the article. If an article topic has no reliable, third-party sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on it. ...Be careful not to go too far on the side of not upsetting editors by leaving unsourced information in articles for too long, or at all in the case of information about living people. Jimmy Wales has said of this: "I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons."
How to quote a person talking about themselves in their social media: Self-published sources on themselves
WP:SOCIALMEDIA
On caveats
The use of skeptical caveats does not allow for wiki-pages to use unsubstantiated charges that come from none reliable unnotable sources. Saying "While most people are skeptical that Joe Smith is part of a terrorist network, private investigator Sam Incognito insists that this is true" is no more allowable than just saying "Joe Smith is part of a terrorist network". I refer you to the example used by Wikipedia:Verifiability that links to this message from wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-May/046732.html
"Here is an example from an article I [Jimbo] deleted: "The most recent disaster that <name omitted> claims his organization has responded to is the 2004 South Asia Tsunami, although there is no convincing evidence that he or any of his team has been there.[citation needed]" That is really really really awful."
Remember to report attack pages
Put {{db-attack}} on attack pages as per: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#General_criteria which lists criteria for pages that merit Speedy Deletion.
- (emphasis added) “10) Attack pages. Pages that serve no purpose but to disparage their subject or some other entity (e.g., "John Q. Doe is an imbecile"). This includes a biography of a living person that is negative in tone and unsourced, where there is no NPOV version in the history to revert to.”
Barnstars
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The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar | |
Thank you very much for your recent advice and the fun new template. Your kind words brought me some joy on a dreary winter day. Cheers. L0b0t 16:19, 11 January 2007 (UTC) |
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The Barnstar of Liberty | |
For work on the Goddess of Democracy article. evrik (talk) 13:05, 15 June 2007 (UTC) |
Badali
GOD!
you write, like, really really well!
I agree with everything you said. It's so sad. WP could have been the first edition of encyclopedia galactica or the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - a single work that encompasses all knowledge. but tragically, it has been trivialized and shittified; a loss for humanity.
but thank you for letting me know that someone else thinks so too.
-- faye
Links
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533580.aspx
Wowaconia (talk · contribs · logs · block log)
WP:HARV Wikipedia:Citation templates
Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace
Wp:vandalism#Tracing_IP_addresses
Wikipedia:Long_article_layout#Breaking_up_long_articles
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Wowaconia
Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch
Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_and_questionable_sources_as_sources_on_themselves
Indiana Law journal entry
Arthur E. Sutherland (Bussey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Cambridge Mass.), Book Review 40 Indiana Law Journal pg.83, 86 (1964) Review of Wilber G. Katz's Religion and American Constituions Evanston: The Northwestern Univeristy Press Pp. 318.
I concur cordially with Professor Katz in his view that public education, even on the grade-school level, cannot avoid some consideration of the religious element in our history and culture; and like him I certainly would not condone the use of social studies as a device for intentional evangelization. But I do not see this religious element as "neutral"; rather some tendentiousness toward religious influence I should think is justified by countervailing policies, which in the balancing process of constitutional adjudication the Court would find out-wishing the policy of separation. Cannot Engel be reconciled with acceptance of a respectably dispassionate course in social studies, for example, by reasoning that where the prime objective of the governmental activity in question is lay -- as it is in teaching history, or in furnishing at public cost R.O.T.C. instruction or chemical apparatus for a Church-college, or in requiring cessation of commercial work on Sunday, or in taking children alike to public and parochial schools in buses -- the incidental aid to religion is permissible as the dominant purpose is not piety; but where the activity is purely liturgical, as in shool prayers, it is barred? This reasoning, with a judicious use of de minimis, would solve a good many church-state problems. It would not solve all; for example, constitional tolerance of the opening prayers in the Congress would require some other theory--possibly the idea that another class of public activity, which the Dean of the Yale Law School recently called "ceremonial deism," can be accepted as so conventional and uncontroversial as to be constitutional. Perhaps this is only another aspect of the de minimis principle.
footnote: I quote Dean Rostow from my memory of his spoken words, I hope correctly. The phrase occurred in his Meiklejohn Lecture at Brown in May, 1962, which is yet unpublished.
In judgment Mr. Katz and I come out together. Our respective reasoning would not be enitrely alike, which is probably not very important. My difficulty with "neutrality" as a guiding principle is that, for me, it does not guide very well. A good many governmental activities affecting religion seem to me tolerable as a matter of constitutionality, and reasonably sound in policy, but do not seem neutral in effect. Of this the high school history course, of which I told in the early part of this review, offers a good example. One is driven to giving weight to governmetnal motivation; constitutionalsim is not a mathematical process but a weighing of tendencies to see whether underlying constitutional aspirations are promoted. Of this, Professor Katz presents admirable demonstrations.
Sutherland may be in error about the date
In the Book Review Sutherland claims the date of Rostow's lecture was May, 1962, but this seems to be in error:
Brown's Websites [1] Says "He [Alexander Meiklejohn] was able to come east to hear Justice William O. Douglas deliver the first Meiklejohn lecture at Brown in 1963."
Harvard's collection of Arthur E. Sutherland's Papers [2] include: "25-5 'Church and State in Perspective', Meiklejohn Lectures, Brown University, May 1, 1964 Folder contains correspondence and three drafts of lecture. Mr. Eugene Rostow was the other lecturer."
Rostow
35 N.Y. St. B.J. 228 (1963) Dissent: Notes for a Broadcast on Engel v. Vitale, A; Rostow, Eugene V.
Dean Rostow here expresses a brief but important dissent from Dean Griswold's views. What follows are notes which he prepared for a debate with Dean Griswold, broadcast March 6, 1963.
I think the Court was right to take jurisdiction int he case, and right in its decision. ...To my mind, however, two forces justify the Court's decision in the New York school prayer case. The first ist he tradition of religious liberty. The Pilgrims and many other persecuted people came here to escape religion imposed upon them, or pressed upon them, by their governments. The memory of their principles and their sacrifice has been revised and revitalized in recent years by the growing political influence of religious groups, which we feel in education, in censorship, and in many other ways. In that perspective, the Supreme Court's decision is a reminder to the nation of the divisive issues which lie behind the seeming innoucuousness of the New York prayer, and a wise call to avoid a new round in an old controversy both to ancient and modern history. There is a second factor which I feel supports the Court's action. In this anxious age, the individual seems to be more and more threatened: threatened by big cities, big business, big government, big labor; threatened by communism, by war, by atomic annihiliation; threatened by the necessity to make decisions so complex and so wrapped in mystery as to be almost beyond the reach of politics. Confronting a world of that character, American opinion is jealously fighting back, trying to assert and to protect as large a zone of freedom as is possible for the beleaguered individual -- his essential freedom, that is, the freedom from control by the state or by organized majorities. Since the time of Chief Justice Hughes, especialy, the Supreme Court has reflected and expressed this strong feeling in American opinion. Against that background, the Engel case is part of the Court's groping and continuing effort to develop a doctrine that can reconcile the tradition of deism in our public life with that of separating chruch from state, and protecting the individual in his freedom of worship, as well as his other liberties. E.B. White put the problem superbly in his recent book, "The Points of my Compass": ...I think the Court again heard clearly the simple theme that ennobles for Constitution: that no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity. New York State, with the best intentions in the world, created a moment of gentle orthodoxy in public school life, and here and there a child was left out in the cold, bearing the stigma of being different. It is this one child that our Constitution is concerned about--his tranquillity, his health, his safety, his conscience. What a kindly old document it is, and how brightly it shines, through interpreatation after interpretation! [End]