Erik Moeller wrote:
>That's OK, as long as someone explains it to him
>when he complains. If he hadn't used the worst
>possible way to do so (through the BTS), that would
>have happened.
If he had known the page was listed on the VfD page in the first place, then
he would not have had to post anything on the bug reports page. The notice is
real easy - you don't even need to copy a boilerplate;
Listed on [[votes for deletion]]
How hard is that? The name of the link itself indicates the purpose of the
page and that there is a chance to challenge the listing. As an added bonus,
you can even use the resulting link as a very easy way to get to the VfD page
in order to list the page. That is what I do.
>Moral: Remind me to replace "Bug reports" with
>"Contact us" when I'm not in a state of prolonged
>sleep deprivation.
Come on, its not that hard. I've already done this for Wikibooks.
Here is a link;
http://textbook.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Contact_us
You can use that as a basis to create something better for Wikipedia or just
leave the job of improvement to somebody else.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ wikipedia-Bugs-793759 ] POST RECIPIES IS IMPOSIBLE!!!
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 07:05:00 -0700
Summary: POST RECIPIES IS IMPOSIBLE!!!
Initial Comment:
Yestaerday I posted two recipies from Argentina (Locro
and Milanesas) and Today there isn´t it here...
Why?...I need a special authoritation for do it?...and, if
this is real... Where is the free spirit of "Wikipedia"!?!?!?!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
See, this is the kind of stuff I get cluttering up the bug reports queue
when we don't have deletion notices.
I checked the logs, and the pages in question appear to have been posted
in Spanish on the English Wikipedia, and were deleted by Jiang with
reason "not in English" within minutes of their posting. I don't see any
sign that they were ever listed in 'Votes for Deletion', nor that any
attempt was made to contact the author (an anonymous IP with no other
contribs).
They weren't _great_ pages, and both pages had had newbie experiments
dropped in them last year, but summary deletion isn't necessarily the
best thing.
Putting a notice on the pages that they should be moved to
es.wikipedia.org and/or translated into English would have taken just a
few seconds, and may have made a new contributor very pleased and
interested instead of angered and alienated.
(This isn't a criticism directed at Jiang, it's just a note on how this
now very widespread click-delete-and-forget philosophy doesn't look very
friendly from the other side.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Seen on the pump:
> Please, just ignore those bogus copyright claims. The painting is in
the public domain and the digitization process is not
creative.—Eloquence <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence>
Does that mean that I can take a book out of the library on, say,
Constable, and scan the reproductions of his paintings for wikipedia?
Could the copyright gurus pronounce on this please?
>
>>Toby wrote:
>>Furthermore, you apparently protected the page to win an edit war
>>that you were taking place in.
>
>I did nothing of the sort and how dare you suggest it. An anonymous user
>appeared and added in highly POV rascist material into a page. The material
>could not be substantiated and the language used suggested it was someone
>trying in a very blatent way to POV the article. I reverted the addition
>and notified those who had worked on the article as I suspected they might
>be better placed to deal with the issue. The user in question proceeded to
>re-insert his anti-zionist rant and verbally abuse everyone else who
>touched it. I checked his list of contributions to try to ascertain whether
>this was a rather naive newbie with a problem of grasping NPOV, or a
>vandal. (The page in question had been subject to nakedly sectarian
>vandalism for a while.) All the evidence I could find was of a user who had
>made other contributions that had been seen as vandalism and had been
>reverted elsewhere. When he continued abusing other users, in the belief
>that he was a vandal I blocked him.
>
>He then came back as a new IP added in the same POV stuff and called people
>''fucking morons'', ''fucking hypocrites, etc
>
>Among his talk page comments were
>
><Sarcasm> Yes, I'll admit it: everyone here on Wikipedia is a paid
>propogandist for the worldwise Zionist colonialist genocidal conspiracy!
>That's why we have articles on Israeli terrorism and Deir Yassin massacre,
>and why the Palestinian page doesn't even *contain* the words "terror" or
>"terrorist" or "terrorism". </Sarcasm> Look, there are lots of facts in
>the world. It's a fact that the Israelis assassinated Muhammad Sadr, the
>Islamic Jihad leader in Hebron. It's a fact that afte that, two Palestinian
>militant groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, claimed responsibility for a
>deliberate attack on a civililan bus that killed quite a few people,
>including many children. It's a fact that the Israelis then killed Abu
>Shanab, one of the founders of Hamas, in the Gaza strip.
>
>I have disagreed with some users on the page who have been pushing a less
>than NPOV pro-Israel stance. I reverted and requested the banning of a user
>who inserted rascist anti-Israel attacks all over wiki. I have regularly
>reworded mentions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the current events
>page to remove one-sided comments from either side and ensure equality of
>language and interpretation. I was NOT involved in an edit war with this IP
>contributor. I was simply doing what I was doing with /everyone else/,
>ensuring that NPOV standards were followed. The behaviour and threats of
>the user in question pretty much shows that he was not some poor newbie
>wrongly treated but someone determined to vandalise articles.
>
>/If/ I had abused my sysop powers to 'win' against an opponent, I would not
>have drawn attention to the fact by contacting other users, by putting a
>note on the Vandalism page and sent a note about it around on the wiki
>list, would I?
>
>I stand over my decisions and resent your gross and dishonest
>misrepresention of them.
>
>JT
>
In the above message, I inadvertently included a mistake. In a rush to leave
(I was already 20 minutes late to meet friends), I cut the wrong section.
The above comment marked <sarcasm> was /not/ the bit I meant to put on the
page. That was from Noel who was criticising the anonymous user and, lest
their be any confusion, I am not IN ANY WAY associating Noel with the
behaviour of the anonymous user. I should have cut the line just above it
from the anonymous user, which read
>>> The more you ugly baboons try to control things and hide the truth,
>>> the more you contribute to your own perennial replusiveness.
That comment pretty much sums up the attitude, mentality and contributions
of the blocked user. It shows that Toby's presumption that the anonymous was
just some niave and misguided newbie is wide of the mark. And as I said
earlier, I stand by my decision to block him.
And again, apologies to Noel for cutting /his/ sarcastic put down to the
neanderthal ejjit who wrote the above and suggesting that it was part of the
bigot's comments. It wasn't. As we Irish say in gaelic, ''Tá brón orm'' (I
am sorry).
JT
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
There are now six Wikipedia pages about banning me, most
started by EntmootsOfTrolls. Worse, he is now getting a lot
of support from Martin (MyRedDice) and Stevertigo (who also
simultaneously claims to be support me a Sysop; he thinks
that no one noticed he has been engaged in both campaigns
simulatneously.)
None of these pages are about discussing a ban. This is
about an enraged and unstable individual who is engaged in
full-press harassment campaign. And some of you here are
egging him on.
For shame.
Please stop the people engaged in this harssment and
vandalism. I don't know what else to say. Otherwise, you
are making this this place a violently hateful community,
one whose reputation will only suffer.
In sadness at the vast amount of hatred,
Robert (RK)
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
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> From: "james duffy" <jtdirl(a)hotmail.com>
> An anonymous user appeared ... The user in question proceeded to
> re-insert his anti-zionist rant and verbally abuse everyone else who
> touched it. ... When he continued abusing other users .. I blocked him.
> He then came back as a new IP added in the same POV stuff and called
> people ''fucking morons'', ''fucking hypocrites, etc
> Among his talk page comments were
>> <Sarcasm> Yes, I'll admit it: everyone here on Wikipedia is a paid
>> propogandist for the worldwise Zionist colonialist genocidal
>> conspiracy! That's why we have articles on Israeli terrorism and Deir
>> Yassin massacre, and why the Palestinian page doesn't even *contain*
>> the words "terror" or "terrorist" or "terrorism". </Sarcasm>
Ahh, you seem to have been (in part) tripped up by a confusing edit. That's
not stuff added by an anonymous user, that's some stuff I added *replying* to
the anonymous poster, which got separated from my signature line (a bit
further down) by an intervening comment added later (by Cema). (I have now
put the two parts of my comment back together.) The anon poster said:
>>> The more you ugly baboons try to control things and hide the truth,
>>> the more you contribute to your own perennial replusiveness.
and I was trying to point out to them that the Wikipedia was hardly a
one-sided, pro-Israel, site.
In your excerpt, you also left out the next two lines of my comment (which
were in front of the split):
>> What this all *means* is subject to debate. But adding clearly
>> erroneous claims .. isn't doing any good.
I think you need to take a little longer reading things, because in this case
you have somehow completely misunderstood a fairly straightforward comment; I
would have thought it was obvious from the content that that was *not* the
anonymous poster.
Noel
PS: I didn't realize that sarcasm wasn't allowed on a Talk page. I *did* flag
it, for goodness' sake.
J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
> First, some pages (e.g. Israel) will probably just have
to permanently be
> protected. Well, maybe you need some sort of intermediate
level of
> protection; e.g. only editable by someone who a) has an
account, b) has
> it for a month, and c) has made a threshold level of
accepted edits. But
> allowing anyone, even someone who's not logged in, to
edit them is just
> going to turn into a constant edit war.
I agree with you and Jimbo. This is an excellent idea. It
doesn't prevent anyone (except trolls) from joining us, or
from editing articles. It is an unintrusive way of
preventing damage while still maintaining our principles.
> Blocking IP addresses will work for a while to stop that,
but if it doesn't
> maybe you'll have to disallow all edits from
non-logged-in users, and maybe
> even go to a system were a new user is watched for a
while to make sure they
> aren't a vandal.
At the moment, we do not need to do this. The number of
trolls is small compared to the number of serious
contributors and newbies.
However, over time the number of people visting Wikipedia
will become huge, and eventually vandalism will become a
problem that will take all of our time and effort to deal
with. Eventually, we will probably need to implement this
suggestion.
Every day Wikipedia becomes more and more well known, and
the use of the Internet worldwide is growing by leaps and
bounds. We would be naive to underestimate the threat posed
by the less than 1% of visitors who are out to cause havoc.
Less than 1% of a huge number, is still a very large
number.
Robert (RK)
=====
"I prefer a wicked person who knows he is wicked, to a righteous person who knows he is righteous".
The Seer of Lublin [Jacob Isaac Ha-Hozeh Mi-Lublin, 1745-1815]
__________________________________
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> From: "james duffy" <jtdirl(a)hotmail.com>
> A problem is exists with one IP user who continually tried to add in a
> couple of paragraphs to [[Israel]]
> ...
> I am going to gather my friends for a whole range of contributions if
> you keep forcing your POV. don't delete facts.
> ...
> Any suggestions about deal with this bigot?
Sigh. I have a *very* bad feeling about this - the same kind of bad feeling I
had the day Cantor and Siegel sent their first spam, and wouldn't stop when
asked to.
As the Wikipedia becomes more and more widely known, you're just going to
have a higher and higher probability of including in that group some of the
many humans who are losers. And, as the aftermath of Cantor and Siegel
proved, that effect gets worse, not better, as the community grows.
I'm not happy about this. I got the same feeling from the Wikipedia that I
had in the early days of the Internet, this wonderful group of people who all
had a positive attitude. And we all know where that went...
Look, don't get me wrong, I hope I'm misguided here, or being pessimistic, or
something. Maybe the Wikipedia community will be able to withstand the losers.
But maybe it won't; and maybe there's a reason the world doesn't have many
large, working anarchies - because they don't work.
So, much as it saddens me (which is no doubt not a fraction as bad as it
saddens those of you who've been around a lot longer), you might have to
think about introducing *even more* controls in the Wikipedia than the few
you have already - and maybe a fair number of them.
Don't be afraid to add mechanisms to keep the losers under control - because
if you don't, they will destroy the good stuff you *are* trying to create.
If so, I beg of you to take some lessons from the Internet, where we e.g.
tried too long to keep email open - with the results that you're all seeing
today in your inboxes. How I wish we'd added more teeth, back when.
Imagine the worst - because it will surely happen. (And realize that some of
the people you're dealing with see nothing wrong with deliberately killing
kids - against which trashing some electrons is very small beer indeed.)
So, with that background, here are some practical suggestions.
First, some pages (e.g. Israel) will probably just have to permanently be
protected. Well, maybe you need some sort of intermediate level of
protection; e.g. only editable by someone who a) has an account, b) has
it for a month, and c) has made a threshold level of accepted edits. But
allowing anyone, even someone who's not logged in, to edit them is just
going to turn into a constant edit war.
Now you need to think: how will the vandals respond to that? If I were him,
and I were determined to harm the Wikipedia for perceived hostility towards
Palestinians (and there's a lot of anger boiling around there), I'd probably
start to vandalize random pages.
Blocking IP addresses will work for a while to stop that, but if it doesn't
maybe you'll have to disallow all edits from non-logged-in users, and maybe
even go to a system were a new user is watched for a while to make sure they
aren't a vandal.
But my overall message is "think about the worst case and try and plan for
it". Sadly, I expect it will probably come to pass. But if you think about
it, and discuss it, way up-front, when you have the time and leisure to do so
in a calm and leisurely way, that will be best. Trying to fix it in the heat
of the moment will produce VfD-notice-debate^9.
I hope this email didn't depress you all too badly. The Wikipedia is a really
cool thing, and I am quite it will succeed in really making an impact. (I
wouldn't be working so hard on it if I didn't think so! I'm too ancient to
have this much energy without good cause! :-)
But you do need to protect yourselves.
Noel
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com>
>> Blocking IP addresses will work for a while to stop that, but if it
>> doesn't maybe you'll have to disallow all edits from non-logged-in
>> users
> I'm opposed to that, for as long as we can possibly stand it.
> .. we have to be really vigilant about not letting our fear of
> vandalism turn into a lockdown or a turn towards closedness.
Ah, I was not disagreeing with you on this; I would only suggest actually
implementing more restrictive access policies (like these ideas) when a
problem *actually happened*, one that couldn't be solved any other way (note
I did say "if it doesn't .. stop [the vandalism]").
I only want you all to ii) be aware that the world contains lots of losers,
and you might want to start musing. slowly and unheatedly, about how you all
would deal with their worst-case antagonistic behaviours, and ii) don't be
afraid to take whatever steps are needed to save the Wikipedia. But I see from
this:
> I've always said that my goal, my dream, is a free encyclopedia. The
> 'experiment in anarchy' is secondary at best. So as soon as vandals
> start to gain the upper hand, we'll do whatever has to be done.
that you're already there on ii)!
On a more upbeat note (to balance my earlier doom and gloom :-) I should not
that you all have a much, much easier problem domain, technically.
If we were to try and fix email's many problems today, it would be a massive
job, because SMTP is implemented in every machine far and wide. If you decide
you need to change something to make Wikipedia "more secure" (alas), you just
change the server, and you're done. Now if you can only get everyone onboard
once you have to do so... :-)
Noel