Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Admins' Edit Log

Copyedit : Any articles with "attention needed"
Infobox : Make Infoboxes for Robotics articles which need robotics standards
Stubs : 213 stubs exist of which around 50% could be improved to Start-class
Update : Begin tagging and assessing all related robotics articles with project banner, located on the Template page.

This page is specifically targeted to meet the needs of admins and experienced editors, although anyone is welcome to join the discussion. The following is intended to be a discussion and log of all the editing actions in February and March in robotics articles taken by people who have a good feel for the issues involved, so that they can be categorized and discussed in one place. The only goal here is the convenience of everyone involved...suggestions are welcome, we're all friends here. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:38, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Revised Article Guidelines Please review new section "Article Inclusion Criteria for WikiProject Robotics" and provide any feedback to its talk page. Thanks. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 23:05, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The biggest news of the week is that the reaction we got at the Admin's Noticeboard and the Manual of Style Talk Page was much more positive than some of us expected, and we have incorporated what was said there (and especially, what wasn't said!) into our Article Guidelines. So, friends, before you rip into us for encouraging new editors to create articles even if they don't have a lot of references and even if the articles are technical or of interest to a specific group, please read and digest the following. These are excerpts that don't leave out anything relevant to these conclusions, but you're welcome to follow the links and read for yourselves.

At Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive125#Please help me bring more roboticists to WP, I brought up the point that Wikipedians are often uncomfortable with roboticists, because everyone is annoyed by technology and scared about the future of robotics. There was full support for the idea that roboticists deserve more respect on Wikipedia. The argument continued:

... Roboticists (at least, the ones I listen to) will tell you that most academic and journalistic reviews of new commercial robots are completely unreliable, it's much better to get a report from an individual or group that you know to be reliable who has tested the product. But "Joe over at Engadget says..." is not the kind of cite that WP likes to rely on. This problem has similarities to the problems lawyers face when using "precedent" to argue a case about satellites or intellectual property law...it's well-known that you get some very silly results. Likewise, if we tag robotics articles because they don't cite the same kinds of sources that would be appropriate for history articles, we're going to get some silly results. I don't really expect to have any great difficulty with this issue, but I am inviting comment ... - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:08, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
Google news search is a good way to find reliable sources for...those things that can be reliably sourced. In the case of Lawnbott, it works well: articles in the Christian Science Monitor and Sacramento Bee. Incorporate what those articles say, add them to the references, and your article should be safe. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:01, 2 February 2008 (UTC) If you cite the journal articles and publications from which the article is drawn, that normally satisfies the notability requirement in the process. Unless the only sources are press releases and company publications, in which case the article may be doomed anyway. Guy (Help!) 09:41, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the cites, and I completely agree. Hopefully the combination of newspaper articles sufficient to comply with WP:SOURCE plus informed debate among users (for commonly available robots) or experts (otherwise) will get the job done. Things are going well at the moment. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 13:51, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

What's really important there is what was not said. In a room full of people who are very comfortable saying "no" (visit WP:AN and see), not a single person spoke in opposition.

Another hard-nosed group at Wikipedia (because that's their job, they're actually nice people) are the guys (male and female) who enforce standards for what is "encyclopedic". Some hang out at the WP:WikiProject_League_of_Copyeditors, some belong to WP:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check, but one group in particular that has some very tough standards are the editors of Manual of Style and related pages. This was my argument in reference to a discussion about letting mathematicians say "we" in encyclopedia articles:

... The reason for my passion is that building an encyclopedia (in my case, mostly about robotics) is only half of my reason for putting enormous amounts of time into Wikipedia. The other half is that I actually want to see people benefiting from robots in the home...we desperately need them before all the baby boomers retire, and the developing world needs them to help provide food and power. I see both goals, building an encyclopedia and building robotics community, succeeding or failing together. I believe that both goals will fail if expert roboticists are not comfortable here. They won't be comfortable if their articles are reverted on the grounds that they don't sound right, when they know perfectly well that the articles are using language acceptable for their field...language that MoS editors aren't familiar with and didn't bother to ask about. I have some familiarity with manuals of style from a previous life, and this is most of the reason I'm trying to get up to speed on as much of MoS as I can...because the roboticists are very unlikely to care, and are likely to simply go back to the communities they came from in the first place if they feel disrespected here. Uninformed criticism of language is a great way to make someone feel demeaned. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:33, 6 February 2008 (UTC) With apologies, there are one or two more points that are essential in this argument. Two months ago, I saw nothing wrong with the argument that "nothing technical needs to be in Wikipedia, that's for Wikibooks or Wikiversity". After two months of talking with students, hobbyists, academics and professionals, I realize that I was completely wrong. There is no, none, zilch, desire among these people to stop their productive pursuits long enough to go write a book on Wikibooks. Wikipedia is the top .org site in the world and has enormous cachet, enough to pull people in and get them involved. Either we make them feel welcome here, or we never get an encyclopedic treatment of robotics. (This is in no way a criticism of the many fine robotics articles here. Details are best left to WP:WikiProject Robotics.) Also, I have enormous respect for the incredibly large number of incredibly talented editors around here who would do a bang-up job on, say, an article about using a robotic vacuum for a general audience. But there is already solid support for inclusion of articles dealing with, for instance, path-finding algorithms used by robotic vacuums...you'll find similar articles through the AI Portal. But these articles should be written with the readers in mind who will actually be reading them...that is, they should be written at their level, using concepts they understand and language they are comfortable with. A MoS-aware editor, who might in all other respects be an incredibly talented and feted Wikipedian, but who has never read such an article before, would probably not be the right person to decide what to revert in such an article, and might, if successful, harm the community that some of us are trying very hard to build here. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 04:20, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

And this was the reaction, I'm not leaving anything out:

You're preaching to the choir. I agree Wikipedia needs highly technical articles. In fact, both Trovatore and I know Heine-Borel [the theorem we were talking about] and stuff like that and write and edit very specialized articles.
Your suspicion regarding who wrote Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) does fortunately not reflect reality. It is written by people who write scholarly maths articles and who are perfectly aware that "we" is used there (including myself). Nevertheless, this group decided that "we" should be avoid[ed], for the following two reasons: journal articles and textbooks are written in a less formal style than encyclopaedia articles, and it is jargon (as you say, it sounds funny). I agree that the latter reason is not really relevant for specialized articles, but the former one still stands. I don't want to sound dismissive. Personally, I don't care about the "we" issue, I just want to clear up a contradiction. Perhaps we should discuss the use of "we" again and see whether the consensus shifted. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:42, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
You don't sound dismissive at all, you sound supportive, which is nice, given how argumentative I was (it didn't sound that way to me last night, now it does). Glad that you guys are on top of this. The context for my argument is that I am going around saying the things that I feel need saying to the relevant audiences, attempting to be honest about what connections I do and don't have and how my goals do and don't differ. I love the occasional "archness" of MoS discussions, it's a guilty pleasure, and I very much want to stay up on MoS discussions because I don't think anyone else in WikiProject Robotics will, and we need to be able to play by the same rules everyone else does. I honestly don't expect the community of MoS-aware editors to be the problem, the roboticists themselves are much more of a handful at the moment, and some past arguments made by admins seem less than helpful, and we seem to have an order of magnitude more vandalism than I would expect, given that we rarely have heated arguments. Still, I'd just like to say: people are invited to read my argument above, and if you have any serious disagreement, I'd appreciate it if you could record it here so that I can post it over at WP:ROBO/AEL. My thesis, I suppose, is: we (the copyediting or MoS-aware community) should go a little bit easy on new editors who have technical skills that we very much need here, especially when a new WikiProject like WikiProject Robotics is starting up, and...despite the fact that there's more in WT:MoS and the relevant archives than anyone can ever know...we should accept the additional burden of learning a bit more about how various technical communities talk, and how to use language to make them feel welcome. We should do it because we can. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 17:34, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
So let me elaborate a hair on my objection to "we". It has nothing to do with technical usage; I think technical usage is fine, though articles should of course be written to be as accessible as possible given their subject matter. It's a question of tone. "We" is too discursive, too narrative. It's what you say when you're presenting your own material, or when you're teaching a subject (as in a textbook). Wikipedia on the other hand is a reference work, and needs to be written in a more "just the facts" kind of style. --Trovatore (talk) 18:53, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

That's it, there was no objection. There is advice here on how we should write articles, advice that is relaxed enough to allow people to write with technical language or language aimed at a particular audience, as long as we're careful to make the language as clear and understandable as possible, avoiding "jargon". There was no hint here of "robotics articles have to sound like every other Wikipedia article", that violates the sense of support that I've gotten from everyone who has commented...and also from the people who gave assent with their silence. Obviously this can all be rediscussed at any time, and I will post something here immediately if I ever hear any re-interpretation, but this is how things stand so far. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:38, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]