User:Geogre: Difference between revisions

My personal details are unimportant.

They are, but because I've made reference to some of them elsewhere, I'll confirm some of them.

Latest de novo articles

I ain't proud of them, but.... Ok, I'm kind of proud of them.

• The Mint is an idea whose time has come again (orphaned still)
  • Moll Flanders was a disgrace, so 98% of it is now mine (one sentence left of the original): This is one of those items that visitors to Wikipedia will search for, and if they had seen what was there before, they'd have concluded that Wikipedia is worthless.
• Sarah Fielding is now 10% more comprehensible than when I wrote it
• Ormulum is a dull article that's 500% more interesting than the Ormulum itself.
• Latitudinarian I'm of two minds about.
• Jonathan Wild is deceptive, and it needs an illustration, but folks have scared me witless about public domain images.
• Peterborough Chronicle...forgot that I did that one, such we suffered 19 winters for our sins.
• Parody is about 99% mine. When I found it, it was a stub about film.
• A Tale of a Tub was my first complete article here. Hope you wanted to know all about it.

Places I've Lived

• Savannah, Georgia
• Atlanta, Georgia
• New Orleans, Louisiana (University)
• Atlanta again (University, plus being in a punk band)
• Athens, Georgia (University some more)
• Chapel Hill, North Carolina (yet more university)
• Goldsboro, North Carolina (work)
• New York City (work) (from August 2001 to August 2003 (terrorist attack and blackout framing my time in Manhattan) (weirdest thing in my life was how quiet Manhattan got after the attacks; no planes, no cars, no buses, no trains running, just quiet up on 86th St.))
• Baltimore, Maryland (work) (Arrived just in time for an economic collapse)

Things I've gotten paid to do

• Teach stuff
• School technology
• Drink a beer milkshake
• Pick up a girlfriend from a bus station 260 miles away, despite protestations
• Review movies that were on video
• Technical edit medical journals
• Given my record, I'm hoping to get paid to not live places.

My areas of special knowledge are

• English literature
• Restoration to mid-18th century England
• Religious history
• Film history
• Poetry
• Philosophy
• Punk rock of the first wave (well, they called it punk at the time, but you probably call it New Wave; let's just say "Athens, GA" and leave it there)
• Literary theory, despite myself.

My "Deletionism"

When I first came to Wikipedia, I hit the "random" link a few times. One of those turned up Al Gore. I was impressed that the article was long, detailed, and without an agenda, either pro- or con. It was because of that article that I returned and began to believe that Wikipedia would not just be the anarchy of the web, or Usenet, where the most motivated (i.e. the loudest and most aggrieved) ruled by persistence and intimidation.

I believe very strongly that users of Wikipedia coming to it the first time will perform 2-3 searches, if we are lucky, and will base their impressions of the site on those results. If those 2-3 searches yield nothing, it's bad, but if those searches yield junk, argumentation, inaccuracies, or blips of non-information, it's even worse. We are all aware that reference works have limits. If I do not find "polyphiloprogenitive" in an online dictionary, I know that there might just be a hole in that dictionary. On the other hand, imagine what reaction I would have if I did find it, and it said, "A word used in a poem." What would your reaction be? What if I found, "A new web company based in Tonga with cool products!" or "#redirect Words no one uses" or "A word often heard from Lord Viperskorpion on tel3D00dies?"

I believe that we must, absolutely must, patrol the site for articles with inadequate, erroneous, and argumentative information, and it is far better to have a hole than to have trash on the ground. This is true because of the medium we are operating in. The world wide web itself, and especially those bits of it that allow "anyone" to enter them, will always fall victim to the most motivated. I remember back in 1990, when I was a user of the FidoNet BBS system, that the Feminism echo was full of chauvinists and misogynists. The Christianity echo was full of atheists. The Socialism echo had hyperpatriot and Nazi participants. I.e. there are people who feel so personally upset by a topic that their chief activity online is to search out those who represent what they consider to be evil and to bash them. That model, of what some call trolling, was later replaced, with the www, to a model of spammers. Now, every group or page was full not of cranks, but of advertisers. The shadier the product, the more aggressively it was advertised. Wikipedia, I think, is a prime target for the most motivated, and the most motivated are always the ones with a score to settle or a score to make.

The "eventualist" position is of some concern to me because of the problem of first impressions. Eventually Wikipedians will fill in gaps, but the new users do not often get motivated to fix bad articles. New users need to first believe that their efforts are worthwhile and then that they will not find themselves instantly ridiculed for working on an article. Also, although the documentation is very clear on the subject, people have trouble believing that people really don't own their words, really won't care about being edited. (Unfortunately, having looked at IRC and VfD for a while, I have to say that people do get upset with edits.) I think that the logic of eventualism applies equally to absences as stubs. Eventually a Wikipedian will create a good article, just as eventually a Wikipedian will fix a stub.

A ratings system may help. However, when we get into ratings we again deal with motivations. If I read an article about a Chemist, I would normally not say anything at all. I don't know the field. Who will? Other chemists, surely, and people who dislike the author of the article, or who believe that chemistry articles are too minor. (Think of what will happen to the ratings of Pokemon articles.) I.e. the motivations of reviewers will offer at least an opportunity for a skewing of results. I do not want someone who has never read beyong Stephen King to rate my Ormulum article harshly because it seems unimportant. I want literary scholars to do so (or, rather, rate it highly). I think a ratings system is a step in the right direction, but I worry that ratings can easily reflect prejudice and motivation. A dedicated atheist could easily bomb every religious article. A dedicated Nazi could bomb every socialist article. We can be back to the problems of trolling.

All of this is simply to explain why I am a "deletionist." I do not delete topics. I delete articles. I do not pass judgment often on whether a thing is worth knowing, but I think it is very important to make sure that the materials we have are rewarding for the users.

An Example

I wrote an article on The Mint because I had referred on IRC to needing to find a contemporary version of it. Well, having written the article, I needed to figure out other articles that might link to it. Defoe wrote about life in The Mint in Moll Flanders, so it was natural to worm a reference into both Daniel Defoe and Moll Flanders. I know about Defoe, or at least I know as much as I care to about him. I haven't read Captain Singleton, but I've read Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Jonathan Wild and Roxana. The Defoe article is poor. It's not unforgivable, but it's really insufficient. Since there is a great deal to know about Defoe (Paula Backschedier has a biography that's worthwhile, though hardly the last word she intended it to be) and I don't, I didn't feel like opening the can to add only a few worms. On the other hand, I was shocked to see Moll Flanders. I invite curious parties to go to that article, go to the history tab, and compare the version before and after my edit. I say this not to credit myself, since I really can't remember the plot of the novel well enough to have summarized it, but to warn about the dangers of articles like that. Moll Flanders is a frequently-assigned text in college English classes in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. It also makes it into advanced High School classes. It is, therefore, one of those topics that is very, very likely to be a first search term, since high school and college students hit reference works first and foremost to do their papers and prepare for class. Imagine what kind of an opinion such a user gets of Wikipedia when the entire article is simply the title of the book! It would be far, far better to have nothing there at all, or to have a listing on VfD that will draw out editors, than to let something that abominable be someone's idea of what this project is about. Geogre 18:43, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Very cogent points, Geogre. Your argument sways me, at least somewhat, to the "deletionist" position.

On the other hand, part of what makes wikipedia great is that it is a collaborative work in progress. Perhaps rather than a ratings system, we simply need two Wikipedias: a "working copy" and a "published copy". Indeed since Wikipedia is a database, this can be done much more easily than with any other medium. All it would require is adding one bit of information to each article, a bit noting whether the article was "published".

Then, if a non-logged in user does a search, they would by default see only "published" articles; if the published article did not satisfy their search, we could suggest that more tentative information was available on the subject in the "working copy". Of course, this is just one mechanism to display the difference between copies. We could also show everything, but with a disclaimer at the head of "not yet published" articles, such as: "The article is a rough draft, and should be read with greater skepticism than our published articles." Or we could show published articles as Times New Roman on a white background, and "working copy" articles as a monospaced font on a Manila background.

Ratings would come in only when the article was "published" as a simple up or down vote. We could even elect to publish one version ("as of 1 August 2004") while still working on revised drafts, and establish a "Votes for Publication" page analogous to VfD. I think ratings need not be a great morass: the criterion should be simple conventional truth -- which while eliminating some more speculative claims, would also prevent the ideological "bombing" you fear -- possibly as backed up by a wikipedian familiar with the subject area and who has won the trust of his fellow Wikipedians. Fore example, if you say an article on the Start Age makes sense, I'll be quite inclined to repose my trust in you and vote the article for publication based on a simple "smell test": "Geogre vouches for it, and eh article makes no obvious mistakes." Perhaps you would extent me a similar trust on articles on the C++ Programming Language, just as I would defer to user:dysprosia on the Objective-C Language.

Of course, mistakes would be inevitable, for no such system -- even the Britannica's -- is without error, but we could easily screen stubs, obvious bias, and speculative claims (early versions of Dolphin brain come to mind) from casual users of wikipedia.

(On the technical implementation: a single additional database table containing two columns, the article name and the database id of the "published" version; absence from this table would mean that no published version exists; and a correlated sub-query on all articles to fetch the row (or find no row) in the new table -- optimizers will of course suggest a denormalization of the data by doing the sub-query once and storing the result as a column in the article, trading a bit of additional space for a bit of speed, updating teh value only when the article, or a revised version, is published.)

-- orthogonal 18:27, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

What I edit

I actually spend less time writing articles about 18th century British literature, because I know them so well that doing them justice is daunting. Instead, I do a great deal of copy editing and tweaking. However, for an article that I'm proud of that I did in toto, see A Tale of a Tub. (One day I will get around to writing an entry on my dissertation field, but it's hard to even think about that stuff.)

I'm a believer in Wikipedia and have hopes for its continued prosperity. I've been an encyclopedia reader since my earliest years. Nothing matches the pleasure of learning that I have gotten from grazing in encyclopedia, and I look at Wikipedia as a way for me to, in a small way, add to the pleasure of others and pay off some of my debt.