from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
>And, as Wikipedia is not our employer, I think
>imposing a dress code is inappropriate.

We are creating a product that is used by a great many people with many, many,
unique POVs. Having usersnames that are POV slogans as being attributed
authors to that body of knowledge is going to disparage our work and put its
neutrality in question.

But we can actually wear whatever we want during meet-ups since that doesn't
affect the wide adoption of our work. And of course we can all continue to
write in our underwear!

-- mav


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
>I also think that such a rule would lead us into
>feeding the trolls still further. Though I suppose
>wherever we draw the line, some troll will find a
>username which is nicely on top of it.

Then we redraw the line and refine our policies via the consensus process.

-- mav


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Where did I say that they should be banned? Changing a user name does
> not ban the user. Think of it as a dress code; the great majority of
> employers do not allow their employees to wear shirts expressing
> controversial opinions.

I think this is a good analogy.

And, as Wikipedia is not our employer, I think imposing a dress code is
inappropriate.

There was recently a discussion on one of the Debian mailing lists
about having a dress code for people on the Debian stand at some Expo
or other. There was a strong consensus against this idea.

-M-


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Periodic lag problem

body:
> > Millions of user_newtalk requests, conspicuously absent from the typical
> > dump. Many of them are doing "statistics", whatever that means, and the
> > rest are locked. One side of me is curious as to what "statistics" means
> > and why it produces this behaviour. The other side of me says
>
> Could these hanging selects be just a part of the phenomenon?
> I mean, assume, the mysql has some reason not to respond, but
> still accepts new requests. Then all anonymous users reading
> a page will add a new process looking for a newtalk flag. They
> don't cause the slowdown, they are its victims.
>
> So the question is: Why does it slow down every 15 minutes?
> Do we have some cron jobs running every quarter of an hour?

I think you might be right that it's a symptom not a cause. I tried
disabling user_newtalk requests for anonymous users, but the problem still
occurred. But instead of large numbers of user_newtalk requests blocking, it
was article text requests. Common to both was that the blocked queries were
all in the "statistics" state.

Is it a cron job? Well if so the period should be perfectly regular. In the
captured output previously attached, there are 3 events, with the
separations between the events being 23'20" and 19'25". Another file I have
here shows a period of 22'05" between two events. Performance tends to slow
down before it actually stops, so I'd put error bars on those times of about
20 seconds.

Currently I'm blaming the statistics state. Conventional wisdom is that a
long statistics state is caused by a complex join with no specified index.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
LDan wrote:
>That's  bit broad, don't you think? Wikipedians are
>allowed to have opinions. I see no reason why
>usernames should be NPOV. I think this would be a
>serious violation of freedom of speech.

Sorry to burst your bubble but we ain't a fee speech forum. We have that pesky
little NPOV policy to follow so we can't just write whatever we want in any
way we want (sic free speech).  Similarly, we cannot choose any username that
suits our fancy - other people have to view it in page histories and on RC,
so if the community doesn't like it then it must change. We are simply trying
to find consensus on just where to redraw the line of what we consider to be
acceptable. Our policy on this issue is merely in the process of evolving.

--mav


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
On Sat, Oct 11, 2003 at 09:29:06PM -0700, Andrew wrote:
> I think the name is "jesuS islorD" backwards. er...

*ROTFL*


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
Andrew wrote:

>I think the name is "jesuS islorD" backwards. er... unless you were talking
>about something else... nevermind.
>
>From: "Tim Starling"
>
>>Drolsi Susej requested a name change. S/he (I'm not going to try to guess
>>the gender of foreign names again)
>>
That's hilarious!  My first impression was that it was Hungarian, with
Susej being a variation of Suzie!  Although I don't share the user's
superstitions, I've had no problem tolerating the name.  Its appearance
on an article would leave people alerted to the possibility of POV.

What's become an even more peculiar turn in this saga is that in some
medieval views using God's name backwards was a certain sign of being in
league with the devil.  Are we to believe that his true colours are
those of a Satanist? :-D

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

body:
Delirium-
> Not to mitigate Brion's work, which is certainly very valuable, but
> development work also isn't the only useful thing that goes on at
> Wikipedia (as many sites seem to forget).  For example, a good use of
> funds (in my mind) would be to pay researchers a minimal token salary
[snip]

I believe any such use of funds should be decided democratically or in
consensus. There are probably lots of experts writing on Wikipedia who
have not disclosed their expert status, and who might be disappointed if
others get paid for what they do for free. Similarly, lots of amateurs
might invest much more time to produce high quality material than a paid
expert would.

If we ever get enough funds for this question to be relevant, we may want
to provide a page where users can apply for grants to do a specific job.
Other users could then comment on whether these grants should be given or
not.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo consensus?

body:
tarquin-

>> any Nohat logo is good (2nd is the least good ihmo)
>>
>> Tarquin, can you put it on the fr wiki ?

> I don't have server access.
> but I support its presence on fr ! :)
> could a dev take care of it please?

I have put the Nohat logo on most wikis which used the standard logo. But
I don't have variants of the Nohat logo with translations of the subtitle
("The free encyclopedia"), so I haven't replaced it on the wikis which
used variants of the standard logo. We can either wait until we have these
variants, or upload the logo without the subtitle.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:
> Okay, considering your tolerance of Drolsi Susej
> (but not Jesus is Lord), how would you feel about
> someone calling himself Uoy Kcuf?

That is less than subtle (rather obvious actually) and is also an insult, not
just an expressed POV slogan. So the bar of "offensiveness" is hit more
quickly and for more people.

-- mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>What's become an even more peculiar turn in this saga
>is that in some medieval views using God's name
>backwards was a certain sign of being in league with
>the devil.  Are we to believe that his true colours are
>those of a Satanist? :-D

ROTFL! :-) You should mention that to them and see if it provokes another name
change request.

--mav


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 16:36, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> --- Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> > Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > > The mirroring makes the name [Drolsi Susej] more
> > subtle.
> >  > I still don't like it but I'll hang.
> >
> > Okay, considering your tolerance of Drolsi Susej
> > (but not Jesus is
> > Lord), how would you feel about someone calling
> > himself Uoy Kcuf?
>
> Why does the meaning of a username matter? If someone
> called themself Uoy Kcuf, or, for that matter, Fuck
> You, and they made good edits, why do something like
> forcing a name change that would deter them from using
> Wikipedia?
> LDan
Because people with provocative names like that usually do it for shock
value and do not make valuable edits. In addition, other people may be
deterred from using Wikipedia if they found out that the community
tolerated offensive user names.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
With this edit:

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Jesus_is_Lord%21&diff=
1554335&oldid=1554034

Drolsi Susej requested a name change. S/he (I'm not going to try to guess
the gender of foreign names again) said:

I'v decided that I would like to change my username to "Drolsi Susej". I
would like to say that I'm not terribly happy about changing my username,
but will do so to avoid further conflict from certain users. In the future,
Wikipedia needs to develop a better policy about changing a user's name. An
abrupt insistance that my username must be changed probably lead me to fight
a name change more than I otherwise might have. A policy is better than
having someone complain to the wikien-l, race off to change the policy,
start a vote to have a user name forcibly changed, goes on to insult the
user whose name they don't like, and then procede to declare that they will
ban the user they don't like. Jesus is Lord! 01:53, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Note that Drosli linked various words in that tract to diffs and mailing
list posts. I changed the name shortly thereafter.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 04:37:44AM -0700, Andrew wrote:
> Are you laughing because it's funny, or at how stupid I am for pointing out
> something so obvious?
>

I think it's funny. I didn't notice before you mentioned it. I'm very bad at
anagrams and the like.

Reminds me of [[Ikhtus]].

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
> I really like Mav's analogy - and please note that the dress code he
> speaks of wasn't about collars, it was about "expressing
> controversial opinions".

Yes, you're right.

I wouldn't be too unhappy for a volunteer organisation to prohibit
wearing t-shirts with offensive messages (when representing the
organisation in public). 'Controversial opinions' goes further than I'm
comfortable with, though.

I also think that such a rule would lead us into feeding the trolls
still further. Though I suppose wherever we draw the line, some troll
will find a username which is nicely on top of it.

-M-


subject: [Wikitech-l] French and German versions of the fundraising page

body:
Cross posted to Intlwiki-l

I haven't seen any objections about the page names, so could somebody export
the output of

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilisation_de_fonds

and

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldbeschaffung

to, respectively

http://wikimediafoundation.org/Mobilisation_de_fonds

and

http://wikimediafoundation.org/Geldbeschaffung

Very important note: These pages, for now, will NOT be protected, so please do
not link them from anywhere important or seemingly official (such as the
sidebar or current wiki donation pages). I expect that these pages will go
through some more basic development before they are protected and go live
(for example; some explanation needs to be added that at least in France and
Belgium new PayPal users need two credit cards and some type of access
number).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Usernames

body:
BL wrote:
>I don't care much about people who judge a book based
>on its cover, or on who wrote it. If they* don't feel like
>reading it and/or publish it because of a username they
>can go write their own damn encyclopedia instead of
>leeching on our work.

Leeching? That's not a healthy attitude given our goal of ensuring that
information is made to be free forever instead of locked-up in a tight box.

-- mav


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

body:
Perhaps I'm completely cynical, but the variety of suggestions about
hiring experts to keep watch, or college professors, or
"known-neutral-and-knowledgeable" folks is a bit troubling and un-Wiki.
(And for those who know what I do for a living will find it ironic. :)

If this route is considered, we should ensure no greater authority will
be conferred upon this class of contributors.  So far, the suggestions
by Delerium and Mav have been innocent enough, but could be dangerous if
it becomes related to ownership, entitlement or keeper-status of certain
topics.

In the most extreme case, it reminds me of "The Simpsons" episode where
the Mensa chapter of Springfield take responsibility for running the
town (with their so-called "genius") only to have things go horribly
wrong, and have Stephen Hawking come by to chastise them. :)

-Fuzheado

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mayer
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 2:24 PM
To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

Delirium wrote:
>For example, a good use of funds (in my mind)
>would be to pay researchers a minimal token
>salary for adding information on relatively
>un-fun but need-to-be-in-an-encyclopedia topics.

With a large enough grant we could hire college professors part time to
contribute to selected topics. Yes, that would be neat.

One thing I would love to see happen would be a college (or even high
school
for that matter) Latin instructor work with his or her students on
creating a
whole bunch of Latin articles. Heck, he or she could also work on a
Latin
textbook too!

We could have year long contracts and move from language to language
among the
smaller Wikipedias. /That/ would majorly kick-start many language
Wikipedias
that might otherwise languish for years. I'm a firm believer that one of
the
major reasons why Wikipedia took off was due to the fact that Larry
Sanger
was a full time paid editor of Wikipedia during its first year.

A webpage designer and usability experts could also be hired to revamp
our
user interface. With enough money we could get a lot of the
less-than-fun
stuff done that would otherwise take a long time relying only on
volunteers.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
OK, some troll is trying to make a point. This is an obvious violation of our
user name policy. Please ban this account (the person behind it should be
talked to about this also - but not banned).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Non-liberals_are_stupid

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server purchase plan - advice needed quickly

body:
> I've requested an electronic transfer of the U.S. dollar balance from
> PayPal to our real bank account, because for now I don't have a
> bankcard for the PayPal account directly, so I will need the money in
> the bank so that I can do online ordering.

Just as an aside, the Paypal card is handy to have (I have one, use it a
lot)...
Also, on their site, under 'Withdraw', 'Shop online with a PayPal virtual
card'- useful thing.

-- Jake


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> OK, some troll is trying to make a point. This is an
> obvious violation of our
> user name policy. Please ban this account (the
> person behind it should be
> talked to about this also - but not banned).
>
>
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Non-liberals_are_stupid
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

That was me. I don't believe that non-liberals are
stupid. At the time I was banned (approx. 1 min after
my account was created), I had made no edits aside
from creating my userpage and editing User:Liberal's
talk page. I intended to use the account to make
completely NPOV edits on articles related US politics
to prove that usernames are irrelavent, but I was
banned before I could do that. I started with
User:Liberal, but JamesDay and Angela said that that
wouldn't be enough to prove my point (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Liberal/deny_freedom_of_speech).
Then, without *any* discussion but this one post, I
was banned. The exact opposite of my point. This sets
two bad precedents: banning users because of their
usernames, and banning a logged in user without any
discussion (I thought that the RK ban set that second
one, but now I've found out there was discussion). If
you uphold the ban, I will leave wikipedia. I could
easily circumvent the ban by restarting my router, but
if you really want me to leave, I will. Some people
voiced concerns that I used two accounts to do this,
and I'm sorry for that; I didn't think of that.
Camembert said that this was a childish point to make,
but I don't see why. Maybe this is because I am a
child. Maybe Wikipedia isn't a place for children.
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
LDan wrote:

>At the time I was banned (approx. 1 min after
>my account was created), I had made no edits aside
>from creating my userpage and editing User:Liberal's
>talk page. I intended to use the account to make
>completely NPOV edits on articles related US politics
>to prove that usernames are irrelavent, but I was
>banned before I could do that.

The point I've been trying make all along was that user names /are not/ there
to make points! What you did amounts to trolling and thus is something that
warrents an immediate ban. However, since you have never done anything like
this before and we all know that you are an upstanding young man, then I see
no reason to ban *you* from editing under user:LittleDan so long as you
promise not to pull a stunt like this again and not to edit under
user:Non-liberala are stupid or similarly provocative user names.

>Camembert said that this was a childish point to make,
>but I don't see why. Maybe this is because I am a
>child. Maybe Wikipedia isn't a place for children.

Childish doesn't mean that all children are childish all the time. Many adults
act childish (some almost all the time). However you almost always act very
responsibly and have intelligence and reason way beyond your years. We all
make mistakes and hopefully learn from them. If you'll try to not repeat this
particular lapse of judgment again, then Wikipedia is most definitely a place
for you.

Oh, and you are a teenager, not a child IIRC. ;-)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
> That was me. I don't believe that non-liberals are
> stupid. At the time I was banned (approx. 1 min
> after
> my account was created), I had made no edits aside
> from creating my userpage and editing User:Liberal's
> talk page. I intended to use the account to make
> completely NPOV edits on articles related US
> politics
> to prove that usernames are irrelavent, but I was
> banned before I could do that. I started with
> User:Liberal, but JamesDay and Angela said that that
> wouldn't be enough to prove my point (see
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Liberal/deny_freedom_of_speech).
> Then, without *any* discussion but this one post, I
> was banned. The exact opposite of my point. This
> sets
> two bad precedents: banning users because of their
> usernames, and banning a logged in user without any
> discussion (I thought that the RK ban set that
> second
> one, but now I've found out there was discussion).
> If
> you uphold the ban, I will leave wikipedia. I could
> easily circumvent the ban by restarting my router,
> but
> if you really want me to leave, I will. Some people
> voiced concerns that I used two accounts to do this,
> and I'm sorry for that; I didn't think of that.
> Camembert said that this was a childish point to
> make,
> but I don't see why. Maybe this is because I am a
> child. Maybe Wikipedia isn't a place for children.
> LDan

Since I was banned, 5 more people said I was acting
childish.

I guess I do see why it's childish now, but this whole
debate about banning people because you don't like
their username is also childish.
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Scramble for Africa protected

body:
For some reason some juveniles have decided to add silly comments
to this article. Okay, a lot of them inside an hour or so. As a
result, I've been forced to protect this page.

Would another sysop unprotect it an hour after reading this email,
so that more mature contributors can edit this article? Thanks.

Geoff


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
LDan wrote:
>Why is it necessary to restrict usernames? This seems
>like a pointless measure that could only loose us
>contributors.

I've already gone over this several times. Have you been reading the mailing
list lately? Loosing contributors who want to have provocative and offensive
user names would be a good thing since we already waste enough time with
anonymous trolls.

>So, if I did it again, you'd ban me? Even if all of my
>edits were OK?

You wasted a good deal of editing time from other contributors by your little
stunt. If you keep doing that type of stuff, then yes.

>You still haven't addressed my concern that this sets
>a dangerous precedent of banning someone while a
>discussion of whether or not to ban them was still
>going on.

Why or why do I have to address everything you write? I wasn't the person who
banned your user account either. And it has since be un-banned when we found
out it was you.

>This wasn't even for vandalism or trolling,
>just for having an objectionable username.

Yes it was trolling.

-- mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
> The point I've been trying make all along was that
> user names /are not/ there
> to make points! What you did amounts to trolling and
> thus is something that
> warrents an immediate ban. However, since you have
> never done anything like
> this before and we all know that you are an
> upstanding young man, then I see
> no reason to ban *you* from editing under
> user:LittleDan so long as you
> promise not to pull a stunt like this again and not
> to edit under
> user:Non-liberala are stupid or similarly
> provocative user names.

Why is it necessary to restrict usernames? This seems
like a pointless measure that could only loose us
contributors.

> Childish doesn't mean that all children are childish
> all the time. Many adults
> act childish (some almost all the time). However you
> almost always act very
> responsibly and have intelligence and reason way
> beyond your years. We all
> make mistakes and hopefully learn from them. If
> you'll try to not repeat this
> particular lapse of judgment again, then Wikipedia
> is most definitely a place
> for you.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

So, if I did it again, you'd ban me? Even if all of my
edits were OK?

You still haven't addressed my concern that this sets
a dangerous precedent of banning someone while a
discussion of whether or not to ban them was still
going on. This wasn't even for vandalism or trolling,
just for having an objectionable username.
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
LDan wrote:
>So we can't write our political views on our
>userpages? I have a little bit of my politcal views on
>my userpage, should I delete it? If I don't delete it,
>should my ban be upheld?

Stop it with the straw man argument. What you write on your user page does not
show up in page histories or on RC.

>Being a not being a "free speech forum" is a bit
>different than actively banning people for expressing
>opinions.

Express your opinions /on/ your user page not /by/ your user page.

-- mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
> Sorry to burst your bubble but we ain't a fee speech
> forum. We have that pesky
> little NPOV policy to follow so we can't just write
> whatever we want in any
> way we want (sic free speech).  Similarly, we cannot
> choose any username that
> suits our fancy - other people have to view it in
> page histories and on RC,
> so if the community doesn't like it then it must
> change. We are simply trying
> to find consensus on just where to redraw the line
> of what we consider to be
> acceptable. Our policy on this issue is merely in
> the process of evolving.
>
> --mav

So we can't write our political views on our
userpages? I have a little bit of my politcal views on
my userpage, should I delete it? If I don't delete it,
should my ban be upheld?

Being a not being a "free speech forum" is a bit
different than actively banning people for expressing
opinions.
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
Andrew wrote:
>So if one person (without any discussion) declares
>a username to be trolling then they can ban that
>user immediately? I don't see that on WP:NOU...

The act of creating the user account was trolling, the username itself is just
provocative. And there was discussion - even a vote - concerning this issue,
so let's not pretend that this was done unilaterally.

--mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
> We are creating a product that is used by a great
> many people with many, many,
> unique POVs. Having usersnames that are POV slogans
> as being attributed
> authors to that body of knowledge is going to
> disparage our work and put its
> neutrality in question.
>
> But we can actually wear whatever we want during
> meet-ups since that doesn't
> affect the wide adoption of our work. And of course
> we can all continue to
> write in our underwear!
>
> -- mav

Of course, I never thought if it; no one would adopt
something edited by a Christian!
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: Andrew

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
So if one person (without any discussion) declares a username to be trolling
then they can ban that user immediately? I don't see that on WP:NOU...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 5:10 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

> LDan wrote:
>
> >At the time I was banned (approx. 1 min after
> >my account was created), I had made no edits aside
> >from creating my userpage and editing User:Liberal's
> >talk page. I intended to use the account to make
> >completely NPOV edits on articles related US politics
> >to prove that usernames are irrelavent, but I was
> >banned before I could do that.
>
> The point I've been trying make all along was that user names /are not/
there
> to make points! What you did amounts to trolling and thus is something
that
> warrents an immediate ban. However, since you have never done anything
like
> this before and we all know that you are an upstanding young man, then I
see
> no reason to ban *you* from editing under user:LittleDan so long as you
> promise not to pull a stunt like this again and not to edit under
> user:Non-liberala are stupid or similarly provocative user names.
>
> >Camembert said that this was a childish point to make,
> >but I don't see why. Maybe this is because I am a
> >child. Maybe Wikipedia isn't a place for children.
>
> Childish doesn't mean that all children are childish all the time. Many
adults
> act childish (some almost all the time). However you almost always act
very
> responsibly and have intelligence and reason way beyond your years. We all
> make mistakes and hopefully learn from them. If you'll try to not repeat
this
> particular lapse of judgment again, then Wikipedia is most definitely a
place
> for you.
>
> Oh, and you are a teenager, not a child IIRC. ;-)
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
--- cprompt <cprompt at tmbg.org> wrote:
> Because people with provocative names like that
> usually do it for shock
> value and do not make valuable edits. In addition,
> other people may be
> deterred from using Wikipedia if they found out that
> the community
> tolerated offensive user names.

Many fundimentalist christians leave public schools
because the schools don't teach creationism. Does that
mean the schools need to switch over from their
scientific curricula to more religious education?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
This was the discussion before blocking the name:
"OK, this user name is just trolling. Ban it immediately. --mav 23:37, 12
Oct 2003 (UTC)

done. Fear?IREANN 23:43, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC) "

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 5:50 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

> Andrew wrote:
> >So if one person (without any discussion) declares
> >a username to be trolling then they can ban that
> >user immediately? I don't see that on WP:NOU...
>
> The act of creating the user account was trolling, the username itself is
just
> provocative. And there was discussion - even a vote - concerning this
issue,
> so let's not pretend that this was done unilaterally.
>
> --mav
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
>This was the discussion before blocking the name:
>"OK, this user name is just trolling. Ban it immediately.
>--mav 23:37, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
>
>done. Fear?IREANN 23:43, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC) "

Don't forget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Liberal/deny_freedom_of_speech

Where a majority of people voting to ban user:Liberal.

'User:Non-liberals are stupid' is, of course, much worse.

--mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
Andrew
>That vote was to ban user:Liberal, not the other name.

It was the same damn person! What's more is that they deliberately upped the
ante by choosing an offensive user name. That needed to be stopped then and
there.

--mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
That vote was to ban user:Liberal, not the other name.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 6:05 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

> >This was the discussion before blocking the name:
> >"OK, this user name is just trolling. Ban it immediately.
> >--mav 23:37, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
> >
> >done. Fear?IREANN 23:43, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC) "
>
> Don't forget:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Liberal/deny_freedom_of_speech
>
> Where a majority of people voting to ban user:Liberal.
>
> 'User:Non-liberals are stupid' is, of course, much worse.
>
> --mav
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
Just catching up--- I agree with Andrew that these notions of paying academics for their knowlege is anti-wiki -- its silly, and I need to say so before I read another one of these. With every typical boon come the various ideas for how to spend it. Were talking about a few thousand dollars here.  Even if Bill and Melinda Gates came down and gave a million bucks to wikipedia, it still would not warrant the hiring of expensive academics--- many of whom actuall do 'get it" and already contribute to WP. Its beyond silly-- and I would like to propose an equally silly idea that WP hire on Gary Coleman, Stephen Hawking and Traci Lords as spokespeople for Wikipedia -- and pay for commercial airtime to advertise.

Well maybe a few public transit ads...
~S~

"Thomas R. Koll" <tomk32 at gmx.de> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 03:13:18PM +0800, Andrew Lih wrote:
> Perhaps I'm completely cynical, but the variety of suggestions about
> hiring experts to keep watch, or college professors, or
> "known-neutral-and-knowledgeable" folks is a bit troubling and un-Wiki.
> (And for those who know what I do for a living will find it ironic. :)
>
> If this route is considered, we should ensure no greater authority will
> be conferred upon this class of contributors. So far, the suggestions
> by Delerium and Mav have been innocent enough, but could be dangerous if
> it becomes related to ownership, entitlement or keeper-status of certain
> topics.

How about advertising in scientific magazines? But before we do that we
should make a survey what jobs and interests our readers have so we can
focus one advertising in a Wild-West-magazine somthing like
"Billy the Kid wanted! Write and article about him in the WP"
Ads should be 1) cheaper than experts and 2) reach more people.

> In the most extreme case, it reminds me of "The Simpsons" episode where
> the Mensa chapter of Springfield take responsibility for running the
> town (with their so-called "genius") only to have things go horribly
> wrong, and have Stephen Hawking come by to chastise them. :)

A great episode.

ciao, tom
--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
-.- http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
/|> Urlaub? http://www.tomk32.de/fewo-koll/
/ \ http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
> That vote was to ban user:Liberal, not the other
> name.

Yes, but there was an ongoing discussion about the ban
in general and there was no immediate need for the
ban. On User:Non-liberals are stupid's user page, it
specifically said that all discussion on banning
should still go on that same talk page.
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
> Don't forget:
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Liberal/deny_freedom_of_speech
>
> Where a majority of people voting to ban
> user:Liberal.
>
> 'User:Non-liberals are stupid' is, of course, much
> worse.
>
> --mav

They wanted to ban User:Liberal because he was using
multiple accounts. Not one person on that talk page
wanted to ban User:Liberal because of his actual
username. If you used the multiple-account rationale
for banning User:Non-liberals are stupid, I wouldn't
object, because that's clearly what the vote
concluded. BTW, what's our multiple username policy?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
Okay... I see what you mean, it was banned because it was a second name
belonging to the same person, not because it was offensive (although I agree
it was).

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 6:13 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

> Andrew
> >That vote was to ban user:Liberal, not the other name.
>
> It was the same damn person! What's more is that they deliberately upped
the
> ante by choosing an offensive user name. That needed to be stopped then
and
> there.
>
> --mav
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Andrew wrote:
> >So if one person (without any discussion) declares
> >a username to be trolling then they can ban that
> >user immediately? I don't see that on WP:NOU...
>
> The act of creating the user account was trolling,
> the username itself is just
> provocative. And there was discussion - even a vote
> - concerning this issue,
> so let's not pretend that this was done
> unilaterally.
>
> --mav

There was a vote. You cut it short (it was only up for
a couple of hours) and then defied it.
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Agian-- to everyone. It has nothing to do with a dress code, or setting static standards against names. The standard is consensus.  If we think Stevertigo is an offensive name, you can go ahead and add a slash /namechange in my userspace and ask people to vote on whether its appropriate for WP.  Who decides whats appropriate, and where the line is?  The people do! with EACH VOTE! what a novel idea!  There will be no page anywhere that says a name with FUCK in it will be banned or changed.  There is an implicit reservation of Wikipedians to ask for a namechange if theres enough votes for it.  Does the word FUCK offend me? Of course not! Will I vote "change" on a vote? You bet.
Jesus is Lord, even though its not an offensive statement (especially if you undersand Christian Biblespeak and know what it means to say) got 19 votes against (regardless of the reason) and this is reason enough to change it.  Some here and on that talk would have been right to get at the point that those against were not offended-- and were only supposing "offense" --but even this was disingenous, given that everyone here knows what the word "inflammatory" means.

~S~

<mattheww at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Where did I say that they should be banned? Changing a user name does
> not ban the user. Think of it as a dress code; the great majority of
> employers do not allow their employees to wear shirts expressing
> controversial opinions.

I think this is a good analogy.

And, as Wikipedia is not our employer, I think imposing a dress code is
inappropriate.

There was recently a discussion on one of the Debian mailing lists
about having a dress code for people on the Debian stand at some Expo
or other. There was a strong consensus against this idea.

-M-

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
SV wrote:
>Just catching up--- I agree with Andrew that these
>notions of paying academics for their knowlege is
>anti-wiki

So Jimbo wasted his money paying Larry to lead the Wikipedia project its first
year? IMO, that is one of the main reasons why the whole enterprise took off.
Larry did a hell of a lot of work publicizing Wikipedia, recruiting
contributors, creating/shaping policy (such as NPOV) and resolving disputes.

We now have a strong enough community and already written polices and a sense
of ourselves that that is not really needed for already established wikis.
But at the same time many of the smaller Wikipedias could use somebody to
perform the major, not so fun (and lonely at first), basic organizing and
promotion that Larry did for the English Wikipedia. That will dramatically
decrease the amount of time needed for a project to become viable on its own.
Having no useful wiki in certain languages is far more anti-wiki to me.

>With every typical boon come the various ideas for
>how to spend it. Were talking about a few thousand
>dollars here.  Even if Bill and Melinda Gates came
>down and gave a million bucks to wikipedia, it still
>would not warrant the hiring of expensive academics---

A few hundred bucks a month to kick start a new Wikipedia version would be
money well-spent if we had a million bucks (part timers on limited term
contracts would be best). But any blood money from Bill and Melinda would
probably have strings attached so I don't think we would accept it.

>many of whom actuall do 'get it" and already contribute
>to WP.

Yes, but they do what they want, not necessarily what is most needed. I'm not
convinced that hiring any academic for currently active wikis would do much
good. I'm concerned about kick-starting smaller wikis and optimizing
MediaWiki. The developers already have said that they either do not have time
for that or the knowledge to do it right. So let's pay an expert to do it.

>Its beyond silly--

I think it is beyond silly that the Hindi and Arabic Wikipedias are still so
small. I also think it is tragic that many languages around the world are
dying and that Wikipedia could be used to help save them by hooking the
younger speakers into writting articles in their language.

If that takes having to fork over some cash to kick-start a wiki, then so be
it. If it can be done without it, then that is even better. But I doubt it
can be done as quickly.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> LDan wrote:
> >So we can't write our political views on our
> >userpages? I have a little bit of my politcal views
> on
> >my userpage, should I delete it? If I don't delete
> it,
> >should my ban be upheld?
>
> Stop it with the straw man argument. What you write
> on your user page does not
> show up in page histories or on RC.

No, I was genuinely asking because it sounded like you
didn't think any views (apart from in NPOV format)
should be coveyed by users. You said that Wikipedia
was not a free speech forum. I think that userpages
are much better at conveying messages than usernames
(ie. can convey actual thoughts). So you're saying
that userpages can be "free speech forums", but
usernames cannot. That seems pretty superficial to me.
>
> >Being a not being a "free speech forum" is a bit
> >different than actively banning people for
> expressing
> >opinions.
>
> Express your opinions /on/ your user page not /by/
> your user page.
>
> -- mav

What?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
LDan wrote:
>There was a vote. You cut it short
>(it was only up for a couple of hours)
>and then defied it.

What? I did no such thing! You cut it short when you created yet another  user
account with a provocative and offensive name. JT rightly so banned that
account. /You/ are the one who defied the vote.

Stop wasting everyone's time. I will now stop feeding you.

--mav


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
Stevertigo wrote:

> Just catching up--- I agree with Andrew that these notions of paying
> academics for their knowlege is anti-wiki -- its silly, and I need to
> say so before I read another one of these. With every typical boon
> come the various ideas for how to spend it. Were talking about a few
> thousand dollars here.  Even if Bill and Melinda Gates came down and
> gave a million bucks to wikipedia, it still would not warrant the
> hiring of expensive academics--- many of whom actuall do 'get it" and
> already contribute to WP. Its beyond silly-- and I would like to
> propose an equally silly idea that WP hire on Gary Coleman, Stephen
> Hawking and Traci Lords as spokespeople for Wikipedia -- and pay for
> commercial airtime to advertise.
>

How is the notion of paying academics for their knowledge more anti-wiki
than the notion of paying coders for their skills?

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
> I've already gone over this several times. Have you
> been reading the mailing
> list lately? Loosing contributors who want to have
> provocative and offensive
> user names would be a good thing since we already
> waste enough time with
> anonymous trolls.

So far, we haven't heard of anyone leaving because of
offensive usernames, and I doubt that there are any
unnamed people who have left because of that.

Anonymous trolls are completely different. They make
bad edits. People with bad usernames don't necessarily
make bad edits.
>
> You wasted a good deal of editing time from other
> contributors by your little
> stunt. If you keep doing that type of stuff, then
> yes.

The only time wasted was the 1 minute it took to write
an opinion about it on the talk page (per person) and
30 seconds to ban. I don't think the subsequent
mailing list discussion really counts.
>
> Why or why do I have to address everything you
> write?

I guess it's inaccurate to say that if you don't
respond to an accusation, it's either because it's
true or you don't have any good argument against it,
but that's what I thought.

> I wasn't the person who
> banned your user account either. And it has since be
> un-banned when we found
> out it was you.
>
Well, I guess it wasn't just you, but still, this is
the first time two people determining that a logged-in
user should be banned is enough.

> Yes it was trolling.
>
> -- mav

None of wikipedia was more POV after I used that
username. I didn't threaten anyone. How is it
trolling? What is our definition of trolling?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> LDan wrote:
> >There was a vote. You cut it short
> >(it was only up for a couple of hours)
> >and then defied it.
>
> What? I did no such thing! You cut it short when you
> created yet another  user
> account with a provocative and offensive name. JT
> rightly so banned that
> account. /You/ are the one who defied the vote.
>
> Stop wasting everyone's time. I will now stop
> feeding you.
>
> --mav

How was that defying the vote? The vote was for
*forcing* me to do something, not for what my username
should be.
LDan

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

So Jimbo wasted his money paying Larry to lead the Wikipedia project its first
year? IMO, that is one of the main reasons why the whole enterprise took off.
Larry did a hell of a lot of work publicizing Wikipedia, recruiting
contributors, creating/shaping policy (such as NPOV) and resolving disputes.

>> But Larry wasnt hired for his philosophy - rather for his mediation and administration. >>Ths was a valid and perhaps essential decision by JW -- youll get no disagreement >>from me.

We now have a strong enough community and already written polices and a sense
of ourselves that that is not really needed for already established wikis.
But at the same time many of the smaller Wikipedias could use somebody to
perform the major, not so fun (and lonely at first), basic organizing and
promotion that Larry did for the English Wikipedia. That will dramatically
decrease the amount of time needed for a project to become viable on its own.
Having no useful wiki in certain languages is far more anti-wiki to me.

>>Yes-- this is a very important point and Im glad you made it.  I had thought that
>>perhaps the English WP had gotten an advantage in terms of Larry-- and that this
>>is in part the reason for a disproportion between article counts. But this is not
>>a very valid point to make--things happen the way they do.

A few hundred bucks a month to kick start a new Wikipedia version would be
money well-spent if we had a million bucks (part timers on limited term
contracts would be best). But any blood money from Bill and Melinda would
probably have strings attached so I don't think we would accept it.

>>I dont think there would be any strings at all. At least this is my version of that >>particular pipedream :-)

Yes, but they do what they want, not necessarily what is most needed. I'm not
convinced that hiring any academic for currently active wikis would do much
good. I'm concerned about kick-starting smaller wikis and optimizing
MediaWiki. The developers already have said that they either do not have time
for that or the knowledge to do it right. So let's pay an expert to do it.

>>I was wondering... I know our cadre of Dev's are top notch, but they still WFF and are >>limited in terms of what they can do. But paying someone would only be a temp thing, >>in almost all cases, unless youre counting on massive philanthropy or making money.

I think it is beyond silly that the Hindi and Arabic Wikipedias are still so
small. I also think it is tragic that many languages around the world are
dying and that Wikipedia could be used to help save them by hooking the
younger speakers into writting articles in their language.

>>Youll get no argument from me-- I ve got more edits by far on Ar.wiki and I dont even
>>read Arabic!  (solicitations for help have been tepid.)

If that takes having to fork over some cash to kick-start a wiki, then so be
it. If it can be done without it, then that is even better. But I doubt it
can be done as quickly.

>>Yes I agree with you fully-- I think you make a good point.
>>~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:

No, I was genuinely asking because it sounded like you
didn't think any views (apart from in NPOV format)
should be coveyed by users. You said that Wikipedia
was not a free speech forum. I think that userpages
are much better at conveying messages than usernames
(ie. can convey actual thoughts). So you're saying
that userpages can be "free speech forums", but
usernames cannot. That seems pretty superficial to me.

--
Oh Cmon Dan-- if you really think that the 'no inflammatory names' policy is unfair you might try to pick a less benign name yourself.  That you think there is no difference bettween context comment and pervasive username is disingenous at best. Maybe youre just trolling tonight...

~S~

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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Wikipedia is a privately-owned entity.  Although we treat it as a democracy (and even an anarchy), it is not a governmental agency, and you have no "right" to do anything.

RickK

Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:

--- Rick wrote:
> I would.
>
> RickK
>
>> Andrew wrote:
>>
>> So you would support a rule against any user name
>> constituting an opinion?
>>
>> -evil saltine

That's bit broad, don't you think? Wikipedians are
allowed to have opinions. I see no reason why
usernames should be NPOV. I think this would be a
serious violation of freedom of speech.
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
1.  Those are not opinions.

2.  Even if they were, they would not be construed as opinions by the standard user of the system.

RickK

Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
Rick wrote:
> I would.
>
> RickK
>
> */Andrew /* wrote:
>
> So you would support a rule against any user name constituting an
> opinion?
>
> -evil saltine

You tell 'em, RickK! Certainly Andrew there should not be allowed to
use a name advocating the qualities "manly, valiant, courageous." On
the other tentacle, of course, the name "Richard" expresses the opinion
that its bearer is a "powerful ruler; brave one"....

--~~~~
the Epopt, who has not, in fact, been initiated into the Eleusinian
Mysteries

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subject: [Wikipedia-l]  Paid adminstrator (Money.. Mark)

body:
Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:

How is the notion of paying academics for their knowledge more anti-wiki
than the notion of paying coders for their skills?

---
Because the one is a service-- a skill, irrelevant of content, pov, etc. and the other is exactly as Danny said--  implied creation of an 'expert cabal' -- whose "expertise" trumps that of others. We dont pay for info, -- thats the point of making WP in the first place -- to pay for info is "anti-Wikipedia" IMHO.

That said, to pay someone to be an administrator, as Larry Sanger was-- is an entirely different matter.

~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:

None of wikipedia was more POV after I used that
username. I didn't threaten anyone. How is it
trolling? What is our definition of trolling?

---
Well-- just catching up-- I would have hoped that such a stunt might gain you some perspective... maybe try ask Tim to *change your name to "Non-liberals are stupid" -- this might be a more serious experiment-- if thats what youre trying to do.

I agree with Mav-- creating a phony username just to try to make a point-- (I can only imagine you were bored out of your mind.) is trolling.  A general definition of trolling to me-- is arguing when its beyond pointless-- Ive done it before-- theres nothing wrong with it-- but its perfectly fine for Mav (and now I ) to call it for what it is.

~S~

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
Daniel, you're becoming tiresome.

RickK

Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:
--- cprompt wrote:
> Because people with provocative names like that
> usually do it for shock
> value and do not make valuable edits. In addition,
> other people may be
> deterred from using Wikipedia if they found out that
> the community
> tolerated offensive user names.

Many fundimentalist christians leave public schools
because the schools don't teach creationism. Does that
mean the schools need to switch over from their
scientific curricula to more religious education?
LDan

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subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
They are opinions.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Rick
  To: English Wikipedia
  Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 7:22 PM
  Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User names

  1.  Those are not opinions.

  2.  Even if they were, they would not be construed as opinions by the standard user of the system.

  RickK

  Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
    Rick wrote:
    > I would.
    >
    > RickK
    >
    > */Andrew /* wrote:
    >
    > So you would support a rule against any user name constituting an
    > opinion?
    >
    > -evil saltine

    You tell 'em, RickK! Certainly Andrew there should not be allowed to
    use a name advocating the qualities "manly, valiant, courageous." On
    the other tentacle, of course, the name "Richard" expresses the opinion
    that its bearer is a "powerful ruler; brave one"....

    --~~~~
    the Epopt, who has not, in fact, been initiated into the Eleusinian
    Mysteries

    _______________________________________________
    WikiEN-l mailing list
    WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
    http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Paid adminstrator (Money.. Mark)

body:
Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

>I think we should pay photographers and illustrators. It's very
>necessary, and uncontroversial.

Being an illustrator, I would not disagree with any funds coming my way... but I would still like Brion, Erik, Magnus, *You and whoever else has donated free custom code to get some first.  Then maybe Mav's idea for some "startup funds".. and with the last fifteen bucks...

~S~

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

body:
> How about advertising in scientific magazines? But before we
> do that we should make a survey what jobs and interests our
> readers have so we can focus one advertising in a
> Wild-West-magazine somthing like "Billy the Kid wanted! Write
> and article about him in the WP" Ads should be 1) cheaper
> than experts and 2) reach more people.

Many times when reviewing articles I would think, "Gee, my buddy Bob
could really add something to this article..."  To facilitate this, it
might be nice to have some boilerplate viral marketing text users can
send out, like:

Hi Bob,

Alice thought your expert knowledge can help Wikipedia's article on
"Nuclear Astrophysics"  Click here to contribute to Wikipedia, the
world's fastest growing, open content encyclopedia.

You could even imagine having a link in WP's left-hand menu, like the
"Email this link" or "Tell a friend" link on other Web sites.  Of
course, there are risks, such as Wikipedia being perceived as spam
generator, so more thought is necessary.  But I think the
person-to-person marketing has potential.

-Fuzheado


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here here, or...

body:
"Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>Here. here.

I thought it was "hear, hear"

Whichever it was, add my name to it.
~S~

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from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: AstroWikipedia

body:
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>

> This is probably something that Alex can comment on helpfully.
>
> We probably do need to setup a wiki-legal.  In any event, althugh
> Daniel posted this on wikien-l, I'm moving it to Wikipedia-l.
>
> Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
>
> > I just found AstroWikipedia, a small polish-language
> > wiki of astrology using PhpWiki at astrowikipedia.com.
> > It seems that they created the name independently of
> > us. Should we do anything? It would be bad to force
> > them to change their name, but should we at least get
> > them to say they're not connected with Wikipedia?
> > LDan

Would be good to get some more information. Did they
come up with the name independently? I don't know much
Polish, but they appear to be a new site. If they didn't know
about Wikipedia (or the Polish Wikipedia) perhaps someone
from pl.wikipedia.org should try and contact them and
find out more information before deciding what to do. The
information:  Why did they chose that name? Do they know
there is a Polish language Wikipedia?  When did they
start using the name?

Once we know the answers to those questions perhaps
we can make an informed decision about what to do.

Alex756


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Subtitle

body:
From: "tarquin" <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> >We can either wait until we have these
> >variants, or upload the logo without the subtitle.
> I say upload the one without the subtitle.
> I don't like the subtitle on a logo anyway -- on any logo. It's overkill.
> http://www.planetunreal.com/titanium

Your not liking the subtitles on logos
is a matter of personal taste. When the
logo is so famous that most people
know what it stands for then maybe
a subtitle might not be needed, such
as the case with McDonalds, etc.

But some logos gain the exposure by
tagging onto the subtitle. I feel it would
be wise to keep the subtitle "WIKIPEDIA
The Free Encyclopedia" and specially
use a font that shows off the "W" like
two "V" letters one with the other so
you get four horns... why??? Well,
I like it, and it reminds me of fancy
type fonts... Just throwing in my own
personal tastes and views on this thread
:-)

Cheers,
Jay B.


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo consensus?

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>We can either wait until we have these
>variants, or upload the logo without the subtitle.
>
>
I say upload the one without the subtitle.

I don't like the subtitle on a logo anyway -- on any logo. It's overkill.

http://www.planetunreal.com/titanium


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
LDan has made a faux paux.  So what.  It is neither irreversible nor
serious.  It did not involve an abuse of his sysop powers.

I suggest that we all forget about it and move on.  There are far more
pressing matters to attend to.

Louis


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
I'm somewhat surprised this whole thing didn't break out earlier...
I normally oppose pretty much every form of censorship. I think that those
offended easily are weak-minded and need to toughen up. However, there is a
case for "professionalism"... too many of the masses who could make use are
excessively PC, PR-sensitive types. It's a tricky question, and with
absolute rulings leading, as absolutes tend to, to insanity (see the
postings where people's first names are called opinions), we have to find a
sensible middle ground.
I found 'Jesus is Lord!' a little much... but I dislike the name more for
style than content. I don't like it, but don't know that ruling it out is a
good idea. 'Drolsi Susej' works for me... subtlety goes a long way, and it
becomes a unique identifier.
'Liberal' is fine. If someone new came in to use that, I'd have absolutely
no issue. I strongly oppose people having multiple names, however...
(Jimbo's the only one who I can see as having a valid reason to.)
'Non-liberals are stupid' is unacceptable. There is no question in my mind
that if any username should be disallowed, this one should be.
TMC and Saddam were both clear cases.

And LDan: Chronological age is no big factor (at least not to me, and I feel
not to many), which is much of why I dislike when people call actions
'childlike', 'juvenile', or 'immature'... hell, I'm still a teenager (until
Saturday).

-- Jake


subject: [WikiEN-l] Here here, or...

body:
Stevertigo said:
>"Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>>Here. here.
>
>I thought it was "hear, hear"

You are correct. And I concur, as well.

-- Jake


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] re:Money, money

body:
> Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> So Jimbo wasted his money paying Larry to lead the
> Wikipedia project its first
> year? IMO, that is one of the main reasons why the
> whole enterprise took off.
> Larry did a hell of a lot of work publicizing
> Wikipedia, recruiting
> contributors, creating/shaping policy (such as NPOV)
> and resolving disputes.

And what about paying also those hunting for copyvio ?

and typos ?

And those making international links (which may help
small wikis to take up)

and those making promotion ?

and those copying images from one wikipedia to another
?

Tracking basic vandalism ?

Banning user name ?

Drawing logos ?

Fixing international contests ?

Translating articles from en to a small wiki to help
it take off ?

All this NPOV, and not fun activity.
Or perhaps is it fun activity for some, and boring for
others ?

__________________________________
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body:
Tim Starling said:
> I think we should pay photographers and illustrators. It's very
> necessary, and uncontroversial.

Not a bad thought, but I think this is down the 'it'd be nice to pay
everybody' road. But given as I'm likely going to be contributing a fairly
large number of photos reasonably soon, I certainly wouldn't mind this
plan... I could certainly use the money. ;)

-- Jake


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
In a message dated 10/12/2003 9:03:55 PM Eastern Standard Time,
delirium at rufus.d2g.com writes:
How is the notion of paying academics for their knowledge more anti-wiki
than the notion of paying coders for their skills?
I agree with Steve that we should not pay for knowledge. Having
"professional" experts could dictate the direction an article takes--someone can pull rank
and say, "Hey, I am the expert. Don't argue with me." This might well threaten
NPOV, even if it comes at the cost of having some experts in certain fields
intimidated by people who don't know their ass from their elbow making
assertions about things they know very little about. Hey, we've seen both happen.

On the other hand, we should examine what areas are poorly covered so far and
encourage more people to research and write about them.

Danny
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] re:Money, money

body:
In a message dated 10/12/2003 8:56:17 PM Eastern Standard Time,
maveric149 at yahoo.com writes:
think it is beyond silly that the Hindi and Arabic Wikipedias are still so
small. I also think it is tragic that many languages around the world are
dying and that Wikipedia could be used to help save them by hooking the
younger speakers into writting articles in their language.
I agree fully. It could also be used to encourage college students studying
these languages to write or even translate articles into those languages. A
couple of extra bucks for them couldn't hurt.
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body:
From: "Louis Kyu Won Ryu" <lazolla at hotmail.com>

> LDan has made a faux paux.  So what.  It is neither irreversible nor
> serious.  It did not involve an abuse of his sysop powers.
>
> I suggest that we all forget about it and move on.  There are far more
> pressing matters to attend to.
>
> Louis

Here. here.

Alex756


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Usernames

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> We are creating a product that is used by a great many people with many, many,

I'm not. I'm bitching and writing stuff when I feel like it because I
have to much free time on my hands and so do the rest of you!

> unique POVs. Having usersnames that are POV slogans as being attributed
> authors to that body of knowledge is going to disparage our work and put its
> neutrality in question.

I don't care much about people who judge a book based on its cover, or
on who wrote it. If they* don't feel like reading it and/or publish it
because of a username they can go write their own damn encyclopedia
instead of leeching on our work.

* They, as in those fabled "downstream" users which we must protect
against harm at all costs and who we are required to provide a free
encyclopedia to, so that their stupid and annoying banners can get more
hits.

BL


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
Danny wrote:
>I agree with Steve that we should not pay for knowledge.
>Having "professional" experts could dictate the direction
>an article takes--someone can pull rank and say, "Hey, I
>am the expert. Don't argue with me."

Then we fire them for breaching two very clear clauses of their employment
contract; NPOV and working amicably with others.

But what I am mainly interested in is the hiring of college professors who
teach a particular language to do what Larry did for the English Wikipedia
(except in a part time capacity). Why such a specific criteria? Because we
could suggest to the instructor (or require him/her) to give his or her
students a choice to obtain part of their grade (and extra credit) by
translating Wikipedia articles or even create new ones from scratch. This
would potentially add dozens of Wikipedians contributing to a small Wikipedia
overnight.

So an professor who teaches 80 students Arabic at a university could lead his
or her students into creating many hundreds of articles in a single term.
Once an article is created by a student, the professor edits it to improve
usage and grammer and then adds a critique of the article on the student's
user talk page if needed. Then the student can view the article diff in order
to see the corrections. Other students could also help improve the article. I
think that would be a fun way to learn - and teach - a language.

That much activity should be able to kick-start the Arabic Wikipedia in a
year's time (which would be a nice cut-off point for the contract). So for a
few thousand bucks we get a self-sustaining Wikipedia in one of the world's
great languages. Dirt cheap price if you ask me once the grants start
comming-in. And they will come-in.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Tim wrote:
>I think we should pay photographers and illustrators.
>It's very necessary, and uncontroversial.

I don't know about photographers, but Wikipedia could use many professional
illustrations in the science section (especially biology).

Taking a good photo doesn't take nearly as much skill and only a tiny fraction
of the time.

-- mav


body:
Tim wrote:
>Perhaps our money would be better spent on
>increasing the size of the development team,
>rather than paying hard-core wikipediholics
>like myself for work that we would have done
>anyway.

Hear, hear! I'd love to get paid to work on Wikipedia full time but in terms
of priorities, tripling my weekly Wikipedia time would do less for the
project than hiring somebody to improve the parts of MediaWiki that our
volunteer development team doesn't have the time, skill or want to fix.
Second in lines of priority, IMO, would be to kick-start small Wikipedias.

In short: hire people to do stuff that would probably not get done by
volunteers for a long time, if at all, and keep the fun, more intrinsically
rewarding, stuff for the volunteers.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Short- and Longpages

body:
Hello,

Attached is a patch against the current phase3 branch.
It adds a new column to the cur table, cur_text_length,
that stores the length of the cur_text column.

It is used by Special:Shortpages, Special:Longpages,
Special:Newpages and stub detection.

To add it to an existing wikipedia, you have to
execute these SQL statements.

ALTER TABLE cur
  ADD COLUMN (cur_text_length int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default 0);
CREATE INDEX namespace_redirect_length
  ON cur(cur_namespace,cur_is_redirect,cur_text_length);
UPDATE cur
  SET cur_text_length = length(cur_text);

Beware! This takes some time for a big DB like the English one.
The order of the indexes columns is important, don't change it.

Regards,

JeLuF
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

body:
Delirium wrote:

> I realize I forgot to fully explain my reasons I think this will
> become more necessary.  In addition to simply filling in boring but
> important gaps (probably the best initial use, IMO), I think it will
> become necessary in the future to pay some people to keep track of
> volatile topics.  Especially in light of the recent discussion of the
> possibility of astroturfing Wikipedia, I think it would be very
> valuable to have a few known-neutral-and-knowledgeable people keeping
> watch on certain areas.  If something like genetically modified food
> turns into a turf war between, say, Monsato and environmentalists,
> it's likely any neutral and knowledgeable people will want to be
> completely uninvolved after a certain amount of time, while if there's
> at least some token payment, perhaps it'd be easier to convince a few
> reliable people to devote more attention to it.

> For example, a good use of funds (in my mind) would be to pay
> researchers a minimal token salary for adding information on
> relatively un-fun but need-to-be-in-an-encyclopedia topics.  Currently
> everyone is volunteer-only, and if I were to pick one place to start
> going to "paid labor", I'm not sure it'd be the backend side of
> things. Having them be the ones to intervene in POV disputes would be
> disastrous.

This has got to be one of the worst suggestions that I've heard
recently.  Paying experts in this way would inevitably result in a
two-class society.  Any paid personnel to some extent implies supporting
some kind of POV --- even software development.  In that example,
however, the overall benefit far exceeds the POV risk or damage.

I'm not an absolutist who says that we should never pay anybody at
anytime.  Larry's full time efforts were an absolute necessity at one
time for the very reasons that many people have already expressed.  I do
feel though that in time he outlived his usefulness.  He did a lot to
develop NPOV as a significant underlying principle, but like any others
of us it was impossible for him to completely escape having a POV on
many subjects and expressing it.  What was worse was the growing number
of people who were beginning to depend on a POV from Larry as a basis
for their own decisions.  The real problem there was the questions
rather than the answers.  Jimbo made a wise decision in choosing not to
participate in the editing of articles; to have done differently would
put him in the same position as Larry found himself.  In some respects
he is already facing these problems in disciplinary matters on a regular
basis..

If we are to be faced with an embarassment of riches we would do well to
establish financial priorities.  Our first priority is already clear.
 Jimbo has already signalled that it would take $20,000 to bring the
hardware to an acceptable.  Not being a techie I have absolutely no
basis to either support or oppose that estimate, but I can at least
support it in principal, and I have no problem envisaging that there
must also be a budget element for future contingencies in this area.

Software development should be Priority #2.  Obviously the hardware
difficulties have been a significant factor in holding back that
development, and I hope that the features that have had to be restrained
will soon be back to normal function.   When I was a newbie looking for
things to do I made extensive use of the most wanted and other special
pages; search pages were also a useful tool for tracking down possible
broken or missing links.  Getting these features back in operation will
be a big help to the project.  I agree that there are many articles that
need to be written which nobody seems to do anything about.  The reason
behind that may simply be that people, particularly newbies, don't know
what needs to be done.

There may eventually be some value to paying people a modest stipend to
give an underdeveloped Wikipedia a kick start by providing translations
for key articles, but we don't need professors for this.  Linguistic
skills in the target language will be the most important.

Another project which will require seed funding would be the proposal to
produce the 1.0 version on CD and/or paper.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>> For example, a good use of funds (in my mind) would be to pay
>> researchers a minimal token salary for adding information on
>> relatively un-fun but need-to-be-in-an-encyclopedia topics.
>> Currently everyone is volunteer-only, and if I were to pick one place
>> to start going to "paid labor", I'm not sure it'd be the backend side
>> of things. Having them be the ones to intervene in POV disputes would
>> be disastrous.
>
>
> This has got to be one of the worst suggestions that I've heard
> recently.  Paying experts in this way would inevitably result in a
> two-class society.  Any paid personnel to some extent implies
> supporting some kind of POV --- even software development.  In that
> example, however, the overall benefit far exceeds the POV risk or damage.
>
> I'm not an absolutist who says that we should never pay anybody at
> anytime.  Larry's full time efforts were an absolute necessity at one
> time for the very reasons that many people have already expressed.  I
> do feel though that in time he outlived his usefulness.  He did a lot
> to develop NPOV as a significant underlying principle, but like any
> others of us it was impossible for him to completely escape having a
> POV on many subjects and expressing it.  What was worse was the
> growing number of people who were beginning to depend on a POV from
> Larry as a basis for their own decisions.  The real problem there was
> the questions rather than the answers.  Jimbo made a wise decision in
> choosing not to participate in the editing of articles; to have done
> differently would put him in the same position as Larry found
> himself.  In some respects he is already facing these problems in
> disciplinary matters on a regular basis..

I'm not sure I see that this is necessary what will come out of paying
someone.  While I do think it would be helpful to pay some authoritative
neutral people to watch over very contentious issues, this is something
I'm not very adamant about.  Where I think it'd be most useful to pay
people to add content is for generally very uncontroversial stuff.  For
example, we have very good information on math and computer science
topics, because that's what internet-people tend to like.  We do not
have comparable information on art, history, literature, etc., and I
think paying a professor to go through and jump-start our art history
section would be a good use of funds.

-Mark


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New mailing lists: mediawiki-l, wikilegal-l

body:
MediaWiki-L is intended mainly for announcements of new versions, major
bug fixes, security issues, and the like to people using MediaWiki to
run other wikis without subjecting them to the nitty gritty goodness of
wikitech-l:

   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
   list address: mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org

Wikilegal-L can be used as necessary for the specialized nitty-gritty
licensing, copyright, and incorporation legal issues:

   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilegal-l
   list address: wikilegal at wikimedia.org

If someone would like to admin wikilegal-l, let me know. (This mostly
means rejecting the occasional spam and accepting the occasional post
from a non-subscribed person. Also being able to set up the list pages.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Lee Pilich

body:
LDan wrote:
 >Camembert said that this was a childish point to make,
 >but I don't see why.

I didn't say it was a childish point to make; I said it was a childish way
to make it.

You certainly have a point that deciding what usernames are and are not
acceptable is a very tricky thing. As I'm sure you realise, picking a
username like [[User:All <insert social/racial group of your choice>s must
die]] is just not on, but, at the same time, we don't want too many
restrictions on usernames. That's a fine point to make, but trying to make
it in the way that you did doesn't do you or your cause any good.

You've done a lot of good work on the Wikipedia, Dan - maybe this is a bit
of a slip-up, but we all make them. Whatever the outcome of this debate, I
hope you won't leave.

Lee (Camembert)


from_name: David Friedland

subject: [Wikitech-l] Back to IPA/SAMPA and pronunciations

body:
The last discussions on the lists about how to represent pronunciations
on Wikipedia didn't end with any definitive conclusions.

One of the proposed suggestions was to provide a way input IPA in an
easy-to-use format and then have it automagically get converted into
Unicode IPA. As a first step I wrote a Lex analyzer to convert X-SAMPA
to Unicode IPA (which results in C code that I compiled to an
executable). This will enable editors to enter pronunciations in the
ugly-but-easy-to-type X-SAMPA format and have them appear in IPA using
the Unicode IPA extensions.

I also dove into the Wikipedia code and patched OutputPage.php to
support <IPA> </IPA> tags that surround SAMPA and output it as <SPAN
class="IPA"> </SPAN>, with the Unicode IPA HTML entities inside the SPAN
tag. Finally, I patched style/wikistandard.css to have a .IPA style that
explicitly sets the font-family to a list of fonts that are known to
contain the IPA Unicode extensions. This is necessary because some
broswers (namely Windows IE) don't display IPA Unicode characters even
if they're installed unless the currently active font has those characters.

I envision the use of <IPA> tags on Wikipedia to be fairly limited, in
that IPA/SAMPA will only appear on pages discussing pronunciations, but
I think it will make a good starting point, perhaps, for representing
pronunciations on Wiktionary.

I can attach the diffs for OutputPage.php and style/wikistandard.css to
a future message (if I can ever get the sourceforge cvs server to
respond), but what should I do with my .lex file and Makefile for
building the parser? Should I post them too? I would guess most list
readers would not be pleased by my spamming them with such tediums. I
understand the hesitation developers have to handing out CVS access to
people whose code they have never seen, so email me privately if you
want me to send you what I've done.

Thanks!

- David [[User:Nohat]]

Note: for most purposes, X-SAMPA is backwards compatible with SAMPA for
various languages, but the Lex analyzer can be modified to support
something like <IPA lang="French"> or something like that for the
language-specific SAMPA encodings, if that is deemed desirable.


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

body:
I'm agree with you, we really need more pictures on all wikipedias, under GNU FDL of course :)

[[Shaihulud]] on fr.wiki

>-----Message d'origine-----
>De : Tim Starling [mailto:ts4294967296 at hotmail.com]
>Envoy? : lundi 13 octobre 2003 04:38
>? : wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>Objet : [Wikipedia-l] Re: Paid adminstrator (Money.. Mark)
>
>
>I think we should pay photographers and illustrators. It's very
>necessary, and uncontroversial.
>
>-- Tim Starling.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Tim wrote:
> >Perhaps our money would be better spent on
> >increasing the size of the development team,
> >rather than paying hard-core wikipediholics
> >like myself for work that we would have done
> >anyway.
>
> Hear, hear!

It's very important to remember, too, just *who* is to do the paying.
Looking over the list of contributions, I recognize *almost* every
name on the list.  That is to say, we're giving the money *ourselves*.

Sort of hard to pay hard-core wikipediholics from a fund that is
almost entirely created by wikipediholics.  :-)

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

body:
Delirium wrote:
> How is the notion of paying academics for their knowledge more
> anti-wiki than the notion of paying coders for their skills?

Speaking only for myself, and others may have a different perspective,
I agree with you.  But there are tasks that are not like writing
articles or coding.

Jason works for me.  When he drives to the colocation facility in San
Diego, and works all day on hardware upgrades, spending the night if
necessary, he gets paid to do that.  I wouldn't expect people to
really volunteer for that duty, and it is *especially* hard to imagine
people volunteering to do that and doing it "on demand".

Jason didn't have to "take off work" today to drive to San Diego to
help us out, because helping us out *is* his work.  It's free to
Wikipedia, of course, because I pay for it, but someday in the distant
future it is possible that I will ask Wikipedia to self-fund in one
way or another.

It has often been proposed, and I have repeated it myself sometimes,
that we need to hire a database guru to study our software and find
ways to optimize our database.  Well, even though many people have
said that and even though I have repeated it, I'm actually very
skeptical that it's necessary?

Are we telling ourselves that in the entire universe of free software,
with thousands and thousands of top-level experts available, we can't
find a handful of people from Debian or the mysql development team or
whatever to come and do this for us?  That's hard to imagine?

And I actually have concerns that some buzz about hiring people might
actually *inhibit* them from volunteering.  It's only natural -- if
someone might hire me for $X for Y hours of work, I might not be as
inclined to spend my spare nights and weekends doing the same thing
for free.

--Jimbo


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Maveric149 wrote:

>LittleDan wrote:

>>That's  bit broad, don't you think? Wikipedians are
>>allowed to have opinions. I see no reason why
>>usernames should be NPOV. I think this would be a
>>serious violation of freedom of speech.

>Sorry to burst your bubble but we ain't a fee speech forum. We have that pesky
>little NPOV policy to follow so we can't just write whatever we want in any
>way we want (sic free speech).

Very true; our NPOV policy, part of our foundation, is extremely important.

>Similarly, we cannot choose any username that
>suits our fancy - other people have to view it in page histories and on RC,
>so if the community doesn't like it then it must change.

What do you mean "similarly"?  This is a very different matter!
If the Wikipedia "consensus" starts forcing its opinions
on individual persons too much, then I for one will be leaving.
(Luckily it doesn't do this very much at all.)

I'm ashamed to see "if the community doesn't like it then it must change"
coming from such a respected member of the community --
it is the death knell of a community of individuals.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Username changed

body:
Maveric149 wrote:

>Eclecticology wrote:

>>What's become an even more peculiar turn in this saga
>>is that in some medieval views using God's name
>>backwards was a certain sign of being in league with
>>the devil.  Are we to believe that his true colours are
>>those of a Satanist? :-D

>ROTFL! :-) You should mention that to them and see if it provokes another name
>change request.

Considering the way that Drolsi took some of this as a personal insult,
I think that it would be wise not to imply, even as a joke,
that you honestly think that he would want to do this for that reason.
(You don't /really/ think of Drolsi as medieval, do you?)

-- Toby


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
I wish there were a more eloquent way to put this, I'm
sorry about User:Non-liberals are stupid. At the time,
I didn't realise it was trolling. I didn't mean to
waste your time.
LDan

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Non-liberals are stupid

body:
LittleDan wrote:

>You still haven't addressed my concern that this sets
>a dangerous precedent of banning someone while a
>discussion of whether or not to ban them was still
>going on. This wasn't even for vandalism or trolling,
>just for having an objectionable username.

I'm going to have to side with mav on this one, Dan.
You /were/ trolling -- trying to get a rise out of people.
And you succeeded in that, beyond your wildest dreams. ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Stevertigo wrote:

>everyone here knows what the word "inflammatory" means.

Yeah, /I/ know what it means?  Do you???

-- Toby


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<3F8A0FF5.9090703@hotmail.com> (Tim Starling's message of "Mon,
	13 Oct 2003 12:37:41 +1000")

body:
Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:

> I think we should pay photographers and illustrators. It's very
> necessary, and uncontroversial.

No, it's the same as with texts.  Buying such hardware for lending would
be okay.  It would also be okay to assemble a wipipedia library of
printed books for lending (maybe that's a minor issue since libraries
are still open to the public for free (or for a minimal fee) - at least
that's the case here in Germany.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
RickK wrote:

LittleDan wrote:

>>That's bit broad, don't you think? Wikipedians are
>>allowed to have opinions. I see no reason why
>>usernames should be NPOV. I think this would be a
>>serious violation of freedom of speech.

>Wikipedia is a privately-owned entity.  Although we treat it as a democracy
>(and even an anarchy), it is not a governmental agency, and you have no
>"right" to do anything.

It follows, of course, that we have no legal obligation
to give users freedom of speech in any of various ways.
This says nothing about whether that would be a good idea.
LittleDan is entirely correct to say that this violates freedom of speech.
As to whether the violation is serious, people may discuss that,
but the lack of a legal requirement for free speech isn't enough.
As Jimbo has said in another context, "Freedom works.",
and that's true even when it's /not/ legally required.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Maveric149 wrote:

>Changing a user name does not ban
>the user. Think of it as a dress code; the great majority of employers do not
>allow their employees to wear shirts expressing controversial opinions. Why?
>Because it is disruptive and creates divisiveness in the workplace.

No, it's because employers like to control their workers' lives in petty ways.
I think that we may have found the root of the Wikipedia "consensus"'s
recent authoritarian tendencies.

The employer says, "This is my business!  I own it!  You do what I say!"
The long-time Wikipedian says, "This is our encyclopaedia!  We own it!
You do what we say!"  (And given the "we", they pretend there's a consensus
when there isn't one, but only a majority.)

>LittleDan wrote:

>>and it's not like telling people "You have
>>to believe in Jesus, otherwise you're going
>>to go to hell".

>Funny, I get told that often by people who wear "Jesus is Lord!" t-shirts.

So you're judging JiL by these other people?
I would expect better of you, mav!
(Or if you aren't, then what was the relevance?)

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] User names

body:
Stevertigo wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>But I haven't been able to edit the talk page yet.
>>It may change further depending on JiL's responses
>>to attempts to convince him to choose a new name volunatarily;
>>but I haven't been able to read his responses yet.)

>What do his responses have to do with your opinion on
>the merits of the name?

Well, considering that it's /his/ name,
the things that he has to say about it
are going to have an impact on my opinion.
But what in the world makes you think
that the only issue here is whether I like the name?
If /that/ were the only basis for the vote,
then I'd have voted to keep it a long time ago,
and I wouldn't pay any attention to the arguments
that the name is offensive, or "inflammatory",
or "make[s] a statement".  'Cause I like the name.

>I would agree with those who
>caution that the issue should be separate from
>behaviour.  Tim pointed this particularly important
>bug out to me.

Tim pointed out -- quite rightly -- that it's irrelevant
whether JiL makes good edits to gay-related articles,
or whether he's an old problem user in disguise.
That's because we're setting precedent here, hence policy,
and this will apply to everybody, not just to old trolls.
But this doesn't mean -- in fact, quite the opposite --
that the related matters of /policy/ are irrelevant.
My attempt to talk to JiL directly -- which nobody else did! --
is an attempt to influence the precedent, hence the policy.

>Part of maintaining a consistent
>policy is abstaining from the sideissues -- Just vote
>on the merits of the name, dagummit thats it.

No, dagummit!!!  JiL's individual name isn't very important.
OTOH, whether it becomes acceptable Wikipedia practice
to greet new users (and the next JiL may be a new user)
with "You're going to have to change your name." is a big deal.
That is the sort of "sideissues" that I'm concerned with --
that is really the /only/ issue.

>The real problem issue I see is with the tacit
>deferment of action on these matters to developers--
>like Tim, who's mostly used his conversion script for
>non-inflammatory changes, and seems a little tender
>about just getting it over with.  This shouldnt be a
>big deal -- ideally we want people to agree to a
>change, but barring that, its a conflict between the
>consensus and the ego of one person.

What "consensus" are you talking about?
THERE IS NO CONSENSUS TO FORCE A NAME CHANGE!
(At least not when you wrote that; I'm not sure
how things stand now since Wikipedia is down.
And Drolsi accepted a voluntary change anyway,
so now I'm /really/ not sure how the page looks! ^_^)
It's not as if all of the past discussion
has been about whether or not to follow consensus;
it's about whether to force a name change or not.
What makes you think that you've convinced everybody already?

>Are sysops *not
>to enforce a nay vote on a username, always defering
>to a developer?  This puts developers in a bind,
>because in order for them to make a decision they seem
>to think they need to get involved.  They dont-- they
>just need to do the bidding of the community.

No, sysops are not to enforce a name change,
because we /can't/ -- that's a practical matter.
Maybe a good thing (since sysops like you often
see consensus when it isn't there), or a bad thing
(since Tim was feeling more pressure than he should),
but that's a fact of life, for now.

-- Toby


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

body:
> I do not know what you do for a living :-)
> But I feel equally troubled by this.
> There are quite a bunch of "professionals" among us,
> and it is certainly clear that being professionals do
> not prevent bias for example.
> So not only is it sort of putting again knowledge in
> the arms of academics, but also fooling us in the idea
> these academics are perfectly neutral.

And not to mention walking directly into the problem described by:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_standards_kick

-Fuzheado


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikitech-l] C++ wiki parser

body:
Magnus,

Thank you for your work on the offline parser. Whether it's in C or Java
doesn't matter too much too me, since I'd rather get involved in coding.
But I hope I can get a version that will run under Windoze (until I get
Linux running on my personal box).


subject: [WikiEN-l] People who bicker over name-changes are stupid

body:
See how I sneaked in a POV in the "subject heading", heh, heh?

And you guys thought that employing a username, so that it appears on
Recent Changes, was a clever way to advance one's POV... ^_^

Why don't we all chill out and read a good, funny joke!

See:
http://www.unitedmedia.com/creators/onebighappy/archive/images/onebighap
py2003101104552.gif

Uncle Ed


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: New mailing lists: mediawiki-l, wikilegal-l

body:
On Monday, Oct 13, 2003, at 10:21 US/Pacific, Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

> Will these be available via news.gmane.org?

If the person who set up the others will do it.

gmane.org is not 'officially supported' and may void your warranty. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)