On 19/09/2007, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Armed Blowfish wrote
Erm, the latter is already done, extensively,
regularly and self-righteously.
That would be against policy, then. I'm against it.
It sounds as if you are, too.
I am, though my solution would be to courtesy blank
or delete the attacks, not ban the speakers, who are
often wrapped up in notions of protecting the
encyclopaedia or advocating The Truth or defending
themselves (attacking often becomes a two-way
street... or a huge bazaar) or being drunk... etc.
Every time you
call someone a troll, you
are implying that person's intent is to
get a negative reaction.
On WP, calling someone a troll is way past violating
WP:CIVIL.
It may be a violation of WP:CIVIL, but still, a search on
en.wikipedia.org for troll returns 16,600 results on Google -
I doubt most of those are in mainspace.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll
When adding arbitration to the search query, 5,630 results
are returned.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+arbitration
3,350 results for this one:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+%22requests+for+…
2,880 results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+%22requests+for+…
1,750 results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+%22administrator…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TROLL
This lists six different 'types' of trolling, encouraging people
to call people who do those things trolls.
An interesting one,
'Examples [of trolling] include continual nomination of articles
for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion that are obviously
encyclopedic'
Erm, many blatantly psychologically damaging articles in
violation of BLP may be encyclopaedic. So would those who
support this essay consider those who try to get defamatory
or otherwise damaging biographies deleted from Wikipaedia
trolls?
Another one:
'Some trolls are critical of the project, its policies, its users,
its administration, or its goals. Often, this criticism comes in
the form of accusations of cabals, ilks, or campaigns, that
are typically invested in a particular POV, invested in
maligning a specific user, and other similar claims.'
So would those who agree with this paragraph consider
criticism directed at Wikipaedia as a whole, and not at
individual users, to be trolls? I'm sure the more positive
critics of Wikipaedia would be offended by that....
Perhaps people need to be reminded that not everything is
about either helping an encyclopaedia or hurting it? People
are complex and have a wide variety of motivations, many
of which you will never guess over the internet unless they
tell you.
Clueless
newbie
edits are regularly labelled as vandalism -
which means intentional defacement of
Wikipaedia.
The V-word should be used economically. I had a very
interesting example, where a net nanny was producing
apparent vandal edits for someone. Fortunately I didn't
leap to conclusions, there.
It isn't though. Your average Recent Changes patroller,
constantly looking to revert damaging edits, may be hasty
to call anything that looks bad vandalism. And don't almost
all the standard warnings (uw2 and up) encourage this, by
including the term vandalism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VAND#Types_of_vandalism
This has a whole list of circumstances where you are
encouraged to assume that someone is trying to deface
Wikipaedia!
Heya, even the obvious things may simply be the work of
a drunkard who will regret it next morning with his or her
hangover. And while regrettable, I'd actually prefer the
person defacing Wikipaedia rather than oh, say, beating
on his or her family. Not that most drunkards do that, but
some do, and it's far worse than anything a person could
do to an encyclopaedia.
Enforcement of
the conflict
of interest policy almost always involves
negative speculation on people's motives.
I have repeatedly said that COI is not a reason to abandon
AGF. It really isn't. People use it instrumentally, to try to win
editing arguments, but they are in the wrong there.
Well, unless they come right out and say they have
a conflict of interest, don't you have to go looking
for it, i.e. make negative guess about their motives?
And we wonder why Wikipaedia admins get stalked...
perhaps Wikipaedia itself is setting a terrible example.
AGF is an interesting one.
'Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, assume
that people who work on the project are trying to help it,
not hurt it.'
If good faith is defined as an attempt to help the
encyclopaedia, is WP:AGF encouraging Wikipaedians to
consider motivations which have absolutely nothing to do
with Wikipaedia 'bad'? Or is this a Wikipaedia-centric
world view? The world is not black and white, and not
everything is about hurting Wikipaedia or helping it.
And in big bold letters:
'This guideline does not require that editors continue to
assume good faith in the presence of evidence to the
contrary.'
Erm, when else would the guideline be useful? So if
someone does a few bad things, that person is suddenly
a horrible horrible person who deserves to be defamed
on top of Google? Well, that includes everyone except
the children....
Or, you could join the School of Humanism, and accept
that the world is not black and white, and people are a
mixture of good and bad!
And what is a
sockpuppetry investigation
but a search for hidden malice? Any time
anyone does anything that a significant
number of people don't like, that person's
motives are guessed in the worse possible
light.
A search for abusive sockpuppetry is a search for
abuse, plain and simple. I don't accept this.
But there's no such thing as certainty, only varying
degrees of uncertainty. IP addresses do not map
one-to-one to human beings. NATs (very large
NATs in some countries), dynamic IPs (very dynamic
in the case of dial-up), shared computers (especially
internet cafes), etc. And that's not even getting in to
proxies.... Yes, when you do writing analysis,
accuracy gets much better, but not 100%. Some
people are similar, and it can be very hard to tell the
difference between Sybils and collaborators.
So block the people, keep notes available for the
people who do the sockpuppetry investigations,
but don't label the person as a sockpuppeteer on
top of Google, because y'all will get it wrong
sometimes.
Sometimes, a coral snake is a king snake. Sometimes
it's a milk snake. Other times, a coral snake really is a
coral snake.
The majority
of user-contributed websites
are attack sites, since it is human nature
to attack. Off the top of my head, the only
one I can think of that isn't is DeviantArt.
Yes, people do attack other people on
DeviantArt, but they fullfill requests from
representatives to take things down, no
questions asked.
I have said that "attack site" is a useless classification.
It is facile and prejudges just the issues that matter in
assessing critical material.
Perhaps, but it appears to be the popular term.
In any case, the websites discussed (WP, WR,
ED, WT, WW) all seem to be engaging in one
big, huge cross-site flame war.
So, go over to WR under a white flag....
Most places,
however, will merely say no
when you ask them to take something down
and they don't want to. Wikipaedia and
Encyclopaedia Dramatica are significant
exceptions to this - they will very often make
things worse in response to complaints.
What makes Wikipaedia worse than
Encyclopaedia Dramatica is its higher
Google rankings and self-righteous attitude
(those people deserve to be attacked and
suffer, for the good of the encyclopaedia!)
Encyclopaedia Dramatica, at least, merely
has a rather negative sense of humour.
Well, WP is better than ED on just about everything except intention
to shock and persecute. Think what you're saying a moment.
Charles
Well, let's see, since OTRS is apparently not a badge,
the community is apparently well within its self-defined
rights to draw attention to courtesy blanked material,
including outing, by discussing it publicly, further attack
the person who asked for the blanking saying he or she
has no standing to ask for courtesy blanking and is out
of line, demand a public explanation of the person's
private life, and send the person a private threat to file
an AN/I against the person if any further courtesy
blankings are asked for.
And who do you think ED learnt from?
Hurting Wikipaedia is, of course, such a notable and
horrific thing to do that every banned user should have
his or her own Wikipaedia bio, right on top of Google.
Edited under his or her real name? Brilliant, now you
can make sure no employer who researches potential
employees on Google will ever hire him or her!
I'm doing a statistical study on the Google rankings of
attack pages on various websites, Wikipaedia included.
It will take awhile, though, because there are a lot of
searches to run and Google keeps asking me to solve
captchas to prove I am not a bot.