Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-05-29/In the media

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• The Kennedy citing trend should be seen as a bad thing for us. Unless you are citing Wikipedia to talk about Wikipedia, this only muddles our ability to produce quality content; WP:CITOGENESIS. I don't see why a publisher wouldn't have told their author to spend another week checking the sources Wikipedia uses, rather than citing us directly. -Indy beetle (talk) 07:50, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. As an academic, you are expected to put in the extra effort to find more reliable sources. X-Editor (talk) 23:57, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

But is it a "trend"? From the NYT review, it sounds like an exceptional oversight at Yale University Press. czar 04:23, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

I hope it was merely an oversight, if an embarrassing one. I'd much more concerned if Yale cognizantly signed off on it! -Indy beetle (talk) 10:27, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm not even so worried about feeling the need to preserve one version of an article, I am just generally uncomfortable that Kennedy cited Wikipedia instead of the sources WP uses that he presumably, hopefully, checked first. WP is getting better, but please don't cite us! Especially not in your academic book! Unless it's literally there to cite "For X years, Wikipedia has said Y on the subject..." before going into a mainstream perception argument. Kingsif (talk) 01:29, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I'd be interested to see the citations. Is it a bare URL or a permalink? And what facts are cited? In all likelihood this is indicative of a serious lack of source reliability analysis skills by the historian in question. — Bilorv (talk) 15:03, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

• Wikipedia the best encyclopedia in the history of mankind! And Putin can't do anything about it! ---Zemant (talk) 12:20, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• The bit about low traffic for some moth articles made me think of a thought attributed to J. B. S. Haldane: when he was asked if there were anything that could be concluded about God from the study of natural history, he replied, "an inordinate fondness for beetles", because of the vast profusion of species and morphologies thereof. Somewhere in this line of thought is a disjunction: God can afford to pay lots of attention to all the many many kinds of beetles, but humans apparently cannot afford time to pay significant attention to all the many many kinds of moths. Of course, perhaps arthropod biodiversity could be a matter of a thousand monkeys and not of any deities' proclivities anyway. Regardless, the data exhaust of Wikipedia, in all its countless forms—including what Wikipedia is and is not, and what Wikipedia could be but is not yet and perhaps may never be but we can't yet be sure, and how Wikipedia is developed over time and how it is not developed, and who reads Wikipedia articles (or not) and which ones they read (or not), and so on—lays bare realities about the nature of human cognition and the human condition. Quercus solaris (talk) 03:45, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
• I appreciate Morris' characterization of set index articles as "disambiguation pages except not, because reasons". Haven't quite figured out the crucial difference either :p --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 07:34, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
  • I like that succinct characterization, too. Regarding what the difference is, or was meant to be but perhaps no longer is: An interesting topic. I am pretty sure that the differentiation originally grew out of a legitimate recurring problem of how to adequately handle (ie, not mishandle) semantic relations and ontology components of a hyponymous/hypernymyous character whereby various concepts in life have a hypernymous parent level about which not a whole lot needs to be said, beyond 1 sentence or 1 paragraph laying out the definition, but (in contrast) each of the various hyponymous instantiations of the parent theme is "a whole thing" that warrants a whole encyclopedia article (even if only a short one, nonetheless still an entire one, rather than none). I believe that the concept of a set index article was originally supposed to provide for a way to allow Wikipedia to duly acknowledge and (briefly yet adequately) explain/cover/represent the existence of the parent concept/theme that by itself does not warrant an encyclopedia article but nonetheless is necessary to recognize ontologically, as a node in one's mental schemas, cognitive models, and ontologies. Otherwise Wikipedia's rules/practices, at least as understood and enforced by some Wikipedians if not all, inadvertently contain a misguided problem whereby a parent concept exists and needs to be recognized but Wikipedia artifactually is inadvertently "not allowed to say that it exists," in a way that can actually feel stupidly/maddeningly insane or Kafkaesque to those people who even realize/can perceive that it even exists. For such people, one of the heartaches has been that many others do not realize or perceive thus, in a way that can seem somewhat unaccountable or counterintuitive to those who do. It is the argument between person A who puts a blurb at the top of a DAB page explaining the chief parent concepts and person B who deletes that blurb and says that DAB pages can only start with the contextless and mindless line, "X may refer to:". Quercus solaris (talk) 17:55, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

• I appreciate how the Christian Post quoted extensively from our notability policies to balance out Barnette's claims of being cancelled. I should find it laughable that she characterises the crowdsourced Wikipedia as a monolithic repressive entity to be opposed through people power. “They don’t like giving up power. They forget that the true power is with the people, though.” (Not laughing, though.) I wonder about us telling people they are "non-notable". We understand that the term has a special definition here, but others don't. Would it be better if we said not "famous" or "well-known" enough? Those also send a wrong message. Is there a better term? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 08:37, 12 June 2022 (UTC)
  • Maybe just create some made-up word, like "Wikipedable". That way no common associations can interfere. -Indy beetle (talk) 09:58, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

Moths

Strikes me that Special:WhatLinksHere/Trichromia_phaeocrota might explain a lot: If an article is under a hard-to-spell scientific name, and the only link in (besides this article and the list of least viewed articles) is from a page that looks like this - a lengthy list of links to articles with one sentence at the top - the discoverability of the article is incredibly low. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 7.9% of all FPs} 18:03, 12 June 2022 (UTC)