On 20 Sep 2007 at 21:33:58 +0000, fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info wrote:
[long line rewrapped]
> We do not have an exception to [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]]
> which permits linking to a personal attack on an external web
> site.
Which is relevant if you buy into the concept that "everything not
explicitly permitted is prohibited."
Anyway, the questions at issue tend to be of the form "Does the above
apply in any way to a link, for a purpose unrelated to any attack, to
a site that happens to also have attacks in it?"
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
On 20 Sep 2007 at 13:12:41 -0700, William Pietri
<william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
> I agree that's a real problem, but I disagree that banning discussion is
> the solution.
>
> For everybody else's problems in the world, Wikipedia believes that the
> best solution is more information, not less. We believe that clear,
> neutrally stated factual information is the antidote to pretty much any
> sort of idiocy. Or at least that censorship won't help.
[snip more good commentary]
I wish this were Slashdot, so I could mod you up for that.
Great comments! I wish more others would speak out like that.
Unfortunately, it looks like the ArbCom case will wind up with a
mishmash of vaguely defined positions, some of which imply that
deleting commentary is OK if it goes over some line of civility, and
others that say that none of this should imply that it's OK to
suppress legitimate commentary, and there will continue to be never-
ending debate about exactly where the line between the two actually
lies.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
> > Earlier: "...Please, shut up and go away..."
> A response: "...take responsibility for our
> own happiness by filtering our own reading
> using simple tools like our own scroll-down
> arrow keys and delete keys ... rather than
> asking someone else to put us out of our
> own misery for us ..."
> A response that: "... So when people make
> horrible unfounded accusations against
> members of our project on our own mailing
> list, we should just scroll past and allow
> them to continue? ..."
Peter Blaise responds: Versus ...?
I'm suggesting that we set an example of what we'd prefer.
If we can't do that with the alphabet keys, I'm suggesting exercising
the scroll and delete keys instead. Each of us has a choice.
Looking through dozens of articles, I find that many link to journals that
are hosted on JSTOR. JSTOR is a fine repository of information, but it is not
free. People researching from home do not have access to the articles that are
cited, and are expected to pay to see them, unless they go to a
participating library, usually a university library. Very few other people have access to
their collection.
The fact is that these are journal articles that can be found in most good
libraries in their paper format. They are then free and available to everyone.
In fact, JSTOR is simply a pay-to-view library. Consider too that the actual
source is the journal cited, not JSTOR per se.
As such, I would encourage peopl to link directly to the magazine that
contained the article, not the JSTOR collection which will charge to read it. We
speak of free content and free images. I want to suggest that we expand the
focus to free external links as well.
Danny
************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
"Armed Blowfish" wrote
> On 20/09/2007, <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > "Armed Blowfish" wrote
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TROLL
> >> This lists six different 'types' of trolling, encouraging people
> >> to call people who do those things trolls.
> > You know, it doesn't do that. It implicitly does the exact opposite,
> > and references [[Wikipedia:Do not insult the vandals]], which
> > explicitly does the opposite.
>
> It may not explicitly say 'You should call people trolls!' but it does
> provide material about what trolling supposedly is, which can be
> cited by those calling people trolls.
And how is WP supposed to handle its problem users, without that sort of discussion? Amongst the other Cassandras, there have (in the past) been those saying 'you realise WP will be over-run by trolls?' Didn't happen. I don't think your argument is that strong.
> As for WP:DNITV, the people who don't follow that are far more
> visible than the ones who do.
Tell me, why are you not criticising them, then? Why are you assuming that those who are outside the well-known policy lines are representative of ''official'' Wikipedia? We can both agree that those people are doing it wrong.
> >> An interesting one,
> >> 'Examples [of trolling] include continual nomination of articles
> >> for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion that are obviously
> >> encyclopedic'
> >>
> >> Erm, many blatantly psychologically damaging articles in
> >> violation of BLP may be encyclopaedic. So would those who
> >> support this essay consider those who try to get defamatory
> >> or otherwise damaging biographies deleted from Wikipaedia
> >> trolls?
> >
> > A biography should be _deleted_ if the subject fails the criteria for
> > inclusion in WP. It should be _radically edited_ if the content fails
> > BLP, or other criteria for content. These are two different things
> > entirely. You seem to be conflating them.
>
> And what of the wishes of the subject? And what are the criteria for
> inclusion outside the main space?
You know what the 'wishes of the subject' count for. If say Robert Mugabe put a call through to St. Petersburg, Florida, objecting to inclusion in Wikipedia, you know what the reaction would be. The 'criteria for inclusion'are for the article space, as you also know. Simply shifting crabwise when you are called on these things doesn't help your cause.
> >> Another one:
> >> 'Some trolls are critical of the project, its policies, its users,
> >> its administration, or its goals. Often, this criticism comes in
> >> the form of accusations of cabals, ilks, or campaigns, that
> >> are typically invested in a particular POV, invested in
> >> maligning a specific user, and other similar claims.'
> >>
> >> So would those who agree with this paragraph consider
> >> criticism directed at Wikipaedia as a whole, and not at
> >> individual users, to be trolls? I'm sure the more positive
> >> critics of Wikipaedia would be offended by that....
> >
> > As I have said, criticism of actions on WP is OK. Accusations
> > may not be OK, because they move from disagreeing with
> > what is done, to implications that go well beyond mistakes.
> > This need not make someone a 'troll': trolling is a kind of
> > systematic provocation.
> Individuals can be hurt more easily than whole organisations.
> Especially when talking in a forum where many of the people
> whose actions you are criticising are not able to respond, it
> may be better to criticise the whole organisation. If the
> culture of the organisation encouraged the individual's actions
> anyway, the individual may not be entirely responsible anyway.
> If someone flays you, do you criticise the whip, the hand, the
> whipper, or the person who ordered the whipping? Certainly
> not the whip - it has no control over its actions. Nor the hand,
> which was simply acting mechanically on the nerve impulses
> of the brain. The whipper is him or her self merely a hand to
> whomever ordered it. Sure, he or she could say no, but some
> one else would step in to take his or her place. The one who
> ordered it, though, that person is responsible.
Well, you appear to be saying that the culture encourages the things it explicitly discourages. This may seem a powerful sort of unmasking to you. It is also commonly known as "trying to have your cake and eat it".
> [snip]
> >> It isn't though. Your average Recent Changes patroller,
> >> constantly looking to revert damaging edits, may be hasty
> >> to call anything that looks bad vandalism. And don't almost
> >> all the standard warnings (uw2 and up) encourage this, by
> >> including the term vandalism?
> >
> > Your way of putting it (what is uw2?) makes it clear that you
> > know enough about WP, to know also that the text in templates
> > is editable. Have you tried to get the text changed? This is a
> > sofixit - if there is a problem in your view, there is also a route
> > for debating and dealing with it, namely through the discussion
> > page for any template you think is objectionable.
>
> Clicking on 'edit this page' brings up the following in big bold
> letters:
>
> 'Block warning: You can read pages, but your account is blocked
> from editing and changing them.'
>
> So much for that theory.
>
> This is uw2:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-test2
>
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VAND#Types_of_vandalism
> >> This has a whole list of circumstances where you are
> >> encouraged to assume that someone is trying to deface
> >> Wikipaedia!
> >
> > Well, in fairness, you could also reference the next section at
> > WP:VAND where numerous things, including newbie tests, are
> > described as not vandalism. That page also references the
> > essay [[Wikipedia:Avoid the word "vandal"]]. So I fear you are
> > shifting ground here. Where exactly is the incitement to call
> > someone a vandal?
>
> By saying that certain types of actions are or tend to be the
> result of a desire to hurt Wikipaedia, it discourages consideration
> that most people are more complex than that.
>
> Oh look, an entire page dedicated to calling people vandals!
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrator_intervention_against_v…
>
> Also see the Administrators' Noticeboards....
Really, what exactly is your point? That WP is not perfect, which is a perfectly reasonable point, or that it has no redeeming features, since everything put in place to allow amelioration and fair criticism and sensible policy enforcement in a transparent way somehow doesn't count?
<snip>
> > We have to deal with COI. Since I have worked on the policy, I
> > have a fairly clear idea of what it consists of. There is nothing
> > at all - nothing - at WP:COI which justifies linking having such a
> > policy with stalking. You demean yourself my making such a
> > connection.
> 1. What policy says and what is done are not the same.
> 2. There have been complaints by people who feel outed
> by enforcers of that policy.
> 3. Someone connected to the outing of a Wikipaedia admin
> cited the need to prove a conflict of interest as a reason
> for outing.
As you know, outing people on the site is fundamentally against policy. Everyone should read the COI guideline, of course. It doesn't in any way suggest that investigative work is the right way ahead. In fact one reason it is a guideline is because implementation as a policy would bring just these dangers.
> Perhaps you should consider other ways of keeping the articles
> neutral-ish.
There are plenty of ways of enforcing NPOV. The COI guideline is mainly _advice_ not to get into a false position over COI.
> >> AGF is an interesting one.
> >>
> >> 'Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, assume
> >> that people who work on the project are trying to help it,
> >> not hurt it.'
> >>
> >> If good faith is defined as an attempt to help the
> >> encyclopaedia, is WP:AGF encouraging Wikipaedians to
> >> consider motivations which have absolutely nothing to do
> >> with Wikipaedia 'bad'? Or is this a Wikipaedia-centric
> >> world view? The world is not black and white, and not
> >> everything is about hurting Wikipaedia or helping it.
> >
> > No, that is really a kind of smear on WP. It is a voluntary
> > organization, and anyone can turn up to work on it. The baseline
> > assumption in AGF is that volunteers are there to help, and are
> > not (for example) propagandists or entryists of some sort.
> Not anyone... for starters, not the Chinese.
>
> 'There to help' ... who or what?
>
> Certainly, everyone wants to help someone or something, probably
> multiple someones or somethings. The questions is not whether,
> but who or what?
This is becoming a tiresome dialectical exchange. You are not actually refuting my description of AGF, you are dragging red herrings across it.
> >> And in big bold letters:
> >> 'This guideline does not require that editors continue to
> >> assume good faith in the presence of evidence to the
> >> contrary.'
> >>
> >> Erm, when else would the guideline be useful? So if
> >> someone does a few bad things, that person is suddenly
> >> a horrible horrible person who deserves to be defamed
> >> on top of Google? Well, that includes everyone except
> >> the children....
> >>
> >> Or, you could join the School of Humanism, and accept
> >> that the world is not black and white, and people are a
> >> mixture of good and bad!
> >
> > Actually it means all sorts of things you miss. But making a
> > few mistakes under policy is not 'evidence' applicable to
> > revoking the assumption of AGF.
> The assumption that you are a human being, a mixture of
> good and bad, who feels and laughs and cries, is never
> revoked unless you fail the Turing test.
Tell you what, one of the indicators of a human at the far end of a Turing test would be to say "this is pointless - just being able to answer everything isn't a sign of having anything to say".
<snip>
Charles
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Two days ago the disk filled up on one of our servers, Bacon,
(http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/pmtpa/graph.php?c=Miscellaneous&h=bacon.wikime…).
The full disk resulted in some thumbnails failing to render.
The root problem was resolved, but some of the failed thumbnails
remained failed. They could be resolved by purging the image page, or
by simply waiting for the cache to expire for them. The technical
team considered the matter closed.
Sometime today awareness of broken thumbs on English Wikipedia rocketed up.
Rather than successfully flagging the tech team's attention, a series
of inaccurate sitenotices were placed on English Wikipedia and on
several other language Wikipedias. The English notice in particular
was displayed to the general public.
The notices claimed that the issue was being worked on. This was not
correct. The notice most likely caused people to not report the
problems they were seeing.
None of the active tech team were aware of any ongoing issue. It was
understood that some images would fail to display until their cache
expired but this was not believed to be an issue significant enough in
scale to justify any action.
When I happened to browse over to enwp as a reader I saw the notice.
I asked ST47 to remove the notice. I got a hold of our resident
caching god, Mark Bergsma, and went ahead and mass-purged all the
thumbnails.
Sometime after that point the incorrect notice was restored on English
Wikipedia and revised several times, and in its last version it
attempted to give bad directions on how to purge images. It is
generally inadvisable to instruct the general public to purge pages on
a wide scale for a number of reasons.
All in all this issue was handled poorly all around. On the tech side
a status report should have gone out after the fix, and on the
Wikipedia admins side no claim should ever be made that a problem is
being worked on unless you are darn sure that it is the case.
There are also some issues related to how we communicate with the
public, but I'll leave it to someone else to complain about that.
My biggest fear is that had there been a second issue it may have
persisted for days with the techs unaware of the problem. I've seen
some prior examples of over eagerness to claim something is being
worked on in the past in our user communities. It frightens me for
this reason.
Hopefully future events will be handled better and this message will
increase awareness of the potential issues involved.
Thanks for your time.
>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Goodman [mailto:dgoodmanny@gmail.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 12:54 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
>
>Fred, at the arb com you proposed:
>
>"Discussion of an allegation derived from an external attack site
>engaged in harassment is unacceptable. If there is truth, the matter
>will, in due course, be raised by other witnesses. "
>
>The problem, of course, is that under the policy you are advocating,
>any such witness will in fact been classified by some as an attack
>site. If the encyclopedia isn't neutral, even with respect to our own
>people, it isn't worth the protecting, and we join the attack sites as
>non-neutral biased sources.
Resolution of this question depends on appreciation of harassment. In the case being considered, the person behind Wordbomb, a banned user has carried on a campaign for about 2 years, both on Wikipedia Review and on his own website attacking and attempting to identify a Wikipedia user. A number of fantastic allegations have been raised by the banned user during the course of his campaign. Incidents which happened years ago are repeatedly brought up as though they were new revelations, despite having been previously been investigated and resolved. Any scrap of stale information which might attract attention is advanced.
It is wise not to respond to such a campaign, even if it should though the shotgun method employed, manage to get a few strands of spaghetti to stick to the wall. It is the campaign of harassment which results in the site being classified as an attack site, not particular information.
Fred
>-----Original Message-----
>From: John Lee [mailto:johnleemk@gmail.com]
>Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 05:44 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
>
>On 9/20/07, fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote:
>>
>> We do not have an exception to [[Wikipedia:No personal attacks]] which
>> permits linking to a personal attack on an external web site.
>>
>> Fred
>
>
>So it is legal to link to a diff of an on-WP personal attack for the purpose
>of discussing that attack (e.g. an RfC), but it is somehow wrong to link to
>an off-WP personal attack for exactly the same purpose?
>
>Johnleemk
Depends on the nature of the off-wiki material. Usually we know who made the on-wiki attack and have a diff of the editor making it. Linking to the off-wiki site makes it difficult to know who placed the material there and may raise questions about how well founded the information is. Suppose the off wiki site (maintained for years) concerned the sneaky activities of your sockpuppets? Suppose another editor on Wikipedia repeatedly linked to those pages, brought the subject up every few weeks, etc.? Suppose none of this checks out, but they keep on and on.
Fred
Kind of depends, doesn't it. Suppose the material was somewhat credible, it could be true. And it is about one of our respected administrators, casting them in a false light. Now, let's suppose the accusation has been thoroughly checked out and found to not be true. Let's suppose that most of our users have no way of checking out the accusation (no checkuser access, perhaps).
Fred
>-----Original Message-----
>From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com]
>Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 04:24 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
>
>In that case, we agree completely about the relevance of non-US law. The
>letter is irrelevant, but the spirit can be worth learning from.
>
>Where we disagree is whether content can be malicious on its own. You
>and I agree that we should stop *people* from being malicious on-wiki.
>But I think we should allow people acting in good faith and with good
>purpose to discuss things that malicious people have said.
>
>William
>
>fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info wrote:
>> The issue is malicious content, our concern regardless of legality.
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com]
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 03:50 PM
>>> To: 'English Wikipedia'
>>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
>>>
>>> Mark Ryan wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 20/09/2007, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> But this is (a) wrong (at least in the case of www hyperlinks),
>>>>> and (b) not relevant to a site hosted in Florida, USA.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> It is relevant. Defamation under UK law happens where the content is
>>>> read, not where it is hosted.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Why exactly would we worry about this?
>>>
>>> The way I look at it, all non-US law is relevant only to editors working
>>> in those jurisdictions. If Britain or Venezuela or China believes that
>>> the public can't handle certain material, that is interesting, but not
>>> relevant to how we run Wikipedia.
>>>
>>> What might be relevant is the spirit behind the law. If the law gets
>>> made because of some particular harm that we think is worse than
>>> impeding honest discussion or the free flow of factual information, then
>>> we should take a look at altering our course. But the law itself is the
>>> business of the citizens under its jurisdiction, and not our collective
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> William
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
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>
>
>
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>
Fred wrote
> >PLEASE, give us some guidance that can stick, if (collective you) are
> >going to make the policy any more specific.
>
> I'm not sure we (the arbitrators) would agree on this point (that it was ever proper to remove the link to MichaelMoore.com).
>
> And actually, we didn't necessarily agree to consider that question. Should we?
I'm not sure the ArbCom should get into policy making, even in response to polite requests to do so. One of the clear problems of the reification (BADSITES as if there was a well-defined thing out there, rather than just the usual Web slop of forums for people getting things off their chests with improbable avatars) is that there is some assumption that there _must be a policy_. There can't really be a policy about how junky really junky junk has to be before people will be punished for linking to it. People who go around the site linking to junk are being a nuisance anyway.
A 'policy' would, for the usual reasons, be applied by people saying the junky junk they are linking to is not quite as junky junk as the policy specifies, and so linking to it is somehow OK. That is not how good policy operates. Good policy has some kernel that can generally be agreed (like 'civility helps'); and does not specify (a list of acceptable insults along with a list of definitely unacceptable ones).
Charles
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