from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
>Looks like Clutch is telling the honest truth, to me.  Sorry you feel
>offended by it.  Instead of erasing what he says, try to provide factual
>counter-views.

Nice tactic, except the burden of proof is on the people making outrageous
claims to provide support for those claims.  One encounters only a few
partisans and/or kooks before deciding they're not worth the trouble.

kq


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tucci

subject: [WikiEN-l] mailing list bug or something

body:
The latest digest claims to have five messages in it
when listed in my inbox, but when I open it there are
only three.  Since no one's talking about anything but
Chinese spam (sounds tasty), I'm not worried about
missing anything too important but I do wonder if
anybody else has ever seen this.

Tokerboy

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RDF feed of Wikipedia updates

body:
An RDF feed listing the last 10 non-minor updates to Wikipedia is
available at http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/feed-en.rdf (replace 'en' as
desired to get a feed for the other languages). Updated every half hour,
so it may miss things at busier times. ;)

Thanks to the magic of RDF, Kuro5hin.org users can now select a
Wikipedia headlines box in their display preferences.

Users of Ximian Evolution for e-mail can also put the feed into their
'Summary' page via Tools/Summary settings/News Feeds/Add news feed.

Suggestions for improvements and other uses are welcome at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDF_spool

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikitech-l] the problem with languages being separate from namespaces

body:
I have a goal for the design.  My goal is that, once a Wikilink is
exploded based on the ':' character, I can do simple database lookups,
and append the results together to get the target URL without having to
do any parsing on the data I looked up.

For instance, let us take a link Talk:foo

I can explode this into Talk and foo.

Each namespace has an "urlprefix".  For Talk, the urlprefix would
be http://www.wikipedia.org/Talk

Now, let's add a (separate) language into the mix.  en:Talk:foo

I can explode it into en, Talk, and foo.

Now, the urlprefix for Talk is the same.  How do I say that it is an
english language page?  The normal, standard way to do this would be
like so:

http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk/foo

That feels "right" to me.  But doing that would require parsing the
urlprefix for the namespace to figure out where to put in the language.
I don't want to do that, and don't feel I should have to.

If languages are namespaces it is easy: I can make the namespace en_Talk
have an urlprefix of http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk

However, Brion, you've made a convincing case that we do need to know
the language.  I have no problem having another field for each
namespace, giving that namespaces language to give to browsers.

Can you think of a better way to do this?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] the problem with languages being separate from
	namespaces

body:
On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 00:53, Jonathan Walther wrote:
[..]
> Now, the urlprefix for Talk is the same.  How do I say that it is an
> english language page?  The normal, standard way to do this would be
> like so:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk/foo

Hmm, I'm not a big fan of the slashes between namespace and title;
Slashes imply a hierarchical path-like structure which certainly isn't
there for talk pages.

> That feels "right" to me.  But doing that would require parsing the
> urlprefix for the namespace to figure out where to put in the language.
> I don't want to do that, and don't feel I should have to.

If you must do it that way, keying the url prefix table on language
*and* namespace should do the trick.

> If languages are namespaces it is easy: I can make the namespace en_Talk
> have an urlprefix of http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk

It's unclear to me what it would entail to 'make the namespace en_Talk'.
The link syntax is [[Talk:Foo]] (if in the en language section) or
[[en:Talk:Foo]] (fully qualified or from another section), and you're
talking about a URL that is named differently. Is the 'en_' prefix just
a shorthand for squishing language and namespace into one database
field?

> However, Brion, you've made a convincing case that we do need to know
> the language.  I have no problem having another field for each
> namespace, giving that namespaces language to give to browsers.
>
> Can you think of a better way to do this?

How does your proposal mark namespaces by functionality? (ie, given a
talk page or user page in some language, how do I know it's a talk page
[and should be linked to a subject page] or a user page [and should be
linked to a contribs list], etc)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 01:39:17AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>It's unclear to me what it would entail to 'make the namespace en_Talk'.
>The link syntax is [[Talk:Foo]] (if in the en language section) or
>[[en:Talk:Foo]] (fully qualified or from another section), and you're
>talking about a URL that is named differently. Is the 'en_' prefix just
>a shorthand for squishing language and namespace into one database
>field?

To answer your question: yes.  But here is a question *I* should have
asked ages ago:  what constraints should be put on page titles?  None
whatsoever?  You may not like letting namespaces be separated with a
slash, but I believe most people do feel comfortable with the convention
of making the language go first, and be separated with a slash.

Also, is Talk:en:Foo valid?  I hope it isn't.

Can we abolish use of ':' in page titles so that it is totally reserved
for languages and namespaces?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 01:57, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 01:39:17AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> >It's unclear to me what it would entail to 'make the namespace en_Talk'.
> >The link syntax is [[Talk:Foo]] (if in the en language section) or
> >[[en:Talk:Foo]] (fully qualified or from another section), and you're
> >talking about a URL that is named differently. Is the 'en_' prefix just
> >a shorthand for squishing language and namespace into one database
> >field?
>
> To answer your question: yes.

Which raises the question of what purpose the tag serves? We still have
to distinguish languages and classes of namespaces, which means either
constantly parsing that tag into two pieces or constantly referencing a
namespace table with entries like:
  "en_Talk" -> "en", "Talk", NSCLASS_TALK

>  But here is a question *I* should have
> asked ages ago:  what constraints should be put on page titles?  None
> whatsoever?

At present the following characters are allowed in titles:
[-,.()' &;%!?_0-9A-Za-z\/:\x80-\xFF]

This means the following ASCII chars are _not_ allowed:
  \x00-\x1f (control codes, must not use)
  " double quote
  # hash
  $ dollar
  * ampersand
  + plus
  < less than
  = equals
  > greater than
  [ ] brackets (reserved for links, must not use)
  \ backslash
  ^ caret
  { } curly braces
  | pipe (reserved for links, must not use)
  ~ tilde

Some of these are illegal or special in URLs, but they can of course be
hex-encoded as high characters and ampersands are.

(And of course underscore and space are folded together; internally
underscore is used, and prefered in URLs; spaces are used for display
and preferred in text and wikilinks.)

>  You may not like letting namespaces be separated with a
> slash, but I believe most people do feel comfortable with the convention
> of making the language go first, and be separated with a slash.

Heck, I suggested that myself:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration

> Also, is Talk:en:Foo valid?  I hope it isn't.

It might pass the parser at the moment, but it probably shouldn't.

> Can we abolish use of ':' in page titles so that it is totally reserved
> for languages and namespaces?

We explicitly decided to enable it a few months ago because it's very
common in titles of works --
  [[Three Colors: Blue]]
  [[2001: A Space Odyssey]]
etc

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
"Told ya so" (during the User:Lir page episode). Clutch (Jonathan Walther)
enjoys trolling Wikipedia from time to time. He's quite persistent, too.  If
he keeps it up, we'll have to ban him.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia mailling lists to usenet

in_reply_to: <3DF278D2.40106@wikipedia.be>; from giskart@wikipedia.be on Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 11:40:18PM +0100

body:
I would recommend that they set us up read-only.

Giskart wrote:

> Because it is difficult to explain please read this;
>
>
> -------- Oorspronkelijke bericht --------
> From: admin AT gmane.org (Gmane Administrator)
> To: wikinl-l-admin AT wikipedia.org
> Subject: wikinl-l added to Gmane
> Organization: GNU Mail To News -- http://gmane.org/
> Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 13:19:35 +0100
>
> We have received a request for adding the wikinl-l AT wikipedia.org
> mailing list to the Gmane mail-to-news gateway/archive. A subscription
> request message has been sent. If this is contrary to your wishes,
> please send a mail to admin AT gmane.org saying so, and the list will be
> removed from Gmane.
>
> Gmane is a mail-to-news portal that never expires its messages.  It
> therefore also functions as a mailing list archive.  It's a
> bi-directional gateway, but Gmane verifies that its users' email
> addresses are valid before passing the messages through the
> news-to-mail gateway.  (Groups can also be made "read-only", which
> means that Gmane won't forward any messages at all to the mailing
> list.)
>
> Gmane can encrypt addresses to make address harvesting difficult, and
> heeds X-No-Archive and related headers.
>
> If you wish to import older archives into Gmane, send a message to
> the Gmane administrators -- just reply to this message.
>
> The following parameters are set for this mailing list:
>
>      * Newsgroup name: gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands
>      * Mailing list address: wikinl-l AT wikipedia.org
>      * The gateway is bi-directional    * Address encryption is on
>      * Spam detection is on
>      * The list is described as:
>        "The mailing list of the Dutch language Wikipedia, a
> collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in
> every language."
>      * News URL:
> news://news.gmane.org/gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands
>      * Web URL:
> http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands
>
> This newsgroup will be created when the first message from the
> mailing list arrives.
>
> For more information about the Gmane project, go to
> <URL: http://gmane.org/>.
>
> This request was handled by
> Tom Koelman <tkoelman AT xs4all.nl>.
> ____________________________________________
>
> I have done some testing and it seems to work very well.
> What do you think about to add all wikipedia lists to Gmane.org?
> So you can read the lists like the where newsgroups.
>
> It does not change anything to the mailings lists, the Usenet interface
> is a extra way of using the lists, that is all. Nobody can send a
> message to the list if the are not subscribed.
>
> Because there is email verfication spam will not cause the list
> administrator to receive a message about "As list administrator, your
> authorization is requested" like i now receive a lot every day.
>
> By the way, is there not possibility to blacklist some addresses to be
> send directly to dev/null?
> I receive a lot of spam from the same email adress to the lists. I
> always report it to spamcop but i keeps coming. It gives a lot of work.
>
> And the auto replay to the sender to inform the spammer that his message
> is hold for approval gives a lot a bounce and then i receive a message
> to inform my that the email adress of the spammer is invalid.
> (=again;"As list administrator, your authorization is requested")
>
> Giskart
>
>
>
>
> --
> Info: http://wikitech.wikipedia.be


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Looks like Clutch is telling the honest truth, to me.  Sorry you
> feel offended by it.  Instead of erasing what he says, try to
> provide factual counter-views.

Jonathan, are you Clutch?  If so, please don't refer to yourself in
the third person, as it makes conversation tedious.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> "Told ya so" (during the User:Lir page episode). Clutch (Jonathan Walther)
> enjoys trolling Wikipedia from time to time. He's quite persistent, too.  If
> he keeps it up, we'll have to ban him.

*sigh* I tend to agree with you.

Disputes over NPOV are not unusual and not, generally, problematic.
But I do hate to see someone on a rant who clearly has no intention of
accomodating other people's views in the least.

Clutch, notice that "It's true" is not usually a defense against a
charge of POV.  I could write, on a page about North Korea, that it is
led by muderous tyrants with no right to exist, much less right to
nuclear weapons.  Well, that's true.  But it is still not NPOV.

--Jimbo


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 03:53, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I have a goal for the design.  My goal is that, once a Wikilink is
> exploded based on the ':' character, I can do simple database lookups,
> and append the results together to get the target URL without having to
> do any parsing on the data I looked up.
>
> For instance, let us take a link Talk:foo
>
> I can explode this into Talk and foo.
>
> Each namespace has an "urlprefix".  For Talk, the urlprefix would
> be http://www.wikipedia.org/Talk
>
> Now, let's add a (separate) language into the mix.  en:Talk:foo
>
> I can explode it into en, Talk, and foo.
>
> Now, the urlprefix for Talk is the same.  How do I say that it is an
> english language page?  The normal, standard way to do this would be
> like so:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk/foo
>
> That feels "right" to me.  But doing that would require parsing the
> urlprefix for the namespace to figure out where to put in the language.
> I don't want to do that, and don't feel I should have to.

You're also making the slash back into a magic character, which was part
of the whole problem. If someone creates a page named [[Talk/Listen]]
for some reason (say a film comes out with that title), then your scheme
would cause a collision.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 04:05:53AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Disputes over NPOV are not unusual and not, generally, problematic.
>But I do hate to see someone on a rant who clearly has no intention of
>accomodating other people's views in the least.
>
>Clutch, notice that "It's true" is not usually a defense against a
>charge of POV.  I could write, on a page about North Korea, that it is
>led by muderous tyrants with no right to exist, much less right to
>nuclear weapons.  Well, that's true.  But it is still not NPOV.

I wasn't obstructing NPOV, but I was obstructing peoples attempts to
make sure that the POV shared by myself and countless others was
eliminated from the article.

In other words, there was no lack of accomodation, just protest that
people tried to eliminate what I wrote entirely.  If you look at the
beginning of the edit war, someone summarily reverted my addition to the
article, instead of incorporation my information.  When, later on,
someone did incorporate my information, I worked forward from that.

If warnings are in order, I think they should be directed at those who
want to silence any view other than their own.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I wasn't obstructing NPOV, but I was obstructing peoples attempts to
> make sure that the POV shared by myself and countless others was
> eliminated from the article.

This discussion should probably proceed primarily on the Talk page for
the article.

However, it's worth noting that you wrote "Social workers are the foot
soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers that governments and big
businesses hire to keep people under control."

This is a controversial view, and therefore under NPOV, should have
been attributed to someone, as well as worded in a less contentious
fashion.  Absent attribution, it was perfectly appropriate for people
to simply delete it.  The Wikipdia itself should make no controversial
claims.

> In other words, there was no lack of accomodation, just protest that
> people tried to eliminate what I wrote entirely.  If you look at the
> beginning of the edit war, someone summarily reverted my addition to the
> article, instead of incorporation my information.

They were right to do so.  If you write non-NPOV material, it can and
should be deleted on the spot.  If someone happens to feel that they
can adapt it to be NPOV, that's fine, too.  But it is poor judgment to
add clearly non-NPOV material and demand that others clean it up.

> If warnings are in order, I think they should be directed at those who
> want to silence any view other than their own.

Well, when I see anyone like that, I'll warn them.  But that's not what
happened here.

NPOV is a virtue for all of us.  The process is not to post competing
viewpoints.  One test of good Wikipedia writing is that other readers
can not guess what your POV is from what you have written.

Our process should not be a competitive process of posting POV claims
and daring others to fix them.  Our process should be that *each of us*
works to present NPOV discussions of all views.

--Jimbo


body:
Well, uh, we can just say "no" to them, then.

Personally, I assume that anything I write to any mailing list is
likely to be archived permanently in places that are out of my
control.  So long as my mailings are not dishonestly altered, I don't
care.  Why should I care?

I have no idea if our software respects or passes along no-archiving
headers.  We're using standard open source software, so if there's a
standard for this, it probably works just fine.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 05:45:02AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>This discussion should probably proceed primarily on the Talk page for
>the article.
>
>However, it's worth noting that you wrote "Social workers are the foot
>soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers that governments and big
>businesses hire to keep the masses under control."

I have a valid and extensive historical basis for saying that, from the
history of Margaret Sanger, to the old English "work houses" and
religious charities like the Salvation Army, on to the modern behavior
of welfare workers in intruding on peoples privacy and human dignity as
a precondition to providing them with the necessities of life.  I could
go on for quite a while on the topic, showing all the evidence for that
view.  I see now that my view is not widely shared by the relatively
affluent contributors to the Wikipedia; and now that I think about it,
it is understandable given their lack of background.

To people with sufficient background, the above quote is not a
controversial statement.  I need to make clear that I wrote what I did
in good faith.  My intent wasn't to spark debate and make other people
do all the hard work by writing something egregiously POV.

>to simply delete it.  The Wikipdia itself should make no controversial
>claims.

People turn to encyclopedias for facts.  Once a fact is established, it
should present it, even if the Joe Sixpack may find the fact startling,
or contrary to what he expects.  Naturally in such cases we should give
enough detail so a person can verify these facts for themselves.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 09:33:05AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>We can't abolish the colon, because then [[Magic: the Gathering]]
>couldn't have a properly name article.

Can we have an EBNF grammar for a Wiki link then, that includes
namespaces, languages, and external Wikis?  How do you handle a language
specifier for an external Wiki?  Ignore it?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:02:59AM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>That's why Jimbo and Larry created NPOV, and that's the sheer genius of
>it -- which I'm sure a talented guy like you can understand and
>appreciate.

One way to state the NPOV policy is that it encourages people to use a
Hegelian dialectic.  I wish the NPOV policy could just say "Use the
Hegelian dialectic".  That whole thing about "neutrality" is delicate
and confusing otherwise.

>Later today, I'm going to take a look at the pages in question. I hope
>that by then you have gotten out of the warrior mind-set and have
>accepted Jimbo's NPOV policy.

I haven't edited those articles for some hours; the uproar was
exhausting, and my sources will take a while to gather.  I know what I
know, but tracking down all the sources that form my gestalt is a lot of
work!

>Because a "clutchless" Wikipedia won't get us to our destination any
>faster then standard transmission (of facts). Get it? ;-)

*groan*  I never thought my handle contained so many puns.  Keep 'em
coming!

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On 12/9/02 7:05 AM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> "Told ya so" (during the User:Lir page episode). Clutch (Jonathan Walther)
>> enjoys trolling Wikipedia from time to time. He's quite persistent, too.  If
>> he keeps it up, we'll have to ban him.
>
> *sigh* I tend to agree with you.
>
> Disputes over NPOV are not unusual and not, generally, problematic.
> But I do hate to see someone on a rant who clearly has no intention of
> accomodating other people's views in the least.
>
> Clutch, notice that "It's true" is not usually a defense against a
> charge of POV.  I could write, on a page about North Korea, that it is
> led by muderous tyrants with no right to exist, much less right to
> nuclear weapons.  Well, that's true.  But it is still not NPOV.
>
The "murderous tyrants" bit is NPOV, but it would require some backing up.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 03:40:20PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>Jason Williams wrote:
>
>>
>>Consensus and niceness are good things, but contention and
>>argument drive the wheel faster and produce more comprehensive
>>results.
>>
>>
>>
>You've been watching too much Babylon 5.
>I'm with the Vorlons -- conflict may promote growth, but it's not a
>healthy way to do so.
>
>The social workers I have encountered have been idiots, not pathological
>liars. I've found it's the structure they work within (and their
>pen-pusher mentality which means they can *never* look outside of it)
>which has caused me problems in the past.
>If we want to criticize social workers, we need evidence, like specific
>cases -- and we also need to present the wider picture.

Here is one specific "case"... it's a small and trivial one as far as
these things go, but telling.  It is my most recent experience; my
earlier, more horrific experiences aren't described on this page because
it would take too much time to write up.

    http://reactor-core.org/~djw/diary-arc/20021129072842.html

Want to hear the case of how a social worker in the state of Oregon aided
and abetted a pedophile porn ring run by one of the state approved foster
parents, and got away with it for more than 5 years?  The step-mom of
one of the victims, a 6 year old girl, write up her experience.

    http://reactor-core.org/security/weidner-method.html

Then there are all the personal anecdotes.  When you are poor, you tend
to hang out with other poor people.  And we talk to each other.  And
everyone has stories about themselves, or about family members, friends,
or coworkers who have been jerked around and abused by social workers.

One such personal story: friend of mine was told by the social workers
that if he and the wife wanted a night or a weekend off, there was a
sort of transition house where they could leave the kids to be baby-sat
for a while.  He decided to try it out one weekend.  That night the
house called him and told him to bring his son home.  It turned out that
a 9 year old girl with Downs syndrome had sexually molested this 4 year
old boy, and he was "acting up" as a response.  But noone at the house
would listen to the boy, nor did the social worker take any action on
the matter.

And theres plenty more where that came from.  Shall I continue?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 03:40:20PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>Jason Williams wrote:
>
>>
>>Consensus and niceness are good things, but contention and
>>argument drive the wheel faster and produce more comprehensive
>>results.
>>
>>
>>
>You've been watching too much Babylon 5.
>I'm with the Vorlons -- conflict may promote growth, but it's not a
>healthy way to do so.
>
>The social workers I have encountered have been idiots, not pathological
>liars. I've found it's the structure they work within (and their
>pen-pusher mentality which means they can *never* look outside of it)
>which has caused me problems in the past.
>If we want to criticize social workers, we need evidence, like specific
>cases -- and we also need to present the wider picture.

Here is one specific "case"... it's a small and trivial one as far as
these things go, but telling.  It is my most recent experience; my
earlier, more horrific experiences aren't described on this page because
it would take too much time to write up.

    http://reactor-core.org/~djw/diary-arc/20021129072842.html

Want to hear the case of how a social worker in the state of Oregon aided
and abetted a pedophile porn ring run by one of the state approved foster
parents, and got away with it for more than 5 years?  The step-mom of
one of the victims, a 6 year old girl, write up her experience.

    http://reactor-core.org/security/weidner-method.html

Then there are all the personal anecdotes.  When you are poor, you tend
to hang out with other poor people.  And we talk to each other.  And
everyone has stories about themselves, or about family members, friends,
or coworkers who have been jerked around and abused by social workers.

One such personal story: friend of mine was told by the social workers
that if he and the wife wanted a night or a weekend off, there was a
sort of transition house where they could leave the kids to be baby-sat
for a while.  He decided to try it out one weekend.  That night the
house called him and told him to bring his son home.  It turned out that
a 9 year old girl with Downs syndrome had sexually molested this 4 year
old boy, and he was "acting up" as a response.  But noone at the house
would listen to the boy, nor did the social worker take any action on
the matter.

And theres plenty more where that came from.  Shall I continue?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 08:13:24AM -0800, Larry Sanger wrote:
>more credible by actually presenting an argument that we all ought to
>understand "neutral" to mean whatever you think it does mean (your views
>on this are none too clear to me; as best I can make out, you think it

I think we could do with a good definition of what "neutral" means.  If
it means not supporting one view over the other, and giving all views
equal time, that can be a can of worms.  If neutral means "not making
moral judgements about things", thats something I think we can all agree
on as being neutral.

>I tend to disagree.  I don't think we should encourage anyone in this
>regard.  Give an inch, and they'll gladly take a mile.  It's just far too
>convenient as an excuse: "Oh, I know there was a little bias there, but I
>was trying to provoke a debate."  How conveeeeenient.

That approach does encourage laziness.  But sometimes it is so
exhausting to defend an NPOV edit against partisans that it is tempting
to put in bias, so the opposite side will be more inclined to meet
somewhere in the middle.

Take the current article on fluorine for instance.  It took no end of
effort to get the statements about fluoride out of the fluorine article
where they didn't belong; some folks insisted on linking fluoride with
dental health in the fluorine article, without any of the important
context that the fluoride article provides about the health risks of
fluoride.

The policy about "not deleting any information" really needs to be
revisited.  I recommend rephrasing it as "don't delete any RELEVANT
information".  This is an encyclopedia after all.  Have we lost our
roots?  Remember Denis Diderot.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Larry Sanger

body:
> From: The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>
>
> On 12/9/02 7:05 AM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>
> > Clutch, notice that "It's true" is not usually a defense against a
> > charge of POV.  I could write, on a page about North Korea, that it is
> > led by muderous tyrants with no right to exist, much less right to
> > nuclear weapons.  Well, that's true.  But it is still not NPOV.
> >
> The "murderous tyrants" bit is NPOV, but it would require some backing up.

No, Cunctator, Jimbo was absolutely right.  This is important, and it's
quite simple: the fact that, surely, some North Koreans and other
communists around the world would disagree with that characterization
means that it cannot simply be asserted like that without attribution and
with a fair statement of contrary views.  No amount of "backing up" would
render it **NEUTRAL**; it would merely render it well-backed-up, which is
quite a different thing from neutrality.  Cunc, "neutrality" does not mean
whatever you want it to mean.  In particular, it doesn't mean "true claims
backed up by evidence."  It's rather more complicated than that, as the
[[neutral point of view]] article makes clear.

Now, if you disagree with this, and you want to continue unsubtly plugging
for a change of our neutrality policy, you would make your position much
more credible by actually presenting an argument that we all ought to
understand "neutral" to mean whatever you think it does mean (your views
on this are none too clear to me; as best I can make out, you think it
means "supported by evidence," which is clearly a non-starter, so I'll do
you the favor of not actually attributing that view to you).

> From: Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org>
>
> I wasn't obstructing NPOV, but I was obstructing peoples attempts to
> make sure that the POV shared by myself and countless others was
> eliminated from the article.

See [[neutral point of view]], the section headed "A consequence: writing
for the enemy."  In your efforts to make an article balanced, it is
completely wrongheaded to tip the scales in the direction of your own
views and then expect others to correct the problem.  That entails
creating a bias situation precisely analogous to the one you reacted to in
the first place.

Others can be expected to remove small bits of bias here and there; but
they certainly cannot be expected to spend very significant amounts of
time copyediting partisan screed.

> If warnings are in order, I think they should be directed at those who
> want to silence any view other than their own.

That was plainly not what was happening, however.  Deleting a bunch of
sentences that were basically just a partisan screed, that could not
easily and straightforwardly be shaped into something fair and attributed
--and most importantly, that the author could very well have made
unbiased--is perfectly acceptable.  We've been doing it for a long time.

> From: Jason Williams <jason at jasonandali.org.uk>
> On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 05:45:02AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote: > Our
> process should not be a competitive process of posting POV claims >
> and daring others to fix them.
>
> I'm not so sure this is a good general rule. Probably if used in too
> many cases or taken to extremes then it is a bad thing, but used
> sensibly it can be a good thing in my opinion.

I tend to disagree.  I don't think we should encourage anyone in this
regard.  Give an inch, and they'll gladly take a mile.  It's just far too
convenient as an excuse: "Oh, I know there was a little bias there, but I
was trying to provoke a debate."  How conveeeeenient.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 11:28:38AM -0500, Mark Wojtowicz wrote:
>Andre Engels scribed:
>
>>> At present the following characters are allowed in titles:
>>> [-,.()' &;%!?_0-9A-Za-z\/:\x80-\xFF]

If ? is in that list, how can we support the following?

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo?lang=en
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo?lang=en&action=edit

How do we know that the title of the page is not foo?lang=en
instead of being "foo", and having the argument lang=en applied to it?

I really don't like the ':' separator in the URL section for namespaces,
because it shows up as a hex encoded string, instead of ':' in my urlbar.

Can we find some other syntax (not necessarily syntax within the [[]])
for accessing pages and specifying their namespace in the URL?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> One way to state the NPOV policy is that it encourages people to use a
> Hegelian dialectic.  I wish the NPOV policy could just say "Use the
> Hegelian dialectic".  That whole thing about "neutrality" is delicate
> and confusing otherwise.

It really isn't that confusing if you actually read what we wrote about
it.  It's a heck of a lot less confusing than goddamned Hegel.  :-)

If you read the "write for the enemy" section you will see that the
current document actually specifically repudiates using anything like a
"Hegelian dialectic."  (I take it Jonathan means that we ought first to
make the text biased in one direction, then biased in the opposite
direction, and then someone like me or Ed should come in and find common
ground.)  That's not really how we've worked, and I think it's a grand
thing we haven't, too--because we don't have enough "synthesizers" and
far, far too many partisans who would be (and, when they can get away with
it, *are*) only too happy to use Wikipedia to advance their personal
causes, at least until the next step in the dialectic came along.  ;-)

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: Facts (was re: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade)

body:
"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> writes:

> Please try to understand the difference between objective fact and
> neutrality. For example, that North Korea, Cuba, and the Soviet Union
> were ruled by murderous tyrants is IMHO a "fact". Incredible as it may
> seem, there are some contributors who dispute this fact. So, we are
> forced by *our own policy* to step back from asserting "the truth" and
> humbly stating that "According to sources X, Y and Z these lands were
> ruled, etc."

EIian replied:
> No.
> That they have killed xy-thousand people may be a fact.
> That they have suppressed political opposition by censure etc. may be a
> fact.
> That they were "murderous tyrants" is a moral judgement.

Elian is much closer to the truth, but he still doesn't have it exactly
right.  If the North Koreans officially deny having N people, then it
isn't a fact; it's an opinion, regardless of the fact that everyone *else*
in the world has that opinion.  This is why we'd write, "South Korea and
Western sources claim that the Kim Jong-Il regime have killed N political
dissidents; the North Korean and Chinese government officially disagree
with it."  (I'm not claiming such things have been said by these parties,
I'm just going with the example.)

The relevant section of [[Wikipedia:neutral point of view]]

	http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV

is headed "Alternative formulation of the policy: assert facts, including
facts about opinions--but don't assert opinions themselves."

Moreover, it's not the fact that "murderous tyrants" is a *moral judgment*
that makes it not a fact.  According to the operational definition of
"fact," if everyone is united in making a particular moral judgment
(e.g., I hope, bayonnetting innocent babies for kicks is bad), then the
contents of that judgment is a fact, and we might as well simply declare
it to be such.  Of course, it's entirely possible that we couldn't ever
come up with a moral judgment that we (humans) could all agree upon.
Maybe amoralists like Ohio State professor Richard Garner are a standing
rebuke to the suggestion.  But even in that case, it still wouldn't be the
fact that it's a moral judgment that makes it biased; it's the fact that
other people disagree with it that makes it biased (non-neutral).

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [WikiEN-l] Neutrality (was Re: Clutch is on a POV tirade)

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> I think we could do with a good definition of what "neutral" means.
> If it means not supporting one view over the other, and giving all
> views equal time, that can be a can of worms.  If neutral means "not
> making moral judgements about things", thats something I think we can
> all agree on as being neutral.

The can has long since been opened, and the definition is posted and
begging to be read, at:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_point_of_view

I would have thought you would have had the good sense to know this and to
have read it a few times before boldly engaging in this debate as you
have.  Before you go on more about this can of worms, I'd encourage you to
read it, as well as the copious discussion of it linked at the bottom of
the page.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 06:04:58PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>Removing the : from the wikipedia system would not only mean all
>wikipedians having to learn new syntax, but also to move and redirect a
>zillion entries, not to speak of fixing these links on countless pages.
>
>And even if we just make some "URL wrapper" for namespaces, I don't see
>the advantage. If you want to unite all language databases in a single
>one, why change the syntax? Just add an extra field to the table.
>"en:talk:stuff" will do just fine IMHO.

1) I want to see some sort of specification of what is allowed for
language names, and namespace names.

2) I want to see how languages, namespaces, and article titles are
supposed to map onto URI's that are NOT ambiguous.

3) Maybe I wasn't clear enough; the Wiki syntax wouldn't change; what I
want is a way to map all links onto an URL without ambiguity.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 12:22:46PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>1 - social worker -- employee of government agency, working under a
>budget and administering policies in the context of individuals having
>some kind of problem (sometimes with the government)

This is a social worker.

>2 - social worker -- employee of private social services agency
>working with individuals having some kind of problem

These used to be called social workers, but with the passing of the work
house, no longer are.

>3 - social worker -- employed by private agency providing
>psychotherapeutic support, often with problem solving included

Nor are these.

>4 -- social worker -- self-employed, providing psychotherapeutic
>support under health insurance, often with problem solving included.

Same.  Often this would be called a "Community health support worker",
"Community health nurse", or similar.  Not a social worker.

>All have weighty responsibilities, which means all have some
>opportunity/danger of doing harm.

When one human being gains power over another, there will be abuses and
resentment.  Nanny fascism is still fascism.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
Larry,

I agree with you 100% on the naming issue for the [[Ireland]] and
[[China]] articles. I'd like to provide two more examples for additional
perspective.

Korea is, and Germany was, a divided country. In common speech, that is,
when English-speaking people who are NOT writing encyclopedia articles
are just talking about life among themselves, the following is how I've
heard them use the words 'Korea' and 'Germany'. (Note that the same goes
for writing.)

"Where are you from?" "Korea." (this means 'South Korea', because as
everyone knows, North Korea's travel restrictions are so severe that it
is exceedingly rare for a North Korean to travel to the West or even
communicate with a Westerner.)

"Hey, Joe, where were you stationed in the army?" "Germany." (until
1990, this meant 'West Germany', of course).

"Where would you like to travel, Mr. Tourist?" "I was thinking of
visiting Korea." "Oh, fine, we have excursions to Seoul and Pusan." (The
travel agent doesn't have to mention that there are no flights to
Pyongyang.)

"Korea was a staunch ally of the US during the Vietnam war." (This means
'South Korea', because it's fairly well known that North Korea stayed
out of that war.)

Now we have four cases of divided lands. When speaking of the political
units, we will have to mention the status quo -- regardless of how we
individual writers FEEL ABOUT such divisions.

Ireland has a southern, independent republic; and a northern part linked
to (or dominated by) the British and thus formally part of the "United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island". But the island of Ireland
is filled with Irish people, and it has two distinct political
divisions, like it or not.

China is divided into two political units: PRC (the mainland) and ROC
(Taiwan, the "Republic of China"). Regardless of diplomatic niceties
about the so-called one-China party, there are *de facto* two distinct
political units.

Germany used to be divided into West Germany and East Germany, and so
was Berlin. There's not much controversy here.

Korea is still divided into North Korea (DPRK) and South Korea (ROK).

Please allow me to suggest one editorial policy that fits all four
cases.
* [[China]] => all of China, with links to [[PRC]] and [[ROC]]
governments
* [[Ireland]] => the entire emerald isle, with links to [[Republic of
Ireland]] and [[Northern Ireland]] governments
* [[Germany]] => the country, with links to (1) West Germany (defunct),
(2) East Germany (defunct) and (3) whatever the heck the current
government is calling itself.
* [[Korea]] => the entire peninsula, with links to [[North Korea]] and
[[South Korea]].

Most countries are not divided, so the main referent of [[this country]]
needn't be strictly distinguished from the current government. For
divided lands, however, the existence of divisions MUST NOT be hidden.
Regardless of Wikipedians' opinions or wishes for the resolution of the
various political conflicts, our job is describe what is there.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan,

Are you and Clutch the same person? If so, please stop referring to
yourself in the third person. It makes me dizzy :-).

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com [mailto:koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2002 9:29 PM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: Re: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

Jonathan Walther wrote:
>Looks like Clutch is telling the honest truth, to me.  Sorry you feel
>offended by it.  Instead of erasing what he says, try to provide
>factual counter-views.

Nice tactic, except the burden of proof is on the people making
outrageous
claims to provide support for those claims.  One encounters only a few
partisans and/or kooks before deciding they're not worth the trouble.

kq

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


body:
We can't abolish the colon, because then [[Magic: the Gathering]]
couldn't have a properly name article.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Google PageRank of 8/10?!

body:
I just noticed that http://www.wikipedia.org has a Google PageRank of 8.
Hard to believe, but apparently so--so we skipped from a 6 to an 8.  Wow!
Nupedia is a 7 now, too.

There's also now an open content encyclopedia directory, and Wikipedia is
at the top of it:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Open_Source/Open_Content/Encyclopedias/

Sorry if this is not news, but if it is, let's update the announcements
page.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 05:42:01PM +0000, tarquin wrote:
>I'll tell you the long saga of me versus my local social services one
>day. It will take a large number of beers (and ideally some
>shadow-puppets for the action scenes!)
>but it boils down to said social workers repeatedly quoting regulations
>at me, despite my pointing out that they didn't apply to particular case
>in question; and then them being unable to actually tell me which person
>or body was responsible for the regulations' existence, and which person
>or body had the power to overrule it -- since they seemd to timid to do so.
>it took about 2 years for the whole thing to be sorted out.

I have experience trying to take things up the chain of command.  It
always boils down to "This or that act that was passed as legislation
ordains that it shall be thus, and gives us no flexibility to act
otherwise".  And good luck getting your elected representative to help;
that often makes it worse.  Lower level flunkies poison the ear of the
head minister (an elected official, who is appointed) if you try to talk
to him, and don't let you talk to him in the end anyway.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 09:59:47AM -0800, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>Please do.  Tell us how the cops in LA and New York are generally
>corrupt murdering thugs (arguably true), and so therefore every cop
>everywhere is corrupt (not true).

Now you are getting into straw man territory, because I never made any
statements about "all" social workers or about "every" social worker.
What are you trying to do here?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
Ray (Eclecticology) wrote:

"The official name for any country is the long form..."

Sorry, but I stopped reading at that point.

I think what he meant (or should have said) is the following, which is
subtly yet crucially different:

>>> The official name for any *government* is the long form.

China, whether it's "really" one country or not, currently has two
sovereign political divisions: PRC and ROC. If one division claims
jurisdiction over the other, we should mention that in the article. But
we should absolutely not respect one side's claims over the other. We
must remain neutral, even if "everyone knows" that the only legitimate
government of all of China is X.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
If Clutch is causing problems, we should talk to everyone's favorite
geek, Jonathan, and ask him to regulate the actions of his alter ego!
;-)

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 12:48:09PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>You seem to be saying that only the ones you hate are social workers,
>what you call the "nanny state" (a dead giveaway of POV) and I call
>the "cruel orphan warden" hypothesis (smarty-pants version of same),
>and all the others are something else.  But, at least in the states,
>they all go to social work school and they all call themselves social
>worker and no amount of bluster will change it, although I grant the
>terminology may be different in Canada.

We could make a note of that then; when people talk about "social
workers" they are generally talking about implementors of government
social engineering policies and legislation, but the term itself has a
broader meaning in the United States.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Jason Richey

in_reply_to: <1039447094.1811.8.camel@chesoo.fokus.gmd.de>; from e.moeller@fokus.gmd.de on Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 04:18:14PM +0100

body:
We can also add a line in the subscription verification mail that
states that the posts are archived by gmane...  And perhaps send a
message to the list when archiving starts...

Jason

Erik Moeller wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 15:42, Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
> > Yes of course, as long as I'm aware of this when I post to the list.
> > The problem is that Gmane archives many lists, where I think the list
> > owner and most members don't know about it.
>
> Given the craziness of a concept like copyright in the modern
> information age, the only reasonable approach is often to ignore it
> until problems arise. If specific list owners have problems with gmane,
> they will certainly complain.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> --
> FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
> Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
>
> ______________________________________
> About this list:
> http://wikitech.wikipedia.be

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan,

1. Engaging in an edit war is beneath your dignity. I thought, based on
our private correspondence, that you were above such things.

2. *sigh* Must I remind you that two wrongs don't make a right? Warnings
will be directed at ALL parties who are in the wrong; not just the other
edit warriors.

Please try to understand the difference between objective fact and
neutrality. For example, that North Korea, Cuba, and the Soviet Union
were ruled by murderous tyrants is IMHO a "fact". Incredible as it may
seem, there are some contributors who dispute this fact. So, we are
forced by *our own policy* to step back from asserting "the truth" and
humbly stating that "According to sources X, Y and Z these lands were
ruled, etc."

Likewise, you may have some crucially important information about social
workers in your clutches ;-) but for the sake of our neutrality policy
WE MUST say, e.g., "Source X says that social workers are trained this
way, and Source Y says that social workers aid kidnappers, etc."

You've got these nasty SW fiends by the short hairs, Jonathan. If you
want to give them what Robert Heinlean calls the Kansas City clutch, all
you have to do, Jonathan, is attribute your sources.

What's so hard about that?

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan writes:
>One such personal story: friend of mine was told by the social workers
>that if he and the wife wanted a night or a weekend off, there was a
>sort of transition house where they could leave the kids to be baby-sat
>for a while.  He decided to try it out one weekend.  That night the
>house called him and told him to bring his son home.  It turned out that
>a 9 year old girl with Downs syndrome had sexually molested this 4 year
>old boy, and he was "acting up" as a response.  But noone at the house
>would listen to the boy, nor did the social worker take any action on
>the matter.
>
>And theres plenty more where that came from.  Shall I continue?

Please do.  Tell us how the cops in LA and New York are generally
corrupt murdering thugs (arguably true), and so therefore every cop
everywhere is corrupt (not true).

kq


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan, you are right that people turn to an encyclopedia for facts.

However, when facts are in dispute, one new fact springs into being like
Venus emerging from the half-shell: to wit, that there is a dispute over
the facts! Well, duh!

That's why Jimbo and Larry created NPOV, and that's the sheer genius of
it -- which I'm sure a talented guy like you can understand and
appreciate.

Later today, I'm going to take a look at the pages in question. I hope
that by then you have gotten out of the warrior mind-set and have
accepted Jimbo's NPOV policy.

Because a "clutchless" Wikipedia won't get us to our destination any
faster then standard transmission (of facts). Get it? ;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Walther [mailto:krooger at debian.org]
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 9:24 AM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 05:45:02AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>This discussion should probably proceed primarily on the Talk page for
>the article.
>
>However, it's worth noting that you wrote "Social workers are the foot
>soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers that governments and big
>businesses hire to keep the masses under control."

I have a valid and extensive historical basis for saying that, from the
history of Margaret Sanger, to the old English "work houses" and
religious charities like the Salvation Army, on to the modern behavior
of welfare workers in intruding on peoples privacy and human dignity as
a precondition to providing them with the necessities of life.  I could
go on for quite a while on the topic, showing all the evidence for that
view.  I see now that my view is not widely shared by the relatively
affluent contributors to the Wikipedia; and now that I think about it,
it is understandable given their lack of background.

To people with sufficient background, the above quote is not a
controversial statement.  I need to make clear that I wrote what I did
in good faith.  My intent wasn't to spark debate and make other people
do all the hard work by writing something egregiously POV.

>to simply delete it.  The Wikipdia itself should make no controversial
>claims.

People turn to encyclopedias for facts.  Once a fact is established, it
should present it, even if the Joe Sixpack may find the fact startling,
or contrary to what he expects.  Naturally in such cases we should give
enough detail so a person can verify these facts for themselves.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Clutch wrote:

>For instance, let us take a link Talk:foo
>I can explode this into Talk and foo.
>Each namespace has an "urlprefix".  For Talk, the urlprefix would
>be http://www.wikipedia.org/Talk

>Now, let's add a (separate) language into the mix.  en:Talk:foo
>I can explode it into en, Talk, and foo.
>Now, the urlprefix for Talk is the same.  How do I say that it is an
>english language page?  The normal, standard way to do this would be
>like so:
>http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk/foo
>That feels "right" to me.  But doing that would require parsing the
>urlprefix for the namespace to figure out where to put in the language.
>I don't want to do that, and don't feel I should have to.

You have to parse the namespace anyway, to see if it's really a namespace.
Remember, colons are perfectly acceptable in article titles,
and they *don't* indicate namespaces *or* languages --
except in a few special cases.  (Consider [[en:E. coli O157:H7]].)

So in order to parse a link correctly, we need to do these steps:
* Decide which language it is:
  * Is there a colon?
  Y * Take the string up to the first colon;
    * Is this string a language code?
    Y * Drop this bit from the text of the link;
      * That string indicates the language.
    N * It's the current language.
  N * It's the current language.
* Decide which namespace it is:
  * Is there a colon now?
  Y * Take the string up to the first colon;
    * Is this string a namespace *in*the*relevant*language*?
    Y * Drop this bit from the text of the link;
      * That string indicates the namespace.
    N * It's the main namespace.
  N * It's the main namespace.
* Decide what the page title is:
  * Take the rest of the string;
  * That's the title.

The algorithm is a bit more complicated than this, because of:
* Special meanings when a colon begins the link.
* The pipe trick (and it's use of both namespaces and parentheses).
* Error handling (when the link has forbidden characters).
But the above 3 steps must all be done, and in that order,
or we'll break functionality of certain links like the E coli one above.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
Clutch wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Wikipedia pages now have a 3level name structure:
>>language (or meta or sep11), namespace (possibly empty), and title.
>>What's wrong with this?

>What's wrong is that it is unnecessary complexity.  Can you give any
>reason why it has to be 3 levels, instead of 2?  Having the three levels
>makes the coding tricky when you have pages that only need the two and
>are language independant.

Because all 3 levels have substantially different meanings.
I would argue that a really logical structure would have *4* levels:
language, namespace, talk (a boolean), and title.
But the current user interface is designed with 3 in mind.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:14:09AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
>Because all 3 levels have substantially different meanings.
>I would argue that a really logical structure would have *4* levels:
>language, namespace, talk (a boolean), and title.
>But the current user interface is designed with 3 in mind.

Well, since we are doing a redesign, why not have 4?  If that floats
your boat.  Just figure out what changes would need to be made to the
schema on http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Clutch/mod_wiki

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
I don't get it.  Why are we discussing the actual merits of Jonathan's
views of social workers?  That plainly doesn't advance the *on-topic*
discussion, which concerns the standards of neutrality, one iota.  To
bring this debate to an end, why do we have to do any more than observe
that there is a difference of opinion, and perhaps (on the relevant talk
page) discuss how to make the article reflects this sensibly and
neutrally?

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 07:45:02PM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>Why are we doing another redesign ?
>Weren't 2 we had so far enough ?
>
>Please make only evolutionary changes - fix only what's broken,
>add new features without breaking existing ones, fix performance problems
>and not introduce new. This way everyone will be happy.

I like the Wikipedias version of what it is to be a "Wiki", and want to
use it for many other projects, groups, and committees.  For that
purpose, I am doing the redesign, so I and others can easily deploy the
Wikipedia software in a wide variety of contexts.

So, whether Wikipedia ever uses it or not, I am doing this.  But I want
to ensure that we COULD host the Wikipedia on it.  And because it is
written in C as a custom Apache module, with Postgres backend, I will be
able to make it very fast and efficient.

If we switch to Postgres, to get the benefits of Postgres we must do a
redesign of the table schema, at least.  Did anyone notice that Postgres
is now fully SQL92 compliant?  And a redesign of table schema means we
can design it so that generating a regular wiki page only involves ONE
query, instead of the current TWELVE.  A long term redesign of the
software could definately be beneficial.

The better we design the future Wikipedia software, the easier it will
be to write, maintain, and extend.

In the process of the redesign, we hope to make it so that current
issues with the Wiki software are natural and easy to solve.  Join in if
you like.

    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Clutch/mod_wiki

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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in_reply_to: <1039443416.1817.5.camel@chesoo.fokus.gmd.de>; from e.moeller@fokus.gmd.de on Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 03:16:56PM +0100

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I have tested news.gmane.org and it's an excellent idea. I for one think
> we should make use of this resource. It's great to be able to read
> mailing list archives in threaded form without a) subscribing, b)
> downloading large archive tarballs.

How are their archives an improvement over ours?

> Copyright objections seem silly, I see no difference between a read-only
> gmane archive and a mailing list archive mirror. Basically, if the
> Wikipedia list maintainers think that a mirror is a valuable resource,
> then the implied contract extends to said mirror.

I tend to agree, but don't see enough value added to really upset people,
if people will be really upset.

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
On Monday 09 December 2002 08:23 am, wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> That approach does encourage laziness.  But sometimes it is so
> exhausting to defend an NPOV edit against partisans that it is tempting
> to put in bias, so the opposite side will be more inclined to meet
> somewhere in the middle.

Your edits were far from NPOV and you were the one trying to insert bias so
stop crying wolf. Another example of your extreme bias;

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Fluoride&diff=468589&oldid=467526

You replaced a mention of the most major use of fluorides with;
  Fluorides are noted for their toxicity,
  and have been sold in pill form as
  extremely effective rodent and insect poisons.

Except for the rodent and extremely part this is true but this use is not as
widespread or as important as the removed information about use in toothpaste
and as an additive in water supplies. This gives an unbalanced representation
of the ion.

You went on;
  To retain their right to practice, various
  dental associations require dentists to tell
  clients that fluorides are harmless and beneficial
  to the teeth. Dentists who say otherwise have their
  licenses revoked.

This statement, expressed as fact, gives an impression that there is a
conspiracy to poison patients and dentists who don't follow suit get there
licenses revoked. How very NPOV. I removed the above paragraph asking for
substantiation for the claim and you never offered evidence.

> Take the current article on fluorine for instance.  It took no end of
> effort to get the statements about fluoride out of the fluorine article
> where they didn't belong; some folks insisted on linking fluoride with
> dental health in the fluorine article, without any of the important
> context that the fluoride article provides about the health risks of
> fluoride.

Bad example. The fluorine article is supposed to mention all uses for the
element fluorine. Since the element fluorine in all fluorides then mention of
the uses of fluorides should by all means be the fluorine article. The
sentence you started that edit war over was;

     The fluorine ion [[fluoride]] is used in
     dental health care products and,
     controversially, as an additive to
     some drinking water supplies.

Six people, including myself and Rmhermen (who has done some work with
fluoride), reinserted the above factual sentence after you kept on removing
it. I got sick of the situation so I ended the edit war by placing the above
sentence on the talk page and /temporarily/ removed it from the article.

> The policy about "not deleting any information" really needs to be
> revisited.  I recommend rephrasing it as "don't delete any RELEVANT
> information".  This is an encyclopedia after all.  Have we lost our
> roots?  Remember Denis Diderot.
>
> Jonathan

The removed information is highly relevant. Just look at all the other element
articles; almost all of them mention uses of compounds and ions of the
element (many have compound sections that introduce the compounds and link to
more extensive articles on them). Few elements have many uses in their pure
non-ionic forms. That is why this is relevant.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Karma Payment:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Palladium/Temp&diff=0&oldid=471315
I would have been able to finish this element if I wasn't involved in 3
different edit wars with Clutch on Sunday.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

in_reply_to: <20021209140641.GB54880@mrtall.compsoc.man.ac.uk>; from jason@jasonandali.org.uk on Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 02:06:41PM +0000

body:
Jason Williams wrote:
> If I start an article about something controversial and I stick to
> a bland NPOV stub, chances are it'll get ignored or only get minor
> corrections and additions. If I start with a blatantly biased stub
> which makes outrageous claims, you can almost guarantee one or more
> gangs of people will become very interested in expanding the article.

I don't agree.  This is a tempting idea, but I don't think the
empirical evidence supports it.  What actually happens is that
contentious beginnings delay the proper expanasion of an article
because tempers are high.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> People turn to encyclopedias for facts.  Once a fact is established, it
> should present it, even if the Joe Sixpack may find the fact startling,
> or contrary to what he expects.  Naturally in such cases we should give
> enough detail so a person can verify these facts for themselves.

I hardly count as "Joe Sixpack" -- indeed, I agree 100% with your
non-NPOV statement.  Nonetheless, it is non-NPOV, and it was right for
people to delete it.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> One way to state the NPOV policy is that it encourages people to use a
> Hegelian dialectic.

Yes, that's one way to state it.  It's an incorrect way to state it, but it
is a way to state it.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>"Where are you from?" "Korea." (this means 'South Korea', because as
>everyone knows, North Korea's travel restrictions are so severe that it
>is exceedingly rare for a North Korean to travel to the West or even
>communicate with a Westerner.)
>
>"Hey, Joe, where were you stationed in the army?" "Germany." (until
>1990, this meant 'West Germany', of course).
>
What makes these examples interesting is that they require somebody to
make assumptions.  We anticipate a correct assumption.  If the second
question were asked of a Russian immigrant, he could as truthfully
answer "Germany".  Did he serve in the army before or after immigration?

IMHO good encyclopedic writing should not put the reader in a position
to make erroneous assumptions.

>Please allow me to suggest one editorial policy that fits all four
>cases.
>* [[China]] => all of China, with links to [[PRC]] and [[ROC]]
>governments
>* [[Ireland]] => the entire emerald isle, with links to [[Republic of
>Ireland]] and [[Northern Ireland]] governments
>* [[Germany]] => the country, with links to (1) West Germany (defunct),
>(2) East Germany (defunct) and (3) whatever the heck the current
>government is calling itself.
>* [[Korea]] => the entire peninsula, with links to [[North Korea]] and
>[[South Korea]].
>
That's the way I see it.

>Most countries are not divided, so the main referent of [[this country]]
>needn't be strictly distinguished from the current government. For
>divided lands, however, the existence of divisions MUST NOT be hidden.
>Regardless of Wikipedians' opinions or wishes for the resolution of the
>various political conflicts, our job is describe what is there.
>
Congo will still need some explanation.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Here is one specific "case"... it's a small and trivial one as far as
> these things go, but telling.  It is my most recent experience; my
> earlier, more horrific experiences aren't described on this page because
> it would take too much time to write up.
>
>    http://reactor-core.org/~djw/diary-arc/20021129072842.html
>
> Want to hear the case of how a social worker in the state of Oregon aided
> and abetted a pedophile porn ring run by one of the state approved foster
> parents, and got away with it for more than 5 years?  The step-mom of
> one of the victims, a 6 year old girl, write up her experience.
>
> Then there are all the personal anecdotes.  When you are poor, you tend
> to hang out with other poor people.  And we talk to each other.  And
> everyone has stories about themselves, or about family members, friends,
> or coworkers who have been jerked around and abused by social workers.
>
> One such personal story: friend of mine was told by the social workers
> that if he and the wife wanted a night or a weekend off, there was a
> sort of transition house where they could leave the kids to be baby-sat
> for a while.  He decided to try it out one weekend.  That night the
> house called him and told him to bring his son home.  It turned out that
> a 9 year old girl with Downs syndrome had sexually molested this 4 year
> old boy, and he was "acting up" as a response.  But noone at the house
> would listen to the boy, nor did the social worker take any action on
> the matter.

These are all anecdotal evidence.  It's like trying to draw conclusions
from "I know somebody whose arthritis was cured by drinking snake oil."
or "I know somebody whose astrological sign was Leo, and he was insane."
 Knowing several people who fit these circumstances might seem to
strenghthen your conclusions, but still proves nothing.

Eclecticology


from_name: Mark Wojtowicz

body:
Andre Engels scribed:

>> At present the following characters are allowed in titles:
>> [-,.()' &;%!?_0-9A-Za-z\/:\x80-\xFF]
>
> Please remove '&' from this list: links to a page with '&' in it do
> not go right; they go to just the part before the '&'. So a page with
> '&' in the title is for all practical purposes unreachable.

When it's in the form
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=AT&T
'&' doesn't work.

But these work:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT&T
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=AT%26T

--
Mark


body:
Larry Sanger wrote:

>>That they have killed xy-thousand people may be a fact.
>>That they have suppressed political opposition by censure etc. may be a
>>fact.
>>That they were "murderous tyrants" is a moral judgement.
>>
>
>Elian is much closer to the truth, but he still doesn't have it exactly
>right.
>
>Moreover, it's not the fact that "murderous tyrants" is a *moral judgment*
>that makes it not a fact.
>
What makes the term "murderous tyrants" inappropriate is that it is an
undefined characterization.  It's a moving goalpost that can be made to
fit any circumstances we choose.

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] Hegel (was: Clutch is on a POV tirade)

body:
I never really liked Hegel. I like Sun Myung Moon's alternative
to the Hegelian dialectic, as expressed in a book by the late
Dr. Sung Han Lee: 'Essentials of Unification Thought'.

For those with the background and capacity to understand it,
Dr. Lee's "Appraisal of Traditional Systems of Logic from the
Perspective of Unification Thought" at

   http://www.unification.org/ucbooks/euth/Euth10-03.htm

shows that Jimbo's NPOV policy is actually closer to Rev. Moon's
idea than to Hegel's.

Yes, I'm actually calling an atheist "heavenly" :-)

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Amazing!  The volume of e-mails on a subject is proportional to the
perseption of misdeeds. :-)

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 08:22:42PM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>> If we switch to Postgres, to get the benefits of Postgres we must do a
>> redesign of the table schema, at least.  Did anyone notice that Postgres
>> is now fully SQL92 compliant?  And a redesign of table schema means we
>> can design it so that generating a regular wiki page only involves ONE
>> query, instead of the current TWELVE.  A long term redesign of the
>> software could definately be beneficial.
>
>We have done it twice, without much benefit.
>I'm all for evolutionary way.

Yes, but we were limited by MySQL each time.  Have you used Postgres or
Oracle or Sybase before?  I have a hard time expressing briefly how
great SQL92 compliance is compared to the subset that MySQL supports.
Using MySQL for this is walking the long way around the bay when you
could paddle the Postgres canoe directly across it in a fraction of the
time.

>Most important current issues are:
>* poor markup
>* no media independence
>* 15-or-so-pass parser instead of good hierarchical LALR parser
>* slow database
>* poor mirroring ability
>* no dedicated offline client
>
>I'm currently working on first two (well, three).

I agree and I would love to see your thoughts on all of these issues,
and how best to solve them.  The last two items should be fairly simple,
if we require users to install Apache on their local boxes.

How can we improve markup?  I too feel it might be lacking somehow.

What do you mean by media independance?

>Rewriting it in C won't help with any of these issues.

By using C, we can use lex and yacc to make an excellent LALR parser

Postgres will solve the slow database issue.

>Moving current script to Postgres is easy modulo FULLTEXT index.
>Better think what to do with that one.

No, Postgres really does require a full redesign to reap the benefits.

>Oh, and think how to you implement database mirroring, as
>this is what lost most after move from filesystem database (rsync)
>to MySQL.

Replication (database mirroring) comes with Postgres; we have a choice
of the dbmirror, and the dbbalancer contributed modules.  We can choose
synchronous or asynchronous; I recommend asynchronous for speed.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Speeding up the database (was: Languages & namespaces)

body:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 02:53:22PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>Yes, Jonathan. If you want to become an admired contributor around here,
>PLEASE OH PLEASE redesign the table schema so that queries run much faster!!

I don't know about faster Ed, but I think we can certainly do something
about making FEWER queries....  You are welcome to contribute too, here
is the URL:

    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Clutch/mod_wiki

Of course in my heart of hearts I'm sure that Postgres will be
dramatically more scalable too, but I will not say any such thing until
we have working code and can actually benchmark this.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Clutch wrote:

>Mav quoted Clutch:

>>"Social workers are widely hated."

>>"Social workers are trained to treat their feelings and gut instincts as
>>more important than reason, rationality, and respect for the human dignity
>>of those they seek to help."

>>"Social workers are the foot soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers
>>that governments and big businesses hire to keep the masses under control."

>Looks like Clutch is telling the honest truth, to me.

It *looks* that way?
Surely you remember if you were being honest when you wrote it!

>Instead of erasing what he says, try to provide factual
>counter-views.  Bet you can't.

I did social work for a year (1999 to 2000).
I was not a social worker as such -- I wasn't hired with that job title,
or on the basis of holding such a degree or certification, which I don't hold
-- but I worked with several people who would qualify.
It was a private, nonprofit agency (Ortolan88's sense 2),
although it worked to some extent as an affiliate of the local government.

I was not trained to trust feelings over reason.
Furthermore, I was specifically instructed to respect human dignity.
Now, since I was just a temporary worker, with no degree or certification,
perhaps I didn't receive the training that you refer to above.
But if the social workers that were my bosses (and trained me)
did receive such training, then why didn't they try to pass it on to me?
In particular, why did they stress the importance of human dignity to me,
if they had been trained to disregard it?

The organisation that I worked for definitely trusted the government too much.
That is, they assumed that laws passed by "progressive" legislators
were well intended and should not be thwarted,
although had no compunction against working around
amendments passed by "conservative" legislators.
(For example, we would gladly try to get people on food stamps.
But we'd also try to find a way to make them qualify,
even if a prima facie reading of the guidelines suggested that they didn't.)
It even ran Head Start (a nationally funded public preschool programme)
*for* the local government, although I wasn't involved in that.
But ultimately, the assumption was to trust the people we were working with
over the government (although not, unfortunately, over one's coworkers).

I don't think that anybody there liked big business.
We didn't have businessmen on the board of directors.

>Social workers are trained for years to
>be really rapid and effective communicators.  This, plus their training
>to lie without compunction, and their unaccountability to the court
>system, gives them an incredible edge in defending themselves against
>factual accusations.

So what's your factual basis for the training to lie without compunction?
And do you have statistics on the wide hatred?

-- Toby


body:
Clutch wrote in part:

>I think we could do with a good definition of what "neutral" means.

See [[Wikipedia:Neutral point of view]].

I often get the impression on <wikitech-l>
that you're trying to redesign the PediaWiki code
without having tried to understand the current code.
Now I get the impression that you're debating about NPOV
without having read the current policy.
These are necessary first steps!
(Apologies if you *have* read them.)

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Clutch wrote:

>Koyaanisqatsi wrote:

>>Please do.  Tell us how the cops in LA and New York are generally
>>corrupt murdering thugs (arguably true), and so therefore every cop
>>everywhere is corrupt (not true).

>Now you are getting into straw man territory, because I never made any
>statements about "all" social workers or about "every" social worker.
>What are you trying to do here?

You wrote about "social workers", not "some social workers",
"many social workers", nor even "most social workers".
You've cited as evidence some social workers in Vancouver
(and a crackpot web site).

-- Toby


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Paranoia strikes deep.
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 05:47:22PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>"Social workers are widely hated."
>
>"Social workers are trained to treat their feelings and gut instincts as
>more important than reason, rationality, and respect for the human dignity
>of those they seek to help. "
>
>"Social workers are the foot soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers that
>governments and big businesses hire to keep the masses under control."

Looks like Clutch is telling the honest truth, to me. Sorry you feel
offended by it. Instead of erasing what he says, try to provide factual
counter-views. Bet you can't. Social workers are trained for years to
be really rapid and effective communicators. This, plus their training
to lie without compunction, and their unaccountability to the court
system, gives them an incredible edge in defending themselves against
factual accusations.

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Clutch wrote:

>Ortolan88 wrote:

>>But, at least in the states,
>>they all go to social work school and they all call themselves social
>>worker and no amount of bluster will change it, although I grant the
>>terminology may be different in Canada.

>We could make a note of that then; when people talk about "social
>workers" they are generally talking about implementors of government
>social engineering policies and legislation, but the term itself has a
>broader meaning in the United States.

I wouldn't even say that they are *generally*
talking about government workers in the US.
I usually think of social workers as not working for profit,
but they may work for governmental or private nonprofits.
I just asked a Canadian (from Ontario, not BC)
to define "social worker", and he never mentioned government.
I asked who employs them in Canada,
and he says that it's ususally the government,
but there's no reason that it has to be.
So the more general sense is being used in Canada.
(My Canadian friend is an anarchist, BTW,
if you're worried about ideological bias.)

My impression now is that Canadian social workers
are simply much more likely than those in the US
to be employed by the government -- which I'd guess anyway.
If so, then the article should reflect that.

-- Toby


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> An RDF feed listing the last 10 non-minor updates to Wikipedia is
> available at http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/feed-en.rdf (replace 'en' as
> desired to get a feed for the other languages). Updated every half hour,
> so it may miss things at busier times. ;)

Great!  I'm using this in my RSS import to http://susning.nu/Wikipedia

Why isn't it generated on the fly, just like the Recent Changes page?
I've had this running for ages on http://susning.nu/rss already, and
it even uses the same code that generates the RC list.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
You Wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 09:59:47AM -0800, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
wrote:
>>Please do.  Tell us how the cops in LA and New York are generally
>>corrupt murdering thugs (arguably true), and so therefore every cop
>>everywhere is corrupt (not true).
>
>Now you are getting into straw man territory, because I never made any
>statements about "all" social workers or about "every" social worker.
>What are you trying to do here?
>
>Jonathan

You called them agents of an ivory tower society or some shit like
that.  Without specifying number, you meant all.  You know it too.  ^_^

kq


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

in_reply_to:
<3DF4B964.2050703@planetunreal.com> (message from tarquin on Mon,
	09 Dec 2002 15:40:20 +0000)

body:
Ignorance is no defense of non-NPOV:

1 - social worker -- employee of government agency, working under a
budget and administering policies in the context of individuals having
some kind of problem (sometimes with the government)
2 - social worker -- employee of private social services agency
working with individuals having some kind of problem
3 - social worker -- employed by private agency providing
psychotherapeutic support, often with problem solving included
4 -- social worker -- self-employed, providing psychotherapeutic
support under health insurance, often with problem solving included.

All have weighty responsibilities, which means all have some
opportunity/danger of doing harm.

The amount of pen-pushing varies, but category 4, where my wife
performs much of her social work, requires as much as any to appease
the insurance companies.

Tom Parmenter
married to an L.I.C.S.W. (not an idiot, possibly more intelligent than
Tarquin), former food-stamp recipient, currently unemployed, and
Ortolan88

|From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
|X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
|X-VSMLoop: planetunreal.com
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 15:40:20 +0000
|

|Jason Williams wrote:
|
|>
|>Consensus and niceness are good things, but contention and
|>argument drive the wheel faster and produce more comprehensive
|>results.
|>
|>
|>
|You've been watching too much Babylon 5.
|I'm with the Vorlons -- conflict may promote growth, but it's not a
|healthy way to do so.
|
|The social workers I have encountered have been idiots, not pathological
|liars. I've found it's the structure they work within (and their
|pen-pusher mentality which means they can *never* look outside of it)
|which has caused me problems in the past.
|If we want to criticize social workers, we need evidence, like specific
|cases -- and we also need to present the wider picture.
|
|>
|>
|
|
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Sorry, Jonathan, but you have tarred all social workers with the same brush.  You didn't claim that your attacks were only on certain individuals, you made blanket attacks.
Zoe
 Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org> wrote:On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 09:59:47AM -0800, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>Please do. Tell us how the cops in LA and New York are generally
>corrupt murdering thugs (arguably true), and so therefore every cop
>everywhere is corrupt (not true).

Now you are getting into straw man territory, because I never made any
statements about "all" social workers or about "every" social worker.
What are you trying to do here?

Jonathan

--
Geek House Productions, Ltd.

Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone: 604-435-1205
Email: djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC V5R2W2
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