On 22 Nov 2007 at 12:27:11 -0800, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
> jayjg wrote:
> > Here's an even better idea; rather than attempting to quash the
> > viewpoints of people with whom we disagree, let's instead have a
> > moratorium on any mention of BADSITES or Making Lights etc. on the
> > list at all. As I said before, those horses are thoroughly beaten and
> > long dead. Let's give them an honorable burial, and promise never to
> > mention them again.
> It might be easier if the software just filters out messages with the
> "BA..." word. ;-)
We can call this the BADWORDS policy... and start arguing about it right away (and for the
next few years)!
--
Dan
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"David Goodman" wrote
> To say all food served should be edible is begging the question. Food
> by definition is things suitable to be eaten. To say something needs
> to be verifiable without saying what it means is not much help in
> practice. Just like "notable" or "encyclopedic"
>
> > On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:47:33 -0800, "jossi fresco"
> > <jossif(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I spy a dangerous fallacy. It may be that you can't _define_
> Verifiability without defining "reliable source". But we can certainly
> _agree_ to Veriability without defining "reliable source". And in fact
> we have.
>
> (One can agree that food served in a restaurant should be edible,
> without defining "edible".)
My point entirely, though. We have a "question begging" culture. "Notability" begs the question "noted by whom?". We cope.
The other extreme is a wikilawyering culture. The correct answer to the "you haven't defined your terms" is: cui bono? Does making things more black-and-white in an area help the project, or (as here) help pettifogging editors who are going to raise source criticism to such an art that only access to a huge academic library will allow people to contribute? "Duck tests" for verifiability make a lot of sense, actually.
What we do is to make operational decisions, such as allowing AfD to cut through notability imponderables. This is for the best.
Charles
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"David Goodman" wrote
> There are three problems to relying on AfD alone
> 1. the load on AfD is everything has to come there because there are
> no clear guidelines for people trying to write articles in good faith
> 2. the impossibility of holding a rational discussion on AfD without
> some rules to refer to in the argument--it all becomes a matter of
> whether ILIKEIT.
> 3. lack of consistence (and we deal with this by actually saying we
> dont need to be consistent, the tell-tell sign of a immature system
> that has defined neither its practices or its principles.)
To repeat an old argument: the advantage of AfD is that when, to a rational person, the notability question is something that could go either way, we guillotine the discussion. It is clearly the case that the really marginal decisions include/delete could take up almost all the time in a review process. And those are the ones that matter least: basically it is a toss-up whether they benefit or hinder the project, so make a decision, and allow it to be changed six months later.
Your point 3 is the same as before - everything should be "defined". Well, there is no such need. At the margin, but only there, consistency is the proverbial "bugbear".
There is plenty to be said against AfD, but your slap at immaturity of the system isn't really it.
Charles
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"Ron Ritzman" wrote
> On 11/22/07, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But it had the evil word in it, and it's still in the thread topic.
> > It's a well-known medical fact that any use of or exposure to that
> > word, or even reference to the original strawman, immediately shut
> > downs all rational thought on any wikien-l thread or Wikipedia Talk:
> > page discussion. ;-)
>
> Is this a mutation of [[Godwin's law]]
Not really. Mailing lists have DNFTT not DNA, and that doesn't change.
Charles
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Steve Summit, you have made the following suggestions regarding links
to external harassment:
---------
1. If a link in article space is allegedly non-encyclopedic,
it needs to be assessed according to WP:V or WP:RS or whatever
the sourcing guideline du jour is.
2. If a link in non-article space serves to harass a Wikipedia
editor, it needs to be dealt with in accordance with WP:NPA,
which at times has (and IMO certainly should) treat such links
just as seriously as on-wiki harassment.
3. If an off-wiki page, not linked to from article space
or from non-article space, harasses a Wikipedia editor,
it should either be ignored, or dealt with off-wiki. Nothing
we do on-wiki can punish an off-wiki harasser, or force the
off-wiki harasser to remove their harassing words from the net.
Moreover, we need to keep these three cases -- especially
(1) and (2) -- *separate*. In particular, the decision to keep
or remove an article-space link needs to be made on the basis
of that link's contributions to encyclopedic content, *without*
any confounding arguments about what the linked-to page (or some
other page on the linked-to site) might happen to say about a
Wikipedian. Any attempt to conflate the two arguments invariably
leads -- as we've seen all too well -- to irreducible confusion.
(And has been pointed out, the number of pages that simultaneously
(a) provide useful encyclopedic content but (b) mention Wikepedia
editors -- in any light -- is really pretty vanishingly small.)
--------
Currently a number of editors are working on a guideline to deal with
this issue, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_harassment
What, if any, do you see as the differences between their work and
your own proposal? What deficiencies do you see in the guideline as it
currently stands?
(this is the version as of the writing of this e-mail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Linking_to_external_har…)
On 22 Nov 2007 at 10:24:23 -0500, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 22, 2007 12:17 AM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi there Chad -
> >
> > If it is of any consolation to you, those of us who have been in the
> > trenches on this issue for over six months are pretty tired of it too
> > - heck, even I was ticked off to see this thread overrun by BADSITES
> > babbling,
>
> How odd, then, that you said nothing about it when Dan Tobias first
> brought it up in this thread on the 15th, nor when Steve Summit
> responded at length on the same subject, nor when Josh Zelinsky also
> responded at length.
A rather one-sided list of people, ignoring similarly vociferous participants in this debate such
as JzG and yourself.
--
Dan
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I find it interesting, and a little distressing, that there seems to be a
"groupthink" phenomenon on this list (and also sometimes on Wikipedia
itself). I saw it just now in the discussion of an expulsion from this list.
When it was first brought up for comment, there was a "me-too" chorus of
agreement with the ban. Then, a day later, I posted my dissenting
commentary (which I actually wrote yesterday, but failed to successfully post
due to a misconfigured mail program... getting outbound mail sent while on
vacation and using various different access providers is a pain with all the
security moves and port blocking tossing up hoops to be navigated), and
suddenly there were several other dissenting views following in close
succession.
One can make all sorts of hypotheses to try to explain such things; perhaps
people are timid about expressing their opinion unless somebody else has
already broken the ice in their direction; perhaps people of firm convictions
prefer to be quiet about them unless they're sure they have other supporters
around so they won't be left to twist in the wind alone; perhaps people
without convictions of their own are eager to find bandwagons to jump on so
they'll take up a view that just happens to agree with whoever else posted
last. Whichever it may be (or a combination of these and other factors), it
doesn't seem like the healthiest thing for honest discussion of views (even if
sometimes the outcome might wind up agreeing with my own view).
I know that an atmosphere (which several prominent people seem to be
promoting) where people are in fear of being blocked or banned for their
expression of views is one highly conducive to such groupthink, where
people will either adopt (or pretend to adopt) whatever they see as the
dominant view, or else shut up and decline to state a view at all.
Dan
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All -
we've set up a blog to accompany our annual fundraiser. The headlines
from the blog will be featured in the sitenotice:
http://whygive.wikimedia.org/
I'd like to invite you to submit posts to the blog. These posts can be
provocative, and should give compelling reasons to support the
Wikimedia Foundation. You can draft posts here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Why_Give_blog
Posts will be selected by a number of people: Cary Bass (our Volunteer
Coordinator), Sandy Ordonez (our Communications Manager), Sue Gardner
(Special Advisor to the Board), and myself. We'll probably try to have
a new post every 2-3 days at least.
Once again, the point of these posts is first and foremost to invite
the general public to donate. :-) Please submit stories in this
general spirit.
If you are willing to act as a moderator for comments to vet out spam
& trolling, please contact Cary Bass at <cbass AT wikimedia DOT org>.
For now, this is an experiment and as such, only in English. We will
set up blogs in other languages if this one has a measurable impact on
our fundraising.
Thanks for any and all help!
Erik Möller
Member of the Board
On 20 Nov 2007 at 11:58:16 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have a problem with kicking off people just here to be
> crappy to others? This is a working list, after all.
I've got some problem with Kamryn getting kicked off in particular; here,
she was reacting to
a mistaken demand from Durova that she apologize, following this sequence
of events:
1) Durova mistakenly posts private e-mail to list, with a subject header
calling it "harassing"
2) Kamryn replies, saying that it doesn't seem like harassment
(fullquoting the original)
3) Durova admits that this particular message wasn't harassment, per se,
but later messages
in the sequence (not posted to this list) were; and she insists that
Kamryn needs to make a
big apology for posting the private message without context and
criticizing it (although,
unknown to her at the time, it was actually Durova who posted the message
to the list out of
context, and Kamryn was just responding to it; apparently she had intended
to send it
privately to somebody else but sent it to the list instead)
4) Soon after, Durova realizes her mistake and retracts the call for apology
5) Kamryn replies to the reply in #3, getting a little snarky in the process
6) You ban her for it.
Now, probably Kamryn should have read the later retraction before
reacting, and should have
toned things down a little. However, there seems to be an atmosphere of
touchiness lately,
both on Wikipedia and on this list, where people get easily banned for
minor incivility
infractions, if they're on the "wrong side" of the heated "culture wars",
while people on the
other side can get away with almost anything. That doesn't seem fair to me.
--
Dan
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Lodewijk explained in a discussion on a private list how the 'revision
patrolled' mechanism worked well on nl:wp. I remember that it rapidly
fell into disuse on en:wp, so asked how it worked in practice.
(Message forwarded here with permission - "consider it gfdl :-)".)
I think the idea of an RC patrol roster would be useful - not to find
people to cover the time, as much as to discourage people from doing
it to the point of burnout (and the consequent presumption of bad
faith and newbie-biting).
Thoughts? (And what are the most useful venues on en:wp to put a link
to or copy of this message on?)
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com>
> > I think that this is not entirely true. MarkAsPatrolled is being used
> > extensively in the Dutch language Wikipedia (already for years now i think),
> > with good results. You just might have to work out the right procedures to
> > make it work. I am not entirely sure on which wiki you are basing your
> > conclusions, but you might want to consider to check out nlwiki :)
>[someone else's response deleted - d.]
on nlwiki we have a control center for vandal fighting. You may find
it on http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CV . Every day is chopped in
several pieces, and people can sign up for a part to check it
(afterwards). That way every single anonymous edit is manually
checked. If the edit is checked, it will be marked as patrolled. A
symilar list is set up for new articles, but this is not with
mark-as-patrolled, but with only a checklist for day-parts.
Everybody with a confirmed account can mark as patrolled. Every m.a.p.
is logged. So if someone falsely marks an edit as patrolled, he or she
can be blocked for that. It is not official policy, but generally
considered as inside-vandalism, so worse then normal vandalism.
I think the main trick is that the majority of the vandal fighters has
to support the system. Furthermore, there has to be a certain social
control. The most obvious problems have already been fixed (anonymous
and new accounts can't mark. Marks are logged, so abuse can be tracked
and stopped.
The largest advantage of map is that you can share the workload, that
you can check the vandalism afterwards. Especially for wiki's with no
24/7 patrols this might be very usefull, or wiki's with a *lot* of
edits, where live patrol becomes impossible. There is a clearly
defined backlog, and 99% of the vandalism is found this way.
BR, Lodewijk