Someone pointed this out to me so I thought I'd share it. I can't find
it online yet - it's more of a feature so maybe it won't be. Page
fifteen of today's DM is an article by [[Petronella Wyatt]] - she
created the article herself back in December. Basically a moan piece
on the back of Alan Johnson's remarks. Larry Sanger is now called
'Jerry' and Wikipedia has 'employees'. Seems she spoke to or attempted
to speak to Jimmy about vandalism on her article, threatening to sue.
--
Gary Kirk
Now that this new form shown on the "User contributions" page has gone
live, I would appreciate comments from a broader audience.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mar 14, 2007 1:01 PM
Subject: New Special:Contributions form in SVN
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
I'm fine with showing this form on Special:Contributions itself, but
do we really need to show it when a user has been specified? It seems
that a simple link to the form - "choose a different user" - should be
sufficient.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
There is a (sort of tongue-in-cheek) commentary of Wikipedia that speaks of
it and its articles as something like a "debate sponge", or "conflict
attractor". I have the source somewhere in my bibliography (of thousands of
entries) but can't find it. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Well, only five days late!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: GARY KIRK <g.kirk.2209(a)cgsb.co.uk>
Date: 19-Apr-2007 15:08
Subject: BBC News article on WP 0.5
To: dgerard(a)gmail.com
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6566749.stm
Could you post to wikiEN-l or wikimediaUK-l; I'm at school :)
--
Gary Kirk
(copied from earlier untruncated message that was bounced as too long,
apologies for any duplication if that one later goes through)
(By the way NYBrad, what's the other issue? Now I'm curious.)
Seraphimblade
I thought you'd never ask. This is the third time I've posted the exact
same sentence and the first time someone's been curious (although I have
mentioned the issue itself before, including in my RfA). However, I don't
want to change the subject of this thread, which is important, so responses
to this comment, if any, should go into a new one.
What I view as the other top priority issue facing the project is the
extraordinarily high rate of turnover and burnout that we seem to suffer
from, especially among top-level administrators and leading contributors.
Turnover is part of any Internet project as any other part of life, but when
I read the names of the participants in an RfA from say a year ago, or
I look at the list of bureaucrats or former arbitrators or top featured
article contributors or whoever, I am consistently amazed and saddened by
how high a percentage of the names on the list have moved on. Sometimes
after a spectacular departure, sometimes after vanishing without a trace.
As highly as I think of our collective contributor and administrator base
at present (and I do think that we have an incredibly strong talent base on
this project, no matter how critical I or anyone might be of some or another
aspect from time to time), just imagine how much greater we could be if a
percentage of those people were still with us. I believe we need to
identify the causes of Wikipedians' stress and burnout -- or in NPOV terms,
of departures from the project -- and figure out if there is a way to reduce
them.
Newyorkbrad
>If we don't have appropriate information for a biography, we shouldn't
>have a biography.
>
>[..]
>Doc
Reliable sources state that no reliable biographical information is
available for [[Sathya Sai Baba]] India's most famous living guru, but
not to have an article about him would be very strange.
Andries Krugers Dagneaux
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=…
Gives you a list of all recent edits by new accounts. I urge all here
to go to the above, load 20 or so diffs to get an idea of what our new
editors write. (Lots of good stuff, lots of ehh okay stuff and lots of
experimentation/sandboxing.)
- d.
I read an article in a trashy free daily commuter paper ("mX"*,
probably not available online) which described how [[David Beckham]]
had apparently been replaced with the word TWAT. The article cited an
interview with a computer security expert of some kind who said
Wikipedia's servers might have been "hijacked", and it was surprising
that we didn't have any kind of "protection". Supposedly "Wikipedia
did not return mX's call."
According to the history, the TWAT change lasted three minutes.
Obviously the story is crap, but is there anything we can do to stop
these stories? Send a press release to every paper in the world
explaining what Wikipedia vandalism is and why it's not a story every
time it happens?
Steve
* Published in Melbourne, Australia