Portal talk:Speculative fiction/Selected works

Additions reverted edit

Latest comment: 4 years ago13 comments3 people in discussion

I have have reverted[1] a series of additions to this list by User:Nihonjoe, because they added a disproportionate number of articles related to three topics: Harry Potter, Star Trek and Star Wars.

This series of edits by Nihonjoe left the portal with 217 articles in the "selected works" list, of which 20 were about Harry Potter, 20 about Star Trek, and 6 about Star Wars. Thats' 21% of the portal being about those 3 topics, which is completely disproportionate per WP:WEIGHT. Speculative fiction has a long and very broad history, and these additions massively biased the portal towards a small subset of speculative fiction in contemporary mass media.

These edits added many other articles, which I have not evaluated. I am sure that some of them were appropriate additions, but don't have the energy to evaluate them all. So I make this revert without prejudice to some of them having a place in a list which strives for balance rather than raw numbers.

Here is the lists of articles in these three topics:

Harry Potter

Star Trek

Star Wars

--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:48, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Note: this appears to be related to Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 November 21#Portal:Harry_Potter. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:03, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
- @BrownHairedGirl: What is wrong with you? I added articles directly related to this portal. You have no valid reason for undoing these additions, especially since I added many additional articles clearly not related to Harry Potter. The articles added were generally featured, A, B, and GA articles. You clearly have no clue what you're doing (reverting edits you "don't have the energy to evaluate"), and are just trying to wreak havoc within portals about which you know absolutely nothing. Not to mention posting about tyour actions only here, where you know noone but me will see them. Please, go try to be "productive" elsewhere. You're causing nothing but problems here with your ham-fisted attempts to do whatever it is you're trying to do. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 16:40, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply
  - @Nihonjoe: less of the personal attacks, please.

I pinged you, and I also noted this at the linked RFD, so I was most certainly not trying to hide anything.

My post above explains very clearly why I reverted: because your edits unbalanced the list. I took quite a chunk of my time to document and explain the problem very clearly, but you have chosen to ignore that, and to reinstate your preferred version without even acknowledging the analysis which I took the time to write.

Per WP:BRD, you made a bold edit; I reverted; now we discuss.

Please self-revert your latest edit,[2] withdraw your bogus allegation of vandalism in your end summary (see WP:NOTVAND), strike the personal attack, and resume discussion. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:28, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

@BrownHairedGirl: Your edit was vandalism. You even said that you "[didn't] have the energy to evaluate" everything. If you had, you would have seen that, while there were a good number of HP, SW, and ST articles added, there were even more articles added (to more than one part of the portal, mind you) that were not any of those three. Your edit also undid some sorting I had done (with the other parts of the portal), thereby causing duplicate entries in the portal article listings. Because you didn't have the energy to actually evaluate what you thought you were doing, your edits constitute vandalism (albeit more laziness than anything else).

Your clear antagonistic approach to everything to do with portals is likely based on your interaction with the auto-portal maker (I forget his username). He is not me, and I am not him. Everything I've done with regard to portals has been very deliberate and planned out. None of the portal work I've done has been simple button-pushing to generate a portal from some template somewhere. Just because you don't see the value in portals doesn't mean all portals are what that other guy made them. Every articles added to the various portal parts in P:SF has been very deliberately added because it's clearly speculative fiction-related. If you can't positively impact a portal with your edits, if you can't be bothered to think through your edits before making them, if you don't have the energy to properly evaluate things beforehand to make sure you aren't actually damaging a portal with your edits, then take a vacation. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:40, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Nihonjoe: first, do read WP:VAND: vandalism is "editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose". But may edits were intended to uphold a core policy, so all your abuse has no foundation. I have not been antagonistic to you; all the antagonism has been on your side.

I clearly explained that the problem was WP:WEIGHT, because 21% of the list related to only 3 topics. I did evaluate that, and I evaluated it in some detail, but you choose not to even acknowledge it. The part which I did not evaluate was all the other changes to the list, so I explicitly noted that my revert was without prejudice to some of them having a place in a list which strives for balance rather than raw numbers.

I hoped that we would now be able to discuss the imbalance, but it seems that despite two civil requests to discuss, you prefer to continue being abusive.

So I will now edit the list to simply remove the imbalance towards the 3 topics listed above.

If you proceed to revert that without discussion, or your repeat your bogus accusations of vandalism, then I will have to raise this elsewhere. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:25, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Done. in these 3 edits,[3] I have reduced the imbalance by removing most of the articles relating to those three over-represented topics, trying to restore WP:WEIGHT. There are now:

2 articles on Harry Potter, rather than 20
2 articles on Star Trek, rather than 20
2 articles on Star Wars, rather than 6

That means that these 3 topics now amount to 3.4% of the list, rather than 21%, which is more balanced.

Other imbalances may remain; I have not checked those. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:44, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

I'm glad to see you using something other than the nuclear approach. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 19:25, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Though it looks like you broke the numbering. I've fixed that. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 19:35, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

(ec) Sigh. BRD is not "nuclear". It's basic editing process.

The only way forward was for to act unilaterally, but I would have been much happier to have had an actual discussion about it, rather than just two rounds of of your raging personal attacks and bogus accusations while you entirely ignored the substance of what I had written.

I urge you to retract the numerous personal attacks you have made on me both here and at least three other venues, and to seek some anger management training. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:41, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

You keep making edits and citing WP:WEIGHT, yet that only applies to the mainspace, not the portal namespace. To quote the very first line of it: "Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace..." (emphasis added). The articles on this page were not added arbitrarily, but taken from the list of featured, A, B, and GA articles for the appropriate topics. Since the portal serves up the pages randomly, it's unlikely someone will see every article included on one of the transclusion pages (I would guess it borders on complete improbability). So, WP:WEIGHT is not a valid argument for which articles should be included in the random article service provided by the transclusion portal. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 20:52, 27 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Nihonjoe: Please read the lead section of WP:NPOV: "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic." ... "NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects" ... "This policy is non-negotiable".

Any idea that portals are exempt from NPOV is completely contrary to that intro.

As to the idea that random selection removes NPOV issues ... if the pool from which the random selection is drawn is biased, then the selection process is biased. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:14, 28 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

BHG, I generally agree with you regarding the non-usefulness of portals, but I think you're wrong in this discussion. For a start, your statement at the start of this discussion "Thats' 21% of the portal being about those 3 topics ..." is incorrect (the Selected Works is just one of many parts of the portal). Even if it was correct it's hardly something worth getting bothered about. 21% means that a reader who looks at 3 random works has about a 1% chance of all 3 being from those topics which isn't really a problem. What you've just quoted is about how encyclopedic content is written and it's a bit of a stretch to apply that to a pool of pages used for a random selection. It would be much more collegiate to (rather than reverting) point out any problems you perceive and leave the portal maintainer(s) to adjust the selection. DexDor^(talk) 20:08, 28 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

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