User talk:Jimbo Wales

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Opt-in Page Rating

Hey Jimbo - I've been playing around with various internet filtering solutions, e.g. OpenDNS, and it seems like the tools to allow parents to monitor and control internet content their kids are exposed to have matured. What, if anything, would prevent WP from implementing a similar opt-in page rating system? I'm thinking of a property (or collection of properties) embedded in each page and set by the community that will alert opt-in systems such as OpenDNS to presence of adult-themed material. Curious to know your thoughts on this matter. Ronnotel (talk) 17:38, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Not to butt in, but that seems really unnecessary. Firstly, that seems to sort of conflict with the not censored stuff, and there are already tons of programs (some already built into many, if not all, newer computers) that do the same thing.-RHM22 (talk) 03:21, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I support such measures. I think WP:NOTCENSORED is not a good reason not to do it. My own view is that NPOV categories are the way to handle this, and then end users (or software like you are talking about) can decide what to do about it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:14, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

What are "NPOV" categories? Fram (talk) 08:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

All it would do is spawn endless arguments over whether X should be censored. For example; images of Mohammed? Images of people in disasters, or body parts etc. Images of guns? That's a can of worms that doesn't seem worthwhile opening; censorship needs to be performed on a more local level and the selection of scope made by that individuals. --Errant ^(chat!) 09:54, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Completely agree with you, Errant. The only possible way forward would be to apply a series of NPOV labels, set by the community, that merely describe the presence of content that may be potentially objectionable. The labels are not normally visible to the casual viewer (see below, viewing and manipulating the tags would require the user to turn on a preference). It is then up to the viewer's environment (broswer, content filtering solution, etc.) to determine whether a page should be shown to that user by referencing the meta tags. Most of schools can't let their students use WP now because of content objections. A solution like this could help make WP more available to those kids. Ronnotel (talk) 12:33, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, Jimbo. I know this has caused controversy before and there's a likely to be huge negative reaction from the WP:NOTCENSORED crowd. However, I was thinking that the way to go would be to make the page ratings completely 'opt-in' - i.e. visible only if you have specifically turned on a preference. When a page gets a rating, such as "profanity", it would simply generate meta tags that another tool, for instance a content filter application at a school, could use to filter the page based on its various meta tags. The vast majority of WP users can safely ignore the preference and their viewing experience will be unchanged since they will never see the rating and they can simply choose to use a viewing platform that does not employ content filtering. The small fraction of WP users who have an interest in making WP more available to non-adult audiences can deploy the preference and participate in the page ratings. I think this might require some small change on the dev side (new preference(s), generate meta tags, etc.). I don't have much visibility into the dev process and I would appreciate a pointer or two on how to navigate. Thoughts? Ronnotel (talk) 12:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Given that one of the most qualified legal scholars of the last century resorted to "I know it when I see it", I don't see how a single label would work (in other words, I think the idea is broken and should be rejected). But we could possibly make use of the the Wikipedia crowd, and have (potentially) every individual registered user assign a separate value on certain danger scales ("obscene", "violent", "religiously offensive", "makes people think"). Values could be averaged for the overall rating, possibly with a decay factor. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:12, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I would not be against it as long as it is only used when someone specifically sets it what way on their preferences. Also, I think only administrators should be allowed to assign parental info to articles. If you allow anybody to set the level, people will be marking everything as inappropriate.-RHM22 (talk) 14:14, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

@Stephen - most modern rating systems attempt to use multiple, objective criteria rather than a single subjective criteria. For instance, a TV show might be tagged with "Nudity, mild language, some violence". It's then up to the gate-keeper (i.e. the kid's parent) to decide whether the show would be appropriate. I'm thinking along the same lines. If a user opts-in by setting a preference on their account, they would then be able to view and/or edit multiple ratings properties. For instance, a tasteful nude portrait might be tagged with "nudity", while a picture demonstrating the use of a sex toy might be labeled "nudity" + "sexual content" + "explicit". Again, only those who have turned on the preference would even see these ratings. It would be up to the gate keepers (i.e. parents, school-based filtering solutions) to determine what level is appropriate for their viewers. For someone who doesn't care about these issues, the impact would be completely zero. They haven't turned on the preference - they don't see the ratings, their experience is completely unaffected. Ronnotel (talk) 14:34, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

• Oh, it would definitely have an impact on articles, and one that is in my opinion unwanted. When such a system would be in place, people would either self-censor articles, or ask for the censoring of them, so that the content would remain visible for people filtering out "nudity" or "profanity" or "unveiled women" or whatever potentially unwanted content there may be. If e.g. an article on Peter Paul Rubens would be tagged with "nudity" as long as File:Peter Paul Rubens 019.jpg was included, then wouldn't it be better to remove that (and similar) pictures from the article, so that school children are still able to read about Rubens on Wikipedia? What about Phan Thị Kim Phúc? Should we remove the picture because it is "child nudity" and/or "violence"? Such a scheme will lead to endless discussions, with little to no benefit in the end. Fram (talk) 15:05, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

• Fram, it sounds like you are responding to something no one is proposing. What I think is that we have an encyclopedic responsibility to identify the facts of reality in a clear and accurate way, and that there is a very easy and obvious responsible middle ground which does *not* require removal of images to satisfy edge cases. It actually is possible to find middle ground here, if people are willing to try. The debate between "take it out, it is offensive" and "to hell with you, you'll look at what we want you to look at" is stale. It's time to move on to thinking about responsible and thoughtful accommodation and compromise. NPOV labeling and individual control is the Wikipedia way.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:10, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

That's the second time you used NPOV in conjunction with labelling things as nudity, profanity, etcetera. Could you please elaboate on what is the link between "Editors must write articles from a neutral point of view, representing all significant views fairly, proportionately, and without bias." and indicating whether a page containing e.g. works of arts should be labeled "nudity", "artistic nudity", "nsfw", or whatever one would prefer? As for my comments: the proposal is to categorize articles so that people may install category-based filters to exclude some articles from view for some groups (e.g. schools may filter all pages with nudity). The to me logical next step is that people will try to have pages not labeled as conteining nudity, to make them more accessible for restricted audiences. The only obvious options to achieve this are to either remove the labeling from such pages, or to remove the offending bits from such pages. The first will lead to edit wars, the last is censoring. We have all witnessed the repeated removal of works of arts from Commons because they offended some people (or because someone feared that they would offend other people or generate bad publicity or whatever). There is no "very easy and obvious responsible middle ground", as evidenced by that fiasco. Fram (talk) 08:02, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

• Which one of "Nudity, mild language, some violence" is objective? Nude faces? Feet? Breast(s) (male or female)? Popeye or the A-Team vs. 24 or Spooks on violence? I know which ones give me nightmares. And seriously, if someone is offended by "language", they are welcome to stop using any. The fixation on certain "dirty words" seems to be a very culture-dependent criteria that is not applicable to the international audience of Wikipedia at all. Moreover, specific words are very easy to filter on the client-side. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:39, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Most of the comments above seem to have misunderstood my position, and so I will expand on it here. Problems about whether or not filtering systems work or work well enough should be left to others. My point is that NPOV tagging is entirely possible and well within our capacity, and reasonable default settings are well within our capacity. I can't tell you whether a particular image is appropriate for you or not. I can tell you what the image is of. "Image of Muhammad" - and you decide if you want to see it or not. Simple measures can be taken to allow end users control over their experience. The real danger here is that "cram it down their throats to prove WP:NOTCENSORED" as a sentiment may blind people to the possibilities of individual choice.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:05, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree. If it is done, I think that each article with potentially objectionable content should be labeled as such by administrators. There would several invisible tags that could be added, such as "religion", "nudity", "crude language" etc. That way, in your preferences, you could click a box that says "don't show me nudity, religion etc".-RHM22 (talk) 19:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Err "Image of Muhammad" is highly POV. One of the standing objections to the images is that they don't actualy depict muhammad (since none of the depictions date from anywhere close to his lifetime). La trahison des images gets taken seriously.©Geni 19:13, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I disagree. "Image of Muhammad" is quite straightforward in the vast majority of cases. In the edge cases, it is quite simple to refine the label so that it is NPOV. Do you have any examples or are you simply objecting to object? Give me an example, and I'll work with you to find a neutral and informative way of describing it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:18, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

okey lets take a fairly straigforward one.File:Mohammed kaaba 1315.jpg You would probably describe that as an image of Mohammed yes? However it was painted ~680 years after his death and claiming it as an image of the prophet would from the POV of certian versions of islam be a lying and/or blasphemy. Either way its pushing a POV. A more NPOV forumation would be something along the lines of "images intended to depict Muhammad" however that is not only clumsy but would also include File:Aziz efendi-muhammad alayhi s-salam.jpg which is probably not the intent. Sure you can get around this by adding ever longer tags or writing the whole thing in Lojban but by that point you've destoryed any reasonable level of usability so your approach is less effective than just leaving people to construct lists of images they want to block in adblock pluss.©Geni 19:55, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

That particular image is already categorised as "Muslim depictions of Muhammad" - I presume that a tag would be different to a cat, in a sense, (or may be not - the distinction is fairly arbitrary), but if I understand Jimbo correctly, a tag or a category with that wording would be sufficient to permit appropriate software to allow an individual to choose whether or not to display the image, without impacting on notcensored, and the wording "depictions of Muhammad" is sufficiently NPOV to avoid the question of whether it is an accurate portrayal. - Bilby (talk) 00:06, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Bilby is absolutely correct, and this is my point. We already do perfectly well with NPOV tagging. That's what we do quite well. Of course people can always argue and fuss about what tags to use. And, no, I don't propose that we do any completely new tagging system - such would be a needless duplicate of what we already do quite well. I let this example run to illustrate the point: those who say that NPOV tagging is impossible must, to be consistent, be opposed to our category tagging entirely.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:29, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I would argue vehemently that NPOV tagging is entirely impossible and completely outside our capacity, as a multicultural project. One person's porn is another's erotica is another's refreshingly frank fiction. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:27, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I can't see why this would be a bad idea, but I do think that what is said by editors above is cogent, Jimbo. There probably would be disputes about whether and how particular things should be tagged (how nude is nude? what sort of behaviours count as sexual?). It's a hallmark of Wikipedia that editors will find opportunities to disagree wherever they can. You could object, though, that all that is is an argument for never doing anything new.

I do think that if it was introduced it would be a good idea, if poss, to make it unavailable to IPs or things would constantly be getting tagged and untagged (this would not apply to former IPs, of course).

Mike, what you're saying is correct, but that's just a reason for not designing a system that has options such as "porn", "erotica", "refreshingly frank fiction". It's also a reason not to allow new tags to be created without consensus.--FormerIP (talk) 19:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I think that Mike is mistaken, actually. We already do a great job of NPOV labeling of images. The point of NPOV is that we (already) tend to avoid tags that involve a value judgment. We already deal perfectly well with questions like "how nude is nude?" The point I am trying to make here is that we are already doing what many people are claiming is impossible: we categorize images in an NPOV fashion. Much of the negative reaction here seems to be either unaware of our category system, or envisioning something different that no one is actually proposing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:29, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

People would be hiding pages on Wikipedia based on categories on Commons? That seems problematic to me. And how NPOV is the labeling, and are we really doing a great job of it? I can imagine that every page that has a picture listed in the Commons category "Category:Female buttocks" would be hidden for some viewers. (I don't know why anyone would believe the sight of female buttocks to be a problem, but that's beside the point). Would this include every image in the subcategories as well? If so, many articles on art and artists would be hidden as well. The same for categories like "nude females" and so on. Luckily, we can replace some of these images with other Commons images which are not similarly categorised, even if they could be; File:Rubens, Peter Paul (workshop) - Die drei Grazien - 1620-24.jpg has no "restricting" NPOV categories, but File:Las tres Gracias de Rubens (Detalle).jpg has, so make sure to only use the former and not the latter. Fram (talk) 08:56, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I would tend to agree that any useful tagging is inherently impossible; regardless of how the categories are named, they remain "things some group might want to not see because they might be offended" which requires judgement and subjective evaluation. Even something as "straightforward" as nudity isn't: is a woman wearing only a cache-sexe nude? Is a man? What if they wear nothing, but only their head and shoulders are visible? What if it's a man shown from the waist up? A woman? Or a woman seen from the waist up, but facing away from the camera? What if their entire body is visible but genitalia is obscured by the decor? What if the obstruction is added to the image itself rather than part of the photograph? What do we do in the frequent Hollowodian case that context and setup obviously indend to imply that the subject is nude, but they are not (and it's not possible to tell)?

That impossibility to classify neutrally is the easy part too: with the tags will come pressure to have articles contain no "tagged" material so that "all" may see them; quickly causing de facto ghettos and encouraging self-censorship. That's if things go well.

I'm sorry, Jimmy, but I can't think of a worse idea. — Coren ^(talk) 19:47, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Land war in Asia. Hands down. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

To Coren: That seems a little dramatic. If such a feature were available, I think very few would use it outside of schools and possibly some young children.-RHM22 (talk) 21:12, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Then you posses depths of optimism to which I cannot aspire. I predict that, should such a tagging feature be turned on, wheel wars over tags are inevitable. (And yes, "nothing worse" is hyperbole; what I obviously means is that "... in the context of content control ...") — Coren ^(talk) 00:19, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

• Wouldn't it be nice if we could modularly reuse content among different presentations? This is bigger than anything Wikipedia is or could forseeably be, but indulge me for a second as I dream. In Wikipedia Mark N+1, for each different possible article, editors create content that has both a handle or tag (think of a current section or subsection) and an attribute. So if I want to see (just picking this one because I saw an OTRS ticket complaining about its images) the article Vulva, it would by default show everything we currently have. But if users want to create and upload, say, a line drawing in place of any of the pictures, it could be uploaded with the same tag and a different attribute--say "line drawing of female human vulva" vs. "photograph of human female vulva". In my ideal world, users can choose by default, "show me no photographs of human nudity" and selectively opt-out of the images. I'd love it if this would allow sections of technical articles to be rewritten for non-technical audiences, and readers could select their preferred reading level. If we could keep articles adhering to the same skeleton between different languages, we could then eliminate different "language" wikipedias, and then just store different texts as different attributes of one, all-encompassing article. Ultimately, if this were achieved consistently, all we need to do is allow account configuration to be fixed and password protected, and then we have the ability to have hobbled accounts, locked off to the child-appropriate parts of Wikipedia, opening the knowledge base to kids who might otherwise be restricted from Wikipedia access. Part of inclusionism and diversity is recognizing when others' value systems differ from our own. I'd much rather make enable a setting that says "Don't show me any images that depict Muhammad" than either thumb our nose at Muslims who care about it OR buckle and remove the images entirely. Just because we have a "don't display images" option doesn't mean it's anything more than an inelegant kludge. Jclemens (talk) 00:29, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

What if the "NPOV categories" were highly refined? That is, instead of having a "human nudity" hidden tag, what if there were different tagsfor "revealed human female face," "revealed human male face", "revealed human female abdomen", and "revealed human male genitalia"? Or would that be useless for interaction with the types of software mentioned by the OP? It sure would be a big pain to categorize pictures that way, but it presumably could be done gradually, over time. I don't support "censorship" (in the sense of government restrictions on the publication of images), but I do support people's ability to self-restrict as well as restrict what members of their own family (or, probably, even company or school) can see. Qwyrxian (talk) 02:23, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

There may be a big potential for creep, though, when you describe it like that. If it is claimed that parents want to have the facility to filter out anything to do with "Theory of Evolution", do we pander to that? --FormerIP (talk) 02:33, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I would say so. And if some people don't want to see Muhammed, or some people don't want to see nudity, or anything else. I really don't see why an opt-in filter wouldn't be a good idea. Right now, there are probably millions of children who aren't allowed to learn from all the knowledge available on Wikipedia because of what some people call objectionable. To me, it doesn't matter if a kid is a fundamentalist Christian or a conservative Muslim, or if his/her parent are enormous prudes. They should all be able to access Wikipedia with their parent's approval. As long as the tags are applied either by administrators or trusted users (not just autoconfirmed), there probably wouldn't be a huge problem. Sure, some articles would be labeled incorrectly due to POV or whatever else, but if there are children who can't even access Wikipedia at all the way it is now (either at school or at home), then they're not seeing anything anyway. That's just my opinion. To me, as long as everything is done properly and responsibly, it won't cause huge waves.-RHM22 (talk) 02:55, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

This topic was discussed at Meta:2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content and related talk pages. I oppose rating on Wikipedia because: how do you enforce that people apply the "right" rating scheme? If someone has a different opinion about a particular image, how do you prove him wrong? Endless discussion? Do you have an ever-running majority vote by edit war? The only definitive way - i.e. the only effective way - would be by having admins establish a dictatorial hierarchy in which anyone at a lower level is banned if they classify an image too lightly, or allow someone else to do so. Now that actually can work in a private ratings organization with a strong, monolithic religious viewpoint. It could also work if each user has the right to create his own ratings system and to choose which other users' ratings he trusts. But such systems are not "NPOV" - they are absolutely, unashamedly POV - and they should be administered outside of the normal functioning of Wikipedia. For example, a company providing the internet censorship software which schools and libraries are forced to provide at public expense could recognize that specific URLs within Wikipedia should not be served (whether articles or images). For all I know they are doing so now. That is their business, not ours. Wnt (talk) 03:46, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

How about the way we handle any other content dispute? Local consensus, 3O, MEDCAB, etc... Jclemens (talk) 05:37, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Political content disputes can be very hard to resolve, but in the end there are sources to go by. WP:V covers a multitude of sins. But the definition of categories for rating articles has no reliable source, and everyone has an opinion. There simply is no objective consensus. Wnt (talk) 06:02, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Why are objective criteria even useful? Consider that what people don't want to see is itself subjective. Consider also that things could be multi-tagged. There's no reason that every niche cabal of whomever couldn't stick their own seal of approval or disapproval on anything, and any user could be free to use or not use any one of the myriad of rating schemes. Give people the freedom to organize content as they see fit, and other people the ability to entrust whomever they choose, and then there's no problem, is there? Jclemens (talk) 06:07, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

That is the best way to do it, but note that now you've made the ratings non-collaborative. Keeping them on Wikipedia means that one person can maliciously or accidentally damage someone else's rating, but it doesn't allow multiple raters to do any better than they can on their own. If any IP can edit some morass of special notations in an image file and flip them around, you'll always have odd things popping up where they're not wanted. So it's best to continue by moving the ratings entirely off the site. Wnt (talk) 06:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I think there is a significant different between the current proposal and the ratings model - the proposal, as I understand it, isn't to add a rating scheme to images, but to use meaningful categories which describe the content in a machine-readable fashion. So you wouldn't say "18+ only" so much as "Sexual acts" or "Male nudity", as we already do. Thus there wouldn't be concerns about incorrect ratings, so much as concerns about incorrect categorisation - and those are problems that we already face. I presume that the categories may need to be expanded, in order to allow fine-grained options for the end user, but having effective NPOV categories is a plus for the project anyway. - Bilby (talk) 09:20, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Well-put. I agree. Effective NPOV categories are useful to permit community and end-user control over their experience at Wikipedia, as well as having obvious encyclopedic purpose as well.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:39, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

So if I understand this correctly, what's being proposed is something that resembles the current categories but with the ability to emit meta tags that are machine readable. In addition, these tag-emitting categories, whatever they are called, should be somewhat more stable than existing categories since there will be an expectation by third parties developers who will treat these like an API. That sounds like an interesting approach. Ronnotel (talk) 12:47, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

And these cats (or their tags) should be passed on from Commons to en.wikipedia as well, if I understand it correctly, and they should be diverse enough to prevent lumping together innocent and less innocent pictures into one potentially blocked category, and they should be perfectly NPOV somehow, e.g. being perfectly clear what is nudity vs. what is sexual content vs. what is educational sexual content vs. what is artistic nudity etcetera. Considering that the categories, i.e. the metatags, will come from Commons, this also implies that they have to be universal, i.e. the Danish Wikipedia will receive the same metatags as the English and as the Malaysian, even though they may have a completely different concept of what is e.g. indecent female undressing. Should we add categories to Commons indicating whether on a picture of a woman, any hair is visible? Her ankles? Anything at all? Fram (talk) 13:48, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

@Fram, I take your point but this is, after all, English Wikipedia and the tag-emitting categories themselves will be in English. I don't know that we need to overweight Danish sensitivities. The Danes would presumably be free to develop their own categories. Ronnotel (talk) 14:12, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

(removed the semicolon so you're post isn't bolded, hope you don't mind!-RHM22 (talk) 15:14, 17 March 2011 (UTC))But the categorization would not happen on the English Wikipedia, but (at least for most of the pictures) on Commons. I don't know if Commons will be very happy to add categories dependent on the different wikipedia-languages, or if they will be happy adding matadata categories for the English language Wikipedia only. (I know that I am mixing language and culture in my comments, but we don't have culture-oriented Wikipedia versions, only language-oriented ones, but in many cases, they are linked together to some extent). Fram (talk) 14:56, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand why anyone thinks there would be POV involved in labeling. There's either nudity or there isn't. I don't think anyone is suggesting that articles be "rated" like movies are. That is POV by its nature. Simply labeling images or articles as to what is in them is not, however.-RHM22 (talk) 15:14, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Is File:Breast feeding within minutes.jpg "nudity"? Or File:Female human buttocks.jpg? File:Bone Crusher exposing his buttocks.jpg? File:Aloys Röhr - Arsch gezeigt.jpg? Fram (talk) 15:26, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

(ec)Individual labeling of media files at Commons or in English Wikipedia is neither necessary, nor, to my mind, even optimal. Please stop throwing up straw men. I would argue that labeling at the article level is far better in this case. And yes, I grant you there will always be edge cases - so what? There are plenty of edge cases now and WP seems pretty good at resolving them. Ronnotel (talk) 15:41, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

But then your solution is quite different from the one proposed here by other people, who clearly indicate that it should be done on file level (see e.g. the discussion about images depicting Mohammed). My objections are not straw men, they just address the proposal discussed so far, not the one you give (which has other problems). Fram (talk) 15:51, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I think that the articles have much of the same ambiguity - consider breast feeding for example. Some people will see smut and some will see Madonnas. Most of the alleged Muhammad images will have their own articles, etc. To be clear, does the proposal for categorization of articles in this way include blocking/banning editors who add images to articles without adjusting the categories at the end of the article? Wnt (talk) 16:17, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

That seems a little absurd. If an image is going to change the "rating" of an article, it probably shouldn't be added anyway. If I'm reading about Canada, I don't need to see a woman's ass. Also, as far as breast feeding goes, yes, that is nudity. If a human female breast is exposed, that is nudity. The point of "ratings" is not to say that breast feeding or showing breasts is immoral, it's just to let people know what's in the article and allow them to decide whether or not they want to see it.-RHM22 (talk) 17:57, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I would disagree. Modern celebrity fashion is that as long as the nipple isn't visible, it isn't nudity. You can't see the nipple when it is in the baby's mouth; therefore, most breast-feeding images are not nudity. So long as we keep out of the rating racket, this disagreement doesn't need to lead to blocked editors and general strikes. Wnt (talk) 00:35, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

"If an image is going to change the "rating" of an article, it probably shouldn't be added anyway." What about works of art in articles on artists? Paintings, photographs, ... These can clearly influence the rating an article would get. Look at Eadward Muybridge and compare it with http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge. One contains photographs of nudity, the other one doesn't. Claiming that because the addition of the nude photographs, the article would get a different rating, and therefor the photographs shouldn't be added, is a perfect example of how this scheme would lead to unwanted censoring of our content. Fram (talk) 20:28, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

No offense, but you're really putting words in my mouth. Clearly what I meant is that most articles would not benefit from images depicting nudity or other controversial matters. Some articles obviously would, but most would not. Wikipedia is a work in progress, so if an article would benefit from a nude image, it'll be added and the tag would eventually reflect that. Like I said earlier, IPs and new users can simply not be allowed to tag articles that contain nudity, because you'll have all kinds of censorship going on.-RHM22 (talk) 20:39, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

The issue of cultural bias problems still arises though. Nudity is an obvious category certainly. Would you be as open to categorising an article as containing an image of "women showing XYZ portions of skin", because in certain countries that is viewed as offensive. I argue that finding a limit to what is being categorised is the inherent problem --Errant ^(chat!) 20:44, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Not really putting any words in your mouth, just showing how untenable or unwanted your stated position was. I'm glad that you adjusted or clarified it once this was pointed out with a clear example. As for the rest, it often is not about "allow them to decide whether or not they want to see it.", but about whether they allow others to see it or not. Why should we make this easier? Why should we e.g. help the Chinese Government filter out all pages including descriptions of or images of what happened at Tien-an-Men Square? Why should we help schools in hiding the article on breast feeding or the article Pioneer plaque because it contains "nudity" (as far as one can call that nudity)? This will only lead to more edit wars, more discussions, for very little benefit (even assuming that a good system can be found, since there seems to be no agreement whether this should be image-based, on Commons, or article-based, here, and how it should be done). Fram (talk) 20:56, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

ErrantX: If a signifigant amount of readers of the English language Wikipedia find that objectionable, then yes. I would say the same thing about anything. Muhammed, nudity, vulgar content etc. I'd imagine that partially clothed women (IE, bikinis) would probably offend only a small subsection of English language readers, though. Something like that would be a lot bigger concern for Arabic, Farsi, Persian and the most common languages of other Islamic nations. In most Christian nations, violence and nudity would probably be the biggest offenders.

Fram: I don't believe that Wikipedia is in the business of helping the Chinese government censor the encyclopedia, but if a large percentage of Chinese viewers are indeed offended by images or descriptions of the Tienanmen square incident, then I would allow them to block out such content on their accounts or computers. Still, it seems very strenuous to connect self imposed censorship of articles on a case by case basis with forced governmental censorship as is happening within the current Chinese dictatorship. Allowing users to choose what they want to see is a lot different from forcing it on them.-RHM22 (talk) 21:03, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Also, there are several different kinds of nudity. First and foremost are the two major categories into which all such images fall, spurious and educational. Some of our more pornography-centered articles depict spurious nudity whose original goal was undoubtedly to titillate. The Pioneer image you linked to is entirely different, and was presumably meant to be educational when the aliens found it.-RHM22 (talk) 21:07, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

"Allowing users to choose what they want to see is a lot different from forcing it on them." True, but both options get easier with metadate or specific warning categories. You don't only help users to choose what they want to see, but also to to choose what others may see, no matter if it is parents for their children, schools for their students, or governments for their people. I don't believe that the supposed benefits outweigh the disadvantages and possible problems. (Speaking of problems, what if some parents or schools rely on our metadata, and then find that their children have seen some nudity or whatever they find objectionable, because we forgot to tag one page or image correctly? At least now, people don't get the impression that we take any responsability for what people may see, even though we aim to only include relevant pictures for all articles). Fram (talk) 21:17, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, nothing on Wikipedia is perfect, and that would also extend to the tags. I really don't see how such a tool could be used for governmental censorship, since the proposed idea would be an opt-in for individual users. Maybe if everyone in a certain country used the same WP account. Even if a government could use it to censor Wikipedia, it's nothing they don't already have access to as it is. I'd imagine that most governments that are interested in censoring Wikipedia probably already do it.-RHM22 (talk) 21:45, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

RHM22, r.e. the limitations; that is OK so long as it is clear that the intent is to cater specifically for the majority of English language readers. However if such a feature did appear you are going to see persistent requests for that form of tagging, so it must be ironed out clearly before hand where the limit lies. FWIW I disagree that we need to focus on the majority of English language users, this form of self-censorship is quite clearly a minority issue and if this really is to move forward we need to identify the strong minorities on WP who would like to see content tagged for their benefit in this way. That will probably mean Mohammed images. There is also the issue that en.wiki has the largest amount of content by far - and, so, we are a global Wiki, which means we have to at least consider it from a global perspective. --Errant ^(chat!) 23:23, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

To lay out a scenario for censorship, let's consider what happens if people set up the proposed categories and somehow manage to suppress edit wars enough to make them stable, however many editors that costs. Someone then works out a way to confine child readers to some subset of the categories that is considered "child safe" - no nudity, no death, no expressions of racial hatred, etc. etc. Well what happens next? Obviously, some vandal sees a big juicy target and makes however many edits it takes to get autoconfirmed. He goes into the "child safe" article, on some innocuous kid show, and puts in a big hairy something or other. Now the proponents of "child safe", who by this time have quite a caucus set up, don't just want him banned - they say, he targeted children for pornography and go after him with some state law of very dubious constitutionality, of which there are altogether too many. Now I assume that such a NONOCENSORED wikipedia would cheerfully hand over the vandal's full information without a second thought, but what if that isn't enough? What if the prosecutor says, hey wait a minute, these "child safe" people have a list of complaints on this forum a mile long, so he decides to subpoena Wikipedia for all records for the past 120 days so he can figure out how many editors added an image to an article without changing its rating "appropriately". Now, note, it is no longer up to the editors, but the prosecutors, post facto, to decide whether breast feeding is nudity and so forth. They can make up their lists, make a purge of editors, and demand that Wikipedia enter into a consent decree for permanent censorship of large categories of information, probably they'll throw in articles about explosives or infoboxes which show the location of nuclear power plants by the time they finish.

And after that? It's time to petition Hudong to start an English site so we can have some freedom of speech. Wnt (talk) 01:34, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

No offense, but that is absolutely ridiculous. While there are pros and cons for allowing self censorship, there's just about zero chance of anyone going after Wikipedia because they "exposed children to pornography". I'm sure Jimbo will tell you that Wikipedia gets sued probably dozens of times per year, like all high profile websites, individuals and organizations. If someone wanted to sue because their children were exposed to pornography via an article on Barney the Dinosaur, they would do it anyway. I'm certain that if such a program of self censorship were allowed, it would not say "you are absolutely guaranteed to see no pornography at all when you use this tool." While I don't doubt that some nut might try to sue, it would be totally baseless.-RHM22 (talk) 02:45, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:In_the_news/Candidates#IAR: Non-free image on ITN

Considering the very unusual circumstances, I proposed a wp:IAR for running File:Fukushima I 14 March 2011 satellite image by DigitalGlobe.jpg on the main page on the In The News section. Since this is a delicate subject, I think it would be nice to have your input. Thanks! Nergaal (talk) 20:00, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I think it would be super easy to get that image released under a Creative Commons license. Why not just ask them, and let them know that it will likely appear on the front page of Wikipedia if they do? Ask if they have other images they could release as well, to enhance the article? We aren't a tiny weak little project anymore such that a company would react negatively to such a request - it would be a great honor for them to be featured in this way.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:54, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I emailed them and, to my surprise, they said we can use their images on the power plant. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:24, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Embarrassing

• [1] [2] . I think its time the community organized a cleanup thing for Pakistan articles, they're the worst on wikipedia. They need to be on watchlists too as they attract traffic from Pakistani users who barely speak english and add all sorts of POV and misinformation.♦ Dr. Blofeld 22:49, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Incredible! I had no idea that it was home to Baba Kamal.-RHM22 (talk) 22:57, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I think wikipedia would be better off in nuking 90% of our current Pakistan village articles within Category:Populated places in Pakistan and sub categories and regulating it, leaving just the main cities and towns. The content of over 70% of the articles is shocking and are completely devoid of reliable sources. The problem is too massive to cleanup with just one or two. We'd be better off cleaning up the main cities and towns (and putting them on watchlists) and nuking most of the villages/merging into a tabled list with coordinates.. They are POV magnets and almost completely off anybody's radar on their watchlists.♦ Dr. Blofeld 23:07, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

That sounds like another reason articles should have a 'reliability panel' including its age, the number of editors who have contributed to it, the average experience in edits and years of the editors, the number of high-edit count editors, the number of total page views, the number of page views in the last month, the number of edits in the last month, its vandalism level defined by CBNG/Huggle/Igloo/STiki/Twinkle reverts, its WikiTrust score, the number of citations it has per word, its community (Public Policy project) assessment rating, the ratings of approved external experts or organizations, the number of Projects it belongs to, its Project ratings, its Version 1.0 rating, etc. Although this shouldn't be on the main article page, and there's no secret algorithm to compile these into a single reliability metric, it's time to give readers the data to draw some of their own conclusions. We could easily provide little bar graphs showing how an article compares to the average Wikipedia article in terms of its statistics for added perspective. That way, if you're getting information from a 3-month old article that 2 people watch and only 7 have ever viewed and only 3 have ever edited, and the editor wasn't autoconfirmed, and it has 4 reverts in the last month, and it's rated start class with no projects looking after it, well, buyer beware. Ocaasi (talk) 23:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Now that was a mouthful! Seriously though, I think a "reliability panel" is not a good idea at all. Just because a user hasn't made a lot of edits doesn't mean the content they contribute is more or less worthy than anyone else's.-RHM22 (talk) 23:50, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

RHM22, I'm not talking about preventing anyone from editing, just offering data. There is certainly a correlation between edit count and reliability. And that is only one metric along with many others that could help readers know how the article was constructed. A better question in my eyes is, why shouldn't the reader have access to it? Ocaasi (talk) 16:48, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

How about a drive to improve 90% of the Pakistan articles. That way we wouldn't have to nuke anything. --FormerIP (talk) 00:34, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

They could probably just be merged into a few different articles. Most of them are really short anyway.-RHM22 (talk) 02:06, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't see the kind of content stripping cited above as being "improvement". The English Wikipedia should be in part a Pakistani web site and it should not be ashamed to speak in a Pakistani voice, even if there is a bit of broken English involved. It isn't until Wikipedia that I realized that the reason why Ford Prefect's 15 years of research was summarized down to "Mostly Harmless" was not due to any lack of disk space in the Hitchhiker's Guide, but simply because the deletionists thought it read better that way! Wnt (talk) 03:54, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that try googling articles like Kathar Dilawar Khan and try improving it.. I get absolutely nothing in google books or web which could qualify as a decent source to try to expand it... (And I'd say that those one liners are not even the worst of the articles, worse are those with massive lists of schools, and local "notable" people and businesses all listed in CAPITAL LETTERS.♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:06, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Well that's why I don't want to knock what the Pakistanis put up. Sourcing, encyclopedic tone, neutrality... these are all great things, and we should hope to improve them, but it's better to have something than nothing at all. Wnt (talk) 16:13, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I'll chime on Dr. Blofeld's comment: there is a vast number (many, many thousands) of Asia related articles (Pakistan, India, around them, localities, "castes", etc.) which are nothing more than sanboxes filled up with test edits. Ironically, they serve as a buffer to divert damage from kids vandalising through "random article", but I wonder what external users think when looking at them. Materialscientist (talk) 05:04, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

The central embarrassment is that issues like this have to brought here. Why should Jimbo be expected to mediate on issues like this? Yet where else can they be addressed? There is no central place on Wikipedia where general issues can be sensibly addressed. It is an administrative matter, and therefore the responsibility of administrators. Yet there is no appropriate forum. Why? --Epipelagic (talk) 10:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I think there are appropriate places for this discussion. My talk page is probably not the best, but I do appreciate just about any sensible conversation here, as it helps me to keep aware of any emerging or longstanding problems. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pakistan is probably a good place to look for people who know about this area, and I'm sure they'd be eager to have new members.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:46, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay. So its fine to bring general issues, like this one, here? --Epipelagic (talk) 10:59, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Sure, for a chat. It isn't an official forum for anything, but I do like to chat about Wikipedia. :) A lot of experienced Wikipedians turn up here as well, and so we often have useful conversations that help get ideas started.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

@ Epipelagic. Where else? At WP:Pakistan were there is virtually no active member or barely anybody who speaks fluent english? As you say there is no central place on Wikipedia where general issues can be sensibly addressed. Village pump maybe, but in my experience they are always largely ignored and superceded by other issues.. As far as I know Jimbo is open to conversation about problematic areas of the project and so are the many people who watch his talk page and ar ehappy to discuss ways in which such a situation could be rectified, even if just a starter conversation about it to get the ball rolling. We are striving for a high quality encyclopedia so if we have several thousand Pakistan related articles which are known to be in "Dire Straits" then something needs to be done to alleviate the problem. I've heard three other people this week describe Pakistan or rural Indian articles in general as "atrocious" and "the worst quality on wikipedia". The vast majority of articles are not on watchlists yet they generate quite a lot of traffic from South Asia.

WP:Pakistan formerly consisted of User:Pahari Sahib and barely anybody else. It was him doing all the work. I once addressed the major problem to him and he couldn't possibly put every Pakistan article on his watchlist and help clean them up. Even he is inactive at present. So we have several thousand articles governed by nobody and open to all sorts of POV and poor english. I don't know how the situation can be dealt with unless some sort of drive is done involving many people and they are cleaned up/put on watchlists to stop them getting bad again. Unfortunely though I don't think we have the numbers who care about Pakistani related topics. We do however have numbers who care about quality and avoiding articles which contain barely legible english and heavy POV. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

• I'm familiar with the issue, both from dealing with speedy deletion nominations of various articles from the global south, and also from the typo fixing that I do. In my view it is wider than just Pakistan, there are other areas of the developing world where Wikipedia is still at an early stage and even quite sizeable towns are barely stubs. Hopefully the next ten years will see radical improvement here, but at the moment we are much weaker in our coverage of some parts of the world than we are of others. However I don't see the solution as being to delete these articles, especially as increasing numbers of people in the developing world are getting access to the Internet. I would prefer that we improve our sourcing there and make it easier for mobile phone users to edit. Many of these articles need images, how hard would it be to enable people in Pakistan to take a photo on their mobile post it on commons and add it to an article? As for sourcing, maybe we need to do some investment in getting archives of developing world newspapers digitised and loaded to wikisource. ϢereSpielChequers 14:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I can try to get some attention from the Pakistani media - a friend of mine has a television program there. Before I do, it might be good to round up as many Pakistani Wikipedians working in English Wikipedia to get them interested and excited about a major initiative, and also get some good existing Wikipedians with no particular expertise in Pakistan to help with meeting-and-greeting newcomers. It's really amazing what even a dozen people can do if they coordinate and get excited.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:07, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

That sounds very interesting, and if you could do something like that it would be wonderful. It could really use some coordination. The problem is the lists of non notable people, schools and people leaving their contact info and POV is the problem. See Malhoo for the typical article. Most of the content was added in good faith but its way off. The thing is these editors do have potential but they tend to edit sporadically and don't really have a good idea of the sort of content we are looking for (and what reference are). Virtually every Pakistan related article on settlements at least have these problems..♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:35, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

(EC) I've welcomed a fair few of our editors there, but I'm not sure if the standard plate of cookies welcome crosses the cultural divide. Also I've raised the Sourcing issue. ϢereSpielChequers 14:40, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Malhoo, next article in the category is Mohalla Sadiqabad, note the POV (and that's one of the better articles!) .... Its not as if its just one or two its when you click any article in a categoryand know it probably going to be really bad is a big issue...♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:47, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Naushara in Sindh is of similar quality. Aaarraghh!. Well you get the picture!! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:30, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Scream as you like about Musa, but such genealogies and whos who are apparently important to the people who live there, which makes them important to Wikipedia. Though yes, we could do with a clearer format! Wnt (talk) 16:22, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

LOL so Lapiwala lists really important info Many of the articles glorify the local taxi driver and policeman as being "very famous". That doesn't make the information encyclopedic or even remotedly notable!! Sure the taxi driver might have a cult status amongst the locals but that doesn't make him wikipedia worthy!!♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:45, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

My very limited knowledge is that much of Pakistan has a very tribal culture. I would expect that family affiliations would be as important there as whether the local chief of police is an elected position in a U.S. town. Am I wrong? Wnt (talk) 00:40, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

How about encouraging these people to work on their native language Wikipedia? I see this all the time on NPP with India related articles; people who's native language is obviously Tamil post something like Dr. Blofeld is describing above in horrendously mangled English, while Tamil Wikipedia has around 20,000 articles and could use the new editors more than us. Just a thought. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:14, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Our volunteers have many and diverse motivations. I'm pretty sure that some at least have a secondary motivation of improving their writing in another language. But even so we could promote Urdu, Sindhi and other languages to our EN wiki editors in Pakistan and other non English speaking countries by GEO notices to geographically relevant authors. I made a proposal on Strategy which included this. ϢereSpielChequers 01:03, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

What about Notak Bhakkar? Vandalism?♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:54, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes that was vandalism - a quick trawl through the edit history and I've reverted it. ϢereSpielChequers 22:54, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Use of Wikipedia pages as unacknowledged sources by an academic: Children of the Camps: Japan's Last Forgotten Victims by Dr Mark Felton

I was appalled to find a book published in January 2011, Children of the Camps: Japan's Last Forgotten Victims by Dr. Mark Felton of Fudan University in Shanghai has clearly used both the Wikipedia Batu Lintang camp page and the Tatsuji Suga page as the main source for his information on Batu Lintang and Colonel Suga, without acknowledging this use. I started both these pages and am the main editor contributing to them.

• All the information that is in his book is already in these two Wikipedia pages or can be extrapolated from them.
• Some of the speculative and interpretative information that he has added in his book is incorrect, presumably because he misunderstood the Wikipedia information. Some of the errors are basic and show he had not fully researched the subject.
• All fourteen of the quotations he uses in his book are in these two Wikipedia pages. He even uses the misquotation of a passage that I misquoted. Bit of a smoking gun that.
• The basic layout of the relevant passages and the phraseology in Felton's book very closely echo the layout and phraseology I used for the Batu Lintang and Tatsuji Suga pages.

I have been researching this camp for eight years, and so know it pretty well by now. I am not claiming 'authorship' in any way. I based the Batu Lintang page I made in 2007 on many different sources, not all of which I cited. Felton publishes the information from these uncited sources, yet only cites Ooi Keat Gin, Southwell and Firkins as his sources: he wouldn't be able to cite the other sources as he wouldn't know what they are. I summarised many sources to create the Wikipedia Batu Lintang page; Felton has clearly used the Batu Lintang page and yet cites the sources I used as his main sources, rather than acknowledging his massive debt to Wikipedia.

I feel sure this is not an appropriate way for an academic to carry on. What comeback does Wikipedia have? I understand that text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; but surely there should be some way of flagging up its inappropriate, large-scale and unacknowledged use, especially by academics? By not acknowledging Wikipedia, he is passing off other people's research and hard work - it took me a bloody long time to put those pages together - as his own. Jasper33 (talk) 16:22, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

(Rather tangentially, the promotional material for the book says things like "this whole episode has been overlooked" which seems a bit inaccurate considering well known books and films like Empire of the Sun, and the documentary material that accompanied it.)

I too would be interested in Jimbo's views on this, although my personal initial thoughts are that this might be relevant for the Signpost, plus maybe you should approach non-Wikipedia media to see if they want to discuss it with the author's university. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 16:42, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Has he used text directly from the page? If he has then it does become an issue that could be raised more seriously. Otherwise; take this to the academic community and expose his poor research, undermining poor scholars is the best way to help foster a better academic environment. --Errant ^(chat!) 16:49, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

He has paraphrased. However, I wrote the Batu Lintang page in April 2007 and haven't substantially updated it since then, even though my research has advanced to such an extent that I know some of the information on the page is incorrect (sorry! never got round to correcting it - and besides, some of it was OR). When I wrote it the sources seemed to suggest (vaguely) that there were boys over 10 years in the men's camp. I now know there was only one boy in the men's camp, for three months in 1942. Felton writes 'The Japanese policy of removing young boys from their mothers at around the age of ten years was rigorously enforced at Batu Lintang. The lads were shifted into the men's civilian compound where many were reunited with their fathers.' This is absolute rubbish, presumably based on what was in the Wikiepdia article said ("other sources state that Dutch boys over the age of ten were sent to the men's camp rather than being placed with the women, as the Japanese considered them men at that age. The total number of male children held in the men's camp is uncertain.") and unsurprisingly there is no cite for it - because it never happened. The oldest boy in the camp turned 10 a few days before the Japanese surrender and so was never moved.

He publishes (proflifically) with Pen and Sword Books, a military publisher. They are aimed at a more general than academic readership, but he does use his university credentials in his publicity material, so I'm not sure what the response from the university would be.

I'd like to know what external media you'd suggest I contact. I am absolutely steaming about this. My grandparents were in the camp and I started my research to try to understand a little of what they had been through. To have my research hijacked in this way disgusts me. Jasper33 (talk) 17:13, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Before you start contacting media, you really should try to get Mr. Felton's side of the story first. There might be a perfectly good explanation and I think he deserves a chance to defend his work and reputation. Good luck. Ronnotel (talk) 17:31, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Ronnotel. Honestly, I doubt that there is a good explanation, but as matter of courtesy/decency, you should at least give him the chance to explain. Feel free to keep us (or me) updated on the situation. I'm curious as to how this turns out. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 17:40, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

"If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. ".♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:49, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with others - approaching the Professor himself for an explanation may be a valuable first step. After that, if his answers are unsatisfactory, an approach to the University might be considered. You may find interesting the story of zu Guttenberg - a wiki was used to highlight and expose his plagiarism and his academic degree was revoked and he was forced to step down as Defense Minister of Germany. Please do keep us all posted.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:50, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for all your suggestions. Next stop: a letter to Dr Felton. Will let you know what transpires ... Jasper33 (talk) 18:31, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Maria Bartiromo links

The question "why not include these?" in this edit summary has two separate answers.

The link to the the "CNBC.com profile" was removed when the "Official website" link was added based on an interpretation of the "Minimize the number of links" portion of WP:ELOFFICIAL, since the former link can be accessed from the latter, albeit in two hops – the official site links to her Facebook site, which in turn links to other related sites, including the CNBC one. And, although not part of the original reasoning for deletion, the CNBC site doesn't really seem to present any additional useful information beyond what should be included in the Wikipedia article itself. Is that not a valid interpretation?

The Twitter link was deleted by a bot, which pretty much explains everything right there. Fat&Happy (talk) 16:48, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I think the CNBC link is nice for people seeking to confirm information in the article, but I accept your argument. It doesn't matter much.

I'm not sure what you mean about the twitter one. :) Do you mean it should stay removed because a robot thinks so, or that its removal was a mistake by an overeager bot.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I meant the latter, being a tad sarcastic/sardonic (I get those two confused). But the way policies and guidelines, and their exceptions, are spread out, it takes a Philadelphia lawyer to figure out whether the removal was appropriate or not. In this case, the decision is complicated by the fact that the Facebook page I mentioned above also has a prominent link to Twitter, but close inspection reveals it to be a different Twitter account... Fat&Happy (talk) 17:33, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh dear, I hope I haven't gotten the wrong one. I think we should (often) link to active twitter accounts that have been confirmed in some reasonable way as valid. And I agree with the dim view you take of policies that require a Philadelphia lawyer to figure out.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

No, the one you re-inserted over the bot is in her own name, seems active and appears to be relatively new. The one linked from her official site (not Facebook, I mis-typed above) is for CNBC Closing Bell, and is mostly re-tweets from other sources. I was just saying it would be easy for someone deciding whether the link should stay to look at the official site and say "Oh, her Twitter account is already linked..." – Zap! Fat&Happy (talk) 18:50, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Nominating new article

Dino D-Day. 04:36, 18 March 2011 (UTC)~