I have just noticed that a few days ago, a user removed the names of
several women from a certain "MILF actress" category [1], but he was
summarily reverted and threatened with a block for acting outside of
normal CFD procedure.
'''If you depopulate a category while it's under discussion at CFD,
you may be blocked and possibly have your AWB priviledges [sic]
temporarily or permanently revoked.'' '[2]
That's right, even for categories which have no business existing to begin with.
Maybe we can at least add
> <includeonly>__HIDDENCAT__</includeonly>
to the {{cfd}} template, or better still add
> {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|Category|__HIDDENCAT__}}
to {{cfd}} and {{prod}} and all {{db-whatever}} templates.
this would keep dubious categories out of articles without tampering
with the list of members (articles, subcats) which the cfd
participants will often want to peruse.
—C.W.
[1] I believe this was a BLP issue in every case (otherwise it would
be too disgusting to think about o.O)
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Koavf&diff=210421337&ol…
In a message dated 5/4/2008 10:49:29 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
sam.blacketer(a)googlemail.com writes:
Author Jonathan Zittrain
seems surprised to find the article on the Star Wars Kid does not give his
name.>>
----------------
It used to though.
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There are moments you know you've gained acceptance by the Establishment.
I have been sent a copy of last year's Microeconomics finals paper
from the University of Oxford, where we find the quite marvellous:
---
SECTION A: THEORETICAL
Q 2. "Should Wikipedia be taxed or subsidised"?
----
Note the complete lack of any *definitions*. Whoever set the paper
clearly treats the existence of Wikipedia as a simple fact of basic
knowledge, and assumes their students all have a rough idea of what it
is and how it works...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Those who are familiar with the long lasting quiz show "Jeopardy", will
be pleased to know that "What is Wikipedia" was the correct question
yesterday to the answer, "this website had Hilary Clinton's picture
replaced with that of a walrus." :-D
Ec
Although it is a well known issue, this issue has finally made its way to
spotlight with the ongoing CAMERA incident on English wikipedia... I am sure
English wikipedia's arbcom will come up with a reasonable conclusion and the
purpose of this email is not related to the CAMERA arbcom case directly.
Due to the very nature of wikis they are very open to outside interference
and manipulation. Although there had been many discussions on the matter,
they never generated the intended level of brainstorming.
I am sure someone can provide a brief history of past external manipulations
so I will avoid listing them on this email.
You may be under the false impression that large wikis such as en.wikipedia
is invulnerable to such attacks, but this would be a fatal mistake. English
wikipedia is probably the most vulnerable language edition of wikipedia. If
a lobby group were to secure some 10 admin accounts they can effectively
overwhelm any process we have on English Wikipedia.
So lets discuss possible solutions and precautions.
I recommend that foundation pass a ruling on the matter of lobby takeovers.
Although it goes without saying along with NPOV, spelling it out has
benefits and no harm. This way we can more easily and promptly purge them on
wikis that did not have a serious conversation on this matter enough to come
up with a policy.
A proposal to increase the requirements for autoconfirm has been started
(and looks to be gaining quite significant support) at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal/Poll .
Particularly strong is the proposal to increase autoconfirm to 7 days
and 20 edits. Personally, I think this is a good thing for the reasons
listed on that page but obviously it is good to have maximum awareness
for what is quite a significant change when you consider the actions
that only autoconfimed users can do (upload, edit sprotect and move
etc.) It is probably better that we all post our ideas there rather than
having both that page and an e-mail thread and it will be nice to see
what the comments are on this.
G Donato
This is a mix of technical and general thoughts. Maybe others have voiced
them in the past -- alas. Note that when I say "Wikipedia" I mean,
specifically, "English Wikipedia, but not necessarily exclusively of all
language Wikipedias, because I haven't checked those."
Anyway:
1. Our images don't use the ALT tag. We use the TITLE tag, but only for the
anchor link to the image page. What's up with that? Aside from being
noncompliant with web standards, it also reduces our accessibility. And is
an easy fix.
2. Is there a reason that there is a robots NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW on the image
pages themselves (but only the Wikipedia ones, not the Commons ones)? It
strikes me that this is likely part of the reason that Wikipedia and
Commons' images have relatively low pageranks compared to their textual
content. If you do a Google Image search for, say, "Albert Einstein", only
one image on Commons comes up (out of 70 total, 13 of which are linked to
from the heavily-accessed Wikipedia article), and even that doesn't come up
as #1 like the articles do. I don't know how Google's image ranking feature
works at all but I'm betting our NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW doesn't help that. (I
suspect it might also have to do with the fact that our image pages have the
extensions of images but are really served as HTML, but I don't really know.
That's obviously not something we want to change at this point.)
(Should we worry about Google? Not to the point of doing anything contrary
to our nature, of course. But given the popularity of Google and the
popularity of the image search, why shouldn't we drive traffic towards our
wonderful, painstakingly built and manicured collection of images,
especially since many of them are free for reuse? If it's a copyright
question related to the non-free ones, I am fairly sure that the burden in
that case is on the search engine that is making little thumbnails of them,
and even in that there have been explicit court cases affirming that such a
use is "fair use". But in any case, I don't think that's any more of a legal
issue than hosting them on Wikimedia servers in the first place, no?)
Just some thoughts. Hope this hasn't come up a billion times before -- if it
has, please try to contain your rage and frustration. ;-)
FF