I'd like to invite you to participate in a survey about Wikimedia's
brands, their uses, and possible changes to our brand strategy:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_brand_survey
Thank you.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic
Slim Virgin wrote:
> You admit you haven't read it carefully; that why you haven't seen
> what we're getting at.
I think I've poked around it enough the get the idea. But I'm
curious: How much time does Slim Virgin think I OUGHT to spend
reading WR? Evidently she must read it a lot, since she's so much
more informed about it than I am. Of course, I might be able to reach
her level of enlightenment more quickly if she would provide links to
specific examples of the horrors to be found there, but since this
whole discussion has centered around the idea that no one should ever
link there, we have a bit of a problem. Instead of hard facts that
might lead to shared understanding, what we get instead is weird,
vague stuff about someone saying someone is a pedophile.
--------------------------------
| 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
--------------------------------
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--------------------------------
Jayjg wrote:
> Somebody asserted that it could be beneficial to Wikipedia to link to
> sites like WR. I challenged that person to provide concrete examples
> of how. Soon afterwards hysterical rhetoric ensued, policies and
> insults flying left and right, impassioned cries of "censorship",
> babies being murdered, death stars being blown up, heat death of the
> universe, etc. The usual.
This description is mostly mischaracterization of the discussion. The
part about "babies being murdered," for example, is based on a
complete misreading. Someone who supports the BADSITES policy argued
awhile back that use of BADSITES as a pretext for systematically
removing links to the "Making LIght" website was merely a case of
someone misinterpreting the policy and didn't reflect badly on the
policy itself. The argument was that the policy shouldn't be rejected
simply on the basis of an instance of it being misused. The specific
phrase used was "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater," where
the "baby" meant the BADSITES policy. This in turn led to several
subsequent postings that mentioned babies and bathwater, including
one posting by an opponent of the BADSITES policy who said something
about not murdering the baby. It was a bit of playful wordplay, not
the sort of hysterical rhetoric you're making it out to be. Maybe you
hadn't followed the whole thread and just didn't get the reference.
As for death stars being blown up, heat death of the universe, etc.,
that's just Jayjg adding some hyperbole to exaggerate his point. No
one here actually talked about death stars.
On another matter -- the stuff about "pedophiles" -- Jayjg is correct
that I was confusing him with someone else. It was Slim Virgin who
wrote the hypothetical stuff about someone being called a pedophile.
My apologies.
But since Jayjg says he doesn't support a policy of censorship, I
hope he can clarify something for me. Suppose someone writes an item
for Signpost or their user talk page that mentions and links to
something on Wikipedia Review. I gather that Jayjg generally thinks
linking to WR is a bad idea, but just suppose that someone who feels
differently DOES create such an item. (Maybe they want to critique
something amusingly ridiculous that Daniel Brandt has written.)
Jayjg, since you don't support censorship, does that mean you do NOT
advocate systematically purging such links from Signpost and user
talk pages? It's okay with you if they remain, even though you
personally would prefer that they weren't there?
--------------------------------
| 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:
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--------------------------------
Jayjg wrote:
> But Sheldon, Wikipedia has all sorts of rules about what kinds of
> websites it allows links to, both in the actual articles themselves,
> and even in the External links sections. The rationale behind these
> rules is that linking to these sorts of websites does not assist the
> purpose of Wikipedia (which is to create an encyclopedia), and
> arguably detracts from it or damages it.
As several people here have previously pointed out, the rules you're
describing above restrict people from linking to those sorts of
websites in the article space, not on talk pages or things like
Signpost. And none of those other rules are written as a backdoor way
of banning links to a single specific site. As a general rule, it's a
bad idea to write an across-the-board policy just to deal with a
single situation.
> I haven't heard you
> complaining about those rules, yet, oddly, you seem to have become
> incensed over even the suggestion that WR is also the kind of site
> that could not assist Wikipedia in achieving its goals, and, in fact,
> would arguably detract from Wikipedia or damage it. This apparent
> double standard is troubling.
I guess this passage is some sort of lame attempt to insinuate that
I'm trying to carry water for WR. I don't give a fig about WR. I've
only visited it a couple of times (always in response to the fuss
that people keep making about it here), and I don't find it
particularly interesting or worth reading. I get the general idea
that it's a haven for grumbling Wikipedia-haters and that Daniel
Brandt ought to take a chill pill, but I haven't seen anything there
reach the level of malignancy that some people here keep insisting is
its very essence.
I'd ask you to give me a specific example, but you seem to have a
policy against that. Instead, you've offered elaborate but vague
hypothetical situations: "suppose someone calls you a pedophile on
their website and then never actually links to the page where they
call you a pedophile but instead slyly links to other pages while
standing on their head and whistling Dixie...." Since your
hypothetical situations don't resemble anything I've ever actually
seen on WR, I can't imagine how your hypothetical scenarios apply to
this discussion. I'd ask you to give a specific example rather than
give hypotheticals, but that would require you to link to WR, and you
can't under your own rules. That's one of the problems with
censorship. It even hurts the censor.
--------------------------------
| 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:
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--------------------------------
G'day Gabe,
<many snips; please remove bits that are irrelevant to your reply, for the sake of those with slow connections, small screens, and sanity/>
> > > We know that the easy way to build up a sockpuppet account
> fast is to
> > > do CVU and vote in AfDs. So what do we do? We promote vandal
> fighters> > whose only project space edits are AfDs. I take the
> point that we
> > > can't become paranoid, but complacency's no good either.
> >
> > Because guess which group of people most need admin powers?
>
> Geni has the right point here. Article-writers simply don't need the
> admin tools ass much. ~~~~
Geni is fond of playing Devil's Advocate[0]. When you find yourself
agreeing with him all the time, it's a worry; I doubt that *he* agrees
with all of what he says.
The point is not that those who clean up vandalism don't need the
tools as much, or even that most of our admin pool should not be
drawn from the vandal-fighter pool. A large measure of my own
contributions to Wikipedia have been through vandalism cleanup.
Cleaning up vandalism is an important task, and admin tools are
a great boon to those of us who do work in this area.
There are two points to consider:
1) Cleaning up vandalism does not give you an understanding
of Wikipedia. If you clean up vandalism for 90 days, you do
not have the 90-day experience another editor would earn.
Rather, you have 1 day's experience, repeated 90 times.
Because admins have so much influence on all areas of
Wikipedia, not just "don't replace [[Georgia (country)]] with
the word 'poop'", they should *know* what they're talking
about. And many cleanup admins don't. I call these people
"CVU admins", but Geni doesn't like it when I do.
2) It's easy for someone out to harm the project to rack up a
high score on the RfA voters' various metrics by doing
vandalism cleanup, so if you wanted to sneak in a
Trojan admin account, that's the way to do it. Heck, you don't
even have to do a good job at vandalism cleanup --- biting
newbies and tagging good articles for deletion and reverting
good edits by accident looks just as good to an RfA voter as
someone who knows how to clean up vandalism properly.
The most important thing for a good sporting official to understand
is the Spirit of the Game. The most important thing for a Wikipedia
administrator to understand is the Spirit of Wikipedia. You don't get
that cleaning up vandalism (or, as CVU fans describe it, "whacking
vandals"). You get that cleaning up vandalism and copyediting and
writing articles and discussing protection and discussing deletion
and co-ordinating article cleanup efforts and ... there's all sorts of
avenues to becoming a good contributor, but you need to have
walked more than one of them to be a good admin. At the moment,
though, it's trivial to pass RfA even without anything remotely
resembling Clue, and this not only provides us with poor admins,
it also makes it possible for malicious users --- Trojan admins --- to
gain access they shouldn't have.
As Steve Summit pointed out the other day, I don't have an answer
for this problem. But there is a world of difference between saying
we don't have an answer (as Steve did) and saying that there is no
problem. There is.
[0] Not that there's anything wrong with that, or indeed with
piss-taking of any sort. But I'd like to apologise anyway to
those on IRC last night who genuinely believed I was one of the
primary editors of Wikipedia back in 1979, laboriously reverting
vandalism to the [[Jimmy Carter]] article with punchcards.
--
[[User:MarkGallagher]]
Jayjg wrote:
> Wow, what astounding rhetoric. "Censorship".
That's not rhetoric. It's precisely the right term to describe what
you're trying to do. The Encyclopedia Brittanica defines censorship
as the "act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is
considered subversive of the common good." Wikipedia defines it as
"the removal and withholding of information from the public by a
controlling group or body. Typically censorship is done by
governments, religious groups, online communities or the mass media,
although other forms of censorship exist." Both of those seem to me
to aptly describe what you're trying to do.
Of course, it's not GOVERNMENT censorship. Rather, it's an attempt to
ban a class of speech on Wikipedia via a policy. What makes it
censorship is the supporters of BADSITES are attempting to create a
whole class of forbidden-in-advance speech, arrogating unto
themselves the right to determine what information other people can
include when editing Wikipedia in the future. Does someone want to
link to something on WR so they can comment on its errors? Do they
want to link to it on a talk page because they think it actually has
made a valid point about something? What if WR actually DOES make a
valid point about something? If we have a policy against ever linking
to WR, none of those questions matter. Individual Wikipedians have to
surrender to the policy, regardless of context, circumstances and
their individual judgment as to appropriateness. That's what makes it
censorship, in the same way that it would be censorship to say that
no one can ever post an image of a nude body part or a swastika or
some other thing that someone finds offensive.
Maybe the following example will clarify my point further: I would
fully agree with someone's editorial insistence that we shouldn't
have an image of a swastika in an article about the Catholic Church.
By supporting this position, I'm not engaging in censorship. I'm
simply making an editorial judgment that a swastika is inappropriate
for inclusion in an article about the Catholic Church. However, I
WOULD consider it appropriate to include an image of a swastika in an
article about Nazis. In other words, I think the question of whether
a swastika belongs in an article should be left up to sensible
editors who make their judgments based on context and
appropriateness, NOT on some policy imposed by someone who thinks
they have the right to forbid anyone else from ever doing it under
any circumstances whatsoever. See the difference? What Jayjg wants to
do is forbid anyone else from ever posting a link to WR anywhere on
Wikipedia under any circumstances whatsoever. That's censorship.
I should also note that the supporters of BADSITES are really
attempting to censor a very specific type of information, while
dressing up this specific goal under generalities to make it sound
like something that would be a appropriate as a "policy." What they
really want to do is specifically ban all links to WR, but this is
being dressed up as a policy against "linking to attack sites." If
they simply wanted to ban links to WR, I would actually have less
problem with it. Such a policy would be a mistake, in my view, but it
is less open-ended and therefore less likely to be abused than
generalizing out from WR to some broader, vaguely-defined category
such as "attack sites."
This whole discussion reminds me a bit of a debate that happened at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison a decade or so ago, when some
well-meaning opponents of pornography tried to get the concession
stand at the UW student center to stop selling Penthouse and Playboy
magazines. Some university bureaucrat briefly attempted to impose a
Solomonic solution by forbidding the student center from selling
monthly magazines. The idea was that weekly magazines like Time or
Newsweek could still be sold. It would eliminate Penthouse and
Playboy but wouldn't really be censorship, because the CONTENT of the
magazines wasn't the reason given to ban them. This of course was
nonsense. The late, great Erwin Knoll (then-editor of The
Progressive, a monthly magazine published in Madison), wrote a
humorous column suggesting that the university should just adopt a
policy forbidding the sale of all magazines whose names begin with
the letter "P." To do so, he argued, would be no more arbitrary and
would still have the desired effect of eliminating Playboy and
Penthouse (and also the Progressive) but would at least leave other
monthly magazines unaffected.
In a similar vein, I would like to suggest that if Jayjg and Slim
Virgin wish to find a policy-based way of banning links to Wikipedia
Review, they should at least try to do so under the narrowest
possible policy defining the thing they are trying to ban. A lot of
rhetoric has been thrown around saying that Wikipedia Review is
guilty of libel, harassment, stalking, even terrorism. Each of those
acts, if indeed they have been committed, are real crimes. Someone
who commits libel or stalking can be taken to court and convicted,
fined, even jailed. If Wikipedia Review is committing those sorts of
crimes, the victims can pursue legal remedies and get a court
judgment so that we have a basis for common agreement that WR's
actions do indeed reach the level of criminality that those terms
imply. Once someone has won a court judgment showing that WR has
engaged in illegal harassment, I would accept a policy saying that
Wikipedia should ban all links to websites whose owners have been
convicted of criminal harassment against Wikipedians.
If, on the other hand, you can't prove in a court of law that
Wikipedia Review has actually done something illegal, you should just
grow a thicker skin. As a very wise cop once told me, part of the
price of living in a free society is that you sometimes have to
tolerate unpleasant behavior by obnoxious individuals.
--------------------------------
| 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.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/cmd/shop/
custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1107
--------------------------------
On 30 May 2007 at 14:16:01 -0500, "Slim Virgin"
<slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> TNH's blog is not an attack site. I can't think of any situation where
> it would be necessary to link to WR or ED.
First Jayjg, then you... how come people of such high intelligence
have such difficulty thinking?
--
== Dan ==
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