User talk:Quack 688/WikiJournal

Some comments on your proposal

I see first you have some misconceptions about the new page patrol-I do that, so it's a bit of a touchy subject. :) Newpage patrollers (well, the ones that don't get told to tone it down or get lost) are not out to flag every incoming article for speedy unless it's an immediate candidate for FA. (Actually, we quite frequently are responsible for stub sorting, maintenance tagging, and other assistance with viable incoming new articles, ensuring that the ones with some promise don't just drop to the bottom of the heap and never get seen again). Here's the problem, however. Material is supposed to be sourced. Not before it goes to FA, not once it gets going a little-from the very first edit, what you write should be sourced. WP:V is not ambiguous on that-if it's not sourced, anyone who wants may remove it at once.

Here's an example that I wrote myself on Salt tectonics. This is not a perfect article. It's not even a very good article yet. It's a stub. But you can rest assured that what is in that article is not my original research. Why? Because I just said so? Of course not. Because I said where I got the information, and you can go look for yourself. If you see some more useful information there, you can even use some more to expand the article. If you see I got something wrong, you can correct it. There's nothing wrong with that article being in mainspace now. It's a stub, but it's a reliable stub, and anyone who can reads it can go verify that. But until information is sourced, a draft written "from memory" should remain in userspace. So to sum up-your article doesn't have to be "perfect", or anywhere near it, to get a pass from NPP-but what is there had better be sourced. That's all. You're more likely to get a single poorly-constructed (but sourced) sentence through than you are to get a pretty but unsourced and unverifiable piece. (We get plenty of those, by the way, generally from someone's PR department.)

That being said, what's wrong with "I watched the show and..."? Here's the trouble. Yes, a few things could easily be said. Romeo and Juliet are two young lovers. Jean-Luc Picard is the captain of the Enterprise in The Next Generation series. "The Stand" is set in a world where almost everyone has been killed by a devastating "superflu". Here's the thing, however-all those statements are easily sourced. The "obvious" statements which would not be problematic OR are also the ones which it would be trivially easy to source.

Let's take one paragraph from that Babylon 5 article, and go through it sentence-by-sentence, for an example of something not so simple.

"It was discovered that Delenn had stolen the body and had Branmer cremated."

Discovered when? By whom? How? How would I find this out? Which episode was this in? Likely, it's not the accuracy of this statement which would be problematic-but if I wanted to find out more, or add to this, I'd be at a loss as to where to find additional information.

"She was going to explain his disappearance as a religious mystery, that he his body had been physically taken away by the Gods."

Why? How does anyone know she was "going to" do this? Did she say to another character that was her intent, or is that just the article writer's guess as to what she had planned? Did she try it, or was she caught before she could attempt the trick? Once again, I've no idea where to look to find any of this out, and whose interpretation of events this is.

"This actually was an inconsistency in the plot, later episodes had said that the Minbari did not believe in specific religious deities."

Says who? Why is this an inconsistency in the plot rather than just a really stupid plan? (One could tell non-religious persons that "the gods" did something, it's just not likely to be believed. She could've also simply been misinformed or mistaken regarding their beliefs.) Which later episodes? Who or what said they had no such beliefs? Who did say so beforehand? Anyone? Could that person have been lying or mistaken rather than this being a plot inconsistency? Was that really intended to be true of every last Minbari, or do they have religious variations like we do?

I hope that serves to illustrate some of the problems with "I watched it and...". Only the most trivial stuff falls under the exemption to NOR, and that's stuff it would be easy to source anyway. If it's hard to source, it's also probably not "obvious" or a trivial observation. Seraphimblade 21:48, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

First, just to be clear, that "OR vs unsourced material" section is one of the shite unfinished ones - these aren't formal proposals so much as discussion points. Also, I didn't mean any slur on the newpage patrol in general - I had a look at the new pages section, and I saw what you guys have to deal with. Kudos to you! My point was that even though it's possible in theory for every article with unsourced claims to face deletion, in practice I think some discretion needs to be used. For example, I saw Virtual management on a prod list recently - I've heard of it numerous times, and a quick Google search found several references which discuss this topic, so I added them to the article. Of course, the article needs to be brought in line with what the references say, so I added another tag saying that it needs inline citations. But AfD is "Articles for Deletion", not "Articles for Improvement" - it should not be used to bypass the existing systems for improving articles.

WP:V is not ambiguous on that-if it's not sourced, anyone who wants may remove it at once.

Agreed - but there's a massive difference between removing unsourced claims from an article, versus deleting an article because it contains some unsourced claims. Removed claims are still in the edit history, visible to all, and can be easily restored if someone finds a source. Deleted articles require a lot more work - a new anon editor probably wouldn't bother looking through deletion history and contacting an admin to bring back a deleted page. They'd just create a new article from scratch. The net result is that any sourced content in the original article is now forgotten.

(Btw, I have noticed the proposal at Wikipedia:Speedy deletion criterion for unsourced articles - I've only started reading through it, so I'm not sold on anything yet, but right now, I do like the look of Template:Nsdel.)

WP:V mentions nothing about deleting entire articles. In contrast, the Problem articles where deletion may not be needed list on WP:DELETE specifically says that "lacks source citations", in and of itself, should not be automatically used as a reason to nominate an article:

Look for sources yourself and add citations for them to the article!

Ask other editors for sources using the talk page and various citation request templates.

If those don't work, come back here. If it is truly unverifiable, it may be deleted.

I think that "article contains unsourced claims" is exactly the type of article that "needs sources" tags were intended for. If an article's totally unsourced, and you try to find sources, but fail, that's when you can say that it might be unverifiable, and nominate it for deletion accordingly. Hmm, I sense I'm getting long winded here, I'll try to summarize.

The criteria for removing a claim from an article is "unsourced".

The criteria for deleting an entire article is "unverifiable".

"Unsourced" can be judged on sight - by definition, anything without a reference is unsourced. The ideal approach is to find a source, or simply flag that section of the article as unsourced, but you would be within your rights to remove that specific claim from the article.

"Unverifiable" requires further investigation. You cannot simply look at an article, say it's unverifiable, and nominate the entire thing for deletion. Saying that something's unverifiable requires a good-faith attempt to verify something, without success.

In regard to this B5 case, I agree that some of those character bios are crap. What are they missing? Episode citations. Consider how episode citations would address the concerns you listed:

"It was discovered that Delenn had stolen the body and had Branmer cremated."

Name the episode. That's the single biggest problem with TV articles on Wikipedia - they don't name the exact source. However, if a specific episode was named, I'd have no drama whatsoever with this statement. The name of the episode is enough - we should use the exact same standards as the rest of Wikipedia. When listing a reference from a book, while quotes and page numbers are nice, the only thing strictly necessary is the name of the book. Same here. Exact quotes, scene numbers, and episode timestamps are all nice things, but the only thing strictly necessary is the name of the episode. This allows readers with access to the episode to verify the article's contents.

"She was going to explain his disappearance as a religious mystery, that he his body had been physically taken away by the Gods."

Did she say that somewhere? Did someone else speculate on that? If so, great - but we have to name the episode. We can even include wild speculation by a character in the work of fiction - as long as we name the episode. In this case, all we're saying is that this speculation exists in the work of fiction. However, if this speculation doesn't appear on screen, then we can't start making it up ourselves - that's the OR trap.

"This actually was an inconsistency in the plot, later episodes had said that the Minbari did not believe in specific religious deities."

Find an episode that suggests the Minbari have gods - name it. Find an episode that suggests the Minbari don't have gods - name it. If there's some out-of-universe information that's relevant (e.g. JMS explicitly said, "Minbari do/do not have gods"), then mention it here. Otherwise, just list it as an inconsistency, but avoid making claims like "Episode A was wrong, episode B was right".

I had a look at Salt tectonics and I'm happy with the state of that stub - my only minor comment concerns the inbound links. If there are any other articles which mention salt tectonics, they should be pointed this way - especially if there are a few different articles that include a few different definitions. Point them all here, and make this the spot on Wikipedia to discuss salt tectonics. I saw salt tectonics mentioned in Polystrate fossil, so I added a link from there to the stub. The process might be mentioned in other articles using a different term, but I've got no idea what to search for. (This isn't really a criticism of this stub, more a comment about Wikipedia in general, in that I feel we should all make more of an effort to link articles to each other where appropriate, and avoid duplicating content.)

Say, what do you think about Law in Star Trek? I mainly worked on the Klingon section there, but a few other people have come through, in an attempt to tie claims to specific episodes as much as possible. The article's not perfect by any means, but because it makes a determined effort to focus on what actually happens on screen, and because it makes heavy use of episode citations and quotes, I believe it's more credible, and more useful, than most of the fanfic trash you find on the internet.

Also, do you have any specific comments about the "RotJ" statements on the journal page? That's the "thought experiment" I was actually expecting your thoughts on. I'm especially interested on your feedback regarding describing deaths in fiction, and motives of fictional characters. Quack 688 04:37, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I like your analysis using RotJ, and I for the most part agree. #1 and 2 are indeed quite obvious, and those are cases in which primary sourcing is appropriate and adequate. However, your concerns with the rest are very valid. #3 could be solved by replacing the "guess" with evident facts-"Vader throws the Emperor down the Death Star's main reactor core, and an explosion is seen coming back up the shaft." Alternatively, if secondary sources stated unequivocally that he died, it would be acceptable to cite those as well, though then we must speak with "their" voice, not ours. #4, on the other hand, is simply speculation as to what Vader's motives were. This is a case in which secondary analysis must be cited, though I suspect there is ample secondary source material which would back up that assertion. Still, it is incumbent on the person who wants to write that to go to the trouble of finding and citing it. The same for #5-I imagine plenty of secondary sources do assert that Vader turned back from the Dark Side, but such an assertion must be stated in the sources' voice, not in "our" voice. The same is true for #6. (So basically, "what you said").

As to Law in Star Trek, I like the way it's going. The citation format could be better (perhaps adding an episode number (Season xx, Episode yy), and even the time into the episode when the incident occurs, similar to page number with a book), but at least someone is bothering to say where the information is from. It also could do with some more secondary analysis-primary sources are fine sometimes, but per WP:RS, we mainly should prefer secondary sources where we can get them. There's tons of analysis and writing on Star Trek, and I imagine a good lot of that is on the fictional legal systems presented in it.

I'm very familiar with WP:DELETE, and generally I won't nominate an unsourced article for deletion immediately (unless the claim is so extraordinary, negative, or likely to be a hoax that sourcing is absolutely and immediately required). I place a whole lot of {{unreferenced}} and {{fact}} tags. But I asked for sources in the Babylon 5 article months ago, and I don't have access to that show currently (nor time to watch the whole series if I did), so I can't find them myself. I find very few secondary mentions of the characters aside from unreliable ones such as fanfiction or B5 dedicated Wikis, and those aren't sources. So, I followed the third step-"If that doesn't work, come back here." (I could, alternatively, have simply stubbified the article by removing the unsourced stuff, effectively everything, but you can probably imagine the hell that would've raised.) I tend to agree that one should be convinced that the information is indeed unverifiable before nominating for deletion-but a month and a half after an ignored citation request and some attempts to find something, anything, myself, leads me pretty well to believe that it is.

I like some of your thoughts though, might start a subpage like this myself. Certainly the Esperanza deletion (and it was a deletion, even though Mailer Diablo did a hell of a job at keeping the whole thing from blowing up) got a lot of people thinking. I never really cared one way or the other about Esperanza, but certainly I saw plenty of their members decide not to be too civil. Nobody likes a deletionist, even one that doesn't really like to delete things. It was time for it to go though, it'd just turned into too damn much of a mess, and by that point it was unfixable. I guess I'm more of the opinion that we all just got to help put out a fire every once in a while if we happen to run across it, it runs anyone down to try and jump into that crap all the time.

As to the contentiousness of how things are stated-have a look at Talk:Jews for Jesus sometime. Been quite a debate over that (generally civil, but definitely strong opinions on either side). It really can make a lot of difference how a seemingly-minor point is stated. Seraphimblade 07:34, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

RotJ - personally, I think the most interesting examples there are #3 and #4, the others are clear cut one way or the other for me. However, judging by some AfDs I've read, some people consider #1 to be OR. And judging by some unsourced articles I've read, some people consider #6 to be part of a valid plot summary. #4 (direct cause-and-effect motivations) could be addressed by simply stating the chain of events, and letting the reader draw whatever conclusions they want, e.g. "In "RotJ", the Emperor zaps Luke, Luke asks Vader for help. Vader responds by turning on the Emperor, and throwing him down the shaft." This phrase states the chain of events as they're portrayed in the movie, but doesn't directly speculate on Vader's motives.

Your version of #3 would be fine by me. However, I'm still thinking about exactly what information about a character's death we can draw from primary sources. I'll pick another example - Braveheart. This scenario is based on Wallace's fate in the movie, but I've made up some extra bits. As before, no secondary sources. Imagine a movie that contains the scenes listed below. The list is incremental - i.e. a movie that reaches point 4 also includes points 1 through to 3. Question: at what point can we say "Wallace was killed" in these scenarios? What about "The film implies that Wallace was killed"?

1. Wallace appears in several scenes, then stops appearing with no explanation.

2. Wallace is shown on the execution block.

3. The axe comes down towards Wallace, but you never see it actually get him.

4. Wallace's hand releases the handkerchief.

5. The movie explicitly shows Wallace's head coming off.

6. The movie turns into a gory mess, and shows Wallace being shot, stabbed, sliced, diced, cremated - everything. Also includes funeral, gravestone - everything but a line of dialogue.

7. Converations which hint that Wallace is dead, or at least gone - e.g. someone asks his wife, "How are you coping with your loss? / It's hard to go on without him around / etc"

8. Lines of dialogue which logically imply that Wallace must be dead - e.g. he has a wife in the movie, who is now referred to as a widow.

9. Robert the Bruce makes a speech, saying that Wallace's body was torn to pieces.

10. A character says the exact phrase, "Wallace is dead."

I apologize for the morbid examples. But the topic I wanted to explore was that a film director communicates with the audience through both dialogue and visual cues. It seems awkward to be able to write a plot summary like "He was shot, stabbed, diced, sliced, and cremated - it is presumed that this chain of events was fatal, although no character explicitly says that this was the case."

Time-stamped episode citations - if a book reference is missing a page number, someone with access to the reference could add one, but I wouldn't like seeing somebody deleting every article that has book-only references. I think the same standard could be applied with time-stamping. If someone can add them, that's brilliant. But "episode citation lacks timestamp" shouldn't be use as a criteria to remove content. Personally, I'd rather concentrate on bringing crappy articles up to "episode-citation" standards, but that's just me saying how I'd rather spend my time.

Secondary sources - I agree that they should be added whenever possible. However, just because someone's published a book about their interpretation of the Star Trek legal system, that doesn't mean that they're "correct" (as correct as you can be about fiction, at least). If they've got insider information, of course, it's a different kettle of fish. But they could also just be relying on primary sources, the same as we are. We can (and should) use external sources to introduce theories that we aren't allowed to speculate on ourselves. Even so, proper referencing is necessary to differentiate the "summary of on-screen events" sentences from the "This is Joe's published interpretation of those events" sentences. That way, readers will have the best of both worlds - they'll have access to all relevant primary source material, then be able to judge how different secondary sources deal with those primary sources.

List of minor Babylon 5 characters - I've added a couple of episodes the characters appear in, but that's nowhere near enough - the bios still need a rewrite. To be perfectly honest, before the most recent AfD, I'd totally forgotten about the sourcing issues there. If the page was never edited again after the prod got removed, I probably would have left it as is. My bad. But even so, I don't see any evidence that anyone carried out this step:

Ask other editors for sources using the talk page and various citation request templates.

I still had the page on my watch list - I would have noticed if an "unreferenced" tag came up, but when I looked through the page history and the talk page, the only things I see there are the prod which was removed a day later and the current AfD. IMHO, prod and afd aren't citation request templates. The only templates I'd consider as such are those at Wikipedia:Template_messages/Sources_of_articles. There's templates for "whole article", "this section", or even "this sentence". If an article only has one section that's uncited, use "this section", and remove that section if no sources appear after a while. If the whole article is uncited, use "whole article", and if nothing changes, send it to AfD. All we have to do is encourage people to use the template that's most appropriate - I think that'd improve the atmosphere at AfD substantially.

Talk:Jews for Jesus - whoa. That's a lot of talk for five days. I think I'll need to set aside a big chunk of time before I even try reading all that. :-) Quack 688 04:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)