Talk:Airliners.net

NPOV?

The "general criticisms" section seems very NPOV. Anybody else agree? (NOT a straw poll; comments only!) Sentinel75 02:04, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

There are individuals on the Airliners.net forums who always favour the aircraft manufacturer from their homeland. They will post comments to mock a foreign aircraft manufacturer, and stir up anger.

Here's a good example: The recent fire at an Airbus plant caused some injuries. A Boeing fanatic posted something along the lines of "I hope that halts their production for a while!". He was banned from the forums for two weeks, and will be allowed back when he agrees to be rational, rather than a fanboi.

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There are lots of fanatics on Wikipedia who don't like critical comments about their fixation.

Edits by User:Planefan

User:Planefan has today added content to this article that I would consider original research (with some possible NPOV issues as well). It has been reverted by both User:Brandon W and myself, and to avoid crashing into the 3-Revert Rule I'm bringing the discussion here rather than reverting again. The paragraphs question are:

The screening process for photographs seems dominated by technical considerations rather than artistic ones, and so 
photographs are rejected for reasons such as leveling, centering, and pixelation. This generally means photographs have a 
tendency to all look the same and as cameras evolve, the standards for acceptance change also. This technical approach to 
photography tends to appeal to its overwhelmingly (mostly young) male aviation enthusiast membership.

The website's non-aviation forum has a distinctly right wing authoritarian and political bias which is evidenced by the 
following facts: 1., The relatively high proportion of current and retired U.S. military members on the site, 2., The 
moderators' very authoritarian approach to managing the forums and their reluctance to tolerate public discussion of how the 
site should be managed - even in the site-related forum; 3., Moderators selectively censor topics based on content all the 
while ignoring others with considerable scatalogical content or, for example, crude salacious references to prominent female 
Democrats; and 4., Moderators themselves participate in some of the heated discussions even as they ban members for 
criticizing moderators and censor criticisms, which places members who disagree with moderators in the unfair position of 
being unable to properly respond to moderator' excesses. Because of these practices, some members cynically refer to the 
moderators as the "Bill O'Reilly's of the Aviation world."

While I would agree that the screening process is technical issues, I think that there's a lot of drawing of conclusions in the above. I typically stay out of the political discussions on the site, but again there are conclusions being drawn and what looks like NPOV problems. -- Hawaiian717 22:19, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

NPOV and OR problems?

According to wikipedia itself there is a distinction to be made between OR and compilations. I refer to compilations of readily observable traits on the airliners.net website.

Wikipedia guidelines explicitly state what is not OR:

Editors may make straightforward mathematical calculations or logical deductions based on fully attributed data that neither change the significance of the data nor require additional assumptions beyond what is in the source. It should be possible for any reader without specialist knowledge to understand the deductions. For example, if a published source gives the numbers of votes cast in an election by candidate, it is not original research to include percentages alongside the numbers, so long as it is a simple calculation and the vote counts all come from the same source. Deductions of this nature should not be made if they serve to advance a position, or if they are based on source material published about a topic other than the one at hand.

In my case, logical deductions are made that do not change the significance of the data, and it is possible for the non-specialist to understand the deductions, and I am not advancing a position other than the one at hand.

As for NPOV, I think the nature of the airliners.net conservative and authoritarian slant is worth noting and so I have been careful to explicitly itemize the basis of this observation through compiling readily observable traits on the website itself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Planefan (talk • contribs) 14:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC-8)

Ongoing Vandalism

The page has been semi-protected because of a recent rash of vandalism.MBK004 22:19, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Competing Websites

I recently removed the paragraph talking about competing websites as it seems to leave an opening for anyone to link to their similar site there. An anonymous editor put one back in claiming that information on competitors is often found in articles. A major thing that bothers me is that all the links to competing sites are external links rather than wikilinks, as I don't believe any of the other sites have articles on Wikipedia (and I'm not sure they've established enough notability to warrant them). In the interests of avoiding an edit war, I thought I'd open it up for discussion here. Thoughts? -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 15:19, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

_____

I hope this is technically the right way to answer, this is the first time I have ever done this.

I just do not think that section is an "invitation to spam". If people spam it with links to their personal websites, those can be removed. But an outright deletion of the competitors' names smells of "protecting" the business of the owners of airliners.net from competition which is simply unnecessary.

Just look at articles like the one on YouTube, Yahoo!, Microsoft and so on. They all mention competitors in one way or another. But they are longer, so those references are much easier to weave into the text without the need for dedicated paragraphs. -- Something-thinking some (talk) 14:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

In just the few days since this was put back in, already two more sites have been added: AirspaceOnline and DetroitSpotters.[1] The issue is, when you start to provide examples, everyone else feels free to add their own site (or their favorite site) as an additional example. The same thing happens with the meetups section. None of these other sites have their own article, and instead link to the site itself. I think this helps to show what I mean by the section opens up the article to spamming. -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 18:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I previously restored the paragraph[2] since its deletion was reasoned merely as "a section for spammy external links"[3]. This is a flimsy reason to delete. Instead, a request should be made for verification of the said text in a reasonable amount of time, failing which it would be far more reasonable to consider removing them. Apparantly, Airliners.net does specify MyAviation.net as a sister site, for example, and this should be cited, not removed.--Huaiwei (talk) 02:27, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Just to answer Huaiwei comment about MyAviation.net statement about Airliners.net not specifing them as a sister site. True not a sister site but every page on airliners.net has a link to MyAviation.com at the bottom as Partner Sites: Aviation Photo Gallery. and both sites are copyright Demand Media Inc. Although the link to MyAviation should be put in external links as per WP:EL. MilborneOne (talk) 17:26, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that most examples of having competitor links is in a "See Also" section, and these don't go to the competitors' websites, but to their articles on Wikipedia. For example, Google Calendar#See also contains links to the articles on Yahoo! Calendar and Windows Live Calendar, but not links to the the other sites themselves. I'll also note a couple of points from WP:EL: External links should not normally be used in the body of an article and that the list of links normally to be avoided includes Links mainly intended to promote a website which was my concern that led me to bringing this up in the first place. I don't have a problem with the section on partner sites (MyAviation and FlightLevel360), my issue is with the competitors and that was the paragraph I originally removed. I'll add {{External links}} to the section and see if it gets some attention. In addition, it's probably worth considering adding a short discussion about MyAviation (as it was essentially run by the same people) and how it differs from Airliners.net. -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 17:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Anet Homepage Redesign

The content with the remarks "2008 Redesign In May 2008, the site was redesigned with new colors and a modified page layout. The changes were released to a mixed reaction with many users disapproving of the new site." is both accurate and concise - and there is no evidence of provocation in these remarks. I highly recommend to the managers/head moderators/site foremen/whoever runs this place that if this becomes an editing war, to consider the value of leaving these remarks in the content of the main article, based on accuracy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anetmod (talk • contribs) 22:45, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

There's no use in adding personal comments, though, that are provocative and/or otherwise inflammatory - that would show that those who do not like the new content of the site are trying to present biased information on this site concerning said content on Anet, when, in fact, the basic remarks (shown in the aforementioned edit here) are sufficient. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anetmod (talk • contribs) 22:49, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Whoever 83.219.113.188 is, you are removing information that is valid and descript concerning Airliners.net. I hope the site moderation here will view your contributions to this article subtitle as detrimental to the accurate portrayal of the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anetmod (talk • contribs) 00:03, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Content dispute

There seems to be a content dispute regarding some information claimed by an IP address that resolves to the owners of this website to be defamatory and irrelevant which was posted by a disgruntled user. There also seems to be a systematic cleansing of this article of dissenting information which from what I can tell is cited. I make no judgment about the voracity of such claims and the current version of the article, but further edit warring over this is unacceptable without discussing the valid points. Therefore, I have fully protected this article from editing until the warring parties are able to discuss and come to an amicable agreement on the content of the article. -MBK₀₀₄ 20:12, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Why didn't you revert to my version instead? That would have been a bit more WP:NPOV. --81.105.207.63 (talk) 23:37, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

The only reason I made a revert was because of the removal of text without discussion. The NPOV aspects are what this discussion is meant for. -MBK₀₀₄ 23:42, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

←Hmph, is there going to be a discussion about the content of the article or not? Just waiting until the protection expires won't work because I will re-set the protection until an amicable solution is reached. This is going to be resolved. -MBK₀₀₄ 23:36, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Travel and booking service

In addition to the photo database and discussion forums, the website accepts aviation articles for publishing, has an automatic news service which gathers aviation news, maintains an information database about aircraft types (based on The International Directory of Civil Aircraft by Gerard Frawley), and hosts a flight and hotel booking service.Italic text

Airliners.net DOES NOT host a flight and hotel booking service.

I implore you to find the service on the site. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.205.162.205 (talk) 02:20, 13 July 2008

Airliners.net used to have a partnership with TravelNow.com where TravelNow operated an Airliners.net branded version of it's booking engine. Presumably Airliners.net got a commission on bookings. This seems to no longer be present, presumably Demand Media decided to discontinue the partnership and/or negotiate a new one. I guess updating this should go on the to do list once this article's content dispute is resolved. Also, I suppose it is not quite accurate to state that Airliners.net host(ed) it as it did not, rather it linked to TravelNow. -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 23:02, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Requested Edits

{{editprotected}} This one goes in the "Other Controversy" section. On the date of July 16th, 2008, a parody site of Airliners.net called Airwhiners.net had their domain hijacked by their hosting company, eNom, who is a subsidiary of Demand Media (who owns airliners.net). As a result of this hijacking, anybody who attempted to access airwhiners.net was redirected to airliners.net. This was confirmed by several members of airwhiners.net trying to access the site but getting redirected to airliners.net. —Preceding unsigned comment added by The big secret (talk • contribs) 19:08, 17 July 2008

Not done: Doesn't seem like it adds to the article, and doesn't seem very important. You also haven't given the text you want incorporated (a little fiddling with the above post could fix that) or any sources for it, so I'm going to have to say no. --lifebaka (talk - contribs) 19:16, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps instead say something like "On this date, airwhiners.net was temporarily redirecting to airliners.net...airwhiners.net is registered to eNom, a subsidiary of Demand Media, who also owns airliners.net, however there is no credible evidence to suggest that this was a domain hijacking and not an accident" ?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by The big secret (talk • contribs) 22:27, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Is there a reliable source to confirm that this happened? Is such an event notable? Plus, your suggested wording is factually incorrect; airwhiners.net is not registered to eNom, rather it appears to have been registered through eNom. Plus, it sounds speculative, and if there is no credible evidence to suggest something, why mention it. -- Hawaiian717 (talk) 23:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Other sites

I notice that some pictures have disappeared from Airliners.net since I last looked at the site a couple of years ago. I assume these were removed by disaffected members who have since moved elsewhere? What other sites have been established by such people? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bastie (talk • contribs) 04:29, 12 December 2008

Specifically, I'd like to know more about this image, taken in 2003 - which Concorde is depicted here, and where was it taken? Bastie (talk) 10:52, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Notability?

The page at the moment is entirely based on citations from the website itself, with no third party references. I believe this page should be deleted as it is largely an advertisement for the site in question. I would also question the notability of the website, and without third party references to prove its notability, surely it should be deleted? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noelmg (talk • contribs) 14:08, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

I beg to differ: http://www.salon.com/2007/04/27/askthepilot229/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.250.1.215 (talk) 00:15, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Controversy section

A substantial part of the article is a “controversy” section. The problem with that is that it is 100% original research and links to the site.

Alas, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and cannot rely on original research. We’re supposed to say what reliable sources say about a topic. Especially when the topic is as controversial as a “controversy”.