Some AFD regulars seem to view AFD/DRV as an independent fiefdom which
claims dominion over all Wikipedia content, but resists all comment from
outside (e.g. wikien-l) as interference. *Unfortunately*, it's been causing
real problems for the Foundation of late. Unbelievable rudeness about
outsiders, stupendously crap nominations to make a point, actively driving
away outside experts, etc.
Here is a suggestion: good faith is not enough when the good-faith actions
are stupidly destructive. Incivility on *FD = 24 hour ban from all *FD
pages and deletion of comment. Sufficiently crap nomination = 1 month ban
from all *FD pages.
Ideas?
- d.
The fact that there are so many admins is one of teh key reasons why I think
that such a meeting is so important. It is vital for people to get to know
one another a little better and see who the active admins are.
At the same time, I also think it is important that the admins be made aware
of some things on a Foundation level. What should they be looking out for?
How can they resolve problems effectively? What are the exact policities and
when (gasp) should these policies be overlooked in the larger interest of the
project?
The meeting would take place on IRC as Cimon suggested. I think Fred's ideas
are excellent, and we can certainly consider implementing an admin only IRC
channel and mailing list. These are things that can be brought up at the
meeting.
I realize that the meeting will be clumsy at first because of all the people
involved. I would like, however, to suggest that we try it and see how many
people actually show up. We can, of course, have additional meetings as
necessary, and may realize that one meeting is impractical. As a full-time
Wikipedian, I will make a point of being at any meeting suggested.
Suggested time, anyone?
Danny
Sean Barrett wrote:
>Tony Sidaway stated for the record:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomorrowNow
>Yeah, sure, Tony, but you're being very inconsiderate here. Think of
>all the people who wouldn't have been able to go to sleep with that warm
>glow of satisfaction that only comes from a day spent deleting other
>people's work.
That's a terribly negative way of looking at it. The most
inconsiderate thing is that there is no process to do what Tony did,
so therefore the restoration was OUT OF PROCESS! This is an
unforgivable offence to the community (all praise) and Tony should
probably be blocked again for the effrontery. Or RFCed again. Or
something.
- d.
This email got rejected from the moderation queue because of some sort
of corruption (or an ill-advised use of Gmail's text formatting
features instead of plain text). The user has kindly re-sent the email
in plain text:
~Mark Ryan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Itake <tchakolli(a)gmail.com>
Date: 23-Jan-2006 22:53
Subject: Re: Your email to WikiEN-l about your "ban"
To: Mark Ryan <ultrablue(a)gmail.com>
Ok, I don't know what "garbled" text is, was is that I used the gmail
text formatting features? Anyways, here it is again:
Username: Itake
IP: 213.67.50.30.
I was banned by the user "FeloniousMonk" because he felt I violated
wikipedia's civility code even though I was warned several times. Not
only is this untrue, but it is clear that the user in question has a
bias against me because he and I are involved in an ongoing AfD
dispute.
First off, I'd like to say that I did indeed violate the rules in
question. At that time, I wasn't aware that there even existed rules
for civil conduct on wikipedia. I was warned that my behavior was
against the rules.
I replied to the warnings on my talk page. I didn't even edit the AfD
disputes any further, or violate the civil conduct rules again, but
then suddenly I was banned. So user FeloniousMonk is lying. I wasn't
warned several times, I was told I violated it one time and continious
violations would lead to my ban. I didn't continue to violate it, yet
I was banned.
Further, I belive the user FeloniousMonk should have his admin powers
removed. He is quite clearly abusing them. I direct your attention
first to examples of uncivil conduct found on the wikipedia page about
it:
rudeness
judgmental tone in edit summaries ("fixed sloppy spelling," "snipped
rambling crap")
belittling contributors because of their language skills or word choice
ill-considered accusations of impropriety of one kind or another
starting a comment with: "Not to make this personal, but..."
calling someone a liar, or accusing him/her of slander or libel. Even
if true, such remarks tend to aggravate rather than resolve a dispute.
More serious examples include:
Taunting
personal attacks
racial, ethnic, and religious slurs
profanity directed at another contributor
lies
defacing user pages
calling for bans and blocks
First off, the users Feloniousmonk is grouping with fit in on several
of these criteries. Yet he didn't ban them. For example:
From my user talk page:
::Both of you need an objectivity lesson. And Itake needs a civility
lesson. [[User:Daycd|David D.]] [[User talk:Daycd|(Talk)]] 17:05, 21
January 2006 (UTC)
::: What's the matter, Daycd? Can't you just feel that "Christian"
love? - [[User:WarriorScribe|WarriorScribe]] 19:14, 21 January 2006
(UTC)
That's it, you've pushed it too far
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J…
this time]. Continue violating [[WP:CIVIL|the civility guidelines]]
and you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. --<font
style="background: #000000" face="Impact"
color="#00a5ff">[[User:Cyde|Cyde Weys]]</font> 04:19, 21 January 2006
(UTC)
::::: Interesting. So you interpret Matthew 5:39 as not applying to
you, then? - [[User:WarriorScribe|WarriorScribe]] 01:05, 22 January
2006 (UTC)
Delete pity we can't delete the author. — Dunc| ☺ 22:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
(last one was from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Thomas_Ice)
Secondly, the admin himself violated several of these principles in a
very serious way. As can be shown by his comments on the AfD in
question, he does not only have a serious bias that no doubt played a
role in my ban, but he also does some uncivil conduct himself:
Delete Neither diploma mills nor their presidents warrant articles.
Another non-notable from our most prolific creator of articles on
non-notables, Gastrich. FeloniousMonk 22:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
Delete. Another non-notable from our most prolific creator of
non-notable bios, Gastrich. FeloniousMonk 22:08, 20
Your campaign here to promote your diploma mill is its most notable
aspect. Who knows, maybe they'll name a "hall" in your honor...
FeloniousMonk 22:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Delete Another tool off the diploma mill assemblyline. FeloniousMonk
22:42, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Delete Though I was impressed with the fact that "he regularly reads
academic papers at Oxford University." But since I regularly read the
Pixley Press and the ingredients on the back of cereal boxes and I
don't get an article here, why should he? FeloniousMonk 03:53, 19
January 2006 (UTC)
The admin in question is quite clearly being rude, he's throwing
around accusations, he's doing blatant lying, he is taunting and he is
being judgemental. In my opinion, he has violated more of these
criterias then I have. But because of his admin powers, not only does
he escape justice but all the users who favor his side of the argument
and violate these criterias seem to escape being banned aswell.
I feel the entire AfD dispute around the Louisiana Baptist University
articles is being handled very poorly, and it gets even worse when
admins like FeloniousMonk comes along to abuse their powers. I hope
this dispute, FeloniousMonk's status as an admin, and my ban all gets
the attention it deserves.
Yours sincerely,
Itake.
(ps. I didn't quite get the procedure for these kinds of things. There
was something about a mailing list, but I think that signing up to it
wasn't necessary? If my inquiries are going to the wrong place or so,
please tell me so I know who to send them to .ds)
On 1/23/06, Mark Ryan <ultrablue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> An email was received to the WikiEN-l (English Wikipedia) mailing list
> from your email address with a subject concerning your ban. However,
> the contents of your email were garbled text. If this was a genuine,
> non-spam email message, please re-send the email in text-only format.
>
> ~Mark Ryan
> WikiEN-l mailing list administrator
>
On English Wikipedia there is a list of untagged images, it started at 38 000+, about 6000 of these have been tagged in 5 weeks; see [[Wikipedia:Untagged images]]. From the several hundred I have tagged, 2/10 can be speedied as orphaned fair use images; 7/10 have no source and/or no license information and most likely would only be able to be used as fair use; ~1/10 is a logo, album cover or a gfdl image without a template. Tagging these images is a big drain on contributors time, especially if they aren't admins.
Technically all these images identified as untagged are speediable if they are tagged as no license or no source, so on behalf of the untagged images project I am looking for someone who could write a bot to tag these all these images and notify the up loader.
There needs to be a better mechanism to deal with the lack of copyright information provided for images, and the incorrect copyright information that is being added to images as a result of the license drop down box. Is it possible for all images uploaded to Wikipedia to be tagged as no licence by defalut, forcing the uploader to provide copyright information after the image is uploaded?
--Peta
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Photos
Ring in the New Year with Photo Calendars. Add photos, events, holidays, whatever.
On the English language Wikipedia, there is a poll for voting on a
proposal which would grant the rollback privilege to good contributors,
who are not admins.
--> http://starglade.org/rfr
Other large projects might find the proposal worthy of consideration for
implementation!
Chris (Talrias on en.wikipedia.org)
--
Chris Jenkinson
chris(a)starglade.org
"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
On Talk pages there is a link '+' for adding a comment.
Well why don't you spell out with English etc. what you mean instead
of just this geekspeak '+'.
OK, and if one clicks on this +, one must download 100+ KB of form,
just to add a comment. Perhaps mostly rarely used accented chars
entry help stuff.
When one sees links like Discussion etc. you might as well give an
article count, e.g., Discussion (21 items). Mainly if there is no
discussion yet, I don't want to click, as I have nothing to say, just
want to see others.
And this 4 tilde for a signature biz. Can't you do this thru
cookie/preferences? How could I remember to do that each time.
No complicated sounding plugin for me.
I even made a script to add comments, that works as long as there is
no funny characters in the page name.
#usage eg. $0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminating_vista
#to add a comment to it's Talk page without downloading the form
set -e
test $# -eq 1
case $1 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*);;*)exit 33;esac
p=$(basename $1) t=/tmp/wikipediacomment.html
wwwoffle -o \
'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Miso&action=edit§ion=new'|
perl -pwe 's@(action=")(/w/index.php)@$1http://en.wikipedia.org$2@;
s/Talk:Miso/Talk:'$p'/g' > $t
firefox $t
On all pages there is "Go" "Search". Many don't know what "Go" means...
Anyways, hope this gets to wikien-l, where I suppose it is read (as
this is the best bug report address I know.)
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>I do not know the exact solution to this problem, but this is part of an
>ongoing problem with have *most particularly with bios of living people
>and existing companies*. "I haven't heard of this" seems to be an
>instant excuse for "non-notable" and "AfD", which is offensive to the
>subjects, when the real approach should be _at a bare minimum_ and
>effort at dialogue with other editors *before* jumping to a "vote".
Jumping into VFD discussions with a reference to this email? Though
let's see how many times the obnoxious have to be hit over the head
with this before someone decides it's "spamming" and blocks them!
You see what I mean when I say that AFD/DRV consider themselves worlds
unto themselves, and bitterly resist anything perceived as outside
interference, i.e. the rest of the Wikipedia infrastructure.
- d.
I have been blocked for displaying a photo on my
userpage. The photo in question was of another user
and was in "good standard". I was given an ultimatum
to remove the photo or be blocked.
I argued that I had the right to display the photo on
my userpage and that there was nothing in the policy
that disallowed me from doing so. I also argued that
the user in question agreed to release the photo under
GDU at the time when they uploaded the photo.
FeloniousMonk blocked me for 24-hours for harassment
and disruption. I don't see how I did any of that by
having the photo displayed on my userpage. Nowhere in
your policy does it say that we can disrupt by having
a photo in "good standing" displayed on our userpage.
I would like to know whether I am in the wrong, and if
so, why; and I would like to be unblocked. Thank you.
Anittas.
Related link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anittas#Warning
__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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Hi all,
It seems to me that [[Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines]] is in a sad
shape. I've posted the following request for comment at the talk page.
So reply there if you feel inclined. :)
--
This page is, IMHO, a bit of a mess. There were (until an hour ago :))
policies and guidelines mixed together down the bottom of the page
(undistinguished from each other), style guidelines in the content
section, and some really dubious guidelines. Meanwhile, most of the
serious, meaty policies aren't even linked.
So I ask: what is this page about? What should it be about? What should
be here? What should not be here?
Tentative answer: It should be a meta-policy for policies and
guidelines. It should explain why we have policies and guidelines. It
should explain what the difference between a policy and a guideline is.
It should give guidelines for creating policies - what should not be
enshrined in policy, what should be a guideline, when a guideline
becomes a policy, and when a policy becomes a pile of crap.
I've seen a few discussions about policy around the place and there is
considerable disagreement about whether policy articles describe or
prescribe, and what that means. Do policies describe what people think
people should do, or do they describe what people actually do. A rather
subtle point, but important: If people break a given rule regularly,
should the policy document the fact?
Lastly, should this page actually attempt to list all the policies and
guidelines? There are already other pages that do that, and that do it
better (notably WP:SR and Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines).
Steve