As we grow larger, we get more and more users who seemingly act against at
least some of our rules or do not understand what our mission is. 172, Frank
Wappler, Stevertigo and others are users I would classify as "problematic".
However, doing so on the wiki will not help us much, it will only alienate them
from Wikipedia. There is, of course, a certain point at which we need to ban
users, but I do not see this line being crossed in these cases yet.
Another idea would be to create a list of "Watched users", with a "watcher"
assigned to each one of them, keeping an eye on their contributions. However,
this does have negative connotations, which might lead to edit wars on the
respective page.
A more positive, affirmative approach might be to create a mentor policy. It
could work like this:
[[Wikipedia:Available mentors]] -> everyone willing to be a mentor can put
themselves in that list. Only requirement: needs to have been a Wikipedian
for n months. (I suggest n=6).
[[Wikipedia:Votes for mentoring]] -> users who may need a mentor can be
added to this list.
The "Available mentors" link could be put on the main page and linked
prominently elsewhere so that new users who want some hand holding can message one
of them directly. If we "vote for mentoring" of a user, the assigned mentor
could put some text on the user's talk page:
"Hello, .... It has been suggested that one of the Wikipedia oldtimers could
help you better understand our policies and convention. In that spirit, I
will try to work with you on your future edits to make sure they meet our
standards of neutrality and research. If that bothers you, please comment on my
Talk page or on the [[Wikipedia:Votes for mentoring]] page."
What do you think? I do believe that we need to watch the edits of
problematic users in a more coordinated fashion, at least.
Regards,
Erik
--
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I have created a draft for our 2003 press release and have placed it at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:2003_Press_Release
Unfortunately, I will be out of town for the next several days so I will not
be able to submit a news summary to Slashdot or anywhere else if we hit the
100,000 article mark while I am gone. So it would be great if somebody else
could do this. See the talk page for some suggested text to send to Slashdot.
Also, if anybody knows where we could submit our press release for free then
please do so when the time comes.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
WikiKarma Payment:
Writing the draft press release and
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=January_16&diff=590304&oldid=58…
For some reason, the topic ``Samnite wars 327 - 290 BC" is attracting a
number of vandals. Well, so far two.
Following various links related to Roman History, I took a look at this
article last night & found it was nothing more than several lines of
gibberish. Instead of blanking this out, I overwrote it with a stub
entry based on 10 minutes of research.
As part of my daily habit, I took a look at all of the articles I had editted,
to see if anyone had changed them & saw this one had been altered. Looking
at the article tonight, I saw some more gibberish added to the end from
different IP address than the first edits.
If a bunch of vandals can't help but turn this article into gibberish,
maybe it should just be deleted.
Geoff
Hi Tom,
I've a serious allegation to make about a fellow Wiki. I wrote a page on the
Irish Potato famine which became rather controversial with two people. One
of them threatened to revert any changes I made, and make sure I could not
revert his changes back.
He rewrote one section of the page in a decidedly POV, dodgy historical way.
When I tried to revert, I found that many of the earlier versions had been
vandalised, by him, so as to ensure that either I could not revert to them
or that if I did, the page would be so littered with POVs (his
interpretations of what he thinks my POVs are!) as to be pulled off.
Here's an example of one of the paragraphs vandalised. The changes he made
are in capitals.
One issue which divides the perspective of Ireland on the history of the
Famine from some BOGUS attitudes among the FAKE Irish - living abroad, is
the claim, made by some of the latter, that the Famine amounted to genocide
by the British against the Irish. Few Irish historians accept such a
PATENTLY FALSE definition, which would imply a deliberate policy of
extermination. While all are agreed that the British policies during the
Famine, particularly those applied by the ministry of [[Lord John Russell]],
were somewhat misguided, perhaps ill-informed and frequently
counter-productive, with Professor Joe Lee calling what happened a
'holocaust', [9] Irish, British and American historians of the cailbre of
Professors [[F.S.L. Lyons]], John A. rphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James S.
Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth
Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of A DELIBERATE
POLICY OF genocide. PERHAPS MORE THAN A STRONG BELIEF.
I spotted this paragraph by chance. I saw other dodgy add ons as well. I had
to go back to the version before he began his first of a series of
(seemingly innocent) changes (announcing how he was correcting a spelling or
a grammatical mistake, etc) to find a version that had not been vandalised.
The person responsible, according to the records, is the same person who
threatened to do something; Stevertigo.
What should we do about this? It is one thing to row over interpretation,
but to deliberately vandalise earlier versions so that they cannot be used
or would get pulled as being POV, is astonishing. I know how annoyed many of
us are with 172, but at least (as far as I know) all he does is revert
versions, not vandalise earlier versions as well so that no one can revert
his revertions. I don't fancy having to stand guard over an article most
people are happy with, all because some twat is determined to find some way
of screwing it up
If this is the standard of behaviour that Stevertigo is bringing to Wiki,
then he should be banned.
JT
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You Wrote:
>We got mentioned as a resource for a particular topic in The Straight
Dope.
>Their homepage is http://www.straightdope.com. The recent article I am
>talking about that mentions us is
>http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html
>
>--Qaz
Yes, that's been on the top 20 random "Links for your browsing
pleasure" at http://kottke.org for a few days. I haven't noticed any
surge in anonymous edits to the page, though, so I'm still curious how
many people follow the links.
kq
wikikarma: [[Oman]] and related pages Jan 14 ~ 02:30 UTC
In a message dated 1/7/2003 10:01:05 PM Eastern Standard Time,
cunctator(a)kband.com writes:
> On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 21:20, daniwo59(a)aol.com wrote:
> >We now have an extensive and linked list of imaginary countries, including
> my
> >personal favorite, "Purple Bunny" (I kid you not). Another link is to the
> >Confederate Online States. Will we have an article for each state in the
> >"confederacy" too? I think this is getting a tad excessive. Anyone else
> think
> >so too?
> >
> My question is, so what? Wikipedia is not paper. If you think it's
> excessive, then don't contribute to it.
>
> The real problem is that most of the entries are being written in CIA
> World Factbook style, not Wikipedia style.
>
I would like to think that we are trying to put together a serious
encyclopedia. It has nothing to do with whether we are paper or not.