Sigh. I didn't want to have to come here again, but now I
have no choice. For months, EntmootsOfTrolls has been
harassing me and writing hateful comments on my personal
User page. In the past week this person has gone off the
deep end.
No matter what articles I write on (Marvel comics, Supreme
Power, Norman Corwin, Cathechism, Scientific
Classification, Zionism, Biology, Israel) he keeps on
ranting about me, Zionism and racism. He does this on my
own User page every few hours, which he keeps trying to
turn into a one-man campaign to ban me. After weeks of his
abuse, I can be silent about this no longer.
Consider the following: EntmootsOftrolls denies that he can
be anti-Semitic, while simultaneously baiting me about the
book of Leviticus.
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Zionism_and_racism&diff=12…
"Also, I cannot be anti-Semitic, since, if I was, I would
have to say that *any* attention paid to Jews is unhealthy.
I am not sure you are a Jew anyway, RK. How much of
Leviticus do you follow? ;-) [[User:EntmootsOfTrolls|EofT]]
If that isn't classical Jew-baiting, no such thing exists.
Further, if I recall correctly, we had already agreed that
when sometimes starts talking about the "Zionization of
Wikipedia" or the "Zionpedia" then they are being
anti-Semitic. So consider this:
"I offer User talk:EntmootsOfTrolls/on applying Sharia to
RK as an alternative to the Zionization of Wikipedia. Take
it as you will. EofT 17:12, 21 Aug 2003"
Not only is this anti-Semitic, but certain extremist
interpretations of Sharia (Islamic law) allows for Jews to
put to death for insults to Muslims. EntmootsOfTrools
knows that I am aware of this facet of Sharia. So not only
is this Jew-baiting, but EntmootsOfTrolls is using a veiled
reference to something terrible as his idea of a joke. This
is another reason why I believe that this man may be
obsessed with me, in an unhealthy way.
Either we agree that this kind of thing is prohibited and
we ban this person, or we agree that it is permitted. If
the latter, I will regretfully have to leave Wikipedia, as
I cannot cooperate in good conscience with people if they
approve of such writings. I would never countenance saying
the equivalent things to Muslims, Christians or atheists,
and it is equally wrong here.
With deep concerns,
Robert ("RK")
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One of the goals generally included in the Wiki 1.0 discussion is the creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to have an assumption that lot's of material gets dropped or summarized. I agree with the necessity of that, since paper must be more limited that a hard drive file to be practical. But what about those areas where we have lots more info than a general encyclopedia?
This is a thought about some of the leftover material. I don't mean to imply a well thought out procedure, but a procedure outline sems the most direct way t explain this idea. So, here comes a three step procedure.
1. Complete a list of possible additional paper books to go with the paper Wikipedia 1.0. Examples would be "The Encyclopedia of Rock", "The Enc. of Science Fiction, with Character Ibdex", "Star Trek Encyclopedia", "Enc. of American Biography", etc., etc.
2. When reviewing Wiki articles to include in the paper 1.0, see if a copy goes in any other stacks. For articles droped, put them in their specialized stack.
3. When finished, examine the other stacks to see which have publishable volume and content. Then see if a publisher is interested.
Just a thought....
Thanks, Lou Imholt (LouI at Wiki)
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I'm sending this just to wikien-l rather than wikipedia-l, but it's
sort of a close call. It's just that I think (but correct me if I'm
wrong) that the custom of /ban pages is primarily an en: custom, not
followed elsewhere.
I'm generally opposed to the making of /ban pages as places to discuss
why a person should or should not be banned, and I hope that the
custom will soon fall out of favor. The reason is that I think it
tends to make problems worse instead of better.
It puts people on the defensive, it is a personal attack on them, and
it raises the 'stakes' in disputes in such a way that peaceful
resolution is less likely rather than more likely.
If you need a place to catalog evidence, I'd recommend doing it
privately, on a file on your own computer. When you've got a ton of
goods on someone, email it to me privately if you like. Public
accusations tend to hurt feelings and leave permanent problems. I do
respect confidences, so if you want to complain about something, hey,
I'm here. It's what I do.
Publicly, it'd be fine to post that same evidence right on the
person's user_talk page, but phrased as kindly as you can possibly
stand.
For some jerks, it won't matter if you make a ban page or be nice to
them or what. They'll just be jerks. That's fine, just leave me a
nice clean paper trail of how everyone was nice and kind and this jerk
kept exploding or doing POV things. Then a ban is uncontroversial.
But for some people, the ones who just didn't know how our culture
works, or the ones who are difficult personalities but willing to try
to keep themselves under control, I think a kinder approach will be a
lot more effective.
As an example of something that I really didn't like to see, someone
set up a page the other day where other people could vote on banning
someone. Well, that's just going to anger them more, and anyhow, we
don't vote on bans anyway. We never have, and if we were going to do
that, we'd have to have a huge discussion over the best way to do it,
etc. There's a huge mess of thorns there.
In short, I'm asking (and this is a 'please' in the sense of a genuine
request, not a veiled command!) that we discontinue this practice.
--Jimbo
Jimbo wrote:
>I'd probably like it best if it said something like
>"It is generally considered courteous to let people
>who have worked on the page know that it might
>be deleted, either by putting a note on their talk
>page or by putting a note on the page itself that
>says something like this..."
Done. The text on the policy page now says;
<blockquote>
When you list a page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion that you think will be
listed for the entire 7 days -- i.e., a page that won't be deleted
immediately -- it is generally considered courteous to let people who have
worked on or read the page know that it might be deleted. The suggested way
to do this is to place the following or similar notice above the page's
content:
....
</blockquote>
--mav
Rick wrote:
>Although mav seems highly upset that I complained,
>even getting angry that I actually had the temerity to
>bring the matter to the mailing list.
If you are going to spread misinformation then please don't make it so obvious
(since I already mentioned this in my first reply); I got angry not because
you posted this to the mailing list, but because you posted the /same/
question in four different places in quick succession and I was following
each and responding to each. That got old real fast.
And we could have solved this all on a single talk page; I said "must" when I
shouldn't have after reading a statement on a policy page that said "please".
To me "please" on a policy page means that if you don't do it you won't get
banned, but you really should do it nonetheless. This is probably an artifact
of my very Conservative Christian/"Children should be seen and not heard"
upbringing where people in authority often say "please" in order to sound
nice but you are still expected to comply as if it were a request (unless the
please is highly qualified - weird, I know).
For example, I wouldn't dare say no to my step dad if he asked me to "please"
get him a glass of water (or search for the TV remote *he* lost.. er, opps -
I'm not bitter ;), or say no to my youth leader who asked us to "please"
quiet down or "please" don't make faces at each other and laugh while we
should be praying to God to save our pathetic souls (obviously I'm still
recovering from the whole experience).
Besides, I wasn't even the person who added that statement to the policy page
in the first place! And the person who added it did so by moving the text
from the non-policy VfD page; thus he inadvertently changed its relative
importance by placing it on a policy page. I simply wasn't aware of that - I
just read the statement as it was on the policy page and assumed it was an
established policy (it was, in fact, on that page for at least several
weeks).
If you had just pointed that out then I would have fixed the error. But
instead of assuming good faith on my part or even giving me a chance to
respond, you deemed it necessary to post four critical messages in four
different places.
Can you see why I might get defensive? So, can we put this to a rest now? The
page says "please" and we all know what that means now.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Toby wrote:
>Indeed he would, which is why it strikes me as
>especially odd in this case that mav was seeming to
>impose such a dramatic change like this.
It was on the policy page; I didn't put it there. But
when I read it I thought it was a good idea,
especially since I just dealt with the "full moon
cycle" fiasco where a perfectly valid article was
almost deleted and there wasn't a notice placed on the
page to indicate that the page was marked for
deletion. If there had been then somebody who cared
about the article may have defended it before the 7
days were up.
Also, the original statement was on the VfD page. In
that context "please" really means "please", but when
the same statement was moved to the policy page (NOT
BY ME!!!!), it has a bit more weight behind it. You
will note that I ''did not'' change the policy page;
just over-interpreted its meaning and repeated that
over-interpretation on several user talk pages and
yes, at the top of the VfD page.
I'm sorry I misinterpreted this - now will everybody
please stop talking ill of me? For god's sake I only
had the best of intentions and was trying to prevent
valid articles from getting deleted. What the heck is
wrong with trying to make sure the author and any
reader of an article are informed that a page is
listed for deletion?
How hard is it to write above the article's text:
"This page is listed on [[Votes for deletion]]"?
Heck, I do that just to get to the VfD page; its
easier than even creating a redirect.
Are people a) too lazy or b) don't want to invite
people who might actually care about the article to
the debate?
If not policy, then it certainly is a decent thing to
do (especially considering the huge size of our VfD
page; things are getting lost in the buzz).
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Nicholas Knight wrote:
>And these written policies are apparently developed
>in back rooms with no input from the community.
>Convenient for you until you realize it goes directly
>against your "policy" of forcing openness upon the
>unwashed masses.
No, they are almost always developed in the open by documented consensus and
by people who reasonably and in good faith interpret and codify our best
practices. It is my opinion, whoever codified this rule was writing down the
best practice of leaving deletion notices on articles to be deleted, because
doing so is in the spirit of our (largely unwritten) polices of openness and
transparency. Otherwise some authors may not know why their article was
deleted. We aren't talking about a lot of work here compared with the
potential avoidance of needless ill will.
For example, an article called [[Fumocy]] was recently listed on VfD without
having a VfD notice placed on the article. A week passed and nobody spoke up
for the article. I noticed that this apparently well-researched article was
listed and I tried to confirm the title; I couldn't. I then tried to confirm
some of the information on the page; I could. Apparently the author (a
professional astronomer) and a few of his friends wrote the article using a
brand new term for "full moon cycle" that is not yet (nor may never be)
accepted by the scientific community.
Luckily instead of deleting the article I moved it to the author's userspace
and then later found out all the details. The author, however, was a bit
miffed that there wasn't /any/ notice left on the article that it was about
to be deleted; if a notice had been there, then anybody who knew about the
subject could have argued for keeping the article based on the content
(although the title is wrong). If however, I deleted the article, the author
would not have known why, and the readers likewise would have been denied the
opportunity to defend the article. That is, unless they read every entry
submited to the VfD page; but who has time or want to do that?
IMO, the loss of even one article like this is worse than having 10 crappy
articles slip by our destructo beams. Fairness sometimes requires a bit of
work (of course, in retrospect, whoever wrote the policy to begin with could
have provided a bit more by the way of informing everybody about it; if for
no other reason to ensure that it is followed more-so than not).
>What would have been wrong with the "admin" giving
>some notice before he made what some view as a
>unilateral policy change? Or would that have been too
>inconvenient, since people might disagree?
And is it too inconvenient to leave a deletion notice on an article listed on
VfD because somebody who actually cares about the article might disagree? Two
way street.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Rick wrote:
> I was told by mav, out of the blue, that I
> MUST do what the policy says, or my inputs
> on the VfD page will be deleted. Not the articles
> I put on the page, but my comments on the VfD
> page themselves.
I'm sorry if you interpreted it that way - but I did not say that! I said the
/article/ will not get deleted (my focus was on the deadline; I admit that
without a time qualifer that sentence gives the wrong impression). I should
have been more clear; what I was planning on doing is moving entries that did
not have the notice on the page to a later date and then add the notice. Thus
the clock gets reset in order to give the author of the page and any
interested passerbys to the page time to discuss the deletion proposal. Fair
and open.
LDan wrote:
>What Mav is doing, IMO, is the most, I hate to
>use the term, unwiki thing so far.
You don't know what wiki is then; as Brion pointed out the fact that some
people have the power to delete and undelete when most people don't, we
should take reasonable steps to inform people who might care about the listed
page that it is about to be deleted. The easiest way to do this is to place a
simple notice on the page itself; you don't even have to copy the boilerplate
because it is so easy to remember and type:
"Listed on [[votes for deletion]]"
Easier than even a redirect.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
> On Wed 08/20, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>On my shelf I have "The Timetables of History" which does the same thing
(but only to 1990) in 631 pages. What would be unique and distinctive >about a Wikimedia publication of this sort?
Two unique properties: Wiki versionwould be available under GFDL, and could be abailable online. :)
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Having commented on the great controversy of who changed the policy,
I thought that I might comment on the best practice itself.
This is taken from a recent post by me to
[[Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion#Listed for deletion notice]],
so please reply there:
I'm strongly sympathetic to listing the deletion notices,
but I understand that some people have objected to the practice
(preferring to simply blank the page) on the grounds that:
1* Adding the notice more work than blanking the page.
2* A blanked page tells the software in various contexts
that there's no content there.
My suggestion: Redirect to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion,
which explains everything! That page would need a little text at the top
to explain the redirect, but the objections above are resolved:
1* Since you have to go to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion anyway
to list the page, typing in the redirect (a little work)
saves you work later (you can just click to get to VfD);
2* The software knows that redirects have no content.
So who has those objections, and do you think
that a redirect would work better?
-- Toby