from_name: Jake Nelson

body:
On 3/29/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> > We've never demonstrated that turning off anon-page creation made a
> > substantial improvement on enwiki... I wouldn't make claims like yours
> > without seeing it.

Firstly, calling them "anonymous" as we do is silly, and is part of
why some of the people opposed to registration used to complain about
being asked to create accounts... "You want to take my anonymity! I'm
secret!". IP users are far less anonymous than the majority of our
pseudonymous users.

Secondly, there was little effect from disabling IP page creation
because it was IP /page creation/, not IP page /editing/. Creation
does very little damage, and can be evaluated more easily. If an IP
creates an attack page, it'll get deleted (usually).

When crap gets inserted into an existing good article, it's more
likely to slip by. (and then there's articles that are such vandalpits
that they pretty much become sacrifice zones...)

I've never been convinced of the benefits of IP-address editing,
honestly. Our username registration is so easy and lax... there's no
"barrier"... (or at least there had better not be. I tend to assume
everything's like it was a couple years ago, and keep being surprised
to find processcruft...) IP editing also makes licensing issues and
some agreements murkier than it would if they registered for a name
and clicked the 'I have agreed to the terms and conditions' checkbox
at that time (rather than the 'by submitting this, yada yada in the
edit screen). (Note that I said "murkier". I'm not saying anything
against the validity of the current approach.)

The vast majority of vandalism is done by those without an account.
That much we know. It'd be nice if we could research how many useful
contributions have come from IP users in the last couple years. "the
last couple years" being important, because while I know there used to
be a number of good IP contributors, I believe that class of people
generally have accounts these days.

I've drifted off my point. IP page creation has very low damage
potential, so it's not useful to compare it with IP editing. The
cost/benefit ratio of IP editing needs to be evaluated to move
forward.

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject:
[Foundation-l] Robert Mugabe's daughter - news story
	originating from Wikipedia?


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] BLP - a case study

body:
On 29/03/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Certainly. While the dead cannot themselves sue, read [[Julian Bell]] for the high-profile case of [[Hong Ying]]; in which a Chinese court found that the dead could be defamed (by a work of fiction).
> We have _never_ allowed general arguments on respectfulness to condition what we will allow in enWP.

I'd say it's relevant - respect for the *reader*.

Is the article good and useful?

Note that WP:BLP works as it is based in being a particularly
hard-arsed application of the extant fundamental editorial policies
regarding NPOV, NOR and verifiability - or NOR and ATT. That is, we do
the decent thing by doing the very best we can on the article itself.

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jochen Magnus

subject: [Wikitech-l] Missing Dumps

body:
Brion wrote:
> Note that:
> 1) There isn't a regular schedule
> 2) Not all wikis run at the same time.
> 3) The very large wikis run less frequently
> 4) The last few days dumps are on hold as I'm fixing some longstanding
> problems in the dump generator. New dumps will commence within a few days.

Brion, I know all that and have understanding. But unfortunatly the
download page reports now, 8 weeks after the latest successful dump for
dewiki:

> No prior dumps of this database stored.
> Dump in progress, 9 items failed

I can understand that dumps for WP mirrors have a low prioritity in the
project, but - forgive me - 8 weeks is still too long!

One or two dumps per month are o.k IMHO. A commercial offer for regulary
or live updates is o.k. to. We do have a client, a really important
german media, which is potentially willing to pay for such a service.
They are willing to pay or to support the WP project in another way. But
at the moment they are a bit irritated due to the erratic service for
mirrors.

Jochen


from_name: Oldak Quill

subject: [WikiEN-l] BLP - a case study

body:
On 29/03/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/03/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > Certainly. While the dead cannot themselves sue, read [[Julian Bell]] for the high-profile case of [[Hong Ying]]; in which a Chinese court found that the dead could be defamed (by a work of fiction).
> > We have _never_ allowed general arguments on respectfulness to condition what we will allow in enWP.
>
>
> I'd say it's relevant - respect for the *reader*.
>
> Is the article good and useful?

Isn't this too simplistic? Surely, different readers have different
needs. To a film buff, the actors career is important; to the
celebritist and media scientist, the tabloid stuff is important; to
the politicist, their activism is important. I'm not sure any part of
an individual's potential biography should be dismissed out of hand,
and particularly not with the justification that the reader doesn't
need to read this particular piece of information. Nor can we idealise
the biography and attempt to determine what the average reader wants
or needs.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] BLP - a case study

body:
On 29/03/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/03/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 29/03/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
> > <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> > > Certainly. While the dead cannot themselves sue, read [[Julian Bell]] for the high-profile case of [[Hong Ying]]; in which a Chinese court found that the dead could be defamed (by a work of fiction).
> > > We have _never_ allowed general arguments on respectfulness to condition what we will allow in enWP.

> > I'd say it's relevant - respect for the *reader*.
> > Is the article good and useful?

> Isn't this too simplistic? Surely, different readers have different
> needs. To a film buff, the actors career is important; to the
> celebritist and media scientist, the tabloid stuff is important; to
> the politicist, their activism is important. I'm not sure any part of
> an individual's potential biography should be dismissed out of hand,
> and particularly not with the justification that the reader doesn't
> need to read this particular piece of information. Nor can we idealise
> the biography and attempt to determine what the average reader wants
> or needs.

No, not at all simplistic - I meant what I said :-)

- d.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

body:
On 3/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely
> ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere"
> pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.
>

We don't have the resources to this without straight deleting about
95%+ of bios. <i>And that still wouldn't solve the problem</I>

> People who are fighting the good fight here are sometimes threatened
> with a trip to ArbCom.  They need our support, though.

If the people dealing with copyvios can stay within the rules and be
effective so can the BLP people. If they want extra powers they can
get them through the normal means.

--
geni


from_name: xaosflux

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

- From the technical aspect, we do not require admins to know
everything an admin could ever have use for.  There are many admins
who wouldn't go within 50 feet of a range-block, but may be experts
at copyright violation deletions or mediawiki modifications.

en: xaosflux

- ----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Ritzman" <ritzman at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] CheckUser access requests? Huh?

> What I want to know is why they don't just open up checkuser to
> more admins? Anybody who is trusted with tools that allow him to
> make pages go away (including the main page) and keep anybody they
> want from
> editing would not be trusted with checkuser. Or is it a matter of
> the technical knowledge needed to properly interpret checkuser
> results?
>
> Then again, admins have, or should have, enough knowledge about
> networking to know what IP ranges to block to get rid of a
> troublesome troll+socks but minimize the effect on innocent
> editors.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 8.0.2

iQA/AwUBRgxogdRQDZCQNK6YEQJSWgCg17PDX0QXUweXt7ugHzQ07o11NTsAoIXr
dBhduuTkKtuKghjkVGWPdyHJ
=joGX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] BLP - a case study

body:
On 29/03/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/03/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 29/03/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 29/03/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
> > > <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> > > > Certainly. While the dead cannot themselves sue, read [[Julian Bell]] for the high-profile case of [[Hong Ying]]; in which a Chinese court found that the dead could be defamed (by a work of fiction).
> > > > We have _never_ allowed general arguments on respectfulness to condition what we will allow in enWP.
>
> > > I'd say it's relevant - respect for the *reader*.
> > > Is the article good and useful?
>
> > Isn't this too simplistic? Surely, different readers have different
> > needs. To a film buff, the actors career is important; to the
> > celebritist and media scientist, the tabloid stuff is important; to
> > the politicist, their activism is important. I'm not sure any part of
> > an individual's potential biography should be dismissed out of hand,
> > and particularly not with the justification that the reader doesn't
> > need to read this particular piece of information. Nor can we idealise
> > the biography and attempt to determine what the average reader wants
> > or needs.
>
>
> No, not at all simplistic - I meant what I said :-)

Hmm? I'm not denying you meant what you said. I was questioning
whether one can determine what is good and useful to the reader in any
useable way.

Apologies if this came across in any other way.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
On 29/03/07, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> Hoi!
>
> >It seems unusual that such an orthography
> >can be used enough to have this level of recognition (to the extent
> >that it displaces the formal orthography) and yet not be recognised by
> >the standard.
> The only level of recognition this ortography had was a wiki. There *might* be a Linux locale in the future, but that's not a recognition.
>
> It's loosely based on an experimental prerevolutionary ortography. Anyway, both the original and this "sort-of" version never were taught in school, at least not extensively (there was no time for that at the moment) and after the soviet take-up a number of reforms were made to all soviet languages (starting from the most diffused, russian). Massive formal education in the byelorussian linguistic entity started to be delivered only after the soviet reforms were in place.
>
> A double standard would be usable if both version where recognized at international level, yet they are not and there is no apparent chance for such a recognition. If this claim was accepted we would have no way to keep anyone from asking (say) a Quaker wikipedia based on what's survived of that language in Melville's work, another in runic script, etc. This is absolutely NOT acceptable.
>
> Rules are rules, we are not in a feudal system where we give privileges to relatives. People and linguistic entities are all equal and all have the same rights and rules. If we open the gates to the flood I will accept a klingon wiki back straight away. They even have a regular code...
>
> I understand that people have worked for this and no one says their work will be deleted, what is in discussion is whether it should be hosted by wmf or not. If and when an Arbitration Committee chooses for a NO the existing content will obviously be handed over to the Community, so that they can host it where they please. This is not the Holy Inquisition, Gestapo or NKVD, we don't burn books in public squares.
>
> >Has the Norwegian solution been considered (seperate Bokm?l and
> >Nynorsk Wikipedias) as a soltution to the Belarussian problem?
> If they get an ISO recognition they will obviously be hosted as anyone else, but not until then. We absolutely exclude becoming a place in which linguistic codes get issued, because this is not wmf mission.
>
> > Wikimedia needs to be pragmatic. No standard is perfect.
> Sorry, no. Issueing linguistic standards means issueing political statements, which is absolutely incompatible with our mission (NPOV, etc). If anyone does not like ISO (true, it's far from being perfect) they are welcome to discuss the issue directly with ISO.
>
> As you perfectly understand the alternative is that we will start to say "yes" to one lot and "no" to another. Based on what? On our moods? On the number of hysterics they can make? On the money they can pay me to change my vote? On someone's political ideas? Maybe we can have one more ordeal of crazy berserks in meta? No, sorry. There's but one God, and He is called ISO.
>
> BTW, that's because we ARE pragmatic. It's true Oldak, there's no such
> thing as a perfect system, yet it's a long time since we all decided that
> having a clear set of Unperfect Laws and a number of independent powers
> balancing each other is much better then hoping for some Emperor's
> sympathy. At least THIS much is clear. We are not Gods or Emperors, so let
> ISO care for codes while we care for encyclopedias.

Thanks for clearing this up and giving an account of the situation
"for dummies". Based on what you say, and assuming it is correct, the
committee was right to make the decision that it made. Wikimedia
should not pander to the political use of language: it can be quite
manipulative.

--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)


from_name: Ihar Hrachyshka

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
? ???, 29/03/2007 ? 14:12 +0200, GerardM ????:
> Hoi,
> Wikipedia is not a platform to fight political fights. When, what was the
> Belarus Wikipedia, decided that the orthography as used in Belarus was not
> to be used, it lost its right to call itself be.wikipedia.org. This problem
> became acute when there was an incubator project for the official language.
>
> The language committee was asked how to deal with it. We found that there is
> little or no chance to get this "orthography" recognised by the current
> ISO-639 standard. The standard allows for a private label; we selected an
> arbitrary label. From my personal point of view, there should be no be-x-old
> wikipedia in the first place; I would see it moved outside of the Wikimedia
> Foundation.
>
> There is no chance of having both a be and a bel wikipedia because these
> codes refer to the same language. Where you say "hear the Belarusians" you
> made the concious choice not to hear those Belarusians that write the
> official Belarus orthography. This truth has come home to roost.
>
I know that those who write now the official orthography are against
such a solve of the problem. I am one of admins of new Bel-Wiki and we
didn't want to ban be-x-old. We wanted to start a new project with other
language politics. That's it.
So, if this can't be reverted (though all the Belarusian Wikipedians
from both sides support such revertion) then - what can our community do
to stay be-x-old project - even in other domain - apart with current
be.wp.org?
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
>
> On 3/29/07, Ihar Hrachyshka <ihar.hrachyshka at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Please provide info about the reason to move existed be.wp.org community
> > somewhere instead of creating new bel.wp.org for our community? We don't
> > want such results of separation that we can observe now. We should
> > revert this change and create a new domain for new Belarusian community.
> > Is it possible?
> > Please, hear the voices of Belarusians. Don't make a road of war between
> > us.
> >
> > Ihar Hrachyshka
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Ihar Hrachyshka schreef:
> ? ???, 29/03/2007 ? 14:12 +0200, GerardM ????:
>
>> Hoi,
>> Wikipedia is not a platform to fight political fights. When, what was the
>> Belarus Wikipedia, decided that the orthography as used in Belarus was not
>> to be used, it lost its right to call itself be.wikipedia.org. This problem
>> became acute when there was an incubator project for the official language.
>>
>> The language committee was asked how to deal with it. We found that there is
>> little or no chance to get this "orthography" recognised by the current
>> ISO-639 standard. The standard allows for a private label; we selected an
>> arbitrary label. From my personal point of view, there should be no be-x-old
>> wikipedia in the first place; I would see it moved outside of the Wikimedia
>> Foundation.
>>
>> There is no chance of having both a be and a bel wikipedia because these
>> codes refer to the same language. Where you say "hear the Belarusians" you
>> made the concious choice not to hear those Belarusians that write the
>> official Belarus orthography. This truth has come home to roost.
>>
>>
> I know that those who write now the official orthography are against
> such a solve of the problem. I am one of admins of new Bel-Wiki and we
> didn't want to ban be-x-old. We wanted to start a new project with other
> language politics. That's it.
> So, if this can't be reverted (though all the Belarusian Wikipedians
> from both sides support such revertion) then - what can our community do
> to stay be-x-old project - even in other domain - apart with current
> be.wp.org?
>
Hoi,
There should be only one Belarus wikipedia. If anything, you should work
together. If you can find it in yourself, you can think of the
difference being comparable to the difference between American, British,
Australian etc English and just allow for the difference.

If you want anything good to come out of it, you have to work together.
This is the best way because it will also ensure that you will have an
NPOV. The differences of opinion that are there because of the obvious
political differences will need to be worked out as a consequence as
well. The only reason why you get the be.wikipedia is because it is the
official orthography. It is not because any of the inherent points of
view are endorsed.

Thanks,
     GerardM


from_name: Platonides

subject:
[Wikitech-l] GFDL-wikititle updated (resolves importDump.php
 failures with enwiki-20070206 XML Dumps)

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> The page_title field is limited to 255 bytes; you should probably check
> if your namespaces are set up properly. If they are not, the
> 'Wikipedia:' portion will be injected into the main title instead of
> being used in the namespace as designed.

Having WikiGadugi as ns:project may be making trouble here. Shouldn't it
be translated into proper namespace id per the namespaces tag? Hmm, you
seem to have (the same) content both on WikiGadugi:* and Wikipedia:*...


from_name: Slim Virgin

body:
On 3/29/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Slim Virgin wrote:
> > We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
>
> Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous
> misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do
> _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?

If someone with money were to sue Wikipedia for having damaged him --
or were to finance a lawsuit brought by someone else -- it could end
up costing a great deal because of the global distribution of the
content, and perhaps also because we've not shown ourselves to be
deadly serious about getting rid of defamation. Unlike news
organizations Wikipedia has no libel insurance so it could put us out
of business.
>
> > The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of
> > "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their
> > bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on
> > a definition.
>
> Largely because IMO such a thing is impossible to define in anything
> like an objective manner.

We could come up with an imperfect working definition.
>
> > Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not
> > already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively
> > reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems.
>
> It would leave at least one really massive problem though; we'd lack
> coverage of everyone who doesn't already have a bio published by a
> reliable source (for whatever value of "reliable source" gets settled
> on). For a resource that's claiming to be a general encyclopedia this
> would be a _massive_ omission.

It would be an omission for sure. It would mean only truly notable
people got WP bios.
>
> > The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of
> > living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.
>
> If that's the worst option you can think of you're suffering from a
> drastic lack of imagination. We could get rid of BLP entirely, for
> example, and start encouraging original research into geneology. :)
> Also, I'd like to know how you know that there's a "huge number" of
> vanity articles and attack pages on Wikipedia.

I don't know how many there are, and I've not kept any kind of
records. I know that I've encountered a large number of problematic
bios, or biographical material inside other articles, where people
with grudges have inserted false material maliciously, or for a laugh.
 And the problems of vanity articles are well known, though less
pressing.

> We already have a lot of
> policies and a lot of editors working against those things, most of the
> problems I've seen slip through the cracks have been pretty trivial
> cases (like this one).
>
We had a case that went on for months, despite complaints to Jimbo,
where someone inserted into an article about a news organization that
a certain journalist (who was a critic of that news organization) had
had an affair with his secretary, or words to that effect. In the
grand scheme of things, it was small potatoes, but it might have been
enough to end his marriage. I managed to get rid of it eventually, but
only after a revert war, lots of personal attacks from the people who
had added it, and so on. The journalist didn't make a giant fuss, and
so it didn't become one of our well-known cases (and I suspect that's
why he didn't make a fuss).

I'm guessing that this kind of thing goes on a lot under the radar,
and that one day we're going to do it to the wrong person. I'd like to
see an imaginative solution before that happens.

Sarah


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Isn't it interesting how nobody ever complains
> about inaccuracies in articles other than the ones about themselves?
> Egos, geez...

Actually, people *do* complain about inaccuracies in other types of
articles. Moreover, there are good reasons other than ego for people
to notice the inaccuracies in articles about themselves. For one
thing, we all know our own biographies in a lot more detail than
other people. I'm willing to bet that no one on WikiEN-l other than
myself knows off the top of their head what city I was born in or my
date of birth. If someone other than myself were to read that I was
born in 1961 in Toledo, Ohio, it's unlikely that they'd know it was
incorrect, whereas I'd notice the error immediately.

In any case, the people who complain about inaccuracies in articles
are doing Wikipedia a favor, not a disservice. Complaints help
Wikipedia learn about errors and improve. It may be momentarily
embarrassing for Jimbo to have an error pointed out to him during a
TV interview, but that's a small price to pay for useful feedback.

Slim Virgin wrote:

> The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living
> persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
>
> By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit
> them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of
> controlling.

Actually, hosting living bios probably helps improve fact-checking
and accuracy more than publishing other types of articles. If there's
an error in an article about some dead guy, he's NOT going to point
out the error. Without the feedback from live people, Wikipedia would
know less than it knows now about the accuracy of its articles and
the validity of its editorial policies.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
|  http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------


from_name: Yury Tarasievich

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Like every fad, by token of piggy-backing "the establishment" -- the
standard orthography and grammar, retro-fitting some features of
choice, long cancelled in standard line, and introducing some new
features like new letter into alphabet.

There's 1 (one) small book, normalising orthography, and according to
which all this is supposedly run. You could compare the phenomenon
with Russian phonetic slang, possibly.

---


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely
>ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere"
>pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.
>
>People who are fighting the good fight here are sometimes threatened
>with a trip to ArbCom.  They need our support, though.
>
>--Jimbo

It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.

Fred


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
> You are an entity, yes, set out to destroy the existing Belarusian
> language and culture and replace it with your version -- okay, your
> right. But get yourself your own blessed language code for that.

Now, now. They may hate you because they think you're communists or
evil or whatever, but still, I wouldn't say they're out to _destroy
the existing Belarusian language and culture_. They just want to
modify it.

> Some years ago I witnessed a creation of one of such sites you call
> "proofs". So, there was 1 tech and 1 editor, who re-edited everything
> incoming (like 90+% or even 99% in standard Belarusian and Russian)
> into his flavour of "classic". It was politics. Thousands pages (and I
> mean real thousands, there was sort of 4800 or so) of pages. And...
> grant money. I could add -- near to zero interest, excepting the
> indexing bots.

This speaks to me. And this is very possible, lest anyone doubt it --
if it were your full-time job to translate articles, you would only
need a handful of people to run a functioning online newspaper (see
http://www.tempusnostru.it/ which is a Sardinian-language online
newspaper that functions with a skeletal staff - not that I have a
problem with that periodical, in fact I am supportive of it and enjoy
the articles it publishes very much)

Mark

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: ikiroid

subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming

body:
I'm wondering the value of presenting one's identity vs. using a pseudonym.
Sites such as meatball advocate the use of true names, but Essjay did have a
point in one of his observations that using a real name can leave an editor
more vulnerable. Does anyone believe wikipedia should lean more towards one
of the two sides?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Bruce McMahan

references:
<grsl03tvq058c3anqijb6bt1tqkv592tqr@4ax.com>
	<79F48F7E-1A56-4540-A993-E28AE456F908@gmail.com>
	<0rtm035qqrihehpr920clatnqpgd0v2gpv@4ax.com>
	<165821F0-1F67-4B0F-BF02-B788CE60F929@gmail.com>
	<mesn03dsvnennoajpklmfer1vb0tpb2pnd@4ax.com>
	<D566EB4C-0F22-4444-8DAF-80BF49F3857D@gmail.com>
	<m60o035nfl688ukj3a06la90rihp49ckjp@4ax.com>
	<54f6f2050703291128t3c5fac6cg60f6174e51c0e9c6@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 29/03/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/03/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:

> > Maybe.  If it's judged significant.  Which, in this case, it clearly
> > is not, since nobody else seems to be running with it.  Have you read
> > their follow-up stories?  It looks *awfully* like a vendetta.

> This argument is not valid. Significance of a particular item of
> information cannot be judged based upon the number of papers which run
> with the story.

Indeed. Anyone with any experience of the media echo chamber would
find this argument ludicrous. The papers reprint and expand each
others' errors *all the time*.

- d.


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Foundation Licensing Policy

body:
On 29/03/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
>
> >On 3/27/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Anthony wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>On 3/27/07, Ed Sanders wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>Only the images on that page which identify a specific part of the game
> >>>>being discussed should be sued, as such they would also fall under
> >>>>"identifying protected works".
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>What about the copyrighted text which is used?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>So where does fair use, in the most normal application of the term, end
> >>and questionable fair use begin?
> >>
> >>
> >Huh?  What does this have to do with fair use?
> >
> >I have no idea what the term "questionable fair use" means.
> >
> To clarify:  By ordinary fair use I mean all those quotations that few
> of us ever worry about.  They are why such a law exists in the first
> place.  "Questionable fair use" refers to all those claims founded on
> the contributors convenience without any analysis resembling the legal
> conditions for fair use.  Perhaps an analysis could support the fair use
> claim, but we don't know that unless it's done.
>
> Ec
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
On 29/03/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry, I blame Gmail's interface and not my own clumsiness.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Don't think I haven'tr seen the livejournal posts about "coming to
vote against the communists".

Mark

On 29/03/07, Monk <monkbel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > > You are an entity, yes, set out to destroy the existing Belarusian
> > > language and culture and replace it with your version -- okay, your
> > > right. But get yourself your own blessed language code for that.
> > Now, now. They may hate you because they think you're communists or
> > evil or whatever, but still, I wouldn't say they're out to _destroy
> > the existing Belarusian language and culture_. They just want to
> > modify it.
>
> Excuse me, Mark, but nobody hates "them" (those who prefer normative
> version), because everyone who prefers classical version understands
> that two versions should coexist and this is ok. But those who prefer
> norm version really hate, as we could clearly see in Yury's letters,
> because of lack of strength - they just don't have enough supporters
> in Belarus. I just don't understand, why they try to get support by
> hate, not by good.
>
> MONK
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.


from_name: Berto 'd Sera

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Hoi!

>It seems unusual that such an orthography
>can be used enough to have this level of recognition (to the extent
>that it displaces the formal orthography) and yet not be recognised by
>the standard.
The only level of recognition this ortography had was a wiki. There *might* be a Linux locale in the future, but that's not a recognition.

It's loosely based on an experimental prerevolutionary ortography. Anyway, both the original and this "sort-of" version never were taught in school, at least not extensively (there was no time for that at the moment) and after the soviet take-up a number of reforms were made to all soviet languages (starting from the most diffused, russian). Massive formal education in the byelorussian linguistic entity started to be delivered only after the soviet reforms were in place.

A double standard would be usable if both version where recognized at international level, yet they are not and there is no apparent chance for such a recognition. If this claim was accepted we would have no way to keep anyone from asking (say) a Quaker wikipedia based on what's survived of that language in Melville's work, another in runic script, etc. This is absolutely NOT acceptable.

Rules are rules, we are not in a feudal system where we give privileges to relatives. People and linguistic entities are all equal and all have the same rights and rules. If we open the gates to the flood I will accept a klingon wiki back straight away. They even have a regular code...

I understand that people have worked for this and no one says their work will be deleted, what is in discussion is whether it should be hosted by wmf or not. If and when an Arbitration Committee chooses for a NO the existing content will obviously be handed over to the Community, so that they can host it where they please. This is not the Holy Inquisition, Gestapo or NKVD, we don't burn books in public squares.

>Has the Norwegian solution been considered (seperate Bokm?l and
>Nynorsk Wikipedias) as a soltution to the Belarussian problem?
If they get an ISO recognition they will obviously be hosted as anyone else, but not until then. We absolutely exclude becoming a place in which linguistic codes get issued, because this is not wmf mission.

> Wikimedia needs to be pragmatic. No standard is perfect.
Sorry, no. Issueing linguistic standards means issueing political statements, which is absolutely incompatible with our mission (NPOV, etc). If anyone does not like ISO (true, it's far from being perfect) they are welcome to discuss the issue directly with ISO.

As you perfectly understand the alternative is that we will start to say "yes" to one lot and "no" to another. Based on what? On our moods? On the number of hysterics they can make? On the money they can pay me to change my vote? On someone's political ideas? Maybe we can have one more ordeal of crazy berserks in meta? No, sorry. There's but one God, and He is called ISO.

BTW, that's because we ARE pragmatic. It's true Oldak, there's no such thing as a perfect system, yet it's a long time since we all decided that having a clear set of Unperfect Laws and a number of independent powers balancing each other is much better then hoping for some Emperor's sympathy. At least THIS much is clear. We are not Gods or Emperors, so let ISO care for codes while we care for encyclopedias.

B?rto ?d S?ra
-------------
DISCLAIMER: this is NOT a colletive statement from wmf LangCom but just my own PRIVATE correspondence...


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living
> persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
>
> By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit
> them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of
> controlling.

That would leave a major hole in our coverage. There has been talk of
deleting articles about people that are only slightly notable at their
request, but that just results in arbitrary definitions of how notable
you have to be to not be allowed to have your article removed.


from_name: doc

body:
Slim Virgin wrote:
> On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>> It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
>>
> The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living
> persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
>
> By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit
> them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of
> controlling.
>
> Sarah
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
Regrettably I think Sarah is right. Any individual case can usually be
solved with a creative use of existing policy, a little common sense,
and the occasional use of the pointy stick.

However, our quality control is not upscaling - nothing like. And we
have a moral, if not a legal, duty to consider that. We simply cannot
protect the subjects of the biographies we are allowing from nastiness
that they should not be subjected to.

I'd not be as drastic as disallowing living bios. But we do need to
except that the eventualism that has so well served wikipedia in other
areas doesn't work here. If vandalism or POV hangs around on our article
on Quakerism - really only our credibility suffers. Not so with a living
person - on whom this may be the only comprehensive listing on the internet.

The problem is with the marginally notable. We recognise and revert crap
on famous people quickly - and in any case no-one will form their
opinion of George Bush based solely on our information.

The solutions:
#Disallow living bios altogether - far too drastic
#Drastically raise the notability thresholds on bios - possible
#Restrict anon editing etc in Wikipedia, or require some scrutiny of
editors  - possible, but the whole project will suffer
#Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with
specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho')  - should
be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining
eventualism on the rest.

For now, I'll predict we'll simply tweek existing rules - but I will
also prophecy that before too much longer we will adopt one of the
above. I just hate to think of the crisis - wrecked life or bad
publicity - that will be the thing that forces us to do it.

Doc


from_name: NSLE (Wikipedia)

subject: [WikiEN-l] CheckUser access requests? Huh?

body:
Uhm, is it just me, or is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Checkuser_requestsa
very, very bad idea? I think it's fairly obvious why it probably
wasn't so
bright to make that an open, free-for-all page. Especially if the
community's not going to have any say and it'll just be the Arbs appointing
Checkusers, then what exactly is the use of that page? The arbs could have
easily just approached people and announce it. This will probably degenerate
into a farce - I already see at least one name on there who hasn't even been
contributing very long to this project, and isn't an admin.

NSLE


body:
> The solutions:
> #Disallow living bios altogether - far too drastic
> #Drastically raise the notability thresholds on bios - possible
> #Restrict anon editing etc in Wikipedia, or require some scrutiny of
> editors  - possible, but the whole project will suffer
> #Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with
> specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho')  - should
> be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining
> eventualism on the rest.

#Use stable versions in some way - I think this is our best option.
Once the stable versions software is finished we should be able to use
it to make fact checking more feasible.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] Language Prevention Committee created

body:
2007/3/29, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> Hoi,
> At issue is that by creating new languages now without getting them
> localisation, we provide them with a substandard service in the first
> place.
> It has been proven hard to rectify this.

Truly, how much harder is it to take material from an existing wiki and put
it under a new language file compared as to take it from the incubator wiki
and put it under a new language file. If worst comes to worst, when they go
to the new language file they might go read-only or off-line for a few
hours.

So we are choosing out of two evils. I am quite unhappy with the result but
> it is one where multiple parties can effect a change. In the end, the
> amount
> of effort needed by the developers is the same. It is just that creating a
> language file should be part of allowing a new project in the Incubator,
> failing that it has to be done and some localisation has to be seen done
> prior to a project getting the royal treatment.

In short, it's our policy because it's our policy, and we're not going to
change that.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject:
[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.9.3 rebuildall.php reports double the
	number of articles

body:
After running importDump.php to completion, then running initStats.php
to update the statistics for the newly imported database,
I get the following output:

[root at gadugi /]#
[root at gadugi /]#
[root at gadugi /]# cd /wikidump/en
[root at gadugi en]#
[root at gadugi en]# php maintenance/initStats.php
Refresh Site Statistics

Counting total edits...4798436
Counting number of articles...1980988
Counting total pages...4797798
Counting number of users...1
Counting number of admins...1
Counting number of images...1092505
Counting total page views...67977

Updating site statistics...done.

[root at gadugi en]#

If I subsequently invoke rebuildall.php against this database, it
reports double the number of pages, runs up to about 277000 articles,
then the
php process goes to sleep and never wakes up.   rebuildall.php reports
the following wrong article count:

[root at gadugi en]#
[root at gadugi en]# php maintenance/rebuildall.php
** Rebuilding fulltext search index (if you abort this will break
searching; run this script again to fix):
Rebuilding index fields for 9648325 pages...
1500

Jeff


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-03-30

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r20830).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

  17 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)  [Has never passed]
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)  [Has never passed]
      * Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)  [Has never passed]
      * Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)  [Has never passed]
      * message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled  [Has never passed]
      * HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting  [Has never passed]
      * Mixing markup for italics and bold  [Has never passed]
      * dt/dd/dl test  [Has never passed]
      * Images with the "|" character in the comment  [Has never passed]
      * Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.  [Has never passed]
      * Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.  [Has never passed]

Passed 494 of 511 tests (96.67%)... 17 tests failed!


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] [Wikiquote-l] board resolution

body:
Hi,

On 3/29/07, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez at gmail.com> wrote:
> About the board resolution and wikiquote.
>
> It says that now projects can't hold nonfree content unless they
> develop an exemption policy.

I agree.

> Wikiquotes host mostly content under some sort of exemption (for
> instance, when quoting from TV series). Is the resolution meaning that
> all wikiquotes have to develop a specific EDP for TEXT ?

As long as the language project would like to host such copyrighted
materials, I think so. Since those materials are mostly not released
under free license but introduced into the project as fairuse or other
legal excemption. On English Wikipedia Village pump, JeffQ pointed out
we would need a sort of [[WQ:EDP]]. Personally I support this idea.

As far as I know, some Wikiquotes like Japanese don't follow the
course and accept only free/PD materials, for your information. Under
the Japanese jurisdiction, there is no fairuse but "fair quotation" -
it allows you only you need the cited materials as a secondary part of
your whole creation: it means a set of quotes of a living poet on her
Wikipedia article will be okay, but an Wikiquote article which has
only quotes is not okay. For such projects, there is no room for
WQ:EDP unless they declair to follow only US law, but it wouldn't be a
wise way (people living in Japan who may be the majority of website
visitors will take a legal risk in reuse).
.
--
KIZU Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * habent enim emolumentum in labore suo *


from_name: Robth

body:
On 3/29/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know, let's just shut Wikipedia down!
>
> That would  TOTALLY solve all our problems.

This is the problem, of course.  We've developed this way of
operating--we make mistakes eventually we, we fix them, it doesn't
really matter.  If I write something slanderously untrue about some
guy 2,000 years dead, who cares?  But when it comes time to deal with
real people, who apply for jobs, get searched for on google (that
fascinating new form of contemporary voyueurism), or whatever else, a
mistake that lasts a day can be incredibly harmful.  And when we
decide to put our "wiki philosophy", or whatever the hell it is that
you're appealing to here, ahead of the concerns of the people our
articles effect, we've created a project many of us don't want
anything to do with.  And over the last few months, it's become very
clear to me that many Wikipedians have exactly that order of
priorities.

I guess that's why they put exit signs on doors.

Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)


body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Steve Bennett [mailto:stevagewp at gmail.com]
>Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 06:15 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
>
>On 3/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>> I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely
>> ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere"
>> pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.
>
>This is a step up from what you have previously requested, namely that
>we must be ruthless about removing *harmful* unsourced information
>from biographies.
>
>Which of these statements most closely matches what you want us to do:
>1) Remove all unsourced[1] material from all articles
>2) Remove all unsourced material from all biographies, and unsourced
>harmful material from all articles
>3) Remove all unsourced harmful or slightly dubious sounding material
>from biographies and other articles
>4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
>from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles
>...etc.
>
>If the claim made was not harmful (as I don't believe a fictitious
>family member normally is), and was not implausible (I wouldn't have
>known), then why would we have removed it? How would we have known?
>
>Steve
>[1] I don't even know how we determine if a claim is sourced, short of
>tracking down and reading every source mentioned on the page and
>looking for it.

If the information does not have a specific source attached to it such as a page in a book or the equivalent, it is unsourced. You are not obligated to read whole books when no page is given. The priority needs to go to 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
>from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles and probably extends to removing such material when that is all that is in the article, even if it is sourced.

Fred


from_name: Monk

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Hi,

I'm sorry but it seems that Berto have got some wrong information.

I hope this message will be read carefully by all subscribers of this
list, including those who made the controversial decision.

> >It seems unusual that such an orthography
> >can be used enough to have this level of recognition (to the extent
> >that it displaces the formal orthography) and yet not be recognised by
> >the standard.
> The only level of recognition this ortography had was a wiki. There *might* be a Linux locale in the future, but that's not a recognition.
I don't know anything about Linux locale, but this wiki is just one of
thousands resources in this orthography. Yes, classical version
doesn't have its own Language Institute due to political issues, but
it is recognized; there are regular printed newspapers, recognized by
government in this grammar; big number of books in this grammar are
printed yearly (including fiction and scientific). Vast majority of
sites and blogs are created in classical version (I don't have
specific statistics, but rough count allows to say that around 80-90%
of all Belarusian language sites and almost 100% of Belarusian
language blogs are in classical version). It is not recognized by ISO
yet just because nobody here in Belarus knew that it could be
necessary; lack of ISO code never was an obstacle to use the language.

It is codified thoroughly; there are reference books, textbooks,
primers in it; big orthographic dictionaries exist, and cross-language
dictionaries as well.

> A double standard would be usable if both version where recognized at international level, yet they are not and there is no apparent chance for such a recognition. If this claim was accepted we would have no way to keep anyone from asking (say) a Quaker wikipedia based on what's survived of that language in Melville's work, another in runic script, etc. This is absolutely NOT acceptable.

It is just speculation. There are no obstacles to classical version
being recognized at international level. Some languages which are not
codified, and are spoken just by hundreds of people are recognized;
and this language is codified, has strict rules, and is actively used
by approx. 50-100 thousand people.

> I understand that people have worked for this and no one says their work will be deleted, what is in discussion is whether it should be hosted by wmf or not. If and when an Arbitration Committee chooses for a NO the existing content will obviously be handed over to the Community, so that they can host it where they please. This is not the Holy Inquisition, Gestapo or NKVD, we don't burn books in public squares.

Thanks, really. But the main point is that this content is free
encyclopedic content, it is strongly crosslinked to other wmf projects
(interwiki, commons pics, mediawiki software and so on), and it seems
that there is no other competitive projects where this content could
be usefully hosted and worked on.

> >Has the Norwegian solution been considered (seperate Bokm?l and
> >Nynorsk Wikipedias) as a soltution to the Belarussian problem?
> If they get an ISO recognition they will obviously be hosted as anyone else, but not until then. We absolutely exclude becoming a place in which linguistic codes get issued, because this is not wmf mission.

Thanks for this point. I hope ISO code will be issued in nearby future
and Norwegian solution will be possible.

Thank you.

---
Monk, native Belarusian speaker, who can use both grammar systems, and
who is clearly against the discrimination of living natural language
in Wikipedia.


from_name: geni

body:
On 3/30/07, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I like the "raise the notability bar" idea that Doc has, and perhaps Slim
> Virgin's threshhold might be the right course.

Not really.Because that means that con artists and the like will
simply spend weeks argueing they are nn.

And of course there is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe.27s_daughter_-_news_story_originating_from_Wikipedia.3F

--
geni


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Hi all,

and another question according to the point.

As all we know, all the variants of English (British English, American
English, Australian and so on) live together in en.wiki, and never
thousands of articles in one version were deleted at once.

And Belarusian grammar versions differ essentially less that British
English differs from American English. So I don't see why the solution
for English wikipedia couldn't be used in Belarusian one.

As everybody knows, previous be.wiki (be-x-old) has large number of
articles in both language versions (ratio roughly corresponds to ratio
of active speakers of both versions in Internet), and both language
versions contributors were welcomed in old wiki. But new one states
that it will forbid any contribution in grammar that is not favored by
current admins right from the start.

As I see, the only variant which would help Belarusian wikipedia to
develop, progress and grow on - to allow both versions contributors to
put their efforts in it.

You know, there is nearly 1 mln internet users in Belarus; and while
vast majority of them use only Russian language, thousands (up to
dozens of thousands) of them use so-called "classical" version of
Belarusian language (which was mostly used in be-x-old), and only
hundreds use "normative" version of Belarusian language (the one that
is used in be now).

Thank you.
Monk.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt & other banned users posting still

body:
Seth Finkelstein wrote:

>>Vee
>>Brandt is not being given a 'free pass' to edit, he is being allowed
>>to make useful comments about concerns he has about his own article. I
>>am certain that if he were to make any abusive edits to
>>[[Talk: Daniel Brandt]], they would be reverted. However, reverting
>>his edits to the _talk page_ of the article about *himself* when he's
>>merely expressing concerns about an article that could affect his
>>PERSONAL LIFE directly is simply unfair and isn't going to help anybody.
>>
>>
>
>	I endorse this viewpoint.
>
>	Just call it the exception WP:HUMANITARIANGROUNDS
>
>	It is the right thing to do morally, as it violates very basic
>standards of fairness to discuss a person so directly, yet deny them
>the opportunity to defend themselves *in the same forum*.
>
>	It is the right thing to do pragmatically, as otherwise
>accusations of sockpuppetry fly back and forth.
>
>	It is the right thing to do from the standpoint of dispute
>resolution, as it allows at least the (admittedly small) chance of
>developing some mutual understanding from the discussion.
>
>	It is the right thing to do from the standpoint of minimizing
>harm, as otherwise the situation looks like something out of Kafka
>("Anyone can write accusations against you, but *you* aren't even allowed
>to speak in your defense, since we don't like you and we 0wnz ur bi0").
>
>	If nothing else, the obvious ill-will that is generated from
>not even being able to defend oneself should make the choice clear.
>
I too endorse this well-expressed view.

This is not about Brandt or the bloody-minded obsession that some have
expressed about Brandt.  This place is about building an encyclopedia,
and that should take precedence over who happens to have made the edit.

I am often appalled by the lack of understanding for principles of
fundamental justice in some people's attitudes.  A person whose
character is questioned in a public forum needs to have an equivalent
right to defend himself in an equally public forum.

Ec


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] More concerns about wide scale article protection

body:
On 3/29/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I rather think all of this misses the point. Vandalism to our most popular
> articles is not really a problem: new users/anons editing those articles
> isn't a problem either. Reverts are easy.
>
> Something we should really think about, though, is semi-protecting our
> quality articles; GAs and/or FAs. The current state of affairs, where
> quality articles deteriorate very rapidly if no one is looking after them
> due to people introducing questionable junk that isn't out-and-out
> vandalism, is not acceptable. Semi-protection would help here, because
> those
> responsible for introducing this kind of material - often trivia - are
> usually anons.
>
> Moreschi

I don't know how true this is for most FAs, but those I've previously been
involved with end up being defeatured due to increasing standards for FAs.
Some of the finest (IMO) featured articles I've been involved in, on the
other hand, don't seem to have deteriorated all that much despite becoming
featured over a year ago. (Though to be fair, they're on obscure topics.)

It seems to me that the FAs most prone to such nonsense are those which also
happen to be extremely famous (oh God, I remember the frustration I had
dealing with [[Theodore Roosevelt]] due to overenthusiastic editors
introducing material on trivialities and downplaying his actual achievements
- not to mention their penchant for calling him "TR" instead of Roosevelt).
I'm wary about introducing full protection on these articles, though. We got
a lot of good content that could be shipped out to subarticles that might
not have materialised at all if people went "Damn it, this thing's protected
- I guess I won't write anything about TR's African expedition after all."

Johnleemk


from_name: Travis Mason-Bushman

body:
On 3/30/07 1:13 AM, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> Offering subjects to delete on request is a bad idea IMO. If they can't
> handle sourced criticism, we can't possibly have neutral articles on anyone.

The problem often is not that "they can't handle sourced criticism." The
problem is that an article about a borderline-notable person consists of a
stub written by a detractor, which contains nothing but negative minor
minutia about their marriage or the one time they had a DUI, rather than
what the person's actually done to be encyclopedic.

Adding positive sources does nothing to fix the problem - the problem is
that their marriage or their DUI has absolutely nothing whatsoever with why
they're encyclopedic. Biographies of living persons should not be scandal
sheets. The details of personal lives - who they had an affair with, why
they got fired from a job, etc. - are generally irrelevant and should not be
on Wikipedia unless there is a compelling reason which makes those details
encyclopedic.

We have too many people who spend too much time hunting down negative stuff
to write about people who have Wikipedia articles, so that their articles
can be "balanced." That is not balance - that is sensationalism. If
someone's article reads like vanity, tone it down and clean it up - don't go
Lexis-Nexis-searching for that one time he wound up in the local paper when
he injured someone in a car wreck 20 years ago. That doesn't help the
encyclopedia.

-Travis Mason-Bushman


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject:
[Foundation-l] Board Resolution + Wikiquote (was: board
	resolution )

body:
On 3/30/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/30/07, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So,  I see several wikiquotes really confused about this. Can the
> > board clarify a little bit about the specific case of wikiquotes?
> > Since wikiquotes are much more likely needing to use EDPs, can we have
> > some pointers?
>
> It's a media licencing policy.
>
> That should answer your question.
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.bain at gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

The policy it's about content, so it includes text, not only images,
sound and other media. So the impact on wikiquotes is much larger than
other wikis (where content is GFDL and quotes are inserted in
context), since on wikiquotes we have quotes (copyrighted material)
in a large amount without much context (they're not being discussed,
for instance).

So no, "it's a media licensing policy" does not answer my question and
it's dodging the real issue


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <20070329142331.67973.qmail at web63508.mail.re1.yahoo.com>,
bobolozo <bobolozo-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
>[[Special:Statistics]] has a list of the top 100 most
>viewed articles on en.Wikipedia.
>
>9 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 20 articles, are
>currently semi-protected.  Of the 5 that aren't, 2
>have been sprotected for major portions of the last
>month, 2 for short portions of the last month, and
>only one has never been protected.
>
>In addition, pick most any highly notable subject, and
>you'll find the article is sprotected.  God, Satan,
>Islam, Buddhism, United States, and so on.  Any major
>topic you look at, if they're not protected currently,
>they have been recently.
>
>We seem to be sliding towards a policy of
>semi-protecting all high traffic articles.
>
>I got [[God]] and [[Giraffe]] unprotected by
>requesting it be done, and a day later, they're both
>protected again.  In looking at those who vandalized
>those pages, what I found is that almost all of them
>vandalized a bunch of other articles at the same time.
>
>My belief is that semi-protecting our major articles
>does nothing to lower the overall amount of vandalism
>- it just spreads it around.  Instead of messing up
>our most popular pages, they just click on unpopular
>ones and mess those up instead.
>
>I suppose the positive side of semi-protecting all
>popular articles, as we're leaning towards, is that it
>makes life easier for the editors who watch those
>articles.  The rather more substantial negative side
>to it is that it takes the vandalism which would have
>certainly have been caught and fixed quickly, and
>moves it off to low interest pages where it might sit
>for days or weeks or longer before anyone sees it.
>
>I believe this policy we're leaning towards, of
>sprotecting all popular articles, is a bad idea, as it
>basically makes no sense.  If we aren't going to let
>new editors edit articles, we might as well just come
>out and admit that's what we're doing and sprotect the
>whole database.

Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like to argue that we
should be neither afraid of semi-protecting articles, nor ashamed of
doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it, and for historical
reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams and players - a
field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding amount of vandalism.
The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no longer possible to
assure the quality of articles through simple reversion - it's just
happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I semi-protected [[Wayne
Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15 months, and I suggest
interested people take a look at that articles' edit history before and
after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users was incessant before
protection, but the semi-protection has not prevented the article from
being constructively edited since then, while I think I'm correct in
saying we've had nothing that would be construed as out-and-out
vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most recent bout of
semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having so much vandalism
that a major piece of vandalism - the player's middle name, in large
font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an incorrect state for
no less than 54 hours.

It's time to recognise that there are whole classes of articles - sports
players and teams, for example - which attract a large amount of
attention from particularly immature non-logged-in editors, and that
these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a virtually permanent basis.
The requirement to have had a registered user for a few days before
editing does discourage the great majority of drive-by vandals, and does
not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.

I should add that I take a "robust" attitude to vandal non-logged-in
users: 1 warning on the talk page, then I can sometimes be quite
merciless with repeat vandals with regard to giving a long-term block;
also if they've clocked up a "final warning" from someone else, then the
next time they vandalise they don't get another warning, they get
blocked - no messing around; in three and a half years as an admin, I've
never had a complaint about my activities.

--
Arwel Parry


body:
2007/3/27, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it>:

> Andre, now that reaction is a bit silly, don't you think? We are not
> fighting here - we are trying to make sure projects really have a good
> chance.

By not letting them start?!?

People can work on the contents on incubator without problems,
> but it is also relevant to make sure the UI is there.

If they can work on the incubator without problems, surely they can also
work on a separate wiki without problems?

Then again: when we started nap.wikipedia people wanted to create
> contents, I was the only admin that could edit the UI, but I had my
> problems with that since I had to edit everything more than once not
> being native, but the only techie that was around for that langauge.
> Still we have some localization problems since not anybody can work on
> it and who does has limited time - just not even a handful of people can
> edit the UI ... so Incubator (and for now Betawiki) is a great place to
> make sure things work out fine.

Well, nobody stops you from doing the same thing on your own wiki, do they?

As for Neapolitan now it is too late to
> get people to work there. They simply don't see the reason why they
> should do things there and so we are still with a half-way (in the mean
> time probably 3/4) localized UI - and that does not help the language.

So it is the fault of the neapolitans to not see  that they should do it? If
they don't see the need, might that not mean that there is less need than
you consider it to be?

Small wikipedias do work and function in a different way than big ones
> do. There are often language issues related as well: what if there is
> programming needed to get the chars right? Even one and half a year
> after having started the nap.wikipedia we still don't have a solution
> for the '' (double quote that causes italic script) that we find within
> a word - we have to write ' instead of the single quote ... that is
> plain annoying. And: I am the only one who could hurry after the
>
programmers to do that stuff and I don't have time to do so ... so we go
> along with that. By requiring certain stuff to be done first you avoid
> that kind of mess and you avoid people to have that really bad
> experience that new editors get annoyed since they cannot write like
> they should/would. By doing the localization + some creation of contents
> first: well we can make sure newbies do not have to deal with such
> issues. (how would I love to see English with such an issue ... and how
> would I like to see how long it takes to have it solved).

Well, if  the Neapolitan Wikipedia  asks to be put on hold until the double
quote problem is solved, surely people will listen? Because basically,
that's what's happening to the wanted new Wikipedias - they are being put on
hold until their problems are solved. So if that's best for them, won't it
be best for nap: too?

It is not just a "we play the hard way" thigie - it is a "let's make
> sure that potential editors that are not wikiphile find their way
> through the wiki" and let the communities build up easier. Of course in
> the beginning all seems to be somewhat more difficult, but all that is
> done before the project is acutally an own wiki will help it afterwards
> to have a nicer way to go, an easier job to build communities etc.

If they start now, they have more time to do that. Instead we are keeping
them third-class citizens 'for their own good'. Well, I don't see any good
in it. If people are having problems getting their way around the wiki and
building a community if there is no localization, they will have even more
problems doing so when they have only the incubator to go with.

I repeat: we are not sacrificing any language, we are trying to make
> sure they can survive and grow more easily.

Well, helping them to survive and grow is NOT done best by keeping them
small until we think they are ready to grow, in my opinion. Why not give
them the little opportunities we can give them now now, and the greater
opportunities we can give them later later? Won't 6 months of slow growth
followed by a bloom work better than 6 months of doing nothing followed by a
bloom?

Who knows me should know
> that I am all for new languages, but it does not make sense if the
> communities afterwards have to hassle with thousands of issues they were
> not aware of and they don't even know with who to talk.

And how is forcing them to wait helping one iota with that?

These people
> most of the time are simply left alone and that has nothing to do with
> "our own little fights".

 So in other words, now to start you have to have finished already? Is that
what you're saying?

If you need an example for a wikipedia that instead of localising in
> their language localises into another one ... just to have something
> similar since there seems to be nobody able to create their UI, please
> let me know ... I will happily show you the project. I did not bring up
> that issue up to now, but probably it is time to do so in order to show
> why certain requests are legitimate.

What does that show? To me, what it shows is that people want the best they
can get, and prefer to work in a non-ideal interface rather than working in
nothing at all. If you know such a wikipedia, why not offer them to close
down their Wikipedia and reopen it once there's a good localisation? That's
what you are doing with the new Wikipedias, basically.

Thank you for your understanding

No, I still don't understand a iota. Yes, I do understand that having a
localized interface is a good thing, and that it's a good thing to have
people work on that. But I do not understand that it is so important that
it's better to tell people to wait for it than to have them happily work
with something subobtimal.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


body:
On 3/30/07 1:24 AM, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> People
> tend to give more attention to controversy and accusations, which unless
> that's what a person is primarily known for, should be kept to a reasonable
> size within the article.

They should be omitted entirely unless that "controversy and accusations"
can be shown to have a reasonable basis in fact or public interest, or that
controversy is what the person is primarily known for. It is far too easy to
create "controversy and accusations."

Example: If geology professor Jon Dough is accused of adultery in divorce
papers, does that fact belong in his Wikipedia article? What does it add to
our knowledge of Dr. Dough's work in geology? What does it add to our
knowledge of the universe that some geologist's wife accused him of sleeping
around, and thus wants Splitsville?

The answer, of course, is nothing. It's not relevant to his life and work as
a geologist and there's no public interest in what his wife said in a court
document in yet another divorce case.

It might be an accusation and it might be "controversial," but should we be
in the business of simply repeating every single accusation ever made about
every person? Is that really a "biography" or is it simply a scandal sheet?

-Travis Mason-Bushman


body:
On 3/30/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/03/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > She asked me about this on television.  I danced around it as best I
> > could, but basically it was not fun. :(
> > --Jimbo
>
> Ignoring the underlying issue here for the moment, just about nobody
> watches Sunday nowadays anyway. It's not a mainstream Australian
> program. It averages about 200,000 viewers. So it's not a huge public
> relations drama in Australia for us.
>
> Are we sure the inaccuracy wasn't inserted by Fanning herself, in
> order to find something to complain about in the interview?
>
> ~Mark Ryan
>

The IP carried out the edits a while back and hit a few other
articles. I think we can be pretty sure that Ms Fanning was not the
person who performed the edits.

--
geni


body:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > If the people dealing with copyvios can stay within the rules and be
> > effective so can the BLP people. If they want extra powers they can
> > get them through the normal means.
>
> This is exactly the attitude I am trying to combat.  It's this idea that
> the people fighting for BLPs are somehow violating the rules while the
> people inserting crap are not.  This is total nonsense.
>
> --Jimbo

Nyet. We have our deletion policies. The people dealing with BLP are
known to ignore them. While doing this as a one off may not be a
problem doing this on any scale is.

--
geni


body:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe.27s_daughter_-_news_story_originating_from_Wikipedia.3F
>
> So that's the best example I have seen in a while.

BLP won't solve that problem.

We have no shortage of articles that are not about living people that
could cause diplomatic issues if an error in them spread beyond
wikipedia. The various country X and  weapons of mass destruction
articles. The various articles on nuclear power plants . It would be
fairly trivial to slip say "Russia has supplied plutonium from this
reactor to Iran" into [[BN-600 reactor]]. not true of course but
believable if you don't know the difference between selling fuel grade
uranium (which Russia has offered to do) and selling plutonium.

Ripping out "person X is has some negative trait" from articles on
schools and villages is another pretty common activity.

While articles on countries are rather better watched "this town is
home to a bio weapons lab" could well get missed.
--
geni


body:
On 3/30/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP
> articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.

Yeah but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs.

--
geni


body:
On 3/30/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> geni wrote:
> > On 3/30/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Or alternatively, we could just get to work on stable versions. The BLP
> >> articles most prone to such mishaps rarely have many edits anyhow.
> >
> > Yeah but the ones they do get are mostly from IPs.
>
> Shouldn't cause a problem for stable versions, which I assume will at
> the very least not be flaggable by anonymous editors.

We don't have stable version.

--
geni


from_name: Delirium

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:
> Slim Virgin wrote:
>
>> On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living
>> persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
>>
>> By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit
>> them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of
>> controlling.
>>
>>
> Wouldn't really work though, because people would just add the
> problematic material in other articles. I don't have any bios on my
> watchlist these days, but still see additions of hearsay about celebs
> visiting cities and national parks, music video shoots in the desert,
> and the like.
>

Not to mention that incorrect information about living people is neither
the only nor the most damaging sort of incorrect information we can have
in our articles.  The potentially most damaging and inflammatory
information is generally incorrect allegations in articles relation to
nationalist disputes.  So, in addition to removing all biographies on
living people, I'd suggest we remove all biographies on currently active
disputes, recent wars, and of course currently extant countries, ethnic
groups, and religions.

-Mark


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Light entertainment

body:
I share MGM's concerns, but do appreciate your take on the matter.

Let me put it this way. Here's my RFA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Recently_created_admins&oldid=1819982#Jakenelson

At the time, I had ~400 edits and had been on Wikipedia ~2 months.

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]


from_name: webmaster at tiosam.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirroring from Portuguese Wikipedia again

body:
Dear Luiz,
As I explained last time you posted us as live mirrors (Jan 2007),
tiosam.com and ebaita.com ARE NOT LIVE MIRRORS: we DO have cached
pages in our servers. Please check Wikitech messages from January 2007.
BTW, our IPs are not allowed to access Wikipedia since that month, but
as I've been telling you, we have the pages in our servers... I hope
now you understand and stop posting and re-posting erroneous
information.


from_name: Rory Stolzenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Light entertainment

body:
To the contrary, WP:POINT doesn't prohibit all makings of points, it only
prohibits disruption to make a point, so this doesn't violate anything.
Also, discussion of why something is wrong is the first step to fixing it,
so discussion is certainly a good thing.

On 3/30/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I added a question to the RFA.
>
> Your comment that it's "pleasing" that it's turning into a debate on the
> system rather than your nomination worries me a bit because it means your
> nomination could be considered a violation of WP:POINT to get this
> discussion going, but I'll assume good faith for now. If you think the
> current RFA process doesn't work, I believe submitting a new process
> rather
> than nominating yourself using the process you dislike is the way to go,
> IMO.
>
> Mgm
>
>
> On 3/30/07, Earle Martin <wikipedia at downlode.org> wrote:
> >
> > Some of you may recall that a few months back I had a go at the RfA
> > process (and failed, of course [1]). Well, I'm demonstrating again
> > that I clearly don't know what's good for me:
> >
> >
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Earle_Martin_2
> >
> > I'm losing, of course, but this time it's turning into a big
> > discussion between the pro-RfA-system and anti-RfA-system camps. This
> > is pleasing. While I'm not explicitly asking for your votes (although
> > I certainly wouldn't say no to them), any replies to comments on the
> > page would be of interest, for policy discussion's sake.
> >
> >
> > [1]
> >
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2006-October/055827.html
> >
> > --
> > Earle Martin
> >            http://downlode.org/
> > http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Light entertainment

body:
On 3/30/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Back then the project was merely two years old. We could afford to be less
> picky about admins back then.
> Some people have gone over the top in their requirements, but how can we
> address that without affecting the fact the entire community has a voice in
> the process?

1. I'd say we can afford to be less picky about admins now.
2. The community SHOULD have a voice in the process, but that's not
exactly what's happening.

It's a similar issue to AFD... a certain group gets established around
a section of Wikipedia, and develops rules, procedure, and norms based
on the attitude of that group, which may be very different from those
of the rest of the community. Then, the tasks (important to the
functioning of Wikipedia) that're entrusted to them start being
handled in ways that are not in Wikipedia's best interest.

(Sidenote: While Jimbo and others assert that BLP issues are our
biggest PR issue (and while I can understand completely why they'd
think so), in my experience, AFD has done far more damage, and has
made enemies out of a lot of people who wanted to help us.)

I don't know the answer to this... it's similar to some "committee as
fiefdom" tendencies I've seen in some organizations IRL. Those cases
varied depending on the nature of the organization and the choices
they made... essentially, they either dealt with it or were crippled
by it.

Generally speaking, the ones that successfully resolved it were ones
that 1) recognized the problem as something that needed to be fixed,
in an active sense, and 2) empowered someone (typically their
officers, but in some groups of an anti-hierarchical bent, an
individual or group specially elected for this role) to specifically
"deal with it", and agreed to support those thus empowered in
implementing whatever remedies they suggested.

When I say "crippled by it", I mean that the organization got bogged
down in internal issues, and ceased making outwardly appreciable
progress towards their goal. Sometimes they didn't fix it, and lost
members and momentum to a more active group... other times they
recovered after a change of leadership.

Just my experience...

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Slim Virgin [mailto:slimvirgin at gmail.com]
>Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 06:47 PM
>To: fredbaud at waterwiki.info, 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
>
>On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>> If the information does not have a specific source attached to it such as a page in a book or the equivalent, it is unsourced. You are not obligated to read whole books when no page is given. The priority needs to go to 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
>> >from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles and probably extends to removing such material when that is all that is in the article, even if it is sourced.
>>
>The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material.
>Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair
>portrait of the person. Then there's the problem of Wikpedia editors
>hunting down every tiny bit of published material from decades ago,
>thereby reviving stories that were long dead, or posting something
>that was published only in a local newspaper, thereby turning it into
>an international story.
>
>But if you try to remove material like that from a bio, or delete a
>bio entirely because it's inherently unfair, a great hue and cry goes
>up about censorship, and a revert war begins.
>
>Sarah

Yep, that's what happens, but folks need to know that one side is right, the other side wrong. There is no limit to removal of unsourced crap. Repeatedly putting crap back in will, eventually, result in sanctions.

Fred


from_name: Nick Wilkins

body:
On 3/30/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> She's married to her son? That doesn't sound right.

The direct quote from the source is "She is married with a young son."  I
would imagine that a more up-to-date version would add bigamy to the various
things wrong with being married to your own young child...

-- Jonel


from_name: bobolozo

body:
--- Arwel Parry <arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Unlike other contributors to this thread, I'd like
> to argue that we
> should be neither afraid of semi-protecting
> articles, nor ashamed of
> doing so. My watchlist has some 3700 articles on it,
> and for historical
> reasons it includes a lot of football (soccer) teams
> and players - a
> field of coverage which attracts a quite astounding
> amount of vandalism.
> The volume of vandalism is now so great that it's no
> longer possible to
> assure the quality of articles through simple
> reversion - it's just
> happening too frequently. About 10 days ago I
> semi-protected [[Wayne
> Rooney]] for about the 4th time in the last 15
> months, and I suggest
> interested people take a look at that articles' edit
> history before and
> after 19th March -- vandalism from IP-address users
> was incessant before
> protection, but the semi-protection has not
> prevented the article from
> being constructively edited since then, while I
> think I'm correct in
> saying we've had nothing that would be construed as
> out-and-out
> vandalism at all. The thing which prompted the most
> recent bout of
> semi-protection was the fact that we'd been having
> so much vandalism
> that a major piece of vandalism - the player's
> middle name, in large
> font in the articles' infobox - had remained in an
> incorrect state for
> no less than 54 hours.
>
> It's time to recognise that there are whole classes
> of articles - sports
> players and teams, for example - which attract a
> large amount of
> attention from particularly immature non-logged-in
> editors, and that
> these articles SHOULD be semi-protected on a
> virtually permanent basis.
> The requirement to have had a registered user for a
> few days before
> editing does discourage the great majority of
> drive-by vandals, and does
> not disallow worthwhile edits from registered users.

Your arguement does make sense, of course, but it
wouldn't make any sense to go as far as you're
suggesting and then stop there.  You want to sprotect
all the sports articles, someone else will want to
protect all the sexuality articles, someone else all
the articles on celebrities or living people in
general, and so on.  If we're going to go through
protecting every one of our popular articles, leaving
only articles no one ever reads unprotected, we might
as well just protect them all.

Except this wouldn't really make sense either.  If
we're going to protect them all, it would make more
sense at that point to allow everyone to edit as soon
as they make an account, but require email validation
of the account.  This way, someone can spot an article
they want to change, make an account, and a few
minutes later be editing the article.

Having to use their email address to sign up, and
allowing only 1 account per email address, would still
end the vast majority of vandalism; the average bored
teenager who is vandalizing articles is not likely to
bother setting up an account, and if he does, once it
gets blocked he's not likely to bother setting up
another.

Making new editors wait 4 days before they can edit
articles is not reasonable, and shouldn't be done on a
wide scale.

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from_name: Birgitte SB

body:
--- Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

><snip>
>
>
> No, I still don't understand a iota. Yes, I do
> understand that having a
> localized interface is a good thing, and that it's a
> good thing to have
> people work on that. But I do not understand that it
> is so important that
> it's better to tell people to wait for it than to
> have them happily work
> with something subobtimal.
>
> --
> Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
> ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels

I am a little unclear here on the significance of this
issue.  Since the languages in question are able to
create content on Incubator, what is the great
disavantage of them remaining there a bit longer?
Everything will be able to be imported with full
history.  Wikisource has always run it's own
"incubator" since the the language split, and
languages have sometimes had a long wait before the
new subdomain is created.  But they didn't stop adding
content, designing the main page, or building
catagories just because they did not yet have their
own subdomain.  Of course everyone would prefer to be
in their own subdomain, just like everyone would
prefer to have localized interface.  But I am not sure
why it is such a disadvantage to be creating content
on incubator vs. a suboptimal seperate wiki?

It might help if those who are on the commitee, who
have spent much more time thinking about this than I
have, could list the pros and cons of each option,
showing some examples if possible.  Then others will
be able to better understand why you decided on your
position, and better clarify exactly what they
disagree with.  This may something better suited to
Meta than a mailing list.

I also think it may be helpful if there were a set of
benchmarks on Incubator for each language on it's way
to a seprate wiki.  That way various languages can
clearly see their progress is being recognized and
have some idea how far they still have to go to reach
their goal.

BirgitteSB

____________________________________________________________________________________
Don't pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.
http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html


subject: [WikiEN-l] Naming

body:
--- ikiroid <ikiroid at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm wondering the value of presenting one's identity
> vs. using a pseudonym.
> Sites such as meatball advocate the use of true
> names, but Essjay did have a
> point in one of his observations that using a real
> name can leave an editor
> more vulnerable. Does anyone believe wikipedia
> should lean more towards one
> of the two sides?

Requring people to use their real names, as
Citizendium is trying to do, would be a terrible idea,
and a monumental failure as a policy, as Citizendium
is about to find out.

A huge percentage of editors would leave, or would
never sign up in the first place, and of those who do
give their name, a sizable percentage would be fake.

Our policy should be that people who want to give
their real name should be free to do so.

____________________________________________________________________________________
Don't pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.
http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html


from_name: Ken Arromdee

body:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Fred Bauder wrote:
> >The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material.
> >Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair
> >portrait of the person.
> Yep, that's what happens, but folks need to know that one side is right, the other side wrong. There is no limit to removal of unsourced crap. Repeatedly putting crap back in will, eventually, result in sanctions.

Am I missing something here?  That wasn't about "unsourced crap", it was
about sourced-but-biased material, which is different.


body:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Delirium wrote:
> Not to mention that incorrect information about living people is neither
> the only nor the most damaging sort of incorrect information we can have
> in our articles.  The potentially most damaging and inflammatory
> information is generally incorrect allegations in articles relation to
> nationalist disputes.  So, in addition to removing all biographies on
> living people, I'd suggest we remove all biographies on currently active
> disputes, recent wars, and of course currently extant countries, ethnic
> groups, and religions.

The difference is that ethnic disputes are widely discussed; the Wikipedia
article is only a small part of the discussion and won't have much of an
effect that thousands of books, magazines, and web pages can't.

For marginally notable people, Wikipedia may be the #1 source for information
about that person.


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> That was exactly my point. If someone is primarily known as a geologist,
> their sex life has no relevance to the article.
>
So the FA on Isaac Newton shouldn't be saying anything about who he
dated when he was young, and the FA on Charles Darwin shouldn't say
anything about how he weighed the reasons to get married? On the
contrary, the personal lives of famous scientists have always been
interesting to historians, and they've spent many hours in parish
registers and city archives to get the particulars.

Now this is an area where only using secondary sources serves us well,
because that is where we get the assessment that says that A's turbulent
marriage led to meeting collaborator B, while C's divorce may have been
messy, but there is no observable impact on career, so we just note that
it occurred, and don't bother to go further into the details.

Stan


from_name: Yury Tarasievich

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Be-x-old

body:
Internet isn't yet commodity here in our country. Paper sources hold
much more sway.

Language codes just do not get transferred to best internet chatters.

You are an entity, yes, set out to destroy the existing Belarusian
language and culture and replace it with your version -- okay, your
right. But get yourself your own blessed language code for that.

P.S.
Some years ago I witnessed a creation of one of such sites you call
"proofs". So, there was 1 tech and 1 editor, who re-edited everything
incoming (like 90+% or even 99% in standard Belarusian and Russian)
into his flavour of "classic". It was politics. Thousands pages (and I
mean real thousands, there was sort of 4800 or so) of pages. And...
grant money. I could add -- near to zero interest, excepting the
indexing bots.
---


from_name: Jossi Fresco

subject: [WikiEN-l] Light entertainment

body:
On Mar 30, 2007, at 3:29 AM, Earle Martin wrote:

> My intention in starting this RfA was to genuinely apply for
> adminship, albeit in my own fashion, because I am not afraid of openly
> stating what I believe in.
Basically, an excellent example of [[WP:POINT]].

-- Jossi


from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Light entertainment

body:
Some of you may recall that a few months back I had a go at the RfA
process (and failed, of course [1]). Well, I'm demonstrating again
that I clearly don't know what's good for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Earle_Martin_2

I'm losing, of course, but this time it's turning into a big
discussion between the pro-RfA-system and anti-RfA-system camps. This
is pleasing. While I'm not explicitly asking for your votes (although
I certainly wouldn't say no to them), any replies to comments on the
page would be of interest, for policy discussion's sake.

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikien-l/2006-October/055827.html

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 3/29/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely
> > ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere"
> > pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.
> >
>
> We don't have the resources to this without straight deleting about
> 95%+ of bios. <i>And that still wouldn't solve the problem</I>
>
Why wouldn't it solve the problem?

Personally I'd lean toward "deleting" (in reality the information is
still there) 95%+ of bios (by hand, not automatically), if that's
really what's necessary.

> > People who are fighting the good fight here are sometimes threatened
> > with a trip to ArbCom.  They need our support, though.
>
> If the people dealing with copyvios can stay within the rules and be
> effective so can the BLP people.

So you think it's possible to remove "95+ of bios" without violating
the three revert rule?  Yeah right.

Anthony


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 30/03/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:

> It seems to me that an interviewer will for years to come be able to
> easily find something in Wikipedia that is obviously wrong. Treating
> that a a problem is accepting a negative premise, which I understand to
> be a PR mistake.[1] When people catch us in errors, aren't we better off
> going with positive responses that begin with, "Yes, exactly..."?

You got it. "Of course. Wikipedia is not *reliable* in the sense it's
all checked. It can't be by the process it's written by. You have to
think when you're reading. But if you do, it's good and useful."

("But what if people take it as gospel?" "We can't and don't promise
to think for people. You have to do that for yourself.")

I take this line every time this comes up - live radio, if not TV -
and it works fine. It would have worked here too.

- d.