subject: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> For reasons unknown to me, the arbitration committee currently only
> accepts cases directly referred to it by you. This should be changed
> ASAP.

The reason is that they were still in the process of working out
internal procedures when I pressured them to get going on some real
cases.  I did that because some sysops were starting to feel a need to
be more aggressive than our traditions would support out of a growing
sense that we were in a state of anarchy where trolls were getting
ever more bold.

The arbitration committee agreed to handle some emergency cases, but
prefers to go slowly in figuring out all their procedures otherwise.

> What we always do: Refine our processes. It's a delicate balance. If you
> have too many rules, people feel constrained by them, which causes
> unhappiness. If you have too few, people disagree about interpreting them,
> which causes conflict. Right now I think we can deal with a little more
> unhappiness if it gives us a little less conflict.

*nod*

--Jimbo


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] the proliferation of ridiculous titular naming schemes

body:
James Duffy wrote:

> The problem is that most people where titles are not used see them as
> some form of foppish irrelevance and don't understand that people in
> states with titles are often known at different points of their career
> by personal name only, by title and by a combination of both. It would
> be nutty, for example, to write an article about 'Henry Coyningham'.
> He is known variously as Henry Mountcharles, Lord Mountcharles and the
> Earl of Mountcharles. To stop people writing 'Henry Coyningham' to
> provocatively cause confusion (as part of their campaign against
> titles) he ended up having to change his name by deedpoll to Henry
> Mountcharles but that too doesn't stop confusion among those who have
> never heard or don't remember his first name but know 'Lord
> Mountcharles' as the guy who holds rock concerts at Slane Castle and
> is an Irish politician.

After some discussions with john (I forget his full username, but he
signs 'john'), I partially agree and retract my initial complete
opposition.  However, I also still oppose using titles uniformly, even
in cases where they are not the standard way to refer to the person.
For example, [[Bertrand Russell]] should be there, because he was not an
Earl until relatively near the end of his life, and in philosophy and
mathematics journals, where he is best-known, he is almost always
referred to as "Bertrand Russell", not as "Lord Russell" or anything of
that sort.

I wouldn't object to the first line of the article being "Bertrand
Russell, after [[year]] the 3rd Earl Russell, ...".

-Mark


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
I'm only joking, so no one take me too seriously here, but I think
writing an ALLCAPS LETTER DEMANDING IMMEDIATE ACTION is a bannable
offense in and of itself.

It's very difficult to imagine that this person is really serious, or
just trying to be a pain in the ass.  No one needs to apologize for
disregarding completely lunatic positions.

Anticapitalist, Wikipedia is not anticapitalist.  It's an
encyclopedia.  Canon is a famous company, and it is therefore
deserving of an encyclopedia article.

--Jimbo

anti anti wrote:

> PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
>
> MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR DELETION
> PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT PAGE IN
> WIKIPEDIA.
>
> ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA NEEDS
> PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
>
> WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO FIND A
> COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR PROPAGANDA.
>
> ANTICAPITALIST
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*.
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
anti anti wrote:

> PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
>
> MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR
> DELETION PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT
> PAGE IN WIKIPEDIA.
>
> ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
> NEEDS PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
>
> WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO
> FIND A COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR
> PROPAGANDA.

Just to add information: by the tone and content of this post and the
sorts of articles he was "removing advertisements" from, this is almost
certainly the same user that has been blocked so far under 2 or 3
different IPs, one of them an anonymizing proxy (207.44.154.35).  The
edit summaries are usually all caps and somewhat abusive, along the
lines of "THE WIKIPEDIA RULES SAY NO FUCKING COMMERCIALIZATION! STOP
PUTTING IT IN ASSHOLES!" (from [[Atlantic City, New Jersey]]).

-Mark


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
I support in principle some sort of experiment, since it seems to be
agreed that it wouldn't have any practical effects: we'd just be trying
it out to see for ourselves whether the trust metrics will really end up
corresponding to what we think are reasonable values for various people.

I think the simple "yes/no" scheme is just a little too simplistic, but
I agree that too complex is not a good idea.  The main problem is that
it simply allows lots of new accounts to add trust.  I think instead we
should use one of the "trust flow" type systems, where getting a
thumbs-up from a well-respected contributor helps out your rating a lot
more than getting a thumbs-up from someone with no reputation does.
This could be jump-started by giving Jimbo an initial level of respect
and then having it flow out to whoever he approves of, and etc.  Lots of
details to work out, of course.

-Mark


list: wikitech-l

from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pages with lots'o images

body:
On Saturday, 14th February 2004, at 10:00 (GMT), Karl Eichwalder
wrote:

> Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> writes:
>
> > I have recently seen several pages with many images on them, in a
> > way that, even thumbnailed, the pages seem cluttered and hard to
> > read.
> >
> > In (unsaved) experiments, I found that it is possible to align
> > several thumbnailed images on a single page on the right side by
> > doing this:
> >
> > {| align=right
> > |[[image:1.jpg|thumb|right|first image]]
> > [[image:2.jpg|thumb|right|second image]]
> > [[image:3.jpg|thumb|right|third image]]
> > |}
>
> Interesting :)  Is this the recommended syntax to line up images
> vertically?

I use:

    [image:...|200px]
Caption

    [image:...|200px]
Caption

    [image:...|200px]
Caption

... which looks, to my mind, neatest.

> > This is best done with thumbnails of similar size, which can be
> > achieved easily enough.
>
> It isn't that easy if images should be aligned horizontally.  I'm
> interested in a layout as follows (this is: images in a row with the
> same size but with different description texts):
>
>    +-----------+   +------------+   +------------+
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    +-----------+   +------------+   +------------+
>    |           |   |            |   +------------+
>    +-----------+   |            |
>                    |            |
>                    +------------+
>
> I get this far (centered at the middle: ........):
>
>                    +------------+
>    +-----------+   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   +------------+
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   |            |
> ...|...........|...|............|...|............|....
>    |           |   +------------+   |            |
>    +-----------+   |            |   |            |
>    |           |   |            |   +------------+
>    +-----------+   |            |   +------------+
>                    +------------+
>

Well, this would work:

  {| align="center"
    |[image:.1.|200px]|[image:.2.|200px]|[image:.3.|200px]
    |Caption 1|Caption 2| Caption 3
  |}

... but it's horribly ungainly for editing.

>                                 [ powered by Emacs/artist-mode ]

Bah, use vi! ;-)

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
james at jdforrester.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk | jdforrester at grovewood.org
jon at eh.org | jamesdforrester at hotmail.com | james.forrester at orange.net


from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration progress report #5

body:
Hi all

So, we've got some limited agreement on the thorny issue of Transparency, and
we're moving on to discussing how folks will make Requests of us (in the future,
after this temporary Jimbo-based session).

1) We plan to take evidence in public, but reserve the right to take some evidence in
private in exceptional circumstances.

2) Each arbitrator will make their own decision about how much personal information
about themselves they are willing to share, both publically, and with the rest of the
committee.

3) Arbitrators with multiple accounts on Wikipedia will disclose the usernames of
those accounts to the rest of the committee, but are not required to disclose them
publically.

4) Initially, we will keep our deliberations private, based on a semi-formal vote
amongst arbitrators. However, both Fred Bauder and The Cunctator have expressed
strong distaste for this option, so the arbitrators are far from unanimous on this point.

5) We will make the rationale for all our decisions public, based upon our private
deliberations.

-Martin


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Trust metrics

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I am not advocating anything in this post, I'm just sharing some of my
>thoughts over the past few days.
>
I'm glad you're not advocating anything, and I trust that constitutes
permission to shoot these ideas down before they get off the ground
(just kidding - I'm glad to see it articulated, although I disagree with
the approach).

Anyway, I'm not sure the eBay model improves much on what we have now,
or even on Slashdot karma. It's fairly simplified, and the reason it
works reasonably well is because it addresses a simple question - "If I
make a contract with this person I've never met, can he/she be relied on
to send me money or merchandise?" That's a straightforward question, and
eBay feedback provides just enough information to make that decision.

Our user reputation issues, much like Slashdot, are more complex, and I
don't think they should be approached by implementing metrics. If
Slashdot's system is broken, I would venture that it's partly because
they oversimplified it. The simplicity of voting somebody's feedback up
or down is appealing, but leaves behind little useful information for
others.

I also don't think the eBay model translates to Wikipedia. There's less
incentive to give positive feedback, and a bigger crowd willing to give
negative feedback. Also, without transaction-based limitations, you have
less restriction on the negativity. I would expect many users that you
or I might consider very positive contributors to have *negative*
reputations, unless we set the zero-point so low as to make the system
meaningless. I consider this probable even if we devise a way to weight
the scores. But basically, I have concerns about generating any kind of
reputation score, because it provides no context for the feedback that
went into it.

>Some possible downsides, and there are many...
>
>2.  People might be dissuaded from taking controversial and brave
>stands, if it's going to get them some negative feedback.
>
>
I think this is a huge problem for any kind of formalized feedback
system, especially given the purposes of Wikipedia. Wikipedia could turn
into a place where the content is largely a tasteless, watery gruel
because everyone is on pins and needles to avoid provoking negative
responses. In my opinion, using oversimplified feedback is a terrible
way to promote NPOV. Neutrality can be achieved by addressing
controversial issues and finding a balanced way to present them; it
can't be achieved by avoiding the controversy altogether.

I don't believe the system is broken. At most, maybe we need a little
more informational material in the Wikipedia namespace. Specifically,
something that presents ideas of how to find out information about any
given user, so people can assess that user's reputation for themselves.
We have user pages and user talk pages. People can check the links to a
user page for posts the user has signed. People can check user
contributions, and a few diff-checks of a user's more substantial
contributions can give anyone a perspective on the quality of that
user's edits. It's a little work, but if knowing more about another user
is worth it to you, it should be worth putting forth the effort.

I also think even an experiment can be dangerous, because really,
there's no such thing as an experiment here. The only way to set one up
is by getting the community involved with it, and nobody will
participate if they don't see the results. Once they see results, some
people will insist on using those results, even if we *know* that the
information is misleading. And the only way to stop the experiment would
be for Jimbo to make a very divisive decision to stop it. As a
prediction, I believe an experiment would end up as one of two things:
largely unutilized, like WikiMoney accounts, or dysfunctional like Slashdot.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Arbitrators' wiki

body:
On Feb 14, 2004, at 08:09, David Friedland wrote:
> The arbitration committee has mostly decided that there will be
> private deliberation to some extent for cases brought before the
> committee.
>
> Is it possible to set up a MediaWiki with read/write access limited
> just to arbitrators, so that we can deliberate in Wiki form?

No. If you want to speak secretly amongst yourselves, please use e-mail.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

body:
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Jimmy Wales wrote:
| Erik Moeller wrote:
|
|>For reasons unknown to me, the arbitration committee currently only
|>accepts cases directly referred to it by you. This should be changed
|>ASAP.
|
|
| The reason is that they were still in the process of working out
| internal procedures when I pressured them to get going on some real
| cases.  I did that because some sysops were starting to feel a need to
| be more aggressive than our traditions would support out of a growing
| sense that we were in a state of anarchy where trolls were getting
| ever more bold.
|
| The arbitration committee agreed to handle some emergency cases, but
| prefers to go slowly in figuring out all their procedures otherwise.

Would you consider referring the 168 issue as such a case?  As one who
was online during last night's "undelete war" I am probably biased, but
it seems to me that 168 broke a fair number of separate rules for sysops.

Nathan aka pakaran
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Arbitrators' wiki

body:
David-
> The arbitration committee has mostly decided that there will be private
> deliberation to some extent for cases brought before the committee.

> Is it possible to set up a MediaWiki with read/write access limited just
> to arbitrators, so that we can deliberate in Wiki form?

> If so, could someone who has permission and knows how please set that up
> right away so we can start using the private Wiki?

I recommend using boards.wikimedia.org for that purpose. Besides being
better for discussions, phpBB also has the advantage that it supports
creating polls.

Just tell me whether you want a separate board limited to arbitrators and
I'll set it up and assign the permissions.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Idea for a far-out project

body:
On Feb 14, 2004, at 15:43, Dan Carlson wrote:
> In a nutshell, my idea is this: Use FileMaker Pro Developer (probably
> version 7 when it comes out in a few months) to create a read-only
> offline browser for my Memory Alpha wiki content.

I use FileMaker Pro at work, and find it maddeningly uncooperative, but
then I'm mostly trying to fetch data from it for use by external
programs, which it's not really good at. (It's got its own primitive
web template language which is useless for anything I do -- rendering
custom markup to HTML with interpage links -- so I have to jump through
hoops to get the data in/out.)

As you say rendering HTML would be a bit tricky. Hypertext with
embedded links is central to the experience, I think, and if FileMaker
can't do that, well that seems like a deal-breaker to me.  Really what
it sounds like you need is an HTML viewer with a self-contained set of
documents extracted from the wiki.

Everybody's got a web browser these days; a simple static dump of a
bunch of HTML files may or may not be sufficient. There are some
scripts floating around to do that.

If you want a self-contained little app (custom interface, data
compression?, no monster file trees), there are embeddable databases
out there and certainly embeddable HTML viewers. Magnus Manske has
written a couple of experimental offline/alternate readers; one which
grabbed text out of a pre-indexed database dump and displayed it in a
wxWindows-based GUI (which has an HTML widget), another which uses an
SQLite database and a lightweight web server. You might want to check
out the Waikiki module in our CVS
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/) which has Magnus's
lightweight Wiki->HTML converter (in C++).

wxWindows is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Unix at least) and includes
an HTML viewer widget, so a minimal viewer probably wouldn't be that
hard to write. Magnus's old code might still be around somewhere...
WINOR? Something like that.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Till Westermayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi,

two points regarding trust metrics.

First: I didn't understand *when* a person gives another person trust/
distrust. Should this be related to article edits? Should one person/
distrust give trust to another person only once (and can change from up
to neutral or down, if they want?). Or could one person give trust
multiple times to others? Each of these decisions will affect the
possibility to "game".

Second: Two possible ressource (but only in German): the German online
democracy simulation game www.dol2day.de uses a person-based trust/
distrust system, where between to dol2day members there can be the
relations A trusts B, A is neutral to B, A distrusts B (and vice versa,
of course). And then there is a minor thesis about trust and possible
computer implementations (for multi agent systems) I wrote in 2000.
[http://www.westermayer.de/till/uni/studienarbei_.pdf Trust in Bots].
This is in German, too, and I don't have the time to translate it, but
maybe it (or the resources listed in the end) is helpful for developing
a trust management system for wikipedia for some.

Regards,

Till
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


subject: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

body:
Jimmy-
> Is the amount of internal squabbling getting worse or better?  My
> rough sense is that it's getting worse, but maybe I'm just tired of it
> and therefore perceiving it to be more of a problem lately.

It's getting a little worse. I think one reason is that we have devoted so
many pages and places to dealing with conflicts. The worst of all, in my
opinion, is the "Wikipedia:Conflicts between users" page. It is
effectively a public arena. Making a dispute ever more public is not a
very good idea. It attracts spectators and more combatants, and it
increases the feeling of the individuals involved that they have to "win"
to avoid public embarrassment.

Things worked better early on because you were a private mediator everyone
could talk to by email. This model, of course, is not scalable, and we
need to find a scalable one that emulates its advantages.

I think the "Conflicts between users" page should redirect to the page for
requesting mediation. I also think that mediation and arbitration need to
be "privatized" to some degree.

The mediation commiette itself is fairly ineffective as it has neither a
carrot nor a stick. For reasons unknown to me, the arbitration committee
currently only accepts cases directly referred to it by you. This should
be changed ASAP.

I think before we talk about stuff like trust metrics, we should optimize
these processes.

Another reason things have gotten worse is that we now have over 200,000
articles, and Wikipedia has reached significant prominence. We have
comprehensive pages about almost any controversial subject. These pages
naturally attract highly devoted people, but they find out that most of
the stuff they know is already covered, only that they disagree with the
*wording* of certain sentences and paragraphs.

These disputes about particular words or phrases are often the most
difficult to resolve, as there are no clear authorities either party can
cite, and NPOV simply doesn't work here. Take the recent dispute on the
[[Atheism]] page about whether to write "God" or "god": There are plenty
of sources for both variants, and it's impractical to write something like
"God, sometimes spelled god". Even the compromise that has been found - to
use a neutral word like "deity" - does not always work.

Or how do you apply NPOV to the question whether the article about 9/11
attacks should have "terrorist" in the title? Do you want to call it
[[September 11, 2001 attacks, sometimes referred to as terrorist]]? As Mav
has often said, NPOV simply doesn't work in page titles.

In my opinion, voting is a lot more appropriate for these minor disputes
than for major ones, and that should be reflected in our guidelines. Often
these questions are simply matters of personal taste, and why not let the
taste of the majority decide when there's clearly no solution that makes
both sides happy?

> What can we all do to build a sense of love and harmony?

What we always do: Refine our processes. It's a delicate balance. If you
have too many rules, people feel constrained by them, which causes
unhappiness. If you have too few, people disagree about interpreting them,
which causes conflict. Right now I think we can deal with a little more
unhappiness if it gives us a little less conflict.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] wik is back

body:
Edward-
> I see that wik has come back and has already started
> reverting.  Something needs to be done.

The easiest and most effective thing to do is for Jimbo to officially
authorize the "three revert rule". More than three reverts on the same
page per day and you're out for at least one day -- no need for either
mediation or arbitration.

If we make an exemption for vandalism, people will claim that non-vandal
edits are vandalism and that they are allowed to revert them. So maybe we
should not do this, and instead recommend that in cases of vandalism, the
user contact a sysop to a) protect the page, or b) ban the vandal.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [WikiEN-l] BAN MORWEN!

body:
anti anti wrote:
> MORWEN KEEPS BLOCKING ME! WHY?
>
> WHEN I ADDED SOME LINKS TO OPPOSING VIEWS IN AN ARTICLE, MORWEN RE-BANNED
> ME! MORWEN SHOULD BE DESYSOPED ASAP!
>
> I AM NOT A VANDAL. I TRY TO BALANCE THE EXCESS COMMERCIALIZATION AND ADS
IN
> WIKIPIDIA!
>
> IF YOU CONTINUE THIS PRACTICE YOU WILL PROVE THAT WIKIPIDIA IS NOT OPEN
AND
> CENSORS OPPOSING VIEWS!
>
> ANTICAPITALIST

Despite your evidently irrational state, I'm moderately amused, and as such,
will give you some real advice:
#1. Using all caps never helps your credibility. You either come across as
unknowledgeable about text-media communication, or attempting to "shout".
Those of us who spend a lot of time communicating in text-only fora tend to
find "shouting" uncomfortable, almost as if someone were really shouting at
us.

#2: An advertisement is something that attempts to induce those who view it
to do business with whomever it advertises. Something that gives factual,
neutral information about a company is an article, not an advertisement.

#3: If, going by a previous message, you think anarchism is "truth", or that
anarchism leads to anything except taking all the constraints off of
capitalism, you are terribly ignorant.

#4: Adding an 'opposing views' section with a list of anti-corporate topics
to every company's page is a very silly idea. Now, if you wanted to do this,
the sane way would be this: "Company X is a [[corporation]] that makes
widgets..." or something similar. Then, in the article [[Corporation]], you
would add a section something like:
== Anti-corporate philosophy ==
There is an ideology that corporations are inherently bad. Those who
subscribe to it (many of whom call themselves [[anarchist]]s or
[[anticapitalist]]s) often oppose globalization and free trading.

Just off the top of my head, anyway. (I haven't actually looked at the
corporation article, but it probably has something like this already.)

#5: The following, from your contributions lists, among others, are simply
unacceptable, even if you weren't wrong (which you are):
07:53, 2004 Feb 11 User:Angela (angela is a troll!)
00:57, 2004 Jan 23 Atlantic City, New Jersey (THE WIKIPEDIA RULES SAY NO
FUCKING COMMERCIALIZATION! STOP PUTTING IT IN ASSHOLES!)
20:21, 2004 Jan 21 Atlantic City, New Jersey (took out commercialization
again because it doesn't fucking belong there! what is wrong with you prick
assholes don't you know how to read the motherfucking rules?)
16:27, 2004 Jan 20 Atlantic City, New Jersey (took out commercialization
because it doesn't fucking belong there!)
17:48, 2004 Jan 12 World Series of Poker (why doesnt some one ban this
fucker for vandalism)
17:44, 2004 Jan 12 World Series of Poker (not on my watch fucker!)

Etcetera. When working somewhere you're fairly new to, if a large number of
people repeatedly act to undo your actions, perahps you shouldn't shout that
they're violating its policies, and instead look to see whether /you/ are.

In conclusion, calm down, take some deep breaths, try to think about why you
have irrational and excessive reactions to being corrected, and figure out
how you're going to operate successfully in a world where capitalism will
exist as long as humanity does.

-- Jake


subject: [Wikitech-l] Idea for a far-out project

body:
Dan Carlson wrote:
> Of course, if any one with Wikipedia *is* interested in using this kind
> of browser, I'm definitely willing to help out there.  I'm just
> assuming that that's not the case because FMP is an expensive program
> and probably isn't viable for the kind of free software means that
> Wikipedia uses.  But that's just my assumption.

That'd definitely be a factor. At my old job, I was in charge of creating
and maintaing the FMP dbs, and it's not a program that's great with
interacting with other stuff. You're pretty much limited to using the web
interface if you want to do widespread work with it, and it's definitely
lacking in accessing a lot of the structure-modifying stuff from there. I
like working with FMP, it's terribly useful sometimes, but I don't think it
interacts terribly well with this sort of structure. Not to shoot down the
idea or anything, though, just saying it's... tricky.

-- Jake


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anonymous proxies (was Re: Desysop Morwen)

body:
Tim wrote:
>Would there be any objections to systematically
>blocking all anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?

Please do.

--mav

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subject: [WikiEN-l] "Desysop Morwen"

body:
Martin Harper wrote:
> > EACH COMPANY ARTICLE MUST HAVE A SECTION NAMED "OPPOSING VIEWS"
>
> Like the one for [[Nestle]]?
>
> If capitalism is as bad as you feel it is, I'm sure you'll have no
> difficulty digging up dirt on all kinds of evil multinationals. Please do
> so.

Certainly if he were making specific criticisms of the actions of that
company, it'd be appropriate to an opposing views/criticism scetion. But
what he added to Canon's article was just a cluster of links like
[[anarchism]], [[Marxism]], etc...
It'd be interesting if he could actually add content instead of just
spewing.

-- Jake


from_name: zero 0000

body:
--- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anonymous proxies are
> regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just
> moves to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to
> vandalise tens of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
>
> Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all
> anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?

I would object to it being done without a study to determine how many
genuine editors use anonymizers.  There are quite legitimate possible
reasons.  One is an editor who writes in Wikipedia from work but
doesn't want his/her employer's IP to be associated with it.  Another
is someone who wants to be anonymous on Wikipedia but has a fixed IP
address that uniquely identifies him/her.  We should not ban this
practice unless we have a global policy that anonymity is forbidden.

That's not to say that I don't sympathize with the problem you
describe.  On the other hand, how much of this problem would
exist if it wasn't for the practice of allowing people to edit
articles without logging in?  Every time this matter is raised there
are screams about the sky falling in, but I have yet to see a single
convincing reason why we can't restrict editing to logged-in users.

Zero.

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from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Arbitration progress report #5

body:
On 02/14/04  at 02:39 PM, "Martin Harper"
<martin at myreddice.freeserve.co.uk> said:

> 2) Each arbitrator will make their own decision about how much personal
> information  about themselves they are willing to share, both
> publically, and with the rest of the  committee.

> 3) Arbitrators with multiple accounts on Wikipedia will disclose the
> usernames of  those accounts to the rest of the committee, but are not
> required to disclose them  publically.

Am I the only one uncomfortable with the idea that members of the
arbitration commitee are using sockpuppet accounts for these activities?
Isn't important that these individuals are known and trusted inviduals
within the wikipedia community? Why for example does Kat feel obliged to
use the account UninvitedCompany for her commitee work?

V.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Arbitrators' wiki

body:
Brion wrote:
>No. If you want to speak secretly amongst yourselves,
>please use e-mail.

And that is exactly what I've been saying on cabal-l for a while now. ;)

This would, IMO, be a really dumb idea for a wiki and would just be a target
for crackers. The idea of a closed wiki is also a bit oxymoronic to me. Best
for us to discuss things among ourselves, come to something close to an
agreement and then work out the details on a public wiki draft (and then offer
the rationale for each of our decisions). All evidence used as the basis for
any remedy should be public.

In short, a closed wiki is a bad, bad, bad idea and it sends the wrong message
as well.

-- mav (all just my opinion - I'm not speaking for the committee)

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from_name: Lee Pilich

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Are things getting worse?

body:
Sayeth Erik:
 >For reasons unknown to me, the arbitration committee
 >currently only accepts cases directly referred to it by you. This should
 >be changed ASAP.

The reason is that we've not yet decided on our working processes, and so
are trying to limit ourselves to emergency cases while we finalise some
guidelines (perhaps the situation isn't optimal, but it's how it is).

Don't worry, it will be changed ASAP.

Lee (Camembert)


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Arbitrators' wiki

body:
On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 11:09:48AM -0500, David Friedland wrote:
> The arbitration committee has mostly decided that there will be private
> deliberation to some extent for cases brought before the committee.
>
> Is it possible to set up a MediaWiki with read/write access limited just
> to arbitrators, so that we can deliberate in Wiki form?
>
> If so, could someone who has permission and knows how please set that up
> right away so we can start using the private Wiki?

Setting up a cabal, aren't we ?
Where's the "become public after certain period of time" part ?


from_name: Dan Carlson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Idea for a far-out project

body:
Okay, I'll admit up front that this idea isn't directly related to
Wikipedia, but I've got this really potentially cool idea, and I'd need
some pointers from you guys to get it working.

In a nutshell, my idea is this: Use FileMaker Pro Developer (probably
version 7 when it comes out in a few months) to create a read-only
offline browser for my Memory Alpha wiki content.

Here's how I was thinking of setting it up:  it would use either a
regular database dump, or more likely a customized dump containing only
the necessary tables.  In addition, I would probably only include the
current versions of all the articles (although I can definitely
understand why others would want to have past versions as well).  Since
rendering the HTML would probably be a bit tricky, it'd be best to just
serve the text straight-up and display the links in a side table, sorta
like how Slashdot displays external links in its articles.

I've had a fair amount of experience working with FileMaker over the
past decade or so -- I first started using it when I was about twelve
or thirteen (making my own personal Trek database with FMP 2.1!).  I've
kept up somewhat over the years, although I've never gotten into the
really in-depth tricks and tools, I definitely know my way around (or
can figure out what I need).  My problem, *IF* I'm going to try this
project, is that I'm less familiar with the structure of the MediaWiki
database and what kind of information I'll need to relate where in
order to keep everything functioning properly.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how this could be done?  Or should I
forget the whole idea? ;-)

Of course, if any one with Wikipedia *is* interested in using this kind
of browser, I'm definitely willing to help out there.  I'm just
assuming that that's not the case because FMP is an expensive program
and probably isn't viable for the kind of free software means that
Wikipedia uses.  But that's just my assumption.

Thanks,
Dan Carlson


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

body:
This approach seems like eminent common sense. We can expect a substantial
portion of our users to edit in at least some area from a strongly held
point of view, whether it is the viewpoint of an Israeli settler or an
advocate of alternative medicine. The question cannot be does someone have
and try to express a point of view, but how they go about it. The problem
with User:Anticapitalist is not his point of view; it is the blanking of
pages followed by the insertion of nonsense and his notion that he can just
make up a rule for all of Wikipedia.  If he would just go to [[capitalism]]
and add a negative perspective...

Fred

> From: Caroline Ford <caroline at secretlondon.me.uk>
> Reply-To: caroline at secretlondon.me.uk, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 20:58:34 +0000
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?
>
> I think one thing we need to remember is that in real life people die
> over some of the issues we are squabbling about. With this in mind, it
> is hardly surprisingly that people edit-war "to the death" over some of
> them.
>
> I think some of the problems are a natural consequence of our growth.
> The larger we become the more likely it is that we get a wider range of
> POVs. As we become more prominant we will also attract more "netcranks"
> and the like.
>
> We still have a geographical bias, partly but not solely due to the
> different levels of internet access amongst different communities and
> countries. As this divide narrows we will get more contributors who
> disagree with the current consensus on various articles. Most articles
> on countries and political movements have not been edited by people from
> the relevant country.
>
> If we sometimes have trouble getting Wikilove between the US and UK then
> it will probably get worse as net access improves in eastern Europe and
> the former Soviet Union, for example.
>
> I don't mean to be pessimistic but we need to have a strategy to deal
> with this.
>
> Caroline/Secretlondon
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anonymous proxies (was Re: Desysop Morwen)

body:
Tim wrote:
>Sunir Shah has suggested a method for making it blindingly
>obvious that a user is about to edit anonymously. Specifically,
>if the user is logged out, a username/password box is shown
>on the edit page. I made a mockup of this for demostration
>purposes, at:
>
>http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~tstarling/EditPage_with_login.html

Neat! But it does make the very important copyright agreement text harder to
see. Perhaps removing the save button and forcing anons to preview first would
help. The preview screen would have a save button but the login prompt would be
removed.

That would have a triple positive benefit:
1) It reminds people with accounts to log-in
2) It gently nudges anons to create an account
3) It would cut down on experiment-type vandalism, slow down anon vandals, and
teach anons about the preview feature.

-- mav

__________________________________
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from_name: James Duffy

body:
The problem is that most people where titles are not used see them as some
form of foppish irrelevance and don't understand that people in states with
titles are often known at different points of their career by personal name
only, by title and by a combination of both. It would be nutty, for example,
to write an article about 'Henry Coyningham'. He is known variously as Henry
Mountcharles, Lord Mountcharles and the Earl of Mountcharles. To stop people
writing 'Henry Coyningham' to provocatively cause confusion (as part of
their campaign against titles) he ended up having to change his name by
deedpoll to Henry Mountcharles but that too doesn't stop confusion among
those who have never heard or don't remember his first name but know 'Lord
Mountcharles' as the guy who holds rock concerts at Slane Castle and is an
Irish politician.

The same is true of the man who at various times was the historian and
politician Frank Pakenham and the historian and politician Lord Longford or
the Earl of Longford. No-one of my generation know him as Frank Pakenham
because we only ever heard of him as Lord Longford. But my grandfather and
father's generation knew him primarily as Frank Pakenham. And you have to
indicate which Lord Longford he was because a number of people held the
title and his brother, the prevous Lord Longford, was a famous impressario
while his son the current Lord Longford is also like his father a historian.

Delirium's arguments here as elsewhere are simplistic and show no
understanding whatsoever the the fact that there is often no such thing as a
person's name, but a series of names and titles interlocked that have to be
used to create maximum recognition among those who depending on their age
may have heard of someone referred to by any number of combination of names
and titles. It was the same rubbish that made Wikipedia initially a laughing
stock when it decided to put in the current Prince of Wales as 'Charles
Windsor' (and they couldn't even get that bit right, his personal name is
actually Charles Mountbatten-Windsor). And you can just see everyone copping
on to who Victoria Wettin is! (That was Queen Victoria's marital name. Her
Royal House name was Saxe-Coburg. Her title was 'Queen of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland'.)

Putting the correct article name on the Prince of Wales's article involved a
war with 'no titles here' brigade who didn't understand that vast numbers of
people outside the US do know people by title and leaving out title is
completely unworkable and simplistic. And 'most commonly recognised' is not
an option in an enclopaedia in all cases; there has not been such a person
as 'Prince Charles' since February 1952 when his titles changed to Duke of
Cornwall, later to Lord Rothesay and Prince of Wales. And though she was
called it a billion times, there never was such a person as 'Princess
Diana', she was actually simply 'The Princess of Wales' or 'Diana
Mountbatten-Windsor'.

Delirium's well meaning arguments are in fact simplistic, mis-informed and
completely unworkable. Wikipedia's job is not to push agendas but do deal
with was 'is'. Titles exist and are a necessary requirement in many cases.
That does not mean in using them we 'approve' of their use, just reflect the
fact that they exist. Using them is NPOV. Choosing because you don't like
them that they should not be used is pushing your POV. And the last time I
checked, Wikipedia is against pushing POVs.

JT
>
>This is a difficult problem. If they deserve an article they have probably
>done something under their name (without title), but we have a faction that
>honestly believes that all members of the titled British nobility deserve
>an
>article based on their title. Long ago someone said, "Well, they appear in
>Who's Who"
>
>Fred
>
> > From: Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com>
> > Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 03:05:31 -0600
> > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] the proliferation of ridiculous titular naming
>schemes
> >
> > Among many other examples, if a reader were looking for the person
> > commonly known as [[Robert Harley]], on Wikipedia they'll be pleased to
> > find them under the ridiculous title of [[Robert Harley, 1st Earl of
> > Oxford and Mortimer]], a name not used except in the context of giving
> > his title.  Now, while the said Robert Harley may indeed have been 1st
> > Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, it's nonetheless a plain fact that his name
> > was Robert Harley, and it is by this name that he is and was commonly
> > called.
> >
> > This seems to be a proliferation on Wikipedia, and indeed there is a
> > proposal, currently with a wide degree of support, being discussed on
> > [[Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Peerage]] to make this official Wikipedia
> > policy: where someone holds a title, it must be part of their name,
> > without exceptions.  At least for British titles; perhaps other
> > countries' titles will be dealt with more vaguely.
> >
> > I'd argue that simply using peoples' names, except where their titles
> > are commonly used or necessary for disambiguation purposes, is best in
> > keeping with our standard "use the most common name in English" naming
> > policy, and far preferable to the one currently being proposed.
> >
> > In either case, those of you with an opinion might wnat to head on over
> > to [[Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Peerage]] and vote.
> >
> > -Mark
> >

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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Alexandros

body:
[[User:Alexandros]] is publishing purported private information about other users on his user page.

RickK

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from_name: Edward Senft

subject: [WikiEN-l] User Alexandros

body:
This is exactly what Viajero did to me and no one
batted an eyebrow.
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [[User:Alexandros]] is publishing purported private
> information about other users on his user page.
>
> RickK
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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_______________________________________________
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> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] User:Sennheiser/Ed Senft (was: Re: Are things getting
	worse?)

body:
On 02/14/04  at 08:22 AM, Edward Senft <edwardsenft at yahoo.com> said:

[...]

Hi,

You recently applied to be an admin. on VfA and another contributor
supplied some circumstantial evidence to suggest that you might be another
user, Alexander Plank. I notice that the IP number you posted this message
from resolves to Charlotte, Virginia, where Alex lives, which would indeed
give added weight to such suspicions. Are you Alex Plank?

V.


from_name: anti anti

subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!

MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR DELETION
PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT PAGE IN WIKIPEDIA.

ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA NEEDS
PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?

WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO FIND A
COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR PROPAGANDA.

ANTICAPITALIST

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from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> For us, we have nothing like a 'transaction',

Well, this is what "an edit" is, very similar to "a move" in chess or
"a deal" on eBay.  Every "edit" on Wikipedia leaves a record in the
recent changes log and a "diff" between an old and the new version of
an article.  Every edit is made by one person (logged in or IP
address).

If the "old" database table was redesigned only to contain the diffs,
similar to how RCS and some other version control systems work, as was
discussed recently on wikitech-l, this would become even more clear.

One problem with identifying such transactions is the moving of large
chunks of texts within or between articles, as this leaves a large
"diff" at a rather small effort.  Perhaps a special HTML form could be
designed for moving text, one which opens both articles, having a
single submit button, leaving a single recent changes record.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Abigail Brady

subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 20:33, anti anti wrote:
> PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
>
> MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR DELETION
> PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT PAGE IN WIKIPEDIA.
>
> ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA NEEDS
> PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
>
> WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO FIND A
> COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR PROPAGANDA.
>
> ANTICAPITALIST

The 'Anticapitalist' is referring to [[Canon (company)]], which they
repeatedly blanked and replaced with 'Please delete this advertisement!
wikipidia is not yellow pages! wikipedia is encyclopedia!'.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Canon_(company)&action=history

I'm not sure this contributor is a vandal - they might just be seriously
deranged, either way I am confident I acted properly.

--
Abi


subject: [WikiEN-l] User Alexandros

body:
Viajero was pointing out that you were creating multiple accounts and treating them as sock puppets for various suspect reasons.  And this response is not in keeping with the apologies you're posting all over the User pages.  ~~~~

Edward Senft <edwardsenft at yahoo.com> wrote:This is exactly what Viajero did to me and no one
batted an eyebrow.
--- Rick wrote:
> [[User:Alexandros]] is publishing purported private
> information about other users on his user page.
>
> RickK
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing
online>
_______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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from_name: Caroline Ford

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Is the amount of internal squabbling getting worse or better?  My
>rough sense is that it's getting worse, but maybe I'm just tired of it
>and therefore perceiving it to be more of a problem lately.
>
>What can we all do to build a sense of love and harmony?  What can
>each of us do to alter our own behavior to be supportive of others,
>less argumentative, more productive?
>
>Is the mediation/arbitration system working to increase internal
>political problems, or do decrease those problems?  Or, is it way too
>early to tell?
>
>My concern is that it seems to me that we're spending way too much
>time on internal court intruigues, to our detriment.  Every day, it
>seems, there's some new crisis of management, some new emergency ban,
>some new sysop crossing the line.
>
>Part of this was caused, I think, by a perceived power vacuum after
>the start of the year.  I was out of the business of policing, but the
>arbitration committee was still not ready.  Sysops felt a real need to
>do something to stop some real problem users.  It was a vicious cycle.
>
>But, what about now?  How can we bring about peace?
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>
>
>
I think one thing we need to remember is that in real life people die
over some of the issues we are squabbling about. With this in mind, it
is hardly surprisingly that people edit-war "to the death" over some of
them.

I think some of the problems are a natural consequence of our growth.
The larger we become the more likely it is that we get a wider range of
POVs. As we become more prominant we will also attract more "netcranks"
and the like.

We still have a geographical bias, partly but not soley due to the
different levels of internet access amongst different communities and
countries. As this divide narrows we will get more contributors who
disagree with the current consensus on various articles. Most articles
on countries and political movements have not been edited by people from
the relevant country.

If we sometimes have trouble getting Wikilove between the US and UK then
it will probably get worse as net access improves in eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union, for example.

I don't mean to be pessimistic but we need to have a strategy to deal
with this.

Caroline/Secretlondon


from_name: Delirium

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>I know that these anon proxies are annoying. But I would prefer if we
>continued our curent whack-a-mole game in the interest of freedom of
>speech. Most sock puppet users don't know about anonymizers anyway.
>
>
I agree with that, and suggest that perhaps we can set up something
short of banning all anon. proxies to make the whack-a-mole game
easier.  Perhaps even extended to all anon. vandalism, not just anon.
proxies.

One suggestion is a "Recent changes from all IPs that have, at one point
or another, been banned".  Would make it easy to see if any of them have
returned after the expiry of the IP ban, and would make any damage they
cause very transient.

-Mark


from_name: Charles Podles

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> 207.44.154.35 is the popular anonymous proxy http://www.anonymization.net,
>
>and as such is used by lots of different vandals. Anonymous proxies are
>regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just moves
>to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to vandalise tens
>of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
>
>Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous
>proxies on a site-wide basis?
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
>
>
Are there any *valid* uses for anonymizing proxies, or are they used
only to vandalize,
troll, and dodge hard bans? Can anyone think of a situation in which
someone might have
a legitimate purpose for such a tool? Since I can't, I wouldn't object
to a permanent block
of any and all anonymous proxy services.

--Charles Podles (en:User:Mirv)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

>I'm not sure whether it will work (ref wikimoney) or whether it is a good
>idea anyway. It might lead to a meritocracy where people with a high rating
>throw their high wikistatus into an argument, or may even unintentionally
>intimidate others with a different opinion, where now the merit of each edit
>is judged on its own.
>
>
I suppose I don't see this as a negative effect, in the long run.  I
think as we fill in the gaps and become more complete and start moving
from "need information" to "need better-presented information", it might
be desirable to have some minor movement towards meritocracy.  Not in
the very strict Nupedia style, but something vaguely more than we have
now.  If there's a dispute over an article like, say, [[World War II]],
then I'd want to give more weight to respected long-time contributors
who are experts in the field than to every random person who stops by
Wikipedia and tries to change the article to conform to their personal
viewpoints.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
>From: Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen
>Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:22:54 -0800
>
>anti anti wrote:
>
>>PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
>>
>>MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR DELETION
>>PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT PAGE IN
>>WIKIPEDIA.
>>
>>ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA NEEDS
>>PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
>>
>>WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO FIND A
>>COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR
>>PROPAGANDA.
>
>Just to add information: by the tone and content of this post and the sorts
>of articles he was "removing advertisements" from, this is almost certainly
>the same user that has been blocked so far under 2 or 3 different IPs, one
>of them an anonymizing proxy (207.44.154.35).  The edit summaries are
>usually all caps and somewhat abusive, along the lines of "THE WIKIPEDIA
>RULES SAY NO FUCKING COMMERCIALIZATION! STOP PUTTING IT IN ASSHOLES!" (from
>[[Atlantic City, New Jersey]]).
>
>-Mark
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I REGARD YOUR POST AS AN ATTEMPTED ATTACK TO MY PRIVACY.

ANTICAPITALIST

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963


subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
>From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen
>Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:19:19 -0800
>
>I'm only joking, so no one take me too seriously here, but I think
>writing an ALLCAPS LETTER DEMANDING IMMEDIATE ACTION is a bannable
>offense in and of itself.
>
>It's very difficult to imagine that this person is really serious, or
>just trying to be a pain in the ass.  No one needs to apologize for
>disregarding completely lunatic positions.
>
>Anticapitalist, Wikipedia is not anticapitalist.  It's an
>encyclopedia.  Canon is a famous company, and it is therefore
>deserving of an encyclopedia article.
>
>--Jimbo
>
>anti anti wrote:
>
> > PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
> >
> > MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR
>DELETION
> > PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT PAGE IN
> > WIKIPEDIA.
> >
> > ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA NEEDS
> > PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
> >
> > WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO FIND
>A
> > COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR
>PROPAGANDA.
> >
> > ANTICAPITALIST
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*.
> > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

SO WE, THE WIKIPEDIANS, DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO WRITE IN OUR FAVORITE
WRITING STYLE??

COMMERCIALIZATION SUCKS.

IF YOU STILL WANNA ADVERTISEMENTS IN WIKI, EACH COMPANY ARTICLE MUST HAVE A
SECTION NAMED "OPPOSING VIEWS" WITH LINKS TO ARTICLES LIKE
[[ANTI-CAPITALISM]], [[ANARCHISM]] ETC!!! SO THE PEOPLE CAN KNOW THE TRUTH

ANTICAPITALIST

_________________________________________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] BAN MORWEN!

body:
MORWEN KEEPS BLOCKING ME! WHY?

WHEN I ADDED SOME LINKS TO OPPOSING VIEWS IN AN ARTICLE, MORWEN RE-BANNED
ME! MORWEN SHOULD BE DESYSOPED ASAP!

I AM NOT A VANDAL. I TRY TO BALANCE THE EXCESS COMMERCIALIZATION AND ADS IN
WIKIPIDIA!

IF YOU CONTINUE THIS PRACTICE YOU WILL PROVE THAT WIKIPIDIA IS NOT OPEN AND
CENSORS OPPOSING VIEWS!

ANTICAPITALIST

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Sennheiser/Ed Senft

body:
On 02/14/04 20:01, Edward Senft wrote:
> No, and I don't live in Charlotte, Virginia.   (By
> contributor I assume you mean Wik?)  BTW, I would not
> like people to know where I live so please respect my
> privacy and stop attempting to resolve my IP address.

If you send an email it's in the headers. If you want
your email read by the recipient, it will be in information
that you (and no-one else) are making publicly available.

- d.


from_name: Martin Harper

body:
Viajero wrote:

> Am I the only one uncomfortable with the idea that members of
> the arbitration commitee are using sockpuppet accounts

Well, no. JamesDay has also expressed concerns, for example. See
http://boards.wikimedia.org/viewforum.php?f=2

-Martin


subject: [WikiEN-l] wik is back

body:
On 02/14/04 17:41, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Edward-

>>I see that wik has come back and has already started
>>reverting.  Something needs to be done.

> The easiest and most effective thing to do is for Jimbo to officially
> authorize the "three revert rule". More than three reverts on the same
> page per day and you're out for at least one day -- no need for either
> mediation or arbitration.

If I were a persistent troll, I would create three sockpuppet accounts
and use them through three anonymising proxies. That's what springs to
mind instantly; I'm sure there are more creative ways.

When writing rules of this sort, one must always consider how the
sociopathic will game them.

- d.


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] wik is back

body:
David Gerard wrote

> If I were a persistent troll, I would create three sockpuppet accounts
> and use them through three anonymising proxies. That's what springs to
> mind instantly; I'm sure there are more creative ways.

But one should always take the 80 for 20 on these things.  So, it's not even
going to challenge a serious wrongdoer.  Not the point, if the idea is to
progress where things are, in general terms.

Charles


from_name: John Robinson

body:
Erik Moeller writes:
 >We need knowledgeable people in countries like China to be able to
write about the facts without fear of ending up in a labor camp.

I think if a repressive regime wants to track the Internet writings of
people living there, an anonymous web proxy is not going to stop them.

If I had ever once seen an anonymizer used in such a manner on
Wikipedia, I would agree with Erik that it is worth putting up with the
extra vandalism.  However, I never have.

-Hephaestos


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Desysop Morwen"

body:
> EACH COMPANY ARTICLE MUST HAVE A SECTION NAMED "OPPOSING VIEWS"

Like the one for [[Nestle]]?

If capitalism is as bad as you feel it is, I'm sure you'll have no
difficulty digging up dirt on all kinds of evil multinationals. Please do
so.

Martin


from_name: Arwel Parry

subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
In message <402E91AE.4070602 at rufus.d2g.com>, Delirium
<delirium at rufus.d2g.com> writes
>anti anti wrote:
>
>> PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
>>
>> MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR
>>DELETION PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT
>>PAGE IN WIKIPEDIA.
>>
>> ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
>>NEEDS PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
>>
>> WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO
>>FIND A COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR
>>PROPAGANDA.
>
>Just to add information: by the tone and content of this post and the
>sorts of articles he was "removing advertisements" from, this is almost
>certainly the same user that has been blocked so far under 2 or 3
>different IPs, one of them an anonymizing proxy (207.44.154.35).  The
>edit summaries are usually all caps and somewhat abusive, along the
>lines of "THE WIKIPEDIA RULES SAY NO FUCKING COMMERCIALIZATION! STOP
>PUTTING IT IN ASSHOLES!" (from [[Atlantic City, New Jersey]]).

207.44.154.35? Hell, I blocked him on the Welsh Wikipedia last Wednesday
for vandalising [[cy:Hafan]], the Main Page to promote some "NESARA"
rubbish (it wasn't even in Welsh, which might be a little more
forgivable!). He was back today doing a minor bit of vandalism to one of
the date entries, and got blocked again. Is there any way to permanently
block an IP address?

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] Idea for a far-out project

body:
Is there a reason that TomeRaider doesn't fit your needs, or would you
be providing more functionality than it offers? TomeRaider already seems
to include compression, quick indexing, cross-platform existence (Pocket
PC, Palm, EPOC, Windows, even some Nokia and Ericsson phones).

See, for instance, http://members.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/.

Cheers,
Ivan

Dan Carlson wrote:
[...]
> In a nutshell, my idea is this: Use FileMaker Pro Developer (probably
> version 7 when it comes out in a few months) to create a read-only
> offline browser for my Memory Alpha wiki content.


references:
<BAY10-F59hlKlrZV4BP0002277f@hotmail.com>
	<402E91AE.4070602@rufus.d2g.com> <zmZ9EDRgcrLAFwWb@cartref.demon.co.uk>
	<c0mj8b$jh3$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
In message <c0mj8b$jh3$1 at sea.gmane.org>, Tim Starling
<ts4294967296-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> writes
>
>Arwel Parry wrote
>> 207.44.154.35? Hell, I blocked him on the Welsh Wikipedia last Wednesday
>> for vandalising [[cy:Hafan]], the Main Page to promote some "NESARA"
>> rubbish (it wasn't even in Welsh, which might be a little more
>> forgivable!). He was back today doing a minor bit of vandalism to one of
>> the date entries, and got blocked again. Is there any way to permanently
>> block an IP address?
>
>207.44.154.35 is the popular anonymous proxy http://www.anonymization.net,
>and as such is used by lots of different vandals. Anonymous proxies are
>regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just moves
>to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to vandalise tens
>of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
>
>Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous
>proxies on a site-wide basis?

No objection from me!

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
> I also think even an experiment can be dangerous, because really,
> there's no such thing as an experiment here. [

]
> And the only way to stop the experiment would
> be for Jimbo to make a very divisive decision to stop it.

Suggestions:

The experiment could run on meta. I expect less people will get emotionally
attached there, given the nature of its content.

Perhaps a more refined scheme might lessen the confusion about what a
person's rating is based on. People might want to compliment one another for
sheer number of contributions, reliability of content/factual knowledge,
courtesy/diplomatic efforts. An expert who writes only highly valued
articles in his/her particular field of knowledge might score low on
etiquette.

Doubts:

I'm not sure whether it will work (ref wikimoney) or whether it is a good
idea anyway. It might lead to a meritocracy where people with a high rating
throw their high wikistatus into an argument, or may even unintentionally
intimidate others with a different opinion, where now the merit of each edit
is judged on its own.

To avoid confusion and lessen the meritocratic side effects, the experiment
might be confined to the latter criterium: personal behaviour/wiki
etiquette. This is probably what Jimbo was thinking of in the first place,
since he gave potential usability for (de)sysoping as a possible benefit.
Then again, when a debate gets heated people will have stronger opinions
about each other. Will it be helpful when people resort to the statistical
equivalent of name calling? Will people with a negative account become
stigmatized, meaning their future actions will be prejudged based upon their
etiquette rating?

Erik Zachte


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Tim-

> Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous
> proxies on a site-wide basis?

Yes, from me. We need knowledgeable people in countries like China to be
able to write about the facts without fear of ending up in a labor camp.
Of course we do not allow original research -- but we do allow NPOV
contributions from anyone, and blocking all anonymizers threatens to lock
out certain persons from editing.

I know that these anon proxies are annoying. But I would prefer if we
continued our curent whack-a-mole game in the interest of freedom of
speech. Most sock puppet users don't know about anonymizers anyway.

Let's implement ways to filter out vandalism more effectively instead. The
login box on the edit screen is also a good idea.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikitech-l] Arbitrators' wiki

body:
I am not very familiar with the process of arbitration, though I have read
the Wikipedia:dispute resolution and Wikipedia:arbitration policy - so
please pardon me if my remarks are off the target.

Regarding openness:

Partly from my experience, I see the benefit of closed communication.

It may be easier to use closed communication for mediation - for the
involved people to admit failures, etc. It could also be a lot easier when
people have to negotiate wordings of their joint statement, etc. when there
is such a thing (the kind of statement that announces the end of conflict
and their shared understanding of what has happened, and so on.) - who would
apologize on which point, etc. could be negotiated better under non-open
circumstances. So I see benefit of closed communication. That's all because
of the reduced need for saving one's face.

Legally, at least in Japanese context, there is less risk of somebody
causing defamation, etc. when the communication is not public. And after
getting used to wikis, I really understand BBS and email is a bit
inconvenient.

I am not very sure about arbitration, but I suppose there would be similar
reasons.

One way to ensure openness is to have some observers who can monitor what's
going on. They can be, for example, all the admins. They may publicly
comment/report about the process and the outcome.

At Japanese wikipedia, we are preparing a mailinglist for non-public
deletion request. It is for people to request for deletion of pages that
contain possible defamation, privacy and other problematic materials. We may
have some trusted users as "observers" - not that they cannot have a say
regarding if the page should be deleted or the request should be rejected,
but to make sure there are enough who watch what's going on and create
deterence for the abuse of process by admins.

Regarding wiki:

I happen to know that WakkaWiki has a feature called Access Control List.
With that, a page owner can control who can read and write the page you
created or own. (Page ownership is granted to the initial creator of the
page, but is also transferrable). The setting is attached to individual
pages as opposed to the whole site or namespace. And it can list individual
usernames as blocked or permitted. If you happen to have a server and
technical knowledge (I have neither, btw), it may be useful for you guys.

best,

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
Get some great ideas here for your sweetheart on Valentine's Day - and
beyond. http://special.msn.com/network/celebrateromance.armx


from_name: Ruimu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

body:
Jimbo:
> > What can we all do to build a sense of love and harmony?

Erik:
> What we always do: Refine our processes. It's a delicate balance. If you
> have too many rules, people feel constrained by them, which causes
> unhappiness. If you have too few, people disagree about interpreting them,
> which causes conflict. Right now I think we can deal with a little more
> unhappiness if it gives us a little less conflict.

Wikipedia as a mod for civ3 :-) (But I'm not sure at all that adding rules
will result in easyer interpretations of them.)

Your point that wp could have reached a kind of critic mass is
interesting. An idea to avoid endless conflicts on words could be to launch
exiting new projects or to open up new fields of knowledge that are not
currently in focus (if any).


from_name: Rich Holton

body:
How about requiring users from known anonymizers to
login? This still allows for legitimate uses of the
anonymizers, but helps to restrict vandals.

-Rholton (aka Anthropos)

--- zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Anonymous proxies are
> > regularly used for vandalism, and once we block
> one, the vandal just
> > moves to another one. On meta recently we've had a
> bot operating to
> > vandalise tens of articles, via an anonymous
> proxy.
> >
> > Would there be any objections to systematically
> blocking all
> > anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?
>
> I would object to it being done without a study to
> determine how many
> genuine editors use anonymizers.  There are quite
> legitimate possible
> reasons.  One is an editor who writes in Wikipedia
> from work but
> doesn't want his/her employer's IP to be associated
> with it.  Another
> is someone who wants to be anonymous on Wikipedia
> but has a fixed IP
> address that uniquely identifies him/her.  We should
> not ban this
> practice unless we have a global policy that
> anonymity is forbidden.
>
> That's not to say that I don't sympathize with the
> problem you
> describe.  On the other hand, how much of this
> problem would
> exist if it wasn't for the practice of allowing
> people to edit
> articles without logging in?  Every time this matter
> is raised there
> are screams about the sky falling in, but I have yet
> to see a single
> convincing reason why we can't restrict editing to
> logged-in users.
>
> Zero.
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing
> online.
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
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from_name: anti anti

subject: [WikiEN-l] BAN INFROGMATION

body:
INFROGMATION BANNED ME AGAIN WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO
HELP WIKIPIDIA BY WRITING USEFUL LEGITIMATE ARTICLES. SHOULDN'T THEY BE
BANNED FOR ABUSING SYSOP PRIVILEGES?

A GOOD SYSOP SHOULD UNBAN ME ASAP! I WANT HELP WIKIPIDIA AND WRITE USEFUL
ARTICLES, REALLY. I AM A CONTRIBUTOR, NOT A TROLL.

_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen

body:
>From: Arwel Parry <arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysop Morwen
>Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 00:02:40 +0000
>
>In message <402E91AE.4070602 at rufus.d2g.com>, Delirium
><delirium at rufus.d2g.com> writes
>>anti anti wrote:
>>
>>>PLEASE DESYSOP MORWEN!
>>>
>>>MARWEN BANNED ME WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION WHEN I USED THE VOTES FOR DELETION
>>>PAGE TO VOTE FOR THE DELETION OF A BUSINESS ADVERTISEMENT PAGE IN
>>>WIKIPEDIA.
>>>
>>>ADVERTISEMENTS SHOULD BE DELETED IN WIKIPIDIA. WHY AN ENCYCLOPEDIA NEEDS
>>>PAGES ON FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES?
>>>
>>>WIKI IS NOT YELLOW PAGES. IT IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. THOSE WHO WANT TO FIND A
>>>COMPANY AND LEARN ABOUT IT CAN VISIT ITS WEBSITE AND READ THEIR
>>>PROPAGANDA.
>>
>>Just to add information: by the tone and content of this post and the
>>sorts of articles he was "removing advertisements" from, this is almost
>>certainly the same user that has been blocked so far under 2 or 3
>>different IPs, one of them an anonymizing proxy (207.44.154.35).  The edit
>>summaries are usually all caps and somewhat abusive, along the lines of
>>"THE WIKIPEDIA RULES SAY NO FUCKING COMMERCIALIZATION! STOP PUTTING IT IN
>>ASSHOLES!" (from [[Atlantic City, New Jersey]]).
>
>207.44.154.35? Hell, I blocked him on the Welsh Wikipedia last Wednesday
>for vandalising [[cy:Hafan]], the Main Page to promote some "NESARA"
>rubbish (it wasn't even in Welsh, which might be a little more
>forgivable!). He was back today doing a minor bit of vandalism to one of
>the date entries, and got blocked again. Is there any way to permanently
>block an IP address?
>
>--
>Arwel Parry
>http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

I AM NOT A VANDAL, NEITHER A TROLL. THEY JUST SHARE THE SAME IP. I KNOW
NOTHING ABOUT THE INCIDENTS YOU DESCRIBED.

ANTICAPITALIST

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anticapi--examples of good work?

body:
> Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 06:30:47 +0000
> From: "anti anti" <anticapi at hotmail.com>

> INFROGMATION BANNED ME AGAIN WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION BECAUSE I WAS
> TRYING TO
> HELP WIKIPIDIA BY WRITING USEFUL LEGITIMATE ARTICLES. SHOULDN'T THEY BE
> BANNED FOR ABUSING SYSOP PRIVILEGES?
>
> A GOOD SYSOP SHOULD UNBAN ME ASAP! I WANT HELP WIKIPIDIA AND WRITE
> USEFUL
> ARTICLES, REALLY. I AM A CONTRIBUTOR, NOT A TROLL.

"Anti anti," what's your Wikipedia user name, and some Wikipedia
articles which you would point to as examples of good work?

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: cprompt

references:
<BAY10-F59hlKlrZV4BP0002277f@hotmail.com>
	<402E91AE.4070602@rufus.d2g.com> <zmZ9EDRgcrLAFwWb@cartref.demon.co.uk>
	<c0mj8b$jh3$1@sea.gmane.org>  <402ED470.90901@sympatico.ca>

body:
On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 21:07, Charles Podles wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
> > 207.44.154.35 is the popular anonymous proxy http://www.anonymization.net,
> >
> >and as such is used by lots of different vandals. Anonymous proxies are
> >regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just moves
> >to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to vandalise tens
> >of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
> >
> >Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous
> >proxies on a site-wide basis?
> >
> >
> Are there any *valid* uses for anonymizing proxies, or are they used
> only to vandalize,
> troll, and dodge hard bans? Can anyone think of a situation in which
> someone might have
> a legitimate purpose for such a tool? Since I can't, I wouldn't object
> to a permanent block
> of any and all anonymous proxy services.
>
> --Charles Podles (en:User:Mirv)
>
At the absolute least, people using an anonymous proxy should get a
read-only version of the Wikipedia with a notice saying that they're
missing the full functionality through using their proxy. Perhaps they
could also edit talk pages, although those can also be abused.


subject: [WikiEN-l] ban anti anti (was YHBT)

body:
anti anti writes:
 >[incoherent all-caps diatribe elided]

I thought this list was moderated.

I consider myself a firm believer in the wiki concept of
AssumeGoodFaith, in fact I have tried to incorporate an identical
philosophy into my daily life since long before I discovered wiki.  On
the other hand, I have seldom come across a group of people who blindly
cling to it in the face of the bloody obvious so tenaciously as the
folks who run Wikipedia.  I believe this to be one of the root causes
of our recent troubles.

-Hephaestos


from_name: Viajero

body:
On 02/14/04  at 11:14 PM, John Robinson <john at freeq.com> said:

> I think if a repressive regime wants to track the Internet writings of
> people living there, an anonymous web proxy is not going to stop them.

> If I had ever once seen an anonymizer used in such a manner on
> Wikipedia, I would agree with Erik that it is worth putting up with the
> extra vandalism.  However, I never have.

But how would one know? Would it be possible, for example, to analyze the
server logs to determine whether there are people making useful edits via
anon proxies? Has this ever been done?

V.


subject: [WikiEN-l] BAN MORWEN!

body:
> anti anti wrote:
...
> > CENSORS OPPOSING VIEWS!
> >
> > ANTICAPITALIST
>
> Despite your evidently irrational state, I'm moderately amused, and as
> such, will give you some real advice:
> #1.
...

You and many others have been trolled in this thread, I'd swear to it.


from_name: David Friedland

subject: [Wikitech-l] test.wikipedia.org on the fritz

body:
test.wikipedia.org seems to be sending compressed data incorrectly, as
both Safari and Firefox just display a bunch of garbage, but it works
fine in Mac IE 5.2.

Sorry, can't test any other browsers as all I have is a Mac.

- David


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Arwel Parry wrote
> 207.44.154.35? Hell, I blocked him on the Welsh Wikipedia last Wednesday
> for vandalising [[cy:Hafan]], the Main Page to promote some "NESARA"
> rubbish (it wasn't even in Welsh, which might be a little more
> forgivable!). He was back today doing a minor bit of vandalism to one of
> the date entries, and got blocked again. Is there any way to permanently
> block an IP address?

207.44.154.35 is the popular anonymous proxy http://www.anonymization.net,
and as such is used by lots of different vandals. Anonymous proxies are
regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just moves
to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to vandalise tens
of articles, via an anonymous proxy.

Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all anonymous
proxies on a site-wide basis?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Delirium

references:
<BAY10-F59hlKlrZV4BP0002277f@hotmail.com>	<402E91AE.4070602@rufus.d2g.com>
	<zmZ9EDRgcrLAFwWb@cartref.demon.co.uk>	<c0mj8b$jh3$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<402ED470.90901@sympatico.ca> <1076859715.1725.3.camel@chai>

body:
Replying to two related comments at once. =]

Rich Holton wrote:

>How about requiring users from known anonymizers to
>login? This still allows for legitimate uses of the
>anonymizers, but helps to restrict vandals.
>

This is already how it works: if a user is IP-banned, he or she can
still log in by creating an account.

cprompt wrote:

>At the absolute least, people using an anonymous proxy should get a
>read-only version of the Wikipedia with a notice saying that they're
>missing the full functionality through using their proxy. Perhaps they
>could also edit talk pages, although those can also be abused.
>
This is already how it works for all banned users: there's no facility,
as far as I know, for banning people from *reading* Wikipedia, only one
to ban them from *editing* it.  So all our banned users can still make
use of the content.

-Mark


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikitech-l] th.wikipedia

body:
The Thai wikipedia is not accesible. Why is this?
Waerth  from nl.wikipedia

___________________________________________________________
BT Yahoo! Broadband - Free modem offer, sign up online today and save ?80 http://btyahoo.yahoo.co.uk


body:
zero 0000 wrote:
> --- Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com>
wrote:
> >
> > Anonymous proxies are
> > regularly used for vandalism, and once we block one, the vandal just
> > moves to another one. On meta recently we've had a bot operating to
> > vandalise tens of articles, via an anonymous proxy.
> >
> > Would there be any objections to systematically blocking all
> > anonymous proxies on a site-wide basis?
>
> I would object to it being done without a study to determine how many
> genuine editors use anonymizers.  There are quite legitimate possible
> reasons.  One is an editor who writes in Wikipedia from work but
> doesn't want his/her employer's IP to be associated with it.  Another
> is someone who wants to be anonymous on Wikipedia but has a fixed IP
> address that uniquely identifies him/her.

An editor who wants to obscure their IP address can always use a transparent
proxy. If the user accidentally (or by choice) edits when logged out, the
address displayed publicly will be the address of the proxy. However, a
sufficiently motivated developer could capture the "forwarded for" header
and determine the actual address, thereby thwarting any vandalism.
Developers already have a policy of not giving out IP addresses without a
very good reason.

Perhaps a tutorial on transparent proxies would be helpful, if people want
to do this.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who want to write exposes about
their employers, of the kind that the employers would want to follow up with
a subpoena for logs. Wikipedia is not the place for original research or
unverifiable insider information.

>We should not ban this
> practice unless we have a global policy that anonymity is forbidden.

There are varying degrees of anonymity. The kind of anonymity which holds up
under legal requests or vandalism prevention actions by developers should be
forbidden. The costs are far too high, and easily outweigh the negligible
benefits. However, we should continue to allow people to keep their IP
addresses hidden from the general public.

>
> That's not to say that I don't sympathize with the problem you
> describe.  On the other hand, how much of this problem would
> exist if it wasn't for the practice of allowing people to edit
> articles without logging in?  Every time this matter is raised there
> are screams about the sky falling in, but I have yet to see a single
> convincing reason why we can't restrict editing to logged-in users.
>

Sunir Shah has suggested a method for making it blindingly obvious that a
user is about to edit anonymously. Specifically, if the user is logged out,
a username/password box is shown on the edit page. I made a mockup of this
for demostration purposes, at:

http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~tstarling/EditPage_with_login.html

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anyway we can ban him from the mailing list?

body:
Anyway we can ban him from the mailing list?

Fred

> From: "anti anti" <anticapi at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 21:35:09 +0000
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anticapi--examples of good work?
>
>
>
>
>> From: Daniel P.B.Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net>
>> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anticapi--examples of good work?
>> Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 07:06:12 -0500
>>
>>> Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 06:30:47 +0000
>>> From: "anti anti" <anticapi at hotmail.com>
>>
>>> INFROGMATION BANNED ME AGAIN WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION BECAUSE I WAS TRYING TO
>>> HELP WIKIPIDIA BY WRITING USEFUL LEGITIMATE ARTICLES. SHOULDN'T THEY BE
>>> BANNED FOR ABUSING SYSOP PRIVILEGES?
>>>
>>> A GOOD SYSOP SHOULD UNBAN ME ASAP! I WANT HELP WIKIPIDIA AND WRITE USEFUL
>>> ARTICLES, REALLY. I AM A CONTRIBUTOR, NOT A TROLL.
>>
>> "Anti anti," what's your Wikipedia user name, and some Wikipedia articles
>> which you would point to as examples of good work?
>>
>> --
>> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate: dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
>> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
>> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
>> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
> I CREATED LEGITIMATE USEFUL ARTIKLES SUCH AS [[LIST OF DEAD PORN STARS]] AND
> [[LIST OF PORN STARS DIED ACCIDENTALY]] ETC! THEY BANNED MY USERNAME
> ANTICAPITALIST3 AND VOTED TO DELETE MY HARD WORK! NOW ALL MY ARTICLES ON
> VFD! WHAT A SHAME!
>
> PLEASE UNBAN ME OR GIVE ME SYSOP STATUS SO I CAN BAN THEM.!
>
> ANTICAPITALIST
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
> http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: zero 0000

body:
--- John Robinson <john at freeq.com> wrote:
> Erik Moeller writes:
>  >We need knowledgeable people in countries like China to be able to
> write about the facts without fear of ending up in a labor camp.
>
> I think if a repressive regime wants to track the Internet writings
> of people living there, an anonymous web proxy is not going to stop
> them.
>
> If I had ever once seen an anonymizer used in such a manner on
> Wikipedia, I would agree with Erik that it is worth putting up with
> the extra vandalism.  However, I never have.

Please explain how you would have noticed an anonymizer being used
in such a fashion.

Zero.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Idea for a far-out project

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Feb 14, 2004, at 15:43, Dan Carlson wrote:
>
>> In a nutshell, my idea is this: Use FileMaker Pro Developer (probably
>> version 7 when it comes out in a few months) to create a read-only
>> offline browser for my Memory Alpha wiki content.
>
> If you want a self-contained little app (custom interface, data
> compression?, no monster file trees), there are embeddable databases out
> there and certainly embeddable HTML viewers. Magnus Manske has written a
> couple of experimental offline/alternate readers; one which grabbed text
> out of a pre-indexed database dump and displayed it in a wxWindows-based
> GUI (which has an HTML widget), another which uses an SQLite database
> and a lightweight web server. You might want to check out the Waikiki
> module in our CVS (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/)
> which has Magnus's lightweight Wiki->HTML converter (in C++).
>
> wxWindows is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Unix at least) and includes
> an HTML viewer widget, so a minimal viewer probably wouldn't be that
> hard to write. Magnus's old code might still be around somewhere...
> WINOR? Something like that.

Actually, I gave up wxWindows for this purpose, as the integrated HTML
display is not *that* complete in supporting tags (table alignments
etc.). The waikiki package compiles to a command-line executable, which
can work in tandem with a tiny web server that needs no installation.
You can use your favourite browser this way.

It also has editing capability; I used to keep a copy with a blank DB on
an USB stick for taking notes. Quite handy, actually.

Magnus


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] th.wikipedia

body:
On Feb 15, 2004, at 05:58, Walter van Kalken wrote:
> The Thai wikipedia is not accesible. Why is this?

It somehow slipped out of the list and database permissions weren't set
up. Should be working now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.2.0 release soon

body:
I'd like to get the dev branch cleaned up and packaged as a 1.2.0
release in the next few days. Any outstanding serious bugs should be
fixed right quick... We also should make sure if we haven't already
that MediaWiki:-based messages can be used without memcached, and that
the default install works on MySQL 3.x out of the box.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: test.wikipedia.org on the fritz

body:
Great, seems to work now, but all the images are broken. Maybe they
haven't been copied over to a new server or something.

- David

E23 wrote:
> Should be fixed now (try a shift/ctrl-reload if not).
>
> // E23
>
> Alwin Meschede ameschede-at-gmx.de |wikipedia| wrote:
>
>> David Friedland schrieb:
>>
>>> test.wikipedia.org seems to be sending compressed data incorrectly,
>>> as both Safari and Firefox just display a bunch of garbage, but it
>>> works fine in Mac IE 5.2.
>>>
>>> Sorry, can't test any other browsers as all I have is a Mac.
>>
>>
>>
>> I can confirm this for Konqueror, Lynx, Mozilla and IE6 :-(
>> Someone should really fix that, because I'd love to have the testwiki
>> available for some bug chasing...


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> For us, we have nothing like a 'transaction', but the system could be
>> generalized from that.  Each person could assign positive or negative
>> feedback to others.
>
> ...
>
>> 2.  Difficult to game -- it is NOT automated, so there's no way to
>> game the system by engaging in repetitive actions to score points.
>
> On the contrary it's very easy to game: create a bunch of sock puppet
> accounts to give each other feedback. On E-Bay you'd have to go to the
> trouble of faking some auctions to yourself, but not here...

Of course there would be listing fees at eBay.  And there would alwys be
the risk that you might be outbid by someone who didn't realize that you
weren't selling anything. :-)

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] trust metrics

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> For us, we have nothing like a 'transaction', but the system could be
> generalized from that.  Each person could assign positive or negative
> feedback to others.
...
> 2.  Difficult to game -- it is NOT automated, so there's no way to
> game the system by engaging in repetitive actions to score points.

On the contrary it's very easy to game: create a bunch of sock puppet
accounts to give each other feedback. On E-Bay you'd have to go to the
trouble of faking some auctions to yourself, but not here...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: John Robinson

body:
zero 0000 writes:
 >Please explain how you would have noticed an anonymizer being used in
such a fashion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/65.110.6.34
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/66.36.249.149
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/207.44.154.35
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/65.161.65.104

100% vandalism, all of them.

-Hephaestos


subject: [Wikitech-l] Servers everywhere

body:
I've stuck another apache onto isidore, which is otherwise CPU-idle.
This gives us 5 web servers evenly splitting the load. Ahhhhhh, nice.
:)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Downloads and stats

body:
DNS for download.wikimedia.org should update in a few hours until then
you can get at yesterday's backup dump here:
http://zwinger.wikimedia.org/

(The en old dump is split on account of the 2GB 32-bit problem.)

Wikistats should be up sometime tonight/tomorrow.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
> From: Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com>
> Date: Saturday, February 14, 2004 10:13 pm
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Anonymous proxies (was Re: Desysop Morwen)
>
> > Sunir Shah has suggested a method for making it blindingly obvious
> > that a user is about to edit anonymously. Specifically, if the user
is
> > logged out,  a username/password box is shown on the edit page.
> > I made a mockup  of this for demostration purposes, at:
> >
> > http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~tstarling/EditPage_with_login.html

I think it should look like this (propery fomatted):

   In order to edit Wikipedia pages you need to log in.  If you don't
have
   an account you are very welcome to create one.  It is free,
immediate,
   and you don't need to give any personal information.

    -- then boxes for creating a username and password just like
    -- on the account creation page.  After the form is filled in,
return
    -- the user automatically to the edit page.

This would deter more casual vandalism than any suggestion I have
seen and be of trivial consequence for genuine users.  Is there really
a good reason we don't do this?

Zero.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html


from_name: Alwin Meschede

body:
David Friedland schrieb:
> test.wikipedia.org seems to be sending compressed data incorrectly, as
> both Safari and Firefox just display a bunch of garbage, but it works
> fine in Mac IE 5.2.
>
> Sorry, can't test any other browsers as all I have is a Mac.

I can confirm this for Konqueror, Lynx, Mozilla and IE6 :-(
Someone should really fix that, because I'd love to have the testwiki
available for some bug chasing...

Alwin Meschede