Hi everyone,
Today I was approached by a journalist (who is a colleague of a friend
of mine from Uni) at IDG regarding our position on the publication of
the HD-DVD decryption key.
As far as I know:
* the [[WP:OFFICE]] has so far refused to intervene in the matter and
* the departure of Brad Patrick means we currently have no general counsel
* the Foundation has recieved no DMCA take down notices regarding the matter
For the last 24 hours, we've been censoring the HD-DVD key from
articles, talk pages, user pages and signatures and relying on
draconian measures such as full protection of [[HD-DVD]] and blocks
with the justification that we were awaiting official guidance.
Now that the desperately needed legal advice is apparently not
forthcoming, it may eventually appear to outsiders that we are
paranoid of what the AACS/MPAA may do to us instead of only being
cautious. I am starting to feel uncomfortable that many administrators
such as myself may be acting unilaterally over the matter based upon
our own personal (mis)interpretations of the DMCA instead of enforcing
an official stance or community consensus.
So how exactly should we respond to the press regarding this?
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Lau (Netsnipe)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: mitchell_bingemann(a)idg.com.au <mitchell_bingemann(a)idg.com.au>
Date: May 3, 2007 10:27 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: HD-DVD controversy
To: netsnipe(a)gmail.com
Hi Andrew,
I'm a colleague of Liz's and was following the whole HD-DVD debacle.
Just hoping for a Wikipedia update on the whole thing, where do you
guys stand on it now? Cheeers,
Mitchell Bingemann
Journalist
IDG Online
(02) 9902 2711
I am amazed there are people who haven't read this:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
The problem with Internet-based project is that they form groups of
humans, and a group is its own worst enemy. That's a marvellous essay
by Clay Shirky (who's on the Wikimedia Advisory Board for good
reason), and when I read it I was just nodding my head and going "yep"
over and over. An Internet community has a life cycle. It starts, it's
good for a while, it chokes itself or falls away. I've seen this
happen over and over.
The problem comes when the community is not an end in itself but is
attached to a purpose: it starts fouling the purpose. We're seeing
that on Wikipedia. That is, English Wikipedia's interesting community
problems are a wider emergent phenomenon than just Wikipedia or Jimmy
Wales having done something wrong.
(Woe is us when flooded with people for whom this is their first
online community and who haven't experienced the cycle even once. We
have enough trouble enculturating Usenet refugees and their … robust …
interaction style.)
Larry Sanger is trying to work around this on Citizendium, as advised
by Shirky's main source, Bion's "Experiences In Groups": group
structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order, parliamentary
procedure, etcetera. The question then is how much emergent bad
behaviour you can suppress without suppressing the emergent good
behaviour.
Shirky says "Constitutions are a necessary component of large,
long-lived, heterogenous groups." I've long spoken of Wikipedia's
fundamental policies — neutrality, verifiability, no original
research; assume good faith, no personal attacks, don't bite the
newbies — as a constitution, and said that any process that violates
them must be thrown out. The catch being there's not yet a way to
enforce that.
One thing Shirky strongly points out: "The third thing you need to
accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some
situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite
common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one
person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea
voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in." You
would probably believe the outrage when I applied the phrase "one
moron one vote" to Requests for Adminship. That, by the way, is the
prime example on English Wikipedia at present of a group that's being
its own worst enemy. I think it's worse than Articles for Deletion.
(And you'll see this 2003 essay speaks of Wikipedia as a project
that's avoided that one. Whoops.)
How to keep the community focused on the point of the exercise? What
level of control does one apply to keep on track without killing off
the liveliness?
- d.
Matthew Brown wrote:
> On 5/2/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 02/05/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
>> > So, if I start spamming "George Bush" all over the wiki that string
>> > will get blocked by the regex filter too?
>>
>> You know, sometimes I think [[WP:POINT]] *should* have been written
>> about you.
>
> It wasn't?
I thought so too at the time, but the author of the original admonition
claimed it was not. Or at least, Anthony may have been no more than one
example of the phenomenon being addressed. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Don%27t_disrupt_Wi…
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Don%27t_disrupt_Wi…>
--Michael Snow
>-----Original Message-----
>From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, May 1, 2007 08:35 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Administrator flameout: Naconkantari
>
>Fred Bauder wrote:
>> The warning signs were when the Arbitration Committee decided that continual agitation was just "free speech". We all know the users who have taken the lead. The precipitating event is at:
>>
>> Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Kelly Martin 4
>>
>
>So after reading that and rummaging, I've got a couple of questions.
>
>It seems like Naconkantari had recently taken some heat for too-vigorous
>blocking. Then he blocked several people on the RFC you link to above,
>shortly before the RFC was deleted. Doc Glasgow, one of the people
>blocked, offers this as an explanation:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notic…
Yes, I see it, the above link leads to a rather plain exchange which sets forth the essence of the problem we face. The bad guys are winning. And further down there is a call to punish those who try to do something about it.
Fred
>
>Thanks,
>
>William
>
>_______________________________________________
>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
>
Wikicharts is still up and running:
Observations from April:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enw…
* Current events really do dominate. Three of the top ten are related
to the Virginia Tech massacre.
* "Wiki" is a perennial favourite, which I find a bit bizarre.
* It's very odd that World War II, World War I, Vietnam War and even
Cold War are in the top 100, but Iraq War isn't. I wouldn't have
expected the high placement of WWII and Adolf Hitler.
* Apparently viewers' obsession with sex is diminishing. Only two
sex-related articles in the top 20.
I also note from the 1 day of May stats (
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enw…
):
* The daily FA ranks #12
* The date itself does well (May 1 #14, May Day #2)
* Popular culture does very well: Heroes #4, List of characters in
Heroes #6, Spider-man 3 #7, List of Pokemon #10...
Should we be reacting to these statistics in some way? Given the
enormous interest in our [[Wiki]] article, should we put more effort
into making it an FA?
Steve
Does anyone have experience contacting schools regarding vandalism and can
offer advice/best practices?
I had to block one of the schools one of the jurisdictions where I attended
school, and comfortable contacting them. They can possibly track down which
student did the latest vandalism, but not really sure what the school can do
to stop them. I only speculate that it's a relatively small number of other
kids responsible for previous incidents of vandalism from the school. Does
that sound reasonable?
The majority of edits from the school IP are not constructive, but some are
constructive. The volume of vandalism is moderate, but manageable (on our
end) and not high as I've seen with other schools. And have no idea how
many students and staff there edit with accounts. I prefer not simply
blocking the whole school because of some bad kids.
What other things can the school network administrator and staff do? Any
suggestions?
--Aude
I started a discussion at [[WT:BLP]] on the proposal that we implement
a variant of proposed deletion as follows:
It is proposed that this article be deleted as a biography of
a living individual which does not cite its references or
sources.
If you can improve the article by sourcing it, please edit
this page and do so. You may remove this message if you add
reliable independent sources. This template should not be
removed without first sourcing the article.
The article may be deleted if this message remains in place
for 14 days. (This template was added: 26 April 2007.)
If you created the article, please don't take offense.
Instead, please improve the article so that it is acceptable
according to the policy on biographies of living individuals.
The idea would be to give a bureaucracy-free route to removing
*unsourced* biographies. The unsourced condition may be the result of
removal of questionable sources for negative statements, that should
not make a difference.
There's also a debate at [[WP:AN]] about this.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
While looking at the list of most linked domains I ran into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Linksearch&target=www.t-m…
It looks like a bunch of spam. But then when I go to the links,
they're broken. And they've apparently been added by an admin.
Anyone know what this is all about?
The links to www.nscb.gov.ph likewise seem to be spam, added by the same admin.
Anthony