Original subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins
- The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution
to the decline in their active numbers
At 03:46 PM 6/2/2010, quiddity wrote:
>Abd, please take the time to make your thoughts more readily parsable.
>Don't force your readers to work so hard in order to find your point.
>[[tl;dr]] is generally an odious dismissal, but it really does apply here.
Thanks, quiddity.
Some find my boiled-down "thoughts" even more difficult to read. If
the uncondensed material, which contains the redundancy that
sometimes allows the unclear to become clear, is hard to "parse,"
it's quite likely that one or more of a number of different conditions obtain.
1. There are held assumptions interfering.
2. It takes time to approach some of the concepts. I've seen it take
a year of exposure before the meanings start to appear to even a very
bright reader.
3. The reader is impatient or needs an overview in which to place
each statement, instead of simply reading without demanding immediate
understanding. (That can describe me, sometimes, by the way. And one
of the easiest fixes to my TL comments is to make them a little
longer by prefixing them with a summary. I always create a summary on
request, and others have done this for me. Actually boiling it down
without making it unintelligible is very time-consuming, typically
I'm already spending too much time writing!)
4. It's not polemic, but some readers want to know what the "point"
is. I.e, what conclusion is being pushed? Trying to figure this out
can be frustrating because I'm not generally pushing a point but
simply considering an issue. Or, another way to put this, it is a
literal point of view, that is, a view from my position, that is
being expressed, not pushed.
5. The reader has a strong position which appears to be contradicted by me.
6. The reader doesn't have time and/or adequate interest. This is the
real tl;dr, and it's fully legitimate.
There are different learning styles, and only some people are capable
of learning from someone like me. That is not blameworthy, and is
only a problem when these people try to prevent *others* from
learning from me, for there are many who can and do.
Now, as to the question I posed: What do you get when you can see
things from two different points of view at the same time?
Some thing that this is weak, that it produces vacillation, lack of
clarity, etc.
But what you actually and literally get is depth perception.
On Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:18:03 -0400, Abd wrote:
> Durova's history is a classic example. She was hounded by a screaming
> mob when she made a mistake, even though she recognized the error and
> undid it within an hour.
I might well be counted as part of that "screaming mob" since I was
one of the critics at the time, but my intended target was never
Durova personally (who is now a Facebook friend of mine), but the
entire system and its associated mindsets, in which a group of
"insiders", with closed mailing lists of their own, takes on a
"circling the wagons" mentality against "trolls and harassers",
leading to snap judgments that can get people blocked or banned for
saying politically incorrect things.
I had some comments on that situation in my essay I wrote as a
rebuttal to one of JzG's essays:
http://dan.tobias.name/controversies/cyber/wiki2.html
--
== 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/
Spotted by Mathias on the comcom list:
http://customslaw.blogspot.com/2010/06/cit-dumps-on-wikipedia.html
Precis: litigant brings up Wikipedia description, court rejects it
because anyone can edit Wikipedia. So pretty much in accordance with
our general advice ;-)
That said, the litigant asserted that a long-standing Wikipedia
definition could itself be taken as evidence of "common usage" ...
that's interestingly plausible. I wonder if someone will get a court
to accept that when it's relevant.
- d.
Hello Wikien-l,
Right now I am working on a robot that will process recently uploaded images
for problems, and respond to them. The amount of images that are being
uploaded and violating policy is currently (in my mind at least)
unacceptable. If we had a robot that could weed out obvious problem images
it would benefit the project greatly.
I would appreciate your feedback of its processes and methods at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Images_and_Media#Us…
Thanks,
FinalRapture
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd(a)lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> At 11:17 AM 6/1/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>>On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Procedural note to moderators: Perhaps it is time to consider a length
>> > limit on posting?
>>
>>I'm not a moderator, but I've just been skipping those long posts.
>>They are annoying, but I may one day read those posts if I have
>>nothing better to do, and sometimes there is something interesting in
>>there.
>
> That's what I do with long posts that don't grab me. Some people like
> long posts, some don't. Some of those who don't want to prevent those
> who like them from receiving them. It is a very old story.
Actually, what we have here now is thread drift. We are way off topic,
so anything discussing mailing list etiquette (or even discussing Abd
if anyone wants to do that) should be started in a new thread, and
this thread should go back to discussing, er, let's see:
"declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it
easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their
active numbers"
But maybe with a shorter title?
Carcharoth
At 11:17 AM 6/1/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Procedural note to moderators: Perhaps it is time to consider a length
> > limit on posting?
>
>I'm not a moderator, but I've just been skipping those long posts.
>They are annoying, but I may one day read those posts if I have
>nothing better to do, and sometimes there is something interesting in
>there.
That's what I do with long posts that don't grab me. Some people like
long posts, some don't. Some of those who don't want to prevent those
who like them from receiving them. It is a very old story.
I skip *lots* of posts. But I have no opinion that there is
necessarily something wrong with them. Obviously. If the writer
wanted to reach me, then the effort failed. But the post wasn't sent
personally to me, if it were, I'd be much more inclined to read it.
Now, what I do which could be a problem is to respond to an
individual, thus luring the individual into reading it, but I'm
actually exploring a much larger topic. Perhaps if I'm going to write
something that might be taken as an attack, I should make it brief
and separate it from the larger commentary -- or not send it at all.
At 10:01 AM 6/1/2010, you wrote:
>On 1 June 2010 14:30, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd(a)lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> > Therefore, instead of only needing to skip one mail, you'll need to
> > skip two. This is part one.
>
>Abd, have you ever considered opening a blog? :)
>
>You could write the lengthy version of your comments on various topics
>in a post there, and post a summary comment here on WikiEN-l (with a
>link to the concurrent blog post)? Just a thought.
Sure. Now, tell me why I should go to this trouble? Absolutely, if my
goal were polemic, it would be an effective way to proceed. That's not my goal.
At 09:57 AM 6/1/2010, Risker wrote:
>Procedural note to moderators: Perhaps it is time to consider a length
>limit on posting?
There is a 20K limit. That's lower than usual, my experience. I think
it's silly, since it is easier to ignore one 30K post than to ignore
two 15 K posts. But, hey, I have well over twenty years experience
with this, and there will always be people who want others to
self-censor so they don't have to bother. Nobody is obligated to read
any post (except *maybe* a moderator, and that can be reserved for complaints.)
At 09:38 AM 6/1/2010, AGK wrote:
>Derailing meta-discussion with criticism of specific users stinks of
>axe-grinding.
I criticized an argument with an expression of concern about how an
administrator might apply that argument. That remains within
metadiscussion. I specicifically disclaimed any criticism of actual
behavior. I have no axe to grind with AGK.