On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz(a)gmail.com> wrote: This continues to be founded in the mistaken notion that I disapprove of user boxes. Until you people actually read and understand what I've had to say about why I did what I did, I have no real incentive to "negotiate" with any of you. Kelly _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz(a)gmail.com> wrote: Since I did not take unilateral action on the basis that "userboxes are silly", I see no reason to acknowledge this. Were I to publicly acknowledge this, it would be taken as an admission that I deleted the userboxes I did because they were "silly". I've grown tired of removing the same image from the same userbox repeatedly. I dealt with this issue a while back, and I'm tired of it. And I can't block effectively block these people, as their admin buddies will just unblock them and whine. I did delete several templates because I felt that they facilitated dividing Wikipedians amongst factional lines. It is my opinion that this is harmful to the encyclopedia, a position which flows from comments made by Jimbo on this list. I deleted those templates because I believe that content that harms the encyclopedia has no place or purpose and violates several of our core policies. I'm not sure that it would have been "better" for me to try to spur a discussion: my experience is that discussions on Wikipedia go nowhere when they are made in the hypothetical, absent any actual controversy. Perhaps I could have nominated a few of them for deletion, but that would not have raised the underlying question (the templates in question would likely merely have been deleted as "silly" without reaching the underlying issues, and/or a few users would have gone ballistic and melted down all over the project, and the entire problem would have recurred in three months). I certainly did not expect the explosive shitstorm that occured; I underestimated the degree of the attachment that at least some of the userboxers held for their userboxes, and the shallowness of their committment to the project, and I underestimated the extent to which the "process before product" mentality has spread through the community. I therefore accept culpability for incorrectly assuming that Wikipedians would put the project of writing the encyclopedia ahead of their personal amusement, and for failing to realize the degree to which Wikipedians have become process-bound (and, apparently hierarchical). As a longer-term and respected Wikipedian, I do feel that I have failed in my responsibility to indoctrinate newer Wikipedians in the Tao of Wiki, and that this failure has led to many of the problems we have today. Kelly _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Jan 3, 2006, at 9:16 PM, SCZenz wrote: You just built it. Right there. You showed how they do not conform to Wikipedia's policy and purpose. Thus, assuming they do exist, they can be deleted freely. Because that's what consensus is - the conclusion of a sensible discussion. Or do you mean we can hold a stupid poll to delete them? -Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Be bold - until somebody raises a meaningful (i.e. non-procedural) objection to your actions, you are entitled to make good faith changes that a reasonably persuasive argument can be made for. -Phil On Jan 3, 2006, at 11:54 PM, SCZenz wrote: _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Tony Sidaway wrote: You keep saying this, but haven't yet explained how "stamping hard" on userboxes is supposed to prevent new editors from classifying themselves by politics and religion, or seeking out likeminded editors.

On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz(a)gmail.com> wrote: This has nothing to do with Kelly Martin. To give an indication of the scale and rapidity of the growth of this problem, editing of userboxes in December exceeded by a good margin all editing of userboxes, ever, prior to that month. Of 44 templates listed under beliefs, I counted only 3 that existed before December, and the vast majority seem to have been created in the past two weeks. We must stamp hard on this or we will have permitted these new editors to rebuild Wikipedia in the form of a network of people classified by political and religious alliances. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

From the above figures we can see that the growth in political userboxes, whose *sole* purpose is to link an editor into a handy group that enables them to operate as a political bloc, has been some tenfold. They must die.

It also seems extremely odd to me that a project with the goal of giving people free access to the sum of all human knowledge would engage in a discussion over whether or not it is appropriate for people to provide information about themselves on their user page.

The irony is that with so many boxes, some people are going to discover that they're the only Wikipedian to hold a certain belief, which is likely to be more humiliating than anything else. I expect the fad will crest at about that point - who wants to advertise that they're unpopular?

I can also see belief-haters adding themselves directly to a category, quietly bypassing userbox, as a way to monitor the category members.

It also seems extremely odd to me that a project with the goal of giving people free access to the sum of all human knowledge would engage in a discussion over whether or not it is appropriate for people to provide information about themselves on their user page. Anthony _______________________________________________

Well, I took a brief look at the RfC for Kelly, and apparently one of the deleted userboxes was "User_Christian".

Maybe that was done for copyright reasons though, I can't really tell.

Yes, information is bad. We should definitely blame the spread of information for the fact that idiots act like idiots. This fits in perfectly with a foundation whose mission is giving people free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

It's a lot easier to get along with somebody if you know who they are, what they believe in, etc. Do you disagree, or do you just think it isn't important for Wikipedia editors to get along with one another?

Knowing more about other editors has always helped me working with them, so there's at least one counter-datapoint. For instance, I found trying to reason with Wik to be very difficult because nobody knew anything about him, and so we couldn't figure out whether he was stubborn on principle, extremely immature, mentally ill, or what.

On 1/4/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: I work well with many editors and seldom give a thought to their backgrounds, native tongue, politics, religion or personal outlook on life. That they share with me an ability to cooperate is evident from their behavior and the results of our cooperation.

I am very suspicious of the suggestion that having editors categorized by beliefs and convictions helps Wikipedia, and I see no evidence that this is so. Moreover Wikipedia survived very well to the point of 800,000 articles without any significant user categorization by belief. I am aware of three recent cases in which that categorization was used in attempts to further factional ends, and I am also aware that the number of such boxes has increased tenfold in one month. The balance is thus tipping strongly against conviction-related userboxes.

I support that and I suggest that a note be posted on AN/I immediately to the effect that all fairuse images outside of the article space are subject to immediate deletion and that our fairuse and userbox guidelines be changed to reflect that.

"Fair use" images can't possibly be used on user pages or template pages without violating copyright, as far as I can see. I'm prepared to fight the good fight on this, image by image, if my help is requested. But that means removing images, and deleting them if they're not used elsewhere--not deleting templates. SCZenz

On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm sure this has been discussed before, so could you point us to a url where this assertion is explained? Alternatively I suppose you could just write the explanation here, but that'd probably be redundant. Anthony _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Fastfission wrote: >Mainly because a large deal of our feeling confident that our use of >unlicensed copyrighted material is "fair" is that it is purportedly for >"comment and criticism." This approach seems backed up by a number of >informed sources, i.e. >http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html#1which >lists "Comment and Criticism" and "Parody" as the two primary >categories of things which receive legal blessing for "Fair use" claims. I >think most people have a pretty poor view of what counts legally as the >latter (most seem to think it just means "used in a funny way" which is not >at all how the courts interpret "parody"). As for the former, the Stanford >page says: > >"If you are commenting upon or critiquing a copyrighted work--for instance, >writing a book review -- fair use principles allow you to reproduce some of >the work to achieve your purposes. Some examples of commentary and criticism >include: > > - quoting a few lines from a Bob Dylan song in a music review > - summarizing and quoting from a medical article on prostate cancer in > a news report > - copying a few paragraphs from a news article for use by a teacher or > student in a lesson, or > - copying a portion of a Sports Illustrated magazine article for use > in a related court case. > >The underlying rationale of this rule is that the public benefits from your >review, which is enhanced by including some of the copyrighted material. >Additional examples of commentary or criticism are provided in the examples >of fair use cases in Section C." > >Now whether we achieve this in the article namespace is of course often >under discussion. In the User and Template namespaces media is primarily >used for decoration and personalization. This would not seem to fall under >the above descriptions even in a very optimistic approach. > >Unfortunately the Stanford Fair Use case summaries page has almost nothing >relating to using images on webpages (only the "thumbnailing" case which is >not quite the same thing) so it is hard to know what sort of precedent one >would be fallnig back upon in either direction. I know a few cases offhand >but I'm not a lawyer and it is hard for me to sort through what is most >relevant and what would not be. > >This is, anyway, my understanding of what the policy is based upon, for >better or worse. There is also a crude risk/benefit equation going on here. >There is simply no compelling reason to allow unlicensed, copyrighted images >in the user namespace, and a number of reasons to be suspicious of it. >

"Fair use" images aren't allowed in template- and user-space by our current guidelines (although there was some edit-warring where that clause was removed last week, if I recall). Enforcing this in any way is problematic, because the number of people who like to decorate their userpages with professional graphic design is larger than the number of people devoted to free content. Jkelly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wp_ayb.gif Like Jimbo Wales (even though I guess he didn't put it in his userspace personally), David Gerard and Jayjg? The text on Yelyos' page also has to go, it's fair use as well. Yes, I'm being a dick here, but I just want to demonstrate that this is more fundamental than it seems. If we're going to take a radical approach, we give up a lot of the little jokes and amenities we're used to. I'm against plastering fair use images all over the user namespace via templates, but it's not just a problem of "omg all these new editors have no clue about our policies and need to be whacked over the head". grm_wnr P.S. Please inform me if this is deleted, I'll host it in my personal webspace because it's darn funny. jkelly(a)fas.harvard.edu wrote:

On 1/4/06, grm_wnr <grmwnr(a)gmail.com> wrote: What stuff on my User page is fairuse? Jay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wp_ayb.gif Like Jimbo Wales (even though I guess he didn't put it in his userspace personally), David Gerard and Jayjg? The text on Yelyos' page also has to go, it's fair use as well. Yes, I'm being a dick here, but I just want to demonstrate that this is more fundamental than it seems. If we're going to take a radical approach, we give up a lot of the little jokes and amenities we're used to. I'm against plastering fair use images all over the user namespace via templates, but it's not just a problem of "omg all these new editors have no clue about our policies and need to be whacked over the head". grm_wnr P.S. Please inform me if this is deleted, I'll host it in my personal webspace because it's darn funny.

On 1/4/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: Uncyclopedia is now hosted by a for-profit company.