User talk:Johntex/Talk09

Proposal

Hi John, could you please review the draft quickly when you have time? We are almost done with modifications of the proposal. Thanks. Resid Gulerdem 00:38, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

chairs

I noticed you were worried about the possibility of articles about chairs in McDonalds appearing - while wanting to reassure you that I've never seen even one article like this, existing policy (verifiability) already deals with this. Take a look - I hope you'll be reassured, Yours, For great justice. 02:05, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

That is no comfort at all. Anybody could take a picture of the McDonald's and upload it to prove that all the chairs do exist. Someone may object and say, "how do I know those chairs are in the McDonalds you say they are in", but they'll probably get shouted down by scores of people telling them to WP:AGF. Notability requirements are important. Johntex\^talk 11:51, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

No, take a look at the verifiability policy, and original research. This is already explicity prohibited. Now, if National Geographic were to run an article on a chair in a McDonalds, then I would say we could have an article on it, but, at present, your example is prohibited by existing policy. For great justice. 19:27, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

No, the policy on "no original research" does not forbid uploading information that a user gathers themselves. If it did, then it would not be possible to upload our own photos of places and events. The "no original research" policy covers things like saying "I saw the Invisible Pink Unicorn and therefore I know it exists, or "We may be able to achieve sustained Cold fusion if we follow this proceedure...". If I start a band and we post a blog, it is easy to verify that the band exists - that does not make the band notable enough to be included here. It does not make the blog notable enough to be covered here either. That is why we have WP:BAND and WP:WEB. We need a general notability policy to keep out other types of cruft as well. Johntex\^talk 08:26, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

"Original research is a term used on Wikipedia to refer to material added to articles by Wikipedia editors that has not been published already by a reputable source." You can upload photos you took of something, but only if that thing has been described in a reputable source. Yes, you could use your website as a source to write an article about your band, but the website on its own would not be enough to write the article, since there is no verification, simply a claim by the band. A review in a newspaper would be verifiable. Again, your 'problem' does not exist, and is dealt with by existing policy. In fact, the 'problem' here, is the use of ideas like 'cruft', which just mean 'what I don't like'. For great justice. 16:27, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't know how you use the word "cruft", but I do not use it to refer to things I don't like. There are plenty of things I don't like that are still encyclopedic and they deserve to have an article. I am using the word cruft the way it is defined in the Wikipedia Glossary: "Cruft: A term used to describe an article or group of articles which are too detailed and/or irrelevent for Wikipedia." From you example above, it seems like you would have no problem with the band having an article if they had been reviewed in just one single reputable source? That places the notability bar far too low. Let's take it one step further, what if it is not a band, but an incident? If you think that anything reported by a reputable source is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, then it sounds like you would have no problem with User:Johntex/Cruft_Sample? Johntex\^talk 21:08, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, first, to close the loop on the original problem, can we say that your chair example is dead? We both agree that existing policy prohibits articles on chairs in McDonalds, except where said chairs are extensively and rigorously documented?

Secondly I define 'cruft' pretty much as you do "stuff that relates to someone's opinion about what is relevant or too much" so while some people talk about 'sciencecruft' (articles about details of scientific theory) or 'pokemoncruft', (articles about details of Pokemon), or 'rulecruft' - proposed rules that are too detailed or irrelevant.

Thirdly, re the band, it's somewhat contextual - exactly what is a reputable source varies. Generally though, I would think that simply having one review would not give enough information to write much more than a stub, or part of a list.

The problem that I have with User:Johntex/Cruft_Sample is that it references only one secondary source. There is no referencing of the facts reported. I would not write this article, since it is simply reporting that a newspaper published this article, and reproducing the facts claimed in the article. I would be inclined to merge it into an article on violence in schools, but would not necesarily press for it to be deleted. As it stands though, it is a poor article. For great justice. 22:48, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for staying with me here through this discussion. I am trying to keep my mind wide open to understanding your point of view and to look for common ground.

Unfortunately, if I understand your position correctly, it does not seem that even the chair example is dead. I could easily imagine that some event could take place at a McDonalds that results in a photo of that McDonalds being run in a major newspaper. Let us suppose that the photo shows that the nearest chair to the cash registers has a crack in it. Someone could create an article about that chair using that one source (which would be a primary source). Clearly, the chair is verifiable, even though the chair is not famous by any typical standards. No newspaper has run a story about the chair, yet it is possible to prove the chair exists. The chair is verifiable. They are now free to create an article about that chair. They can even upload their own photo because they are just uploading a GFDL image of something that has already been covered in the mainstream press. Now, if they turn slightly so as to capture that chair as well as others in the photo, they could upload that photo as well. Arguably, all these chairs are now verifiable as well, so if verifiability is our only filter, then they could have their own articles as well...

Second point - I am not sure we are defining cruft the same way. I define it as "Stuff that is too-detailed or not important enough to include." You seem to be using almost a Meta definiton - that "cruft" applies to people's opinion on what is too much or too unimportant? To illustrate by example, I might choose something like "intelligence". There are many different different scales that attempt to measure how intelligent someone is. Although you would probably not get 100% unanimous agreement that any single system is the best (some will argue that a given test is culturally biased, some would argue that intelligence can't be measured,...etc.), most people do agree that there is an attribute called "intelligence" that some people possess more than other people. It is demonstratably possible for a given community of people to achieve consensus that a certain test is valid (within experimental error) under a given set of circumstances. Likewise, a community of people (I.e. Wikipedia) can agree on a level of importance that something could possess in order to be noteworthy (Ie. notable). The fact that different people will have different opinions on exactly where to draw the line is OK. That should not prevent us from drawing the line somewhere. We don't have to 100% agree that the standard is the perfect standard in order for us to have the standard, keep the standard, and have the standard be useful.

Your third point - At the risk of allowing myself to become optimistic, perhaps we are finding some common ground here, I'm not sure. If that one newspaper review was lengthy and well-written, it would certainly be possible to write a seemingly decent stub about the band - maybe even a full non-stub article. If the writer of our article also owned the band's CD - they could add all the song titles, the album cover art, etc. At the end of the process, the article would look pretty decent if no one checked up on it. At the end of the day though, they could still be a very obscure band, with only 1,000 CD's sold. Maybe only 100 sold. Maybe they have never even sold a CD because they are trying to do a viral marketing campaign with their first CD. I would say this article should be deleted simply because the band is non-notable. They simply don't deserve to have an article in an encyclopedia. (please see two points down)

Concerning your feedback on User:Johntex/Cruft_Sample, here I start to doubt my earlier statement that we may be finding common ground. I find it disheartening that you would not press for this article's deletion. There are probably 20+ articles like this every day in every single newspaper. That figure may be conservative. The issue about the seondary source is not really the point here. Please don't I could easily have picked out a different article from the Houston Chronicle, or I could have gone straight to the San Angelo Standard Times since they have their own website. There simply is not space in our main articles to house all this cruft. Therefore, mereging won't work for long, we'd have to spin the articles back out.

Now, without notability standards, here is where we would be: We can't delete the article on the McDonalds because there is a photo in a major paper, even though it is not even about the chair. We can't delete the article on the band because their was a single well-written article on them, even though they have no CD sales to speak of, and they fail WP:BAND miserably. We can't delete the cruft article I wrote because it is sourced to a reputably paper. At this point, you may as well create an article on me. I've been mentioned in newspapers before. I could point you to those articles, my blog, an on-line phone-book, and many other sources that prove I exist. I am verifiable. I don't think I pass WP:BIO, but if we lower our standards to verifiability, then a whole-lot of non-notable people are ready for inclusion. I think this would be a shame. Johntex\^talk 23:45, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for bearing with me ;).

The chairs. Your interpretation of verifiability and reliable sources is not one that would ever have occured to me, or, it seems to anyone else, because we don't have any articles like this. The fact that a chair, or a fire hydrant, or some other bit of furniture appears in a publication is not sufficient to write an article on that object, primarily because there's nothing to say about it. Even if we accept, which I do not, that there is anything to say, we have to decided that appearing in the background of a photo is a valid sourcing, and not fundamentally original research. It looks like original research to me, since the news report did not concern the chair at all - it is you who have pulled out a new interpretation of the news report photo and decided to research the nature of the chairs pictured in the background. Now, unless 'fast food chair monthly', the premiere peer reviewed publication for all things fast-food-chair ... No, I'm not even going there. Existing policy stops this already. Really. It does.

Re Cruft. I'm glad you raised measuring intelligence, because it illustrates my point entirely. The notion of intelligence is entirely a POV one. There are many different tests, and they are notorious at showing one 'race' as being more or less intelligent than another based on the POV of the person who made the test. The definition of 'cruft' is the same - it is 'something I think there is too much of'.

Re your example article, you can't make rules about what a good article is. What goes into an article about violence in schools is an editorial decision based on discussion on the talk pages between editors based on policy. There's no need to legislate that only items that you like can be used. If there is an article to be written about incidents of school violence, and it's verifiable, then that example might find a place in it, based on the concensus of the users editing it.

OK, can we write an article about you? Well, it depends - is there anything that we can say about you? Will it be more than simply saying that you exist? Maybe, but if, not, the WP:NOT deals with it. There has to be something to say that is documented in a reliable third party resource, and it has to say more than simply that you exist.

Since I don't believe in the concept of notability, I'm not worried about 'non-notable' people 'getting in'. My life is much more relaxed because of this, because I know that, because WP is not paper, there is not a problem with there being verifiable, neutral information that is well sourced about people who I never want to look up. I just ignore them, and I never have to see them! The same with the band. So, a small band releases an album, and it gets reviewed, but sells poorly. WP reports this... Well, the world doesn't stop turning. The fact that there is true information that you are not interested in is ok! For great justice. 02:50, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, if you wanted to remove that example of yours, you could use wp:not, since it specifically points out that things only appearing in local news are better suited to WikiNews. Again, no problem! For great justice. 16:04, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

POV screed

What do you think about this:Bush family conspiracy theory? I think it's a WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, WP:CITE, WP:RS and WP:OR violation.

Thanks so much!

Thank you, dear John!

I'm truly sorry about the belated reply, but I really really wanted to thank you - your concern in my absence and your get-well wishes really mean a lot to me. Sometimes, well - life can be tough on us, but as long as good friends like you are there, I'll always have a reason to cheer up. You are very special to me, John. Thank you!

Phædriel ♥ ^{tell me} - 16:16, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

On Barcelona, Wikitravels

Well, I live in a town near Barcelona called Caldes de Montbui (is a very interesting place, there should be an article in wikitravels) and I can give you some information on Barcelona. First, there's any restaurant in the city specially known among the natives. You should look for it in a touristic guide but I'll ask it to my friends that live there anyway. Second, there's any good beach in Barcelona. The beaches of Barcelona are known among the natives as a paradise of theft. So, the "best" (but not good) beaches of the city are the beaches where less thefts have been reported, that's to say, the beach of La Vila Olímpica and the beach of the Fòrum. Moreover, Barcelona is placed between two polluted rivers due to industry: the Besós and the Llobregat, so the quality of the water is (literally) a fucking shit (sometimes you can see orange or even yellow water, although there are plants the purify the water) and, as you can see, the natives think that take a bath in the city's beaches isn't a good idea. So, when catalans want to go to the beach, we take our cars and go to a non-touristic and high-quality-water town like Arenys de Mar. In conclusion, there's any specially known restaurant in the city though I think that the best are in the cool Born district and take a bath there isn't recommendable at all. Gangleri2001

Resid, again

Greeting Johntex. As User:Rgulerdem's mentor I thought you should be aware of this RFCU filed by User:Azate concerning him. Netscott 10:44, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I've blocked him and his two sockpuppets indefinitely. I think your mentorship is over. --Cyde↔Weys 18:16, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I've actually undone the block, because the CheckUser has not yet been done. NSLE _(T+C) at 00:38 UTC (2006-05-24)

RFCU has confirmed[1] User:Rgulerdem to be the puppeteer of User:Mokotok and User:Light&Truth. Azate 23:19, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the note Johntex. From looking at Resid Gulerdem's behavior not only here but also on the Turkish Wikipedia, I'm inclined to think that the only way he would have been able to contribute was with a lot of mentorship (essentially a mentor hovering over him) which unfortunately isn't very realistic. Your deciscion to try to aid him was a noble one though. Netscott 07:29, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Sad, sad news

I'm devastated :( Please, please promise that you won't be leaving as well, John - I can't afford to loose yet another friend. Phaedriel ♥ tell me - 23:49, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Deletion_review#User:Raphael1/Wikiethics

Since you previously showed interest in the former proposed policy Wikiethics, I'd like to inform you about this deletion review. Raphael1 15:01, 4 June 2006 (UTC)