User talk:JzG/Archive 84

Di Stefano whitewashing begins?

See Talk:Giovanni Di Stefano (fraudster)#Erroneous move to "legal counsellor" - I suspect you might have some thoughts on this... Prioryman (talk) 00:44, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Not a good idea and recording

I worked as a recording engineer when I was younger and would encourage you to consider recording with your Bach choir, just keep it simple.

There were two schools of thought, German and British, about recording classical music. The former preferred multitrack recording — this was in the days before digital — while the latter would record directly to stereo if possible and often with a single pair of mics.

All it took was a hall with excellent acoustics and performers who could balance levels correctly, in other words, good musicians.

Technology has lowered the cost of high-grade recording if you keep it simple and mic prices have plummeted.

Get yourself a two-channel mic or matched pair for a few hundred and a two-channel recorder, preferably 24-bit, and make music! — Robert Greer (talk) 20:50, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

That was the way Suvi Raj Grubb preferred to do it, if I recall correctly, and I am pretty sure that's how he managed to make the farewell disc for Gerald Moore in such short order. The problem we always have is getting good enough mics; every amateur choir tends to be sop-heavy, our tenors and basses are strong and the balance is good in the venue but when we record it we've almost always found that the bass line is lost. I suspect this is because of where the mics are positioned, the fact that they are designed to pick up speech tones not sung tones, and of course the fact that you have to filter out background noise in a hall. We should try a studio day, I think, with a good engineer with proper kit. Maybe the next Douai programme, which will revisit Schoenberg's Friede Auf Erden. It's a good idea and thank you. Guy (Help!) 22:05, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Good point, good mics a must! — Robert Greer (talk) 20:48, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Company drafts

Hi JzG, just following up a comment you made elsewhere. When companies contact OTRS, why not ask them to put their drafts on their websites? That way, editors can use them as source material, as we would any other source. The objection at the moment is that source material from the company is being privileged over any other source, by not being cited, but instead being added directly to the article, with no way to tell the readers that they are reading the company's text.

That was what we always used to do when an article subject asked to add perspective. We asked him to put it on his personal website, then we were able to cite it and quote him. Primary sources are allowed to be used that way so long as they don't swamp the article. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:18, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

It's a matter of pragmatism. The aim, always is to address the concern raised. The best way to do that seems to me to be to state the concern on the talk page, and suggest how it might be addressed; this then allows for the normal ebb and flow of conversation leading to (hopefully) a mutually agreeable outcome. The Wikipedia community seems to me to prefer to engage in person and on wiki. Obviously some people (naming no names) believe it's fine to write PR copy , GFDL it and have it dropped straight into Wikipedia, but I think that is a bit simplistic and lacks the potential for the interpersonal interactions and bonds of trust which, to me, characterise Wikipedia.

Of course if someone wants to include something factual, dull and uncontentious, and we want to be able to cite it, then their own website is a good place to do that, but it remains a primary source so is no good for the tricky things such as "you say X, but it wasn't quite like that..."

My personal view only, of course. Guy (Help!) 22:42, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

What has been happening has gone beyond stating concerns on talk pages; organizations are having entire drafts ported over by editors who don't have the time, inclination or expertise to assess them. I'm not now talking about BP; there is a long list of articles where this is happening, some of them quite contentious (including the American government). It has the potential to cause Wikipedia trouble, because it means our articles are not crowd-sourced or written by independent experts, as we imply, but are being ghostwritten by the article's subjects, with the agreement of part of the Wikipedia community (it's this last part that people will find objectionable). No will care when it's a small company or a borderline-notable person, but they will care a lot if powerful interests are doing the same. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:54, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Where is the best place to start a discussion about the advice being given out by OTRS agents? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:04, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Um. Let me ask. As to wholesale porting, I suggest the vigorous application of the trusty Wikitrout. Companies are concerned about their Wikipedia presence, this is both inevitable and desirable. If people can't be trusted to understand the difference between PR puff and genuine information, then what the fuck are they doing here in the first place? No, scratch that, I know what they are doing: writing about their hockey team, their favourite band and their school. I think I just figured out the cause of the problem. Guy (Help!) 00:16, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

You're undoubtedly correct about the lack of editorial responsibility. But I view that as a systems problem, not something we can write off as a failure by a handful of specific editors. If our system relies on the cluefulness of a self-selecting assortment of pseudonymous volunteers to vet material produced by a megabudget professional PR operation, then we've set ourselves up for these kinds of failures. It would be great if we had a sudden influx of clueful, dedicated volunteers, but we have to face the reality that our pool of clueful editors - never abundant in the best of times - has dried up and doesn't look likely to rebound anytime soon. Any solution that's critically reliant on sound judgement by random Wikipedians is unrealistic.

We need to give editors a better framework in which to handle these issues. I don't know what that framework would look like, but the current model doesn't work that well. Look at the articles related to the Transcendental Meditation movement; you have a group of clueful, experienced editors - many with real-world expertise in the precepts of evidence-based medicine - who are struggling, not very successfully, to vet massive amounts of promotional material produced by editors directly affiliated with the movement. Even in that best-case scenario, it's a full-time job to try to parse their proposals for fairness, accuracy, and balance; we can expect no help (and, in some cases, active hindrance) from the powers that be; and we're the sole firewall keeping our articles on the subject from mirroring the TM movement's press kit. It's not a great system.

On a separate note, I wanted to thank you for your comments and engagement on the issue. It's refreshing to have a serious discussion with someone who's thoughtful, clueful, and of a different opinion than myself. :) MastCell ^Talk 19:26, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Likewise - though I think we agree much more than we disagree, it's really only perspective as far as I see it. And yes, it is a systemic problem. You cannot learn good editorial judgment by editing articles on professional wrestlers, debating only with others who share your enthusiasm. The loss of people like Geogre is keenly felt. Even the FA process tends to reward style over substance on occasion, and the GA process does nothing else as far as I can see. Giano is spot on about that, I think. The lack of an editorial board was less of a problem in the barn raising days but now I think it is a material impediment. There is nobody to rule on content issues, and (more importantly) nobody to identify editorial priorities. It's crowdsourcing without direction, without a plan, and without meaningful quality metrics. Do we even want to fix that? I think some people do, but the resistance to flagged revisions shows that many more do not. I personally believe that we should enable flagged revisions based on a very lightweight process for individual articles, and systematically for all BLPs, but the community does not want that. Is the community really a community, a democracy, a mob, a teenaged gang? I honestly don't know any more. Most of the time the right thing gets done but it fails often enough to be a real concern. Back in the day, Uncle G would probably have fixed up the article and been showered with praise. We need to protect and reward people who are genuine editors, not dilettantes like me. Guy (Help!) 21:46, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

How

How can I get my page back? I didn't mean for it to be anything malicious to this site, I was only trying to create a page for a show that's been getting really popular and is quite deserving of one, and I want to do it right, so how do I get it back? --Matt723star (talk) 16:13, 30 March 2013 (UTC)