On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
> You can add to the advantages that it can also produce a "why did you
> moderate *him*?" response from list members. I got an e-mail from the
> other user you placed on moderation, and I was puzzled as to why he
> had been placed on moderation.
Yeah, for sure. Being list moderator is pretty much a no-win game: the
best you can hope for is that no one notices your presence. Once
someone starts posting in such a way that a few people get annoyed, or
they start mildly breaking the list rules, then any action will be
divisive. Either leave them unmoderated (continuing to annoy people),
moderate them (cop flak for being heavy-handed), etc.
> I think that if the person you moderate
> objects to it, and wants it announced on the list, you should do so.
Of course.
> You can also add "increases transparency".
Good point.
> I have no idea how many people are on moderation on this list. Some
> numbers might help there. I would also ask how many people are
> subscribed to this list, but that might be rather a low figure. Are
> there public stats anywhere for this list?
There don't seem to be. The administrative interface doesn't give good
stats either, it will only tell you for a given user whether they're
on moderation or not. At a guess, somewhere between 20 and 50 users
are on moderation, out of 1004 total.
And Thomas' comment:
>Personally, I am in favour of such announcements. If you aren't
announcing it publicly, it is an absolute must to inform the affected
person privately
Yes. If only because generally you put someone on moderation in order
to change their behaviour, so it would be counter-productive not to
inform them.
Steve
On Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:59:06 +1000, Steve Bennett wrote:
> I disagree, and I'd like to see file renaming opened up. It sucks
> seeing a file with a blatantly wrong name sitting there for years.
> Sure, the file names could be totally arbitrary (a882be8.jpg) or they
> could be extremely meaningful - but having them stuck at whatever the
> uploader originally thought of is not ideal. Especially since
> redirects exist and work.
Yes, some of my own files have "wrong" names, such as when I
attempted to give them names that included the date a photo was
taken, but later realized I got the date wrong for some of the
pictures and fixed it in the description, but was stuck with a
mismatched name.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
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This isn't a new issue by any means, but here's a nice post by someone
who's been contributing occasionally since 2004, about how daunting
"wikibullying" can be for newbies and other editors who aren't
well-versed in the procedures and processes.
http://travel-industry.uptake.com/blog/2009/09/04/bullypedia-a-wikipedian-w…
Unfriendliness is built into the system, even when admins and others
who enforce the rules are perfectly civil and try to be friendly at an
individual level.
-Sage
http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/Sound/MSixths.mp3
DATA 35,27,2,24,40,6,45,27,2,30,50,4
DATA 55,33,2,36,60,4,65,39,4,42,70,4,0,0,4
' How is it that the above numbers, which approximate the western scale,
' in stereo, in parts a constant major sixth (5:3) apart...
DATA 60,35,2,30,40,6,54,45,2,27,50,4
DATA 54,55,2,48,60,4,54,65,4,60,70,4,0,0,8
sound a lot like the above series?
Hint: you need to multiply all of them by 66/35 to render them.
Complete source (or the equivalent in a key for ladies) available upon
request.
I like the first series better, because both parts are more interesting than
the scale, while in the second version, one part basically is Doh-Ray-Mee.
Among issues difficult to resolve while respecting the limitations of
the BLP policy, enter the article about a world-class athlete whose
gender has recently been questioned. The problem is this: can the
article discuss the supposed results of the tests and its
implications, as widely reported, without violating the BLP policy?
The information is clearly personal and very sensitive, and the
official results have not yet been released (and they may not be). In
normal circumstances, that would argue strongly against including
speculation. The perverse effect in this case, though, is that details
that have become common knowledge are entirely missing from our
article.
I think this might be one situation where our duty of care in
biographies of living people is being overzealously observed, but its
definitely a gray area and I'm not at all certain. It's jarring for me
to see some obviously relevant information excluded from the article,
particularly when its been reported in most major news venues in the
world, but I do understand the desire to be above the gross
speculation found in some outlets.
Thoughts? Have we been so successful at permeating the community with
care for BLPs that we need to start emphasizing the limits of that
care more clearly?
Nathan
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Hello all!
As a result of the success of the Strategy planning office hours and the
recent "meet the board" presentation on the #wikimedia channel on IRC,
we've decided to do regular office hours featuring a Wikimedia
Foundation staff member.
And to kick things off, this Friday, September 25, 2009, between 15:30
and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30), Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia
Foundation's Executive Director, will be online to answer your questions
and talk about her role in the Foundation and plans for the future.
The IRC channel that will be hosting Sue's conversation, and all future
WMF staff office hours, will be #wikimedia-office on the Freenode
network. If you do not have an IRC client, you can always access
Freenode by going to http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the
nickname of your choice and choosing wikimedia-office as the channel.
You may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
--
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
IRC office hours for the strategy plan will be held as usual.... next
office hours will be: 04:00-05:00 UTC, Wednesday 23 September
Local timezones can be checked at http://tiny.cc/kReRZ
It's a big week - the launch of the call for participation will happen
today.
Our office hours are in #wikimedia-strategy.
You can access the chat by going to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and
filling in a username and the channel name (#wikimedia-strategy). You
may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
____________________
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Facilitator, Strategic Planning
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
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the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
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Re Apocs comments. My experience has been that while there are
overenthusiastic speedy deletion taggers out there, most of them are
quite receptive to a bit of guidance. Unfortunately and perhaps due
to our ongoing shortage of admins there isn't enough of that feedback
being given, and poor speedy deletion tagging has derailed several
RFAs this year ("Good vandal fighter" has long ceased to be enough on
its own to get someone through an RFA, especially if there is
perceived to be a flaw elsewhere).
But as for "What do you do if their deletion tagging is no more
accurate than picking new articles at random?" I haven't encountered
new page patrollers whose tagging is anywhere near that bad. Quite a
few of the articles that I decline as speedy deletions subsequently
get deleted at AFD, as though the article claims importance the
subject is not notable. Other common mistakes that I've noticed
include tagging attack pages as biographies lacking a claim to
importance or significance, and tagging pages as no-context when a
smidgen of work can salvage them.
Defaulting to minor edits is also something that nowadays can damage
an RFA, it certainly didn't help my first one. But unlike some faults
most RFA !voters are open to a candidate who responds by changing
their default; again I doubt that enough admins or experienced editors
are taking the time to point this out to people making that mistake
before their RFA.
WereSpielChequers
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:02:11 +0100
> From: Surreptitiousness <surreptitious.wikipedian(a)googlemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <4AB75D33.8010703(a)googlemail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Apoc 2400 wrote:
>>
>> A question for the admins here: When you come across an article wrongly
>> tagged for speedy deletinon or prod, do you check up on the user who tagged
>> it? What do you do if their deletion tagging is no more accurate than
>> picking new articles at random?
>>
>>
> When I tackled NPP and prods I used to follow up on this, but after a
> while I noticed it didn't make much difference. I also noticed such
> users would pass RFA's quite easily because of all the people who would
> support them based on their awesome work "fighting" vandals. I burnt out
> fairly quickly I'm afraid on these tasks. I'm trying to find a new way
> of shaping people's behaviour on Wikipedia such that it is better in
> keeping with the spirit of WP:CIVIL. There was one user I used to nag
> repeatedly to turn off the minor edit check-box to no avail, which I
> found incredibly frustrating. I think after a while you develop an
> instinct about people who will be good Wikipedians and those that won't,
> but it is incredibly hard to try and generate debate on those issues.
> User RFC's are next to useless, I mean, could you imagine an RFC on a
> user who refused to mark their edits, no matter how contentious, as
> anything other than minor? It's seen as something rather trivial.
>> The issues we discuss in this thread go deep, but here is one change that
>> would help a lot:
>> * Articles should not be tagged for deletion two minutes after creation for
>> not asserting notability. Yes there is {{Hangon}} but how would a newcomer
>> know about that, and why should they? Of course an article created a minute
>> ago is being actively worked on. If it's not time critical (attack pages,
>> copyvios) no tagging should happen the first hour. If this is technically
>> difficult then NPP should be modified.
> Personally I'd like to see deletion rolled back further, such that stuff
> that was neutral and verifiable and wasn't obvious spam just be kept.
> Let every company that has ever existed have an entry, no matter how
> brief. If it is verifiable, where's the issue. An argument can be
> mounted that we are failing to adopt a neutral point of view by
> excluding some businesses over others. If you have a short stub which
> merely states the line of business and the date of establishment, you've
> given due weight and you've gone some way to informing a curious reader,
> further than a red link does.
>
