Hi everyone,
While Dario is out (on vacation I believe) on his behalf I wanted to forward on an something RCom should be aware of.
You may have heard that in the past Wikiversity community members have used the project as a platform to study Wikimedia projects. It came to our attention that this issue may have cropped up again through an English Wikiversity community member performing some kind of experiment on English Wikipedia.
In their discussionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=450061202#User:Marshallsumter_disrupting_Wikipedia_for_.22research.22_purposes., the English Wikipedia community has concluded that a good bit of his work is nonsense and problematic from a copyright standpoint. He’s indefinitely blocked on Wikipedia and they are evaluating whether best to delete everything he’s ever done or check each article edit individually. There is also some productive discussionhttp://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Marshallsumterbetween the user and English Wikiversity community members.
My understanding is that there isn't anything which necessarily needs to be taken action on by RCom members immediately, but we felt it was important you should be aware of this, since it's the not the first time we've encountered issues with contentious research projects conducted cross-wiki. If there are further developments we'll keep RCom updated.
Thank you,
Wow. I'm so confused. From my cursory reading of the discussion and the editor's edits, it looks like he was just playing with Wikipedia. On the grounds of the gross copyright violation alone, I'm not surprised that this editor is up for ban and mass delete.
It seems to me that this is something RCom should stay out of, but I'm open to other points of view.
On the other hand, I also think it would be useful for us to catalog the failed interactions between researchers and Wikimedia project communities. Do we have a list like this anywhere?
-Aaron
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Hi everyone,
While Dario is out (on vacation I believe) on his behalf I wanted to forward on an something RCom should be aware of.
You may have heard that in the past Wikiversity community members have used the project as a platform to study Wikimedia projects. It came to our attention that this issue may have cropped up again through an English Wikiversity community member performing some kind of experiment on English Wikipedia.
In their discussionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=450061202#User:Marshallsumter_disrupting_Wikipedia_for_.22research.22_purposes., the English Wikipedia community has concluded that a good bit of his work is nonsense and problematic from a copyright standpoint. He’s indefinitely blocked on Wikipedia and they are evaluating whether best to delete everything he’s ever done or check each article edit individually. There is also some productive discussionhttp://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Marshallsumterbetween the user and English Wikiversity community members.
My understanding is that there isn't anything which necessarily needs to be taken action on by RCom members immediately, but we felt it was important you should be aware of this, since it's the not the first time we've encountered issues with contentious research projects conducted cross-wiki. If there are further developments we'll keep RCom updated.
Thank you,
-- Steven Walling Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
RCom-l mailing list RCom-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfaker@gmail.comwrote:
It seems to me that this is something RCom should stay out of, but I'm open to other points of view.
I agree personally, but I was told that just to cross our Ts and dot our Is we should make sure y'all were informed, since it was ostensibly some kind of research.