There has been some recent discussion at [[MediaWiki talk:Blockedtext]]
about providing specific instructions for AOL users who find the IP of
their proxy blocked, similar to how we provide instructions for users
editing from China.
It seems the German Wikipedia already advises blocked AOL users to use a
different browser (like Firefox), as this apparently bypasses the proxy
setup the standard AOL browser is configured to use. They even held a
(failed) poll to rangeblock the entire AOL proxy range, forcing anyone
editing from AOL to do this.
Give this, there are a number of questions I'd like help answering:
1. Does using a different browser really help? Does it work on both
Windows and Mac? If you're on AOL, you can check this by opening the
link <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Mypage> in an alternative
browser while not logged in to Wikipedia, and comparing the address
shown to the list at <http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html>.
2. Can the AOL browser itself be configured to bypass the proxies? Can
this be done for Wikipedia only? And again, does this work on Mac OS X
too, since AOL uses a different browser there?
...and finally, something I'm sure is controversial:
3. If a sufficiently easy way to circumvent the AOL proxies was found,
would you support rangeblocking the proxies permanently (or until AOL
fixes their proxies to provide XFF headers)? This would force anyone
editing from AOL to bypass the proxies somehow, but would also make
blocking AOL vandals much easier. And what would you consider
"sufficiently easy"?
In any case, answers to 1 and 2 above would let us amend the block
notice to suggest workarounds for AOL users accidentally caught in a
block. Presumably there are people with AOL accounts on this list; if
you're one of them, your help is needed.
--
Ilmari Karonen
On Sun Mar 26 14:30:49 UTC 2006 Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Personal communications are valid to cite. All one needs to do to check
is call the guy and ask
> the same question.
Mav, personal communications have been banned as long as we've had the
[[No orignal research policy]]. The earliest draft of this page
explicitly forbids its use:
A good way to look at this distinction is with the following example.
Suppose you are writing a Wikipedia entry on physicist Stephen Hawking's
Theory X. Theory X has been published in peer-reviewed journals and is
therefore an appropriate subject for a Wikipedia article. However, in the
course of writing the article, you meet Hawking, and over a beer, he
tells you: "Actually, I think Theory X is a load of rubbish." Even though
you have this from the author himself, you cannot include the fact that
he told you this in your Wikipedia entry. Why not? The answer is that it
is not verifiable in a way that would satisfy the Wikipedia readership.
The readers don't know who you are. You can't include your telephone
number so that every reader in the world can call you directly for
confirmation. And even if they could do this, why should they believe
you?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:No_original_research&
oldid=20267486]
Personal communications are often permitted as legit citations in journal
articles because (1) the author's reputation is on the line, & (2)
chances that someone has contacted the individual quoted to verify that
the quotation is accurate are in proportion to the reputaition of the
journal. (For example, _The New Yorker_ will almost always fact-check;
the _Weekly World News_ never bothers for obvious reasons.) For
Wikipedia's purposes, if informaiton in a personal communication is
important, it will eventually see print -- & then we can use it.
Geoff
Hi
Having read through these long posts, I thought I would introduce myself for
those who do not know me, and tell you a little bit about what I do.
My name is Danny Wool. I am 42 years old. I am one of two and a half
employees of the Foundation--the others are Brion, who deals with hardware and
software issues, and Monica, an intern, who assists me in the office. In past
incarnations of my career, I have worked as a writer (I have a book coming out in
a few months) and as staff in a New York City Museum. I have considerable
experience in the not for profit sector.
I am also active in various Wikipedia projects, and have been for a rather
long time. Officially, my user ID is in the 500's though I made anon edits
before getting an ID. I have about 30,000 edits in the Wikipedia namespace. I
have also been involved in some of the high profile Wikipedia policy cases,
including helping to lift a life ban against one user, who is now contributing
rather amicably to Wikipedia. I can usually be found in mIRC on #wikimedia,
and I occasionally pop in to #wikipedia where my moniker is usally dannyisme. I
also contribute to several other languages, some more than others, and to
some of the other projects as well, most recently to Wikisource.
Officially I work five days a week, though I am usually in the office at
some point or another seven days a week. On a standard weekday, I arrive in the
office at 8 am and leave sometime after 6. Of that, at least one-third of my
time is spent answering phone calls, between six and ten an hour. People who
are involved in OTRS (the system by which the Foundation responds to email
complaints) will have some idea of the kind of phone calls I receive. It is
really a mixed bag, and some of them are quite funny. They include people trying
to contact celebrities (no, I do not have Vana White's home phone number), to
people mistaking us for various companies (no, we cannot supply a new
carburetor for your Ford Pinto in Swaziland), to people asking for advice (no, I do
not know how you can get the coyotes out of your backyard), to "eccentrics"
(no, I do not know what God meant when he spoke to you this morning)--all of
these are real phone calls--to press (lots and lots and lots of those).
There are two additional types of call that I get. One type is from people
concerned about their articles. In these cases, I will attempt to assist the
person myself, or ideally, to find someone on IRC who can assist them, though
there are also times when I am forced to tell people that we cannot help them.
Sometimes, they get upset. This happened most recently on Friday when a PR
firm called to insist that we allow them to put up press releases about their
clients as protected wikipedia articles. I said no. They said yes. Etc. Often
there are very happy results, as happened with a prominent television
commentator, who is now an ally of Wikipedia--I will not give names, but it was
worth the half hour I spent with him on the phone. This kind of phone call
happened all the more frequently when the Senate story was brewing.
Finally, there are the legal phone calls. These come in two varieties.
People I can speak with, understand their problem, and resolve it, and people that
I cannot help. Of the latter kind, one good indicator is when people call
and say "What is your fax number." I ask them why and they tell me that they are
sending us a fax. I tell them I would like to know who they are before they
send us a fax, and they tell me that they do not want to say who they are. I
then tell them that I cannot give them our fax number. That is when they
identify themselves as a lawyer and they are suing us. As instructed by our own
lawyers, I tell them that our fax number can be obtained from our website--we
are not obligated to make it easy for people to sue us. The discussion
begins.
Above my desk is a Roy Liechtenstein picture of a woman crying with a
caption that reads "I should have called my lawyer." The Wikimedia Foundation has
outstanding legal counsel, and my job is the first level of triage. In most
cases, I will call or email our attorney and provide him with as much
information as I can, including name, phone number, contact info, etc. He then
responds accordingly, sometimes with instructions for me as to what should happen
next.
So, why all the detail? Because this is exactly what happened in several
instances. In fact, this happens about twice a day minimum. It is a credit to
our attorney that we do not use WP:OFFICE more frequently, and he should be
congratulated for this.
Anyways, this is a long email. I just wanted to introduce myself--I do lots
of other things besides--and give you some idea of how the legal triage works
from the office. I also want to thank a lot of amazing Wikipedians who step
in to handle these problems quietly and discreetly, and especially all of the
people who spend hours on OTRS, answering the endless queries by email, just
as I am doing by phone. If I were to name them all, this email would be twice
as long. I really believe that it is because of them that Wikipedia is such
a huge success.
Danny
[[User:Danny]]
Wikipedia's got a problem with images. 2000 of them are uploaded
every day, and most of them have inadequate source information, an
incorrect license tag, or an invalid fair-use claim.
A quick and easy way to reduce the flood of images would be to remove
the link to Special:Upload from the sidebar, and instead point the
"upload file" link to [[Wikipedia:Image use policy]]. If users have
to hunt around for a bit for the actual upload link (and hopefully
read some of the page), they're less likely to upload every image they
can find on Google Image Search.
Thoughts?
--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com>
>
> --- slimvirgin(a)gmail.com wrote:
>> On 3/26/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Personal communications are valid to cite. All one needs to do to
>>> check is call the guy and
>> ask the same question.
>>
>> All our sources have to be published, Daniel, i.e. in the public
>> domain, so a personal communication can't be cited.
>
> That is absurd since not all knowledge has been written. What
> matters is if you can trust the
> source and if it is verifiable. The method of communication is not
> that important.
>
> -- mav
Citing a personal communication is much better than citing nothing at
all. I have used an email from a representative of Babson College,
for example, on the Babson College Talk page, as a reference for
whether or not their giant world globe rotates. (It was built to
rotated and once rotated but it doesn't now).
But these aren't _good_ references and do _not_ meet Wikipedia's
guidelines, which I believe are longstanding.
The reason why publication is important is that by definition a
published source is widely available and easily checked. As I have
personally found, it is not always easy to "call the guy and ask the
same question."
Among other things, you may not have his contact information. (It
would be a serious breach of etiquette and privacy to include that in
the reference). And you are basically requiring every reader who
wants to verify the information to establish a personal contact with
the source. That's just not reasonable.
Finally, the requirement of publication puts a very rough-and-ready
filter in place. In order to publish something, the author _usually_
has to convince at least _one_ other person that it is worth
publishing... and spending money on. That's not an absolute test of
truth, but it is at least a filter. Over the phone, someone can say
anything to me that they like. Thus, a personal communication is a
poor reference for the same reason that a personal website is a poor
reference: anyone can say anything they like, without even the
slightest necessity of passing any kind of vetting process. Actually,
a phone call is worse: a personal website is, at least, out in the
open and subject to inspection.
> From: slimvirgin(a)gmail.com
> On 3/26/06, Keith D. Tyler <keith(a)keithtyler.com> wrote:
>> What happens if I use as a reference a website that has
>> disappeared in
>> the time since I added the information? It then becomes unverifiable.
>> Presumably the info, like the website it was sourced from, must
>> disappear?
>
> Keith, for any source you use, you should leave a full citation in the
> References section. See [[WP:CITE]]. That way, if your source is on
> the Web and disappears, others may still be able to find it (if, say,
> it was a published article that was posted online). However, if you're
> using material that exists only on the Web, and the website disappears
> completely, then you've lost your source, and the material in the
> article goes back to being unsourced. For that reason, and also to do
> with the likely quality of the source, I'd say it's best to avoid
> relying on material that exists only on one or two websites.
>
> Sarah
I'm _starting_ to make a habit of checking http://www.archive.org at
the time whenever I insert any Web reference that I would hate to
lose. It's actually quite easy: just prefix http://web.archive.org/
web/*/ to the address, e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://en.wikipedia.org .
Unfortunately the archive.org site is a) incomplete, b) often very
slow, and c) sometimes doesn't do a good job of preserving the
appearance of entire web pages.
Nevertheless, _if_ archive.org has the page, then one of their links
(e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20021130190725/www.wikipedia.org/ )
can be a stable link. Provided, of course, that archive.org itself
remains stable!
Does Raul654 have an email ?. I'd still like to know what exact thing I did wrong so it wont happen again. Because I'm still clueless because I didn't write anything negative just changed a win to a draw lol
Best Regards
Mike
---------------------------------
Blab-away for as little as 1¢/min. Make PC-to-Phone Calls using Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
This occured to me recently - wouldn't it make a lot of sense to lower
the threshold to 50% for a successful undeletion of speedies? I'm all
for keeping the 75% threshold for stuff deleted via *fd, since *fd
deletions require consensus to achieve, it makes sense to require a high
standard to overturn that decision, however if an article has been
speedied (ie the deletion judgment was made by one admin, rather than a
discussion on *fd), and 60% of people think that it shouldn't have been,
surely there is something wrong there.
Sure, I know that voting is evil, Wikipedia is not a democracy and so
on, but shouldn't speedies (or, to be more precise, an individual
admin's interpretation of whether a page meets the speedy deletion
criteria) which are not subject to any community scrutiny be easier to
overturn than *fd votes, which are?
Cynical
Hi all,
I really, really struggle with the idea of "notability" and
attempting to work out how much information is "tolerated" in
Wikipedia before people start nominating it for deletion with various
words ending in "-cruft".
So, a concrete example. I would be tempted to add more information on
juggling tricks into Wikipedia. There is already an excellent juggling
wiki (http://www.jugglingdb.com/jugglewiki/), but this poses no
obstacle: our mythical African Wikipedia reader may not have access to
the net.
So, it is almost unarguable that [[cascade (juggling)]] has no place
in WP. This is the most basic juggling pattern, and a term that many
are likely to know.
Next down the notability scale, we have [[reverse cascade]], [[shower
(juggling)]] and [[fountain (juggling)]]. Basic patterns that deserve
to be documented.
Now, how about [[machine (juggling)]], [[Mills Mess]] and
[[Rubinstein's Revenge]]? These are more advanced tricks that a
non-juggler is unlikely to know. He may recognise the first two, but
probably not the third.
Continuing, [[crossed-arms cascade]], [[contortionist (juggling)]] and
[[penguin (juggling)]] would represent even less well-known moves,
that are however known to almost all jugglers.
Even more obscure, how about [[Luke's Lobotomy]], [[Time-reversed
Mills Mess]] or [[Manham's Mangle]]? These are unknown to anyone
except serious jugglers, and very unlikely to be seen in a performance
for a general audience.
And to take one final leap, how about [[Seven Ball Marden's Mayem]],
[[Turbo Wally Walk]], [[Mountain Tennis]] or even [[Hermine
(juggling)]]? I haven't heard of any of these, I found them on
jugglewiki. The last one has possibly never been attempted by anyone
other than its inventor, yet is documented thoroughly with video
footage.
So, my question is: where should the line be drawn on inclusion into
"the sum of all human knowledge", and on what basis? Also, is that
basis really documented anywhere, or does it all come down to the
caprices of the editors who one day decide that these tricks aren't
"notable", and that this jugglecruft (I swear this word will be used)
has to die?
Thanks all for any comments, advice etc.
Steve