Delete Tinwiki section on 9/11?

As some members of ATS may know, I've drafted quite a few entries on the Tinwiki - mainly (if not entirely) in the UFO section of the Tinwiki.

I have also made several attempts to promote participation in the Tinwiki by members of ATS (for example, see this thread and this post). (I'm also planning one or two more such attempts to promote participation in the near future).

In short, I've been quite a supporter of the Tinwiki.

So, some of you may be surprised to learn that I am seriously asking whether an entire section of the Tinwiki should simply be deleted...

This question arises in my mind since I've recently been through all of the entries in the 9/11 section of the Tinwiki.

It didn't take very long.

There are only 17 entries in the 9/11 section.

Most of those entries are only a few lines long.

Having been through all the 9/11 entries, I wonder whether the entire section should simply be deleted.

Has anyone else read all these entries?

If so, what do you make of them?

I think they give a rather bad impression of the Tinwiki.

Indeed, it is hard to take the Tinwiki seriously when it contains such a poor section.

Have a look for yourself at:
The 9/11 section of the Tinwiki.

It is useful to compare that section with some of the relevant entries on Wikipedia, such as

(1) The main Wikipedia entry on 9/11 conspiracytheories;

(2) The numerous additional Wikipedia pages on various (more specific) topics, including this one;

(3) The numerous additional Wikipedia pages on specific individuals associated with the 9/11 “Truth Movement”, such as David Ray Griffin.

One of the few substantial entries in the 9/11 section is this one: Problems with official account of September 11 2001.

Although one of the moderators has stated that the Tinwiki is intended to be "factual, with out bias, and of a neutral standpoint", most of the 9/11 entries only give one side of the story. They are heavily biased towards certain conspiracy theories.

One rather extreme example of such bias is the subsection entitled "Alleged hijackers still alive", the contents of which are (to put it midly) highly controversial. That subsection simply states the following:

"The official story alleges that four planes were hijacked by a group of 19 terrorists, at least 7 of which are alive to this day"

Note the absence of any caveat in relation to the assertion that "at least 7 of which are alive to this day". (This is merely one example of a bias, or poor writing, that is prevalent in the 9/11 entries).

Furthermore, considering the limited amount of material, there are a surprisingly high number of basic factual errors. For example, the same entry on the allegedProblems with official account of September 11 2001 contains the following:

Several employees of the Israeli company, Odigo, who were tenants of the World Trade center received warnings to leave the building two hours prior.

There are several problems with the quoted statement about Odigo, not least being that Odigo were not in fact "tenants of the World Trade center". Odigo's offices were in fact four blocks away from the World Trade Center.

Some of the 9/11 entries on Tinwiki are simply very badly garbled. For example, the main Tinwiki entry in relation to 9/11 contains a section which appears to relate to President Bush's rather muted reaction upon being informed of the crash of the second aircraft on 9/11. That section states the following:

Mr. President at the school
After getting "informed" from his secretary, something was burn in him but he says nothing. Was a "single word" the signal to stop th operation. Remember ist a basic rule to use a-weapons only with the presients obligation. A little timeshift (alter the school-stream by 10 miniutes) the would it make possible.

I would be surprised if many people could understand that paragraph (without relying upon detailed prior knowledge of relevant conspiracy theories).

Obviously, quite a few changes to the relevant material could be made but, frankly, it would probably be better to start from scratch.

So, should the entire 9/11 section on Tinwiki simply be deleted?

If the current entries represent the best that can be achieved on the Tinwiki in relation to 9/11 (due to a lack of interest or other reasons), I really think something drastic needs to be done.

All the best,

Isaac

[edit on 7-5-2008 by IsaacKoi]

I dont think that anything should be delted, mainly join alot of them together so we have 1 large article about 9/11 rather than 17 small stubs. I think to delete it would be wrong, theres is information there; and thats what tinwiki was set up for. i think we just need to sort that info out, get rid of some sentaces, bind them together and put it in order and so on.

Fox

Originally posted by ProTo Fire Fox
i think we just need to sort that info out, get rid of some sentaces, bind them together and put it in order and so on.

I'm afraid the problems are probably deeper than that.

It is hard to read more than a few sentences in most of the 9/11 entries without coming across several serious errors and/or biased statements.

All the best,

Isaac

Why dont we edit them ? it would make sence TinWiki can be edtted by anyone. Ill make a start after a finsh typing this. If you'll help as well i hope some other will and then we'll talk about moving stuff and so on, But i think that moving stuff is WOS and Optimist, or can just anyone move them >?

Edit -

Ive just had a look on it on tinwiki, i think if we sort it out we'll have to figure it out as a team. theres no than i thought. I guess e'll have to wait for Optimist's and WOS's opinion.

[edit on 7-5-2008 by ProTo Fire Fox]

Originally posted by IsaacKoi
If the current entries represent the best that can be achieved on the Tinwiki in relation to 9/11 (due to a lack of interest or other reasons), I really think something drastic needs to be done.

I do not believe that what is presented on 9-11 is the best that can be achieved on tinWiki. However, for all of the short comings that we see, I think you hit the nail right on the head, what we are seeing there is due to a lack of participation in tinWiki.

To try and make the tinWiki more appealing, we have been trying to change the skins to make the site look more attractive. However we have come to the conclusion that we will need SkepticOverlord's aide in this matter. So maybe if we are successful in that we can get more people interested in editing. Which is of course what tinWiki is all about.

I don't think that deleting the 9-11 section is the solution, I just think we need more people with interest in the subject to work on the articles. So in that aspect I suppose I am more optimistic in the future of that section. Because of course if we wanted to be critical, we could point to many flaws on the site, which is a good thing. My goal is to improve the site as much as possible. So we can see what will be.

I would like to hear Optimist weigh in on the subject though as well.

What I think is, firstly, that it's great to see the serious scrutiny and criticism you post, Isaac. That's really refreshing and very healthy for tinWiki, in my opinion. The concrete actions you suggest to consider taking, seem to look different from my perspective, and that's maybe because I see some of the functions in tinWiki in a slightly different way than how I understand you see them, from what I read in your post now. I also notice I disagree with one thing Fox suggest.

As I see it, there aren't really any "sections" in tinWiki. I would rather say that tinWiki has a particular focus, as opposed to what Wikipedia has (Wikipedia pretty much aims to cover all topics in the world, basically, as long as it's deemed 'noteworthy', or what the term is). I think it would probably be nice to have tinWiki's area of focus even more clearly defined, but generally I think it should be 'somewhat' clear to ATSers and many other visitors what tinWiki wants to collect and present information about. Every topic that looks like it deserves its own page, should have one -- even if it doesn't start out with a very complete and long article. That's what I seem to maybe take a different view from Fox on.

None of the articles in tinWiki would really have to link to any category page (which it finally dawned on me yesterday is how they get listed in such category pages). But the category pages are nice tools for visitors to be able to navigate information. Another practical tool for this purpose is internal links in an article's text, from terms that have their own articles. Also, sometimes it may be practical to offer a little link section called "See also", in case there are articles that didn't get linked to from terms in the article which the visitor is reading, for example. It's all about information (but while keeping in mind that tinWiki is concerned with only certain types of topics, though), and about how to make that information manageable and easy to find and maneuver through, and so on, for the reader.

If a topic that warrants having a page/article just for that topic, presently has a really poor article, then I think the article should just be gone through and the sentences, and maybe paragraphs or even whole sections, that just don't live up to like a 'minimum standard' or something like that should be removed, if they can't be improved in a reasonably practical way. If there's lots of talk in an article, that is basically just outside of what article text is supposed to be, it can be deleted, and what is 'salvageable' can remain in the article. But I wouldn't agree that deleting a "section" is something that serves the goal of creating and presenting information. If, say, two or three people looked over the 911 information and decided that, out of all of it, there is just three of four paragraphs worth keeping, then I think it would make sense to keep one page/article with some suitable title, and let the other, previously existing, pages be redirect pages to the page with the short article text in it. Something like that is what I think would be a nice approach to trying to clean up the 911 information. Later, if some aspects of the topic started to get much information, and deserved to be elaborated fairly much on, they could get their own pages (again), which could be linked to from the 'main' 911 article, or something like that.

But deleting absolutely all the 911 information in the encyclopedia would, as I see it, basically only make sense if not even one or two ok sentences were possible to produce in tinWiki, about the 911 topic. Remember that, even if the encyclopedia is supposed to be neutral and factual, the articles don't have to be "complete". A topic that belongs in tinWiki can have a short information presentation (short and concise), and then it an be expanded whenever readers want to contribute. That's something like how I think all info creation in tinWik should work. Categories only sort the info.

Optimist

P.S.

To try and clear up something which probably sounded very self-contradictory in my reply, I want to say that about the 911 topic(s), I imagined that there are more than one topic that are in some way big enough that they should have their own pages. But as a general 'principle' or way of reducing material, and which I somewhat thoughtlessy and confusingly used the 911 topic as an example (even if I had said already that I imagine it's perhaps to go too far to reduce all the 911 pages in tinWiki down to one page), I think it's better to reduce several pages down to one page, than deleting absolutely everything of that material, if there are, say, nine pages and most of them seem 'all over the place' and very off topic and/or make statements that can't at all be shown to have been 'proven' or to generally make sense. In such cases, my view is that one should go back to using just one page, and keep a short little summary of the topic in that page, instead of absolutely deleting 100% of info on the topic from tinWiki. And then build the material up again, in a good way and according to the guidelines.

So, I think it would be better to go back to one page if several pages on a topic have 'nothing' in them, instead of making the decision to absolutely delete everything on that topic. But my extremely humble impression was that the 911 related articles in tinWiki aren't that empty of real content, that it's really just material there for one page. I'm not in a good position to say anything about the 911 topic, though. I don't know all that much about the topic itself, at all, and if I have read all the 911 articles in tinWiki, it's a while back. I do hope the 911 material isn't that bad, but you could very easily have much better overview over the 911 material than I have, Fox, and that if not all of the material gets deleted, there is just enough left to warrant a single page. Which would be, like Isaac points out now, of course, really sad in a conspiracy theory encyclopedia. Anyway, I wanted to just try and explain that it was two things I had in mind in the other reply, namely the specific situation with the 911 material as it is now, and -- on the other hand -- content removal or 'compacting' in general..

Optimist

Originally posted by Optimist
I'm not in a good position to say anything about the 911 topic, though. I don't know all that much about the topic itself, at all, and if I have read all the 911 articles in tinWiki, it's a while back. I do hope the 911 material isn't that bad

Hi Optimist,

Well, I'm happy with any steps that improve the content of the articles placed in the 9/11 category on the Tinwiki.

As a far less radical step than deleting all the 9/11 articles in the Tinwiki, how about one of the ATS staff announcing some short-term incentives to members to improve that section of the Tinwiki?

(There are already several incentives, e.g. points for creating good new entries, but a special announcement by one of the Three Amigos or a Moderator always helps get some attention/action...)

Some ideas for the content of such an announcement:

1. I don't think many members of the 9/11 forum on ATS read many threads in the Tinwiki Working Forum, so I'd suggest making the announcement in the 9/11 forum.
   
   
2. Ask for help in improving the 9/11 category on the Tinwiki, either by creating new entries or improving existing entries.
   
   
3. Stress that Tinwiki editors keep an eye out for new entries and can award over 10,000 points for a good new entry.
   
   
4. Introduce, for a limited period, a points reward for correcting errors and/or remedying any apparent bias in existing entries in the 9/11 category on the Tinwiki. One simple way of doing this would be for members of ATS to post their suggested edits in the thread relating to the announcement, with each good suggestion getting a certain number of points (?500 points, by giving the member applause for the post containing the suggestion).
   
   
   
   A bit of healthy competition for points often seems to generate a surprising amount of effort by members of ATS.
   
   Why not harness that effort to try to improve this section of the Tinwiki?
   
   Kind Regards,
   
   Isaac
   
   
   [edit on 8-5-2008 by IsaacKoi]

Isaac,

Yes, that definitely seems like a great idea, in my opinion, about offering points and promoting a little upgrade project like that. I have thought of something that's sort of related, perhaps, recently, which is something I saw in Wikipedia, where they seem to form little projects and maybe have some members in like a project group to, precisely like what you talk about, improve articles that relate to a certain topic. Perhaps something like that would be nice to do, in addition to promoting such article improvement work through the relevant ATS forum, and offering points and so on.

On a total side note, I thought of something that I wanted to mention as a kind of illustration of what I think is a difference in tinWiki from how things are organized in ATS. So, what I thought of is to use as an example some Hotmail and Gmail features and differences: In Hotmail, you can create Folders to put your e-mails in, but in Gmail there is no such thing as Folders. Instead, Gmail uses Tags (or what it's called), where you simply assign like a keyword to an e-mail, and that means you can find all the related e-mails since they have this tag in common. But any one e-mail can have ten or even 50 tags. So that's basically what is done when putting tinWiki articles in categories. In an article, one can simply write any such descriptive category name, and the category gets created simply by writing its name in an article... And many articles, as you probably know, though, have multiple such category links in them. Clicking on the category link, which a reader can do when looking at the article, will bring up a list of all other articles that also have that same category link in them. So, in a way I picture that ATS use like "folders", while tinWiki uses "tags". It probably isn't totally accurate to say it like this, but maybe it's somewhat useful as an illustration. :-) Of course, tags and that method is fairly popular lately in lots of different websites, like del.icio.us and tons of other places.

Anyway, if the ATS administrators like what you suggest, then this could become a great development for tinWiki. :-) And if Wiki Master #1 William One Sac thinks it sounds like a good idea, I would very much like to help create something to make a like official project or such of this in the tinWiki site itself, as I mentioned, maybe add a little banner in the discussions of the articles (which is basically what I think I've seen in Wikipedia...) This could all become a very creative development as far as ways of getting stuff done in tinWiki. Like I said, your serious input and criticism and bringing light on the condition of the 911 pages is the type of activity which is what tinWiki runs on, so to say. I imagine involvement and getting engaged in what goes on in tinWiki, from people who are interested, is really the only thing that can make a collaborative wiki of this type work like it really should.

Optimist

Fox,

You have already mentioned making a team to improve the articles, which is something I think is a great idea. Such teams working on various projects are probably a very creative way to approach various tasks in tinWiki. I want to go 'spy' on Wikipedia a little bit, :-) and see if there are any practices they have come up with for that that aren't obvious enough that I would think of them myself...

About what you asked about moving pages, that is a feature that moves an article to a new title, brings along the discussion, and also brings along the version history of both the article text and of the article discussion. The ability to use that Move feature is, like you thought, part of the Sysop user account status.

I hope a Project, like you suggest, of some kind can be fairly easily put together to make it more easy and practical to collaborate on improving the 911 material, and if ATSers from the 911 forum want to help, maybe to get some point awards, it could be quite interesting. Collaborating in teams like that is probably also something that would be very good practice as a way of doing things in tinWiki, since my impression is that some -- however, far from all... -- who have done things in tinWiki work on a more personal basis and maybe don't take into use that extra power, so to say, that can lay in getting feedback and giving feedback and making it more of a collaborative effort.... Of course, there generally aren't very many people in tinWiki (incredibly I think there's more than 2000 registered users, though...., which are maybe most spam bots (?)).

Optimist

I have now created a Project page dedicated to the improvement of the 9/11 articles. The idea is that any and all resources that could help the work should be readily available here, and discussing the improvement work can be done here and, of course, in this ATS thread (and other threads that one might want to create for the purpose).

Let me know what you think about this. Feel free to make changes, additions, and improvements to the Project page, or you can also ask me to make changes if you aren't totally comfortable with how the wiki codes and so on work (well, not that I am, either...). I hope this will be a helpful tool.

Optimist


edit: corrected the links

[edit on 11-5-2008 by Optimist]

Originally posted by Optimist
I have now created a Project page dedicated to the improvement of the 9/11 articles. The idea is that any and all resources that could help the work should be readily available here, and discussing the improvement work can be done here and, of course, in this ATS thread (and other threads that one might want to create for the purpose).

Let me know what you think about this.

Hi Optimist,

I think the Project page is a good first step, but attention needs to be drawn to it.

As I've mentioned above, I think relatively few members of ATS visit the Tinwiki working forum (i.e. this forum). This is fairly apparent from the relatively low numbers of views of each thread.

I presume that relatively small numbers of people have visited the Project page since it was created several days ago.

Hence my suggestion that an announcement should be made on the 9/11 forum.

Even if the Mods do not agree with the suggestion I made above of announcing on the 9/11 forum a short-term improvement campaign with points being awarded by moderators (or Tinwiki editors?) for good suggestions for corrections/amendments (in addition to points for new entries), I think it is worth you at least posting on the 9/11 forum giving a brief introduction to the Tinwiki and asking participants in that forum to help.

The 9/11 forum can be found: HERE.

All the best,

Isaac

Isaac,

Great suggestion. I'm not among those most experienced in the forums, I must admit, but I have now attempted to post a message in the 9/11 forum, of the type I understand you to suggest. If you want to take a look, here is that thread. Comments and input of any kind are welcome.

Optimist