User talk:Yaron K.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome!

Hello, Yaron K., and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  Budgiekiller 19:22, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] discourse db links

hello yaron. you look like a great editor, but on the subject of Discourse DB links - please stop adding them. if you read WP:EL#Links_normally_to_be_avoided, you will see number 12 says: 'Links to open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors.' i've checked the recent changes of the wiki, and it takes around a month to rack up 500 edits for the entire project; this does not demonstrate stability and substantial numbers of editors. perhaps when their user base is stronger adding their link to certain EL sections would be appropriate, but for now it just isn't. if you have any other questions about this, please ask Wikipedia talk:External links about it. they are a great resource and very helpful when it comes to concerns. cheers. JoeSmack Talk 02:19, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Discourse DB is a wiki, it's true, but it differs from conventional wikis in that the information presented on there is not original content; it's a database of article titles, authors, quotes, topics etc., that happens to be user-editable. So I think common sense dictates that the standards for editing volume can be looser for such a site than for conventional wikis; it's much easier to police, and thus much harder for it to become unstable. Compare that to SourceWatch, which is evidently a wiki considered so useful that it has a Wikipedia template for links to it; but which contains articles like "War on terrorism", in which one paragraph begins, "Consistent with the duplicitous nature of the Junior Bush Regime..."
I'm not at all suggesting that two wrongs make a right, and certainly not that SourceWatch should be removed as a source. I'm bringing it up just to show that, in my opinion, even a popular wiki like SourceWatch will have more problems with unauthoritative information than a data-centered wiki like Discourse DB. So I'm asking you to please reconsider the guidelines; I think they should apply less to this site, because in some important ways it's not like a regular wiki at all.
One more thing: tied in with that difference is the lower editing volume - because there's much less creativity in creating the content, there's much less need for multiple edits to the same page in order to achieve consensus. Essentially, usually once a page is done, it's done. But I'd like to hear your thoughts. Yaron K. 04:24, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, the concern of the guideline this: nothing is stopping me from making a seeming innocuous link on a Wikipedia article to Discourse DB, then a week later going to Discourse DB and changing the entry to something horribly offensive or into an advertisement, etc. This is where 'stability' comes in. Because Discourse DB has a small user base, such changes can go either unnoticed for long periods of time or even unchanged all together. For this reason open wikis like this are unreliable as ELs, and thus the EL guidelines exist. Hope this helps. JoeSmack Talk 18:40, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
I understand what you're saying, though I think stability is affected by two parameters: not just the number of contributors, but also the type of information. In the case of data-centered wikis like Discourse DB, I think it's much harder to add offensive information or spam in a way that goes unnoticed. I don't believe any such information has been allowed to languish on Discourse DB more than a day or two previously, for instance. Again, contrast that with the SourceWatch article, where that "duplicitious nature" statement has been allowed to stay for something like three and a half years. Again, I don't mean this as an attack on SourceWatch, just an indication that it takes less people, and much less work, to keep a data-centered wiki stable than a text-centered one. Yaron K. 19:34, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
To be honest, I'm not to thrilled with SourceWatch for the most part myself. Even still, if a link does or does not meet EL guidelines, that is grounds for inclusion or exclusion. The current guidelines approach wikis from the quantitative standpoint of user numbers to assess stability. If you'd like to ask the wider community about Discourse DB, ask at WT:EL - you'll get a few different voices on the matter and perhaps that'll help you out. JoeSmack Talk 21:32, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Alright, I will. Yaron K. 23:41, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Was a bot used to delete all links to http://discoursedb.org ? If so, it may be a violation of some wikipedia guideline. Because I don't believe one can make blanket blocks of all links to websites such as http://discoursedb.org

Wikipedia:External links is a guideline not a policy. So deletions of external links should be left to the discretion of the talk pages for the articles. It looks to me like http://discoursedb.org pages are basically directories. We allow external links to directory pages such as those at Open Directory Project. Of course each directory page has to be judged on its own merits. --Timeshifter 23:46, 16 May 2007 (UTC)