Dakleman

Dakleman, you are invited to the Teahouse!

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PACER

I hadn't spent much time thinking about WP from a system standpoint. Mostly I was frustrated by zealous admins who terrorize the newbies.

Imagine for a moment the overarching goal of goal of WP -- a crowd-sourced compendium of the world's knowledge. It is not limited by weight or number of pages as the Britannica is, but it has a limit to complexity. Too much and it becomes unusable. In matters of fact and history, we can write rules that keep the pages limited in number, logically connected to one another, and supported by other sources. The value of WP articles is that they are curated, that is, they have hand-written text that establishes the relevance of the various facts to one another.

When we have articles that describe different occurrences of the same type of event, like court cases, the Infobox is a great organizing technique. It is, by definition, metadata. I like your idea for a standard PACER Infobox.

{{PacerRef|CREW|Trump|2017|title=...|case-state=XX|case-district=...|pacer-num=...|docket=yes|doc-number=...|att-number=...|at=paragraph #|pages=...|page=...|pdf-page=...}}

PACER is probably the most unfriendly database offered by the government. That's good for them; it increases the number of paid pages a user must access. Translating cases of interest from PACER to WP is a good thing. It takes a friggin hour to build pages like NAACP v Trump. My only fear is that someone builds a bot to do it automagically. Then, instead of the nineteen notable cases we have in List of lawsuits involving Donald Trump, we get the ninety open cases. John Jones' pro se appeal for a habeus corpus hearing is not of general interest. Who wants to see it should go direct to PACER.

It seems that editors and admins fall into areas of interest to them. That's fine, but it leads to different standards in different areas. Some people don't think ACLU v. Trump and Pence is important. By contrast, we have a full fledged article about a nighway in NJ that is five miles long New Jersey Route 53. What is tragically wrong in all parts of WP is pages that are obsolete. A new article is automatically put on a list to review. There it get the attention of zealots. The old pages molder. New information, stuff written in the present tense, is from 2012.

The most valuable things you (we) could add to the PACER infobox are immutable "filed" and "closed" date fields. Right now we use the "Decided date" field for multiple purposes. That is a violation of third-form-normality. A bot could update the closure date and trigger a request for an editor to finish the story. Plenty of these Trump cases will be closed for lack of standing. We need to keep an eye on them lest we fill WP with hundreds of unfinished stories. At least then we wouldn't have a bunch of abandoned articles.

Waddaya think? Rhadow (talk) 11:36, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Rhadow I think you have misunderstood my intent. See my sandbox for demo of draft templates and discussion on the related talk page. Your idea would be a nifty tool for initial page creation, but kind of impractical for day-to-day usage, precisely because it is not trivial to gather the required information. Without someone placing stuff in the Recap archive, it's not even free. Dakleman (talk) 16:21, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Also, one thing you ran afoul of is the scale of Wikipedia. On a company internal wiki, it is common practice to link to missing articles and use the link to create the article. Wikipedia caches generated HTML pages for lower CPU overhead so such a practice leaves red-linked articles even after the article is created. So it is better practice to create the article first, and failing that to "WP:PURGE" the cache of the red-linked source page. Dakleman (talk) 16:34, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Getting lawsuit articles reviewed

How long does it take your lawsuit articles to be reviewed? I have a backlog, some as long as a month. Rhadow (talk) 13:59, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Rhadow, I really don't depend on the review of others as part of my workflow. Especially as most of the cases where I have made contributions are pending cases with multi-month timescales. Dakleman (talk) 18:07, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Women in Red World Contest

Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale!

Category:Wikipedians interested in abstract algebra has been nominated for deletion

Category:Wikipedians interested in abstract algebra has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Marcocapelle (talk) 12:25, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:PacerRef

Template:PacerRef has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. GoingBatty (talk) 01:43, 24 March 2024 (UTC)