Talk:Wikipedia/Archive 4

message: I'm removing the text I copied below as it represents something that a small number of people have been raising over the last couple of days (even though I agree with the points they are raising)and then with a personal POV about possible results added to it:
:It has also been argued that contributors have an ethical responsibility to seek out and express views that are under-represented on the Internet, but are nonetheless widely held in the real world. This challenge is particularly significant with regard to central issues like religion, ethics, or politics. A political shift in those articles tends to create a shift in many other articles, which over time can alter what contributors see as neutrality itself.
Thanks, BCorr|Брайен 16:05, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "It has also been argued..."

message: I have edited the "personnel" section to reduce Sanger's prominence.  There are two reasons for this.
# Sanger has not been with the project for a considerable time.
# Fact is, though his role was important, Sanger wasn't a co-founder.
Here's some rationale on point #2:
* Let's consider what it really means to be a founder.  A founder is someone who is the first to provide three things to a venture in return for a stake:
*# Decisionmaking
*# Resources, such as money, equipment, space, or work without pay
*# Responsibility for the debts and legal obligations of the new venture.
:While Sanger provided decisionmaking, he did not provide resources, did not have responsibility for Wikipedia's debts and legal obligations, and did not receive a stake.  Wales, however, meets all four tests.  While Wales' decisionmaking was largely delegated to Sanger he was indeed active particularly at the very beginning, and ultimately made the decision to remove Sanger from the project.
* Now let's look at how it got to be this way.  Until very recently (when Sanger's claim of being a co-founder created some practical problems) Wales has not tried to define his and Sanger's roles in public.  Sanger, on the other hand, has been fairly active in tooting his own horn.  I quote herewith from the current version of his resume:
::"Editor-in-chief, Nupedia.com; Organizer and co-founder, Wikipedia.org; Feb. 2000-Feb. 2002
::Designed and managed virtually every aspect of two volunteer, from-the-ground-up, free online encyclopedia projects.  Duties: selected subject editors; organized reviewers, writers, copyeditors, programmers, and translators; organized article editing systems; led advisory board discussions about editorial policy; drafted policy guidelines; set up and moderated project mailing lists; many public relations duties; managed and worked with an administrative assistant and an assigned programmer; and much else.  Employed by Bomis, Inc., a small Internet firm.
::During my time developing these projects, they were positively reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, MIT's Technology Review, PC World, The Industry Standard, Wired News, and in many other articles.  Wikipedia has gone on to become the largest free encyclopedia online, and, according to Alexa.com, among the most-visited of all online encyclopedias."
: Basically, Sanger himself is the source of the claim that he is the "organizer and co-founder" of Wikipedia.  There is no independent verificaiton for this claim.
* A review of historically important pages in en.wikipedia.org and at meta.wikipedia.org, as well as the mailing list, reveals that Jimbo was always clearly in charge.  There are several key areas where he overruled Sanger, particularly with regard to allowing anyone to edit any article, a policy Sanger opposed.  This historical record demonstrates that Wales and Sanger were not peers, as they would have had to be to be "co-founders."
uc 16:39, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Regarding Wales and Sanger 

message: What's a good way to get started editing Wikipedia?
: See Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers and Wikipedia:How to edit a page. Ðåñηÿßôý | Talk 22:17, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  New User 

message: I read this article for the first time now, after half a year of editing Wikipedia, and found it rather lacking in NPOV. I therefore added a Criticisms section, and added "criticisms" to the section heading: "reviews, endorsements, and discussions of Wikipedia". — David Remahl 05:50, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticisms 

message: On the main page it reads something like there are 404567 pages being written. To make it easier to assimulate such info all numbers of over 3 figures should have commas added. So 404567 becomes 404,567. I see there are similar "mistakes" on the statistics page but could not see how to edit it, so I hope this is read by someone who will clarify the convention for writing numbers. Tolkny November 25 2004
I disagree with this statement. A comma is not recommended as a number separator. I quote from the NIST guide to SI units section 10.5.2]
:Because the comma is widely used as the decimal marker outside the United States, it should not be used to separate digits into groups of three. Instead, digits should be separated into groups of three, counting from the decimal marker towards the left and right, by the use of a thin, fixed space. However, this practice is not usually followed for numbers having only four digits on either side of the decimal marker except when uniformity in a table is desired.
Donar Reiskoffer 13:33, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need for commas in numbers 

message: We have a "Criticisms" section on this page, and that's a good thing to have since there are a lot of ways in which WP can be improved. However, keeping the spirit of presenting both sides, shouldn't we add a "Positive Things About Wikipedia" type section? 
I'm open to discuss this, and would like to hear others' opinions before I would go ahead and write one. EventHorizon 19:30, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Positive things about WP

message: I consider EventHoriozon's addition a rant in that it presents opinions without attribution. Specifically:
:The general consensus of the Internet community is that Wikipedia is an excellent source of information, but that, as a forum and community itself, it is lacking, drowning in incivility and petty squabbles.
What is "the Internet community"? All Internet users? ISOC? Bloggers?
:While the process seems  democratic regarding matters of deletion, the observed reality is that some users have vastly more influence than others, often for no reason other than having been a contributer for longer.
Seems to whom? Who are the observers of this reality?
:These inequalities of influence are especially noticed around sysops. While most are well-intentioned and use their privileges for the betterment of Wikipedia, there are documented cases of them abusing them to "bully" other users.
Especially noticed by whom?
:For this reason, Wikipedia is occasionally described as "the Stanford prison experiment of the Internet."
No reference given.
:On Urbandictionary.com ...
Finally attribution! I almost think this should be kept. However, are entries urbandictionary.com significant? Do they carry more weight than, say, arbitrary blog comments? Up for discussion.
:A more abstract criticism of Wikipedia is that its goal of neutrality is unattainable, especially in an open-source environment.
Who says this?
:Finally, some opponents of Wikipedia have argued that, by containing a large number of internally linked pages, it receives high rankings from Google. This alone would not be cause for concern-- Wikipedia does recieve heavy traffic-- but it also results in high rankings for the often identical Wikipedia  mirrors. This makes it more likely that web searches will return identical results.
Who are these opponents?
-- Fredrik | talk 20:51, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I did some work regarding those. You're right that my additions needed POV work. EventHorizon 21:02, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It is better now, but some of the problems remain. For example, it is still unclear what "much of the Internet community" means. Fredrik | talk 21:24, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: Wikipediasuck.com is flimsy criticism that contains personal attacks. In contrast there is well-researched criticisms by ex-wikpedians. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ex_Wikipedia_Support_Group/ Read the files section Ex-Wikipedian 20:28, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Problems with EventHorizon's addition