On 19/09/2007, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Armed Blowfish wrote
Erm, the latter is already done, extensively, regularly and self-righteously.
That would be against policy, then. I'm against it. It sounds as if you are, too.
I am, though my solution would be to courtesy blank or delete the attacks, not ban the speakers, who are often wrapped up in notions of protecting the encyclopaedia or advocating The Truth or defending themselves (attacking often becomes a two-way street... or a huge bazaar) or being drunk... etc.
Every time you call someone a troll, you are implying that person's intent is to get a negative reaction.
On WP, calling someone a troll is way past violating WP:CIVIL.
It may be a violation of WP:CIVIL, but still, a search on en.wikipedia.org for troll returns 16,600 results on Google - I doubt most of those are in mainspace. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll When adding arbitration to the search query, 5,630 results are returned. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+arbitration 3,350 results for this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+%22requests+for+a... 2,880 results: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+%22requests+for+c... 1,750 results: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+troll+%22administrators...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TROLL This lists six different 'types' of trolling, encouraging people to call people who do those things trolls.
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?
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....
Perhaps people need to be reminded that not everything is about either helping an encyclopaedia or hurting it? People are complex and have a wide variety of motivations, many of which you will never guess over the internet unless they tell you.
Clueless newbie edits are regularly labelled as vandalism - which means intentional defacement of Wikipaedia.
The V-word should be used economically. I had a very interesting example, where a net nanny was producing apparent vandal edits for someone. Fortunately I didn't leap to conclusions, there.
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?
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!
Heya, even the obvious things may simply be the work of a drunkard who will regret it next morning with his or her hangover. And while regrettable, I'd actually prefer the person defacing Wikipaedia rather than oh, say, beating on his or her family. Not that most drunkards do that, but some do, and it's far worse than anything a person could do to an encyclopaedia.
Enforcement of the conflict of interest policy almost always involves negative speculation on people's motives.
I have repeatedly said that COI is not a reason to abandon AGF. It really isn't. People use it instrumentally, to try to win editing arguments, but they are in the wrong there.
Well, unless they come right out and say they have a conflict of interest, don't you have to go looking for it, i.e. make negative guess about their motives? And we wonder why Wikipaedia admins get stalked... perhaps Wikipaedia itself is setting a terrible example.
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.
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!
And what is a sockpuppetry investigation but a search for hidden malice? Any time anyone does anything that a significant number of people don't like, that person's motives are guessed in the worse possible light.
A search for abusive sockpuppetry is a search for abuse, plain and simple. I don't accept this.
But there's no such thing as certainty, only varying degrees of uncertainty. IP addresses do not map one-to-one to human beings. NATs (very large NATs in some countries), dynamic IPs (very dynamic in the case of dial-up), shared computers (especially internet cafes), etc. And that's not even getting in to proxies.... Yes, when you do writing analysis, accuracy gets much better, but not 100%. Some people are similar, and it can be very hard to tell the difference between Sybils and collaborators.
So block the people, keep notes available for the people who do the sockpuppetry investigations, but don't label the person as a sockpuppeteer on top of Google, because y'all will get it wrong sometimes.
Sometimes, a coral snake is a king snake. Sometimes it's a milk snake. Other times, a coral snake really is a coral snake.
The majority of user-contributed websites are attack sites, since it is human nature to attack. Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of that isn't is DeviantArt. Yes, people do attack other people on DeviantArt, but they fullfill requests from representatives to take things down, no questions asked.
I have said that "attack site" is a useless classification. It is facile and prejudges just the issues that matter in assessing critical material.
Perhaps, but it appears to be the popular term.
In any case, the websites discussed (WP, WR, ED, WT, WW) all seem to be engaging in one big, huge cross-site flame war.
So, go over to WR under a white flag....
Most places, however, will merely say no when you ask them to take something down and they don't want to. Wikipaedia and Encyclopaedia Dramatica are significant exceptions to this - they will very often make things worse in response to complaints. What makes Wikipaedia worse than Encyclopaedia Dramatica is its higher Google rankings and self-righteous attitude (those people deserve to be attacked and suffer, for the good of the encyclopaedia!) Encyclopaedia Dramatica, at least, merely has a rather negative sense of humour.
Well, WP is better than ED on just about everything except intention to shock and persecute. Think what you're saying a moment.
Charles
Well, let's see, since OTRS is apparently not a badge, the community is apparently well within its self-defined rights to draw attention to courtesy blanked material, including outing, by discussing it publicly, further attack the person who asked for the blanking saying he or she has no standing to ask for courtesy blanking and is out of line, demand a public explanation of the person's private life, and send the person a private threat to file an AN/I against the person if any further courtesy blankings are asked for.
And who do you think ED learnt from?
Hurting Wikipaedia is, of course, such a notable and horrific thing to do that every banned user should have his or her own Wikipaedia bio, right on top of Google. Edited under his or her real name? Brilliant, now you can make sure no employer who researches potential employees on Google will ever hire him or her!
I'm doing a statistical study on the Google rankings of attack pages on various websites, Wikipaedia included. It will take awhile, though, because there are a lot of searches to run and Google keeps asking me to solve captchas to prove I am not a bot.