> If Cla68 is as disruptive as claimed -- and I have no reason to
> doubt it -- you need only a little patience to wait for a truly
> disruptive action to apply the waited-for block in response to.
Low-intensity trouble-making is a known technique on the site. Very useful
for thinning out opposition, by making reasonable people think thay have
better things to do.
Charle
******
Very well said. And I've seen that and dealt with that in enough
contexts that I know when it amounts to gaming. Other than a rather small
group of people who've been tag-teaming on this issue, there's very little
controversy here. They've done their best to stir up others with the straw
man about "a block for questioning", but the community as a whole has a lot
of horse sense.
-Durova
Durova wrote:
> 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.
You're saying that the primary purpose is to reduce the traffic going to
the sites, and whether it discourages them from intimidating editors is
_secondary_?
******
Please don't put words into my mouth. That's not what I'm saying at all.
How can you justify making it Wikipedia's goal to manipulate other
websites' traffic? We've been trying to stop SEO people from doing that
since forever.
******
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_argument
> NPOV *is* harmed when good editors decide "this isn't worth it"
> and leave the project.
Only indirectly in that with fewer good editors edits to correct
existing POVness aren't made as frequently. We can't go down the path of
calling anything that makes editors want to leave Wikipedia an "NPOV
violation", that way lies a lot of ridiculous scenarios.
*******
Are you suggesting that bypassing normal dispute resolution and singling out
individual editors for ridicule is a legitimate and healthy way to build an
encyclopedia? I must disagree.
> Wikipedia has a legitimate interest in ensuring that
> all points of view are represented among its contributors.
What about the points of view represented by the so-called "attack
sites"? Sometimes there are legitimate concerns to be had among the
rantings and whatnot.
*******
There's a *baby with the bathwater* effect that the participants in all such
sites should bear in mind. I am not completely opposed to a site like
*Wikipedia
Review*. Sometimes the dialog there impresses me and in at least one
instance I have a barnstar waiting for a *WR* contributor, if he decides to
disclose a matter openly. What detracts enormously from their credibility
as a critical site is how much they also serve as a forum for potshots and
sour grapes. And what's really sad is there are probably some people whose
bans would have been lifted by now if they hadn't gone there.
-Durova
Durova wrote
> There's a *baby with the bathwater* effect that the participants in all such
> sites should bear in mind. I am not completely opposed to a site like
> *Wikipedia
> Review*. Sometimes the dialog there impresses me and in at least one
> instance I have a barnstar waiting for a *WR* contributor, if he decides to
> disclose a matter openly. What detracts enormously from their credibility
> as a critical site is how much they also serve as a forum for potshots and
> sour grapes. And what's really sad is there are probably some people whose
> bans would have been lifted by now if they hadn't gone there.
Yes, there is evidence that trying to "centralize" critics of Wikipedia on a forum site doesn't do much to improve the standards of criticism. On the whole that is WR's problem. Only threaded discussion - another problem. Editorial policy - another problem. Tabloids are usually run for money, not influence (though not always).
Charles
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Steve Summit wrote
> If Cla68 is as disruptive as claimed -- and I have no reason to
> doubt it -- you need only a little patience to wait for a truly
> disruptive action to apply the waited-for block in response to.
Low-intensity trouble-making is a known technique on the site. Very useful for thinning out opposition, by making reasonable people think thay have better things to do.
Charle
-----------------------------------------
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Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam
Following up on a request from Elonka, I did an analysis using the category
web structure to crudely estimate how Wikipedia content is distributed.
The result I got was that Wikipedia "is":
9.6% - People
28.0% - Science
10.5% - Culture
16.0% - Geography
6.3% - History
0.8% - Religion
5.5% - Philosophy
1.8% - Mathematics
14.3% - Nature
6.0% - Technology
1.4% - Fiction
The basic principle I used was that each of the categories listed
above corresponds to pure X-ness, and that each child category inherits
their flavors as the average of their parent categories.[Footnote-1] Each
article then has flavors based on the average of the categories they are in,
and the totals come from averaging over all articles. This approach has
some interesting consequences, the Category:Scientists becomes a mix of
People-ness and Science-ness. Category:American scientists would then blend
People-ness, Science-ness and Geography-ness, etc. So even though 20-30% of
Wikipedia articles are biographies, most are blends of People-ness and
whatever the person is known for with the end result that this crude measure
only associates 10% of Wikipedia content with People-ness.
Whether this is desirable or not is of course subjective. Consider, how
would you count Scientists if asked what fraction of the encyclopedia is
about Science vs. Biographies? In some sense the question isn't even
sensible since it is not really an either/or proposition and some articles
are about both Science AND People. The same problem exists for essentially
any set for categories. The approach I used counts these problem cases a
little towards each relevant category, but other solutions are of course
possible.
On top of this, there is the problem that the category tree... er, web...
sucks. There are many places that the categories meander sideways, like
Water sports->Sailing->Winds->Wind power, so the descendent grand-children
have very little to do with the grandparents. If you want a challenge, find
the path that leads Science to Religion and back to Science (yes such a path
exists purely through category children). In fact, each of Wikipedia's
"Category:Main topic classifications" categories share nearly all the same
children just at different depths of organization.
Oh, and then there is the problem that the category structure doesn't
necessarily make sense. For example, Natural science and Applied Science
are both "Main topics" but their obvious parent, Science, is not.
So anyway, the category web sucks and the idea of breaking Wikipedia content
into discrete categories is somewhat nonsensical, but if one wants to try,
it might look something like the list I gave above. Lots of Science and
Nature (which in practice means all those stubs of living things and
astronomical objects). Many places, citites, states and Rambot fodder.
Substantial amounts of people, culture, and history (which overlap in a
variety of ways), and modest amounts of other things. The fiction number
was lower than I expected, but that may be because it was diluted against
the entertainment side of Culture. I also suspect that the Science number
is bit stacked because virtually everything is somebody's science (be it
social science, policital science, military science, etc.)
Whether these results are useful (or even interesting) is a fair question,
and I don't know. Aside from subjectively deciding on some starting set of
categories, it is an "objective" measure. However one might well get more
meaningful results by subjectively sorting a few thousand random articles.
I could also repeat this experiment with a different set of basis categories
if people have suggestions.
Anyway, I hope this helps Elonka's curiosity and is interesting to at least
someone (if only because it makes you think about the logical problems
associated with categorization).
-Robert Rohde
[1] The formal description of this form of flow modeling involves solving a
set of 200,000+ simultaneous linear vector equations, one for each
category. Glory be unto Matlab.
On 20 Oct 2007 at 20:28:17 -0700, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Here's a rant of my own, and I hope a more pleasant one.
Interesting anecdote, but I wouldn't call it a "rant".
--
== 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: David Goodman [mailto:dgoodmanny@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 06:10 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [[Views of Lyndon LaRouche]] indefinitely full protected
If there are one or two good generally trusted people preferably with
admin powers intent on reverting the nonsense, they can continue to
do it. Many of us have a few articles we watch intensively.
Or, assuming we're a community, the situation would be suitable for
encouraging wider participation--just as for other contentious
matters.
I do recognize that this is perhaps a special case--and I hope will
not be followed by attempts from the same quarter to sneak their way
into the admins. Personally, I follow JS Mill, that we must be open
even to those who would destroy us. If the great majority of the
community want to protect it, we will not be destroyed.
_________________________
Yes, good to study them, but important to study them, not just the face they present to the public. That's what a lot of the edit warring is over. Them trying to suppress well-sourced statements of their leader, not meant for public consumption.
Fred
Yes, think about everything some. But also realize that there is such a
thing as an excessive rant from someone who really really has crossed
the line in comparing a 24 hour block for trolling to the "East German
Stasi".
--Jimbo
******
Here's a rant of my own, and I hope a more pleasant one.
One of my claims to obscurity is that I happen to be one of the last people
in history to have crossed the Berlin Wall illegally. I happened to be in
West Berlin three days before Checkpoint Charlie came down, which meant it
was legal for Germans to cross anywhere (there still was an East Germany but
everyone knew they were merging) and about half a dozen checkpoints existed
for other Europeans. I visited the Brandenburg Gate and saw one of those
checkpoints, but as soon as the official saw the cover of my United States
passport he waved me away.
Within eyeshot of that spot was the most solemn memorial I've ever seen: a
line of white crosses. This wasn't any kind of official thing but something
ordinary people had built to the people who had died trying to reach the
West. Some of them were nothing more than a date; the name had never been
released. But the people of West Berlin were saying "You're with us in
spirit." The last cross was dated February 1989, just a few months before
the wall broke.
When I saw those crosses I decided to break that law as a gesture of respect
to those people.
I look German, and my accent was good enough that people couldn't tell I was
a foreigner if they'd had a couple of drinks first or I didn't have to chat
for too long. So I sneaked onto the subway, which didn't work, and tried a
couple of other methods before I gave up and paid my five marks for a visa
over at Checkpoint Charlie. I went for a stroll, then paused for half an
hour chipping away Berlin Wall pebbles from the East Berlin side. My Swiss
army knife got ruined but it was worth it.
When twilight came I tried to retrace my steps, but I took a wrong turn
somehow and ended up at a dead end street...like all the streets that led
into the wall were. The wall had some holes in it by that time - it was
actually two walls with a strip of sand in between that used to get raked
every day to make it easier to find footprints and shoot people.
The raking had been neglected and flowers were growing in that strip, and a
rabbit was hopping along nibbling on the flowers. A woman came in from the
West Berlin side and walked her dog in it. Then a man came up from behind
me and walked his bicycle across. This was legal for them; they were
Germans.
I looked left and then right and thought "What are they going to do? Shoot
me?" And I escaped from East Berlin through the wall.
I see a few analogies from that to this edit war, but they're corny and
obvious. I guess they don't need to be said.
-Durova
On 20 Oct 2007 at 19:27:19 -0700, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
wrote:
> Yes, think about everything some. But also realize that there is such a
> thing as an excessive rant from someone who really really has crossed
> the line in comparing a 24 hour block for trolling to the "East German
> Stasi".
Yes, comparing a 24 hour block to the Stasi would be rhetorically
excessive. But that's not actually what I did; I observed that "Zero
tolerance; shoot on sight" seemed more akin to the Stasi than to
Wikipedia. You were the one who initiated the use of overblown
violent rhetoric when you said to "shoot on sight"... done ironically
in a context of wanting to bring back a state of "wikilove".
Am I one of those you think should go away and find a different
hobby?
--
== 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/