User talk:Coren

Sensible comments at MHP

Thank you for these comments at the MHP arbitration, in particular, for the "least worst" comment, Arbitrators have been doing an excellent job with findings of fact and remedies relating to conduct, but are struggling with the principles. In my view the latter should be kept to a minimum for many reasons (e.g., hard cases make bad law, ArbCom should not rule on content). I hope you can convince your colleagues that such rulings are unnecessary and may be unhelpful or even damaging to the encyclopedia. Here I refer not only to ruling 11), but also to ruling 3), which is a content ruling that does not take into account many subtle issues.

There is, in my view, one principle that rules them all: it is wonderfully concise, yet poorly named and frequently misunderstood or misused. It is WP:IAR. Geometry guy 21:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Part of the point of being a committee is to ensure that we have enough diverse perspective to reduce the chance of error by oversight. My background is scientific and technical, so that particular error seemed glaring to me. But thank you, it's heartening to have one's effort appreciated once every so often.  :-) — Coren ^(talk) 21:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

They are much appreciated. However, I was adding to the remarks above in an edit conflict with your reply: ruling 3) as well as ruling 11) seems to me to be unnecessary, and potentially harmful. Geometry guy 21:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah. Well, I'm afraid we'll be stuck having to disagree on that. I agree with my colleagues that, as a generalist encyclopedia, we have to avoid becoming opaque to a general readership. It's what an encyclopedia is, and thus part of our founding principles. — Coren ^(talk) 22:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

We don't have to disagree: we can discuss it. Wikipedia is not merely a generalist encyclopedia, it incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. (WP:FIVE)

Guidelines exist to describe rather than proscribe, and Wikipedia manifestly does incorporate elements of specialist encyclopedias. I have often described Wikipedia as a nested family of overlapping encyclopedias rather than a single monolithic tome. It is a big mistake to constrain "the sum of human knowledge" by a traditional interpretation of what an encyclopedia should be. What we are doing here is not paper: let it shine. I cannot articulate this better than WP:MANYTHINGS, which I recommend as reading for all arbitrators. Geometry guy 22:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

True, to a point, but not particularly relevant to that principle I think. Certainly (as Brad noted), there are topics where "widest possible audience" means that an undergrad would struggle; that doesn't detract from the objective of keeping it as simple as possible. This is why the principle reads "For most articles [...]". — Coren ^(talk) 23:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I very much appreciated Brad noting the issue, but what weight do such asides carry? Geometry guy 00:00, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

False positive

Whatever algorithm caused CorenSearchBot to see possible plagiarism here needs to be extensively revised. The article I wrote is 1800 characters long and fully referenced, and yet the bot thought it might be a copyright violation of a website featuring no prose and very little information:

†Platykotta Chablais et al. 2010 (decapod)
Malacostraca - Decapoda - Platykottidae
Parent taxon: Platykottidae according to J. Chablais et al. 2010
Sister taxa: none
Subtaxa: Platykotta akaina (view classification)
Type: Platykotta akaina
Ecology: epifaunal carnivore
Distribution: there are no occurrences of Platykotta in the database
Show more details

This is patently absurd. Apart from raw classification (which is also misleading: the species has a sister taxon; see the article), all it contains is the phrase "epifaunal carnivore", which is information I haven't even included in a reworded form. If the bot can't do better than that, then its continuation may be placed in question. --Stemonitis (talk) 06:07, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

The bot's doing just fine. False positives are a natural occurrence. AerobicFox (talk) 04:12, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

But they are something to be minimised, and when the only additional material contained on a website is the binomen (how could I write an article on an organism without including the binomial name?), then a suggestion of plagiarism is clearly fatuous. My article was much longer than the source the bot thought I'd copied it from, and fully referenced, so that it is clear to all readers where the information comes from. If the bot can't understand that, then it has failed. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:33, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Is this bot working correctly?

Hi Coren. I received a message from your bot about Melchior Wathelet Jr., and honestly, I cannot figure out how it did find any similarity between my article and the website. Except for the name of the guy, I do not think there is even any identifiable group of two similar words (which is in a way surprising for a short stub on a Belgian politician). Is you bot working correctly? I mean, the false positive is so strange here, maybe it should be tweaked a bit? Cheers et cordialement. Sipahoc (talk) 21:01, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Substituting welcome templates

Would it make sense if this bot substituted welcome templates when it provides notifications to new users? I notice AnomieBOT has been coming back through and adding a subst after this bot, for example here. VQuakr (talk) 00:27, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Honestly, I've never managed to figure out when editors are expected to subst or not (well— except for the obvious cases where it's technically important that one or the other is done). In the case of welcome templates, wouldn't it make more sense making them simple to remove and not fill a newbie's talk page with several pagefuls of complicated wikimarkup?

It's not clear what purpose AnomieBOT serves in this case, really, the performance cost of the transclusion is insignificant, after all. — Coren ^(talk) 18:18, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I had to look it up, but this is discussed at the editing guideline Wikipedia:Substitution#User_talk_namespace. The justification is that it is more important to have the welcome message be static than to prevent complex markup on the talk page. VQuakr (talk) 19:34, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, that certainly gives an exhortation to subst, though by no means a rationale (or rather, I'm not sure how solid that rationale is). That said, there is no point in not substituting it if it's going to get substed anyways; I've switched CSBot do to so in the first place. — Coren ^(talk) 20:08, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

My ban

Hi, you have accused me with the following:

I've had the opportunity to say this before in past case, but I believe there is no "crime" in the construction of an encyclopedia greater than willfully misrepresenting sources: it destroys the most important foundational principle of what we're trying to do.

I have never misrepresented sources. Your accusation is completely not true. Could you please give me an example of where you think I misrepresented sources? Kehrli (talk) 05:36, 22 March 2011 (UTC)