(In response to the issues above, about what this should be:) Personally, I think this would be better as an RfC/U on Wolfkeeper's behavior, rather than a policy RfC. The policy is already abundantly clear to the vast majority of editors, and the real issue has been Wolfkeeper's behavior in trying to push his misguided understanding of that policy. Trying to change or clarify the policy is not likely to get us anywhere since, as I said, it already works fine for just about everyone. What's more likely to be productive is getting some editing restrictions put on Wolfkeeper (for instance, ban from editing DICDEF-related policy pages and maybe DICDEF-related AfDs, maybe rules for blocking if he rewrites article intros to conform to his view). rʨanaɢ ( talk) 00:10, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
I'd agree to any of the suggestions given above. Policy rfc or User rfc. As I've said, I don't wish to take the lead in deciding how this proceeds - partially because I have very little experience with RfCs, partially because I've already put many hours into compiling and sorting the raw diffs, and find the whole endeavor increasingly exhausting. -- Quiddity ( talk) 02:21, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
I think this is clearly an RFC/U. It's problem with one user, not a problem with policy or anyone else's edits or misuse of policy. Quiddity, I hate to put you on the spot since you've already done so much work, but as the one most familiar with the evidence, please type up a statement of the dispute per the Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct format, and we'll get it going from there.-- Cúchullain t/ c 14:23, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
I see that the current scope of the dispute described here is so wide that I would have to list myself as partially agreeing with Wolfkeeper: In my opinion etymology should only rarely appear at the beginning of an article. It's important to keep the different issues separate. At the moment this page is formatted as if it was intended to become an RfC/U on Wolfkeeper. I will try to transform the beginning to something more like a policy RfC. If that's really what we want, we should probably try to get Wolfkeeper, LtPowers and TenPoundHammer on board as well. Hans Adler 07:54, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I moved the page to the WP: namespace so that we'd have a place to talk.
Specifically, I wanted a place to address the current little edit war between NeilN and Wolfkeeper (e.g., this, in which we revert over whether Wikipedia has "quite a few articles" that are wholly or partially about words or phrases, or "very few articles".
Here's my view: They're both right. The vast majority of articles are not about words or phrases, but "quite a few" certainly are. Even if you (incorrectly) assume that every article about a word or phrase is listed at Category:Words (disregarding things like Category:Medical terms), there are clearly more than a thousand such articles -- which usually qualifies as at least "quite a few" according to the common language conventions, even if it's a tiny fraction of Wikipedia articles. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 04:09, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Might be a useful example, as it's clearly notable but not a "bad word" (which seems to have been one of Wolfkeeper's complaints about examples cited before). I was thinking of this a couple months ago and then forgot it, took me until today to remember that this was the word I had in mind. rʨanaɢ ( talk) 15:29, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Was there some reason for a delay in notifying me of an RfC that concerns me? Powers T 23:29, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
It contains the phrase "Wolfkeeper should be stopped", it lists votes at AFD, it lists edits that apparently were not reverted by anyone (such in War on terror), it lists peoples votes at AFDs, and it's being shopped around to try to get people to join a bandwagon of hatred.
This is not an RFC, it's an attack page.- Wolfkeeper 04:00, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
It seems to me that a central part of this dispute regards the difference between an encyclopedia being about "actual things" and it being about words, concepts, and, more broadly, "our collective understanding of things." I suggest that the reason that both we and Wolfkeeper are so convinced that all of wikipolicy favors our own viewpoints is that these are epistemological concerns, related to our understanding of truth and the limits of human knowledge. I was heading in this direction with my comments about semiotics on Talk:Slam dunk (and I have even flirted with the idea of writing an essay on that subject), although I don't know if that helped to clarify the issue. I'll try to keep this simple.
According to basic Kantian epistemology, the world is divided into two types of concepts:
Because we are only capable of perceiving the world as the second of these types, our language necessarily describes only that. We lack the language to describe things as they actually are. An encyclopedia, as the sum of HUMAN knowledge, is thus restricted to describing human understandings of things. It is my contention that the very subject of an encyclopedia article is not a thing itself (type 1), but the human understanding of that thing (type 2).
This contention is consistent with the following facts:
-Countless articles feature etymology sections, explaining the origin of the word that represents the idea or things being discussed
-Countless articles describe the difference between common understandings of words and expert understandings of words, such as why a strawberry is not considered a
berry by botanists but a grape is, or why a
buffalo is not really a
buffalo
-Countless articles describe the difference between one culture's understanding of a term and another's (as seen on
Central America)
-Countless articles cover broad concepts that cannot be described without acknowledging that they mean different things to different people, are the source of longstanding disputes, have been understood differently over time (see
Homosexuality), and cannot really be considered "things" without acknowledging that they are really a grab-bag of associations that people have with a word or phrase (such as
Peace or
Vegetable or
Feudalism)
-Numerous articles about physical objects contain large amounts of detail on the various associations that humans have had with their subjects throughout history (such as
Mars and many other astronomy articles)
-Numerous articles exist to describe significant cultural phenomena that are bound up in and inextricable from a word or phrase (see
NIMBY)
Many of Wolfkeeper's edits fit a pattern of insisting that not only are words not suitable for encyclopedia coverage but also that the discussion of verbal associations in general is unencyclopedic. This appears to be predicated on a supposition that the words that are used to express ideas are not actually parts of those ideas. If we are writing an article about a Slam dunk, we should not discuss other understandings that are closely related to Slam dunk, according to Wolfkeeper, because only dictionaries discuss words (apologies if this is an incorrect assessment of Wolfkeeper's arguments; this is merely my understanding of them), whereas encyclopedias discuss things. But many of us share an understanding that the words that we use to refer to things, and the associations we have with those words, are very much a part of the way we understand things, and thus are very much a part of human knowledge, ergo eligible for encyclopedia inclusion (if they meet other criteria for inclusion, of course).
I do not believe that Wolfkeeper is alone in his opinions, nor that taking action against Wolfkeeper for disruptive edits would be enough to settle this dispute for Wikipedia once and for all. I believe that a guideline should exist to explain that WP:NOTDIC does not mean that words are not important to the concepts they describe, or even, more broadly, it could state that language is an important (often encyclopedic) part of our understanding of things. I would be willing to contribute to an effort to put together such a guideline. Feeeshboy ( talk) 18:48, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
Well, Wolfkeeper appears to have retired, but a few editors share some of his views, and WP:NAD might still be considered confusing, and all of Wolfkeeper's old edits still remain, so this issue is unfortunately still not finished. I built a table of evidence a few nights ago, which may or may not be useful. Feel free to add arguments/examples to either side.
For | Against | |
---|---|---|
Precedent | At wikisource:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/
|
Your Examples here |
Practice |
|
Your Examples here |
References |
from Encyclopedia#Characteristics:
|
from Encyclopedia#Characteristics:
|
Principles/policy/guideline/essay.
Interpretation thereof. |
[we need something like: a statement from one of the original authors of WP:NAD, explaining that the intended purpose was:
ie. as long as sufficient secondary source material exists (not just a handful of dictionaries) to write a verbose article, then an article is viable. WP:N + WP:V = article.] |
[need a statement from Wolfkeeper, explaining how he interprets WP:NAD's purpose] |
(In response to the issues above, about what this should be:) Personally, I think this would be better as an RfC/U on Wolfkeeper's behavior, rather than a policy RfC. The policy is already abundantly clear to the vast majority of editors, and the real issue has been Wolfkeeper's behavior in trying to push his misguided understanding of that policy. Trying to change or clarify the policy is not likely to get us anywhere since, as I said, it already works fine for just about everyone. What's more likely to be productive is getting some editing restrictions put on Wolfkeeper (for instance, ban from editing DICDEF-related policy pages and maybe DICDEF-related AfDs, maybe rules for blocking if he rewrites article intros to conform to his view). rʨanaɢ ( talk) 00:10, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
I'd agree to any of the suggestions given above. Policy rfc or User rfc. As I've said, I don't wish to take the lead in deciding how this proceeds - partially because I have very little experience with RfCs, partially because I've already put many hours into compiling and sorting the raw diffs, and find the whole endeavor increasingly exhausting. -- Quiddity ( talk) 02:21, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
I think this is clearly an RFC/U. It's problem with one user, not a problem with policy or anyone else's edits or misuse of policy. Quiddity, I hate to put you on the spot since you've already done so much work, but as the one most familiar with the evidence, please type up a statement of the dispute per the Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct format, and we'll get it going from there.-- Cúchullain t/ c 14:23, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
I see that the current scope of the dispute described here is so wide that I would have to list myself as partially agreeing with Wolfkeeper: In my opinion etymology should only rarely appear at the beginning of an article. It's important to keep the different issues separate. At the moment this page is formatted as if it was intended to become an RfC/U on Wolfkeeper. I will try to transform the beginning to something more like a policy RfC. If that's really what we want, we should probably try to get Wolfkeeper, LtPowers and TenPoundHammer on board as well. Hans Adler 07:54, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I moved the page to the WP: namespace so that we'd have a place to talk.
Specifically, I wanted a place to address the current little edit war between NeilN and Wolfkeeper (e.g., this, in which we revert over whether Wikipedia has "quite a few articles" that are wholly or partially about words or phrases, or "very few articles".
Here's my view: They're both right. The vast majority of articles are not about words or phrases, but "quite a few" certainly are. Even if you (incorrectly) assume that every article about a word or phrase is listed at Category:Words (disregarding things like Category:Medical terms), there are clearly more than a thousand such articles -- which usually qualifies as at least "quite a few" according to the common language conventions, even if it's a tiny fraction of Wikipedia articles. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 04:09, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
Might be a useful example, as it's clearly notable but not a "bad word" (which seems to have been one of Wolfkeeper's complaints about examples cited before). I was thinking of this a couple months ago and then forgot it, took me until today to remember that this was the word I had in mind. rʨanaɢ ( talk) 15:29, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Was there some reason for a delay in notifying me of an RfC that concerns me? Powers T 23:29, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
It contains the phrase "Wolfkeeper should be stopped", it lists votes at AFD, it lists edits that apparently were not reverted by anyone (such in War on terror), it lists peoples votes at AFDs, and it's being shopped around to try to get people to join a bandwagon of hatred.
This is not an RFC, it's an attack page.- Wolfkeeper 04:00, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
It seems to me that a central part of this dispute regards the difference between an encyclopedia being about "actual things" and it being about words, concepts, and, more broadly, "our collective understanding of things." I suggest that the reason that both we and Wolfkeeper are so convinced that all of wikipolicy favors our own viewpoints is that these are epistemological concerns, related to our understanding of truth and the limits of human knowledge. I was heading in this direction with my comments about semiotics on Talk:Slam dunk (and I have even flirted with the idea of writing an essay on that subject), although I don't know if that helped to clarify the issue. I'll try to keep this simple.
According to basic Kantian epistemology, the world is divided into two types of concepts:
Because we are only capable of perceiving the world as the second of these types, our language necessarily describes only that. We lack the language to describe things as they actually are. An encyclopedia, as the sum of HUMAN knowledge, is thus restricted to describing human understandings of things. It is my contention that the very subject of an encyclopedia article is not a thing itself (type 1), but the human understanding of that thing (type 2).
This contention is consistent with the following facts:
-Countless articles feature etymology sections, explaining the origin of the word that represents the idea or things being discussed
-Countless articles describe the difference between common understandings of words and expert understandings of words, such as why a strawberry is not considered a
berry by botanists but a grape is, or why a
buffalo is not really a
buffalo
-Countless articles describe the difference between one culture's understanding of a term and another's (as seen on
Central America)
-Countless articles cover broad concepts that cannot be described without acknowledging that they mean different things to different people, are the source of longstanding disputes, have been understood differently over time (see
Homosexuality), and cannot really be considered "things" without acknowledging that they are really a grab-bag of associations that people have with a word or phrase (such as
Peace or
Vegetable or
Feudalism)
-Numerous articles about physical objects contain large amounts of detail on the various associations that humans have had with their subjects throughout history (such as
Mars and many other astronomy articles)
-Numerous articles exist to describe significant cultural phenomena that are bound up in and inextricable from a word or phrase (see
NIMBY)
Many of Wolfkeeper's edits fit a pattern of insisting that not only are words not suitable for encyclopedia coverage but also that the discussion of verbal associations in general is unencyclopedic. This appears to be predicated on a supposition that the words that are used to express ideas are not actually parts of those ideas. If we are writing an article about a Slam dunk, we should not discuss other understandings that are closely related to Slam dunk, according to Wolfkeeper, because only dictionaries discuss words (apologies if this is an incorrect assessment of Wolfkeeper's arguments; this is merely my understanding of them), whereas encyclopedias discuss things. But many of us share an understanding that the words that we use to refer to things, and the associations we have with those words, are very much a part of the way we understand things, and thus are very much a part of human knowledge, ergo eligible for encyclopedia inclusion (if they meet other criteria for inclusion, of course).
I do not believe that Wolfkeeper is alone in his opinions, nor that taking action against Wolfkeeper for disruptive edits would be enough to settle this dispute for Wikipedia once and for all. I believe that a guideline should exist to explain that WP:NOTDIC does not mean that words are not important to the concepts they describe, or even, more broadly, it could state that language is an important (often encyclopedic) part of our understanding of things. I would be willing to contribute to an effort to put together such a guideline. Feeeshboy ( talk) 18:48, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
Well, Wolfkeeper appears to have retired, but a few editors share some of his views, and WP:NAD might still be considered confusing, and all of Wolfkeeper's old edits still remain, so this issue is unfortunately still not finished. I built a table of evidence a few nights ago, which may or may not be useful. Feel free to add arguments/examples to either side.
For | Against | |
---|---|---|
Precedent | At wikisource:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/
|
Your Examples here |
Practice |
|
Your Examples here |
References |
from Encyclopedia#Characteristics:
|
from Encyclopedia#Characteristics:
|
Principles/policy/guideline/essay.
Interpretation thereof. |
[we need something like: a statement from one of the original authors of WP:NAD, explaining that the intended purpose was:
ie. as long as sufficient secondary source material exists (not just a handful of dictionaries) to write a verbose article, then an article is viable. WP:N + WP:V = article.] |
[need a statement from Wolfkeeper, explaining how he interprets WP:NAD's purpose] |