No objections here. I'd just like to caution others against seeing this
as an issue of good versus evil. I don't mean to preemptively accuse
Zoe, as she has, from what I understand, a pretty good track record, but
I wish to see both Lir and Zoe being held to the same standards. Lir
shouldn't get any lenience because he/she (I'm confused) is learning
what constitutes a good contribution, and Zoe should not get any
lenience because she is in a more authoritative. I hope my comments
don't seem presumptuous or accusatory. I'm still quite the
newbie/outsider in Wikipedia terms, I think.
On Monday 10 February 2003 08:15 am, Andrew Smith wrote:
> The MIT vandal might be discouraged from repeating his antics if someone
> complains to MIT about him. While we don't explicitly know who it was, it
> seems from what I've read that we know what IP addresses he was using at
> specific times so if MIT keep track of this then they will know who he is.
> Pointing out to them that if actions like these are repeated then wikipedia
> may be forced to block ranges of MITs IP addresses which would adversely
> affect their students as this is a useful educational resource etc might
> spur them into action.
>
> While I wouldn't like to see anything serious happen to him a warning about
> his future conduct regarding university network facilities (which
> universities seem quite keen to give) might encourage him not to repeat his
> actions.
>
> Just an idea..
>
> Andrew
Hm. Has anybody on this list written such a letter before? If so, it would be
useful to edit out the specifics in that letter and create a boilerplate
template for Admins to use when contacting the abuse departments of ISPs.
Aside: Just so everybody knows we already have a boilerplate template "request
for permission" that several people have used to ask outside authors to allow
us to use their work under terms of the GFDL. See
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Boilerplate_request_for_permission
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma:
Added a bunch of events to [[February 5]]; updated all the year pages and many
of the other articles linked from that page.
I think we need to change our naming convention to use the more correct
article title if everybody who knows the history of the term in question
agrees that it is correct; that is, if everybody who has a coherent POV on
the matter shares the same opinion. In other words, we should use
academically correct titles, not those which Google prefers.
Examples:
1) Ockham's Razor should not reside at Occam's Razor (Occam is the
latinization of the town name Ockham; the town still exists today).
2) Pennsylvania Dutch should be at Pennsylvania German (it is not Dutch at
all; the word is merely a corruption of "Deutsch" or "Dütsch").
As I wrote on [[Talk:Pennsylvania Dutch]]:
Regarding the title, I agree this should be under Pennsylvania German.
This is a case where a redirect makes perfect sense. I support anglicized
article titles, but I do not support using an obviously inccorect title
because it is more popular among the uninformed. It is not POV for us to
assert that "Pennsylvania German" is correct if there's nobody who
disagrees, based on factual arguments and not mere habit, with that
statement. This "Dutch" has nothing to do with Dutch.
[...]
Linkability is not an argument: People are already linking to this article
using [[Pennsylvania German|Pennsylvania Dutch]], because obviously they
do not want to use the corrupt form. Searchability is neither, since
redirects show up in searches. Google-ability is only slightly reduced,
since "Pennsylvania Dutch" would still be mentioned in the article body.
Erik Moeller wrote:
>I agree. Sysops need emergency powers to ban signed in users in cases of
>obvious vandalism.
As I stated in a previous post, I think it would help if Wikipedia's
tech people could work on some enhanced security features. We can
debate the details, but I think they should include:
(1) Flexibility on the part of the administrator (Jimbo). If there
are no vandals currently active, the current laissez-faire system
works fine. When there's a pest afoot, however, Jimbo should be able
to temporarily turn on additional security features, such as giving
sysops added powers.
(2) The ability to temporarily restrict contributions from
non-registered users.
(3) The ability to create some kind of registration barrier that will
make it harder for vandals to get back in the door immediately by
simply registering under a new name.
(4) The ability to push a button that will instantly send one million
megavolts coursing through the body of Ed Poor. (Just joking.)
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (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
--------------------------------
Sheldon, I was electrified by your shocking remark. "Wire you attacking me?" I asked myself. Then, with a jolt, I remembered all the energy our conversation last week generated, and that cleared the circuits in my head. ^_^
Uncle Ed
-----Original Message-----
From: Sheldon Rampton [mailto:sheldon.rampton@verizon.net]
(4) The ability to push a button that will instantly send one million
megavolts coursing through the body of Ed Poor. (Just joking.)
The English-language Wikipedia will be in _read-only mode_ for a few
hours tonight (Feb 9->Feb 10) while the database structure is altered to
eliminate some of the remaining performance drags before the heavy
weekday traffic gets into full swing.
This will also fix the out-of-order page history bug, which was caused
by a temporary workaround to the slow history problem.
The downtime window will cover roughly 04:00-08:00 UTC (UK time). For us
USians, that's 8pm-midnight PST / 11pm-3am EST. Australians & others,
please check http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone for the appropriate
offset to your local time. (I'm not certain of the end time; it may run
shorter, and hopefully won't run longer. It's a big database, and mass
modifications take a *long* time.)
During that time the wiki should remain accessible for reading, but no
one will be able to log in or make edits.
I'll also be upgrading various other languages to the current software
revision; those should go relatively quickly, and will be staggered.
Generally, meta, wiktionary, and Wikipedia's other languages should
remain accessible for both reading and editing through the night except
for some brief read-only outages.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
ps Tech note: I figure we should hold off on the mysql 4 upgrade until
they can release a version that isn't followed within a day by a dire
warning about a new bug that directly affects a type of query that we
use a lot for Wikipedia. :)
In the meantime, I'm adding the inverse timestamp column which can be
sorted on the index by mysql 3 (thus speeding and fixing bugs in
history, contribs, & recentchangeslinked), and a random queue index
column to replace the separate table and its insanely slow refilling
operation.
When a user is IP blocked here, does that:
(a) prevent them accessing Wikipedia at all
(b) or just kick them into a "read only" mode?
If the former, is it technically feasable to do the latter instead? The
advantage would be that sysops would not need to be in quite so much of
a hurry to restore blocked IPs.
Brion wrote:
> The downtime window will cover roughly 04:00-08:00 UTC (UK time). For us
> USians, that's 8pm-midnight PST / 11pm-3am EST. Australians & others,
> please check http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone for the appropriate
> offset to your local time.
Just one problem. You forgot that Australians are too stupid to be able
to calculate how many hours away from UTC they are, and which one you
are supposed to add to the other one to get the right one. Or is it
subtract?
Errr .. Guess it will be back up when it's back up. (And I reckon the
next rain might come when my hat gets wet.)
(PS: why is it that I can calculate a standard error on the back of an
envelope; work out an appropriate discount on a $1950 sale in my head
without scratching it; but haven't quite got the hang of telling the
time yet? Is it something to do with big hands and little hands?)
For some unfathomable reason, people want to allow Lir to come back. Why, is beyond me. He has been nothing but disruptive since he first came onto the scene. See the Talk page on [[Iowa State University]] for Lir's very first comments on Wikipedia, in which he called people who disagreed with him morons and specifically said that a dean at Iowa State was a liar for disputing a quote Lir attributed to him. It's also worth noting that Lir tried to delete the Talk page, but I've restored it so people can see just what he had to say.
His next forary into collegiality was his attempt to make us believe that Christopher Columbus's sole reason for visiting America was to take slaves. We also encountered a long edit war in which Lir insisted that the article be at [[Cristobal Colon]] (with accent marks I'm not going to try to reproduce here). He then went into a crusade to rename all places and people by the names they're known in their native languages, instead of by the names they're known to English speakers, even though this is the English wikipedia. He has never made any attempts to be polite, cordial or cooperative, but insists that only his way can prevail.
When he was finally banned, he went outside the Wikipedia and tried to make people believe, on his personal blog page and elsewhere, that he was banned for his politics, not for his personality and inability to cooperate with others. So then he came back as Vera Cruz, and continued his lack of cooperation. Even 172, someone who has the same sort of personality as Lir/Vera Cruz/Adam/Bridget, found him impossible to work with on the [[New Imperialism]] page, even though at first the two of them were allies against those of us who wanted to keep the page NPOV and useful.
And now he claims he's repentant and won't behave in the same manner. I find it hard to believe, but for some reason, the rest of you think he's reformed. I've had a long night thinking about this. At first, I felt that if you thought it was more important to have Lir here than me, that fine, I'd leave and you could have him, and more power to you. But I've decided that was childish, and I apologize to everybody for saying that.
However ...
If you let Lir back, I'd like to be a sysop. I've avoided asking for the authority before, even though some people have encouraged me to do it. But I know that Lir will be as disruptive as before, and I want to be able to deal with him. I promise I will be on my best behavior, and will not act abruptly. If you grant me this authority, then I'll go along with the odd request that Lir be allowed to come back. But if he continues to disrupt, and people don't step in to get rid of him for good, then I do swear I will leave, and I'm not just blowing smoke this time.
Zoe
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If it came to a choice, I'd pick Zoe over Lir any day, in terms of quality
of contributions to Wiki. I've only been here a few months and Lir seems to
have become a walking (or typing) landline, ready to go off anywhere at any
time, leaving wreckage in his/her wake.
JT.
>From: Zoe <zoecomnena(a)yahoo.com>
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>
>Fine. Goodbye. I'm obviously not wanted here.
>Zoe
>
> Jesse Alter <jesse(a)snacksoft.com> wrote:Apparently, the issue with Lir is
>a bit deeper than I thought, and I do
>side with some of the people offended by her--some of the comments were
>sharp and a bit 'unladylike' (for the record, I think men and women
>should both behave 'ladylike' in polite company). But one of the things
>that really got me was where Zoe said she would leave if Lir was
>unbanned and 'continued his usual obnoxiousness'. That's not cool. Now
>you're adding some more emotion to the admin's decisions. Now they must
>worry if it is worthwhile to add Lir if they'd be losing you, and that's
>really unfair. The decision should be made based on whether the admins
>feel it would help Wikipedia, overall.
>
>/
>
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