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>To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality
>Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:56:20 -0700
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>
>It strikes me as increasingly obvious that some concerted effort to be as
>NPOV as possible on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is necessary, as it's
>starting to be one of the more frequent edit wars, and distributed
>throughout the wiki, even in places you might not expect.
>
>Two issues in particular that have come up lately, one from each side:
>
>1. [[User:BL]] is mass-adding the contents of palestineremembered.com --
>massive lists with hundreds of subpages comprising every village (defined
>as 10 or more people) destroyed in the 1948 war, every "massacre" (defined
>as 10 or more people) committed or purportedly committed during that war
>(little effort is made to distinguish), and a whole host of other
>information that's difficult if not impossible to verify.
>
>Even if it weren't for the difficulty in verifying this information, it
>strikes me as somewhat odd that we'd have 300 pages dedicated to Arabs
>killed in 1948, and only a single page dedicated to the Armenian genocide,
>or the Pontian Genocide, or the Hutu-Tutsi genocide, and so on. I don't
>think it'd be a good idea to add 10,000 pages or so, one for each village
>("village" defined as 10 people or more) destroyed in each of those
>conflicts. And if we're going to have a separate page for every instance
>of civilian deaths during a war, WW2 alone would be another 10,000 pages or
>so.
>
>2. [[User:RK]] is, as is probably obvious, somewhat of a pro-Israeli
>activist, and is becoming difficult to clean up. The latest thing I've
>noticed is him adding 2-paragraph-long attacks on Arab anti-Semitism to
>articles such as [[George Washington]] and [[Benjamin Franklin]], in the
>guise of "defending" their "tarnished" reputations against charges of
>anti-Semitism stemming from little-known fabricated quotes.
>
>Not to single out these two users in particular; they're the two that come
>to mind at first. And these two issues in particular are also being dealt
>with on talk pages. But it's becoming clear that it will be very difficult
>to catch all of these, so perhaps some more concerted effort is needed.
>I'm not sure exactly what to propose, but it seems as a minimum we need a
>group of several people who are not particularly partial to either side --
>but who are knowledgeable about the issues -- to essentially police
>(hopefully in as unconfrontational a way as possible) this sort of stuff.
>The problem is that those most knowledgeable and interested in spending a
>great deal of time writing articles on these topics are often those who are
>most partisan to one side or the other.
>
>Suggestions?
>
>-Mark
>
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Erik wrote:
>Vicki-
>> Can someone ban user 205.188.xx.xx; it's Michael
>> again and he's going after Hephaestos.
>
>Michael's edits should be auto-reverted when they are
>identified. I hard-banned a previous incarnation
>because he started moving pages around, which is more
>difficult to revert. But if he only makes edits, it
>is more efficient for us to stick to
>reverting/deleting all edits made under
>one pseudonym than to always have to figure out his
>account du jour.
But we have been doing this for months already - he
simply will not get the point! It is high time we
complained to AOL about this person. If that doesn't
work after a couple of trys then the whole IP range
that he uses should be blocked (and we should warn AOL
that this might happen). We should, however, allow
approved singed-in user accounts to edit from that IP
range (such as User:Danny who uses the same IP block
and anybody new who asks).
On the block notice we can give the AOL abuse email
address to direct complaints in the right direction.
We have already lost Zoe to this *@%! and now he is
going after Hephestos and others by moving their user
pages to "User:Bastard" and similar oh-so-clever
insults. Oh and Michael is already under a HarBan
(meaning all his edits are fair game for reverting and
we ask other users not to resurrect those edits).
I really do not see any other way to deal with this
mental case.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Erik wrote:
>Daniel-
> > But we have been doing this for months already - he
> > simply will not get the point! It is high time we
> > complained to AOL about this person. If that doesn't
> > work after a couple of trys then the whole IP range
> > that he uses should be blocked
>
>This might mean all of AOL. I don't think that's an acceptable option. But
>if you beg me a little, I'll hack our IP blocking code to
>- make IP blocks auto-expire after a while (unless no limit is set), so
>that we can use them more effectively
>- allow sysops to ban newly created accounts for the first 4 weeks or so
>and retrieve the IP address under which they were created.
I'm begging. Please, please purdy please! Although just the thought of banning
all of AOL does tickle my Evil (TM) bone....
And if what you propose doesn't work then we can think about the, well
unthinkable, solution I mentioned.
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
re-last night's blocking, I have since been in contact via email with Jason.
The problem arose because by a twist of fate, Jason was given an IP
previously used by DW and then went straight to edit articles which some of
DW's incarnations had edited in a rather controversial manner. It seemed at
the time rather too much of a coincidence. I and others were highly
suspicious. However even strange coincidences such that these evidently do
occur. The blocking had nothing to do with the opinions being expressed but
were simply because of a previous DW IP going straight of articles
associated with DW, or rather one of his personæ with had added in the past
in various places added references that were, or could be interpreted as,
supportive of paedophilia. (Some comments made at that time were rather
disturbing. If I remember correctly I asked about wiki having any
downloadable images of children. It was presumed at the time that DW, having
been banned for the umptheenth time, had decided to get revenge by trying to
damage wiki by creating the impression to visitors that wiki could be of use
to, or was being used by, paedophiles.)
It was in view of this, and the apparently suspicious coincidence of /that/
IP going to /those/ pages that a block was imposed and all changes which
were presumed to be DW's work, reverted or deleted.
The block has since been removed and some of the changes made reverted.
(Those who made the revertions decided not to reinsert all of Jason's
additions.) I have explained what happened and how it happened to Jason.
I hope that clears up the mystery.
JT
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The question of copyright violations in article histories has come up before. See
about halfway down http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_copyright_issues.
Isis suggested that we keep copyvios in page history, because:
# The page history is an editing tool, not something we "publish"
# It would be good evidence of our procedure in any court case
Is there a list somewhere of legal questions that wikimedia should (eventually) get a
paid legal opinion on?
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper
Appologies if this comes to the list twice I used the wrong address last
time...
This is on VfD but I thought it worth mentioning here.
The article for "pop punk" ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_punk ) was
expanded last week by a new user. He then realised that his work may have
copyright implications and asked for it to be deleted. I reverted to the
stub that was there before he started work, but he asked for the versions in
the history to be deleted too. Presumably a developer could selectively
delete the problem versions, or we could delete the whole thing and then
replace the original stub. The problem with doing that is that the history
would be gone too.
How should we deal with selective deletions of this type? Or am I worrying
too much about the article history?
Regards
sannse
I just whipped up an article on river dolphins (fascinating animals, they).
If that is of interest to anyone, I'd ask that they please give it a look
and see if there's anything that they can add. I'd also appreciate it if
those same wonderful people would look over the articles on the 5
individual species. Thanks a bunch!
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_dolphin
-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri(a)digitalgrapefruit.com
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
-Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
This is on VfD but I thought it worth mentioning here.
The article for "pop punk" ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_punk ) was
expanded last week by a new user. He then realised that his work may have
copyright implications and asked for it to be deleted. I reverted to the
stub that was there before he started work, but he asked for the versions in
the history to be deleted too. Presumably a developer could selectively
delete the problem versions, or we could delete the whole thing and then
replace the original stub. The problem with doing that is that the history
would be gone too.
How should we deal with selective deletions of this type? Or am I worrying
too much about the article history?
Regards
sannse
>What problems are you seeing with the GFDL that the
"Creative Commons"
>license (which I'm not familiar with) would solve?
The main problem I see with the GNU FDL as it stands is
that it demands that any work that uses any of its content
must be released under the same GNU FDL license. However
there are other open content licences out there that people
will be using. So, if some day down the road anyone wants
to mix content from a Creative Commons license or any other
license at all, the work must be released under the GNU
license. So any work I do on a textbook will be limited to
only GNU versions.
It would be as if the work wereforever condemned to be in
its own, propietary format, 100% incompatable with all
other sources and licenses, including all other open
content licenses that I am familiar with.
This will be very inconvenient to Sanford Forte of the
California Open Source Textbook Project and may make any
work we do for his project unusable unless he and all his
people are willing to release everything under the GNU FDL
license.
It is also very inconvenient for me because any work that I
do under the GNU FDL on the wiki is only mine to use under
another license as long as noone else makes any
modification at all to it that I keep. So if I wanted to
release my own work under another, more flexible license, I
would have to go thru the work of eliminating every letter
that wasnt my own. This is hardly the spirit underlying
open content.
Remember that the GNU FDL was created for software, not
open content. And remember that even RMS says that it may
not be the ideal license for open content.
One solution I see would be to create a special version of
the GNU FDL just for open content, or just for Wikipedia.
That way we could decide for ourselves without needing the
rest of the GNU world to go along with it. Or, adapting
another license like one of the Creative Commons ones.
Thats the only way I see that will prevent eternal,
unmixable forks of content.
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