RationalWiki talk:Goals for Content on RationalWiki

Shouldn't this be on the forum?--BobSpring is sprung! 21:19, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Man, I totally forgot about that. This is why we have the forumspace in the first place, isn't it?  Thanks for reminding me, Bob.
 * Depends on how you want it organised. Forum suggests signed, talkpage like discussion. Scarlet A.pnggnostic 21:33, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * More like RW-space. -- Nx  / talk 21:36, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Stop making so many suggestions. I'm confused now.  :(   21:41, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yah, I'm afraid of it turning into an unnavigable mess of comments on the page.  21:41, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * RW space then, though there are a few essays to that effect. Тy talk 21:43, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Alright.  21:47, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Problem and suggestion on "category clean up"
The problem with this process of dealing with categories is that it's way to big a whale to chew. Besides the technical aspects of deleting a category, which are themselves huge but tedious, you need to have a good framework of what a catigory structure should be. And each "major" category will have very different styles of how to subcat things. What works for a system in Religion, is not going to be a reasonable approach for something like "people", or Politics. You need people who are very knowledgeable about the field to help sorta "design" a structure that makes sense for the topic. And finally, you need some way of sorta "enforcing" it, if you care. Since anyone can make new categories then you will always have the problem of someone not finding what category they think an article should go into, and just making a new one up. (that's also why we have dup articles. I think Quran, you think Koran and low an behold, "TWO".)

I do think one solution is that we could have (oh dear) committees of people who love a field and/or are knowledgeable in a field, and tackle the cats one subcat at a time. "Science lovers" taking on Physics first, then Biology, then.... One group looking at UK politics and its sub cats, another looking at US politics. etc. But it's a lot of work. I did a lot with the Religion category when I was stressed out, cause it was tedious but calming -- and after 3 weeks of it, i'd not even finished xianity, much less other religious cats. Godot  Moi j'dis, laisse beton 22:26, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Bot scripts and madness can help here. Thunderkatz and I did Politicians sub-catting easily in a day. It'd be fun. Тy talk 22:29, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * We do this, like, once every year and a half. Nothing new.  People spend their whole time here recategorizing.  On the other, I hand, I think insufferable assholes is absolutely necessarily.  More boringification.  steriletalk 22:33, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * My goodness, people talking about what they're doing on the wiki! Truly, RationalWiki is doomed to borification!   23:10, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The important thing to remember about cats is that they're there for navigation - so that you can easily navigate from an article page to all relevant category pages, & from there to all relevant articles. Unfortunately some users view cats instead as a hierarchical filing system, where an article shouldn't be in category X if it's in category Y which is a subcat of category X etc.  This doesn't help with navigation.  23:48, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The other side of that coin is that sometimes categories become too bloated to be effective for navigation - if Category:Politics included every article about politics here, it would be an overlong mess of hundreds (thousands?) of pages, 80-90% of which would be of no use to the reader. 00:04, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Make it a meta category. Only use the most specific instance. If it is US politics, put it there, not in politics. Тy talk 00:07, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I made it a meta-cat over a year ago... 00:09, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * As in in case something like that happens.  Тy talk 00:12, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Citation style
Different fields use their own citation styles (APA, for example, is for psych journals), there's really no way to use one style uniformly. That said, I think we should at least try not to leave and/or clean up raw URLs and have some descriptive text in the cites, no matter the style. That way, if a link dies, it's easy to figure out what the title, author, whatever was and replace it. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 22:54, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, but there's a huge difference between "if you cite something, do it this way" versus "if you cite something, try to include some stuff."
 * If there's one thing that needs to look professional on a site, any site, it's the citations. This shit's important, and part of what makes a good resource good and a bad resource something to be dismissed.  Last I checked, RationalWiki was trying to be the former.   23:07, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Er, I'm confused about whether you're agreeing or disagreeing with me. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 23:15, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm agreeing with you, but objecting to how weakly you worded it.  23:27, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I prefer simplicity over anything too detailed; I prefer the simple [source - article title]. Occasionally if it's specifically a person but posting in a newspaper (say a column) then I'd be tempted to also include the author too. Citing scientific papers I'd go for anything that looks sensible and conveys the right info - the consistency just needs to be article specific, a site wide binge would be a nightmare. But ANYTHING is better than a plain link. Scarlet A.pngpostate 23:30, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The shortcut is to just copy-paste the cite that's on the paper itself into the article. Brilliant! Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 23:35, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree this is too hard to do with too many articles at RW, but I'm suprised by the rejection of MLA. MLA does incorporate many, many different types of sources, and plus almost everyone with a high school diploma has seen a book and a journal article cited before.  (Actually, I think we should use the American Chemical Society format because I know it best, and it's all about me.)  steriletalk 00:11, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I just sort of fell in love with Turabian after I discovered it, and I've disregarded MLA ever since then. What's the American Chemical Society's format like?   00:31, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Chicago/Turabian wins hands down because it uses actual footnotes rather than making it look like a phone directory and calendar threw up on your paper. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 00:35, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * @Armondikov: I like things looking simple, too, but I feel [source - article title] is too simple.  I like knowing what organization/website the page is from at a glance.  If it were just me puttering around, I'd drop the author, but for a site like RationalWiki, acknowledging the author is common courtesy.  Bloggers, when discussing another blogger's post, almost always say "person X on blog Y," or at least "person X said," and I think we should manage at least as much courteousy as that.   00:31, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * That's a fair point. I just figure that two "fields", as it were, effectively makes it idiot proof as you don't get confused about putting the authors name first, or last, or in brackets, or the blog in brackets, or give the URL or the name of the blog... but I don't think it matters too much so long as a) there's something there and b) any one article is self-consistent. Scarlet A.pngpathetic 12:08, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

In practice, people won't do anything that's a pain in the arse. A good cite in a crappy format is better than no cite. If you want cites to look a particular way, you do the cleanup personally, rather than lay out work plans for others. As a general guide, any sentence starting "But if we all just ..." is wrong - David Gerard (talk) 13:31, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * That was my intention from the start, but I wanted to head off the inevitable complaints of me enforcing personal standards across the site by fiat. This way, if anyone complains, I can say, "It's official, bitches."   22:07, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Nothing's "official" in this dojo, but I doubt anyone will actually complain about you cleaning up citations. Get stuck in.  22:13, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, as official as anything ever gets around here. And will do  :)   22:29, 17 November 2011 (UTC)