Actually, Eric, I disagree.
Trolling is a form of vandalism. This could justly be interpretted as trolling. (I am reminded of the constant edit wars with Helga, which cost Wikipedia quite a lot in terms of time and people who were disgusted and left)
For me to just ask some other "neutral" sysop to do it instead of me is hardly a neutral step.
I was not involved in an edit war. It was not an article that I care too deeply about. I was protecting it from what I (continue to) perceive as trolling.
Given the situation with Lir/.Vera Cruz/Susan Mason as well as Michael/Weezer and 172, perhaps its time sysops took more steps to limit trolling and not just the "George Washington had big balls" kind of vandalism. I open that for discussion.
Danny
On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 22:35, daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Actually, Eric, I disagree.
Trolling is a form of vandalism. This could justly be interpretted as trolling. (I am reminded of the constant edit wars with Helga, which cost Wikipedia quite a lot in terms of time and people who were disgusted and left)
For me to just ask some other "neutral" sysop to do it instead of me is hardly a neutral step.
I was not involved in an edit war. It was not an article that I care too deeply about. I was protecting it from what I (continue to) perceive as trolling.
Given the situation with Lir/.Vera Cruz/Susan Mason as well as Michael/Weezer and 172, perhaps its time sysops took more steps to limit trolling and not just the "George Washington had big balls" kind of vandalism. I open that for discussion.
No, it's not time. And it should never be. "vandalism" is a loaded, poorly defined term that should never been introduced to the Wikipedia lexicon, but since it was, its definition definitely shouldn't be extended.
And page protection should just about never be used. It's much healthier to just ignore the page for a while.
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:50:52PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
And page protection should just about never be used. It's much healthier to just ignore the page for a while.
And what of the people who come to the 'pedia while it's being ignored?
Perhaps there should be a new option to allow sysops to place a block of protected text at the top of a page. A nice way would be for text above a certain identifier (eg, "<<<<") to only be editable by sysops. This would allow a lighter touch than protecting a page while still indicating that the contents might need some salt added.
It's inevitable that some new users will encounter a portion of Wikipeidia that is in a state of disorder, e.g. during an edit war or while one of our more difficult users in actively "editing" it. Hopefully they will be patient and work though the difficulty. Affected pages could, though adjustments to language.pnp put put into a category that would show an uneditable header that made some attempt to explain the phenomena of disorder.
There are several problems: Most of these events are ephemeral, for example, even the article, "Columbus" is not today a focus of attention; soon "Chiropratic medicine" will no longer be a focus of attention; Another problem is that it takes a lot of time and effort to move pages into such a new category and to move them out, and to remember to move them out.
To ignore is simply to quit working the the affected article, to let the SOB have their way. A new user who stumbles on the article and tries to edit will feel the full brunt of the "SOB's" furor as typically almost any change will be met with hostility. This is deplorable, but probably unavoidable.
Fred
From: Jason Williams jason@jasonandali.org.uk Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 09:30:03 +0100 To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] 172--what happened
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:50:52PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
And page protection should just about never be used. It's much healthier to just ignore the page for a while.
And what of the people who come to the 'pedia while it's being ignored?
Perhaps there should be a new option to allow sysops to place a block of protected text at the top of a page. A nice way would be for text above a certain identifier (eg, "<<<<") to only be editable by sysops. This would allow a lighter touch than protecting a page while still indicating that the contents might need some salt added.
-- jason@jasonandali.org.uk http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Jason Williams wrote:
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:50:52PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
And page protection should just about never be used. It's much healthier to just ignore the page for a while.
And what of the people who come to the 'pedia while it's being ignored?
Perhaps there should be a new option to allow sysops to place a block of protected text at the top of a page. A nice way would be for text above a certain identifier (eg, "<<<<") to only be editable by sysops. This would allow a lighter touch than protecting a page while still indicating that the contents might need some salt added.
I've had an idea. If a page is being blocked to cool off an edit war, trying to edit the page could redirect to a graphic of somebody standing in an obviously freezing shower, with the caption "The cold water will be shut off in xxx minutes".
Ec
daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Actually, Eric, I disagree.
Trolling is a form of vandalism. This could justly be interpretted as trolling. (I am reminded of the constant edit wars with Helga, which cost Wikipedia quite a lot in terms of time and people who were disgusted and left)
I think, though, that Erik's point is important. There is what I have in the past called "simple vandalism", which is behavior that is outrageous and makes no pretension to be helpful, and which doesn't really require anything in the way of "due process". If someone writes "fart fart fart" on a page, then it's best if any sysop just deals with it immediately, and that's that.
Cases like Helga are more complex. You're right of course that it *is* vandalism in a sense, but we are trying to reserve 'vandalism' as a technical term of art, with a specific meaning within the context of wikipedia.
Given the situation with Lir/.Vera Cruz/Susan Mason as well as Michael/Weezer and 172, perhaps its time sysops took more steps to limit trolling and not just the "George Washington had big balls" kind of vandalism. I open that for discussion.
I think it's a valid subject of discussion.
The problem is that we want to avoid the situation in which sysops run roughshod over other contributors for political reasons. This is one reason why I almost never edit. That way, I can stay out of the "heat of the fight" for the cases when I have to step in and make a final judgment.
--Jimbo