"David Gerard" wrote
> And almost all of our processes are quick hacks someone thought would
> be a good idea at the time, and they're usually modified by putting
> hacks on hacks on hacks, building into a rococo fractal mosaic of
> prescriptions.
Which is a pretty good description of how evolution works, on a conventional model. _Especially_ the bit that the thing designed for one issue gets commandeered and adapted for another.
I think we can take comfort from the way the conventional model of evolution also has this to say: it's smarter than you. (No, I don't mean David G, I mean this is a more effective problem solving attack than a priori plans.)
Charles
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> > It's okish for editors and a really bad idea for admins. Editors
> > actions can be undone by pretty much anyone. Admin actions cannot. An
> > editor doing something annoying will merely result in them being
> > reverted. Admins actions can affect far larger numbers of people. Most
> > people accept WP:OWN applies to edits. A section of admins keeps
> > trying to claim that it does not apply to admin actions making it even
> > harder to revert the things. Admins are meant to serve the community.
> > The powers were only given by the community in order to do what the
> > community wanted. They were not given for you to do whatever seemed
> > like a good idea at the time.
> >
> > IAR is ok for content but admin actions apply to people rather than
> > content.
>
> Yes - this is a good point about IAR.
>
> Rules protect people from the abuse of power. I'm not so worried
> about protecting content, as it can always be restored.
>
> Once a person has gone, that's it.
>
I almost entirely agree. Some admin actions are in a fundamentally different
class. The use of IAR should be tempered, and for exactly the reasons given.
But, I would add "some" before "rules protect people". There are, unfortunately,
other times when the rules act to bite people. I wish admins would do a bit more
IAR in those circumstances. Bloody hell, a LOT more. And again, for exactly the
reasons given.
I'm going to go further and suggest that, at the current time, on the english
wikipedia, the people bitten by strict enforcment of rules outnumber the people
bitten by admins abusing power.
The flagship cases on the one side are certain bureaucrat actions to re-sysop,
certain out-of-process project-page speedy deletes, certain wheel wars, and
possibly others I'm not aware of or have forgotten. These generate an awful lot
of uproar, but, even taken all together, how often do they happen?
On the other side, my flagship case is the set of rules on WP:U. It suggests
that admins can permablock certain new accounts instantly, even when there is no
obvious malicious intent, and there are some admins who take this to heart. For
many, this means a ban until the autoblock wears off. Strict applications of
this ruleset generate little protest, and often no protest at all, but last I
checked, this by itself happens several times a day.
Regards,
Daniel Mehkeri
Tim Starling has been ill for the last nine days and went into surgery
today. He was originally misdiagnosed as having gastroenteritis but it
turned out to be a bowel obstruction, probably caused by adhesion from
an appendectomy nine years ago.
The surgery took about three and a half hours, but he's now well
enough to be on a main ward, so it seems it went well (it's impossible
to find a doctor to actually tell you about this in the middle of the
night though, so I may have more news tomorrow - let me know if you
want updates).
He's likely to be in the hospital ([[St Vincent's Hospital,
Melbourne]]) for another week and then taking up to six weeks before
he's 100% again.
If you'd like to send "get well soon" messages, please edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling/Get_Well_Soon - I'll be
getting it printed to take in to him in a few days.
Angela.
--
Angela Beesley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela
"David Gerard"
> At least
> with "expert" qualifications the idiots will be expert idiots, and any
> good academic has way too much experience dealing with those.
Yeah, it's kind of touching how people outside assume academia is a kind of haven of good behaviour. It's a haven, but not for that particularly.
Charles
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"Matt Brown" wrote
> I don't disagree that sources should be reliable ones. I disagree
> with the idea that reliability can be so rigidly defined, against
> common sense.
Hear! Hear!
Phil Sandifer's original post on this is well-argued, though I don't particularly wish to follow him onto the ground of webcomics.
Common sense needs to apply, sooner rather than later. It indicates things like, oh, in religion and politics you are not going to have people 100% agreed onw what a reliable source is (do you believe the Bible or the BBC, sort of thing). Almost any source can be _fallible_ anyway. So we err generally in the direction of including sources, assuming a critical reader.
Common sense also says that policies that are written in very black-and-white terms do not necessarily trump others, which are apparently wishy-washy and aspirational and don't help you win your edit war on content.
Charles
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> 1) They actively encourage removal of material that is accurate
While I mostly agree with your argument here especially [[Spoo]], if
one edits the articles Jimmy watches the chance of you getting a
mailing list post or a usenet group post source to stick is very low,
even if it isn't documented anywhere else.
For example (just one of several :)), I ran into this problem trying to
explain
a key part of the [[Merkey]] history as there is sort of a "reliable source
blackout" on some periods that were clearly "notable" to the subject.
So, perhaps that is the "de-facto policy" there.
> I think that our problem may be that,
> because we place such a great demand on our sources, people don't
> bother to source articles at all. Perhaps we need to demand less in
> order to achieve more
I disagree and IMHO anyone who is a fact-tagger for a while on more
mundane articles will see the issue quickly.
Often, when I would {{fact}}-tag something,
someone would remove the tag and instead go into a five-page essay on
why a certain point was "correct" or not. Usually it was, but sometimes
it clearly was dubious; and usually needed attribution anyway. It is
difficult to attribute something when you don't know its source :).
The good part is that usually they just go "OH!" when you let them
know that all they needed to do was source the thing; which ends up
with a solid source almost every time :).
Maybe this has something to do with David's theory about the encyclopedia
being written mostly by anons/new users (my own theory is that it is sort of
40/60,
but anyway). I'm assuming at some point, if this is true, then there will be
some kind
of software measure to make sure something added is sourced.
> Put another way, following policy for policy's sake violates IAR.
>
> -Phil
Ah, but ignoring IAR for the sake of IAR _doesn't_ violate policy. Or something.
Charles
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There's recently been a spate of extensive vandalism to high-use
transcluded templates - the other night I dealt with dozens of OTRS
complaints which could be traced back to someone (or multiple
someones) vandalising {{cquote}}, {{otheruses}} & {{taxobox}} in the
same manner. I've seen this form of vandalism before ({{bio-stub}} is
the one I recall...), but rarely to the same extent - any particular
vandal incident is rare if it generates two or three seperate
complaint emails, and there were bucketfuls here.
I've seen protection for high-profile templates like this mentioned
before, but never implemented; after I mentioned these attacks on
WP:AN, someone protected all three. Is anyone capable of coming up
with a list of all individual templates transcluded on, say, more than
a couple of hundred pages? Even if we don't *protect* these (I
strongly suggest we do - they mostly shouldn't be edited without a
good reason, much like the MediaWiki messages), having a few dozen
admins watchlisting them would be helpful.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Sean Black wrote
> This is really just a part of the continued onslaught against useful
> dab pages in the name of adherence to the manual of style... the
> stricter we make these pages, the more likely we are to be encouraging
> the blind elimination of good content.
To be fair, the _given name_ lists are not apparently generally favoured. I'm entirely tigerish in my defence of lists by _surname_ .
Charles
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