I recently joined facebook.com, the social networking site. Facebook
allows people to form groups, and there are numerous ones matching
"Wikipedia". (I quite liked the one called "fricken wikipedia, its
4am!") The majority are silly ones titled with variations along the
lines of "Everything I know I learnt from Wikipedia", but there are
also some anti-Wikipedia or even pro-vandal groups, like this one:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2205217096 (sorry, you may not
be able to see that without an account) - "GLOBAL Wikipedia Vandals".
People are posting comments like this:
[[
Personally, I wish we could all collaborate on a mass group edit.
Imagine if we each created 50-100 sockpuppets, had access to a few
different computers each, and ran some scripting programs to speed up
our work for us...the only way i think it could be any better, is if
we actually had, say 10 admin accounts and could block the entire
recent changes patrol as well as the counter-vandalism unit, then go
about editing on a massive scale. Personally i think that would be a
testimony to the power of individual free-speech, not to mention an
intriguing social experiment.
]]
and this:
[[
I've played around with the idea of doing a lot of legit edits with
one account to apply for adminship eventually. It's something I'd like
to have done by the summer.
As for the mass vandalism idea, I love it. We should get some
interested parties. Whoever wants in, message me on Facebook (we'll
try not to leave most of the plan out in the open).
]]
This is worrying. We should probably try and keep an eye on these places.
--
Earle Martin
http://downlode.org/http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey(a)wolfmountaingroup.com>
Date: 05-Apr-2007 08:29
Subject: [Foundation-l] enwiki-20070206 Wikipedia Thesaurus XML Dumps Posted
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia developers
<wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
An XML Dump with articles has been posted to:
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/thesaurus/wikipedia-thesaurus-20070206.xml.bz2
This dump has been imported in a MediaWiki installation as an online
Thesaurus compiled by a Machine interpreter from the English Wikipedia
Dumps and the links these dumps contain. Wiki links with a [[Article
Name | phrase]] were used in this first run. The XML dump is
importable into MediaWiki
as a real time Thesaurus of word and phrase associations used by the
English Wikipedia Community. This same compilation can be done with any
languages that use MediaWiki and for which XML dumps exist.
The site is at:
http://thesaurus.wikigadugi.org/wiki/Main_Page
I have not fully run the rebuildall.php script, so the full text search
is rebuilding at present.
Some interesting pages are:
http://thesaurus.wikigadugi.org/wiki/Egypt_%28220406%29http://thesaurus.wikigadugi.org/wiki/Town_Center_%281864650%29http://thesaurus.wikigadugi.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_%28571170%29
Jeff
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
After a post here mentioned it, I went to WP:COI and WP:AUTO.
These two articles seem to promote the view that you're not supposed to edit
an article about yourself.
However, WP:BLP seems to suggest that you can to remove libel or unsourced
material, and it's a common refrain to complaints about Wikipedia, "why didn't
you just fix the article yourself?"
It just isn't consistent to both expect people to fix the article about
themselves, and expect them not to, at the same time. It's true, of course,
that neither WP:AUTO nor WP:COI are absolute prohibitions, but they discourage
it in *such* strong terms that anyone who comes to Wikipedia with a complaint
about an article about themselves and stumbles across either guideline,
will think that fixing the article isn't allowed. The subtlety that
"strongly discouraged" doesn't mean "prohibited", or that even a new user
is permitted to violate a guideline, is something they'll completely miss.
How can this be fixed? I complained on the COI talk page and nobody seems
to care. And I suspect just editing the guidelines myself would be reverted
within the hour.
This is a message I wrote in another mailing list. I'm forwarding it
to enwiki-l at Jimbo's suggestion.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com>
Date: Mar 30, 2007 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Otrs-en-l] [SPAM] info-en vs info-fr
To: English OTRS discussion list <otrs-en-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
(Comments from another contributor redacted; the discussion was
related to how inclusionist tendencies tend to lead to large numbers
of unmaintained articles.)
This was the gist of my recent blogpost on maintainability as the
proper criterion for inclusion. I freely admit to being an
inclusionist -- I would love to see proper articles on all rysorts of
random topics of even marginal interest -- but I temper that with the
understanding that having unmaintainable articles harms the
encyclopedia as a whole, and the recognition that the Wikipedia
community is not currently capable of maintaining even the articles it
has, let alone all the articles it could possibly have.
My attitude on such people is that the content should be sequestered
in a nonpublic place and reviewed upon notice that the individual in
question has died. If we never receive notice, then that's probably
because the person was not interesting enough in life to justify an
article anyway. Yes, we might sequester an article for decades under
this policy, but I'm an eventualist as well.
However, don't mistake my eventualism for being support for the idea
that we should leave crap articles sitting out there in public view
(which is a point of view commonly attributed to eventualists). I am
firmly opposed to leaving low-quality articles on the public wiki when
doing so will bring disrepute onto the subjects of those articles or
bring harm to Wikipedia as a project. I am therefore very much in
favor of deletion of any article for which there is no established,
committed process for maintenance.
The problem with this is that there is no established, committed
process for maintaining ANY article on Wikipedia. All article
maintenance on Wikipedia, and in fact virtually all process on
Wikipedia, is haphazard. We are just starting to get comprehensive
vandalism management using centralized tools, or so I am told. We
still have no mechanisms for coordinating even so much as article
categorization or article sourcing, both of which are crucial aspects
of article maintenance.
The infrastructure to maintain over a million and a half articles has
never existed on Wikipedia. Until it does, every new article is
another paper cut, bleeding us a bit more each day.
As I see it, the following absolutely must be done:
* All articles must be categorized. A bot can be used to generate
lists of uncategorized articles, and the articles found in this way
presented to volunteer categorizers using a workflow approach.
Articles not categorized within a reasonable time (say, seven days for
new articles, and three months for existing articles) will be deleted.
My understanding is that there are bots that are capable of making
"good guesses" at categorization, so this may be less painful than it
seems.
* A mapping of categories onto Subject Working Groups needs to be
established. Each Subject Working Group is responsible for the
maintenance of all articles which are categorized within categories
assigned to that SWG. (If an article is within the scope of multiple
SWGs, an arbitration process, with both automated and deliberative
components, will determine which SWG will be primarily responsible for
it.)
* Editors, most of whose edits are made to articles categorized within
a specific SWG, will be identified and asked to form a SWG (or
formalize an existing informal one).
* SWGs will have the responsibility to ensure that all articles within
their ambit are properly sourced, cleaned up, etc.
* Any article which remains unsourced for one month will be deleted.
A bot will detect unsourced articles and notify the responsible SWG of
the article and the need to source it.
This is all entirely orthogonal to vandalism management.
There are already a lot of SWGs on Wikipedia, with varying degrees of
organization; many WikiProjects qualify as such. However, both the
automation and the sense of group responsibility is not currently
present, and needs to be cultivated. We need these people to feel
personally responsible for the quality of all of the articles in their
SWG.
This is a response to the scaling problem. The English Wikipedia's
community has grown too large to function organically the way it used
to three years ago. It is my belief that breaking it up into multiple
subject-oriented communities will help to combat the scaling problem:
the members of the SWG will all know one another and are far more
likely to remain collegial and productive with one another. A SWG
that gets too large can be subdivided further, which means this
provides an ongoing solution to the scaling problem, not just a
one-time fix.
Please feel free to refine this idea or just tell me it's a load of hooey.
Kelly
"The Cunctator" wrote
> I soundly disagree with you that's the main conclusion from this discussion.
I'm open to other conclusions.
> In fact, looking at your above summary, I might think the proper
> conclusion to draw is that the bureaucratic overhead of contributing
> to Wikipedia has grown out of control.
It probably is harder to be a newbie. But you can still turn up and edit 99.9% of the articles without having an account. It is not plausible to me that there is a solution to compiling the largest repository (of its kind) of human knowledge ever, without some sort of trade-off. 'Open for business' is still hanging there on the door.
Charles
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On Wed, 04 Apr 2007 21:13:16 +0100, Guy Chapman aka JzG
<guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Apr 2007 11:17:07 -0700 (PDT), Doc glasgow
> <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
> >porn actresses
>
> There ain't no such animal. Or maybe you've seen a better class of
> porn?
I was thinking at the weekend, when the Sunday Times headlined "BAE
hired actresses for Saudis", how welcome it was to see the return of
the use of the word 'actresses' as a euphemism for 'prostitutes'.
--
Sam Blacketer
London E15
On 4/3/07, "The Cunctator" <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > What we have here is a creative selection of listings.
>
> Which has been compiled by Wikipedians, not by the show.
No, it hasn't. The listing has been compiled by 'Top Gear'. The list
has been copied down from the screen by a Wikipedian based solely on
what was on the screen, adding nothing, changing nothing, removing
nothing, just writing a list of what was on the screen. The creative
input from the Wikipedian was nil.
Suppose there was a television music show with a sing-along song,
where the words were displayed on 'idiot boards' for the studio
audience. A wikipedian watches the show and copies down the lyrics off
the boards displayed in the studio and clearly visible on the
television. That would still be an infringement of the copyright of
the lyricist of the song. This is the same thing, only with a list of
cars.
--
Sam Blacketer
London E15
John Lee wrote:
> It strikes me that you could say, for example, "The usage of the
> phrase in
> the NYT during the 1980s was triple that of the 1970s"
Are you sure it didn't triple in just the last six months?
--Michael Snow
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In today's /Real Life Adventures/, the little girl says "Dad says men
are smarter than women. Is that true?"
Her mom replies, "Listen, Honey. Dad is the human Wikipedia. He has
all the answers, but most of them are wrong."
- --
Sean Barrett | A good plan violently executed now
sean(a)epoptic.com | is better than a perfect plan next
| week. --General George S. Patton, Jr.
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