WikiEN-l March 2007

wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org

181 participants
397 discussions

Re: [WikiEN-l] Just what *is* Jimbo's role anyway?
by Sheldon Rampton 21 Mar '07

21 Mar '07

Stevertigo wrote: > But the > fact is that until Jimbo decides otherwise, he is the reigning > monarch. He already HAS decided otherwise, by creating the Wikimedia Foundation and transferring the assets of Wikipedia from his private company to the foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation's bylaws clearly state, "All corporate powers shall be exercised by or under the authority of, and the business and affairs of the Foundation shall be managed under, the direction of the Board of Trustees. ... The act of the majority of the Trustees present at a meeting at which a quorum is present shall be the act of the Board of Trustees." Moreover, "Any Trustee may be removed by a majority vote of the full membership of the Board." In short, Jimbo's powers only exist insofar as they are granted to him by the full board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation, on which he only holds one seat. Moreover, the other trustees could remove him from the board if they so chose. If it were their desire to do so, in fact, they could impose limits on his powers up to and including banning him entirely from editing Wikipedia. This does not mean, of course, that he has no powers. It merely means that his powers are derived from (and therefore limited by) the consent of the full board of the foundation, which chooses to grant him certain powers based on the trust he has accumulated through his history as a leader of the project. If, however, a dispute were to arise over the question of who has ultimate power, there is little doubt that a court of law would rule in favor of the board. In short: The king is dead. Long live Jimbo! -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Just what *is* Jimbo's role anyway?
by Sheldon Rampton 21 Mar '07

21 Mar '07

Jimmy Wales wrote: > Well, Sheldon, this assumes that the Foundation has authority > *over* the > community, which the Foundation more or less denies. So whatever > corporate powers I have or don't have are likely quite different from > whatever powers our community traditions give me. > > Several board members have made it quite clear that they don't > intend to > interfere with that one way or the other. Again, turning to the bylaws: "The majority of the Board shall be elected or appointed from within the community," but "'Community' as used in the Bylaws, shall be defined by the Board, consistent with the mission statement." This seems to say that the ultimate power in Wikipedia resides with the community, as you stated. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the Board has the power to define the community. In theory this could lead to a situation where the board defined the community in such a way as to manipulate the outcome of elections to produce unrepresentative outcomes. In practice it most likely means that ultimate power now resides with a broad-based community of Wikipedians who elect the board to represent them. The fact that the current board assents to the current definition of Jimbo's powers does not mean that future boards will continue to do so. It's possible (again in theory, and I see no sign of it happening) that the community could elect board members who choose to do otherwise. For the record, I'm not in any way advocating that they do so. The point here is simply to define from whence your powers derive. As for the question of whether the Foundation has authority over the community, of course the Foundation doesn't have any ability to tell any of us what to do. However, it *does* control the physical assets of Wikipedia, including the servers. If it chose to do so, it could shut the site down and fire the staff, and the community would have to try to reconstitute itself elsewhere. Again, I'm not advocating that this happen, nor do I think that it is even remotely likely. The main point here (on which I think you and I agree) is that Stevertigo's description of you as a "monarch" with "unlimited powers" is no longer accurate. Whether your powers derive from the board or from "community traditions," they now derive from some source other than actual ownership of Wikipedia. Moreover, if your powers derive from community traditions, it is paradoxical (to put it politely) for Stevertigo to suggest that the community should refrain from publicly discussing how your powers are defined. Is he just being a troll, or what? -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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User space needs to be more clearly marked
by Steve Bennett 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Hi all, I was helping my girlfriend's little sister with a school project last night. Like all high school students, when asked to "research" a topic, she gets on google and pretty soon ends up at Wikipedia. For some reason that I don't understand, she wound up on a copy of [[Paris]] stored in someone's user space. She had no idea - not the faintest. I noticed because the URL wasn't quite right, and tried to explain to her, getting questions like "So, what's wrong? The information is so good!" So, is there anything we can do to make REALLY REALLY CLEAR to visitors that User space is *not* article space? For that matter, perhaps we should have one colour for article space, and another colour for *everything else*? Steve

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Inconvenience
by wikipedia2006＠dpbsmith.com 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

> From: "John Lee" <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> > > What's the point of that? It would be better to wait until you've > > found the sources before you start writing... > > > > Citing sources should be easy because they should be the actual source > > of the information, which you will already know since it's whatever > > you just finished reading. > > This strikes me as a rather inconvenient process. It's known as "work." Writing is work. Writing an encyclopedia is work. > Perhaps other people work > at things differently, but I rarely directly refer to sources when starting > an article unless I know little about it. The only exception is when I have > sources and am not sure what articles could use them, in which case I hunt > through the book/whatever for things I could write about. Otherwise, when I > want to write about something in general (especially when it's on impulse, > normally after "what? this is a redlink?"), it's often inefficient and > frustrating to hunt down a source. Why is it any more "convenient" to do this in the main article space than in your own user space? > Call me an eventualist, I don't call this eventualism. I call this rehearsing in front of the audience. I call this running out into the street naked and telling the policeman "But I was just about to put my clothes on."

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Fwd: ASINs and ISBNs
by Andrew Gray 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Hello all. This was posted back in August 2005, but sadly has not been kept by the list archives; we have a gap of a dozen days or so, and whilst the end of this thread survives, anything before the 21st August is lost. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-August/thread.html The topic in question has arisen again, and I wanted the opportunity to quote this, so I'm forwarding it back to the list so I have a citable source to point to. I promise I'm not just making it up... :-) If anyone is interested, the current discussion is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Amazon - basically, are Amazon internal catalogue IDs a useful and sensible piece of data to give as a reference? As may be apparent I swing towards HELL NO, but YMMV... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> Date: 10-Aug-2005 19:20 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ASINs and ISBNs To: andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk, English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org> Andrew Gray wrote: > According to Google, I've now done about a quarter of the pages > mentioning ASINs. This seemed a good time to see what people thought - > are there any real objections to me continuing, and purging all ASINs > from wikipedia? I can't see any problem with replacing them with > ISBNs, but it struck me some might object to removing the unique ones. I think ASINs are very very very very bad things, and that you are doing wonderful wonderful work in purging them from Wikipedia completely. --Jimbo -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [WikiEN-l] purpose served by anonymity / unmoderated
by Sheldon Rampton 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Steve Bennett wrote: > Yeah. Which is also bad: "Welcome to Wikipendium, the encyclopaedia > that's being edited in real-time. This article is 92 days out of > date." Not as bad as Britannica. Not as good as Wikipedia. I think there's a way to have most of the Citizendium advantages on Wikipedia without losing Wikipedia's advantages. Wikipedia's advantages are: more inclusive; more editors; articles updated more frequently. Citizendium's advantage is: expert vetting by people with actual credentials. (And yes, credentials DO mean something.) A problem, though, is that even experts don't always agree, and some people value different sorts of expertise. One way to have the best of both worlds would be to have a public version of Wikipedia's watchlists feature, with a couple of modifications. Since this feature doesn't currently exist, I'll call it "approval lists" for lack of a better name. Each user would be able create and maintain his/her own "approval list," which would work just like watchlists, except for the following two changes: (1) A user's "approval list" would be publicly viewable by everyone, not just the user who creates it. (2) Rather than marking an ARTICLE for inclusion in the approval list, users would mark a REVISION VERSION of the article. This information would then be usable in various ways. For example, if user A and B are having an edit dispute, they might prefer to simply put different versions on their approval lists rather than having a revert war. If other users chime in, the effect would be akin to voting on a preferred version between the two. If user A's version gets marked for approval by 200 users while user B's version gets marked by only 10 users, this would provide evidence that A's version is more widely accepted. Also, the issue of "credentials" could be dealt with by having users who possess credentials "bless" versions of articles that meet their standards. This would not prevent subsequent editing, but it would make it easy to find the latest version that has been vetted and approved by someone with credentials relevant to the topic. "Credentials" would not have to be defined or standardized. They might include "I have a Ph.D in physics" (a credential that I personally respect) or "I represent the John Birch Society" (a credential that I don't). The result would be that people could choose which credentials they personally value and find versions of the article that match their values. If this functionality existed, I assume that most users would continue to rely primarily on the latest version of article. They would simply find it easier to meaningfully navigate the version history. -------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR (Ray Saintonge)
by Sam Blacketer 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

> > From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: <46004E87.5050306(a)telus.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > Angela wrote: > >On 3/20/07, Guettarda <guettarda(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > >>In a recent posting, Jimbo stated that anything that draws from primary > >>sources is OR. The section is question was drawn in part from primary > >>sources (San Diego courts case detail, a Superior court judgement). > >> > >> > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons > >suggests that whether or not primary sources can be used depends on > >how public the figure is. For non-public figures, it says "material > >from primary sources should generally not be used," whereas for public > >figures it says "material from primary sources should be used with > >care" though that is under the heading "Presumption in favor of > >privacy". > > > Court judgements (and, for that matter, court filings by the disputants, > and even trial transcripts) are a matter of public record. This is an > important component to maintaining the transparency of the judicial > system. Privacy should not be a factor with this kind of material. I would have thought a court judgment is one of those rare sources that is part primary and part secondary: the opinions of the Judge are a primary source, and should if preferable be backed up by a legal textbook which analyses their implications, but the summary of the facts of the case is a secondary source in that it is the Judge's analysis of the primary sources presented to the court. -- Sam Blacketer London E15

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An Open Letter to Mr. Wales
by Sharon, Lois Bram 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

That cannot possibly be the case, sir. Your system is faulty or someone is lying about this. On 3/19/07, George Herbert < george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > On 3/17/07, Sharon, Lois Bram < oneelephant(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Sir, > > > > that cannot possibly be correct. > > I won't forward a private email, but the Steward's wording was "Both > the first and second Elephant accounts shared an IP with RunedChozo". > > That is IP singular. > > > -- > -george william herbert > george.herbert(a)gmail.com > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >

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New Messages message
by Marc Riddell 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

To any and all, I don't know who else to ask about this so I thought I'd ask here. For the last several days I have been getting a "You have new messages" indicator, but when I click on it, and go to my Talk Page, there are no new messages listed. Am I somehow missing them? Is anyone else experiencing this, and what could be the problem? Help! Marc Riddell

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Re: [WikiEN-l] purpose served by anonymity / unmoderated edits
by charles.r.matthews＠ntlworld.com 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Bennett Haselton wrote > The disadvantage of making people register under a presumed real name, much > less following up and trying to verify their identity and credentials, are > of course that you will have fewer users that way. On the other hand, the > advantage is that you can give articles the stamp of reliability if it's > been signed off on by, say, a professor whose .edu address has been > verified. > > Could you get the best of both worlds by (a) allowing unverified users to > build up the meat of an article, but then (b) verifying the credentials of > certain users (Citizendium calls them "editors"), and having those users > sign off on the contents of a given article once it's reached a stable > state? (And then future edits to that article have to go through them?) One can. One could set up one's own wiki and import any WP articles that one wanted to 'bless' into it. The WP way has been to be free-wheeling and pick up the pieces afterwards. That's obvious. Something less obvious to most people, apparently, is that _discussing WP article by article_ misses the basic point that we write hypertext, not self-enclosed essays. You don't really 'improve' a knowledge network by stabilising it. I hear almost nothing from this angle. Charles ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam

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WikiEN-l March 2007