We have a problem with a new user, "Palestine liberator"
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Palestine_liberator
Here are some of his gems. Let's start with his
anti-Semitic statement in which he demands that all the
Jews in Israel be murdered "Only peace will come when the
Zionists drink the sea at Gaza."
Some more of his statements:
INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON
SHARON IS FECES
RULES: COMMENTS BY ZIONISTS WILL BE DELETED !
This site is crawling with Zionists
ZIONIST TERROR
The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.
This was genocide and ethnic cleansing. The UN says Zionism
equals racism and this proves they are right, as the
genocide by the Zionists was motivated by their race
hatred.
Only peace will come when the Zionists drink the sea at
Gaza.
The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel" so
that everyone forgets their crimes against the Arab nation
of Palestine, is the world's biggest terrorist. Like Nazi
Germany and bin Laden, this terrorist must be destroyed so
that Palestine can strech from the river to the sea
(There is more, but I tire of copying his rants.)
I think "Palestine liberator"'s statements speak for
themselves. His rabid hatred is a violation of everything
that Wikipeida stands for, and I hope that he is not
allowed to damage our community.
Robert ("RK")
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It strikes me as increasingly obvious that some concerted effort to be
as NPOV as possible on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is necessary, as
it's starting to be one of the more frequent edit wars, and distributed
throughout the wiki, even in places you might not expect.
Two issues in particular that have come up lately, one from each side:
1. [[User:BL]] is mass-adding the contents of palestineremembered.com --
massive lists with hundreds of subpages comprising every village
(defined as 10 or more people) destroyed in the 1948 war, every
"massacre" (defined as 10 or more people) committed or purportedly
committed during that war (little effort is made to distinguish), and a
whole host of other information that's difficult if not impossible to
verify.
Even if it weren't for the difficulty in verifying this information, it
strikes me as somewhat odd that we'd have 300 pages dedicated to Arabs
killed in 1948, and only a single page dedicated to the Armenian
genocide, or the Pontian Genocide, or the Hutu-Tutsi genocide, and so
on. I don't think it'd be a good idea to add 10,000 pages or so, one
for each village ("village" defined as 10 people or more) destroyed in
each of those conflicts. And if we're going to have a separate page for
every instance of civilian deaths during a war, WW2 alone would be
another 10,000 pages or so.
2. [[User:RK]] is, as is probably obvious, somewhat of a pro-Israeli
activist, and is becoming difficult to clean up. The latest thing I've
noticed is him adding 2-paragraph-long attacks on Arab anti-Semitism to
articles such as [[George Washington]] and [[Benjamin Franklin]], in the
guise of "defending" their "tarnished" reputations against charges of
anti-Semitism stemming from little-known fabricated quotes.
Not to single out these two users in particular; they're the two that
come to mind at first. And these two issues in particular are also
being dealt with on talk pages. But it's becoming clear that it will be
very difficult to catch all of these, so perhaps some more concerted
effort is needed. I'm not sure exactly what to propose, but it seems as
a minimum we need a group of several people who are not particularly
partial to either side -- but who are knowledgeable about the issues --
to essentially police (hopefully in as unconfrontational a way as
possible) this sort of stuff. The problem is that those most
knowledgeable and interested in spending a great deal of time writing
articles on these topics are often those who are most partisan to one
side or the other.
Suggestions?
-Mark
Try using google. It's usually months out of date; you have to put
site:wikipedia.org in there manually to find anything that's actually
on the Wikipedia; it comes up with gobs of results, many of which are
in languages you can't read. And it's fast! For instance, according
to google, my search came up in no time at all:
>Your search - "teng hsiao ping" site:wikipedia.org - did not match any
>documents.
>
>Suggestions:
>
>- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
>- Try different keywords.
>- Try more general keywords.
>- Try fewer keywords.
>
>Also, you can try Google Answers for expert help with your search.
How easy is that?
(don't tell me, you're one of those folks who's hung up on blaming
browsers when the problem's with the server.)
-John "Hephaestos" Robinson (who doesn't work for google either, but
one's probably better able to tell it in my case.)
>> It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's
search
>> facility I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing
that such
>> an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of
the
>> Continental Army]]
>
>Try using google. It's fast; it doesn't cause Wikipedia to slow down;
it gives >vastly
>better content summaries; and it's much better at evaluating the
relative >importance
>of pages. For example, if I do a google search for "continental
breakfast", I >get two
>hits, in under a second: [[breakfast]], and [[Full English
breakfast]]. >Parfait!
>
>How easy is that?
>(don't tell me, you're on some browser where the google taskbar
doesn't play, >or
>something - in which case, sorry...)
>
>-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper
>A month max, IIRC. At the moment it's just under a week out of date:
the google
>cached version of [[breakfast]], for example, is from the 29th July.
The google cached version of [[Deng Xiaoping]] on the other hand would
seem to be 32 months out of date (i.e., created 21 Oct 2001, and
apparently never cached by google at all, ever).
>Nope. You want the "search this site" toolbar button*
This instruction should be in the null-result page, then, as most new
users probably don't subscribe to the mailing list.
Or better yet, we could have a google search box there, as we did last
time local search was turned off.
As it is now, if we're lucky, what happens after someone searches for
"battle of hastings" (lowercase) is that they click on "Edit this page"
and put a short stub in [[Battle of hastings]] which will later have to
be merged, leaving a redirect that will be useless when (if?) the
search function is turned back on, because the search function isn't
case-sensitive.
In not-so-best case scenarios, they fill the page with junk, or click
on the google link, do the same search, go to www.battle1066.com and
never see Wikipedia again.
Yes my original post was sarcastic--it was meant to be. I had just
read another post which seemed to actually posit that we're just as
well off using google. And that simply is not the case. Getting
search turned back should be the number-one coding priority (as an
aside, I notice that the server quite often drags even with it off).
-Hephaestos
Pizza Puzzle left the following on the Village Pump at 23:12, 1 Aug 2003
It is obvious that certain users have become convinced that I am another
user against which they hold a grudge. I will be changing my account name so
that this is no longer a problem for me. Pizza Puzzle
Those of us who have followed PP's edits and behaviour have long known that
it was Adam von Rickleff. Evercat showed the detailed evidence at
[http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Evercat/PP]
I have not argued for PP's banning, even though he is a multiple banned
user, on the basis that his behaviour was a considerable improvement on his
actions in the past, all of which warranted a ban then. When PP's behaviour
began to slip back to old ways, I told him
''You have done good work as PP and I have been one of the people defending
your right to be here because of how you have behaved as PP. Don't slip up
now and revert to a standard of behaviour that got you banned before. You
have a lot of ability. Please don't blow it and get yourself banned by
acting like Vera and the other characters. '' (He deleted the comment,
interpreting it as an attack, not constructive advice, which is what it was
intended as, given that I was one of only a small band of users to defend
him.)
However his actions is going incognito /again/ are hardly in the spirit of
wiki. It is the same old Adam, running away from the consequences of his
actions, then performing those actions again under another identity which he
hopes no-one will spot. I have gone out on a limb defending him as PP and am
not exactly impressed that he had decided to revert to form, as he did as
Bridget, Vera Cruz, Lir, Susan Mason, Dietary Fiber. We /really/ need to lay
down the rules here and tell him in no uncertain terms that running multiple
identities on wiki is as unacceptable now as it was months ago when we faced
his previous games with names.
JT
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> > The Daniel C. Boyer bandwagon is getting a bit out of control. Daniel is
>a
> > user on wiki who has an article about himself on wiki. While that seems
>OK
> > as he is a real if rather minor celebrity and artist, his articles
>relating
> > to himself are breeding like rabbits.
The Cunctator wrote
>I fail to see the problem. Wikipedia is meant to be a universal
>encyclopedia.
Once Daniel don't interpret universal as universally about him! :-)
JT
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Toby Bartels saith on WikiEN-l:
> Try setting your options for the mailing list
> so that the digest comes with MIME enabled.
> This is off by default in case of broken readers,
> but there's no reason that anybody should leave it off
> if they have a decent mail reader -- like Mozilla.
> Then if an individual message specifies its charset,
> your mail reader will know and won't have to guess.
Brion Vibber also saith (in part) on Wikitech-l:
> ...Change your options to use MIME digests instead of plain text digests...
I /do/ have MIME enabled. I'm not using Mozilla Mail
(the so-called "Thunderbird") but Mozilla Navigator
("Firebird") because I use web-based Yahoo! Mail. In
Y!Mail, the entire digest comes as one HTML file, and
messages with different charsets in one digest confuse
both Y!Mail (as to what charset it should write out)
and Mozilla (as to what charset it should autodetect).
There is no option in Y!Mail not to show e-mails within
other e-mails automatically, and POP access for Y!Mail
costs (too much) money (so I can't use Mozilla Mail).
The main problem is not so much with UTF-8 bytes,
but with ISO Latin-1/ANSI bytes that are invalid in UTF-8
and hence display as white question marks inside
black diamonds. It<?>s hard to read messages with these
symbols. (The 'smart' quote is one of these
invalid characters.)
Isn't there some simple software routine to convert all
incoming messages - or at least the Latin-1/ANSI ones - to
UTF-8?
There was talk a while back about moving to a wiki-like
or bulletin board system instead of using mailing lists;
that would solve this charset problem, and would be a
generally good idea. Are there any plans for that?
-[[User:Geoffrey|Geoffrey Thomas]]
=====
-Geoffrey Thomas
geoffreyerffoeg(a)yahoo.com
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Using Google may be okay -- thanks for the various hints -- , but coming
back to Wikipedia's own search facility, why do I get "Ann-Marie MacDonald"
when I type in "Ann-Margret" (and there '''is''' an article with exactly
this title)?
KF
> It's usually months out of date
A month max, IIRC. At the moment it's just under a week out of date: the google
cached version of [[breakfast]], for example, is from the 29th July.
> you have to put site:wikipedia.org in there manually
Nope. You want the "search this site" toolbar button* - if you're on a wikipedia
webpage when you hit search, it'll automatically add site:www.wikipedia.org. (If you
can't use the google toolbar, then see the apologies I gave in the last post, and
ignore this mail).
Using site:www.wikipedia.org rather than site:wikipedia.org also ensures that you get
only English results, by the way - so that should solve your problem with gobs of
foreign language results.
Hope this helps :)
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper