The arbitration committee, consisting of 11 members, was prodded by me
to take a vote on a short-term procedure to take care of some pressing
matters immmediately, an "emergency session" in Martin's terminology.
I proposed a voting procedure, and with some small modifications, it
was approved by them 7-0. The other 4 may still vote, but of course
the existence of a majority is sufficient to get us moving right
along.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_policy
The deal is this:
1. The Arbitration committee will continue their careful
deliberations towards a more permanent policy, and when they get it
done, we'll have an open community vote "yes or no" on what they've
come up with.
2. In the meantime, they will handle emergency cases that I refer to
them. It is understood by all that they are merely acting in
my stead now, so as to begin the transfer of power in an orderly and
timely fashion.
3. The voting procedure for the committee is as follows:
There being 11 members of the commmittee currently,
a. An appeal to the abritration committee will be officially heard
upon referral by Jimbo and approval by any 4 committee members. That
is, 4 votes to hear a case will result in the case being heard.
b. Upon those 4 votes, a final decision will be made within 1 week.
c. A quorum of the committee will consist of a majority of members,
i.e. at least 6 members must vote within that week, or no decision is
made, and no action is taken.
d. When a quorum has been reached, then after 1 week is up, or after
enough members have voted such that the conclusion is inevitable, the
majority decision will be the arbitration committee decision.
--Jimbo
Kent wrote:
> I remember reading somewhere on Wikipedia: that it'd be really nice for
> publicity if we could have a research paper about Wikipedia published in
> a peer-reviewed academic journal. I'm currently a history undegraduate
> at the University of Texas - Austin and would like to "spam" some of our
> school's professors about this. Is there an existing pre-formed letter
> for this purpose or should I author my own? Have there been other
> attempts to solicit academic research by other Wikipedians? To what
> degree of success?
I am currently writing a students research paper on Wikipeda in Library and
Information science. There are a lot of more scientific topics relatet to
Wikipedia in other fields - for instance I would like to see a sociologic study
on Wikipedia users. But history... maybe "didactics of history" or something
like that. You could also compare Memex and other attemts up to Wikipedia (sure
there are some profs working on "internet-history" yet. Just try to make
scientists interested and sooner or later they will write something.
Personally I recommend writing something on your own - its not much more
complicated than writing *good* wikipedia articles - in all cases it is work!
(as long as you are not a prof inventing facts or stealing your students work).
As Robert wrote it should contain something new that you cannot find in any
other encyclopedia or journal article. Getting your article in a academic
journal depends on relations, knowing the style-of-writing in your field and
relations. The scientific community is open but far from beeing as open as
Wikipedia.
Greetings,
Jakob
P.S: My paper will be in German first.
Sheldom Rampton,
> Just out of curiosity, is there some reason why the entry bar for
> Wikipedia contributors is so low?
Yes, because it's pointless to do anything else.
http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?LoginsAreEvil
SS
I am going to take a wikivacation. Things havn't been nice here for awhile,
and now that I have changed my name (and incidentally made a rather stupid
mistake involving angela) I think it is great timing for me to take a
vacation from all the name calling and hostility. I think the power
structure here is broken, and that the admins are out of control. I don't
think the admin position is helpful in its present state. Power corrupts,
and to be frank, I think most of the trolls on the wiki ARE admins. Anyways,
lets hope that when I come back, things will be loads better, and it will be
a magical place of smiles and reference checking, instead of wikipolitics,
block voting concensus, and flaming subtituting for intellectual discourse.
Clearly the article content suffers, and the time when someone could
legitamately cite the wikipedia as a reference source is not within sight.
Goodbye for now, and God bless.
Sam Spade (JackLynch)
_________________________________________________________________
Learn how to choose, serve, and enjoy wine at Wine @ MSN.
http://wine.msn.com/
Dear Robert "fuck you sick Nazi bastards" Kaiser,
You have alleged that I have "refused to mediate". This allegation is incorrect. I
remain entirely happy to accept mediation. TUF-KAT was the first to volunteer for
mediation, and I have already accepted his assistance, pending your agreement to
his acting as mediator. Additionally, you yourself suggested LittleDan as a mediator,
and I have indicated that he would also be acceptable to me, after he reassured me
on a few points of detail.
I believe that I am awaiting a response from you indicating your acceptance of either
LittleDan or TUF-KAT as our mediator.
I do not have a "secret agenda". I have previously publically stated my goals for
resolving the conflict between you and myself. I was cautious about restating them in
public, since I felt that doing so might inflame the situation, though I have always
been happy to do so in private, with you and a mutually agreed mediator. However,
given your concerns on this point, I am happy to publically outline my objectives for
mediation:
1) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract the recent email
he sent to the wikien-l list, calling Wikipedia "Nazipedia".
2) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract and cease his
completely unfounded accusations and insinuations that I agree with, or support,
Nazism, anti-Semitism, or similar bigotry, in any way.
3) Robert to, publically and unreservedly, apologise for and retract and cease his
accusations that my conduct on Wikipedia in any way constitutes "censorship" or
"harassment" of his good self.
4) Robert to accept that calling long-standing Wikipedians, editing in good faith,
"vandals", "censors", or in need of being banned, is not appropriate behaviour;
Robert to agree to henceforth cease such behaviour.
5) Resolution of certain other, more minor, points of contention.
I trust that this response is sufficient to allay any concerns you might have regarding
the mediation process. If you wish me to expand on any of these points, publically or
privately, I will be happy to do so.
Thank you for your time.
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper
In the past few days, we've had three unilateral bans of controversial
users:
* Lir by Hephaestos -- twice, unblocked by Tim Starling once and
Angela once
* Wik by Hephaestos -- once so far, unblocked by me just now
* Anthony Del Pierro by Eloquence -- twice, unblocked by me once and
by Eloquence once
I was under the impression that when the new ban functionality for
logged-in users was implemented, sysops were explicitly forbidden for
making use of it except in three cases:
* Users Jimbo has personally said should be banned
* Reincarnations of such users
* Users who have no edit history except for pure vandalism
A possible fourth that has proved controversial but generally at least
tolerated is "emergency" temporary bans to stop damaging vandalism
streaks by other users (e.g. making tons of edits or moving pages around
or deleting images).
Recently, Jimbo has indicated that he wishes to stop making the banning
decisions unilaterally, and so has constituted an "arbitration
committee" to take over the responsibility of doing so when necessary.
However, I do not recall at any time there being a green light given to
all 150-something sysops at large (nor the members of the arbitration
committee, acting individually) to use their individual discretion in
banning logged-in users, but this seems to be what's happening, and not
by recently-elevated sysops either.
So I suppose my main purpose in this email is that I'd like to request
that the original guidelines be forcefully restated and that this stop
happening. We can't have controversial users being banned without any
sort of process at all, at the sole whim of any of the 150-plus sysops,
and I'd rather this not generate into a reversion war of sorts where
some sysops ban users and others immediately unban them (and the
original sysops reban them, and so on...).
-Mark
So far the only evidence presented, that Jack Lynch is
a "troll", is that User:Tannin swears at him. All this
gossip and blacklisting is not helping the wikipedia
become a better place.
__________________________________
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Could someone have a look at the conflict over Alexander Lukashenko,
between Adam Carr and 172. And give their opinion ?
I hardly dare to say it, but I reverted to a version that is anterior to
december 2003, to insure it was "somehow" stable.
[[User:Anthere|ant]] (worth a ban ?)
Ed Poor wrote:
>How about a simple formula, based on what percentage of a user's edits
>are reverted by other users? (We might tweak this by discounting reverts
>from a certain class of user.)
I think Ed's proposal is the germ of an idea with merit, but it needs
further refinement. We don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Maybe
we could look at Kuro5hin's system for ranking articles and see if it
could be adapted. Other models worth considering include:
Epinions.com's Web of Trust; eBay's ratings system; Slashdot.org's
Meta Moderation system. Here are a couple of URLs to articles that
discuss "reputation management" on the Internet:
http://www.shorewalker.com/pages/reputation_manager-1.htmlhttp://www.smartmobs.com/archives/cat_the_evolution_of_reputation.html
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------