> Wikipedia is not a role playing game. Why isn't that in WP:NOT?
"It just closely resembles one." User:Elonka has a talk she's done on
the subject, showing the correlations ... leveling-up, the 6-18 month
typical participation time ...
- d.
******
That dynamic can be harnessed to productive purposes. For instance, I
created the triple crown award using the same logic I've used to motivate
players in role-playing games I've run: generate a fantasy item that seems
shiny and cool, then create a clearly defined route to attaining it.
The difference here is that the game has a positive end product. All three
of the venues I specify have some degree of quality control and people
improve real articles to get a triple crown or the imperial jewels. That
makes a better encyclopedia for everybody. And if a little appreciation
motivates them to do more good work, everyone wins.
-Durova
Firstly, I'd like to say hello all - as a first time poster, and an
'only just figured out how the mailing list works' person. Although
saying I've figured it out may be going too far.
My reading of the culture here is that it's pretty much ok to dive
straight into comment - which is what I shall do. Sincere apologies if
my Ps and Qs are not sufficiently minded. I'll try and learn pretty
fast.
I feel the oft-noted decline in civility on the wiki has led to some
extremism in admin. behaviour, and I am of the opinion that a parallel
stream to the ArbCom, some kind of ethics committee / forum might be a
good idea. That's the bigger picture thought, now some specifics;
It may be repetitive but I absolutely stand by all of my contributions
to the wiki, which absolutely are in good faith. I thank the various
users who have said nice things about me - I can now represent myself
better on this list.
In terms of gauging community consensus, Guy was self evidently wrong
to indef-block me - the decision was rightfully overturned pretty
quickly. Where do I feel ethics come in?
I trusted guy with a user history, directly traceable back to my
identity fairly easily, and practically begged him not to abuse this
trust, and to keep that information confidential.
He shared that information with many users.
This is unethical.
(and incidentally, it both upset and angered me hugely)
Now a couple of further corrections, the need for which concerns me also;
(quoting Matt).....
>Actually, the 'original identity' of PM was a user with less than a
>thousand edits and whose contributions to the project in earnest
>didn't start until January 2007. He had a dozen or so edits in 2005
>and only a couple in 2006. Almost immediately after he resumed
>editing, he was embroiled in Wiki politics, stirring up trouble in the
>Essjay affair among others. His encyclopedia-space editing is only
>about a fifth of his edits, and most of those are to just a small
>handful of articles. Notably, they seem to have been picked mostly
>for their notoriety and for being the locus of disputes.
This is wholly inaccurate. I will happily discuss my history with
those I trust privately - but please don't make such aggressive points
without better information, it creates drama, and upsets.
What do you good people think about the need or use of an editor
ethical committee?
Many thanks,
PM.
Hi Lisa,
I know for a fact that User:24.19.33.82 has nothing to do with Greg Kohs.
You've really blown it here, and comments such as…
"I'll call this a WP:DUCK block: I've been blocking MyWikiBiz socks for a
year and am pretty good at spotting them."
"With experience one gets quite good at this."
…will make you look awfully stupid if the true identity of
User:24.19.33.82comes out.
How do I know this? Because that's my current IP (for now.) My aim was only
to edit anonymously like any other IP. So please let me do so. Otherwise,
I'm forced to prove how badly you and Jonathan have messed this up in order
to get unblocked. Unblocking the IP's yourself (which belong to public
commercial establishments, you shouldn't be blocking them for 3 months
anyway) with some summary like "benefit of the doubt" would be a face-saving
way for you to avoid this.
-M.O.
[a sequel to the parable posted earlier in this list]
Maddenville was in crisis. People with bizarre views of what
constituted "football" were disrupting it. Some of the town's
leaders decided that what was needed was to Get Tough on the trolls,
vandals, and disrupters. A number of people were banned. Many of
the banned people, along with others who were critical for some
reason or other of the concept of Maddenville, the way Maddenville
was being run, or the game of American football itself, started
congregating on a hilltop near enough to Maddenville to get a good
look at what was happening there, but across the county line so that
the authorities of Maddenville had no jurisdiction over them. They
named their new settlement "Maddenvile Review Village", and soon it
grew into a thriving settlement, though still much smaller than
Maddenville itself. From there, residents used telescopes and
binoculars to monitor the goings-on at Maddenville, as well as
getting reports by phone, paper mail, and in person by visitors from
Maddenville, not to mention watching and listening to the TV and
radio stations originating in Maddenville. Just like the obsession
of Maddenville was football, the obsession of Maddenville Review
Village was Maddenville.
For a while the two settlements coexisted without very much strife;
many in Maddenville were glad that some of the more disruptive people
had left (whether voluntarily or by being exiled forcibly), and chose
simply to ignore the activities of the village of critics and go on
with their own passion for football. However, there were a few in
Maddenville whose feelings were hurt by the mean things Maddenville
Review Village was saying about them. They would send banned people
to sneak into Maddenville at night and post notices on the bulletin
board in the town square, sometimes containing personal attacks on
citizens of Maddenville, or revealing embarrassing personal
information about them. Maddenville's constables would rip them down
as soon as they saw them, but sometimes ill feelings resulted from
their being seen at all. A growing sentiment developed among some of
the leaders of Maddenville that more needed to be done than simply
passively ignoring them.
Matters soon came to a head when a leader who had been the subject of
particularly nasty attacks from the Review Village noticed the
distressing fact that Maddenville Review Village was listed in the
atlas and gazetteer in the Maddenville Public Library. This atlas
was the pride and joy of the town librarian and the centerpiece of
the library's collection, as the librarian supplemented her love of
football with a love of geography nearly as great. The atlas was
kept in a set of three-ring binders so that pages could be updated as
needed, in order to keep it accurate up to the minute. In a recent
update, MRV had been added, as the publishers of the atlas decided
that it was sufficiently notable for inclusion along with the many
other cities, towns, villages, and hamlets included there.
This would simply not do, according to the town leader. MRV was a
group of evil, banned trolls, and should not be given the recognition
of inclusion in any reference work in Maddenville, in his opinion.
Since Maddenville had a tradition to "Be Bold", he went into the
library with a tube of White-Out and obliterated MRV from the map.
The librarian wasn't very happy with this, but didn't vocally object
because she didn't much like MRV anyway, and didn't want to be seen
by the townspeople as supporting that group of trolls and harassers.
>From then on, people looking in the atlas at the library couldn't
help notice that something had been censored from it, and this
actually increased the attention paid to MRV, including by people who
hadn't even heard of the place before this. Once their curiosity had
been piqued, it wasn't very hard for them to find it, since it was in
other sources such as Google Maps which were outside the control of
the town leaders. At any rate, many of the town's leading citizens,
including the ones most fervently opposed to MRV, spent much time
looking up at its hilltop with their own telescopes and binoculars in
order to keep an eye on what those evil trolls were up to. However,
they still didn't want anybody else finding the place; they could be
trusted to look at it themselves, for good motives of helping to
protect Maddenville from it, but if others find it they might be
manipulated by the evil trolls, which wouldn't be good.
While debate was breaking out over whether the blanking of the atlas
entry was justified, a citizen wrote an essay called "BADTOWNS" and
posted it to the bulletin board in the town square. It called for a
ban on referring, pointing, or giving directions to any town,
village, or hamlet that was engaged in personal attacks on any
citizen of Maddenville. It was originally designated as merely an
essay, but some people attempted to move it from the bulletin board
into the law books in the town courthouse so it could be enforced as
law, despite it not actually having been voted into effect by the
legislature or by a referendum of the citizens. Others tried to move
it to the historical archives along with other failed proposals.
Somebody even grabbed it and fed it into a paper shredder, but
another person painstakingly taped it back together so that it
remained on the bulletin board. Despite not being made into law,
some tried to enforce it nevertheless, including on people who were
trying to discuss the proposal itself and feeling the need to refer
to specific things about MRV and other towns that might be covered by
the proposal. Some people trying to make such mentions in their
speeches and bulletin board postings about the proposal were given
warnings, and one who persisted after such a warning was forced to
spend the night in the town jail. This tended to chill discussion
afterward.
Proponents of the BADTOWNS policy claimed that it was actually
already law, regardless of the status of the current proposal, due to
an earlier decision of the Maddenville Superior Court. This decision
was regarding another town called SportsDramaVille, which was settled
by comedians with a very tasteless sense of humor. Their main
product was a set of trading cards with grotesque caricatures of
various figures in sports including players, coaches, team and league
officials, and even some prominent fans. The cards also had
scurrilous gossip about the people on them, including false and
defamatory information, true and privacy-invading information, and
nasty personal attacks. Some prominent Maddenville citizens were
included, but some people from Maddenville Review Village also were,
as well as people from other places and other sports of little
interest here. The court decision ultimately banned those trading
cards, and anything else connected with SportsDramaVille. Some felt
this was an overreaching decision going beyond the proper
jurisdiction of the court, and was possibly unconstitutional, but few
wanted to object very strongly because of the overwhelming view that
SDV and its cards were vile things of no use to the serious pursuit
of football. Some thought that the actions of a Maddenville
constable soon after the decision, to go and rummage through the
drawers of the local sports card shop to find and destroy all of the
offending cards even in the dusty, musty backstock that was seldom
even looked at, were unnecessary, however. This decision was now
being used as a precedent to support larger bans on references to
BADTOWNS.
The next controversy came when a scandal broke out that some of the
football players in Maddenville were using illegal performance
enhancing substances, and were lying about it and cheating on their
drug tests. This got extensively written up in the national press,
and resulted in some players being suspended or expelled from their
teams. Embarrassingly, the scandal had been uncovered and publicized
by the people at Maddenville Review Village, as part of their ongoing
attempt to cast disrepute on Maddenville. When the local newspaper,
the Maddenville Goalpost, wrote about the scandal, they included a
line mentioning the involvement of MRV in it. This upset a town
leader so much that he went around town early in the morning
gathering up all the papers before anybody else woke up and read
them, burning those papers, and printing a new edition without the
offending mention. The paper's reporter and editor didn't much care
for this, just like the librarian earlier, but also didn't want to be
seen as MRV sympathizers.
[To be continued]
--
== 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/
Dear good people of Wikipedia,
I am writing here as the owner of Wikipedia Review, and
also as someone who would like to apologise to you, the
Wikipedia community, in addition to the Wikipedia Review
community, for some actions that a member of our forum,
Kato, performed recently, which relate to various other
topics discussed on Wikipedia, surrounding the user name
Private Musings, the administrator JzG, and the article
and person Robert Black.
First and foremost let me say that I do not approve of
what Kato did. I was so angry about what he did that I
stood up to it, and Somey, who is managing the forum,
decided to give me a "mandatory holiday" over it, and
right now as we speak we are negotiating as to whether I
will just take my forum back and clean up this whole mess,
or whether he will do it and I won't have to. Needless to
say this entire incident created more problems on
Wikipedia Review than it did on Wikipedia. However, I
would like to state that this was done by one person and
one person alone - Kato - and should not be seen to
reflect the opinions and views of people who use Wikipedia
Review as a whole.
I wrote on my blog about this incident here:
http://therealadrian.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5D338A8729E83EAB!892.entry
Put simply, Kato was trying to hurt SlimVirgin and
Wikipedia as a whole through some well-placed lies. The
entire thing was a set up. Kato abused Wikipedia Review's
trusted members forum, and his newly appointed position as
moderator in doing this. And I believe that it was
actually done with an aim for him to try to take over
Wikipedia Review. Certainly, his actions prior to doing
this were consistent with this aim, when he attacked a
number of high profile members in relation to the "child
grooming" issue. He has succeeded wonderfully, too, as
Wikipedia Review is absolutely shattered thanks to this
issue, with nobody really being able to make heads or
tails of it, and to this day they still refuse to openly
discuss what Kato did (instead they are discussing my
complaining about Kato and various conspiracy theories
about what my secret agenda was, since they refuse to
accept that Kato actually did something wrong here).
Quite frankly I am disgusted at this. We at Wikipedia
Review have always prided ourselves on being "the good
guys", who expose lies and always tell the truth. In this
incident, we became "the bad guys", who lied to you (and
to ourselves) and who then had to have our lies exposed by
you guys over there at Wikipedia. What is the point of
having a forum to expose lies if we are the ones making up
the lies?
And while I haven't been fond of SlimVirgin for a long
time, and perhaps we could suggest that a few people who
probably deserve to be hurt did get hurt in this, the
amount of innocent bystanders who got hurt is far too
many, and attacking a group, hurting innocent people along
the way to hopefully perhaps hurting someone who in your
opinion deserves it is the wrong way to go about things.
A number of people on Wikipedia who had nothing to do with
any of this were banned, and they are completely innocent
of all wrongdoings. I don't know if anyone on Wikipedia
can take the time to wade through this to figure out who
was innocent and who was not. Because of the sheer level
and complexity of Kato's lies, realistically its probably
not even possible to do this, and I understand the idea of
banning people "just in case".
I can offer no reassurances that Wikipedia Review are
going to clean everything up, because right now I am
standing here as someone who got banned from my own forum,
and if I do take it back, then the whole place may well
fall apart (that is the threat I have been given to try to
suggest to me that I shouldn't go in and take my forum
back). Right now most people on there are refusing to
accept the truth of the situation, and are instead
insisting that this whole thing was my set up. That Kato
didn't actually bully anyone, didn't actually set anyone
up, and that the whole thing was my fault for making
"unfounded accusations" against Kato.
I just want to reassure everyone here that that is not
what Wikipedia Review is meant to be about. We are meant
to be there to make Wikipedia accountable, to discuss the
various issues with the site, to make sure that people are
aware of the various problems and to educate people. This
whole incident goes further against what Wikipedia Review
stands for than anything else in its 2 year history. This
is not who we are. And if I have anything to do with it,
this is not who we will become.
I know that a number of admins have offered to let me back
on Wikipedia over this, for showing integrity, and have
wanted me to betray people over at Wikipedia Review. But
I am not going to do that. If my Wikipedia ban is to be
reviewed, it should be on its merits. No, of course my
ban wasn't fair and no of course it doesn't have any
legitimacy. But that doesn't mean that I am going to
betray all that I have worked for just to get back in. I
have more integrity than that. I would rather be
somewhere for the right reasons, and to do things in the
right way.
Again, I would like to apologise to everyone who got hurt
over this, and all of the Kato-inspired drama that this
created, in the mailing list, on AN/I, and everywhere
else.
And for the record, I do think that Private Musings is an
abusive account. But they should be exposed legitimately,
not in this way.
Thank you.
Adrian, owner of Wikipedia Review
Wikipedia Review username: Blissyu2
Wikipedia username: Zordrac
I wanted to propose a chance concerning how edit conflicts work. I am not sure what mailing list this should be done on so I'm just posting it here since I know that it's at least on English Wikipedia. The problem is this: Whenever I edit a specific subsection of a page and there is an edit conflict, it reloads the entire page in edit mode, not just the single section that I edited which the edit conflict occurred. This causes problems for two reasons. Firstly, Even though I am using a cable modem, it still causes a high amount of lag and time to load large pages in edit mode, sometimes it even freezes my firefox browser. Secondly, While it loads the entire page in edit mode, if another edit occurs while I'm resolving the edit conflict, I am forced to do it again and again since the chances of an edit conflict occurring are much greater when editing an entire page opposed to a single section. My question is this: Is it possible to cause edit conflicts to only load the
single section edited opposed to the entire page? For instance if I edit a subsection of the Admin notice board page and I get an edit conflict, I don't want it to load the entire notice board page in edit mode, just the single section that I edited so that I can quickly fix it. Is this possible?
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
FYI -
we're filtering out $0.01 donations from the various statistics on the
fundraiser from now on. This means e.g. that
http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22 shows much more accurate data
now, but also that the sitenotice counter has dropped significantly.
Please, if you see people asking about this in various places on the
wikis or mailing lists, explain to them what is going on.
These tiny donations are, apparently, people testing credit cards;
they don't give us anything, but they also don't cost us anything. We
already have a JavaScript to block them at the donation form; I don't
know if there's much else we can do about it.
--
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
> I'm a firm believer in the principle that ethical decisions where good
> people disagree belong to the individuals who live with the consequences.
It's sort of an abstract philosophical question, but for what it's
worth, it seems to me that the people who have to live with the
consequences are probably the very last people who should be making
decisions.
So, to use a concrete example, if I have an off-wiki dispute with an
individual or website-- they are strongly criticized, attacked, or
(noncriminally) harassed me in some way-- I'm now probably the last
person on the entire project who ought to be making decisions about
that individual/website's articles. Nothing to do with my character,
my judgment, or my faith-- I just am now personally involved, and
should stay away from those articles-- if only to avoid even the
appearance of impropriety.
******
That example misapplies the principle. Wikipedia's rules and guidelines
exist because the website serves the public. Per WP:NOT, the site's
articles are not a soapbox or a venue for airing personal grievances. The
only exception I recognize in that realm is WP:BLP: within reason, Wikipedia
should accommodate courtesy deletion requests from the subjects of these
articles.
That was the principle I used to get rid of Daniel Brandt's biography. Of
course, if your argument is persuasive enough, you may change my mind and I
could open a discussion to have it unsalted.
******
And actually, this principle extends beyond personal disputes, but to
any subject we're "too" passionate about. I know I have, in the back
of my own mind, a set of articles I will never ever edit, because I'm
just a little too close to them. I don't have an recognizable COI,
but I care a little too much, and that work is best left to someone
who doesn't care as much as I do. Passion is the enemy of precision.
******
I very much agree with you on there, and exercise a similar restraint
myself, but I don't see how you construe it as at odds with this principle.
******
I don't know that you're actually disagreeing with any of that, of
course. It's just when you say "Let the person who has to live with
the consequences make the tough calls", I say "No! Let absolutely
anybody BUT the person who's gonna have to live with the consequences
make tough calls-- the calls are tough enough as is, without being
blinded by personal interests or emotions".
******
To put this another way I'll offer a concrete example. While my father had
a brain tumor I was his primary caregiver and I was quite active in the
caregiver community during that time. A young woman joined our mailing
list. Her husband was about 30 years old and had just been diagnosed with
glioblastoma multiforme. Since my father had the same thing I knew the
statistics by heart: no cure, no five year survival rate. 50% of patients
live 12 months. 10% reach the two year anniversary. 2% last three years.
After that they stop keeping statistics. This couple was childless.
Under a normal therapeudic schedule her husband's radiation treatment would
start about three weeks after his brain surgery. He was coherent and
competent - able to make decisions - and they wanted to discuss the
possibility of freezing some of his sperm. The best time to do that would
be before radiation. Yet when they raised the topic with his doctor the
physician called it unethical and refused to discuss it.
This woman wasn't absolutely certain she wanted to bear her husband's child
through artificial insemination, but she wasn't very pleased about the way
that doctor handled the issue. She and her husband wanted to make an
informed decision. If they decided to go through with the idea, she was the
one who would bear the child and raise it.
As for myself, I wouldn't make that choice. Caring for a terminally ill
patient is incredibly hard. I'd have serious misgivings about bringing a
child into the world that had almost no chance of knowing its own father. I
shared that perspective with her.
But ultimately I went on with my life, the doctor went on with his life, and
this woman lived with the consequences. The decision belonged to her.
-Durova
Probably about as long as I've been using Wikipedia I've wondered what the
dull grey image in the background at the top of the monobook skin is
supposed to be. You can only glimpse part of it, and if you're using a
smallish monitor, that's a very small part indeed.
Well, today I suddenly glimpsed enough to see it for what it is. Wow.
For anyone who hasn't worked it out, I won't spoil it. :)
PS Am I the only one for whom the words "log out" appear over a dark grey
Africa-shaped blob?
Steve
"Even if admins were blocking a specific POV- so what?" Well, here's why
that thinking might be dangerous: most banned editors are banned for
disruptively arguing their POV, nor their POV. If we ban accounts on the
basis of POVs like already banned editors, that would be a severe error, and
compromise our neutrality, our effectiveness, and our ability to criticize
ourselves.
I'd let this go - I don't normally write in - but it seems that too many
people have begun believing that 'sounding like' people who are dangerous
for *other reasons *is in itself reason for banning. That's just happened at
AN/I, for example which is why I've broken the rules I've set myself and
written in. We've got to be careful to avoid false positives in our
identification.
I agree with Joshua on the effectiveness of textual analysis to catch
sockpuppets, so don't make this remark about that. It isn't. It's about how
this method must not appear to be used to scotch criticism of our own on-WP
behavior.
RR
Quoting joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu
<wikien-l%40lists.wikimedia.org?Subject=%5BWikiEN-l%5D%20Featured%20editors%3F&In-Reply-To=20071112103004.GB16056%40psi.co.at>
*Mon Nov 12 14:16:40 UTC 2007*
> > Quoting Raphael Wegmann <wegmann at psi.co.at>:
>
> > On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 05:41:21PM -0500, joshua.zelinsky at yale.eduwrote:
> >> Quoting Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at >:
> >>
> >> > Guy Chapman aka JzG schrieb:
> >> >> On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:52:43 +0100, Raphael Wegmann
> >> >> <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >>>> No, the only people who need to fear that are the *already banned*
> >> >>>> abusers of the project whose socks we are blocking on an almost
> >> >>>> daily basis.
> >> >>
> >> >>> And what kind of magic is involved in finding those socks?
> >> >>> In what way is it different from a witch hunt?
> >> >>
> >> >> The average sockpuppet is traceable via IP using CheckUser and other
>
> >> >> methods, whereas witch hunts require ducking stools and the like.
> >> >
> > What are those "other methods"? According to WP:SOCK
> > "similarities in interests and editing style" might help
> > to detect sockpuppets. If this is the case, how can we
> > make sure, that we do not block different editors,
> > who happen to share the same POV? Does it matter at all
> > since we might call them as well meatpuppets?
> > How do we prevent admins from blocking not a vandal
> > but a certain POV?
>
>
> Furthermore, even if admins were blocking a specific POV- so what? In
> order for
> a POV to look similar to a blocked editor it generally needs to be extreme
> and
> with no caring for NPOV. So even if such blocks were occasionally
> occurring we
> aren't losing much. Consider for example, some socks of Jason Gastrich
> we've
> blocked. At least one of those I think wasn't a Gastrich sock, but it was
> interested in pretty close to the same thing; spamming and promoting
> Louisiana
> Baptist University and whitewashing the article. We didn't lose much for
> blocking it. Note incidentally, that this isn't the sort of evidence we
> are
> talking about above- that sort is almost never wrong.
>