subject: [Wikitech-l] slow diffs

body:
Hey Tim,

I have some more questions about wikidiff2. I installed it, added it
to LocalSettings.php, and ran some benchmarks on diff pages, it
doesn't seem to give me any improvement, at least on our development
server. Loading 183 diff consecutive pages takes about 5 minutes using
both wikidiff2 and the default diff.

Is there any way to tell wikidiff2 is being used and is configured
properly? Or is there a better way benchmark the module? I seem to be
able to call  wikidiff2_do_diff manually from a test page.

Or is it possible that the benefits are only realized when there's
some substantial load on the server?

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.

Travis

On 11/2/06, Travis Derouin <travis at wikihow.com> wrote:
> Hey Tim,
>
> It seems like if
>
> #include <assert.h>
>
> is added to DiffEngine.h, it takes care of this problem.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Travis
>
>
> On 10/25/06, Travis Derouin <travis at wikihow.com> wrote:
> > Upgrading swig seemed to get me by the first part. Which version of
> > GCC did you use? I'm getting compilation errors as well:
> >
> > g++ -O3 `php-config --includes` -shared -fPIC -o php_wikidiff2.so
> > wikidiff2.cpp wikidiff2_wrap.cpp
> > DiffEngine.h: In member function `void _DiffEngine<T>::diff(const
> >    std::vector<T, std::allocator<_CharT> >&, const std::vector<T,
> >    std::allocator<_CharT> >&, Diff<T>&) [with T = std::string]':
> > DiffEngine.h:560:   instantiated from `Diff<T>::Diff(const
> > std::vector<T, std::allocator<_CharT> >&, const std::vector<T,
> > std::allocator<_CharT> >&) [with T = std::string]'
> > wikidiff2.cpp:15:   instantiated from here
> > DiffEngine.h:196: error: `assert' undeclared (first use this function)
> > DiffEngine.h:196: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for
> >    each function it appears in.)
> > DiffEngine.h: In member function `void _DiffEngine<T>::diff(const
> >    std::vector<T, std::allocator<_CharT> >&, const std::vector<T,
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> >
> >
> > On 10/25/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > > Travis Derouin wrote:
> > > > Thanks Tim.
> > > >
> > > > Is there any documentation for wikidiff2 other than the readme file?
> > >
> > > I doubt it.
> > >
> > > > I'm having issues compiling (wikidiff2.i:13: Syntax error in input.)
> > >
> > > We seem to be using swig version 1.3.21, you might want to try something
> > > similar.
> > >
> > > > and am not sure how to configure it - what settings do I change to
> > > > enable it?
> > >
> > > "make install" will install the shared library into the PHP extensions
> > > directory. Then in LocalSettings.php, put:
> > >
> > > $wgExternalDiffEngine = 'wikidiff2';
> > >
> > > That will tell MW to use wikidiff2, and if necessary, to do a dl() to load
> > > the extension on demand. Apparently dl() is deprecated these days, so to be
> > > completely pure and true you might want to avoid it by putting:
> > >
> > > extension=php_wikidiff2.so
> > >
> > > in php.ini.
> > >
> > > -- Tim Starling
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > >
> >
>


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Brad Patrick

subject:
[Foundation-l] Good news everyone (tax, servers,
	amsterdam and wikimedia germany)

body:
Very happy for you and WMF-DE.  Congratulations!

On 11/2/06, Arne Klempert <klempert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/2/06, oscar <oscar.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > yay! herzlich gratuliere!
> > a very very very good start indeed :-)
>
> Vielen Dank :)
>
> > when will they be installed, operational etc?
>
> They will probably arrive in Amsterdam next week. The rest is up to
> Mark and the other tech people.
>
> Arne
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf at gmail.com
727-231-0101


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Raimond Spekking

subject: [Wikitech-l] AntiSpoof problems

body:
Luiz Augusto schrieb:

> I'm a active editor
> since July 2004 and use the User:555 in lots of wikis since 23 May 2005.
> [[:en:555 (number)#Other fields|Wikipedia have a article devoted to the
> number 555]].

You can ask an admin of this wiki to create this account for you.

Raymond

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list: wikien-l

from_name: Matthew Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units conversion?

body:
On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Except when changing the MOS before making an editing run, then
> putting "per MOS" in the edit summary. He's been blocked repeatedly
> for this behaviour.

Far from the only one to do this, though perhaps the most noticeable -
most people change policies and guidelines to win an argument on one
page or a few pages, while Bobblewik does so to change something
site-wide.

Fortunately this only extends to changes in things like units and dates.

-Matt


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Classical tape recordings from the 1950s and 1960s

body:
On Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:16:34 -0700, "The Uninvited Co., Inc"
<uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:

>During the 1950s and 1960s, tape was the premium media for audio.  It
>was available in stereo format several years prior to the commercial
>availability of stereo phonograph records, and did not suffer from pops
>and scratches even when played and handled multiple times.  Prerecorded
>tapes were marketed to audiophiles and other serious listeners as a
>better-quality alternative to records.  Casual listeners of today would
>notice no difference in quality between the best tape recordings of the
>early 1960s and the CDs of today.

I have no idea about the copyright, but this reminded me of the "song
of reproduction" by Flanders and Swann - "I've an opera here that you
shan't escape / on miles and miles of recording tape..."

I will have to dust off tht Tandberg :-)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bad And Wrong Policy/Procedure/Guideline Hitlist

body:
On 11/3/06, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
> WP:IAR should really be historical at this point.  Did it have use back in
> the day?  Maybe so, but we have enough admins and useful policies and
> guidelines at this point where there really isn't ever a need to do so
> anymore, and is really just trotted out by people who know better these
> days.

I think in the cases of most good applications of "ignore all rules",
it isn't invoked by name.  People simply do the right thing instead of
the rules-bound thing.

The flipside of IAR is also useful.  If you do a stupid thing, "but I
followed all the rules!" doesn't excuse it, and doesn't mean that the
stupid thing can't be fixed.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bad And Wrong Policy/Procedure/Guideline

body:
I am in broad agreement with this.  I think the problem is especially
that all WP:COI is going to do is make people not admit to their
conflicts of interest, and encourage people to edit anonymously.

-Matt


from_name: Samuel Klein

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation to make a donation to
	FreeNode

body:
This is wonderful, and very appropriate.

--SJ

On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Anthere wrote:

> The Wikimedia Foundation will make next week a one-time donation of USD
> 5,000 dollars to the Peer-Directed Project Center, the non-profit
> organization which operates FreeNode
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode).
>
> This donation recognizes the tremendous value of online chat to the
> Wikimedia community, on the level of projects, languages and chapters,
> as well as to the Foundation itself. We hope it will help the servers to
> keep running smoothly :-)
>
> For directions to use irc and freenode network to communicate with other
> wikimedians: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC.
>
> We also renew our condoleances for the death, 2 months ago, of FreeNode
> founder, aka Lilo.
>
> Florence Devouard
> Wikimedia Foundation, chair
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units conversion?

body:
On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 01/11/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> > Bobblewik is somewhat single-minded
> > and determined, but always courteous, well-informed, intelligent, and
> > willing to engage in discussion.
>
> Except when changing the MOS before making an editing run, then
> putting "per MOS" in the edit summary. He's been blocked repeatedly
> for this behaviour.

But I thought that was the way you were supposed to do it - edit
policy/guidelines before you get into an argument, and then you're always
right, since we must blindly follow policy and guidelines.  After all, isn't
the rule "whoever breaks the rules first wins" since after that everyone
else is edit warring or wheel warring (unlike the first person to act, who
is BE BOLDing)


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
On 11/3/06, The Uninvited Co., Inc <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> I have in my hand a tape recording published by the Deutche Grammphon
> Gesellschaft that was published in the USA during this era.  All of the
> original packaging is intact and no copyright notice is present.  It
> contains a collection of important sacred arias and choruses performed
> by leading performers of the day, and the musical and audio quality is
> beyond criticism.  I bought it for a few bucks on eBay.  There are many
> other such recordings available on eBay and elsewhere, and they could
> readily be converted to Ogg Vorbis and uploaded.  Their value both to
> the public at large and to the articles they could illustrate is
> tremendous.

While I don't know about the copyright situation, I am sure of one
thing: Eventually, your new tape player will break down, and the tapes
will go bad. Not soon, but think 20 years of use. If you were to make
copies to Ogg Vorbis (or maybe even FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio
Codec) and store them on CDs/DVDs, and maybe give a few trustworthy
people copies of these, digital copies will be available once the
copyright smokescreen clears.

Magnus


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation to make a donation to FreeNode

body:
The Wikimedia Foundation will make next week a one-time donation of USD
5,000 dollars to the Peer-Directed Project Center, the non-profit
organization which operates FreeNode
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode).

This donation recognizes the tremendous value of online chat to the
Wikimedia community, on the level of projects, languages and chapters,
as well as to the Foundation itself. We hope it will help the servers to
keep running smoothly :-)

For directions to use irc and freenode network to communicate with other
wikimedians: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC.

We also renew our condoleances for the death, 2 months ago, of FreeNode
founder, aka Lilo.

Florence Devouard
Wikimedia Foundation, chair


from_name: Jeff Raymond

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> Please list and elaborate.
>
> This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> awful.

A7 and G11 continue to chap my behind.  They go against what we'd normally
use for a CSD, and the high number of poor uses (yes, I know it generally
works the way it's allegedly supposed to, but too many other things get
caught in the crossfire) make it more of a pain than anything else.  And
that's not even getting into the WP:BITE considerations.

WP:IAR should really be historical at this point.  Did it have use back in
the day?  Maybe so, but we have enough admins and useful policies and
guidelines at this point where there really isn't ever a need to do so
anymore, and is really just trotted out by people who know better these
days.

I don't think the off-wiki personal attack addition was a bad one in
retrospect, but it would sure be nice to see some consistent application
of it.

</bitching>

-Jeff

--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.


body:
On 11/3/06, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:
>
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> > Please list and elaborate.
> >
> > This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> > just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> > awful.
>
> A7 and G11 continue to chap my behind.  They go against what we'd normally
> use for a CSD, and the high number of poor uses (yes, I know it generally
> works the way it's allegedly supposed to, but too many other things get
> caught in the crossfire) make it more of a pain than anything else.  And
> that's not even getting into the WP:BITE considerations.

Once upon a time there was a vote about "criteria for speedy deletion".  I
thought it was needlessly bureaucratic, and best to be ignored.  Since then,
a whole language has developed "A7", "G11" and the criteria have multipled
like crazy.  Once upon a time I ignored it because I thought it was needless
bureaucracy - now I ignore it because it is impenetrable bureaucracy, and
quite frankly, if I wanted to deal with crap like that I would have gone to
law school.

WP:IAR should really be historical at this point.  Did it have use back in
> the day?  Maybe so, but we have enough admins and useful policies and
> guidelines at this point where there really isn't ever a need to do so
> anymore, and is really just trotted out by people who know better these
> days.

While IAR is often abused as a reason to be disruptive, the truth is that
it's the last defense against insanity in many cases, specifically
becausewe have too many useless guidelines and policies.  When we have
too many
people who don't understand the difference between guidelines and policies,
and who wikilawyer guidelines into "absolute truths"... we have a problem.

IAR is good, but when done intentionally.

I don't think the off-wiki personal attack addition was a bad one in
> retrospect, but it would sure be nice to see some consistent application
> of it.

Yep - to begin with, in IRC

Ian


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units converstion?

body:
Andrew Gray wrote:

>On 31/10/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I just found this:
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Capote#In Cold Blood
>>
>>Apparently some time ago, someone added a metric conversion (4 km^2)
>>to the term "1,000 acres" in the quoted New York Times article.
>>
>>That's a direct historical quote - is an in-line metric units
>>conversion appropriate within the quote?
>>
>>It seems to me like we shouldn't be doing that.
>>
>>
>I confess I'm one of the real hardliners who says we shouldn't even
>wikilink in quotes! One of my real bugbears is people helpfully
>correcting unusual date formats without checking to see if they're in
>a direct quote, or in the title of a cited source, or something...
>really we shouldn't be altering or muddying the text of a quote any
>more than we have to.
>
I very much believe that quotes should be respected, but there are still
places where judgement should be exercised.  I have no problem with
correcting obvious typos, as long as there is no question about it.
This can also depend on the nature of the work.  If a person is highly
literary the obvious typo may not be a typo at all.  US/UK spelling
differences are not typos.  Malapropisms are not typos.  Typos that lead
to a grammatical but off beat result, like a reference to an "immoral
soul" when "immortal soul" is likely intended should not be altered.

In some cases though, particularly in factual writing, we don't need to
make a writer look like an idiot when it serves no purpose.  The
following from an article called "The Post Offices of Bracken County,
Kentucky" is one where I would make the corrections:  "The Genmantown
post office was established on the Mason Cbunty side of the line on
December 8, 1817 with Ludwell Owings (?) as postmaster."  The town
should be "Germantown", as the rest of the context will establish; I
also know that in reading some sans-serif typefaces in particular the
distinction between the "rm" and "nm" combinations is not always clear.
The totally meaningless "Cbunty" should also be changed.  On the other
hand the date format should not be altered, and the question mark
expressing the author's uncertainty should be retained.

>With the exception of rectifications to make something actually parse
>better - changing "all the underaforesaid shall" to "[they] shall" -
>I'd personally feel happier with using footnotes to annotate the
>quotation, if you feel the need to annotate it at all. And even that
>should be done sparingly unless it's truly confusing to the average
>reader... and, if at all possible, not a mindless numerical
>conversion.
>
I don't know about that one.  A word like "underaforesaid" strikes me as
psudo-legalese, and has a clear bearing on the credibility of the
writer.  Your "they" may not lead the reader to the same antecedent that
the writer intended ... if that can be discerned at all. :-)

Ec


body:
Matthew Brown wrote:
> On 11/3/06, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com>
> wrote:
>> WP:IAR should really be historical at this point.  Did it have use back
>> in
>> the day?  Maybe so, but we have enough admins and useful policies and
>> guidelines at this point where there really isn't ever a need to do so
>> anymore, and is really just trotted out by people who know better these
>> days.
>
> I think in the cases of most good applications of "ignore all rules",
> it isn't invoked by name.  People simply do the right thing instead of
> the rules-bound thing.
>

You're not the first person to claim this, but I've also never seen it to
be true.  It's a constant battle, and one I know I'm losing.

-Jeff

--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.


body:
Jeff Raymond wrote:

>Matthew Brown wrote:
>
>
>>On 11/3/06, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>
>>>WP:IAR should really be historical at this point.  Did it have use back
>>>in
>>>the day?  Maybe so, but we have enough admins and useful policies and
>>>guidelines at this point where there really isn't ever a need to do so
>>>anymore, and is really just trotted out by people who know better these
>>>days.
>>>
>>>
>>I think in the cases of most good applications of "ignore all rules",
>>it isn't invoked by name.  People simply do the right thing instead of
>>the rules-bound thing.
>>
>>
>You're not the first person to claim this, but I've also never seen it to
>be true.  It's a constant battle, and one I know I'm losing.
>
That may depend on where you are applying it.  If the article is already
contentious your edits of that kind will most certainly attract
attention.  My experiences are more like Matthew's.

If you use the rule like bait on the end of a trolling line you are
bound to get attention that you don't want.

Ec


body:
David Gerard wrote:

>What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
>Please list and elaborate.
>
>This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
>just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
>awful.
>
Why do I think that there is something masochistic to that question? :-)

I would personally prefer a complete review of all policies and
guidelines, but I can also recognize dreams as what they are.

I remember suggesting a way to systematically deal with the rules a long
time ago, but that would have required more discipline than what is
standard here.

Ec


body:
Jeff Raymond wrote:

>David Gerard wrote:
>
>
>>What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
>>Please list and elaborate.
>>
>>This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
>>just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
>>awful.
>>
>>
>A7 and G11 continue to chap my behind.  They go against what we'd normally
>use for a CSD, and the high number of poor uses (yes, I know it generally
>works the way it's allegedly supposed to, but too many other things get
>caught in the crossfire) make it more of a pain than anything else.  And
>that's not even getting into the WP:BITE considerations.
>
>WP:IAR should really be historical at this point.  Did it have use back in
>the day?  Maybe so, but we have enough admins and useful policies and
>guidelines at this point where there really isn't ever a need to do so
>anymore, and is really just trotted out by people who know better these
>days.
>
I have no idea what you mean by A7 and G11.  The other three
abbreviations are repeated often enough for me to remember them, but
there is still a need to explain your jargon when you initiate it in a
thread.

Ec


from_name: Nick Jenkins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Links?

body:
> "Liz Kim"
> > Is it possible to have images as links?? HOW??
> > THANKS!
>
> * If you want to show the image use: [[Image:imagename]]
> * If you want to link to the image page use [[:Image:imagename]]
> * If you want to link to the file use [[Media:imagename]]
> * If you want to link to the file from outside the wiki use
> http://XX.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Filepath/imagename
>
> If you wanted to read the fine manual go to
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Images

And if you want to have image linking to other pages, you can either:
* Install the imagemap extension (if you want areas to be clickable). -
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/ImageMap/ (that'll give internal links, but not external links
currently).
* There's this extension: http://www.dandwiki.com/w/extensions/buttonLink.php.txt ... although you might perhaps want to fix the XSS
that allows this attack to work: <buttonLink>"><script>alert('All_your_base_are_belong_to_me!');</script><span
id=",http://url/to/button</buttonLink>
* There's the LinkedImage extension: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LinkedImage  (I think it'll do internal links, but not external
links).
* If you have to have it now no matter what, and none of the above are suitable, you can apply this patch:
http://files.nickj.org/MediaWiki/image-linking-diff.txt - however the main problem with this is that currently it will stuff up on
nested images ( example:
http://theplaypit.nickj.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Problem_with_nested_image_where_the_inner_image_has_image_attributes ).
The solution to this is probably to recursively call the parser on just the caption, rather than everything after the "[[image:xxx|"
bit, as currently happens. It'll do internal links, external links, and no links, but it ain't production-ready yet, and I haven't
made a systematic attempt to try and break it yet either.

So, long answer short, as far as I'm aware there is no ideal solution to this yet. In the interim, probably pick the one that seems
most appropriate for your needs.

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Aerik Sylvan

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Search in Category" function for MediaWiki

body:
Christophe Henner wrote:

>
> Hi
> Still about Category search, I looked for something about it but
> didn't found, what about something making possible to have all the
> article matching x categorys.
> For exemple giving the list of all the articles both in
> [[Category:Writer]] and [[Category:Born in London]].
> Have a nice day
> --
> schiste

That's the much discussed and desired "Category Intersections" and is a
tricker problem (at scale) than I thought.  I've been testing some ideas on
and off, but have been slowed down due to having a hard time clearing the
query cache on the server I'm using (I've tried "FLUSH QUERY CACHE" and
"RESET QUERY CACHE" but they don't seem to actually do it - all you MySQL
gurus out there, what am I missing?).

I've got two ideas I want to test:

1) use the existing table and the query I've previously suggested, but
constructed it smarter by considering the number of pages in each category -
in other words, purposefully narrow down he result set as early as possible
(like look at "People born in 1912" and then see how many of those are
"Living People" instead of the other way around).

2)  Try building a table with a fulltext index using a record for each page,
and a column for the categories, delimited by spaces (use underscores for
spaces in a category name).  This may be a bit hackish, but I'm thinking
this will get MySQL to do the tricky part of building the index on
categories (each being a word in that column) for me.  The MySQL people
must've made the fulltext index code as efficient as possible, so it will be
interesting to see how it performs.  I know full text indexing is not
acceptable for whole Wikipedia articles, but if we're only considering
categories, we're talking about a lot less text.  I've been wondering if
maybe this is how Flickr handles tags - whatever they're doing, the
functionality seems to match what we want to do, and at a large scale, too.

If neither of these work, then I think we're off into either Lucene or some
other search function with a custom index/data structure.  But I have the
strong impression that those are pretty inherently not updated in real-time,
which is a bummer.

Best Regards,
Aerik


from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 11/3/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not happy with DCMA take down stuff being dealt with through normal
> deletion rather than oversight deletion. I don't like the idea that I
> could accidentally restore stuff deleted due to DMCA notices.
>

I didn't even notice that... but yeah, that sounds like a bad idea.  If
there's a DMCA or other external reason for things, it should be made clear
to everyone...

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [Foundation-l] benefactors page

body:
On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> the PayPal donation tracking pages). Would be neat to treat 'Anonymous'
> as a single donor.

This would hide the # of fantastic anonymous donors who are signed up
for recurring $1000 donations or other large sums; better perhaps to
list big anon donors separately, and small ones by statistics ($489,000
from 15,400 named and 9,035 anonymous donors)

> I would also like to link the benefactors page from very visible real
> estate on each page on each wiki. That page is virtually hidden from the
> content wikis atm.

<strong agreement>

SJ


subject: [Foundation-l] benefactors page


from_name: Gregory Kohs

body:
I think that WP:COI (or Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) is botched.  The
basic notion is that if you really intimately know about or care
passionately about a topic that might have some impact on your career,
even in some tangential way, you are either "strongly encouraged" or (just
in case you are dense) "very strongly encouraged" to avoid editing Wikipedia
on that topic.

Following this policy means that:

In the article about the theory of general relativity, Wikipedia would
reject the submissions of Albert Einstein, but encourage those of a talented
high school physics student.

In the article about Microsoft, Wikipedia would reject the submissions of
Bill Gates, but encourage those of an amateur computer enthusiast, or
(heaven forfend!) accept those of Steve Jobs editing anonymously.

In the article about the Pokemon character, "Brock", Wikipedia would reject
the submissions of conceptual creator Satoshi Tajiri, but encourage those of
an 8-year-old kid in his underpants on his mom's computer.

In summary, regardless of whether the authoring agent can prove Notability,
use excellent independently-sourced Citation skills, and civilly engage in
the Editing/Discussion process, if the author stands to make any personal
money in the process, their edits must be "strongly"
avoided/discouraged/deleted.

If that's the case, why is it that:

(1)  Angela Beesley has edited the article about Wikia.com (her own company)
on July 12, April 30, March 27, and February 18 of 2006; plus October 17,
July 15, May 6-7, April 23, March 24, February 10, February 4, and January
14 of 2005?

(2)  The Reward Board is allowed to remain in place -- WP:COI clearly says
that if "you are receiving monetary or other benefits to edit Wikipedia",
then "we *very strongly* encourage you to avoid editing..."

If Wikipedia's most staunch defenders of "non-conflict-of-interest" editing
would grab hold of a clue, maybe they might see that commercial interests
and scrutiny have a lot to offer Wikipedia, in terms of careful, fact-based
editing, contributing hard-to-find information, and engaging in the ongoing
editorial dialogue.  The company that just repeatedly comes into the
Wikipedia space and makes one biased, unsupported claim after another will
just be making itself look foolish.

When you peel away all the layers of excuses and hypocrisy, let's face it,
EVERYONE has some personally-beneficial agenda when they choose to edit one
topic in Wikipedia over any of the 1.3 million other ones at their disposal.

(Great question, David!)

--
Gregory Kohs
Cell: 302.463.1354


from_name: Rob

body:
On 11/3/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:

> Following this policy means that:
>
> In the article about the theory of general relativity, Wikipedia would
> reject the submissions of Albert Einstein, but encourage those of a talented
> high school physics student.

We have a large, ongoing problem with companies attempting to use WP
as a promotional tool, as I'm sure you are aware, and political
operatives attempting to use WP as a campaign tool.  A policy is
helpful and useful in dealing with these issues, if only to provide a
link to paste on a spammer's page to help explain why he can't post a
link to his sales page everywhere.  I doubt that anyone would
seriously interpret this policy in a way that would reject the
contributions of a notable scientist editing articles in his field.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units converstion?

body:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

>>In some cases though, particularly in factual writing, we don't
>>need to
>>make a writer look like an idiot when it serves no purpose.  The
>>following from an article called "The Post Offices of Bracken County,
>>Kentucky" is one where I would make the corrections:  "The Genmantown
>>post office was established on the Mason Cbunty side of the line on
>>December 8, 1817 with Ludwell Owings (?) as postmaster."  The town
>>should be "Germantown", as the rest of the context will establish; I
>>also know that in reading some sans-serif typefaces in particular the
>>distinction between the "rm" and "nm" combinations is not always
>>clear.
>>The totally meaningless "Cbunty" should also be changed.  On the other
>>hand the date format should not be altered, and the question mark
>>expressing the author's uncertainty should be retained.
>>
>>
>I have _great_ reservations about changing directi quotations for any
>reason. I take your point, but even in the case you mention, it
>requires a certain degree of expert judgement to "correct" an
>"obvious" typo, and the danger is that the correction leaves no
>obvious trace. I think it's better to place the correction in a
>footnote.
>
>Someone once told me that in analyzing old texts, it is an
>established principle that if there are two versions and one makes
>sense and one doesn't, it is the one that doesn't that is likely to
>be accurate, because the coherent version is usually the result of a
>later editor trying to "correct" the passage.
>
Judgement is the operative term, and in most cases I too strongly
support retaining the quote as presented.  Regretably, I am only too
aware that judgement is a scarce commodity.

Ec


from_name: John Grohol

subject: [Wikitech-l] Enwiki dump failing (twice in a row)

body:
The past two dumps of enwiki have failed; last successful dump was in September.

Any ideas on what might be causing this?


from_name: SPUI

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> Please list and elaborate.
>
> This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> awful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:State_route_naming_conventions_poll
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28U.S._state_highways%29


body:
On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Have a look at the arbcom pages some time. Fred Bauder seriously
> proposed some time last year that Chip Berlet should not be allowed to
> edit articles about the LaRouchians because - hah! - his expertise on
> the subject meant he was too involved.

Did he actually say that "expertise" should be a disqualification from
editing or did he say that due to his experience Berlet may have a
preconceived notion that the LaRouchians were all nuts and should thus
be disqualified?  The latter seems to be a more reasonable and
defensible position, though it isn't one I that I agree with.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Links?

body:
On 11/3/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 10:53:37AM -0800, Liz Kim wrote:
> > Is it possible to have images as links?? HOW??
>
> Look around for a template called "Click"; we use it on the front page
> of wiki.mythtv.org, and it works nicely.
>

It's not recommended since it won't work in all browsers, but you can
find it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Click

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Click has an example of using
this with an image.

Angela.


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 11/3/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation will make next week a one-time donation of USD
> 5,000 dollars to the Peer-Directed Project Center, the non-profit
> organization which operates FreeNode
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode).
>
> This donation recognizes the tremendous value of online chat to the
> Wikimedia community, on the level of projects, languages and chapters,
> as well as to the Foundation itself. We hope it will help the servers to
> keep running smoothly :-)
>
A great idea.  I had thought the idea of donating to freenode had
already been brought up and rejected, but looking back it seems that
while Angela opposed making the donation, you and Jimbo were in favor
of it.

Anyway, a $5000 one-time donation seems quite appropriate.  Freenode
has been very helpful to the Wikimedia projects.

Anthony


subject: [Wikitech-l] Image Links?

body:
> > It's not recommended since it won't work in all browsers, but you can
> > find it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Click
>
> You have any pointers on that, Angela?  I don't think we knew that...

It says it on the template - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Click
There's also more discussion of the problem on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Click

> (And, on an unrelated topic, what happened to bestpractices.wikia?  It
> seems to have evaporated, and I didn't hear a thing...)

We should discuss that off-list, but it's still there -
http://bestpractices.wikia.com/

Angela.


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units converstion?

body:
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units converstion?
> I very much believe that quotes should be respected, but there are
> still
> places where judgement should be exercised.  I have no problem with
> correcting obvious typos, as long as there is no question about it.
> This can also depend on the nature of the work.  If a person is highly
> literary the obvious typo may not be a typo at all.  US/UK spelling
> differences are not typos.  Malapropisms are not typos.  Typos that
> lead
> to a grammatical but off beat result, like a reference to an "immoral
> soul" when "immortal soul" is likely intended should not be altered.
>
> In some cases though, particularly in factual writing, we don't
> need to
> make a writer look like an idiot when it serves no purpose.  The
> following from an article called "The Post Offices of Bracken County,
> Kentucky" is one where I would make the corrections:  "The Genmantown
> post office was established on the Mason Cbunty side of the line on
> December 8, 1817 with Ludwell Owings (?) as postmaster."  The town
> should be "Germantown", as the rest of the context will establish; I
> also know that in reading some sans-serif typefaces in particular the
> distinction between the "rm" and "nm" combinations is not always
> clear.
> The totally meaningless "Cbunty" should also be changed.  On the other
> hand the date format should not be altered, and the question mark
> expressing the author's uncertainty should be retained.

I have _great_ reservations about changing directi quotations for any
reason. I take your point, but even in the case you mention, it
requires a certain degree of expert judgement to "correct" an
"obvious" typo, and the danger is that the correction leaves no
obvious trace. I think it's better to place the correction in a
footnote.

Someone once told me that in analyzing old texts, it is an
established principle that if there are two versions and one makes
sense and one doesn't, it is the one that doesn't that is likely to
be accurate, because the coherent version is usually the result of a
later editor trying to "correct" the passage.

To your examples, I'd add that when Lewis Carroll spells the words
_can't_, _won't_, and _shan't_ as _ca'n't_, _wo'n't_ and "sha'n't,"
respectively, they are not typos... and when George Bernard Shaw
spells the same words as _cant_, _wont_, and _shant_ they are not
typos, either.


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units conversion?

body:
On 01/11/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> Bobblewik is somewhat single-minded
> and determined, but always courteous, well-informed, intelligent, and
> willing to engage in discussion.

Except when changing the MOS before making an editing run, then
putting "per MOS" in the edit summary. He's been blocked repeatedly
for this behaviour.

- d.


body:
Charles R. Matthews wrote:

++++++++++++++
We would reject the edits of anyone claiming to be Einstein! We would have
rejected edits from AE himself, if he had not been able to edit neutrally on
the Copenhagen interpretation.

>* In the article about Microsoft, Wikipedia would reject the submissions of
*>* Bill Gates, but encourage those of an amateur computer enthusiast, or
*>* (heaven forfend!) accept those of Steve Jobs editing anonymously.
*
I think we might have some problems with Mr. Gates's POV on, for example,
the EU's fining of Microsoft. I think we'd have many problems with
Microsoft's legal office slanting the articles about Micrsoft's litigation.
Don't you?
++++++++++++++++++++
Charles, thank you for actually defending my main point.  If Wikipedians
like yourself assume that PREVENTION of editing is the only way we'll ever
see whether paid, seemingly-conflicted editing can actually be done
neutrally, we'll never actually know.  Let's just all assume that Albert
Einstein and Bill Gates would be intellectually INCAPABLE of contributing
neutral, beneficial content to Wikipedia.  Let's assume that the Wikipedia
community would not be capable of MERCILESSLY EDITING (or reverting) the
content that they found to be biased (through cited sources, of course).  In
fact, let's just assume bad faith, all around, shall we?  It certainly
stands to reason that the only thing Bill Gates might possibly be able to
add to an article about Microsoft (or computers, or inner-city secondary
education) would be his perspective on EU fines against Microsoft.  It would
equally stand to reason that Arch Coal and Fleshlight are very similar
companies, in search of exploiting Wikipedia in the exact same ways.

So, as long as we're assuming the worst possible abilities on the part of
anyone who earns a dollar, I'm curious to see what you had to say about my
other two points (to which you didn't respond) -- that of Angela Beesley's
editing "her" Wikia article, and the nature of the Reward Board, which
offers MONEY to people to write about a particular topic that the financier
wants written about?

(Prediction:  This is where we'll begin to see these layers of excuses and
hypocrisy being donned once again.  Wikia is a different case.  The Reward
Board is an exception.)

--
Gregory Kohs
Cell: 302.463.1354


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
[[WP:DRV]]. Allegedly set up to hear procedural cases, it has become
a court of appeal whereby procedure is considered sporadically, and
more often, where decisions that are unpopular among the main clique
that watches DRV get overturned with no further chance of appeal. It
has become one of the worst examples of a de facto committee on en,
and is far past the point where any of its decisions should be
considered binding.

All of our notability guidelines, which fit together to provide a
completely ludicrous overall picture. (It's far easier to get onto
Wikipedia as a pornographic actor than as a webcartoonist. Or, if you
want to ) These are a mess of kludges created to sort out a momentary
instance where six or seven articles of a given topic got AfDed in a
short time period, leading to a guideline, usually written primarily
by the people who wanted the articles deleted. We have, meanwhile, no
generalizable criteria for notability, and thus no useful end in
sight for these guidelines.

[[WP:RFA]], which, like notability, lacks any consensus anymore on
what the overall standards should be, and has thus degenerated into
utter madness.

[[WP:FA]] and to a lesser extent [[WP:GA]], which, like RFA, suffer
from such a wildly disparate set of standards that the process of
passing them is more a process of politics than of actual quality.

[[WP:RS]] still stands, due to the lack of passage of [[WP:ATT]].
It's still as big a problem as ever.

Best,
Phil Sandifer
sandifer at english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

 >

On Nov 3, 2006, at 11:43 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> Please list and elaborate.
>
> This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> awful.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Excessive units conversion?

body:
On 03/11/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:

> But I thought that was the way you were supposed to do it - edit
> policy/guidelines before you get into an argument, and then you're always
> right, since we must blindly follow policy and guidelines.  After all, isn't
> the rule "whoever breaks the rules first wins" since after that everyone
> else is edit warring or wheel warring (unlike the first person to act, who
> is BE BOLDing)

Also, as long as you can write civilly, you can be as absolutely
bloody infuriating as you like, because after all your opponent is
obviously wrong because they blew their top first. Assume smarmy
faith!

- d.


from_name: jf_wikipedia at mac.com

body:
On Nov 3, 2006, at 9:59 AM, Gregory Kohs wrote:

> I think that WP:COI (or Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) is
> botched.  The
> basic notion is that if you really intimately know about or care
> passionately about a topic that might have some impact on your career,
> even in some tangential way, you are either "strongly encouraged"
> or (just
> in case you are dense) "very strongly encouraged" to avoid editing
> Wikipedia
> on that topic.

We have had a vigorous debate on these issues on the talk page, and
similar concerns were voiced there. The current wording about "close
relationships" makes allowances related to editing within policies.
It now reads:

----
== Close relationships ==
Friedrich Engels would have had difficulty editing Karl Marx, because
he was a close friend, follower and collaborator.[1] Any situation
where strong relationships can develop may trigger a conflict of
interest. Conflict of interest can be personal, religious, political,
academic, financial, and legal. It is not determined by area, but is
created by relationships that involve a high level of personal
commitment to, involvement with, or dependence upon, a person,
subject, idea, tradition, or organization.

There is no tidy definition of what is meant by "too close" in this
context, and editors should use their common sense in deciding
whether this guideline applies. An article about a little-known band
should preferably not be written by a band member or the manager. On
the other hand, an expert on climate change is welcome to contribute
to articles on that subject, even if he is deeply committed to it. As
a rule of thumb, the more involved you are in a particular area in
real life, the more careful you should be to adhere to our core
content policies ? Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No
original research, and Wikipedia:Verifiability ? when editing in that
area. Closeness to a subject does not mean you're incapable of being
neutral, but it may incline you in that direction. Be guided by the
advice of other editors. If editors on a talk page suggest in good
faith that you may have a conflict of interest, take seriously what
they say and consider withdrawing from editing the article.

----
There is some opposition to this wording on the basis that it is "too
soft", but IMO it captures the spirit of what this guideline wants to
say about editing articles in which one may have a COI based on a
"close relationship".

-- Jossi


body:
What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
Please list and elaborate.

This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
awful.

- d.


from_name: geni

body:
On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> Please list and elaborate.
>
> This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> awful.

Parts of Wikipedia:Username

"Names that can be confused with other contributors" tends to be
overused. It is common practice on the net for people when a user name
is taken to use the user name followed by some number. We need to
accept this.

Wikipedia:Sock puppetry

just seems to be rather long

Wikipedia:Ownership of articles

Should be Wikipedia:Ownership of content. I tend to feel we have a
problem if people are asking permission to edit images.

CSD G12 is getting better but still suffers from having undergone two
different rapid changes with little discussion

Office Actions:

Not happy with DCMA take down stuff being dealt with through normal
deletion rather than oversight deletion. I don't like the idea that I
could accidentally restore stuff deleted due to DMCA notices.
--
geni


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> [[WP:DRV]]. Allegedly set up to hear procedural cases, it has become
> a court of appeal whereby procedure is considered sporadically, and
> more often, where decisions that are unpopular among the main clique
> that watches DRV get overturned with no further chance of appeal. It
> has become one of the worst examples of a de facto committee on en,
> and is far past the point where any of its decisions should be
> considered binding.

I think the thing that continues to bother me about DRV is that, as much
as we harp about not being a democracy and not voting, it's the msot
blatant vote counting mechanism out there.  Someone can point out five
problems with a deletion, and as long as the people in favor of deletion
can dredge up one more person than you, it stays.  Patently absurd.
>
> [[WP:FA]] and to a lesser extent [[WP:GA]], which, like RFA, suffer
> from such a wildly disparate set of standards that the process of
> passing them is more a process of politics than of actual quality.

I haven't found that so far, but I'm relatively new to the world of FA.
  I'm also highly critical, so maybe I'm part of the problem as opposed
to the solution.

-Jeff

--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
	Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
	- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Original research on a featured article


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

>geni wrote:
>
>
>>Office Actions:
>>
>>Not happy with DCMA take down stuff being dealt with through normal
>>deletion rather than oversight deletion. I don't like the idea that I
>>could accidentally restore stuff deleted due to DMCA notices.
>>
>>
>
>My objections about the ambiguity of whether edits by User:Danny were
>"office" or not has recently been resolved, but I'd still like to see a
>more intuitive username for the office action account than "Dannyisme".
>I suggest "User:Office Actions" as the obvious choice.
>
Having "OFFICE" in all capitals would make it even more obvious.

Ec


body:
On 03/11/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/3/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:

> > In the article about the theory of general relativity, Wikipedia would
> > reject the submissions of Albert Einstein, but encourage those of a talented
> > high school physics student.

> We have a large, ongoing problem with companies attempting to use WP
> as a promotional tool, as I'm sure you are aware, and political
> operatives attempting to use WP as a campaign tool.  A policy is
> helpful and useful in dealing with these issues, if only to provide a
> link to paste on a spammer's page to help explain why he can't post a
> link to his sales page everywhere.  I doubt that anyone would
> seriously interpret this policy in a way that would reject the
> contributions of a notable scientist editing articles in his field.

Have a look at the arbcom pages some time. Fred Bauder seriously
proposed some time last year that Chip Berlet should not be allowed to
edit articles about the LaRouchians because - hah! - his expertise on
the subject meant he was too involved.

- d.


body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote:

>We have had a vigorous debate on these issues on the talk page, and
>similar concerns were voiced there. The current wording about "close
>relationships" makes allowances related to editing within policies.
>It now reads:
>
>----
>== Close relationships ==
>Friedrich Engels would have had difficulty editing Karl Marx, because
>he was a close friend, follower and collaborator.[1] Any situation
>where strong relationships can develop may trigger a conflict of
>interest. Conflict of interest can be personal, religious, political,
>academic, financial, and legal. It is not determined by area, but is
>created by relationships that involve a high level of personal
>commitment to, involvement with, or dependence upon, a person,
>subject, idea, tradition, or organization.
>
>There is no tidy definition of what is meant by "too close" in this
>context, and editors should use their common sense in deciding
>whether this guideline applies. An article about a little-known band
>should preferably not be written by a band member or the manager. On
>the other hand, an expert on climate change is welcome to contribute
>to articles on that subject, even if he is deeply committed to it. As
>a rule of thumb, the more involved you are in a particular area in
>real life, the more careful you should be to adhere to our core
>content policies ? Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No
>original research, and Wikipedia:Verifiability ? when editing in that
>area. Closeness to a subject does not mean you're incapable of being
>neutral, but it may incline you in that direction. Be guided by the
>advice of other editors. If editors on a talk page suggest in good
>faith that you may have a conflict of interest, take seriously what
>they say and consider withdrawing from editing the article.
>
>----
>There is some opposition to this wording on the basis that it is "too
>soft", but IMO it captures the spirit of what this guideline wants to
>say about editing articles in which one may have a COI based on a
>"close relationship".
>
Conflicts of interest are a fact of life, and should not in themselves
bar a person from editing a subject.  It's more important that potential
conflicts of interest be declared so that the person's perspective is
clear.  While neutrality is important, and articles should clearly
approach neutrality more closely with each edit, no-one can completely
divorce himself from his own perspective on a controversial issue.  A
person directly connected with a company may very well quote from the
company's PR material; that's fine because he can very well be an
authority on what the company's point of view really is.  Editing that
should not distort what the company is trying to say.  If the company's
statements differ from what it actually does that needs to be expressed
too, but this is in addition to rather than instead of the company's
propaganda.

The contrast that you make between the band manager and the climate
change crusader is interesting.  There is a lot of controversy about
climate change, but you seem to support a lighter application of the
rules in this case than with the band manager in an article that is of
more limited importance.  In the absence of further information why not
let the band manager's comments stand if they are not of a controversial
nature?

The advice of other editors is to be considered, but a claim that
someone is in a conflict of interest is often a personal attack.  It can
too often be used as a bullying tactic to make the opposing POV dominant.

Ec


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
geni wrote:
> Office Actions:
>
> Not happy with DCMA take down stuff being dealt with through normal
> deletion rather than oversight deletion. I don't like the idea that I
> could accidentally restore stuff deleted due to DMCA notices.

My objections about the ambiguity of whether edits by User:Danny were
"office" or not has recently been resolved, but I'd still like to see a
more intuitive username for the office action account than "Dannyisme".
I suggest "User:Office Actions" as the obvious choice.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Sep11Wiki cleanup effort closed; wiki locked again

body:
On 31/10/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:

> who keeps suing people, making whacked-out
> attacks on Wikipedia and Wikipedians on his website, and generally
> showing a mental disconnect from reality?

He's stopped doing that stuff and is now trying to do his best to work
with Wikipedia and Wikimedia on stuff, particularly things like
Cherokee-language materials.

- d.


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> [[WP:FA]] and to a lesser extent [[WP:GA]], which, like RFA, suffer
> from such a wildly disparate set of standards that the process of
> passing them is more a process of politics than of actual quality.

Fortunately, unlike the rest of the problematic policies and guidelines
you mention it's easy and harmless to just do what I do and ignore the
entire concept. I don't care whether articles I work on get the little
star sticker or not, improvements to an article are worth making purely
for their own sake.

I do the same thing with "stub sorting" these days. I added a bit of CSS
to my skin to make stub templates vanish from my sight and let other
editors waste their time as they see fit. :)

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from_name: David Boothroyd

body:
The three revert rule is now bad policy, specifically in the way it
has been allowed to evolve.

Firstly, it is badly named: if three reverts is not an entitlement
then it should not be called that, and in practice three reverts or
fewer, or over a longer period, have got editors blocked under the
general provision to block disruptive users.

Secondly, a 'revert' is not clearly defined. Lots of things which
aren't reverts are included, while plenty that is a revert is
excluded.

Thirdly, enforcing admins rarely look intelligently at what is
actually happening in an article. It is very easy to find that
POV pushers use it to enforce their position.

Fourthly, it is being enforced in a way that discourages compromise.
Editors who always revert back to their version are treated just
the same as editors who continue to disagree but propose compromise
wording instead.

Fifthly, despite the complicated and questionable interpretation
involved in working out whether the rule is engaged, there is no way
in practice to expunge the block log where the interpretation is
proved inaccurate.

Sixthly, the fact that new anonymous or IP users can claim ignorance
of the rule and be unblocked while experienced editors cannot, means
that enforcement actually discriminates against the experienced
Wikipedian old hands.
--
David Boothroyd - http://www.election.demon.co.uk
david at election.demon.co.uk (home)
dboothroyd at westminster.gov.uk (council)


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 03/11/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
> > Please list and elaborate.
> >
> > This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
> > just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
> > awful.
>
>
> Parts of Wikipedia:Username
>
> "Names that can be confused with other contributors" tends to be
> overused. It is common practice on the net for people when a user name
> is taken to use the user name followed by some number. We need to
> accept this.

Random anecdote: some years ago, my then-girlfriend's little sister
got an email address. It was on Hotmail, I think - she took something
like "nickname43" as the username. On being asked - what, was
"nickname" not available? - she told us that she thought *everyone*
had a number at the end of their names on the internet...

> Office Actions:
>
> Not happy with DCMA take down stuff being dealt with through normal
> deletion rather than oversight deletion. I don't like the idea that I
> could accidentally restore stuff deleted due to DMCA notices.

On the other hand, it's very handy to see the page *was* deleted, so
admins can handle queries about it, and if you oversighted all the
revisions this might not be the case.

Would it be simpler just to delete it and say "DMCA takedown" in the
deletion summary? You'd be hard pressed to restore something without
having read the delete log...

...alternately, if we don't want to make the exact details of
"copyright holder used actual legal methods" widely public, but are
happy with explaining things to admins only, it could be worthwhile to
blank the article and write a brief explanation on the newest revision
before deleting the page, then refer to this in the edit summary. If
nothing else, it flags up an immediate problem if you restore the old
version without looking - because you'll have a discussion page not an
article.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

body:
Guettarda write
> While IAR is often abused as a reason to be disruptive, the truth is that
> it's the last defense against insanity in many cases, specifically
> becausewe have too many useless guidelines and policies.

Right. IAR is not to be ignored, except by those who can't work out why it is needed.

Charles

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body:
"Gregory Kohs" wrote

> I think that WP:COI (or Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) is botched.  The
> basic notion is that if you really intimately know about or care
> passionately about a topic that might have some impact on your career,
> even in some tangential way, you are either "strongly encouraged" or (just
> in case you are dense) "very strongly encouraged" to avoid editing Wikipedia
> on that topic.

Well, only if you have interests that 'conflict' with Wikipedia's.

> Following this policy means that:
>
> In the article about the theory of general relativity, Wikipedia would
> reject the submissions of Albert Einstein, but encourage those of a talented
> high school physics student.

We would reject the edits of anyone claiming to be Einstein! We would have rejected edits from AE himself, if he had not been able to edit neutrally on the Copenhagen interpretation.

> In the article about Microsoft, Wikipedia would reject the submissions of
> Bill Gates, but encourage those of an amateur computer enthusiast, or
> (heaven forfend!) accept those of Steve Jobs editing anonymously.

I think we might have some problems with Mr. Gates's POV on, for example, the EU's fining of Microsoft. I think we'd have many problems with Microsoft's legal office slanting the articles about Micrsoft's litigation. Don't you?

> In the article about the Pokemon character, "Brock", Wikipedia would reject
> the submissions of conceptual creator Satoshi Tajiri, but encourage those of
> an 8-year-old kid in his underpants on his mom's computer.

Depends whether Tajiri was providing verifiable, neutral edits or not.

> In summary, regardless of whether the authoring agent can prove Notability,
> use excellent independently-sourced Citation skills, and civilly engage in
> the Editing/Discussion process, if the author stands to make any personal
> money in the process, their edits must be "strongly"
> avoided/discouraged/deleted.

Yes, I think that's right. We do think that people editing for free and without ulterior motive has made 'the house that Jimbo built' what it is.

<snip>

> When you peel away all the layers of excuses and hypocrisy, let's face it,
> EVERYONE has some personally-beneficial agenda when they choose to edit one
> topic in Wikipedia over any of the 1.3 million other ones at their disposal.

Hmmm ... did it say at WP:COI that Buridan's Ass came into it? AFAIK, people who attack that guideline or say it is unworkable actually _want_ WP not to have a workable policy in this area. They find weaselly ways to get round the point: WP is quite entitled to say that those who edit and not for the good of WP, but to some other end, are to be discouraged.

Charles

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from_name: Christopher

subject: [WikiEN-l]  Quitting Wikipedia and wanted you to know why.

body: I don't think that all this is worth quitting Wikipedia over. If you take a breath and a wikibreak, you can come back to try to fix it. If you do not want to come back at all, we will miss you. Goodbye.


body:
On 11/3/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, it's very handy to see the page *was* deleted, so
> admins can handle queries about it, and if you oversighted all the
> revisions this might not be the case.
>

The problem is that the deleted stuff isn't being cleared from time to
time any more with the result that many artices have deleted stuff.
This makes it hard to do selective deletes and has the risk of stuf
being acidentaly undeleted. This is a risk best not taken with DMCA
stuff.

--
geni


from_name: Anthere

body:
Anthony wrote:
> On 11/3/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>The Wikimedia Foundation will make next week a one-time donation of USD
>>5,000 dollars to the Peer-Directed Project Center, the non-profit
>>organization which operates FreeNode
>>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode).
>>
>>This donation recognizes the tremendous value of online chat to the
>>Wikimedia community, on the level of projects, languages and chapters,
>>as well as to the Foundation itself. We hope it will help the servers to
>>keep running smoothly :-)
>>
>
> A great idea.  I had thought the idea of donating to freenode had
> already been brought up and rejected, but looking back it seems that
> while Angela opposed making the donation, you and Jimbo were in favor
> of it.

Nod. This said, this donation was suggested by Erik very soon after he
was elected.

ant

> Anyway, a $5000 one-time donation seems quite appropriate.  Freenode
> has been very helpful to the Wikimedia projects.
>
> Anthony


body:
On 11/3/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> [[WP:DRV]]. Allegedly set up to hear procedural cases, it has become
> a court of appeal whereby procedure is considered sporadically, and
> more often, where decisions that are unpopular among the main clique
> that watches DRV get overturned with no further chance of appeal. It
> has become one of the worst examples of a de facto committee on en,
> and is far past the point where any of its decisions should be
> considered binding.
>

"Overturned with no further chance of appeal"? Nothing to stop you
from listing it on AFD other the the risk of large amounts of drama.

> All of our notability guidelines, which fit together to provide a
> completely ludicrous overall picture. (It's far easier to get onto
> Wikipedia as a pornographic actor than as a webcartoonist.

Hmmm it would be quite odd to see a study that backed that claim up.
By easier do you mean "amount of effort expended" or percentage of
people in a certian area covered.

Pornographic actors tend to be better known and there are more
publications out there writeing about them.

> These are a mess of kludges created to sort out a momentary
> instance where six or seven articles of a given topic got AfDed in a
> short time period, leading to a guideline, usually written primarily
> by the people who wanted the articles deleted. We have, meanwhile, no
> generalizable criteria for notability, and thus no useful end in
> sight for these guidelines.
>

Mulitple independent sources.

> [[WP:RFA]], which, like notability, lacks any consensus anymore on
> what the overall standards should be, and has thus degenerated into
> utter madness.
>

People have been saying that for rather a long time. Shouldn't it have
exploded or something by now?
--
geni


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing list search changes

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> I'm setting up htdig search integration for the mailing lists; once
> that's working, list archives for all remaining lists will be forbidden
> from robots.txt.
>
> This should hopefully cut down on requests to remove items from the list
> archives due to someone's name showing up on Google from posting a
> message to a public list.

I don't understand. Why don't you just remove the e-mail addresses from
the archives? You've now rendered Google useless for searching the
mailing lists, and I'm sure you know that nothing else achieves its
level of usefulness...


body:
On Nov 3, 2006, at 6:49 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>  It's more important that potential
> conflicts of interest be declared so that the person's perspective is
> clear.

That was also discussed in talk page at [[WP:COI]]. I agree with you
that declaration of COIs is important as it encourages transparency.
But other editors are of the opinion that such declarations are
meaningless in this context. I would appreciate your comments in talk.

-- Jossi


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 11/3/06, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> John Grohol wrote:
> > The past two dumps of enwiki have failed; last successful dump was in September.
> >
> > Any ideas on what might be causing this?
>
> I don't think there's any mystery. It's not restartable, and there's all
> sorts of things that can make the process die. A simple solution would
> be to split the dump by page_id, say into 10 files. Then if the process
> died, you could restart from the start of that file, rather than the
> start of the wiki. If it's too big a hassle for clients to download 10
> files instead of 1, then you can always put them in a separate directory
> and serve them by anonymous FTP.

Wee even more non-atomic.

In any case.. if we could complete a dump in ten files, there is
absolutely no reason we couldn't concatenate the results.   What are
you smoking? :)


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 16:35:26 -0500, Phil Sandifer
<Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

>[[WP:DRV]]. Allegedly set up to hear procedural cases, it has become
>a court of appeal whereby procedure is considered sporadically, and
>more often, where decisions that are unpopular among the main clique
>that watches DRV get overturned with no further chance of appeal.

Rarely.  Few are overturned and deleted, I think slightly more are
overturned and undeleted, but in most cases it seems to me to be
people bitching about deletion of fundamentally unverifiable articles.

>All of our notability guidelines, which fit together to provide a
>completely ludicrous overall picture. (It's far easier to get onto
>Wikipedia as a pornographic actor than as a webcartoonist. Or, if you
>want to ) These are a mess of kludges created to sort out a momentary
>instance where six or seven articles of a given topic got AfDed in a
>short time period, leading to a guideline, usually written primarily
>by the people who wanted the articles deleted. We have, meanwhile, no
>generalizable criteria for notability, and thus no useful end in
>sight for these guidelines.

Again, I think this is nonsense.  Most of them seem to be written by
the people who want the crud *included*, which is why we have such a
farcically low bar to porn "stars".

>[[WP:RFA]], which, like notability, lacks any consensus anymore on
>what the overall standards should be, and has thus degenerated into
>utter madness.

Yup.

>[[WP:FA]] and to a lesser extent [[WP:GA]], which, like RFA, suffer
>from such a wildly disparate set of standards that the process of
>passing them is more a process of politics than of actual quality.

Never managed to get an article to either, mainly I think because it
needs a number of interested editors who are determined to see their
article in lights; not many people are interested in [[Giovanni
Punto]].

>[[WP:RS]] still stands, due to the lack of passage of [[WP:ATT]].
>It's still as big a problem as ever.

What, people's refusal to find decent sources?  Sure is.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


body:
On Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:40:25 -0500, Jeff Raymond
<jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:

>I think the thing that continues to bother me about DRV is that, as much
>as we harp about not being a democracy and not voting, it's the msot
>blatant vote counting mechanism out there.  Someone can point out five
>problems with a deletion, and as long as the people in favor of deletion
>can dredge up one more person than you, it stays.  Patently absurd.

The best way to deal with this is to reduce the overall temperature by
not opposing every single deletion of every single piece of Internet
crap.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Rob wrote:

> On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Have a look at the arbcom pages some time. Fred Bauder seriously
>> proposed some time last year that Chip Berlet should not be allowed to
>> edit articles about the LaRouchians because - hah! - his expertise on
>> the subject meant he was too involved.
>
> Did he actually say that "expertise" should be a disqualification from
> editing or did he say that due to his experience Berlet may have a
> preconceived notion that the LaRouchians were all nuts and should thus
> be disqualified?

After allowing for some hyperbole in this description of Berlet's views
regarding LaRouche supporters--at some point, when all the experts have
reached the conclusion that the earth orbits the sun, you can't
disqualify them from writing articles that describe the solar system,
simply on account of their vehemence in making that argument in the
past. In particular, when people show that they can write neutral prose
in articles, it should matter very little that they express strong views
on the talk pages.

--Michael Snow


body:
"Gregory Kohs" wrote

> (Prediction:  This is where we'll begin to see these layers of excuses and
> hypocrisy being donned once again.  Wikia is a different case.  The Reward
> Board is an exception.)

The guideline at WP:COI is clear enough: those whose editing of an area is or is likely to be at cross-purposes with Wikipedia's interest in the matter are discouraged from editing in that area. It is surprising to think that any other sort of policy could be contemplated. But instead of trying to stretch the principles involved to the point of absurdity (which is the lowest, crudest form of debate that we get here), perhaps you should look at the detailed form of the guideline. Which includes:

- statement that conflict of interest is handled within the other policies, not in some special way;
- advice that good practice is not to bring up authorship of articles at AfD, advice that conflict of interest should not be used adversarially as an accusation in disputes over POV editing;
- neutral discussion of the question of declaring an interest, concentrating on its pros and cons.

Charles

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body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>
> If I recall correctly, at least one of the requests was from someone
> ("user-A") who used their real name and their Wikipedia username
> together (just once) in an email to one of the mailing lists.

Argh. You know what this means? Just because one user did something they
regretted, we are now all prevented from googling the archives. WTF?
Surely the scenario you described was their problem, not ours, so why
are we penalised for it?


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote:

>On Nov 3, 2006, at 6:49 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>> It's more important that potential
>>conflicts of interest be declared so that the person's perspective is
>>clear.
>>
>>
>That was also discussed in talk page at [[WP:COI]]. I agree with you
>that declaration of COIs is important as it encourages transparency.
>But other editors are of the opinion that such declarations are
>meaningless in this context. I would appreciate your comments in talk.
>
After reading through that article and its talk page I can only regard
it as so much excess verbiage to be cut severely.  The problem with my
getting involved in such a page is that I would waste a lot of time
arguing over things that have little bearing on what I prefer to do.  If
it so happens that someone accuses me of a conflict of interest I can
wait until then toi argue about what the policy should be.

It would be nice if people declared their conflicts of interest, but
this kind of detailed rules is an absolute disincentive.  I am not
concerned with harassing people who might have these conflicts of
interest.  I very much prefer keeping their opinions there where they
can be seen for what they are.  Even PR people should have a place.  If
they claim that they are being paid to keep an article favorable to
their client it's a promise that they can't keep, and it may even be
fraudulent for them to accept money that they can't fulfill, but that is
between them and their "client".

Ec


body:
Angela wrote:

>On 11/4/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I think that WP:COI (or Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) is botched.
>>
>>
>...
>
>
>>If that's the case, why is it that:
>>
>>(1)  Angela Beesley has edited the article about Wikia.com
>>
>>
>Because the policy didn't exist then. [[WP:COI]] was a guideline about
>not making vanity pages until October 10th.
>
Frankly, I am not bothered by your editing the Wikia article. I'm sure
you understand that your edits are subject to being mangled by future
editors.  What the advocates for this page are treating as conflict of
interest is really minimal in the real world.  If the detractors believe
that you are not being neutral it's up to them to offer alternative
views of Wikia.

For you, continuing on the boards of both WMF and Wikia could have
become a conflict of interest, but you fixed that.

Ec


body:
Angela wrote:

>I don't really object to either A7 or G11, but the idea that these
>bits of jargon justify a deletion is a problem. Especially since when
>new criteria are added, A7 may become A8, leaving anyone looking at
>the deletion log in future very confused. Most people wanting to know
>why something was deleted will have no idea what these codes mean and
>it gives a bad impression that you need to understand this sort of
>thing to get involved with the project.
>
Absolutely!

>Blocking people for having usernames in non-Latin characters is the
>worst policy I've seen on Wikipedia. It's going to become even worse
>when we have single login and people from the wikis that use other
>alphabets find they need to log out before editing or risk a permanent
>block of their username.
>
Single login?  Is it really going to happen?  Otherwise a good point.
It will probably need to be abandoned with single login.

>Other policies are sometimes fine, but their application is
>inconsistent which gives an appearance to unfairness, so perhaps the
>application of these ought to be looked at - not just the policies
>themselves.
>
True again.  The problem here is also the large mass of rules which
people seem to want to forever expand under the guise of clarification.
This pprocess of imagining everything that could go wrong and providing
a rule for that eventuality is counterproductive.  When we have too many
laws we just stop reading and understanding them.  Even those who
purport to enforce those laws have kimited time available and will tend
to enforce only those laws which they personally think to be important.

Ec


from_name: Mark Clements

body:
"Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net> wrote in message
news:eigng9$boa$1 at sea.gmane.org...
> Nick Jenkins wrote:
> >
> > If I recall correctly, at least one of the requests was from someone
> > ("user-A") who used their real name and their Wikipedia username
> > together (just once) in an email to one of the mailing lists.
>
> Argh. You know what this means? Just because one user did something they
> regretted, we are now all prevented from googling the archives. WTF?
> Surely the scenario you described was their problem, not ours, so why
> are we penalised for it?

I agree.  People should learn to take responsibility for their actions.
Mailing lists like this are permanent and public records.  Newsgroups are
permanent and public records.  Forums are permanent and public records.
It's not our fault if someone decided to post something they shouldn't have.
If I was holding a press conference and accidentally mentioned something I
shouldn't have I would have no right to tell the journalists not to publish
it, and they most defenitely ignore me if I did!

The very most that should be done is to edit the database/files/wherever the
post is stored and XXX out the offending text.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


from_name: Keith Old

subject: [WikiEN-l] Claims that Wikipedia was used to distribute malware

body:
G'day folks,

Vnunet reports that security company Sophos claims that De was used to
distribute malware.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2167949/hackers-wikipedia-dupe-users

Hackers are using online encyclopaedia Wikipedia
<http://www.wikipedia.com/>to spread malware, according to a security
firm.

Sophos <http://www.sophos.com/> discovered that hackers had created an
article on the German edition of Wikipedia containing false information
about a new version of the Blaster worm, along with a link to a fix.

However, the fix is actually a piece of malicious code designed to infect
visitors' PCs.

Wikipedia is built from user contributions, allowing anyone to create or
edit the content of a page.

The hackers sent spam messages to German computer users, which purported to
come from Wikipedia, and directed recipients to the fraudulent information.

As the emails linked to a legitimate website, they were able to bypass some
anti-spam solutions.

"The good news is that the authorities at Wikipedia quickly identified and
edited the article on their site," said Graham Cluley, senior technology
consultant for Sophos.

"Unfortunately, a version of the page remained in the archive, allowing the
hackers to send spam and continue to direct visitors to the malicious code."

Wikipedia has now confirmed that it has permanently erased all versions of
the page.

"The very openness of websites like Wikipedia, which allow anyone to edit
pages, makes them terrific, but can also make them less trustworthy, "
Cluley added.

"In this case, the article in question was not just misleading, it was
downright malicious.

"Everyone should exercise caution and ensure they have appropriate defences
in place to protect their computer systems.

"Additionally, people should remember that if there really is a new threat
on the internet, you're likely to hear about it first from the security
companies, not an online encyclopaedia."
What do we have in place to minimise the impact of something similar in the
future.

Regards

Keith Old


body:
On Nov 4, 2006, at 1:37 AM, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>
> My opposition is on the Talk page, not only on those grounds. It is
> also muddling to insert advice in the definition section. I don't
> think that can stand.

What is muddling to one, may be clarification to another.

There is no consensus for the section on COIs and close relationships
as only a very few editors have engaged in the discussions.

-- Jossi


body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote

> There is some opposition to this wording on the basis that it is "too
> soft", but IMO it captures the spirit of what this guideline wants to
> say about editing articles in which one may have a COI based on a
> "close relationship".

My opposition is on the Talk page, not only on those grounds. It is also muddling to insert advice in the definition section. I don't think that can stand.

Charles

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body:
Ray Saintonge wrote

> Conflicts of interest are a fact of life, and should not in themselves
> bar a person from editing a subject.  It's more important that potential
> conflicts of interest be declared so that the person's perspective is
> clear.

The WP:COI page Geoffrey Kohs is attacking has had wording added recently, to cover just that feature of 'declarations of interest'. It would be pleasant to have some credit given for this, rather than the blanket condemnation.

I don't think WP should actually advise people whether to declare an interest or not. The consequences are not calculable, and the onus is on a person to decide on pros and cons. That is how the page treats the issue.

 While neutrality is important, and articles should clearly
> approach neutrality more closely with each edit, no-one can completely
> divorce himself from his own perspective on a controversial issue.  A
> person directly connected with a company may very well quote from the
> company's PR material; that's fine because he can very well be an
> authority on what the company's point of view really is.  Editing that
> should not distort what the company is trying to say.  If the company's
> statements differ from what it actually does that needs to be expressed
> too, but this is in addition to rather than instead of the company's
> propaganda.

We don't really have problem with informed people fact-checking and providing citations. As I think would be common ground, it rarely stops there. If people battle over prominence of criticism, over reliability of sources, over balance of material appropriate to NPOV, then one gets the everyday debates. And, as WP:COI says, proper Wikipedians edit from both sides. Hired flacks may well not.

> The contrast that you make between the band manager and the climate
> change crusader is interesting.  There is a lot of controversy about
> climate change, but you seem to support a lighter application of the
> rules in this case than with the band manager in an article that is of
> more limited importance.  In the absence of further information why not
> let the band manager's comments stand if they are not of a controversial
> nature?

I think we do. But this doesn't remove the conflict, as such. For a band, the absence of fans who would add verifiable material is a prima facie argument that the band is not too notable. For academic areas, there is no such argument. Conflicts of interest are defined in terms of interests cutting across WP's interests. Academia's model is broadly in line with WP's: make information public. Academics hit conflict of interest mainly if they try to skew the relative importance of their sub-area relative to other areas.

> The advice of other editors is to be considered, but a claim that
> someone is in a conflict of interest is often a personal attack.  It can
> too often be used as a bullying tactic to make the opposing POV dominant.

The new WP:COI advises specifically against introducing COI as an adversarial tactic in POV disputes. Again, some acknowledgement from Geoffrey Kohs that this improves the guideline would be welcome.

Charles

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body:
jf_wikipedia at mac.com wrote

> >  It's more important that potential
> > conflicts of interest be declared so that the person's perspective is
> > clear.

> That was also discussed in talk page at [[WP:COI]]. I agree with you
> that declaration of COIs is important as it encourages transparency.
> But other editors are of the opinion that such declarations are
> meaningless in this context. I would appreciate your comments in talk.

No. They are not meaningless: they have a big social impact. To quote the WP:COI page on two points:

- Most editors will appreciate your honesty.
- You lay the basis for requesting help in having others post material for you.

It also says there that they don't justify an assumption that your hands are free to be an 'advocate' on one side of an argument. NPOV editing requires more than that.

Charles

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body:
Angela wrote

> Because the policy didn't exist then. [[WP:COI]] was a guideline about
> not making vanity pages until October 10th.

It is still just a guideline. I think that implies that it is the behavioural issues arising that matter most, for policy; and that these are dealt with under regular policy that is nothing new.

That being said, it is apparent to me that we need at the very least a clear, tough guideline on 'conflict of interest'. As much as anything else, in its absence people are going to come here and impale themselves on policy, just because they are completely ignorant of what editing entails. There needs to be a place where the issues are spelled out.

Charles

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body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>Angela wrote
>
>
>>Because the policy didn't exist then. [[WP:COI]] was a guideline about
>>not making vanity pages until October 10th.
>>
>>
>It is still just a guideline. I think that implies that it is the behavioural issues arising that matter most, for policy; and that these are dealt with under regular policy that is nothing new.
>
>That being said, it is apparent to me that we need at the very least a clear, tough guideline on 'conflict of interest'. As much as anything else, in its absence people are going to come here and impale themselves on policy, just because they are completely ignorant of what editing entails. There needs to be a place where the issues are spelled out.
>
Why is it so necessary to have everything spelled out in such detail?
You are making "conflict of interest" an issue that is out of all
proportion to its importance.  It's good to know if a person has a
connection with the subject of the article because it allows us to
consider what credibility should be given to his edits.  This policy
seems to be designed to discourage such disclosure to avoid any
potential conflict.

Your term "tough guidelines" is an oxymoron.  A "rule" can be tough, but
a guideline is highly flexible.

Those who impale themselves on policy are the ones who spend their time
writing detailed policy which most editors are wise to ignore.  The ones
who do "real" editing prefer to work on their favorite subjects without
much regards to the wind-breaking that goes on on the policy pages.

Ec


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote

> After reading through that article and its talk page I can only regard
> it as so much excess verbiage to be cut severely.

The page was created by amalgamating two, one of which was the old 'vanity' guideline, the other a page on COI created in September and with obvious gaps. The result has had several drastic haircuts since. More concision work required? Yes, but satisfying the need to have a comprehensive guideline comes before boiling it right down. People do dicker on so, making ridculous extrapolations, if you make it very simple.

>The problem with my
> getting involved in such a page is that I would waste a lot of time
> arguing over things that have little bearing on what I prefer to do.

Better stick to wikien then.

Charles

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from_name: Nick Jenkins

body:
> > I'm setting up htdig search integration for the mailing lists; once
> > that's working, list archives for all remaining lists will be forbidden
> > from robots.txt.
> >
> > This should hopefully cut down on requests to remove items from the list
> > archives due to someone's name showing up on Google from posting a
> > message to a public list.
>
> I don't understand. Why don't you just remove the e-mail addresses from
> the archives? You've now rendered Google useless for searching the
> mailing lists, and I'm sure you know that nothing else achieves its
> level of usefulness...

I'm not sure it's the email address that's the problem.

If I recall correctly, at least one of the requests was from someone ("user-A") who used their real name and their Wikipedia
username together (just once) in an email to one of the mailing lists.

This then allowed another Wikipedia user ("user-B"), who had developed a grudge against user-A, and who had been blocked on the
Wikipedia, to use Google to find the real name of user-A, whereas previously they only knew their username.

User-B then posted on their personal web site various things attacking user-A, using user-A's real name. As a result, someone
googling user-A's name would get various results, some of which were effectively slandering user-A.

User-A was then able to use various legal avenues to get user-B to remove this stuff from their website.

However, user-A also requested that the particular message (which allowed the connection between their Wikipedia name & their real
name) be deleted from the mailing list archives (or made so that no search engine would index it), to try and prevent the same thing
ever happening to them again.

There may be other reasons too, but at least in this case, it wasn't the email address that was the issue, rather it was the mailing
list serving as username <--> real name lookup table.

All the best,
Nick.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

body:
On Nov 3, 2006, at 9:39 PM, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:

>
> OK, I passed on 4 of your [[WP:TLA]]s and failed on 2. Please write in
> english.

You could just type them into Wikipedia and see what comes out.

-Phil


from_name: Chris Picone

body:
I'd just like to throw in a few cents here:

1. Notability: Pathetic. Verifiability already keeps out junk, why do
we need an icredibly subjective set of guidelines based on some old
essay?

2. RFA: Don't expect any second chances here. Made a copyvio four
years ago? Too bad. Don't use edit summaries 100% of the time?
rejected. Don't vote on AFD? rejected.

3. Not written down, but the community isn't very forgiving for past
policy violations or for little slips. If some admins out a bunch of
pressure and provocation on a user, if they go a little batshit in
response, then they can't wait to block them. This is also why RFA is
bad: Genuinely good editors get rejected, bullies stay in.


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
geni wrote:
> On 11/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What policies/procedures/guidelines on en:wp strike you as just awful?
>> Please list and elaborate.
>>
>> This could be in any of purpose, current wording, ineffectuality or
>> just being a completely bad idea. Or anything else that makes it just
>> awful.
>
>
> Parts of Wikipedia:Username
>
> "Names that can be confused with other contributors" tends to be
> overused. It is common practice on the net for people when a user name
> is taken to use the user name followed by some number. We need to
> accept this.
>

Except that "on the rest of the interwebs" people with usernames of the
form (word)(number) where (word) is common don't tend to run into each
other; on Wikipedia they *do*.

> Wikipedia:Ownership of articles
>
> Should be Wikipedia:Ownership of content. I tend to feel we have a
> problem if people are asking permission to edit images.
>

Actually it's "best practice" to not upload a modified version of an
image over the original unless the modifications are lossless and trivial.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote
>
>
>>Why is it so necessary to have everything spelled out in such detail?
>>You are making "conflict of interest" an issue that is out of all
>>proportion to its importance.
>>
>>
>Hmmm. I remember some very long threads of discussion here, quite recently, about corporate interests. Are you just assuming those will go away?
>
There was indeed the long thread that you mention.  I am not a supporter
of the corporatist agenda, but the best way to keep an eye on it is to
have it right out there in the open.  Let them have their paragraph
(sometimes more depending on the topic), and there will still be room
for rebuttals or criticisms of their agenda.  The real neutrality will
often be somewhere in between.  If they parrot the company's PR line it
will be evident that it is exactly that.

>Isn't it more natural to assume that with every milestone Wikipedia passes, in terms of its audience, there is a corresponding increase in the number of those who will come to edit Wikipedia, without having WP's best interests at heart, because they put something else ahead of those?
>
It's more than an assumption.  Such behaviour tends to scale very well.

>Think of the need to go into what we mean by that as part of the price of success in reaching a mass audience.
>
Rules do not scale as well as bad behaviour.  Tediously complex rules
will just be ignored.  Simple flexible guidelines are far more
effective, because they are more broadly understood and enforced by a
wider community.

Ec


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd:  Bad And Wrong Policy/Procedure/Guideline

body:
Forwarded. Looking for URL.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Date: 04-Nov-2006 12:38
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Bad And Wrong Policy/Procedure/Guideline
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Cc: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>

On Nov 3, 2006, at 11:22 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> Have a look at the arbcom pages some time. Fred Bauder seriously
> proposed some time last year that Chip Berlet should not be allowed to
> edit articles about the LaRouchians because - hah! - his expertise on
> the subject meant he was too involved.
>
>
> - d.

How about a url for this? I don't recall any such proposal.

Fred

This will have to be forwarded to the list if it is to appear there.