Talk:Steve Kubby

From Free Talk Live

Rather than copying Wikipedia verbatim, which causes all the links in the article to become broken, we should either:

• Have all our Steve Kubby links go directly to Wikipedia
• Have our own Steve Kubby page with FTL-related information, and a link on that page to Wikipedia's article on him.

--Rabidfurby 19:40, 2 February 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

I think we can do a better Steve Kubby page than Wikipedia, it's just that we care more ... I thought I fixed most links --CorrosionX 19:44, 2 February 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

I really think FTL pages on issues should not be mirrors of Wikipedia articles that we then edit. It is unmanageable. For example, what if there's a factual error in the Wikipedia article that's now duplicated here? If it's fixed there, it won't be fixed here unless someone updates it. If someone does update it with the most recent Wikipedia version, how do we go about merging the edits we've made with edits made on Wikipedia?

Issues pages should be an explanation of the topic as it relates to the show, and arguments pro/con on that issue from a libertarian perpsective. A link to the Wikipedia article, if it exists, is great. But I don't think we should turn our wiki into a Libertarian-slanted Wikipedia. --Rabidfurby 02:58, 3 February 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

I think it should be something like a libertarian-slanted Wikipedia, after all Wikipedia is mainstream-slanted in its objectivity (simply because of the mass of ordinary people on it) I fixed the Wikipedia links, granted there's too much, but I figured nobody could've make a page on him this complete without plagiarizing a little... if something's wrong we'll correct it, that's the cool thing about wikis :) --CorrosionX 11:40, 3 February 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

Sorry, I should have made my comment about the libertarian-slanted Wikipedia clearer. Wikipedia documents facts. We should document ideas - specifically, libertarian ideas. Our articles can and should contain facts, but they do not need to be anywhere near as detailed as most WP articles are - if someone wants to learn about the subject in depth, they'll go to Wikipedia.

I think the goal of documenting Libertarian ideas is made more difficult by copying the Wikipedia article over verbatim. Most of our articles will, by necessity, contain POV text. (can you come up with any libertarian arguments in favor of keeping Steve Kubby imprisoned, for example?) Because WP has such a strict NPOV policy, their articles are written in such a way that if we try to insert our Libertarian POV into the article, it ends up looking schizophrenic - most of the article is written from a NPOV, then the last paragraph shifts to being extremely POV.

Thus, the only way to avoid having our articles sound schizophrenic is to completely rewrite them from the libertarian POV. Currently, if a new user saw this page, they would see that it looks pretty complete and isn't in need of much editing. If they are familiar at all with WP, they would notice that our text seems to be written from a NPOV, and assume that we have a similar NPOV policy, when in fact we don't. This would make the new user hesitant to edit and add POV text.

On the other hand, if we start our issues articles from scratch, copy only a bare minimum of facts from WP to explain the situation to those who've never heard of it, and tag it as stub, the incompleteness of the article encourages editing.