Talk:Airliners.net

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Airliners.net article.
Article policies

This article was nominated for deletion on December 11, 2005. The result of the discussion was keep. An archived record of this discussion can be found here.

Contents

[edit] NPOV?

The "general criticisms" section seems very NPOV. Anybody else agree? (NOT a straw poll; comments only!) Sentinel75 02:04, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

There are individuals on the Airliners.net forums who always favour the aircraft manufacturer from their homeland. They will post comments to mock a foreign aircraft manufacturer, and stir up anger.

Here's a good example: The recent fire at an Airbus plant caused some injuries. A Boeing fanatic posted something along the lines of "I hope that halts their production for a while!". He was banned from the forums for two weeks, and will be allowed back when he agrees to be rational, rather than a fanboi.

There are lots of fanatics on Wikipedia who don't like critical comments about their fixation.

[edit] Edits by User:Planefan

User:Planefan has today added content to this article that I would consider original research (with some possible NPOV issues as well). It has been reverted by both User:Brandon W and myself, and to avoid crashing into the 3-Revert Rule I'm bringing the discussion here rather than reverting again. The paragraphs question are:

The screening process for photographs seems dominated by technical considerations rather than artistic ones, and so 
photographs are rejected for reasons such as leveling, centering, and pixelation. This generally means photographs have a 
tendency to all look the same and as cameras evolve, the standards for acceptance change also. This technical approach to 
photography tends to appeal to its overwhelmingly (mostly young) male aviation enthusiast membership.

The website's non-aviation forum has a distinctly right wing authoritarian and political bias which is evidenced by the 
following facts: 1., The relatively high proportion of current and retired U.S. military members on the site, 2., The 
moderators' very authoritarian approach to managing the forums and their reluctance to tolerate public discussion of how the 
site should be managed - even in the site-related forum; 3., Moderators selectively censor topics based on content all the 
while ignoring others with considerable scatalogical content or, for example, crude salacious references to prominent female 
Democrats; and 4., Moderators themselves participate in some of the heated discussions even as they ban members for 
criticizing moderators and censor criticisms, which places members who disagree with moderators in the unfair position of 
being unable to properly respond to moderator' excesses. Because of these practices, some members cynically refer to the 
moderators as the "Bill O'Reilly's of the Aviation world."

While I would agree that the screening process is technical issues, I think that there's a lot of drawing of conclusions in the above. I typically stay out of the political discussions on the site, but again there are conclusions being drawn and what looks like NPOV problems. -- Hawaiian717 22:19, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV and OR problems?

According to wikipedia itself there is a distinction to be made between OR and compilations. I refer to compilations of readily observable traits on the airliners.net website.

Wikipedia guidelines explicitly state what is not OR:

Editors may make straightforward mathematical calculations or logical deductions based on fully attributed data that neither change the significance of the data nor require additional assumptions beyond what is in the source. It should be possible for any reader without specialist knowledge to understand the deductions. For example, if a published source gives the numbers of votes cast in an election by candidate, it is not original research to include percentages alongside the numbers, so long as it is a simple calculation and the vote counts all come from the same source. Deductions of this nature should not be made if they serve to advance a position, or if they are based on source material published about a topic other than the one at hand.


In my case, logical deductions are made that do not change the significance of the data, and it is possible for the non-specialist to understand the deductions, and I am not advancing a position other than the one at hand.

As for NPOV, I think the nature of the airliners.net conservative and authoritarian slant is worth noting and so I have been careful to explicitly itemize the basis of this observation through compiling readily observable traits on the website itself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Planefan (talk • contribs) 14:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC-8)

[edit] Ongoing Vandalism

The page has been semi-protected because of a recent rash of vandalism.MBK004 22:19, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Competing Websites

I recently removed the paragraph talking about competing websites as it seems to leave an opening for anyone to link to their similar site there. An anonymous editor put one back in claiming that information on competitors is often found in articles. A major thing that bothers me is that all the links to competing sites are external links rather than wikilinks, as I don't believe any of the other sites have articles on Wikipedia (and I'm not sure they've established enough notability to warrant them). In the interests of avoiding an edit war, I thought I'd open it up for discussion here. Thoughts? -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 15:19, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

_____

I hope this is technically the right way to answer, this is the first time I have ever done this.

I just do not think that section is an "invitation to spam". If people spam it with links to their personal websites, those can be removed. But an outright deletion of the competitors' names smells of "protecting" the business of the owners of airliners.net from competition which is simply unnecessary.

Just look at articles like the one on YouTube, Yahoo!, Microsoft and so on. They all mention competitors in one way or another. But they are longer, so those references are much easier to weave into the text without the need for dedicated paragraphs. -- Something-thinking some (talk) 14:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

In just the few days since this was put back in, already two more sites have been added: AirspaceOnline and DetroitSpotters.[1] The issue is, when you start to provide examples, everyone else feels free to add their own site (or their favorite site) as an additional example. The same thing happens with the meetups section. None of these other sites have their own article, and instead link to the site itself. I think this helps to show what I mean by the section opens up the article to spamming. -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 18:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I previously restored the paragraph[2] since its deletion was reasoned merely as "a section for spammy external links"[3]. This is a flimsy reason to delete. Instead, a request should be made for verification of the said text in a reasonable amount of time, failing which it would be far more reasonable to consider removing them. Apparantly, Airliners.net does specify MyAviation.net as a sister site, for example, and this should be cited, not removed.--Huaiwei (talk) 02:27, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Just to answer Huaiwei comment about MyAviation.net statement about Airliners.net not specifing them as a sister site. True not a sister site but every page on airliners.net has a link to MyAviation.com at the bottom as Partner Sites: Aviation Photo Gallery. and both sites are copyright Demand Media Inc. Although the link to MyAviation should be put in external links as per WP:EL. MilborneOne (talk) 17:26, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
It seems to me that most examples of having competitor links is in a "See Also" section, and these don't go to the competitors' websites, but to their articles on Wikipedia. For example, Google Calendar#See also contains links to the articles on Yahoo! Calendar and Windows Live Calendar, but not links to the the other sites themselves. I'll also note a couple of points from WP:EL: External links should not normally be used in the body of an article and that the list of links normally to be avoided includes Links mainly intended to promote a website which was my concern that led me to bringing this up in the first place. I don't have a problem with the section on partner sites (MyAviation and FlightLevel360), my issue is with the competitors and that was the paragraph I originally removed. I'll add {{External links}} to the section and see if it gets some attention. In addition, it's probably worth considering adding a short discussion about MyAviation (as it was essentially run by the same people) and how it differs from Airliners.net. -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 17:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Anet Homepage Redesign

The content with the remarks "2008 Redesign In May 2008, the site was redesigned with new colors and a modified page layout. The changes were released to a mixed reaction with many users disapproving of the new site." is both accurate and concise - and there is no evidence of provocation in these remarks. I highly recommend to the managers/head moderators/site foremen/whoever runs this place that if this becomes an editing war, to consider the value of leaving these remarks in the content of the main article, based on accuracy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anetmod (talk • contribs) 22:45, 29 May 2008 (UTC)


There's no use in adding personal comments, though, that are provocative and/or otherwise inflammatory - that would show that those who do not like the new content of the site are trying to present biased information on this site concerning said content on Anet, when, in fact, the basic remarks (shown in the aforementioned edit here) are sufficient. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anetmod (talk • contribs) 22:49, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Whoever 83.219.113.188 is, you are removing information that is valid and descript concerning Airliners.net. I hope the site moderation here will view your contributions to this article subtitle as detrimental to the accurate portrayal of the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anetmod (talk • contribs) 00:03, 30 May 2008 (UTC)