4 ms·

See also Cox's Clock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox's_timepiece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox's_timepiece I'm sure Wikipedia used to have a much better

See also Cox's Clock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox's_timepiece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox's_timepiece I'm sure Wikipedia used to have a much better write up, and more info on other clocks of a similar type. It's a shame they started on deleting and merging so much of the historic and esoterica - they lost a lot of accuracy and good data in the process. Now the best write up and photo is at http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/oddclocks/oddclocks.htm http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/oddclocks/oddclocks...

neotek 9y ago
Off topic, but I have never understood Wikipedia's intense drive to rid itself of anything interesting or unusual or esoteric. It's text in a database, you're not running out of space, nor are you diminishing the quality of other articles!
- Amorymeltzer 9y ago
  It's an encyclopedia; its content should be encyclopedic. A website that holds on to everything else would be something different. While that's also fine, it's a different project with a different goal.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    I know citing definitions only gets you so far, but the first definition Google provides for encyclopedic is "comprehensive in terms of information."
    - yoz-y 9y ago
      If the content starts to touch topics which are too niche, there is a risk that no-one will be able to verify it and the information will become unreliable.
      - Double_a_92 9y ago
        Where would be a good place to actually store that niche knowledge? I agree that it doesn't really belong on Wikipedia... But it could still be valuable. Maybe even more valuable than "normal" content because if it's lost it's lost for good.
        hobofan 9y ago
        Maybe Wikidata if the knowledge can be expressed in a somewhat structured way? They don't have the deletion as Wikipedia does, AFAIK.
        yoz-y 9y ago
        In an ideal world, on the free decentralized web of interconnected webpages indexed by search engines and archived in several places for posterity. In the current state, I suppose something like Wikia but for anything? It definitely deserves some place.
        seiferteric 9y ago
        Amazingly I got useful information on an angelfire website the other day... hope things like that stay around forever.
        JetSpiegel 9y ago
        Blog it and crawl it with the Internet Archive
        gowld 9y ago
        wikia.com? Your own wiki? Talk pages on Wikipedia?
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    But the public perception of encyclopedic has changed since the marriage of data storage with computation. A printed volume has limitations that do not exist in a database or a filesystem. A wiki encyclopedia can easily preserve all information ever added to it, and still present it through as many interfaces as it likes. If articles are tagged with enough metadata, it would not be extraordinarily difficult to produce all of the following automatically, with no further human intervention: abridged dictionary, unabridged dictionary, single-volume encyclopedia, multi-volume encyclopedia, single-disc encyclopedia, all math and science, all history, all art, all art minus the webcomics, all meaningful human knowledge, every last bit of trivia ever recorded, and everything written by anyone named Steven or Stephen. It could be like moderating an entire library with the Slashdot system and then setting the default browse level to +4 or +5. But instead, the moderator-tyrants delete anything that they believe to be (-1, unimportant), and they can't be effectively metamoderated by the community.
  - triplesec 9y ago
    And this is the problem with putting online and adhering to C19th definitions of information optima. It's time for a new format and more adaptive information metaformat.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I'm much more an inclusionist than a deletionist. Still, taken to an extreme, it's not hard to see the problem with a vast number of articles about obscure and hard to verify topics that are poorly maintained. They're just text in a database but they can bring down the overall level of the encyclopedia.
  - da_chicken 9y ago
    Yeah, I think poorly maintained or particularly obscure articles should simply be flagged as such for the user. If it's really poor or has major problems which cannot be fixed, sure, go ahead and delete it, but deleting documents just because they're rarely accessed doesn't seem like the point of Wikipedia. At the very least, the content could be put into a long term archive of some sort instead of outright deleted. I mean, database partitioning exists for a reason.
    - taneq 9y ago
      Maybe they could have something like the 'show comments rated over x' feature on Slashdot? By default you only get curated high quality articles but you can choose to lower the bar?
- dwc 9y ago
  I agree, and I've made this point myself in the past. Notability standards do serve a purpose, but it should no longer have to do with a scarcity that doesn't exist to the same degree as with printed material.
- triplesec 9y ago
  You can look up the version histories, but that's rather manual and labour-intensive. Unless someone feels like writing a script or two for that...
  - nugi 9y ago
    Anyone know if such a script exists?
rvern 9y ago
I cannot find much valuable content on deletionpedia.org in general and nothing interesting about clocks. If you know about articles with valuable information that were lost, you can ask an administrator to give you the page's text. Full edit history for all deleted pages is kept and more than a hundred administrators are happy to give it to you, it's just not publicly viewable because it can contain copyright violations, personal information, and so on.
svat 9y ago
Looking at the history of that Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cox%27s_timepiece&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cox%27s_timepiece... I don't see any major deletions, so I doubt Wikipedia ever had a longer writeup of this at any point. (Unless something was deleted from even the history, for containing defamation or copyright violation.) Please feel free to add the info though, if you can find verifiable/reliable source to cite for it.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  I did spend a few mins in the history on both pages trying to find a reference to what I had in mind. Perhaps it was copyright or a see-also to something more notable - I doubt I'd have a positive memory of defamation. It's long enough ago I can't remember the exact route through that rabbit hole. Nonetheless the other point stands that much has been trimmed that seems like should easily meet the bar of adequate notability.
  - svat 9y ago
    My experience of Wikipedia is that very little is deleted if it has citations to a reliable source (like a book by a reputed publisher, say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...). Notability can be the reason for deletion of an article, especially about people or companies or bands (because typically the people involved create the article), but usually, having citations in reliable sources generally implies notability as well. (At least, that's my impression. You can gain your own impression by looking at history, e.g. for article-deletion, here's the discussion/debate log from a day in the middle of last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2017_July_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... ) Unfortunately, stuff that someone wrote on Wikipedia by themselves (without reference to some other source) does tend to get deleted, even if the person who wrote happened to be an expert… but that's the goal of Wikipedia: to summarized published material, rather than to contain original material. (See the “No original research” policy page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research ) This policy does mean there's less useful information on Wikipedia than there could potentially be, but there do exist people who make up stuff, so having uncited material is problematic.
cbsmith 9y ago
Somewhat related would be Atmos clocks. I see them on eBay listed for surprisingly low cost.

neotek 9y ago

Off topic, but I have never understood Wikipedia's intense drive to rid itself of anything interesting or unusual or esoteric. It's text in a database, you're not running out of space, nor are you diminishing the quality of other articles!

Amorymeltzer 9y ago
It's an encyclopedia; its content should be encyclopedic. A website that holds on to everything else would be something different. While that's also fine, it's a different project with a different goal.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  I know citing definitions only gets you so far, but the first definition Google provides for encyclopedic is "comprehensive in terms of information."
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    If the content starts to touch topics which are too niche, there is a risk that no-one will be able to verify it and the information will become unreliable.
    - Double_a_92 9y ago
      Where would be a good place to actually store that niche knowledge? I agree that it doesn't really belong on Wikipedia... But it could still be valuable. Maybe even more valuable than "normal" content because if it's lost it's lost for good.
      - hobofan 9y ago
        Maybe Wikidata if the knowledge can be expressed in a somewhat structured way? They don't have the deletion as Wikipedia does, AFAIK.
      - yoz-y 9y ago
        In an ideal world, on the free decentralized web of interconnected webpages indexed by search engines and archived in several places for posterity. In the current state, I suppose something like Wikia but for anything? It definitely deserves some place.
      - seiferteric 9y ago
        Amazingly I got useful information on an angelfire website the other day... hope things like that stay around forever.
      - JetSpiegel 9y ago
        Blog it and crawl it with the Internet Archive
      - gowld 9y ago
        wikia.com? Your own wiki? Talk pages on Wikipedia?
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  But the public perception of encyclopedic has changed since the marriage of data storage with computation. A printed volume has limitations that do not exist in a database or a filesystem. A wiki encyclopedia can easily preserve all information ever added to it, and still present it through as many interfaces as it likes. If articles are tagged with enough metadata, it would not be extraordinarily difficult to produce all of the following automatically, with no further human intervention: abridged dictionary, unabridged dictionary, single-volume encyclopedia, multi-volume encyclopedia, single-disc encyclopedia, all math and science, all history, all art, all art minus the webcomics, all meaningful human knowledge, every last bit of trivia ever recorded, and everything written by anyone named Steven or Stephen. It could be like moderating an entire library with the Slashdot system and then setting the default browse level to +4 or +5. But instead, the moderator-tyrants delete anything that they believe to be (-1, unimportant), and they can't be effectively metamoderated by the community.
- triplesec 9y ago
  And this is the problem with putting online and adhering to C19th definitions of information optima. It's time for a new format and more adaptive information metaformat.
ghaff 9y ago
I'm much more an inclusionist than a deletionist. Still, taken to an extreme, it's not hard to see the problem with a vast number of articles about obscure and hard to verify topics that are poorly maintained. They're just text in a database but they can bring down the overall level of the encyclopedia.
- da_chicken 9y ago
  Yeah, I think poorly maintained or particularly obscure articles should simply be flagged as such for the user. If it's really poor or has major problems which cannot be fixed, sure, go ahead and delete it, but deleting documents just because they're rarely accessed doesn't seem like the point of Wikipedia. At the very least, the content could be put into a long term archive of some sort instead of outright deleted. I mean, database partitioning exists for a reason.
  - taneq 9y ago
    Maybe they could have something like the 'show comments rated over x' feature on Slashdot? By default you only get curated high quality articles but you can choose to lower the bar?
dwc 9y ago
I agree, and I've made this point myself in the past. Notability standards do serve a purpose, but it should no longer have to do with a scarcity that doesn't exist to the same degree as with printed material.
triplesec 9y ago
You can look up the version histories, but that's rather manual and labour-intensive. Unless someone feels like writing a script or two for that...
- nugi 9y ago
  Anyone know if such a script exists?

rvern 9y ago

I cannot find much valuable content on deletionpedia.org in general and nothing interesting about clocks. If you know about articles with valuable information that were lost, you can ask an administrator to give you the page's text. Full edit history for all deleted pages is kept and more than a hundred administrators are happy to give it to you, it's just not publicly viewable because it can contain copyright violations, personal information, and so on.

svat 9y ago

Looking at the history of that Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cox%27s_timepiece&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cox%27s_timepiece... I don't see any major deletions, so I doubt Wikipedia ever had a longer writeup of this at any point. (Unless something was deleted from even the history, for containing defamation or copyright violation.) Please feel free to add the info though, if you can find verifiable/reliable source to cite for it.

oldcynic 9y ago
I did spend a few mins in the history on both pages trying to find a reference to what I had in mind. Perhaps it was copyright or a see-also to something more notable - I doubt I'd have a positive memory of defamation. It's long enough ago I can't remember the exact route through that rabbit hole. Nonetheless the other point stands that much has been trimmed that seems like should easily meet the bar of adequate notability.
- svat 9y ago
  My experience of Wikipedia is that very little is deleted if it has citations to a reliable source (like a book by a reputed publisher, say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...). Notability can be the reason for deletion of an article, especially about people or companies or bands (because typically the people involved create the article), but usually, having citations in reliable sources generally implies notability as well. (At least, that's my impression. You can gain your own impression by looking at history, e.g. for article-deletion, here's the discussion/debate log from a day in the middle of last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2017_July_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... ) Unfortunately, stuff that someone wrote on Wikipedia by themselves (without reference to some other source) does tend to get deleted, even if the person who wrote happened to be an expert… but that's the goal of Wikipedia: to summarized published material, rather than to contain original material. (See the “No original research” policy page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research ) This policy does mean there's less useful information on Wikipedia than there could potentially be, but there do exist people who make up stuff, so having uncited material is problematic.

cbsmith 9y ago

Somewhat related would be Atmos clocks. I see them on eBay listed for surprisingly low cost.