This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Mastodon (social network) article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: Index, 1Auto-archiving period: 21 days |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Tooter was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 1 January 2021 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Mastodon (social network). The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here. |
On 28 November 2022, it was proposed that this article be moved from Mastodon (software) to Mastodon (social network). The result of the discussion was moved. |
@David Gerard: Thanks for notifying others interested in this article that some of the sources cited herein have been deemed ((unreliable sources)).
Could you please identify which which of the 96 references for this article have been designated as "unreliable"?
Failure to do so, in my judgment, is a violation of Wikipedia guidelines in WP:DRIVEBY. I am therefore deleting your tag.
I hope you will restore it and be more informative about which sources cited herein are officially deemed "unreliable". Failure to do so, in my judgement, mitigates against the Wikipedia:Prime objective, to give "every single person on the planet ... free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
Are you familiar with the section on Articles on contentious issues in the Wikipedia article on Reliability of Wikipedia, and especially Feng Shi; Misha Teplitskiy; Eamon Duede; James A. Evans (29 November 2017), The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (PDF), arXiv:1712.06414, doi:10.1038/S41562-019-0541-6, Wikidata Q47248083, cited therein? They found that "articles attracting more attention tend to have more balanced engagement ... [and] higher polarization is associated with higher quality." We cannot have that if references are deleted. I support citing "unreliable sources", while explaining, at least in a note, why they are considered unreliable and not to be trusted in that particular context -- or saying that they may be appropriate for a particular purpose but not others.
Thanks for your efforts to try to make Wikipedia better. DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:07, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree that blogs are generally uncitable. Policy does allow exceptions, though. There's WP:NEWSBLOG, and there's WP:BLOG, which says that "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications", but only for unexceptional claims. The ActivityPub devs have had their federation standard published and sanctioned by the W3C after through review. I think that counts; they are experts on the fediverse.
We don't have a blanket ban on all primary and non-independent sources in any context. Mastodon's founder has also been interviewed and published by third-party sources on the subject of Mastodon, and he is thus categorized as expert but not independent, and a valid source for unexceptional, non-self-serving claims. "Mastodon is part of the Fediverse" is certainly an unWP:exceptional claim. However, it is one that can readily be cited to many sources other than the ActivityPub devs, and that would be preferable; improving adequate but suboptimal citations is a good thing and can be done by anyone. Things like version numbers and their release dates, and statements like "The database software is PostgreSQL", are harder to get third-party sources for. But they are unexceptional and unselfserving, and I'm willing to cite devs for them (as is standard on many other Wikipedia pages). Nor does Github seem likely to be wrong about the release dates and version numbers just because it is edited by the devs.
The consensus at WP:TECHCRUNCH suggests we should be wary of citing Techcrunch, so I'd also be happier with replacing that citation. Secjuice really does not look reliable and I don't think we should cite it.
I don't think it's a problem to cite both a primary and a non-primary source for a fact; providing different types of source for those interested in reading further is a well-accepted reason for using multiple citations. I'd favour removing all the "non-primary source needed" tags for facts that are already cited to both primary and non-primary source(s).
The "irrelevant citation" tags seem excessive; the Slate article about how quote functionality on Twitter enables hostile "dunking" seems like useful context for Mastodon's policy of not allowing quoting, as does a comparison between character limits on Mastodon and Twitter. HLHJ (talk) 01:29, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
So far nobody seems to be able to fix any of these with anything more RS than literal blog posts. Time to start clearing out some of the badly sourced content - David Gerard (talk) 23:35, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
The section on content moderation feels like it presents a narrow view of what Mastodon's approach to content moderation looks like. There is no Global policy on Content Moderation like there is for Twitter. Each instance sets its own policy. It feels like having a single instance's policy as the only example gives the wrong impression.(Lucas(CA2) (talk) 04:13, 26 February 2023 (UTC))
I added WP:ONESOURCE for the Security section because it is mainly a rewrite of one Ars Technica article. Maybe it could be expanded, even with recently published cites. P37307 (talk) 22:08, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
The whole section should be scrapped or greately expanded. As it stands it only gives a very narrowed view of the differences while at the same time gatekeeping in a minor section some of the main design goals of Mastodon, which I am adding on the summary. Cinemaandpolitics (talk) 21:30, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
The title of this article needs to be changed to "Mastodon (software)". Mastodon is not a social network. It is a piece of software people can used to run their own server as part of a decentralised social network commonly known as "the fediverse", made up of thousands of servers running Mastodon and other ActivityPub software.
It might be relevant in this article to mention that newbies to the fediverse often refer to the social network as "Mastodon", despite the facts mentioned above. But having "social network" in the article title is misleading. Danylstrype (talk) 02:51, 17 February 2024 (UTC)