from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Tony, I agree these are a problem, but I'm not very familiar with
> them, so I have a question. What is the difference between having a
> box on your page saying you're e.g. Hindu, and having yourself listed
> in a Hindu Wikipedians category?

None.  It is the categorization that is the problem, facilitated to
some extent by the convenience of userboxes (the ease of typing {{user
bigendinan}} compared to "[[Category: Bigendian wikipedians]]).

Categorization people by skill or by services provided is a good use
of user boxes.  But the beliefs and religions userboxes provide a
handy telephone book for people interested in pushing a point of view
an unscrupulous enough to spam user talk pages or contact likely
supporters by email.

The categories must die too.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Philip Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal on userbox disagreement

body:
Be bold - until somebody raises a meaningful (i.e. non-procedural)
objection to your actions, you are entitled to make good faith
changes that a reasonably persuasive argument can be made for.

-Phil

On Jan 3, 2006, at 11:54 PM, SCZenz wrote:

> I'm not all of Wikipedia, and not everyone agrees with my personal
> analysis.  I don't propose a poll; I do think we need to gague
> consensus somehow.  How about a policy proposal, or a discussion at
> the village pump?
>
> SCZenz
>
> On 1/3/06, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jan 3, 2006, at 9:16 PM, SCZenz wrote:
>>>
>>> 3. I've also heard (from Tony, I'm not sure if you've said it), that
>>> many userboxes are being used for inappropriate vote-garnering.  If
>>> that's true, we can darn well build a consensus to delete them.
>>
>>
>> You just built it. Right there. You showed how they do not conform to
>> Wikipedia's policy and purpose. Thus, assuming they do exist, they
>> can be deleted freely. Because that's what consensus is - the
>> conclusion of a sensible discussion.
>>
>> Or do you mean we can hold a stupid poll to delete them?
>>
>> -Phil
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia Day 2006 : 5 years wikifying knowledge

body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Soon it will be again [[w:en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia day|]] on January 15.
>
> This year it is the 5th anniversary of Wikipedia. Should we not do
> something?
>
> If so, then it is high time to make the preparations.
>
>
> I have some ideas what could be done ...
>
> On January 15th, Wikipedia Day, only for one day, Wikipedia goes ..
>
> - Retro! Change the default skin of the largest Wikipedias to
> "Nostalgia". (most of the now existing Wikipedias did not exist in 2001
> and have not even ever have used the usemod wiki.)
>
> - Change to logo of those wikis back to the old Wikipedia logo. (Pre-Nohat)
>
> - Change the style of the main pages back to one of more earlyer
> incarnations. Basic style.
>
> - On the main pages the main story is for once Wikipedia. The Wikipedias
> write a article, does not even have to be NPOV (Wikipedia namespace?)
> about the early history of there Wikipedia, about the very first users,
>   anecdotes about how some policy's or things not seem normal come to
> be. The first attention of the media for Wikipedia. And this until today.
>
> Jimbo could write also something about how he looks at the last five
> years back now and how he thinks about the future of Wikipedia.
>
> It would also be a great opportunity for all the current Wikipedians who
> where not here from the start to get the feeling a bit how it was only 5
> years ago.
>
> This Wikipedia day would be in the first place be for the Wikipedians
> them self.
>
> Any for supporters for this idea?
>
> Greetings,
> Walter

Switch back to software phase I during the full day ... would be my
favorite. or have a version of these times set up and fully working just
to see how it was :-)

ant


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> One gets tired of doing that over and over again.  Zach and I spent
> months fighting with these people over our policy about the use of
> unlicensed media on user pages.  They simply refuse to listen; they
> are convinced that they have the right to do whatever they want
> without regard to policy, common sense, or really anything else.
>
> Kelly
>

Did you contact the fair use wikiproject?

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Last month one editor used userbox
> > information to locate dozens of people who shared his religious
> > persuasion in an overt attempt to destroy the consensual
> > decision-making process of Wikipedia.
>
>
>
> Was this editor successful?

Actually I believe there were a number of such cases.  The creator of
the Catholic Alliance of Wikipedia page used talk page spamming to try
to get this page kept.  His wording, apparently placed on over 40 user
talk pages, was as follows:

"Since you are listed as a Roman Catholic, I figured I'd send you
this. [[Wikipedia:Catholic Alliance of wikipedia]] has been nominated
for Deletion. Please vote and/or tell other people to vote to keep
this organization on wikipedia. The link to the voting page is here:
[[Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Catholic Alliance of
wikipedia]]"

The page in question was overtly intended to "nurture and keep
wikipedia's pro-life/pro-catholic articles and categories"

Out of eleven keep votes, nine were from those who were solicited.
Some  of those contacted may have voted to delete (at least one did to
my knowledge).


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, Ben Emmel <bratsche1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that userboxes for languages,
> knowledge of certain topics, or Wikiprojects can be useful, not only for
> identification purposes, but also for finding help on certain topics.

I agree on this.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>Yes, some people do things
> on Wikipedia that are less than entirely productive. But some of these
> things boost community morale and connect people with each other in fun
> ways.

This isn't about connecting people in fun ways.  It's about turning
Wikipedia into a vehicle for promoting points of view.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> I'm coming across as much more strident in this thread than I mean to
>> be. But the point is that pseudoscience is in fact *bullshit*, not
>> science, and there's going to be no label that doesn't puff up the
>> subjects with false respectability that won't soon carry the same
>> connotations. Because it is in fact bullshit.
>
> I wholeheartedly agree with the above. Pseudoscience is nothing more
> than dogmatic and irrational thinking trying to pretend it's exactly the
> opposite to get public support. It should not be given a single bit of
> credibility at all - and not giving it credibility would fit perfectly
> with our policy of neutral point of view.

The Neutral Point of View has nothing to do with what you say, which is
clearly the ranting of someone who doesn't know WTF he's talking about.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, we can certainly illegalize any userboxes we like.  The question is,
> are the productive users we're going to lose (and there are some) if we
> crack down on userboxes worth it?  And who should decide?
>

We may lose them, but they'll be welcome on livejournal and myspace.
I cannot imagine losing any serious contributor just because we say
"no, we don't allow people to create userboxes that place them into
categories by point of view--it promotes factionalism and has in the
past resulted in serious attempts to subvert consensus."


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/3/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2. Bloc voting. Is this against the rules?

Yes, of course it is.  Good grief!


from_name: Kat Walsh

subject: [WikiEN-l] Worthy admins? (was "The userbox fad")

body:
On 1/4/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/3/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > Dispute resolution is not an admin task
> > >
> > > People keep seem to be forgeting this.
> >
> > Thanks Geni.  I was trying to think of a way to say that
>
> It isn't, but being able to handle a dispute in an adult and
> reasonable manner certainly IS required.  Most administrative tasks
> have a high potential to be controversial (e.g. deletion, blocking)
> and I don't want to appoint someone who won't be able to handle such
> situations.
>
> -Matt

I agree with this. I'd like to see someone who, if they have the
inclination to jump into things likely to be controversial such as
deletion or blocking, will handle it well. Evidence of good dispute
resolution skills in other aspects of editing is a sign that
misunderstandings regarding these things will be worked out
reasonably.

-Kat

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:LucidWaking
"Once you have tasted flight you will always walk with your eyes cast
upward. For there you have been and there you will always be."
- Leonardo da Vinci


body:
On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 2. Kelly Martin aknowledges that there are many serious contributors who
> like userboxes, so her decision to delete userboxes in defiance of those
> contributors' opinions was an overreaction.
>

This has nothing to do with Kelly Martin.  To give an indication of
the scale and rapidity of the growth of this problem, editing of
userboxes in December exceeded by a good margin all editing of
userboxes, ever, prior to that month.  Of 44 templates listed under
beliefs, I counted only 3 that existed before December, and the vast
majority seem to have been created in the past two weeks.

We must stamp hard on this or we will have permitted these new editors
to rebuild Wikipedia in the form of a network of people classified by
political and religious alliances.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: gmane e-mail address obfuscation

body:
Jamie Bliss schreef:
> Is there any reason why gmane encrypts the e-mails on WikiMedia lists? I
> would think that since the official archives don't do it, gmane
> shouldn't either.
>
> (I believe if you contact them about it, they can change it.)
>
> -- Jamie

That is because when I added the wikipedia-lists to gmane some years ago
I have selected the option to encrypt the email addresses.

I find that a great service. You can still email posters but your
emailadress is protected against spam.

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - for the members of the Wikimedia community


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The difference is that the chess tournament didn't violate copyright,
> > and when told to stop violating copyright, scream that its free speech
> > rights were being violated.
> >
> > The userbox aficianadoes are.
>
>
>  If you're deleting userboxes because they are copyright violations, then
> fine. But what I've been hearing is that you're deleting them because
> they're a waste of time and cause Wikipedia editors to factionalize by POV.
> Not fine.
>
> Ryan

Userboxes as a whole are unlikely to be a copyvio. Some of the images
in them may be.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>I feel that admins have to be able to trust
>each other's judgement, even when we may disagree with it, so that
>blocks aren't constantly being done and undone; and that speaks
>directly to the issue of how we elect new admins, because if we want
>to trust their judgement, and have them trust ours, there has to be a
>shared philosophy or vision, and that requires a minimum amount of
>community interaction before they're promoted. Without community
>interaction, there's no respect for the community. But with too much
>community interaction, there might be less respect for the
>encyclopedia. So electing admins who have the right balance of edits
>is a tricky business, a very "big deal" in my view.
>
This matter of trust is paramount; that builds as the community gets to
know you.  In time one gets to know who can deal with problems, or who
is able to address a problem without becoming a part of the problem.
That's a skill that takes a long time to develop.

Having objective criteria helps  Total overall edits, total edits to the
article namespace, how long a person has been signed up can all be a
part of it.  More difficult to measure would be someone's people
skills.  We could ask, "Give an example where you were able to build
consensus with someone that you initially disagreed with."  I'm
convinced that this kind of skill is among the most important.

"No big deal" is a mantra that has not scaled well.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 2. Bloc voting. Is this against the rules?
>
> Yes, of course it is.  Good grief!

Really? Did we ever manage to kill school watch and the like?

--
geni


body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> jayjg wrote:
>
>> Here's an example of what I mean.  I noticed that a specific
>> administrator,
>> in the last 12 hours, managed to get into a delete wheel war with
>> another
>> admin, get himself blocked for 3RR, and then unblocked himself.  He then
>> unblocked an obvious troll, without informing the blocking admin, and
>> blocked another editor permanently, accusing him of being a
>> sockpuppet, with
>> no evidence that I am aware of.  My curiousity piqued, I looked at his
>> recent edits, and discovered that *none* of his past 600 edits have
>> been to
>> an article, but do find a comment he has posted today saying that
>> Jimbo is
>> "too busy asking for money" to deal with Wikipedia issues.  I then do an
>> editcount, and discover that of his 8700 edits, only 1800 are to
>> articles,
>> the *exact same number* of edits he has made to his User page.  I
>> look at
>> his User page, and discover *86* user boxes on it.
>>
>> What is going on here?
>
>
> If you think he shouldn't be an admin, I invite you to file an RFAr
> about it, rather than complaining to the mailing list, which does
> nothing but create ill will amongst contributors.

I didn't see that as complaining or whining.  Since Jay dd not mention
names, I see his comments as representing a real example of a more
general problem.  Your suggestion to put the matter into a bureaucratic
meatgrinder could in theory solve the problem with that user,  but it's
not going to address the bigger problem  that keeps recurring. with the
big egos of some sysops.

Ec


body:
On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> We must stamp hard on this or we will have permitted these new editors
> to rebuild Wikipedia in the form of a network of people classified by
> political and religious alliances.

Doubtful. For a start the international nature of the project will
tend to throw a spanner in the works of attempts to form political
alliances. Secondaly although there are a lot of user boxes most of
them are not very widely used. For example the largest relgious sect
on the planet is Roman Catholicism. Aparently we have a total of  92
catholics across the whole of wikipedia.
--
geni


list: commons-l

from_name: Horvath Levente-Laszlo

subject: [Commons-l] How to change title style of wiki

body:
Hello

   Could somebody tell me please how to change the
style of my title in my wiki? I would like to have
"index.php\Title" instead of "index.php?title=Title".
I don't even know if this is a PHP/Apache
configuration issue or does it come from a bad wiki
setup. PLZ help and thanks in advance.

Sincerely, Levente

-------
Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  If you're deleting userboxes because they are copyright violations, then
> > fine. But what I've been hearing is that you're deleting them because
> > they're a waste of time and cause Wikipedia editors to factionalize by POV.
> > Not fine.
>
> Then you are listening to people who are not telling the truth.

To clarify, *I* am the one deleting userboxes because they enable
serious disruption of Wikipedia.


body:
On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> >
> >We must stamp hard on this or we will have permitted these new editors
> >to rebuild Wikipedia in the form of a network of people classified by
> >political and religious alliances.
> >
> You keep saying this, but haven't yet explained how "stamping hard"
> on userboxes is supposed to prevent new editors from classifying
> themselves by politics and religion, or seeking out likeminded
> editors.

I don't want to stop new editors classifying themselves by politics or
religion.  I want to stop them abusing powerful Wikipedia resources
such as templates and categories in order to find people who share
their opinions, because this would be the end of consensus-based
decision-making on Wikipedia.

That's the kind of mechanism that works well on myplace and similar
forums, but it has no place here.


body:
On 1/4/06, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> SCZenz wrote:
>
> >Here's what I think we should do.  I don't expect it to be popular, but
> >compromises never are...
> >
> >1. The userbox wikiproject go through and get rid of all userbox images used
> >that have inappropriate copyright permissions for userpages, including fair
> >use images.  Likewise they make sure there are no meta-template issues in
> >the userboxes.  The Wikiproject agrees to police these problems itself in
> >the future.
> >
> >2. Kelly Martin aknowledges that there are many serious contributors who
> >like userboxes, so her decision to delete userboxes in defiance of those
> >contributors' opinions was an overreaction.
> >
> >3. We all go back to the live-and-let-live attitude that lets us write an
> >encyclopedia.
> >
> >SCZenz
> >
> >
> I support that and I suggest that a note be posted on AN/I immediately
> to the effect that all fairuse images outside of the article space are
> subject to immediate deletion and that our fairuse and userbox
> guidelines be changed to reflect that.
>
> -Jtkiefer

Why? This has been policy for quite a while (don't ask me about
templates that appear in articles though).

--
geni


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> We may lose them, but they'll be welcome on livejournal and myspace.
> I cannot imagine losing any serious contributor just because we say
> "no, we don't allow people to create userboxes that place them into
> categories by point of view--it promotes factionalism and has in the
> past resulted in serious attempts to subvert consensus."

I think if people are going to leave over this it'll be because they
hate the idea of admins taking matters into their own hands rather than
discussing it first.

Chris


from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Userbox fads

body:
On 1/4/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Joy S <wiki.joy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This whole thing reminds me of H. L. Mencken's joke about the
> > definition of a Puritan: a person who is worried that someone,
> > somewhere, someplace is having fun.
>
> Most userboxes were just in fun, but there were a few quite
> mean-spirited ones that I saw - I'm sure people would insist they were
> "just joking", but I saw a fair few being used by people I didn't
> think were joking (based on their edits and expressions of opinion
> elsewhere).
>
> -Matt

If users are engaging in personal attacks, racism, homophobia, or what
have you in userboxes, talk pages, wikipedia_talk pages, or anywhere
else on WP, that should be dealt with in terms of WP:NPA, WP:CIVIL,
and their sister policies.  Not in terms of userboxes being a bad
thing, but in terms of some userboxes (and some users' use of
userboxes) being disruptive to the community and being individually
taken to TFD as such.

If I make a user subpage [[User:Pakaran/Why Someuser is a big fat
bastard]], then that does not mean that user subpages are bad.  It
means that I made a bad use of that user subpage, and *I* should be
dealt with (and the page should probably be deleted, etc).  Morven,
none of this is directed at you - just some thoughts I've had in
reading the 80+ userbox-related messages I've gotten in the past 20
hours.

Nathan aka Pak


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fair use outside of mainspace (was: Proposal on
	userbox...)

body:
On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Fair use" images can't possibly be used on user pages or template
> pages without violating copyright, as far as I can see.  I'm prepared
> to fight the good fight on this, image by image, if my help is
> requested.  But that means removing images, and deleting them if
> they're not used elsewhere--not deleting templates.
>
> SCZenz

Anyone who's using a fair use image in a userbox  (or otherwise on a
userpage) should be talked to.  That's especially true given the sheer
quantity of stuff on Commons.  The one possible exception that might
be hard to find replacements for is trademarked things (operating
system logos, etc), but even there you can replace it with large text.
 It's not that hard to do.

Userboxes are fun, and good community building.  If they're breaking
copyright or other policies, than that should be dealt with.  Just
some thoughts, and it's 3 AM here, so I'm sorry if I'm incoherent.

Nathan


from_name: Jake Nelson

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> From the above figures we can see that the growth in political
> userboxes, whose *sole* purpose is to link an editor into a handy
> group that enables them to operate as a political bloc, has been some
> tenfold.
>
> They must die.

Funny, that's the *sole* purpose? Because I happen to have {{user
Democrat}} on my user page. I have it there because I feel it's
beneficial for editors to share their background and personal views, so
as to make it easier for someone else to judge bias that may creep into
their edits. (If it's doing more than creep in, userboxes are the least
issue!)

Templates and categories are hardly intrinsic to the sort of factional
groupings that are being discussed- look at the old WikiProject for
Decency. That was just an ordinary page- and who's to say such
organizing would necessarily happen on Wikipedia itself? A competent
conspiracy would be subtle.

Understand this: I use a userbox to make my background clearer, in the
same sense I note on that page that English is the only language I have
a functional use of and that I use US customary units- to help others
see why I write what I write. I strongly oppose any attempts to organize
oppositional factions within Wikipedia, like WPfD, the AFD for [[Gay
rights in Iraq]] where one user went around to all Wikipedians that
identified themselves as Catholic and asked them to delete the article
(which was, correctly, kept, and the dishonest manipulations noted), or
any similar action.

Personally, I'd like to see anyone attempting to factionalize Wikipedia
and conspire to manipulate votes and article content banned from all
Wikimedia projects for life, and all their edits deleted from history as
if they were copyvios, but that's me.

-- Jake Nelson

(I'm just catching up on the mailing lists... may be a bit behind
discussion)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and world

body:
On 1/3/06, Ant?nio Carlos de Lima Mendes J?nior <cacalo_br at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Mr. Jimmy Wales,
> Why don't you make wikipedia per-to-per, so the other countries could be the
> owners of their own contents ? I don't believe in a secure and accurate
> information under the USA, and Europe servers, according with their laws and
> interests. Their Laws isn't the World law, and Wikipedia contents are World
> contents. Think about it, if you don't give us the right (under our law) to
> access world public information, so I will be very interested to make it
> possible.
>
> Thanks,
> Cacalo.

So you're aware, people from all over edit the articles (and there's
nothing stopping anyone from downloading them and starting a fork, in
your country or any other).  Also, Jimbo is not the author of even 1%
of the material in WP (I doubt he's read any significant fraction of
it either), and certainly those of use who are US or EU residents do
our best to keep the content neutral for everyone.

Maybe if you explain your concern in more detail the list can help
offer a solution?

Nathan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > We may lose them, but they'll be welcome on livejournal and myspace.
> > I cannot imagine losing any serious contributor just because we say
> > "no, we don't allow people to create userboxes that place them into
> > categories by point of view--it promotes factionalism and has in the
> > past resulted in serious attempts to subvert consensus."
>
> I think if people are going to leave over this it'll be because they
> hate the idea of admins taking matters into their own hands rather than
> discussing it first.
>

When the house is on fire, you don't hold a discussion.  It's been
suggested elsewhere that the usera engaged in this fad are not regular
editors.   They can go back to wherever they came from.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> >
> But people have been doing that all along by making lists of like
> minded users on their user pages, all watching the same articles,
> setting up WikiProjects, etc.

No.  Wikiprojects must be neutral.  All article space edits must be
neutral.  If people have been doing the things you describe to promote
their viewpoints, then they also are breaking the neutrality policy.
I just object to giving the pushers powerful Wikipedia facilities to
pursue their counter-policy activities.


body:
On 1/4/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> SCZenz wrote:
>
> > 1. The userbox wikiproject go through and get rid of all userbox images used
> > that have inappropriate copyright permissions for userpages, including fair
> > use images.  Likewise they make sure there are no meta-template issues in
> > the userboxes.  The Wikiproject agrees to police these problems itself in
> > the future.
>
> As I understand it, they have been working on both of those tasks for a
> while now. The huge spike in userbox edits in December was due to these
> folks going through and replacing all 'userbox' templates with 'user'
> templates and updating them on the page of every person using them.

May have been *partly* responsible for that spike.  But when I look at
the belief-based user boxes and discover that 41 out of 44 listed did
not even *exist* before December, and moreover a large proportion were
created over the Christmas and New Year period, I get a very different
picture.  No, it's a massive growth in the number of userboxes.

>From the above figures we can see that the growth in political
userboxes, whose *sole* purpose is to link an editor into a handy
group that enables them to operate as a political bloc, has been some
tenfold.

They must die.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > When the house is on fire, you don't hold a discussion.  It's been
> > suggested elsewhere that the usera engaged in this fad are not regular
> > editors.   They can go back to wherever they came from.
>
>
> The house isn't on fire.

Have you examined the figures?   This is a massive growth.  Political
and belief-based userboxes have increased tenfold since the end of
November.  A database check tells me that of our 3500 or so userboxes,
1500 were created in December, and a further 250 have been created in
the first three days of January alone.  This is a serious push to
reform Wikipedia as a network of users linked according to beliefs and
preferences that can be accessed by a point-of-view pusher at the
touch of a button.

The house is on fire.


body:
All this discussion of admin standards is pretty funny, when so many of
the longtime admins who end up pontificating on policy got their post
within virtually no support votes at all... hell, look at mine, not that
I consider myself that much of an oldtimer: 3 votes. That's it. I'd been
on Wikipedia all of two months, with only ~600 edits. Even then (which
was late 2003), there was some discussion of how it might be too HARD
for people to become admins, as we then (and much, much, much more now)
needed more people able to fight vandals effectively.

It's often underappreciated just how important that little rollback link
is for efficiently removing vandalism from a large number of pages. And
we need more people to have it. Many times, I'll set Recent Changes to
hide logged-in users, 500 edits to a page, and 'diff' everything on that
page... and while all those edits will have scrolled off the view of
anyone else trying that by the time I'm done, there'll still be a bunch
of uncaught blatant profanity edits that slipped through. It's like a
firehose sometimes. (I'm inclined to make some strained simile involving
strainers or buckets and not enough, etc... but I won't.) It's simple:
WE NEED MORE ADMINS.

I do agree with the 'admin status is no big deal' line of thought. If we
invest too much in it, it gets hard to get people on the team rolling
back vandalism and taking care of speedy-delete material (though a
standard policy of simply blanking pages instead of worrying about
deletion would help on that score). Furthermore, it fosters the very
annoying trend to drag every admin into ever more arcane WikiPolitics
and layers of bureaucracy... the powers are there to be a janitor, not a
legislator. They're unrelated. (I don't enjoy spending my time on
talkpages... if I want to have a discussion with someone, I use email or
MUX, not a wiki page... and VFD is a bilious slimefest I'd be happy to
see gone entirely.)

Maybe giving people block/ban powers is a big deal, however. Since the
proposals for bureaucrats, Arbitrators, and the like eventually did go
through, maybe block powers can be split off of adminship and given to
some other userclass, and we can thoroughly establish once and for all
that an admin's job is maintenance. Maybe even rename the label:
'Maintainer', 'Janitor', etc. I don't really care what you call it, but
apparently 'Administrator' gets people thinking too much about it
meaning you're the boss... and I have to admit it gets heavily
misinterpreted outside WP: If I tell someone that I'm an administrator
on Wikipedia, they think I'm saying I'm on the Foundation board, or a
siteadmin, or a developer. As WP's public pfoile continues to rise,
that'll be more of an issue as "Wikipedia Administrator" J. Random
Wikipedian gets quoted in a news article as an authoritative source of
official opinion.

Further, when we find there's a bad admin, this doesn't mean "we need to
make it harder for people whose main contribution is vandal-fighting to
be an admin", it means, fire their ass, deadmin them, and then get
someone else. If all they do is get in fights with other uses or throw
their weight around on talkpages, they don't need the anti-vandal tools.

-- Jake Nelson


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> We could ask, "Give an example where you were able to build
> consensus with someone that you initially disagreed with."  I'm
> convinced that this kind of skill is among the most important.

Not everyone gets into situations where that sort of disagreement comes
up. I don't think, in the last two years, I've ever had a situation that
would meet your criteria. Firstly, most of the articles I edit
significantly are ones I'm interested in, and tend to be too obscure to
get controversy on. Secondly, even more of my edits are spelling,
grammar, reformatting, wikifying, merges, disambiguations, redirects,
very recently categorization... etc. Thirdly, the rest of what I do is
quick [rollback] of blatant vandalism that there really isn't a
consensus to build for.

"Can fix things after they've gotten into a mess" restricts your set to
people who get into messes.

-- Jake Nelson


body:
On 1/3/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Switch back to software phase I during the full day ... would be my
> favorite. or have a version of these times set up and fully working just
> to see how it was :-)
>
> ant

I like this idea. From only joined last year, I (and I assume other more
recent editors) would like to see how wikipedia looked like in the
beginning. Maybe also provide links to some articles how they were at that
time. Like the George Bush article without having to browse through
countless edits.

Garion


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The scope for abuse  of these userboxes has been amply demostrated.
> They fulfil no function useful to the encyclopedia that isn't done
> equally well by simply stating one's affiliations on one's user page.
> They must die.
>

You really ought to learn to pick your battles. Yes, some people do things
on Wikipedia that are less than entirely productive. But some of these
things boost community morale and connect people with each other in fun
ways. Yes, in an ideal world, we would spend all our time working on the
encyclopedia and doing nothing else. But tha door swings both ways. In that
world, you would spend all your time working on the encyclopedia, not
launching a crusade over trivial crap like this.

Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > This is a serious push to
> > reform Wikipedia as a network of users linked according to beliefs and
> > preferences that can be accessed by a point-of-view pusher at the
> > touch of a button.
>
>
> This isn't a conspiracy, it's tinfoil hattery. I'll believe the conpsiracy
> theories when I see a conspirator.

I make no claims about conspiracy. The purpose of creating a userbox
is to permit users of a certain type (originally, with certain useful
skills) to be quickly identified.  The purpose of creating a political
or religious userbox is to enable users with common beliefs  to be
identified quickly.  Of the userboxes listed on the beiefs page, over
90% were created since December 1, and a substantial number of those
were created within the past couple of weeks, so it's definitely a
push.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On the other hand, many people don't care about the userboxes, but are
> instead upset over the way with which their deletion has been handled.
> More deletions at this point may solve the userbox problem, but not
> the community interaction problem.

If there's anything to be learned from this, it's that unproductive members
of the community do less harm than trying to take away their toys does. You
end up alienating a lot more people than you thought you would.

Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

references:
<ce4d55b80601030825j6f2c1a12v86a0b2a29d39b2e6@mail.gmail.com>
	<FEEHIDNLFFBKHPIPAHGNKEHFCGAA.brian@bhaws.com>
	<3f797b9a0601031034w3c742b41v72af49dd8154ed51@mail.gmail.com>
	<eecbb0630601031037j43be02buff202456716b8ece@mail.gmail.com>
	<4cc603b0601031044i3521ed24u6ca601f0bb20af9a@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 1/4/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/3/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If there's anything to be learned from this, it's that unproductive
> members
> > of the community do less harm than trying to take away their toys does.
> You
> > end up alienating a lot more people than you thought you would.
> >
> I'm not sure that's true, Ryan. They do a lot of harm, it's just
> usually less dramatic.

 They certainly do less harm than this whole ordeal has. Some people just
can't stand to have anything on Wikipedia that disagrees with their
principles, and they're willing to go to war over it. This is a great
example. The war is more damaging than the thing you're going to war over.
We all should really just call it quits on this one.

Ryan


from_name: Peter Mackay

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Ben Emmel

> I almost hate to say this, but with the growing size and
> popularity of Wikipedia, we might need to start treating
> adminship truly as a big deal.

Not mentioning any names, but you are spot on. For some users, adminship is
the only reason they get up in the morning.

In fact, judging by the number of edits some people make, WP is the only
reason they get up in the morning. And the only thing they do all day.

And yes, I realise that this is probably the wrong forum to question either
of these attitudes.

Peter, part-time Wikipedian


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggestion for future fundraisings

body:
--- Jeremy Dunck <jdunck at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know there's been a lot of discussion about making a WP 1.0 of
> reviewed articles, but what do people think of giving out a DVD of
> current text for donations over, say, $50?
>
> This would be whatever's current at a point in time, with no guarantee
> about the content accuracy.
>
> I know there'd be some initial hardware cost for a mass burner and
> some admin overhead, but I can see the point that donating to a
> service is something done a little skeptically.

Good idea, but tricky. The Wikimedia Foundation is considered to be an ISP/online service provider
instead of a publisher right now. ISPs and online service providers are generally not liable for
illegal, slanderous, libelous, wrong, and/or dangerous material posted by users of that ISP.
However, a publisher *can* be held liable for things it publishes and if the foundation created a
DVD, then it would be a publisher. Best that that would be taken care of by another organization,
even if it is one we create ourselves.

In the meantime, I see much less potential harm in local chapters coordinating that type of thing
with publishers who are willing to assume that risk. The German chapter did this. We could then
ask our legal department about what risk the foundation would be subject to if it gave away DVDs
created in that way as part of a fundraiser.

-- mav

__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL ? Something to write home about.
Just $16.99/mo. or less.
dsl.yahoo.com


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>When the house is on fire, you don't hold a discussion.  It's been
>>>suggested elsewhere that the usera engaged in this fad are not regular
>>>editors.   They can go back to wherever they came from.
>>>
>>
>>The house isn't on fire.
>>
>
>Have you examined the figures?   This is a massive growth.  Political
>and belief-based userboxes have increased tenfold since the end of
>November.  A database check tells me that of our 3500 or so userboxes,
>1500 were created in December, and a further 250 have been created in
>the first three days of January alone.  This is a serious push to
>reform Wikipedia as a network of users linked according to beliefs and
>preferences that can be accessed by a point-of-view pusher at the
>touch of a button.
>
>The house is on fire.
>
OK, so I have about 19,000 pages on my watchlist, and review it about
twice a day. The only trend I've noticed since November is a slight
uptick in anons engaging in subtle vandalism instead of the "Joey is
gay" type, and some cases of "stacked" multiple vandalism by different
anons - both worrying trends, since they take longer to analyze. I'm
also seeing vandalism staying in, not for the boasted minutes, but
hours or days, which I'm discovering by reviewing anons' contrib
history further back (many articles are apparently not on any active
watchlist).

I have yet to see any userbox-facilitated trashing of articles.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>But people have been doing that all along by making lists of like
>>minded users on their user pages, all watching the same articles,
>>setting up WikiProjects, etc.
>>
>
>
>No.  Wikiprojects must be neutral.  All article space edits must be
>neutral.  If people have been doing the things you describe to promote
>their viewpoints, then they also are breaking the neutrality policy.
>I just object to giving the pushers powerful Wikipedia facilities to
>pursue their counter-policy activities.
>
A WikiProject has a list of participants, just like a category, and
the page is typically on participant's watchlists. It's always been
easy to summon helpers by posting on the project's talk page. Of
course, we only use this power for *good* purposes, not for, say,
enforcing an oddball naming convention, wink wink nudge nudge.

If there are hordes of invading POV-pushers hooking up with each
other, that's the problem to deal with. They're not going to be
encouraged or deterred by whether they have to type 15 vs 30
characters to do it. Mechanism is not policy.

Stan


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and world

body:
I think you mean Peer-to-peer and don't mean that a country such as
Russia or Saudi Arabia would own contents but that Wikipedia would be
held in a distributed network. Is that what you mean? What software
would be needed and what barrier exists to doing that in parallel to
our present setup?

Fred

On Jan 3, 2006, at 11:28 AM, Ant?nio Carlos de Lima Mendes J?nior wrote:

> Dear Mr. Jimmy Wales,
> Why don't you make wikipedia per-to-per, so the other countries
> could be the owners of their own contents ? I don't believe in a
> secure and accurate information under the USA, and Europe servers,
> according with their laws and interests. Their Laws isn't the World
> law, and Wikipedia contents are World contents. Think about it, if
> you don't give us the right (under our law) to access world public
> information, so I will be very interested to make it possible.
>
> Thanks,
> Cacalo.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
>  http://imaginemsn.com/messenger/default2.aspx?locale=pt-br
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> [...]
>
>The number of political belief userboxes has
>increased tenfold since the beginning of December, so the fact that
>we're getting so many such instances at this early stage is
>particularly worrying.
>
The irony is that with so many boxes, some people are going to
discover that they're the only Wikipedian to hold a certain
belief, which is likely to be more humiliating than anything else.
I expect the fad will crest at about that point - who wants to
advertise that they're unpopular?

I can also see belief-haters adding themselves directly to a
category, quietly bypassing userbox, as a way to monitor the
category members. POV-pushers may even find themselves
avoiding the userbox, since it makes them easier to follow.

You want to think ahead and come up with policy for deleting
unused userboxes and categories.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>I have yet to see any userbox-facilitated trashing of articles.
>>
>>
>
>I also have yet to notice any userbox-related vandalism.  Why do you
>mention the fact since it has not been suggested?
>
>
"Trashing" was not the best choice of word. What I meant was that
none of the normal edits of my watched articles by logged-in users
seems to have been part of a campaign by users connecting via
userbox. User names unfamiliar to me all seem to be editing in good
faith, if not always as competently as I would like...

>What I have noticed, without even breaking a sweat, is three separate
>attempts to enlist, by talk page spamming, groups of editors unknown
>to the person doing the spamming, who has (helpfully for my case)
>explicitly stated that he's approaching the person in question,
>*because of his self-identified persuasion*.  This is obviously always
>unacceptable, but here we are providing the pushers with powerful
>technology to enable them to do so.
>
People unknown to me are always pinging me on my talk page, trying to get
me to look at an article, weigh in on a dispute, relicense all my text, etc.

It's useful to know that there have been three attempts to use
userboxes for spamming, so I appreciate your bringing it to the
mailing list for attention, and we should talk about where we want
this to go. Maybe it's a fad, maybe it's the next step of evolution.
At this point it just seems like it's too soon to tell.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> These unproductive users cause harm every day on hundreds of talk
> pages and articles, editing carelessly, insulting people, looking for
> ways to cause trouble, coming back with sock puppets if blocked,
> getting friends from outside Wikipedia to join in revert wars. The
> user box issue is just the first time they've joined forces, and it's
> a good thing in a way that it's happening over this and not over some
> policy change they try to force through, which will happen soon enough
> if we don't get a grip.
>

You're saying that people who play with userboxes do this? You'd better ban
me from the project right away; I'm a scourge to Wikipedia, apparently.
Congrats, you've just alienated one more productive editor.

Ryan


body:
On 1/4/06, Carbonite <carbonite.wp at gmail.com> wrote:

> The solution (and problem) lies in the selection of admins, which I
> believe has become too lax. We need to recognize that adminship on a
> top 30 website IS a big deal. Even one admin who's unfamiliar with
> policy or who gets into wheel wars can cause major issues. We need
> stricter screening of candidates, preferably as soon as possible.
>
> Carbonite

 Incidentally, I agree with this, but the problem is that it will really
become harder and harder to screen candidates accurately. Do you have any
suggestions on how this could be done in some kind of scalable fashion?

Ryan


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 1/4/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>   Time for hiercharchies of admins? Give "rollback" powers to anyone
> with half a clue. Save temporary block powers for people with a whole
> clue.  Save permanent block/ban powers for people with demonstrated
> good judgement, preferably on the previous levels.
>
> Not to make it a prestige thing, of course...
>
> Steve
>
You could always give rollback, delete, undelete, protect and
unprotect powers to everyone, at least everyone with more than X
edits.

Of course that would require banning users that abuse that power,
which I suppose is the real problem with adminship too: no one is
stepping up and removing the powers when they are abused.

The whole theory that adminship "should be no big deal" is based on
the fact that admins have no authority and that adminship can be taken
away.  The arb committee is what's really broken.  Actually, I'd say
the arb committee never worked all that well in the first place.

Anthony


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
> Dispute resolution is not an admin task

It may not be a formal "task" as such, but dispute resolution skills
seem to be critical. Or critically lacking, judging from some of the
complaints we see about (a small number of) admins.

Steve


from_name: Leif Knutsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] User boxes and what disrupts Wikipedia

body:
A couple of points on userboxes:
- If there's use to some userboxes, who's to determine which ones are and
aren't acceptable?
- Aren't there at least half a dozen other ways that people could round up
votes for one cause or another, anyway; and wouldn't we just get
"off-campus" userbox phenomena if we banned them here?
At the risk of sounding like an anarchist (where's the userbox for "people
who sometimes sound like anarchists?"), I say let them be. And those who
delete them should be cited for vandalism (deleting copyrighted images is
another matter entirely).

Now, about disruption. It seems to me a range of sins disrupt wikiefforts
(and arguably also help them often):
1) Sins of hot-headedness - we sometimes get so emotional about subjects we
care about that we forget to be reasonable
2) Sins of self-righteousness - we are so convinced that we know the truth
that we close our minds to valid objections
3) Sins of subterfuge - we are deliberately pushing our point of view in
more or less sneaky ways: POV forks, obfuscations, etc., using the
credibility of Wikipedia to promote our pet causes
4) Sins of vandalism - we are deliberately trying to disrupt the Wikipedia
enterprise in various ways

Those who commit 1) should notice that their blood pressure is rising and
give themselves time off, but otherwise be easily forgiven. We want
passionate people here. Those who commit 2) should lighten up a little and
try to find more inspiration in standards of intellectual honesty. 3) have
to make to make up their minds whether they want a soapbox or an
encyclopedia. 4) should be booted out.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Page age notice hack: comments?

body:
As a quick hack on http://test.leuksman.com/ I've added a little notice that
displays at the top of the page if it's been recently modified, reminding the
user to check the edit history to see what's changed.

The color of the box and the approximate age gradually gets duller after about
10 minutes, 30 minutes, and 60 minutes, then finally disappears.

I believe this idea has been bounced around previously but I hadn't seen it
implemented yet. Not sure if we want it, but something like this might be good:
it can remind new visitors that things can change quickly, and not to worry
quite so much about vandalism they may see.

The actual text is ugly and poorly formatted, but hey, it's a demo hack. ;)

There are two parts: SkinTemplate.php is modified to export a JavaScript
variable containing the last modified date as a machine-readable Unix timestamp.
Then a function in MediaWiki:Monobook.js can check the age and poke a message
into the web page.

The advantage of using JavaScript for this is that the HTML output doesn't
change as it ages, so it wouldn't require fancy cache expiration footwork. The
disadvantage is that client-side clocks may be off, so there's a bit of a fudge
factor. Also a small percentage of visitors will have JS off and won't see it,
but it would be nonessential so that's not a big deal.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 1/4/06, Jake Nelson <duskwave at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > From the above figures we can see that the growth in political
> > userboxes, whose *sole* purpose is to link an editor into a handy
> > group that enables them to operate as a political bloc, has been some
> > tenfold.
> >
> > They must die.
>
> Funny, that's the *sole* purpose? Because I happen to have {{user
> Democrat}} on my user page. I have it there because I feel it's
> beneficial for editors to share their background and personal views, so
> as to make it easier for someone else to judge bias that may creep into
> their edits. (If it's doing more than creep in, userboxes are the least
> issue!)
>
It seems blatantly obvious to me that knowing more about a person
facilitates consensus building.  Whether or not userboxes are a good
way to do that is arguable.  One could say that it's more appropriate
to use text descriptions, but pictures often do convey information
more conveniently.  Maybe a "subst"able template with no links in it
would be better - that way people *can't* use "what links here" to
form factions.

It also seems extremely odd to me that a project with the goal of
giving people free access to the sum of all human knowledge would
engage in a discussion over whether or not it is appropriate for
people to provide information about themselves on their user page.

Anthony


body:
On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Fair use" images can't possibly be used on user pages or template
> pages without violating copyright, as far as I can see.

I'm sure this has been discussed before, so could you point us to a
url where this assertion is explained?  Alternatively I suppose you
could just write the explanation here, but that'd probably be
redundant.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There have actually been attempts to pass such laws, and in some cases
> they've even been passed.  Such laws are unconstitutional in the
> United States, however, and so they don't last.
>
> Wikipedia is not a free speech forum, however, and does not have to
> worry about restrictions on advertisement, personal promotion, etc.
> being found unconstitutional.

This isn't a question of constitutionality. It's a question of, I don't
know, respect? This thing seems a lot to me like the Wikipedia Chess
Championship (which I note at least one Arb is playing in), which was also
VfD'd on the grounds that it had nothing to do with building an
encyclopedia. That VFD failed, incidentally, on the grounds that the project
wasn't hurting anything and it was a fun way for users to cool their heels.
Userboxes are like that- and you might have gotten the same kind of useful
discussion, if you had bothered to discuss it with others before making your
decision that the userboxes must die. (Is this an example of IAR gone too
far?)

On 1/4/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not talking about the user boxes, Ryan, I'm talking about users
> who treat Wikipedia as a social club and not an encyclopedia. The
> user-box issue is the first time I've seen some of them act en masse.
> My point was that I'm glad we've seen it over a relatively minor issue
> (though I feel bad for the targets of it), because it might prompt
> some action before it gets to the point where they're dictating
> policy. Just because some of the user-box editors, if I can call them
> that, make few edits to the encyclopedia doesn't mean none do, or even
> that most don't, obviously.
>

If that's the case, then the problem is the users, not the userboxes. If you
have examples of people who use Wikipedia as *nothing* but another sort of
"Myspace", then I think they ought to be kindly escorted off the project.
But as it happens, I've witnessed nothing of this phenomenon you are
describing, and I strongly suspect this is another incidence of someone
thinking "It seems to me this could cause a problem, so I will react to it
as if that problem is actually occurring", with or without actual evidence.

And even if you're right, and there is an underground community of people
who use Wikipedia for no constructive purpose, this is very far from the
best way of dealing with them. In deleting these userboxes, you've alienated
a lot of legitimate users, including people who never used the userboxes
anyway.

But all that is really beside the point. That there is even a debate about
this is somewhat exasperating to me. Is this really worth it? Wouldn't it be
better to admit that Wikipedia is imperfect but that trying to win every
battle will just drain everyone of all their energy? Most of the people
you're fighting against are good folk who belong here, and want to have a
little toy to play with in the mean time. Instead of reading this email, you
could be, I don't know, reverting vandalism, or doing fact-checking in
existing articles. Which is more helpful to Wikipedia?

Ryan


body:
On 1/4/06, Ben Emmel <bratsche1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> My personal policy is to only vote for a candidate if I can personally
> vouch
> for their editing, conflict handling, and janitorial abilities. There was
> a
> time when I would support every candidate that looked ready. I eventually
> realized that was only hurting the 'pedia, since even a good editor can go
> a
> bit crazy with admin tools due to a lack of understanding.
>
>
I vote this way too, but often that just means that the people who support
everything will get their way, because I don't vote in most RFA's. Does that
mean we should be voting oppose more, then? Or should we vote neutral with
"I don't know this editor, so I can't support" to raise awareness of the
idea that people shouldn't support editors they haven't personally
interacted with?

I'm worried that a combination of the two -- a 30 support-vote minimum, and
voters who won't support anyone they don't personally know -- might make it
/too/ difficult to become an admin, though.

Ryan


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Tony Sidaway stated for the record:

> The three cases I've found happen to involve Roman Catholic
> anti-abortionists, but I have no read to believe that this is the only
> large and popular grouping in which these userboxes happen to be
> abused.  I just happen to have noticed these cases.  I have no reason
> to believe that this kind of abuse will lessen with time--indeed if
> it's not strongly opposed it's very likely to grow to become a
> customary form of abuse.  We don't need this.

It seems to me that while userboxes do facilitate the building of blocs,
they also create highly insecure conspiracies.  I am Catholic and
therefore anti-abortion; I'm strongly tempted to add the appropriate
userboxes to my page so that these bloc-builders will contact me and I
can alter the defenders of the NPOV.  Some of the smarter conspirators
may be able to filter me out of their spammings, but the majority aren't
that clever.

Maybe the bloc-building shouldn't be driven underground, just subverted.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | Susan: I'm just trying to be realistic!
 sean at epoptic.org | Peter: No, you're just trying to be smart.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFDvAUjMAt1wyd9d+URAgpcAJ9TCEg0cSW1TWoDypEq1uoIepY3owCePPUd
66FdqBizJJnEXbyKSUrVwPM=
=x/+I
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Mistakenly blocked User:Regforafd--block affecting
	family and friends in 3 US states

body:
On 1/4/06, Reg forafd <regforafd at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This account is NOT a sockpuppet for AfD!!! Didn't anyone notice that it
> was created about the time that ANON's stopped being able to create "New"
> articles? I created this account because I can no longer file things on AfD
> using my normal IP account User:24.17.48.241. Jeez. Regforafd 23:03, 3
> January 2006 (UTC)

The account may not be a sockpuppet, but the name is quite suggestive, and
> personally I would give it a {{usernameblock}} just like I would names
> including the words "admin" or "moderator". The name somehow appears to
> claim authority by including the name of the deletion process. Why not pick
> another more appropriate name?

As long as you use it to submit articles to AFD, I doubt your lack of
contributions under any particular name will be a problem. People with a
lack of edit history will be ignored in some discussions, but that would've
been the case with IPs as well.

Mgm


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> If there are hordes of invading POV-pushers hooking up with each
> other, that's the problem to deal with. They're not going to be
> encouraged or deterred by whether they have to type 15 vs 30
> characters to do it. Mechanism is not policy.

What is "mechanism is not policy" supposed to mean?  We use mechanisms
to enforce policy, both hard policy and soft policy.  It's perfectly
reasonable for us to make it more difficult to push a point of view
because we don't want people doing that.

Kelly


body:
On 1/4/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The #1 admin job is dispute resolution, like it or not, and good
> dispute resolution is not indicated by the % of interested voters who
> happen to be a part of ones clique, faction, or cabal ;)

Dispute resolution does not require administrative rights.  Some of
our best dispute resolution people are not admins.

Kelly


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Namespace manager docs

body:
For those interested, the namespace manager from the WIKIDATA branch
(intended to ship with MW 1.6) now has basic user docs at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace_manager

Please comment on the talk page if you think any particular aspect needs
more explanations.

Erik


body:
On 1/4/06, Garion1000 <garion1000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > It also seems extremely odd to me that a project with the goal of
> > giving people free access to the sum of all human knowledge would
> > engage in a discussion over whether or not it is appropriate for
> > people to provide information about themselves on their user page.
> >
> > Anthony
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> It depends upon what information. If a userbox states that the editor is a
> catholic or methodist or whatever that's ok. Although I still don't think a
> userbox should be used for it. If a person states "This user supports the
> Global Illegalisation of *same sex
> marriage<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_sex_marriage>
> *." or "this user hates George Bush" I do mind. Although I do personally
> agree with one of them, and I am pro same sex marriage.
>
> Garion

Well, I took a brief look at the RfC for Kelly, and apparently one of
the deleted userboxes was "User_Christian".  Maybe that was done for
copyright reasons though, I can't really tell.

There is a problem, of course, with determining where to draw the
line.  I'm not so sure that can be done objectively.

Anthony


from_name: jayjg

body:
On 1/4/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> Chris Jenkinson wrote:
>
> > jayjg wrote:
> >
> >> Here's an example of what I mean.  I noticed that a specific
> >> administrator,
> >> in the last 12 hours, managed to get into a delete wheel war with
> >> another
> >> admin, get himself blocked for 3RR, and then unblocked himself.  He
> then
> >> unblocked an obvious troll, without informing the blocking admin, and
> >> blocked another editor permanently, accusing him of being a
> >> sockpuppet, with
> >> no evidence that I am aware of.  My curiousity piqued, I looked at his
> >> recent edits, and discovered that *none* of his past 600 edits have
> >> been to
> >> an article, but do find a comment he has posted today saying that
> >> Jimbo is
> >> "too busy asking for money" to deal with Wikipedia issues.  I then do
> an
> >> editcount, and discover that of his 8700 edits, only 1800 are to
> >> articles,
> >> the *exact same number* of edits he has made to his User page.  I
> >> look at
> >> his User page, and discover *86* user boxes on it.
> >>
> >> What is going on here?
> >
> >
> > If you think he shouldn't be an admin, I invite you to file an RFAr
> > about it, rather than complaining to the mailing list, which does
> > nothing but create ill will amongst contributors.
>
> I didn't see that as complaining or whining.  Since Jay dd not mention
> names, I see his comments as representing a real example of a more
> general problem.

Thank you Ray, that's exactly the spirit in which I intended it, and the
reason I did not name the individual in question.

Jay.


from_name: Ben Emmel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unblocking the unblocked... please !

body:
Hello there:
Your block was indeed lifted by Asbestos a while back. I found that when
Jayjg blocked you, he blocked your username with User: attached to it
(meaning [[User:User:l'Omnivore Sobriquet]]). I've undone all blocks that I
can find. Hope this helps.

--
Ben Emmel
Wikipedia - User:Bratsche
bratsche1 at gmail.com
"A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."
-- William Blake


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] Namespace manager docs

body:
Wooo!

Rob Church

On 04/01/06, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> For those interested, the namespace manager from the WIKIDATA branch
> (intended to ship with MW 1.6) now has basic user docs at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Namespace_manager
>
> Please comment on the talk page if you think any particular aspect needs
> more explanations.
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 1/4/06, Jake Nelson <duskwave at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> All this discussion of admin standards is pretty funny, when so many of
> the longtime admins who end up pontificating on policy got their post
> within virtually no support votes at all... hell, look at mine, not that
> I consider myself that much of an oldtimer: 3 votes. That's it. I'd been
> on Wikipedia all of two months, with only ~600 edits. Even then (which
> was late 2003), there was some discussion of how it might be too HARD
> for people to become admins, as we then (and much, much, much more now)
> needed more people able to fight vandals effectively.

Without commenting on whether your adminning was reasonable at the time,
I'll just note that things are quite different now.  English Wikipedia has
over 800,000 articles, thousands of regular editors, and well over 700
admins.

It's not at all hard to be come an admin, and Wikipedia is currently
creating a new admin a day.  If I wanted to, I could create a sockpuppet
account, use it for 20 minutes a day, and within 6 months have it to admin
status.  I already know of one banned edtior who was very close to
succeeding at this (he was caught via other means), and I know of another
problem editor who is currently preparing a sockpuppet (actually his third)
for an adminship he will certainly receive (unless he is exposed first). The
formula is quite simple, and the only reason I don't post it here is because
if I do, other people will start using it.

It's often underappreciated just how important that little rollback link
> is for efficiently removing vandalism from a large number of pages. And
> we need more people to have it. Many times, I'll set Recent Changes to
> hide logged-in users, 500 edits to a page, and 'diff' everything on that
> page... and while all those edits will have scrolled off the view of
> anyone else trying that by the time I'm done, there'll still be a bunch
> of uncaught blatant profanity edits that slipped through. It's like a
> firehose sometimes. (I'm inclined to make some strained simile involving
> strainers or buckets and not enough, etc... but I won't.) It's simple:
> WE NEED MORE ADMINS.

As I said, we have over 700 admins now, and in any event you don't need
admin powers to revert vandalism.  As well, the "semi-protection" template
seems to be quite effective in calming down articles which are regularly
vandalized, or which are undergoing a spate of vandalism.  The issues I see
as far more pressing aren't about vandalism, but are about registered users
violating community interaction norms (e.g. personal attacks, uncivil
behaviour, wikistalking) and content policies (in particular POV pushing).

Further, when we find there's a bad admin, this doesn't mean "we need to
> make it harder for people whose main contribution is vandal-fighting to
> be an admin", it means, fire their ass, deadmin them, and then get
> someone else. If all they do is get in fights with other uses or throw
> their weight around on talkpages, they don't need the anti-vandal tools.

It turns out that, in practice, it is difficult to de-admin an
administrator.

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>If there are hordes of invading POV-pushers hooking up with each
>>other, that's the problem to deal with. They're not going to be
>>encouraged or deterred by whether they have to type 15 vs 30
>>characters to do it. Mechanism is not policy.
>>
>
>What is "mechanism is not policy" supposed to mean?  We use mechanisms
>to enforce policy, both hard policy and soft policy.  It's perfectly
>reasonable for us to make it more difficult to push a point of view
>because we don't want people doing that.
>
We have a settled policy that users can do pretty much anything
they like on their user pages and subpages, within the bounds of
civility. You can find lengthy screeds for and against all kinds
of things, announcements of intent to push some POV as much as one
can get away with, lists of friends and enemies, and so forth. We
confuse mechanism with policy when we say that these extreme-POV
user pages are OK, but that an intrinsically neutral template or
category is not OK because it might be used in a POV-pushing scheme.

Personally, I would be fine with a policy that disallowed all
POV-pushing on user pages, since purported NPOVers should be
embarassed by their biases, not celebratory of them, but I suspect
that would cause a major ruckus. (No more "I hate Bush and here's
why you should too", for instance.)

Stan


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: REQUEST_URI undefined index

references:
<dov94a$gvd$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<419a942d0512282314o1ea142e5q@mail.gmail.com>
	<dp7bj6$376$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Known bug, see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3000.
Someone will get round to it soon enough.

Rob Church

On 01/01/06, Bartosz Milewski <bartosz at relisoft.com> wrote:
> It seems like MediaWiki hasn't been tested on IIS with PHP 5. Apparently
> $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] is never set in that environment. Is anybody working
> on it?
>
> "Zigger" <zigger at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:419a942d0512282314o1ea142e5q at mail.gmail.com...
> > See the unreviewed suggestion at
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3000
> >
> > -- Zigger
> >
> > On 29/12/05, Bartosz Milewski wrote:
> >> We are running MediaWiki on a Windows Server at
> >> http://www.relisoft.com/wiki
> >> - MediaWiki 1.5.4
> >> - PHP 5.0.5
> >> - MySQL 4.0.18-nt
> >> First problem: When I access it from one of my home machine, I see a
> >> completely blank main page. Other people can see the full page. I can see
> >> some of the other pages, if I specify the title.
> >> Second problem: I get the error:
> >> Undefined index: REQUEST_URI in includes\WebRequests.php, line 284.
> >> This is the offending line of code:
> >>
> >> /**
> >>   * Return the path portion of the request URI.
> >>   * @return string
> >>   */
> >>  function getRequestURL() {
> >>   return $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
> >>  }
> >>
> >> Is this a problem with PHP/MediaWiki mismatch?
> >>...
> >
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 1/4/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
> jayjg wrote:
> > Thank you Ray, that's exactly the spirit in which I intended it, and the
> > reason I did not name the individual in question.
>
> I know you didn't, but the details were so specific it was immediately
> clear to me (and others) who you were talking about. I just didn't find
> the not-quite-naming and shaming helpful.

I'm sure a small number of people who were aware of the specific incidents
knew which individual I was referring to, but that's hardly the point.  Most
of these discussions involve a lot of hand-waving arguments, people making
claims with no concrete examples.  Rather than doing the same, I provided a
live and relevant example of the issues I was raising.  And to remind
everyone, the issue raised was not about whether or not one particular admin
was behaving badly, but more broadly whether people are becoming involved in
Wikipedia (and even becoming admins) without any familiarity with its norms
or committment to its goals.  When one notices that an administrator is
behaving quite badly, and then realizes that fewer than 1/4 of his edits are
actually to articles, and that he has as many edits to his user page as he
has to all encyclopedia articles combined, these issues are highlighted
starkly.

Jay.


body:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/5/06, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Further, when we find there's a bad admin, this doesn't mean "we need to
> > > make it harder for people whose main contribution is vandal-fighting
> to
> > > be an admin", it means, fire their ass, deadmin them, and then get
> > > someone else. If all they do is get in fights with other uses or throw
> > > their weight around on talkpages, they don't need the anti-vandal
> tools.
> >
> >
> > It turns out that, in practice, it is difficult to de-admin an
> > administrator.
>
> Well I think we all agree about what the problem is here. So what do we do
> about it?

I don't think we all do agree on that.  You appear to think the problem is
that it's difficult to de-admin an administrator.  I think the problem is
that we are creating administrators who are not part of the community, not
familiar with its policies and norms, and not particularly interested in
Wikipedia's goals.

Jay.


body:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> I almost wish it were feasible to make a "Request for De-adminship" where
> someone could be nominated for admin removal as a result of a user conduct
> RFC, but then I realize what a trollpit that would become in a matter of
> hours. Arbcom is really the only way to take away admin rights with any
> measure of civillity and rationality. And they are swamped.
>
> Maybe we need to be thinking harder about how to improve Arbcom.
>
> Ryan

Maybe the arb com needs to be thinking harder about how to improve
arbcom.  Would it be out of the arbcom's jurisdiction to establish
groups of people to help them out? Couldn't they say "X, Y, and Z are
beurocrats who, if the three of them agree, can temporarily de-admin a
user; the arbcom reserves the power to overrule any decision they
make"?

Anthony


body:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I almost wish it were feasible to make a "Request for De-adminship" where
> someone could be nominated for admin removal as a result of a user conduct
> RFC, but then I realize what a trollpit that would become in a matter of
> hours.

And this is the other side of the coin.  While it is true that some admins
abuse their privileges, the vastly more common case is that they faithfully
execute their mandate, and then are falsely accused by trolls and borderline
trolls of abusing their privileges.  And, apparently, a growing number of
cases involve administrators who use their powers (e.g. deleting,
undeleting, blocking) in support of the actual goals of the project, and are
then censured as "abusive" by people who are unfamiliar with policy, or
value process over content, or who see Wikipedia's purpose as the creation
of a vast social network or fledgling internet democracy.

Jay.


body:
On 1/4/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/4/06, Sam Spade <samspade.thomasjefferson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > > It turns out that, in practice, it is difficult to de-admin an
> > > administrator.
> > >
> > > Jay.
> >
> > So lets change that.
> >
> > Sam Spade
>
> Is it really that hard at the moment? Two admins who have pulled my
> blocks have ended up as non admins.

It's difficult, but certainly not impossible.  Admins who have significantly
abused their privileges have been de-adminned, but it's a lengthy process.
And it may well be that it *should* be a lengthy process.  Incoming quality
control is almost always less expensive than cleaning up messes after the
fact; that's why I'm arguing we need to focus on the adminning process, not
the de-adminning process.

Jay.


body:
>
> Jay wrote
>
> "I don't think we all do agree on that.  You appear to think the problem
> is
> that it's difficult to de-admin an administrator.  I think the problem is
> that we are creating administrators who are not part of the community, not
> familiar with its policies and norms, and not particularly interested in
> Wikipedia's goals."
>
>
It seems to me that in order to be an admin, a person has to demonstrate
knowledge of and commitment to Wikipedia's policies, goals, values, etc.
Right now we're leaving that up to a more or less random votes of people who
are inclined to drop in and have their say. Clearly, if only qualified and
committed editors become admins, we'll have fewer problems with existing
admins who are either fools or knaves with their powers.

Would it be too formal to set up a test of some kind that candidates would
have to pass in order to be eligible for adminship? And then set in place an
admin board (separate from the Arbcom) that can suspend or disqualify an
admin for a poor job?

I know that adminship is not supposed to be a big deal, but I do think it's
clear that a lot of well-meaning editors are provoked by questionable admin
calls.


from_name: candy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: immediate help required

references:
<dpfcdt$m9c$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<43BB3EF5.7080808@pobox.com>	<dpfg6g$v64$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<e92136380601040505o351beb65t@mail.gmail.com>

body:
I am not trying to use 1.4 script to talk to 1.5 database. And I know
the schemas has changed.
Let me put it clearly, I installed mediawiki 1.4 and the result was
creation of a database (wikidb) with the tables as per the 1.4 schema.
Now I downloaded the pages_full.xml.bz2 from the web (17 gig file). And
I want to import it.

Option 1: importdump.php -  not possible as it is not there in 1.4 mediawiki
Option 2: mwdumper - problem error :
Error 1146(42SO2) at line 31 : Table 'wikidb.old' does not exist

After that it continues to import the pages..it does not stop.

My worry is, if that error can screw up things.

Mayukh

Rob Church wrote:
> You can't use 1.4 scripts to talk to a 1.5 database. The schema has
> changed quite dramatically between the two versions. Indeed, the "old"
> table _doesn't_ exist in 1.5 onwards.
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> On 04/01/06, candy <ccanddyy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>All the tables are there as created during the mediawiki installation.
>>But it never creates something called wikidb.old ! As i said i have done
>>the importing using importdump.php with mediawiki 1.5. Even then there
>>was no wikidb.old.
>>Did someone try mwdumper as yet ? Did anyone import dump to mediawiki
>>1.4. If yes what did you use ?
>>
>>candy
>>
>>
>>Brion Vibber wrote:
>>
>>>candy wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>It asks for password ..which i put in ..then it gives the following error:
>>>>
>>>>Error 1146(42SO2) at line 31 : Table 'wikidb.old' does not exist
>>>
>>>
>>>Perhaps you didn't create the tables first?
>>>
>>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>


from_name: Michelle Kinney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Check all deleted edits?

body:
I recall seeing a post in the past couple of months where someone had a
solution to check all the boxes when restoring a deleted item.
Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me figure out what I did with
that message.  Would anyone happen to have it laying around?

Thanks!
Jareth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jareth)


body:
On 1/4/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I almost wish it were feasible to make a "Request for De-adminship" where
> > > someone could be nominated for admin removal as a result of a user conduct
> > > RFC, but then I realize what a trollpit that would become in a matter of
> > > hours. Arbcom is really the only way to take away admin rights with any
> > > measure of civillity and rationality. And they are swamped.
> > >
> > > Maybe we need to be thinking harder about how to improve Arbcom.
> > >
> > > Ryan
> >
> > Maybe the arb com needs to be thinking harder about how to improve
> > arbcom.  Would it be out of the arbcom's jurisdiction to establish
> > groups of people to help them out? Couldn't they say "X, Y, and Z are
> > beurocrats who, if the three of them agree, can temporarily de-admin a
> > user; the arbcom reserves the power to overrule any decision they
> > make"?
> >
> > Anthony
>
> General when we need to remove an admin fast we don't bother with
> official channels.
>
> --
> geni

Who said anything about acting fast?  Ryan said the arb com was
swamped.  Unless the arbcom wound up reviewing every single instance
of de-adminship, this would greatly reduce the load on them.  In fact,
even if they didn't review every single instance it'd still reduce the
load on them, because someone else would have already organized the
facts and reasons surrounding the issue.  Finally, if *all* issues of
de-adminship had to pass through that committee first, it'd eliminate
the frivolous cases regarding de-adminship completely.

Whatever, though, it's up to the arb com what they want to do.  Maybe
they don't even think they're swamped.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>We have a settled policy that users can do pretty much anything
>>they like on their user pages and subpages, within the bounds of
>>civility.
>>
>
>Absolutely not.  Wikipedia isn't a web hosting service.
>
You're right, [[Wikipedia:User page]] is a guideline, not a policy.
But I also see that the guideline starts with "Whatever you like,
within some reasonable boundaries", and I couldn't find anything
that said advocacy of a POV was outside of those boundaries. In
fact, many editors, including some oldtimers, consider inclusion
of their favored POVs to be an essential part of developing the
encyclopedia; there are even some respected editors for whom
inclusion of material supporting their POV (but written in NPOV
fashion) is the main reason they work on WP. It looks like one or
two variants of the failed Userspace policy proposal from last
April suggested putting an NPOV rule on user pages; not too many
people seemed to like the idea.

Stan


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
On 1/4/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> The difference is that the chess tournament didn't violate copyright,
> and when told to stop violating copyright, scream that its free speech
> rights were being violated.
>
> The userbox aficianadoes are.

 If you're deleting userboxes because they are copyright violations, then
fine. But what I've been hearing is that you're deleting them because
they're a waste of time and cause Wikipedia editors to factionalize by POV.
Not fine.

Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>We have a settled policy that users can do pretty much anything
>>they like on their user pages and subpages, within the bounds of
>>civility.
>>
>
>That is plainly false.
>
True enough, it's a guideline and not a policy, and I oversimplified
by not listing all of the caveats. But do you think we have a policy
disallowing POV advocacy on user pages? If so, where would I find it?

Stan


from_name: Robert Bamler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] List of authors for each article

body:
> Out of curiosity, is this to run under the regular iPod OS or an
> alternative like iPod Linux?

It is to run on ipodlinux, because I didn't find a way to write programs for
the regular iPod OS.

Robert


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>
>I am very suspicious of the suggestion that having editors categorized
>by beliefs and convictions helps Wikipedia, and I see no evidence that
>this is so.
>
Knowing more about other editors has always helped me working with
them, so there's at least one counter-datapoint. For instance, I
found trying to reason with Wik to be very difficult because nobody
knew anything about him, and so we couldn't figure out whether he
was stubborn on principle, extremely immature, mentally ill, or what.

While some are perfectly happy to work in a world of opaque
user pages, I think only a minority of Wikipedians prefer that.

Stan


from_name: James Salsman

subject: [Wikitech-l] may I have "deletedhistory" permission only, please?

body:
I don't want to be an administrator, but I do want to vote on
a deletion review, or at least know enough to figure out whether or
not I should abstain.  Would someone please grant me "deletedhistory"
permission only?  Is that possible?  Do I need to get nominated for
just that?

I am User:Nrcprm2026

Sincerely,
James Salsman


subject: [WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> [...]
>
>I can say how nasty I think that
>Mr Tulkinghorn is and what a rotten job I think Mr Walpole is doing of
>running the country, and I can express my belief that the Tay Bridge
>disaster was caused by an unsound central girder.
>
Agreed.

>However the caveats
>"within reason" and "avoid substantial content on your user page that
>is unrelated to Wikipedia" are important.  You can't do "pretty much
>anything...within the bounds of civility."  I'd say that adding my web
>page to a category of "Wikipedians who think Walpole is a rotter"
>probably oversteps the margin by a wide mark by providing Wikipedia
>with a ready-to-wear voting kit for anti-Walpolians who secretly blame
>the scoundrel for the lamentable state of a Scottish bridge and the
>loss of many lives.
>
I guess this is the crux of a philosophical difference then,
because my immediate reaction was to shrug; text on a user page
vs the same text in the title of a user category. Would
[[User:Tony Sidaway/list of Wikipedians who think Walpole is a rotter]]
be an acceptable subpage or not?

Stan


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 1/4/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Is it any longer possible to be familiar with enough of the
> key policy pages?  Why is there no 'Dummies' guide?  (Well, maybe there is
> and I just don't come across it.)  Norms - well, yes, community norms are
> what actually matter.
>
"Don't use admin powers to do anything that another admin might in
good faith disagree with."  I suspect that was the original intention
of all the rules and policies regarding adminship, but I suppose that
has since been extended.  Still, it's not so bad if a new admin uses
that as the primary rule unless they know of a policy which explicitly
says otherwise.

Anthony


body:
On 1/4/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
> jayjg wrote:
> > I'm sure a small number of people who were aware of the specific
> incidents
> > knew which individual I was referring to, but that's hardly the
> point.  Most
> > of these discussions involve a lot of hand-waving arguments, people
> making
> > claims with no concrete examples.  Rather than doing the same, I
> provided a
> > live and relevant example of the issues I was raising.  And to remind
> > everyone, the issue raised was not about whether or not one particular
> admin
> > was behaving badly, but more broadly whether people are becoming
> involved in
> > Wikipedia (and even becoming admins) without any familiarity with its
> norms
> > or committment to its goals.  When one notices that an administrator is
> > behaving quite badly, and then realizes that fewer than 1/4 of his edits
> are
> > actually to articles, and that he has as many edits to his user page as
> he
> > has to all encyclopedia articles combined, these issues are highlighted
> > starkly.
>
> Maybe he's a bad admin, he certainly gets involved right in the thick of
> the latest and greatest controversy on Wikipedia, but he also received
> 53 support votes on his RFA, including a number of high-profile editors
> who do not normally vote or typically vote oppose. And despite all the
> controversy he's in recently, he still managed to become elected to one
> of Esperanza's positions with 19 votes. I don't want to get into some
> kind of psychological analysis of everyone's voting habits, but I
> believe if someone is unsuitable then they would never get as many votes
> as he has.
>
> Yes, maybe he hasn't been editing the article space enough. I probably
> don't edit the article namespace enough either. But if what he is doing
> is building friendships and welcoming people to Wikipedia, then I don't
> see what he is doing as a problem. People are more likely to contribute
> if they feel happy here and I believe his actions are helping in this
> area. He isn't directly building the encyclopaedia, but he's helping get
> others to build it.

You seem to know him well.  Since you've decided to defend him, tell me,
when he insists that "fair use" images can be used on Userboxes, and that
attempts to delete them are attempts by "the mob" to enforce "copyright
paranoia" and "wiki-law" that have "no basis in reality", and then edit wars
both the policy pages which forbid it, and those who delete the images from
the userboxes, is he helping others build the encyclopedia?

Jay.


references:
<dpfcdt$m9c$1@sea.gmane.org> <43BB3EF5.7080808@pobox.com>
	<dpfg6g$v64$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
You can't use 1.4 scripts to talk to a 1.5 database. The schema has
changed quite dramatically between the two versions. Indeed, the "old"
table _doesn't_ exist in 1.5 onwards.

Rob Church

On 04/01/06, candy <ccanddyy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> All the tables are there as created during the mediawiki installation.
> But it never creates something called wikidb.old ! As i said i have done
> the importing using importdump.php with mediawiki 1.5. Even then there
> was no wikidb.old.
> Did someone try mwdumper as yet ? Did anyone import dump to mediawiki
> 1.4. If yes what did you use ?
>
> candy
>
>
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > candy wrote:
> >
> >>It asks for password ..which i put in ..then it gives the following error:
> >>
> >>Error 1146(42SO2) at line 31 : Table 'wikidb.old' does not exist
> >
> >
> > Perhaps you didn't create the tables first?
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

references:
<dpes7m$6n9$1@sea.gmane.org> <dpevl8$i9r$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<3241e9c00601032000n6f0bde1er37d68bdcb0f5182d@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 1/4/06, Garion1000 <garion1000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Switch back to software phase I during the full day ... would be my
> > favorite. or have a version of these times set up and fully working just
> > to see how it was :-)
> >
> > ant
>
>
> I like this idea. From only joined last year, I (and I assume other more
> recent editors) would like to see how wikipedia looked like in the
> beginning.

Try going to http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wikipedia.com and
looking at some 2001 and 2002 pages.

Alfio


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Filelist

body:
Hi everyone,

after my latest f*ckup with Special:Newimages, I try to do repentance by
merging Newpages and Imagelist (which both do basically the same) into a
new special page.

Thus, I have uploaded SpecialFilelist /to the extension module/ (so
noone can say I'm contaminating the main module again :-)

It *does* contain my dreaded "images of user" function, but deactivated
until img_user gets an index.

Please have a look (especially at the "previous" link, it's broken somehow).

Magnus


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: templatelinks-related changes

body:
"Tim Starling"
<t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote in
message news:dpa1hn$sfs$1 at sea.gmane.org...
[heavy snippage]
> The new template inclusion tracking code is now live. Here's the
> description of it from RELEASE-NOTES in case you missed it:
> * Added templatelinks table, to track template inclusions. User-visible
> effects
>   will be:
>   * (inclusion) tag for inclusions in Special:Whatlinkshere
> The (inclusion) tag in [[Special:Whatlinkshere]] is currently based on
> whether the target page is in the template namespace or not. This will
> progressively be fixed over the next week or so, as refreshLinks.php works
> its way through several million articles.

Was this the set of changes which removed the "offset" parameter from
[[Special:Whatlinkshere]]?

The new "from" parameter, which seems to work on datestamps, is intriguing
but hardly conducive to "ignore the first N entries".

Can we have the "offset" parameter back, please?
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


body:
On 1/4/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
> jayjg wrote:
> > You seem to know him well.  Since you've decided to defend him, tell me,
> > when he insists that "fair use" images can be used on Userboxes, and
> that
> > attempts to delete them are attempts by "the mob" to enforce "copyright
> > paranoia" and "wiki-law" that have "no basis in reality", and then edit
> wars
> > both the policy pages which forbid it, and those who delete the images
> from
> > the userboxes, is he helping others build the encyclopedia?
>
> No, I think he's wrong on this issue, and I've promised elsewhere to
> talk to him about it.

Well, that's great, but again, the issue isn't this particular individual.
Rather, this is a symptom:  Why do we have administrators who are unfamiliar
with policy? Why do we have administators who are unwilling to accept
community consensus, and, indeed, seem almost unfamiliar with the concept?
Why do we have administrators who think that it is so important to have
"fair use" images on userboxes that it is reasonable to completely ignore
any risks of copyright lawsuits against Wikipedia?

Those are the issues here, and your having a chat with your friend isn't
going to fix the root cause.

Jay.


from_name: Carbonite

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Userbox compromise proposal (Was: Proposal on userbox
	disagreement)

body:
I think it's possible to reach a compromise where users can keep their
userboxes (even the silly ones) while eliminating (or at least greatly
reducing) the potential for creating POV factions. I wanted to get
some feedback here before tossing it out to the wolves.

The core of my proposal is that anything that doesn't help to create
the encyclopedia shouldn't exist as a userbox template. Instead, it
should exist as code which users would be free to paste onto their
user pages. Thus, to anyone viewing a user's page, the userboxes would
look exactly as they do now, but the harmful side-effects (easy
identification of POV factions, increased server load, etc..) would
mostly be eliminated.

Userboxes that do help in building the encyclopedia would be allowed
to remain as templates. This would include the Babel templates or
anything that concerns a user's skills or expertise.

The "approved" userbox template would be listed in central location
and any user could add them to their user pages. There would have to
be consensus to approve any new templates.

The "unapproved" userboxes would also be listed a central location,
but they could be added to this repository by anyone. They would exist
only as code and an example of what the userbox looks like. This code
would have to be free of fair-use images and must not include any
categories. Any "unapproved" userboxes that existed as templates could
be speedily deleted.

With this setup, a userbox stating "This user is a Democrat" would be
no different that a sentence on their user page stating that they're a
Democrat. The user wouldn't be included in a category and couldn't be
identified through Whatlinkshere. There also wouldn't be any concerns
about censorship or stifling of free speech.

I'm sure this proposal could use some development, but it's a start. Thoughts?

Carbonite