This is my third archive. It is not my second archive or my first.
Sorry about Lillo, I was just fiddling around here, waiting for a student who didn't turn up. It's good to hear a credible witness admit that books change their claims in the night, I always thought they did. Hey, you've taken on old conflict-between-love-and-duty, the mighty Almanzor! Cool! I was just thinking maybe I'd do a short entry on She-tragedy. Supposedly the comedy and the she-tragedy between them killed the heroic play (good, good riddance). At least, so I claim in Elizabeth Barry, so it must be true. I'd better hurry up if I'm gonna do that, because soon there will be no articles left to create: somebody seems to have unleashed a very, very advanced geogrebot on us. Anyway, I'm about to go home now, see ya.--Bishonen 13:59, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)
She-tragedy lasts longer than 5 years. It goes from Otway in the 1680s into the 18th c. Grr, I'm hampered at every turn by a lack of ref books here, I'm going by KB to pick up a truckful tomorrow. Anyway, I guess the most famous she-tragedy is Lady Jane Grey (1715) by Nicholas Rowe. The book by Elizabeth Howe that I refer to in Elizabeth Barry says that she-tragedy was all about voyeurism and the pleasures of watching a woman in a combination of distress and undress. Howe makes a good case IMO, always remembering how new and fascinating it was to be able to see women on the stage at all. (Pepys wasn't a she-tragedy man, but a major butt man, always saying how much he enjoys seeing the actresses cross-dress. "Went again to the play to see Mrs. Verbruggen wearing breeches.") Anyway, it was very sweet of you to twist your text around to un-orphan Barry. :-) And I also can't believe you wikilinked my nutty list instead of speedying it. :-D Did you see that Deb added a fourth "Virtue Rewarded"? Four is a respectable length for a list. How ya doing, you de novo maniac? I love The classical unities!--Bishonen 17:41, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
You did The Beggar's Opera! Geogre, you are brilliant! You truly are. I can't believe you got to do The Beggar's Opera de novo. Talk about the Wikipedian 18th century being a crying scandal. I'm very glad you un-scandaled this gap, it must have been one of the very worst. Maybe the worst? Great article, anyway!
The 1911 EB bit about the Haymarket venture in John Vanbrugh is positively chuckling. One clubbish gentleman to another. Bah. How I hate that fruity, mellow, pipe-puffing tone. I'm gonna clean it up, I'm gonna kill it dead.--Bishonen 20:29, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Geogre 19:15, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I had the misfortune of being stuck listening to the Rush Limbaugh show for about :30 earlier today (it was on at the clinic), but it was a pleasure to hear the man sputtering, trying to find something good to say about Bush in last night's debate. It was a massacre. "Harold and Maude" is on TV right now. Great, funny, weird movie. It's weird even now, and it was even weirder when it came out. They don't make movies that odd anymore, or at least none that are that odd and that work. Anything that strange these days is a student film that looks like garbage and plays like garbage, too. I wonder if there is an entry on Harold and Maude or Harold and Maude (film)? I wouldn't write one. Some things are better not explained. It's a movie like "Dr. Strangelove": the less you know about it before you see it the first time, the better. I had a phone solicitation earlier from a veteran's group. I told the fellow that I was unemployed, and we had a :30 sympathetic phone call. He was really great and encouraging. Geogre 22:41, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
That stuff about Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage causing the downfall of Restoration comedy seems to be the one established "fact" that everybody "knows" about Restoration comedy on Wikipedia. (In 1698! A likely story!) It pops up all over the place. I've been in there changing a lot of it, but I bet it's in dozens of places I don't even know about. Grrr. I'm doing me a bad-tempered de novo article about the real (miniscule) role of the Short View.
I'm very sorry about Vidalia. :-( --Bishonen 00:45, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Hi Geogre--I just wanted to say hello. I appreciate all the work you are doing on 18th century English literature, and area which was (formerly) embarrassingly underrepresented on Wikipedia. Are you interested in Addison-Steele and the Spectator at all? I was idly thinking of fattening those up, but I didn't do graduate work in this area. Peace and happy editing, Antandrus 01:41, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Orthoepeia is the correct use of words? I assumed it was the goddess of knee surgery. --Bishonen 21:16, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Well, I was kidding, but I'm checking now. Tried to paste the Greek word in here, but Mozilla laughed in my face. Never mind, it's from the Greek for correct + diction. The OED has the forms as orthoepy and orthoepia, but that's fine, orthoepeia has surely just been re-formed more recently as being a more proper trans-whatever-it-is of the Greek word, which I think it is (trying to sound like I know some Greek here).
They have a bunch of quotes for sense 1:
And this quote for sense 2:
So the only part of the Orthoepeia article that I can source is the grudging half-sentence "Often, it refers to what we would call diction, but...". You want to disambiguate the article a bit more, or shall I? --Bishonen 09:11, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Hi, why did you delete Gallagher? Did you read the corresponding talk page before you pressed the delete button?
Apart from the fact that there is no need whatsoever to delete the page (as User:Radiojon wants to recreate it as soon as it has been deleted), can just anyone (and it was just one person, with a record of messing around with page titles) put up that deletion sign and then some willing executioner will immediately go to work and do as told?
All the best, <KF> 01:45, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)
Hi Geogre -- I thought you might be interested in the discussion about my post at Wikipedia:Votes_for_undeletion#List_of_civilian_killed_by_US_force_in_Fallujah, since you've obviously thought a lot about how deletion should work. I quoted two sentences from your managed deletion proposal there. BTW, I don't quite see how what I quoted fits together with what you say on your user page: "What you should not do is engage in a dialogue". What how can we "reason together" and "make it a truly deliberative page" if we don't engage in a dialogue? Fpahl 15:52, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Yay! Drumroll! And here it comes: The great! The long-awaited! The. . . Licensing Act! Written and performed by Hugh Bigodson! That really is great, Geogre. Congratulations on getting to do that one de novo, and on doing it very, very beautifully.--Bishonen 17:44, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC) (edit conflict AGAIN!)
Ping: wrote to you on my own page (by mistake), about getting logged out. :-( Btw, about ripping off some popular art history site for Van's architecture: nah, not after I've seen how awful the stuff out there on the popularizing sites is on the aspects (of Van, of the Restoration, of the drama, of the 18th century) that I do know something about. The thing is, everything out there on the literature of our period, yours and mine, is old. It's just ancient clichés. I guess they're ripping off some public domain (=old) source. You think it's digital, it's gonna be up to date? No, it's some repetition of a repetiton of a repetition of what somebody claimed in the late 19th century and even that person was just guessing. Barring the tweedy language, I might as well keep the 1911 EB. Everything within half a century of being cutting edge is on paper, not on the web. Anyway, I'm going a long way around, but what I mean is this: I daren't use Internet stuff that I don't already know about, because then I can't tell if it's horrible, the way I can with the lit stuff. Anyway, never mind about all that. I hope today has brought you some prospects and some joys. Goodnight, Geogre. --Bishonen 22:52, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I'm glad you liked my comments at early deletions. Moreover I'm glad someone read them. Sort of wish I had gotten involved in the debate a bit sooner, maybe people would have reconsidered their votes. Then again, probably not. People do have to realize that if you allow a policy to be open to non-sysops then its open to everyone, as any hack or troll can get an account in about 10 seconds. People sometimes make the point of counting "legitimate" (or some such word) votes, but while that sort of works when counting votes on VfD, it's way to subjective be made policy. People are either logged in users or not. They are either sysops or not. Anything else is a grey area. Anyway, the good news is that at least it looks like there might be enough support to expand speedy deletions for clear vanity and advertisement, which I think is better than nothing, but now I'm sort of worried about abuse of that power, which I wasn't worried about from your proposal.
Anyway, sorry to say I hadn't actually read your A Tale of a Tub article fully. I made that minor edit because I recently have been disamiguating links to Charles II (and other monarchs who share names) and that page was a link there. But I have read it now, and I gotta say that's quite a thorough article for a pretty minor work. Sort of makes me sad how many great works have no articles or just short stubs. Maybe I should work on that sometime. Keep up the good work. -R. fiend 23:04, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for your addition to the article. Do you have proof for your claim that it's in the top 3 of New Orleans tourist destinations? [[User:MacGyverMagic|Mgm|(talk)]] 17:42, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion. Anthony DiPierro is challenging your right to make speedy deletions. RickK 00:12, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
The rules were written when the #1 concern of Wikipedia was attracting editors and growing. Well, that's not a big concern now. With an Alexa rank below 500 and with over 1,000,000 articles, I'd say "don't scare away the feebs" is not really a big worry. However, because every rule adjustment should be voted on, guess what happens? The tipping point was some months ago. Geogre 00:43, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Incidently, I just read your user page on your "deletionism", and I think you make some really good points. I hope we can find a way to satisfy your concerns (of poorly written, or unfinished articles) with the concerns of some of the "eventualists" (most well written articles started out as a poorly written, unfinished one). I suggest you take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Al_Gore&oldid=233829. That was the Al Gore article which we had from March 29, 2001 until December 24, 2001.
I think we can find a way to come together on these questions, but it involves taking consensus to mean a true general agreement, and not 2/3rds majority. For instance, some articles might be hidden from random page, from search engines, and from logged out users, but still be available to editors.
anthony (see warning) 00:18, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Oh yeah, and when you say "Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art" you probably mean "Museum of Modern Art". There's also a "Metropolitan Museum of Art", but you mention the MoMA, not the Met. anthony (see warning) 00:45, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I'm asking you to unprotect the page Nagaland. As you can see from the [page history], the dispute was over the map on the page. I have since replaced the map with one that I hope Simonides will agree with. Another administrator agreed with this decision on the talk page.
Thanks. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 22:13, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
I was wondering if I could get your help with something as an administrator. I'm trying to move Benedict to Saint Benedict of Nursia, as there's more than one Saint Benedict and a whole bunch of other Benedicts as well. Since there's already a Saint Benedict of Nursia page (a redirect to Benedict), I can't do it. I'll make the necessary disambiguation page and take care of the redirects and links myself if you can do the move. Thanks. -R. fiend 18:53, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Well, that sucked. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:58, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
...but I thought you might move it elsewhere. I probably should have done it anonymously. :) Oh well. After that first statement on your user page, how could you possibly delete a bit of lighthearted fun? :> The Steve 05:41, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps we should elide "Notable" from VfD.
Note that you can't really vote to delete based on any terms, just the reasons in VfD policy. Granularity is definately irrelevant. Notability is probably too subjective and is too much of a PITA to keep. (I'm neither an inclusionist or a deletionist, I'm a technocrat). ;-)
Note that VfD takes up more resources than the articles being deleted at the moment (both in time by different people, and server space) so we really need to be cutting back on it.
Deliberately making these comments to you first, since I know you'd be the toughest opponent. ;-)
I'm on irc often enough, see if you can spot me there if you'd like to iron this out in real time :-) Kim Bruning 21:48, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Geogre 00:57, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Ok, you have two separate arguments. One is about "why ever delete," and the other is "granularity," and the "notable" thing has been lost.
First thing, let's ditch the "not paper" argument altogether, because I have never advocated selection based on computer concerns. I suspect both the "we have room" and the "we don't have room" appeals to hardware. I think that's right into the "damned lies and statistics" category. Your argument that we have space per dollar is self-defeating in the same way that the "we don't have room" argument is: both are based on faulty premises. Yours is on the idea that infinite growth in storage can match infinite growth in content, and the other is based on shrinking storage in the face of growing content. So, why select? Selection ALWAYS takes place. It is simply inescapable. This is something historians have had to realize. Every narrative, every account, selects. Similarly, every record of the world selects. We select with our items already: our selection is, currently, based on the interests of volunteers. So, do we throw up our hands and say, "Anything you like, that goes in," or do we say, "Whether you like it or not, it has to have value?" The overwhelming majority of scholars, and Wikipedia contributors, would say "value." So we're already past the "include whatever the hell" position and down to a debate over "value." In the debate over "value," we can either think of our contributors or our users. The more we try to suit every contributor, the closer we get to Everything2.com. The more we try to suit only our users, the closer we get to Britanica. I'd prefer the latter to the former. I'm not interested in an onanistic project that simply serves as a vast sandbox. The obverse of "value" is "valueless," and that means deletion. This is not a question of space: it's a question of integrity. Is this project aiming for encyclopedia status or feel-good online time? If the former, and I think it's what the project was meant for, then you've got to cut out the junk. It isn't signal to noise ratio that's at stake: it's noise of any sort. We shouldn't have any.
We're going to get to the "web vs. tree" pretty quickly, given the rationale you're offering, because it applies here as well as to the granularity arguments. I'll forestall some of it for now and try to address what you've written per se.
The fallacy in your approach is that you are working from sets, compared to working with process. VfD is supposed to be an adjunct to New Pages and only secondarily a pruning of the existing set. Wikipedia is not infinitely large, for it is, instead, growing. Therefore, I'd rather see an organic model applied. These are new citizens or new cells being added to an existing, presumably majority-good or fit, body. Therefore, VfD can be overwhelmed quite simply by having too many additions for excision of the unfit. There are two mechanisms for evaluating initial worth: speedy delete and VfD.
Once upon a time, Wikipedia was very worried about getting people to participate. After that, it was enjoying growing participation and wanted people to stay. Let's call these the desires for growth. On the other side was the antibody system, the excretory system, the need for health. As the desires succeed, the needs must match. I say that VfD is broken simply because the critical process is overwhelmed.
Pruning the extant weakness is a separate need. I don't know to what degree VfD is failing for that. Generally, when people see something and VfD it from a Random Page flip, it goes down or stays quickly on VfD. I would argue that such articles on VfD are extremely rare. In general, people repair those articles or ignore them. So positive and negative selection apply, in my opinion, to the body as it exists, whereas what I think has broken VfD is the inability to perform triage. VfD and Speedy Delete are supposed to distinguish growth from the neoplasm of cancer.
You seem to be hinting at the idea of a Wikipedia reader, of a Version 1.0 model. I'm not against that at all, but the mechanisms for doing it, so far, have been faulty, and I cannot begin to imagine the outrage that will be expressed when it comes to figuring out by whom and how an article will be vetted for positive selection.
"A hyperlink away" is not true. If an article says "Francis Bean Cobain is the daughter of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain," then a link from their articles is not profitable, because the resulting page tells you what you already know. Secondly, to suggest that we have aspects of an article set up hierarchically by links within pages is to suggest subpages, which, I'm told "were tried and don't work." I can see some reasons why they might not work right off. Let's suppose that one of the "Friends" maniacs had an article on the show and then set up one hundred and twenty-two subpages, one for every single episode. Well, if there were a destructive edit to the "Friends" page or a need to delete it (imagine instead that it was "Sad Girl in Snow Chronicles" and not "Friends"), then those subpages might never be recovered in the one instance or deleted in the other. However, let's say that there is a way to hyperlink over to the greater detail. I have never had a problem with that, if the new article arises because its subject is independently notable or because the master topic is too long. If the subject is United States, then it might be wise to have United States history as a separate page -- too big, too complex, and well known by itself. Similarly, it makes sense to list the names of the four Beatles in Beatles and to have an article on each of them, for each is known and notable as a person. On the other hand, when Norwegian Funeral Metal Band #25 gets an article, the members of the band are anonymous folks who have not done anything to warrant an article, and it is noise to have a page on each of them. I maintain that we isolate the information by granularity, or we simply make waste by having them, if the treated topics aren't notable in their own right.
You can say that "What links here" and "related changes" can be used, but I'd say that there will be a great many mistakes. Subpages require a developer change. I actually think subpages are a good way to do things, but I understand why they don't work.
The non-directional nature of the web is not the same thing as the absence of hierarchy. In fact, I would suggest that it emphasizes logical and memetic hierarchy by removing formal hierarchy. There is no hierarchy in the form (i.e. an article is not shaped like an arrow), but there is a cognitive and meme-based hierarchy that is vastly more important than the formal taxonomy, and smart webs know their true hierarchies and build accordingly. (See Litgeek.com for some implications of non-hierarchical webs in education and the ways they change, but only subtly, learning.) Geogre 17:20, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Our project is non-hierarchical on the machine level, but it is still an encyclopedia, and that means that it is still hierarchical on the logical level. It means that the criteria for selection have to be educational and historical. It's not wrong to have a project where people write up anything and everything in a wiki, but it's not this project, I think. If it is this project, then I'm at the wrong site. I mean that sincerely. I keep trying to write up encyclopedia articles, and I vote to delete things that either aren't encyclopedia articles or don't need to be in an encyclopedia at all.
I think the VfD nominators by and large choose wisely. I find myself voting "delete" on virtually all because I think people have, indeed, flagged things that shouldn't be part of the body. No, I don't assess on perfection, but rather on perfectability. When I look at an article, I ask, "In its perfect form, what will this be?" and I ask, "In its current form, will it grow to perfection?" and I ask, "In its present form, will it inform anyone?" If the answer to either of those last form is "no," then I don't think our users (the readers...and we must always remember the readers) get any benefit, and therefore we ought not have it.
The tricky bit of thinking that most people can't handle is seeing that webs do have hierarchies. First, they must, simply because one page is an index. Second, there is an hierarchy that is temporal created by every use of the web. Third, there is an hierarchy of association, where users go from the commonly used to the less used. When it comes to instruction and webs, we should know that these hierarchies are going to exist, make it possible to use the associative element, and make sure that the temporal hierarchy isn't choked off by, for example, the repetition of content or difficulty of navigation. Wikipedia does a good job with having few choke points of use. Where the taxobox, categories, templates, lists, and subpages folks are arguing, I think, is with attempting to increase the associative usefulness of Wikipedia. I don't have any objections, there, except that we ought to be skeptical and never let those features overwhelm the yield of pages (and yield is information sought, not multimedia pleasure).
See, I have thought rather a lot about the metaphorical and cognitive implications of webs. :-) Geogre 17:28, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Like I said, my Early Deletion scheme would have sped up and removed the weight of some of it. However, we're seeing the hazards of democracy and the tipping point of participation. We have too many users for VfD to work, and total democracy means that the authors of bad articles will always, always, always argue. In the case of the grand micronational genocide, I understand and agree that we ought to have those fights, but when it comes to an article on Stereo City having a big sale, we ought to be able to just kill the articles with nothing much said. Speedy Delete needs its criteria rewritten. Like I said, I tried. I'm no crazy deletionist: I'm just trying to help build an online encyclopedia. Geogre 14:28, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Well, that much is clear. It's just that I think we really need to have more than one way of bottlenecking the flow in to Wikipedia. A Version system on new pages would solve a lot, frankly, but it's kind of hard to do. (Angela has a proposal somewhat along these lines, I think: articles are read and scored by readers. If an article gets enough of a good score, it goes over into the Version. I think that's what she was proposing. It's not a bad idea. If it were applied to New Pages, in particular, so that VfD only took up the issues of strengthening the existing body, it would solve the backlog instantly.) I'm up for other ideas. I would want us to be up to the standards of the old Cambridge History or something, if I could (i.e. with errors, but good stuff to such a degree that you forgive the errors). What I don't want is Wikipedia as a playground, as a discussion board, as Everything2.com. Geogre 17:32, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)