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| :First, I think it is quite important that we don't feel like we have to write down a rule for every obvious things. We're already much too rule-bound as it is. | :First, I think it is quite important that we don't feel like we have to write down a rule for every obvious things. We're already much too rule-bound as it is. | ||
| :Second, of course you are right on the editorial point. It's always wrong for Misplaced Pages to say that someone was born in a place that didn't even exist when they were born. That's so obvious, I'm not sure why any sort of general rule should be needed. I'll go read the discussion.--] (]) 13:46, 21 October 2011 (UTC) | :Second, of course you are right on the editorial point. It's always wrong for Misplaced Pages to say that someone was born in a place that didn't even exist when they were born. That's so obvious, I'm not sure why any sort of general rule should be needed. I'll go read the discussion.--] (]) 13:46, 21 October 2011 (UTC) | ||
| : - I've now read the discussion and I should clarify. I think you are right on the editorial '''principle''' but may not be right on some of the factual particulars. And I think this case shows quite clearly why simple rules for obvious things should not be written down. In that entire discussion, I don't really see anyone opposing the principle of historical accuracy (at least in the main) but rather making very complex points about what accuracy demands.--] (]) 14:10, 21 October 2011 (UTC) | |||
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WikiFinance - new project suggestion
I have a suggestion for a new Misplaced Pages. Tentatively call it WikiFinance. I am writing this to you as a finance professional who has spent over 20yrs in the industry, as a person passionate about technology and as a believer in the unfolding era of social collaboration transforming businesses & global economies.
Here is the case for a WikiFinance as a separate new project for WikiPedia:
The Global financial crisis (GFC) has shown that the current financial structure in unsustainable. Some of the key causes of the crisis a) improper credit rating as rating agencies were paid by the companies who sought rating i.e. moral hazard b) inability of select/limited staff of rating agencies to evaluate all the complexities involved in understand macro & micro factors driving risks. c) information arbitrage by investment banks and hedge funds like Goldman Sachs/Paulson (large team of analysts, close access to key information sources, etc) which allows them to make supernormal profits at the cost of small individuals.
Solution: Start WikiFinance as a collaborative effort by millions of people around the world to analyse, comment on and freely distribute intelligent information and analysis on companies and economies to everyone.
Observations: What the GFC has shown is that bloggers like nakedcapitalism.com or creditwritedowns.com have become more popular than traditional sources for informed analysis. There are millions of academicians, press and ordinary individuals who are posting their comments in multiple blogs/websites, but there is no true collaboration as there is no central place where they can collaborate to comment on the same issue.
Imagine if we had a central WikiFinance to analyse companies, take AIG for example. Imagine, Wiki had a WikiFinance page on AIG where every person who has interacted with AIG were allowed to post their comments. We would have go a) thousands of analysts and academia analyzing their financial statements jointly b) hundreds/thousands of people in the financial services industry could have been whistle blowers in pointing out how they were mispricing the options they were writing c) people could have vetted the CDO documents and pointed out all kinds of toxic assets injected into those and d) regulators could have tracked these and stopped them for blowing up the way they did much earlier.
Imagine: If Mr Bloomberg allows corporate financial statements into WikiFinance as a regular feed (anyway information is public) and all the people who deal with the company (suppliers, customers, bankers, analysts, neighbors, etc) are allowed to comment on a company in a central WikiFinance space - we could be reinventing the financial sector on a bottom up basis. Just create individual company pages, feed free data from Edgar/SEC/Bloomberg, allow analysts/academics to analyse the financial statements, allow customers to comment on their user experience, allow suppliers to comment on their experience with each company. We would have achieved full transparency and contributed to fixing the worlds broken financial sector.
The birth of new collaborative, democratic and a more fair financial sector is possible through WikiFinance. The opportunity, technology and need is very clear. The potential contribution to the world is also very clear. Is Misplaced Pages willing to enable/allow this change to happen?
What do you think? Thanks for reading so far. — Preceding unsigned comment added by NWITP (talk • contribs) 08:26, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- It sounds like what you are proposing is a forum. I am sure there are already many forums on the Internet for the discussion of companies and their financial information. I don't see why those forums cannot achieve what you are looking for. In any event, to my knowledge the Wikimedia Foundation does not operate any "forums" as such (only talk pages and mailing lists to discuss the contents of the projects themselves), and I don't see any reason why they would start now. Neutron (talk) 15:22, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- See Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Economics and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Finance.
- —Wavelength (talk) 15:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- These resources might be of interest.
- —Wavelength (talk) 18:50, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- Richard D. Wolff discusses the economic crisis at Capitalism Hits the Fan: Richard Wolff on the Economic Meltdown.
- —Wavelength (talk) 19:19, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- NWITP, if you are hoping that the richest people in the world will collaborate for the common good in economic matters, then you might find some of them to be closed-minded and tightfisted.
- —Wavelength (talk) 07:00, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
Assistance with a usurp
Hi Jimmy, hope you're well. I'm wondering if you could help me out with something here - I've gone through the usual channels but have been stymied, so thought I might bump it right up the chain for your opinion.
I've had a username here on hold for all of the nine years I've been around. It was, in fact, the username I originally registered with, although I didn't use it, deciding instead to go with my real name. These days, it's the name I use everywhere online - I'm detaching from my real name for personal reasons - and I'd like my Misplaced Pages presence to be no exception to that. So, I requested in the usual place to get switched over. That was a year ago (); but at the time I was informed that somebody had registered on zh.wiki with the same name, so I wouldn't be able to get SUL unless they said it was okay. Over the course of the following year I tried several times to get in touch with them, but unsuccessfully.
I filed an updated request (), asking for an exception to be made because the Chinese user in question has only ever made 112 edits in three years (), none in months, and only ever to zh.wiki. My gut feeling as an admin is that it's extremely unlikely they'll ever need SUL or make cross-language edits. The 'crat I dealt with advised me to make a steward request, so I did (), but was given the brush-off - quite politely, but still so.
Basically I'd like to ask you if, given my long association with the project, I could be trusted enough to have the rules bent a very little for me, and if you could intercede on my behalf.
Many thanks for your time, whatever you decide. Best wishes, -- Earle 11:11, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- I can answer this for you, he won´t help you. Sorry, but the username is the authors name for the license, and because of that users with a single public contribution can´t be ursuped. That would violate our license.--Müdigkeit (talk) 16:18, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- I'm afraid you've misunderstood completely. I own the username Hex on the English Misplaced Pages. That's what I'm asking to usurp, not this Chinese user. However he/she has SUL for that username, because SUL didn't exist when I registered the username in November 2002, and that's what I'm asking to be reassigned. -- Earle 16:50, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- So, you have Hex on one project, and the other Hex - who came after you - has Hex on a dozen projects ... seeing as many of the projects have their own Bureaucrats that would have to act on the request, do you see the potential challenge? (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 16:59, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- Hi there. I don't know about that; I was informed by Xeno at the time of my original request that "Global SUL is owned by Hex (talk · contribs), you'll need to work it out with them and have the global account deleted if they concede the name. Otherwise, you won't be able to unify under the new name." Is that not the case? The other user has not edited any other wikis to my knowledge. -- Earle 17:05, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- I understand the frustration. The challenge is that since the other Hex created their id after SUL came in, they have Hex on every single other project (Global SUL); you just have it on one. You would have an easier time simply asking for a SUL rename of your account to something like Hex, but changing your signature block to say Hex. If you have seen the other massive challenges with Global SUL renames on the the Stewards board, you would understand. It would be a breeze if the other Hex wanted your on this Misplaced Pages, as they only have to usurp one ... you have to usurp a dozen or more. (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 17:14, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- I don't think it's that bad? According to CentralAuth they're only attached to three wikis beyond their home wiki. One of them is zh.wikibooks which I certainly have no need to usurp; the others are meta and fr.wiki, both with zero edits. That should be pretty straightforward to arrange, right? Thanks for chipping in with info, by the way. -- Earle 17:20, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- I understand the frustration. The challenge is that since the other Hex created their id after SUL came in, they have Hex on every single other project (Global SUL); you just have it on one. You would have an easier time simply asking for a SUL rename of your account to something like Hex, but changing your signature block to say Hex. If you have seen the other massive challenges with Global SUL renames on the the Stewards board, you would understand. It would be a breeze if the other Hex wanted your on this Misplaced Pages, as they only have to usurp one ... you have to usurp a dozen or more. (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 17:14, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- Hi there. I don't know about that; I was informed by Xeno at the time of my original request that "Global SUL is owned by Hex (talk · contribs), you'll need to work it out with them and have the global account deleted if they concede the name. Otherwise, you won't be able to unify under the new name." Is that not the case? The other user has not edited any other wikis to my knowledge. -- Earle 17:05, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
Barnstar
| File:R37-yo0365-Orden-dvoglavog-orla-s-macevima.png | The Serbian Barnstar of National Merit | |
| You deserve it! | ||
| This WikiAward was given to Jimbo Wales by WhiteWriter on 19:24, 20 October 2011 (UTC) |
How exactly does Jimbo deserve the Serbian Barnstar of National Merit, I don't follow, or are we a little starstruck here? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:28, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
Place of birth in infoboxes for bios
Jimbo, I have a confession to make. I purpously made an incorrect edit (in my view) in place of birth in George Washington article to illustrate a point and I feel bad now. However, the main problem is that I actually did nothing wrong, because incredibly, we dont have a principle written on this! So this creates a situation of having a general consensus among senior editors to use historical accuracy for place of birth, but editors editing against this consensus end up being allowed because people never made an effort to finish the discussion and writte a short note about this at WP:MOSBIO.
To me seems pretty obvious that Lenin was not born neither died in modern day Russia, but was born in Russian Empire and died in Soviet Union. Hitler obviously was not born in modern day Austria but in Austria-Hungary, just as George Washington, the article I vandalised in my view, was obviously not born in the United States but in Colony of Virginia.
However, all this is relative because we don´t have a rule on this, so people can actually use current states for place of birth, even if they didn´t existed at time of birth, something completely illogical. For exemple, how can a person be born in, for exemple, in a country called Eritrea in 1980 if the country only gained independence in 1991?
I just noteced my edit was reverted (thanks God! I couldn´t stand my own crime) with the edit summary of "unsourced". But here is the problem: sourcing a place of birth for well known historical figures is easy, as there are easily available scholarly sources saying precisely the historically accurate place of birth. But what about sportspeople, less known modern artists, etc.? They often use sources which are not specialised in history and geography, and may vary for exemple in using Soviet Union or current-day states for footballers for exemple. It was with sportspeople that this time the problem started. Within the Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Football there is a general consensus to use historically accurate names of cities and countries at time of birth of a person, and many editors made a huge effort in fighting (what we called) vandalism of numerous IP´s and nationalistically motivated editors to replace former countries by the new ones. This war was specially active in past 3 to 5 years, however nowadays the Yugoslavia´s, Soviet Union´s, Zaire´s, etc. had finally seemed to become accepted and suffer less reverting recetly. However this time a group of Estonian editors had started questioning all agreed and saying that current states are the ones to be used. Now, the problem is that we are basically tighed-up about this, because we lack written principle defending historical accuracy, and because sources may easily say one or onother, depending on their seriousness about that specific issue, as most are not specialised in place of birth. So basically, they remove a precise place of birth of the person when born, and replace it by the current state, and we cannot do nothing about it as we lack principle on this.
I do understand that there were discussions in the past over this issue and nothing was agreed, however seems incredible that the situation continues like this. Many dedicated editors have lost much time around this issue. I also supose that often the past discussions were not successfull because many users were uninformed about them, so now there is a chance at least to finish the discussion. I really beleave we could easily apply the historical accuracy for place of birth, by this meaning to use the city and country that existed at time the person was born, and also, most important excyclopedia´s treat the issue that was as well. If not, we don´t apply what I stand for, but my only wish is to have a principle on this to solve this frequently problematic issue.
I know this sounds like a desperate call for attention, but it is just unbeleavable that we still lack a principle or note on this and the situation has become a bit intolerable. The current discussion is taking place here: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Biographies#Country_of_birth.2C_for_historic_.28and_current.29_bios.2C_part_II. Best regards, FkpCascais (talk) 03:24, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
- First, I think it is quite important that we don't feel like we have to write down a rule for every obvious things. We're already much too rule-bound as it is.
- Second, of course you are right on the editorial point. It's always wrong for Misplaced Pages to say that someone was born in a place that didn't even exist when they were born. That's so obvious, I'm not sure why any sort of general rule should be needed. I'll go read the discussion.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:46, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
- - I've now read the discussion and I should clarify. I think you are right on the editorial principle but may not be right on some of the factual particulars. And I think this case shows quite clearly why simple rules for obvious things should not be written down. In that entire discussion, I don't really see anyone opposing the principle of historical accuracy (at least in the main) but rather making very complex points about what accuracy demands.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:10, 21 October 2011 (UTC)