There's some truth to this; we don't want to create a new atmosphere of fear
by doing stuff percieved by the community as arbitrary abuse of editors.
******
To the extent that this perception exists, it is a direct cause of people
who start threads with inflammatory titles such as this one and continue
with farfetched comparisons to the East German secret police. At the very
least that behavior demonstrates remarkably poor judgement and lack of good
faith. It would be quite refreshing to see some expression of second
thoughts or regret about those excesses. I've shortened the block I applied
by three-quarters as an act of good faith. An equivalent gesture from the
other side would go a long way toward reestablishing the collaborative
atmosphere that builds an encyclopedia.
-Durova
> Well, yes, you add little to legitimate dialog, but part of what you see
is the contrast between the very liberal rules which govern this mailing
list and the level of tolerance on the talk page of the article about a
subject who is actively being harassed. If you have something to say about
such harassment, you are expected to be knowledgable about it. Cla68 adopted
a pose of naive ignorance. You like that pose too, and it is an effective
debating technique, in fact, Socrates often used in the dialogues published
by Plato. However, when you get down to cases, and there you are, in the
midst of an active dispute, acting dumb, well...
None of that is "disrupting Wikipedia", though. Cla98 may have been
being annoying, but that's not the same as being disruptive.
******
These complaints are classic straw man rhetoric: take a small portion of the
actual situation, pretend that's the sole cause of a result, and bemoan in
various fora that the some action was unjustified. I see through the game.
There are times to put one's foot down and that time was today. Wikipedia
has been entirely too lenient about this type of disruption, with the result
that when one brief and overdue block occurs a cluster of people are shocked
by it.
The talk page of a Wikipedia article is not a venue for rehashing poorly
sourced rumors against a living person. It's as simple as that. If I have
any regrets about that block, it's that it wasn't longer, sooner, and
applied to more people.
How hard can it be to find reliable sources for an article? When you locate
them, discuss them maturely. Wikipedia isn't your water cooler. Neither is
this list.
-Durova
> Durova wrote:
> > Here's one possible way to implement this that wouldn't relate to the
NPOV
> > policy: don't remove links, simply deactivate them. The same
information
> > remains for anyone who wants to cut and paste the URL into a browser
> > manually.
> This is a nice-sounding compromise, but it strikes me as pretty silly.
> It doesn't stop anyone who wants to visit the verboten page; it
> merely annoys them, to no purpose. It cements the notion that
> banning the link is punitive, not protective.
We do it for shock sites, and antisocialmedia.net is odious enough to
deserve not being linked.
- d.
******
The purpose is that it reduces incoming traffic from one of the most
powerful sources of link traffic on the Internet. If that discourages
people from using their sites to intimidate particular editors, then so much
the better. NPOV *is* harmed when good editors decide "this isn't worth it"
and leave the project. Wikipedia has a legitimate interest in ensuring that
all points of view are represented among its contributors.
-Durova
On 10/21/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/10/2007, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Firefox became too concerned
> > with their name and it's usage, and people stopped using it (Debian) -
> > who does that help?
>
> Ho hmm. To clarify, by "people stopped using it", I meant people
> stopped using the name (not that people stopped using the software).
> For Debian (and other hard-FLOSS projects), Firefox's policy on the
> usage of their name was too non-free and it needed to be changed (to
> ColdWeasel, I believe).
>
If Firefox had said that the name Firefox could only be used for free
software, I don't think Debian would have cared. The problem with
Firefox is they tried to restrict the use of the name in free
software.
On 20 Oct 2007 at 20:48:48 -0700, "Steven Walling"
<steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Jimbo, at first glance my Portland liberal brain knee-jerk reacted to your
> comment about bringing back the WikiLove by thinking, "How? By simply
> blocking or banning anyone who can't agree with our vision and play nice?
> Seems rather in contrast to wiki values."
>
> But then I thought about it, and that's exactly right. For a long time,
> civility and WikiLove have been rhetoric without any force behind them, or
> at least the force of a block. Perhaps it's time for admins to step up to
> the plate more when it comes to trolls who dance around the letter of the
> law to stick around.
Your first impression makes more sense to me. Love isn't something
you can gain by force or threat of it. Fear, yes, and maybe
compliance, but not love. Are you looking for a fake civility and
feigned love that comes from everybody being afraid to openly show
any other feelings for fear of sanctions? That would be like on the
Twilight Zone episode where the mutant kid reads everybody's mind and
makes people vanish or transform into things if he doesn't like what
they're thinking, so everybody has to constantly think pleasant
thoughts even though they really hate the kid's guts.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Durova has blocked Cla68 for 24 hours for responding to Jimbo's
posting on [[Talk:Gary Weiss]], which included "No nonsense, zero
tolerance, shoot on sight.", with "Most of us usually try to give
some reasoning for any action, proposed action, or threatened action
that we discuss on an article's talk page. Would you mind doing the
same?" It was claimed that this was a "WP:POINT" violation. Just
how is asking the reasons behind a draconian statement a block-worthy
violation?
I swear, with every passing minute Wikipedia becomes more of a self-
parody, with people getting subjected to punitive sanctions for
having the effrontery to question whether the authorities on
Wikipedia are getting overly punitive. It reminds me of the
government of Singapore, which once sued a journalist who had written
that the government suppresses criticism by suing its critics.
People sometimes justify the need for "getting tough" on trolls,
harrassers, and the like because they're driving good editors out;
however, I've been feeling more and more like I'm about ready to take
a Wikibreak myself, being constantly disgusted at the direction the
Wikipedia culture is going and how Jimbo seems to be actively
supporting this development himself. I'm sure there are a bunch of
people who will cheer if and when I go away.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
-----Original Message-----
From: John Lee [mailto:johnleemk@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 04:22 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [[Views of Lyndon LaRouche]] indefinitely full protected
On 10/20/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As I said in my other reply, this is far from the first article space full
> protection. It may be the first one implimented consciously and
> intentionally without a time limit on it, however.
>
> How many years of persistent, organized abuse does it take to justify
> sterner measures?
>
> If this is unnecessary a month from now, tomorrow, or next year, I or
> another administrator can unprotect. I don't have any authority to order
> it
> truly permanently protected; Jimmy or the Foundation or Arbcom might, but
> I
> don't. All I can do it state the case for the situation and see if the
> rest
> of the en.wp admin community agree and leave it, or disagree and overturn
> the protection.
As I understand it, this is how protection has always worked - at least
until the software supported automatic expiry of protections. Until then,
all articles were protected indefinitely until the dispute was cleared up.
This is still a perfectly valid thing to do today.
What perturbs me is why announce this to the mailing list if this is just a
routine protection? Did the policies on page protection change to mandate a
time limit for all protections?
Johnleemk
_______________________________________________
Our theory has usually been that, at some point, protection can be removed from even the most contentious articles. Given the nature of the LaRouche movement, which put bluntly, incorporates war on knowledge, it seems unlikely that protection could ever be removed. Now, as usual, we can anticipate inappropriate attempts to generalize what was necessary in this extreme situation to other situations. Once could say that the Bush administration, or the government of the PRC, or the Turkish government (or whoever) is also engaged in the same activity. And, of course they are, but in those cases there are contervailing forces eagerly presenting alternatives. Very few people are informed about the LaRouche movement, thus we have in our editing a confrontation between LaRouche operatives and a few experts who seriously study extreme groups. We can keep blocking LaRouche socks indefinitely without resolving the problem.
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu [mailto:joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu]
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2007 05:38 PM
To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
Quoting fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info:
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 06:08 PM
> To: 'English Wikipedia'
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
>
> fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info wrote:
>>> The problem is the cases in the middle. What overrides NPOV?
>>
>>
>> I still don't understand what NPOV has to do with this. A link to
>> edit a Wikipedia user's page is as shameful for MIchael Moore as any
>> excess of ours. In a way, linking to it puts him in a false light,
>> displaying petty bullying.
>
> The NPOV violation here is that in the POV of some of us, harassing,
> maligning, or exposing Wikipedia editors is a bad thing. More
> specifically, it is seen as the one bad thing in all the world that
> might merit link removal. Other people do not share this POV.
>
> Perhaps one could make an NPOV-friendly case for removing all links to
> all harassment, or maligning, or exposing of anonymous or pseudonymous
> people. It would be even more clearly consistent with NPOV to argue for
> a removal of all links to all living miscreants everywhere.
>
> Needless to say, I don't think those are a good idea either. I think our
> job is to give people the facts as best we can, while leaving the moral
> judgments to our readers.
>
> William
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine
> alternatives, just debating points.
> Fred
>
Fred, if there are strawmen above please explain what they are. I at
least don't
see any.
_______________________________________________
The statements you say are not good ideas. You are the only one suggesting them. No one is advancing them as serious proposals. You advance them as easy targets, straw men. I speak of
> Perhaps one could make an NPOV-friendly case for removing all links to
> all harassment, or maligning, or exposing of anonymous or pseudonymous
> people. It would be even more clearly consistent with NPOV to argue for
> a removal of all links to all living miscreants everywhere.
Fred