WikiEN-l November 2004

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

97 participants
111 discussions

Re: Opinion of the many?
by Sheldon Rampton 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

Can someone please ban the trolls? Please? I've got better things to do with my time than read R.E. Broadley's attempts to needle RickK or the rantings of some "iridologist" with a personality problem. --Sheldon Rampton

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Fwd: email from Irismeister
by David Gerard 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

I have no idea why Irismeister is sending this to me in particular. Forwarded without comment, hard as it was to resist. - d. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Irismeister <danjipa(a)freemail.iris-ward.com> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:54:56 GMT Subject: Wikipedia e-mail To: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> As per your choice of banning me for one year, and our "agreement" concerning such an unwise move, please find attached the text of my first legal action. This was started during the day of my ban. And the fronts of the huge legal battle that has started against your dictatorship are multiple and wide. Ten individual FTC Consumer Complaint Forms have been filed on behalf of prominent public figures nominally, against each of the offending sysops on the Wikipedia list. You'll find the scope of the problem by checking the legal records and papers with an attorney of law of your choice, as per rn.ftc.gov policies, or only by waiting patiently for legal papers coming in your own physical mailbox. You will be informed individually and in due time of your rights and of your "space of legal opportunity" with each of the following move in the list. Let us say, safely, that a lesson in modesty will be gently and legally taught. You no longer have the opportunity to stop the legal action because of your vote on my ban. Finally, a word of wisdom: let us hope that, to the very least, you'll think twice before your next movement as an admin, sysop, or only editor. We are all real human beings, David, not products of your imagination :O) Wikipedia.org, a product of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. promotes media violence, violence as a mean to settle intellectual dispute, and violence as a culture - notably in the form of libel, abuse of sysop power, censorship and overt insults. Moreover, Wikipedia.org, a product of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. promotes disinformation, pornography and disgraceful displays of pornographic images under cover from arcane "company policies". Perhaps the long experience of its founder, Mr Jimbo Wales, a former CEO of Bomis and a leader of pornographic industry, explains such disgraceful, offensive company policies. As an author, an editor, user and contributor, and a medical doctor myself, I have repeteadly and publicly informed the founder, sysops, administrators and editors of Wikipedia of their enormous bias, media violence, promotion of disinformation, promotion of media violence, libel and unjustified public insults - all to no avail. My contributions have been censored, and traces! of public dispute have been wiped out. They are available as track records in public repositories, at trusted third parties, complete with the list, addresses and legal files and profiles of offenders. Dr Dan Jâpa, MD, PhD Second irismeister, danjipa(a)freemail.iris-ward.com

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Dealing with corporate propagandists
by Mark Pellegrini 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

I had an ephiphany today. I saw the write up on Firefox on the main page. It got me thinking - what is to stop Microsoft, which (a) funds fallacious studies showing that its products are more stable/secure/cheaper (studies which everyone knows,are laughably wrong) and (b) has a history of astroturfing (" formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous and populist reactions to a politician, product, service, event, etc") - what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia? I'm going to make a prediction. Within the next 6 to 18 months, we're goint to start seeing organized corporate astroturfing on Wikipedia. They've already started doing it to blogs (EA even went to far as to run a false blog, which posed as a beta developer for one of their upcoming games). I'm not talking about the little stuff we see already - I'm talking about PR drones register wikipedia accounts, making large contributions over a long time to a large number of articles with no attempt at NPOV, citing ludicriously biased studies, writing glowing product recommendations (or conversely, we could start seeing negative propaganda). I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen. --Mark

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CheeseDreams/Cultural and Historical Background of Jesus
by steven l. rubenstein 30 Nov '04

30 Nov '04

As some of you know there is an endless debate on this article's talk page. Sometimes, there is actually constructive discussion. I am in a conflict with CheeseDreams that is under mediation. But I turn to all of you for hopefully immediate aid on another issue. As the talk page gets too long, CheeseDreams summarizes the discussion. She claims to do this to save space as "some editors are verbose." There are two problems with this. First, it is CheeseDreams who does the summarizing, so in effect she has taken it upon herself to represent all parties in any dispute. Second, the summaries themselves take up a huge amount of space. John Kenney has already questioned this practice (which I don't think is common). I just archived a huge amount of material and asked CheeseDreams to stop summarizing. But she is currently summarizing. She is summarizing the last two days worth of discussion. This is ridiculous -- we should archive old material, but keep new material -- material that is still under discussion -- available. CheeseDreams' method of summarizing doesn't really save a lot of space, but it does rewrite in CheeseDreams' words what other people are saying. I know CheeseDreams is not intending to vandalize the page, and I can't call this vandalism. But it is wrong, horribly wrong. I am not calling for her to be banned or blocked. I am a party to a dispute under mediation and can't do anything. But I ask someone to do something about this obsessive "summarizing." Please. Someone. Help. Steven L. Rubenstein Associate Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bentley Annex Ohio University Athens, Ohio 45701

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Survey of why wikipedians edit
by John Collison 30 Nov '04

30 Nov '04

I am conducting a short survey as part of a project on different methods of building online projects. I mentioned this a while back on wikipedia-l. I would greatly appreciate it if any wikipedians could fill in the survey and send it back to me. Sorry to be a hassle. THE SURVEY: NOTE: This survey only concerns EN wikipedia, do not factor in any work on other languages in this. Q1: How long have you been editing wikipedia? A: Q2: How many hours per week do you spend on wikipedia? A: Q3: Do you write professionally? A: Q4: What is your current employement? A: Q5: Why do you work on wikipedia for nothing when you could be paid to write elsewhere? A: Q6: If people were paid to work on Wikipedia, would you stay or would you devote your time to something else? A: Q7: Do you think people should be paid to work on wikipedia? A: Q8: Do you think developers should be paid? A: Q9: Do you think reward schemes and competitions (like Danny's contest) on a small scale to get people to write more, better etc. should be used on wikipedia? A: Note: You can answer yes to as many of the following questions as you like. Q10: Do you work on wikipedia for the enjoyement of seeing your work online? A: Q11: Do you work on wikipedia for the satisfaction that you have created something good and it can be used by others? A: Q12:Do you work on wikipedia because it you enjoy interacting with others? A: Q13: Do you edit wikipedia for any reasons other than the ones mentioned above also? A: Thanks for your time. John Collison (Ludraman)

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Re: RickK ?????
by Daniel P.B.Smith 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

> From: R E Broadley <20041111(a)stardate.freeserve.co.uk> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] user RickK - vote rigging > Hi, > > Someone else spotted RickK up to no good, and referred to the following > on his talk page:- > > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? > title=Wikipedia%3AVotes_for_deletion%2FBlogsome&diff=7896162&oldid=7894 > 630 > > The diff above is all by RickK in one edit, so I can't see how he can > possibly claim he thought the vote was by an anonymous person. Having reviewed the diff, I'm completely puzzled. I don't understand what you think the problem is, and I don't understand how this is "vote rigging." -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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ABC News: Silicon Insider on Robert McHenry
by Red Drag Diva 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=88655 "Finally, as long as Mr. McHenry is going to end on a crude analogy, so will I: using a traditional encyclopedia is like owning a nice, well-built automobile that, unfortunately, has the seats and mirrors locked in place, the radio frozen on one station, the throttle welded in one position -- and the car is capable of only driving to a limited number of places predetermined by the manufacturer. Frankly, I'd rather pee in a public toilet." *mreee-oww!* - d.

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RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: A user seems to have spent the day reverting articles which appeared to be legitamite edits
by KNOTT, T 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

Some admins watch recent changes, and have vandalism in progress on their watchlists. Other don't. Rick is one of the former. In fact, he deals with vandalism a lot! His user page regularly gets vandalised, and his talk page regularly gets messages from vandals that he has blocked (Who are trying to troll him, or merely expressing an opinion about his sexuality, or his mothers sexuality etc ;-). He probably mistook you for one. Theresa -----Original Message----- From: R E Broadley [mailto:20041111@stardate.freeserve.co.uk] Sent: 26 November 2004 11:37 Cc: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: A user seems to have spent the day revertingarticles which appeared to be legitamite edits And the fact that he deleted the contents of his talk page as soon as I'd started this discussion with him also seemed suspicious to me. Why would he delete our discussion unless he had something to hide? R E Broadley wrote: > Tim, > > One of us is interpreting the diff displays backwards. I thought it > was RickK doing the deleting, (including the deletion of the asterisk). > > I shall double-check. > > Apologies in advance if it was me reading it wrong, although from one > of the comments RickK said to me, he did actually confirm that he was > removing stuff, which reinforced my belief that I was interpreting the > diff logs correctly. > > Regards, > Edmund > > Tim Starling wrote: > >> R E Broadley wrote: >> >>> When I went back to the users talk page, I noticed that they had >>> deleted >>> their talk page, along with the recent discussion on the reverts, but >>> thanks to Wikipedia history, I managed to capture the URL of a version >>> where the discussion was still there. It is here below:- >>> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:RickK&oldid=7859165 #Articles_reverted_but_no_reason_given >> >> >> >> >> >> The reverts in question look fine to me. The edits were: >> >> * Unexplained removal of text saying that the gospels were "compiled >> from a much larger literature in 327AD under the orders of >> Constantine the Great", rolled back >> * Sneaky removal of an asterisk, breaking a bulleted list, rolled back >> * Unexplained deletion of a paragraph, rolled back >> >> This isn't a violation of policy. I think it's odd that Rebroad >> characterised these edits as follows: >> >> "I appreciate there were spelling mistakes that were obvious to you, >> but I'm guessing they weren't obvious to the person who put some >> effort into adding the additional information. And if you felt it was >> biased, couldn't you have let them know this also?" >> >> RickK was not correcting spelling or removing biased information, he >> was reverting deletion. I think he was well within his rights to >> remove this complaint from his talk page. I wouldn't mind if the >> complainant was removed from this mailing list either. >> >> -- Tim Starling >> >> _______________________________________________ >> WikiEN-l mailing list >> WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >> > > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Re: RickK: How do you get from a mistake to "up to no good" and "vote rigging?"
by Daniel P.B.Smith 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

> > Well, I'm not the only one who understood, the person who left the > original comment in his talk page > [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk: > RickK&oldid=7921955#Teehee] > said "I don't know if you realised, but at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion>, you cut > User:Vague Rant <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vague_Rant>'s > comment > in half and declared that the first half of his comment was by an anon > and was therefore not counted". So, you're saying he made a careless mistake? That's the big deal? Comments like RickK's are advisory to whatever sysop acts on the VfD. Unless he actions the item himself he doesn't control what votes "are counted." Secondly, if you advise a sysop to disregard half of a comment, even if the sysop accepts all of RickK's recommendations uncritically, that isn't going to affect the vote, is it? Third, VfD discussions are based on consensus, which means that exact vote counts are not supposed to be and usually are not important. It's not like we're talking about hanging chads. And, finally, the reason VfD discussions last for as long as they do is so that mistakes can be corrected. How do you get from point A), an arguably careless mistake which _even if accepted uncritically by the acting sysop_ would not have affected the vote count, which isn't very important anyway, to point B), "up to no good" and "vote rigging?" -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/

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JoeM hard-ban
by Joe M 28 Nov '04

28 Nov '04

I am ready to put aside comments that many users regard as offensive and start editing in a neutral manner. I want to use this post on the mailing list to apologize to all the users I have offended so far. I hope that I can strike up a positive discussion on the mailing list that can lead to the lifting of my hard ban. -User:JoeM FREEDOM SHALL BE DEFENDED --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard.

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WikiEN-l November 2004