dKosopedia talk:Policies and Guidelines/archive02

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dKosopedia is owned by Daily Kos. As such, it reflects dKos' purpose and point of view, which is US politics in general, and the promotion of Democrats and the politics of the Democratic Party in particular. This happy embrace of a point of view (POV) absolutely separates us from Wikipedia, which has a neutral point of view policy (NPOV). This is not the only place where we diverge from its practices, but we otherwise do follow Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.

We are not in competition with Wikipedia: rather, we supplement it. We leave it to Wikipedia to be comprehensive; when it has (or sould have) an article on any given topic, we discourage duplication here (the off-topic rule). When Wikipedia's NPOV policies inhibit a full discussion of the Democratic point of view, however, a parallel article is encouraged, with reference made to the Wikipedia original.

While we have an actively anti-Republican point of view, we do insist on a neutral tone when expressing this. Politely phrased disparagement is far more devastating than flames and rants.

1 Discussion points

Discussion points

Deletion policies

See Candidates For Deletion/deletion policies

Off-topic articles

We are not competing with Wikipedia, nor even if we had the resources to do so should we. Articles, no matter how worthy or interesting, which do not serve dKP's central purpose should be strongly discourged, or to use the hard word, banned. This will have the side benefit of keeping eventual growth under control.

We need to have clear instructions how to link to Wikipedia. That will encourage people to link to articles there that we don't necessarily want here. Chadlupkes 10:00, 24 June 2006 (PDT)

Interwiki syntax, unpiped:

wikipedia:Policies and guidelines ([[wikipedia:Policies and guidelines]])

piped:

Policies and guidlines ([[wikipedia:Policies and guidelines|Policies and guidelines]])

The syntax for an external url is almost as easy, and since it's the only one that works for URLs, using one for all makes sense.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines Wikipedia's policies and guidelines]--Allamakee Democrat 10:21, 24 June 2006 (PDT)

Email links are just as easy: [mailto:dude@somedomain.com Email Dude] --> Email Dude Chadlupkes 14:25, 24 June 2006 (PDT)

Non-English-language articles

This is under active debate. For the moment, we lack the resources to police such articles. Until such time as we have reliable, trusted bilingual admins, I think such articles should be banned.--Allamakee Democrat 09:54, 24 June 2006 (PDT)

I think discouraged would be a better term, but I agree. -Chadlupkes 10:04, 24 June 2006 (PDT)

At a YearlyKos question and answer session someone asked Kos about a multilingual dailykos.com. His response was that he had neither the time nor resources to run such a site. I think that makes sense. wikipedia itself is segregated into language specific domains (en.wikipedia.org, jp.wikipedia.org, etc. though there may be interwiki links). We're a volunteer effort, and have neither the time nor resources to manage a multilanguage site. --Centerfielder 12:07, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

Brothers and Sisters, there are five good reasons NOT to adopt Alamakee Democrats English Only rule.

First, the rule "solves" a non-problem. We have no evidence of any actual harm from any of the handful of non-English language articles. One salient characteristic of bad public and private management is a focus on solving non-existent problems.

Second, the rule is motivated by ignorance. Another salient characteristic of bad public and private management is decision-making is that it is driven by the ignorance and lack of creativity of managers fearful of the knowledge and creativity of those they supervise.

Third, adopting an English Only rule of any kind sends the wrong message in this period of fuck-witted nativism in American politics. Talk about tone-deaf!

Fourth, the rule originated in political sin. Alamakee Democrat just made it up as part of what appears his or her intention to narrow the scope of what can happen here in DKos. That's not smart. This isn't a campaign organization. This is an information source. Moreover announcing the rule as a fait accompli smells like power trip. That sort of thing becomes pathological in an organization.

Fifth, we depend on volunteer efforts. We can't afford to drive away potential volunteers, unless they are obvious cretins or agents provocateur.

BartFraden June 24, 2006.

Bravo! Good arguments, and good points. However, it still leaves the question of infrastructure development up in the air. Will someone who speaks a second language help us fill in the blanks? Should we create a dKP for foreign language pages, and see who steps up? This may be a grassroots effort, but we need to have people we can trust who translate things according to our true values, instead of just hoping that what we can't read doesn't say what we don't want other people around the world to read. Chadlupkes 09:17, 25 June 2006 (PDT)

Current events

I have mentioned this before. We are essentially a current events encyclopedia, which is something of a contradiction in terms. No encyclopedia is ever really current. In our context, past experience demonstrates that we get a number of hot-topic current news cycle postings that end up being abandoned the moment it's out of the news cycle. And abandoned articles from the 2004 cycle abound. I have been wantonly deleting the least reputable; lots of them though, did have some thought put into them, but had no follow through and who among us is going to trudge through all of this to pick up a long-ago dropped ball from a game no one wants to play anymore. Some of these past articles are unsalvageable.

My current thoughts are to develop a policy for new articles that are in danger of falling into this category, something like "Candidates for heightened-scrutiny". This would be a template and a dKP page a la Candidates for deletion. "Heightened scrutiny" would mean the article is subject to deletion unless it is put into a form that allows it to make sense to a reader some two or more years hence. Not doing something like this is to invite dKP to fall into even greater disreputable chaos.--Allamakee Democrat

My current 'rainy day project' is to go to Special:Oldest Pages and work from the oldest forward, putting them in categories and cleaning up what I can. A lot of these are ancient and as you say, unsalvageable. I'll note it in the Summary if I think something should be deleted. Chadlupkes 20:19, 24 June 2006 (PDT)

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This page was last modified 20:17, 28 June 2006 by dKosopedia user Allamakee Democrat. Based on work by Chad Lupkes and dKosopedia user(s) Centerfielder and BartFraden. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.