On 6/17/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Since no one else has pointed it out, here's their "correction": A front-page headline on Saturday with an article about the online reference work Wikipedia referred imprecisely to its "anyone can edit" guidelines, which have always restricted changes in a small percentage of articles. While Wikipedia has indeed added a category of articles that are "semi-protected" from editing, it has not "revised" its policy or otherwise put additional restrictions on editing; it says the change is intended to reduce the number of entries on which editing is banned altogether. -- I'm not sure what our '"anyone can edit" guidelines' are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction ? I am uncomfortable with saying "the change is intended to reduce the number of entries on which editing is banned altogether" - in practice, I think it's used on many articles where people just get sick of cleaning up the vandalism by hand, and the threshold for use is probably lower than the threshold for using full protection. It's a perfectly acceptable compromise to me, but we should be honest about it. I also note there is very little at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-protection or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy which explictly says that semi-protection is intended to improve openness or "anyone can edit"-ness. There is also a link to a post from Jimbo a few months ago, which includes this quote: "2. A great many minor bios of slightly well known but controversial individuals are subject to POV pushing trolling, including vandalism, and it seems likely that in such cases, not enough people have these on their personal watchlists to police them as well as we would like. Semi-protection would at least eliminate the drive-by nonsense that we see so often." http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-May/046883.html That seems to support the notion that semi-protection should be used in cases where previously no protection at all applied. Is my conscience pricking me unnecessarily? Steve

On 6/17/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: They don't. It's one of the worst sins an admin can commit, but they get collectively accused of it regularly. Steve

Since they could block for 3RR. Fred On Jun 17, 2006, at 6:20 AM, geni wrote:

On 6/17/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm particularly disappointed by that statement, considering I spent a fair bit of effort in the interview explaining how and why they don't. -Kat -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | G/AIM:LucidWaking mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone The good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving -- Lao-Tzu Wikia: creating communities - http://www.wikia.com

At 09:01 AM 6/24/2006, Conrad Dunkerson wrote: It's the old principle of "dog don't eat dog". Physicians don't criticize each other's treatments in front of their patients, police officers don't testify against each other, professors don't disagree with the grades their colleagues give... This social principle develops in any group that is for life. Having term limits would be the only way around it. Chl

Yeah, POV is nearly always good NPOV unless it's OR. We should really change the name NPOV. It's too confusing. The policy is spot on but nobody knows what the acronym NPOV means. I would prefer, say, CPOV. Captured POV or Correct POV. NPOV suggests *Not* POV; whereas POV is absolutely fine. *Seriously*. Page move anyone? On 25/06/06, jkelly(a)fas.harvard.edu <jkelly(a)fas.harvard.edu> wrote: -- -Ian Woollard "Victory can be perceived but not created."

On Jun 24, 2006, at 7:40 PM, Fastfission wrote: I think we should replace "neutral point of view" (which is abbreviated to the misunderstood acronym NPOV) to "neutrality" (which, like "verifiability", is easier to understand). -- Philip L. Welch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch

On Jun 25, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Nathan wrote: We already have trouble with editors who try to use neutral washed out language rather than allowing opposing points of view to be fully expressed. Fred

G'day Fred, [rm top-posted thing] Thank goodness for WikInfo! Cheers, -- Mark Gallagher "But the visibility was very poor, and you yourself admit that you were being struck by thunderbolts all the time, which must have distracted your attention, so it is more than probable you were mistaken." - Esmond Haddock, /The Mating Season/

* Mark Gallagher wrote: Hello Mark. As I said, the user had never been blocked or 'in trouble' before. Nearly all of those defending the admin action actually cited bad behaviour by OTHER people as 'justification' for blocking. 'They are all disruptive POV pushers so we should block them indefinitely' sort of thing - with NO evidence of this being true of the person actually blocked being presented... or apparently needed in the eyes of far too many. Perhaps it could be noted that there are OTHER (less 'terrible') reasons for describing issues without 'naming names'... such as focusing on a general problem rather than specific individuals, attempting not to bias ongoing discussion by leaving the individual name out of it, and/or presenting a scenario without names to get an evaluation based on the scenario itself without any preconceptions based on the names attached. And... weren't you the one who, when I DID specifically object to the actions of someone by name, told me that such public confrontations are counterproductive and it would be better to keep the matter private? It seems almost as if objections are ALWAYS wrong, no matter how presented. As you insist; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/MONGO Um... yes? Did you seriously think there was any question of that? If so, I think you need to consider the possibility that you do not understand me at all; http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notic… http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notic… http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notic… "Famous". How lovely for me. Well maybe someone might eventually listen and consider the validity of these 'famous' comments rather than making invalid negative assumptions from which they might be dismissed. I agree... but do not consider any of those people 'the problem'. There will ALWAYS be people who 'cross the line' from time to time (or who do not know where it is)... no procedure for appointing and/or removing admins will ever prevent that. The 'problem', in my view, resides in the admin community in general, including ArbCom members, who tacitly condone these things by failing to do anything about them or making outright statements in support of double standards; http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AAdministrators%27_not… http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AAdministrators%27_not… Would you find it inconceivable for me to say that I >like< Tony, and Kelly, and Jimbo (I do not know MONGO or Johnleemk well but assume they are equally worthy of respect) despite having directly criticized all of them strongly in the past? These are all good 'admins' doing good things... but they DO 'mess up' occasionally and the fact that this is ACCEPTED and that people are often outright attacked for saying so is, in my opinion, THE biggest problem Wikipedia has right now. It discourages examination of problems and encourages increasingly disruptive behaviour. Again, I agree... except that it isn't primarily an issue of 'good admins' and 'bad admins'. The greater issue is 'good' and 'bad' admin ACTIONS... and the response to such by the admin community. Again, I focus on the actions and community acceptance of them rather than the individuals. In my view what needs to change is the community's willingness to say, 'Um no... that's not kosher' to 'good' admins - and the willingness of the admin community, ArbCom, and all the way up to Jimbo to HEAR it >without< stomping the person saying so as someone who "would never *dream* of actually doing anything likely to make things better for Wikipedia" and other such pleasantries. That kind of response causes most people to clam up, avoid drawing negative attention to themselves, and just let the status quo go on rotting from within. You won't find alot of us who are so arrogantly self-assured as to be willing to be labeled "obnoxious". :] Everything is not broken. Just one thing... how Wikipedia's PTB respond to criticism of anyone 'on the inside'. In response to your analysis I would propose at least two more 'groups' - those who challenge the admin community as a whole to confront the perceived double-standards, and those who respond with some rather nasty comments and assumptions instead of considering that they might have a point. Or perhaps those aren't "groups" so much as individuals. :]

* Mark Gallagher wrote: If all admins behaved blamelessly it'd be a miracle of unprecedented scope. Never going to happen and not remotely my goal. I'm actually against 'punishing' admins who mess up with de-sysoping and the like (in most cases - there are always exceptions). I'd just like us to get to the point where when an admin messes up there are at least as many others willing to say so as there are egging them on. I don't 'damn all sysops based on the behaviour of one admin'... I 'damn' many of them based on their lack of response to it, or outright support. Admins being uncivil to 'troublemakers' (as in that case) from time to time is human nature... not 'the problem'. Sooner or later even >I< will say something annoying to someone... I know, hard to imagine, but it'll happen. Admins being 'allowed' or even 'encouraged' to be uncivil is another matter entirely. Though I will say that when another admin did so recently a bunch of people stepped up and said 'not cool'... and the admin conceded they might have a point. Was very heartening. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about here. The dread 'pi userbox' issue presumably? I believe such vague references to supposed problems are called 'handwavery without giving details' or something like that. :] The 'strict numerical count' seems to be something you have projected onto me, as I said nothing of the kind. Indeed, I didn't mention the 'count of votes' at all. My objection there was that an admin should not close deletion debates they were involved in and/or started... and certainly not as 'delete' given an obvious and overwhelming consensus to keep. Strict numbers nothing. When an impartial decision is required an involved/clearly partisan admin is exactly the wrong person to be closing the debate. That the close involved a 'creative' interpretation that 'keep really means delete after copying the content' was just a profound demonstration of WHY admins should never close debates they are partisan in. The whole thing was just plain silly. It was the value of pi for frick's sake. A number. Inside a rectangle. "Kill it! Outcast unclean!" :] Heh, well that's progress I suppose. Maybe. Personally, I was predicting that it would all end with a public stoning; http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notic… I've always wanted to get a pair of those. :]

On 6/17/06, Fastfission &lt;fastfission(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Why was an article protected to stop a *single editor* from modifying it? Wouldn't banning him from the article (and blocking him from Wikipedia if he failed to respect the ban) have been more effective? Steve

Jimmy Wales may argue that the NYT got the situation exactly backwards, but the reality is that this is a semantic game and in this case the contrarian position the NYT is arguing is, if not ultimately correct, an important one to have. Wikipedia benefits by having outsiders challenging Wikipedia to be and remain open and free. Institutions by their nature are conservative and self-protecting, and their commitment to their claimed ideals must face constant challenge for them to remain true to said ideals. I would say that neither Wales for the NYT is really right-- I would argue that Wikipedia, as it grows in size and prominence, is evolving rapidly and in ways that no one person could possibly understand fully. That Wikipedia will always be straddling the uncomfortable divide between reliability and editability, just as it embodies conflicts between universality and topicality, brevity and completeness, accessibility and accuracy, etc. It is neither the golden perfect lovely machine that Wales seems so insistent on portraying nor the decadent failure its critics decry.* I would be happier if we lived in a world where the New York Times was writing articles promoting the promise of Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales was its biggest critic, finding fault where others see none, but I don't get to choose the world I live in. That said, I found it quite interesting how Larry Sanger is now lost from the official narrative of the creation of Wikipedia. History belongs to the victors, I suppose. Although I became one of his most active critics during his tenure, he does not deserve to become a footnote, or worse, forgotten. --tc

Admins do excercise editorial control, mostly in their selection of articles for deletion (and especially speedy deletion). I've read a few irate bloggers talking about how the articles they added got deleted immediately -- and while of course it's possible to argue that those articles didn't belong in wikipedia, it's silly to say that making *and then enforcing* this argument isn't excercising editorial control. Even non-admins excercise editorial control, often /en mass/. It's just a more participatory form of control, and a more open one. On 6/17/06, The Cunctator &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com

On 6/17/06, The Cunctator &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This is the same false dilemma that reporters just can't seem to grasp. There is no such divide. Ryan

Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the lovely heading "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has added restrictions". Semi-protection certainly is a new restriction. The implementation of semi-protection may end up being a net positive or a net negative. It's difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing honest critical analyses of the effects of his policies. Semi-protection is one of a series of policies that increases the gates you have to go through to participate as a full member of the community. Maybe the net effect is that it makes the site easier to use for more people. But it's certainly a pain in the ass when you just want to edit an article without having to log in because you can't remember your password or don't want to type it on a public computer, or any number of unforeseeable reasons. And I'm speaking from experience. As an admin, I've also turned on/off semi-protection in various cases. I just wish people (aka Jimmy) would be will to admit that there are shades of gray instead of shouting that it's black and white. This is a complicated matter and neither the NYT, nor Jimmy, nor BoingBoing is helping matters by oversimplifying the debate.

On 6/20/06, Lord Voldemort &lt;lordbishopvoldemort(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It was a policy decided by community consensus. For certain definitions of "community" and "consensus". But I see your point. I used "his" because I was conflating it in my mind with a policy that really did come primarily from him (see below) and also because it's less important where an idea started than who champions it and how. Jimmy is certainly laying claim to the impassioned defense of the present-day Wikipedia policies in the public sphere. But I would agree with you on some points. As someone who doesn't Right. Which is why people who argue that something is either TERRIBLE or PERFECT should tone down the hyperbole. (Which is a fair criticism of me ofttimes, but then I don't have the soapbox of the Times nor am I one of the Time 100). But I think it can be argued that these fall under the Yup. Ah, right, this in particular was Jimbo's "experiment": On 12/5/05, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote:

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: A quick note that might clear up some confusion on my part: what do you mean by "more open" here? What's the metric?

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:47:15 -0400, "Lord Voldemort" &lt;lordbishopvoldemort(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: According to the last umpteen posts from Jimbo on the subject, that is correct... Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

Lord Voldemort wrote: That's right. But I also fully agree with Cunctator's point (if I understand him) that not every case of allowing more people to edit would count as "more open". For example, if we had a rule that "Only Jimbo is allowed to edit this article" then this would be a lot LESS open than "no one is allowed to edit this article". Openness refers not only to the number of people who can edit, but a holistic assessment of the entire process. I like processes that cut out mindless troll vandalism while allowing people of diverse opinions to still edit. Those are much better than full locking. --Jimbo

The Cunctator wrote: Gee, that is hardly what I have said. We used to fully protect in cases that we now semi-protect. That's a net gain for openness. Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing studies of how semi-protection is used. Excuse me? I have spent the last several days writing dozens of journalists and bloggers explaining precisely this: that there are shades of gray and that the matter is much more complex than "Wikipedia is locking down" or "Wikipedia is total fucking chaos". The truth is: Wikipedia is incredibly open, and it is my intention that we look at the places where we have been unable to be open in the past, and find clever ways to slice those so that we are more open. Like, for example, semi-protection instead of full protection. I have a general rule in discussion: assume good faith. Before you accuse me of not being "particularly interested" in honest critical analysis, I think you better stop for a moment and think a bit about history. --Jimbo

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:37:21 -0400, "The Cunctator" &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It worked, though. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:10:54 -0400, "The Cunctator" &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: [re no anonymous creation] A massive reduction in "things made up in school one day", and consequently the speedy deletion queue. Or so it seems to me - I no longer do newpage patrol though (appeared to be much less to do after that change). But you know how it is, if there were a strong community consensus in favour of going back I bet it would happen. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 6/20/06, The Cunctator &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: speedy has been around since 2004 -- geni

On 20/06/06, The Cunctator &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Speedy deletion's been around quite a while - the policy page dates to January 2004, and was descriptive then, so it's probably late 2003. You can see an early form of speedy in mid-2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Deletion_policy&old… -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: In addition, a pseudonym is more anonymous than an IP address. Before, it was possible to tell that user X came from school network Y. Now you have to do a CheckUser to get the user's IP. The Seigenthaler vandal was identified because he was an unregistered user. GerardM also has some great ideas how we can build better authentication into our software, so that, for instance, we know that certain IP addresses are untrusted, and instead of blocking them entirely, we allow users who are authenticated _within_ a school or university to use that authentication in Wikipedia. Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable. Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly editable, continuing the path we have already taken. Erik

geni wrote: Not if done carefully, I think. It may kill the main attraction to vandals and POV pushers, but that'd be a good thing. :) -- ####################################################################### # Office: 1-727-231-0101 | Free Culture and Free Knowledge # # http://www.wikipedia.org | Building a free world # #######################################################################

On 6/21/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The idea of "quality protection", like regular protection or semi-protection, is that only a small percentage of articles would behave in that fashion. 99% of articles would continue to be immediately editable, and simply inform the reader of the availability of reviewed versions. Erik

On 6/20/06, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The implementation is the tricky part. If you just want to cut out vandalism things probably wouldn't change much at all. Users that weren't logged in would see the latest version not marked as reviewed. Changes would likely be marked as reviewed very quickly (depending how many people had the power to mark as reviewed, which could very well be something like "just about every logged in user"). If someone with review power tries to edit a page with unreviewed edits you could even make first reviewing the change a required step. One variable though would be how much review is considered sufficient to mark a change as reviewed. Do sources have to be checked, or is just a quick "this isn't obvious vandalism" check enough? I suppose the ability to take away a user's review power without otherwise affecting that user would be useful for people who make too many review mistakes. Of course there are more complicated review procedures which would cause a bigger, longer term split in the article. These probably would soften one of the main attractions of Wikipedia, but only one of them - it might even be worth it. Anthony

On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, time delay is one important mechanism for quality control. The peer review mechanism I have in mind allows for a flexible combination of different parameters, to deal with different review requirements. For instance, a basic copyright check might require only a time delay, while stating the accuracy of an article might require one or two other editors to confirm the claim PLUS a time delay. We should be able to tweak these parameters until we have found the ideal settings for any quality criterion we devise. Erik

On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think that there would be user value in having available a human-reviewed WP derivative of some sort. I see the logical process as being a separate project. It could be a WP project, or another outside project. Not a fork, but a grooming process for articles. All contributions made at WP, versions found to be stable and useful then "promoted" to live on otherPedia. -- -george william herbert gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The default WP assumption of "Quality" seems to be, "an OK enough article, on any encyclopedic subject, which anyone can improve (and vandals can vandalize, but likely to be rapidly fixed again)". An alternate project might assume a definition like "a good to great article, on core encyclopedic subjects, which reviewed community improvements are eventually included in." One could easily pick a superset of all the major print and paid online encyclopedia subject articles as the target set for an initial version of such a project - a more reasonably sized target to manage. "Just" having a free alternative which has an article for anything those guys do, is probably good enough for most people. Extra bandwidth can be used to expand beyond that somewhat, but the keys would be "free" and "comparable" and "good quality" I believe in the first, hence my WP contributions. I also believe in the seond as a worthy goal, though not enough to kick off a major project today to do it. Again, I wouldn't suggest forking to do it. Using WP as the "source" for the selected encyclopedia (thus, second project contributors wanting to improve would go to the WP page and improve) and not forking as a general rule is almost certainly the right approach. -- -george william herbert gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 6/21/06, Erik Moeller &lt;eloquence(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Some of these things make it more complicated to edit the Wikipedia. Some of these things make it easier.

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: Still got it you just use redlinks instead Uninforcable Alrewadyy pretty open when it comes to deletion. The deletion logs are there and nothing to stop you asking the person who deleted it why. -- geni

As I said before, the experiment did cut down on a lot of crap, because some newbies simply don't want to register and instead post to AFC where we can nip an article's creation at the core. But unfortunately, not enough people join in there. Also, knowing that an IP address is likely newbie-ish is no longer helping new page patrollers as now they sign up for an account. If we can somehow have signed up accounts tagged as newbie, it might still work, but however much I was convinced of its workings before, I'm starting to have doubts now. Mgm

Have you ever looked at a regular day of submissions at AFC? Each and every one of them is one more than hasn't been created by an ignorant newbie and avoided overworking admins with the need to delete it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that effect is undone by the amount of logged in newbies. Was there a spike in AFD entries at the time? - ~~~~ Mgm On 6/21/06, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote:

On 6/21/06, BJörn Lindqvist &lt;bjourne(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No, the great thing about AfC is no one has to deal with it at all. If we stopped working on AfC, then Wikipedia would simply lose a little bit of growth. By contrast, if we stopped working on AfD, then Wikipedia would fairly dramatically fill up with total crud. By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article out of the deal. Steve

On 6/21/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Isn't AfC part of Wikipedia? Anthony

On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: So if new articles by users that weren't logged in had "Wikipedia:" in front of their title then you wouldn't have a problem with keeping the crap? Anthony

On 6/22/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: What extent is that? How can this be resolved? What if the page is called "Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Jerry the gay wanker"? There's no reason that crap new articles have to go through AfD. Anthony

Steve Bennett wrote: The hypothetical article in question is "[[Jerry the gay wanker]]", I expect current speedy deletion policies would probably cover it. Failing that one could use {{prod}}. There's no need to devise an alternative process, several already exist.

On 6/23/06, Anthony DiPierro &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: See [[WP:AFC]]. *Almost all* articles created by anons are bad. WP:AFC handles that quite nicely. But I'm not sure where we're going with all this. It's possible for anyone to nominate the article for speedy deletion. I suppose giving "deletion for anonymous articles" rights to people is possible, but fraught. Is an article that has been edited by a registered user still a candidate for mega-speedy deletion? Steve

On 6/23/06, Anthony DiPierro &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: Sorry, but I stop discussing when I hear the S word. I may have misunderstood you. I may have being arguing a different point. But I don't intentionally misrepresent people's positions in order to win an argument. Steve

On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: Here's a harsher version, but just as open and should save even more time. I'll call a user "registered" if they fit whatever criteria is currently used (logged in for X days, I believe). When an unregistered user creates a new article, stick some appropriate warning on the top. Registered users see a checkbox and button next to the warning, which says "approve article". If the article is approved, it's entered into a log, and the warning goes away. Until an article is approved, it can be deleted by *any* registered user, there's no need to bother an admin to delete it. Additionally, if the article is not approved within X days, it is automatically deleted. Anthony

Anthony DiPierro wrote: All good, IMO, except for the assumption of bad faith right at the end there. I don't see why the default has to be "delete". At that point the article's been hanging around for X days with a bomb strapped to its chest and not a single editor has seen fit to pull the trigger on it, suggesting that it probably isn't total trash. It may simply be a little questionable, which is something Wikipedia can work with.

On 6/21/06, Keith Old &lt;keithold(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Is that different from existing speedy deletion? -- -george william herbert gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: I would strongly urge us *not* to make the mistake of assuming that "edited by a logged-in user" equals "approved by a logged-in user". We should *not* be forcing people to take responsibility for whole articles if they simply fix a typo, add a category, or tweak an interwiki link. Bad, bad idea. Steve

On 6/22/06, Anthony DiPierro &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: Well, extensions already exist to allow patrolling. A minimal implementation might be to have a bot which checks for recently created articles by anons, and stamping them with some template/category combination, which, as you say, could be later removed by established users. Steve

On 6/22/06, BJörn Lindqvist &lt;bjourne(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'm simply arguing that AfC is less work for us, the established Wikipedia community, than is putting crap new articles through AfD. It's definitely less convenient for the newcomer. Steve

On 21/06/06, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: I have seen a graph of number-of-articles-on-AFD over time, but damned if I can find it. Does anyone else remember it? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 21/06/06, Mark Wagner &lt;carnildo(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Aha! That'll have been it... If I get the time I'll graph a few months. When was anon creation stopped? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 6/20/06, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt; wrote: Unfortunately the data at stats.wikimedia.org seems somewhat spotty. New user data for en seems to cut out after Jan 2006 (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm) and ditto with new articles per day (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm). There does not seem to be a count for deleted articles per day on there at all. This seems to indicate to me that getting statistics for this period is going to be a considerably harder job. I'm sure it has been discussed why the en stats died then, but it would be nice to politely nudge whoever has the power to deal with this and remind them that these numbers could actually be useful for more than bragging about whether we've created our Nth article... If we had the following stats, some interesting conclusions could probably be drawn: 1. New users per time period (day, week, month, whatever) 2. Articles created by new users (defining new user as someone with under X number of edits or an account which is only X days old) per time period 3. Number of those articles which were deleted with the first X days 4. Number of those articles which ended up on AfD (and maybe whether they were eventually deleted or not) I don't know how hard it would be to make the database spit out numbers on things like that, but it should in theory be possible... FF

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:44:48 +0200, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: How about semi-blocking, letting semi-blocked editors comment on Talk but not in article space? Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

G'day Alphax, * Block users from uploading images * Block users from creating articles * Block users from moving articles We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps' bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable. It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible. (I don't know Bug 550, but I assume it's the one about the autoblocker) Cheers, -- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!" - Danger Mouse

On Jun 22, 2006, at 1:32 AM, Mark Gallagher wrote: The arbitration committee is constantly on the lookout for solutions which provide partial solutions such as you suggest so that there are alternatives to simply blocking someone. Mostly they depend on the using being willing to comply with partial bans on their editing. This is not done by software, but enforced by administrative blocking if they violate the partial ban, such as editing particular articles. Fred

On 6/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG &lt;guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net&gt; wrote: It would give them a last chance to demonstrate good faith. Probably worth doing as a trial at any rate, it's so hard to predict how these things play out in reality. Steve

On 6/22/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: In the case of a recidivist copyviolater, simply banning image uploading seems like a sensible move, though. However, that would imply banning it for all anons too - almost certainly a good thing. Steve

On 6/22/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) &lt;alphasigmax(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Good :) Steve

On Jun 22, 2006, at 8:16 AM, geni wrote: Does it make sense to have one? a button, that is. Fred

On Jun 22, 2006, at 8:12 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote: You exaggerate. Fred

On 6/23/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: Sorry to make a habit of it, but I disagree with you. At Wikipedia, I see a small number of people working on a massive number of pages, and the more help we get with that task, the better. We have a constant stream of people who come past, add a few pages, then leave - but there is little manpower to maintain those pages. I frequently edit pages which have not been touched in a year or more. Sure, our US popular culture sections are totally under control, and do not need manpower. However, pick a different area, like French cuisine, or even any aspect of French culture, and to me it feels very much like a "struggling tiny project". I see the same small handful of names again and again. If there was a useful editor in this area who was going to be banned for image uploading, I would definitely mount an argument for retaining him without image privileges. Maybe others see things differently, but I do not feel a massive influx in people contributing raw, valuable text to our encyclopaedia, which is something we're quite short of. We have lots of people joining us to help delete, categorise, clean, or write about their own pet topic - but do we really have so many helping to expand on our existing topics? Steve

On 6/23/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: We're getting better at this, but your example isn't that far off the mark in some cases. Jay.

On 6/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG &lt;guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net&gt; wrote: There would definitely be huge complaints of favouritism in such cases ("how come me and my friend are blocked, but his friend isn't?!!"). That's probably no worse than the current situation. The real downside of these kind of approaches is that as you find methods of resolving problems that affect less and less people, there is less impetus to get those problems actually resolved. That is, protect [[GWB]], and people will kick up a fuss until the page is unprotected. Ban some small player from some minor article - rightly or wrongly - and it may be a while before anyone gets around to unbanning him. Steve

On 6/22/06, Mark Wagner &lt;carnildo(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: A proper experiment on this would be a good thing. Measure the number of "good", "bad" and "borderline" images before and after the implementation of such a privilege system. How would you work out who to give initial priveleges to? Is there enough history to determine which editors have uploaded more problem images than good ones? Steve

Five hundred! It took me years to get there, and I spend far too much time on Wikipedia. What about 75? On 6/23/06, Mark Wagner &lt;carnildo(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com

On 6/23/06, Ben Yates &lt;bluephonic(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Heh. It took me 5 weeks, of which 2 had a grand total of 4 edits between them. 100-150 sounds reasonable to me, in line with "assuming good faith" - we can always revoke these hypothetical priveleges again once they've demonstrated bad faith or simple incompetence. Steve

On 6/23/06, Mark Gallagher &lt;m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au&gt; wrote: I noticed this the other day, when I saw someone removing the tag from an article because "it hadn't passed through the Good Articles process properly". And here I was thinking that the point of the thing was that it was to be a largely process-free way of tagging articles that seemed reasonably good. Generally because certain people can never see a good idea that they don't think could be improved with more process, formality, forms and bureaucracy. (of course, this is not the only way that they can bollocks it up; I'm simply having a rant) -Matt

Steve Bennett wrote: That's insane. Soon you'll need to go through five days of discussion and achieve a majority poll before you can edit an article... Add it to [[WP:RAUL]]. -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: Problem is most of the obvious lines for improvement involve codeing. -- geni

On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro &lt;wikilegal(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of semi-protected articles, then: P(now) << P(a year ago) That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that: P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago) That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has not increased. We should verify both these claims. I'm a little bit wary in particular because articles are *never* protected for more than a week or so at a time, whereas we now have several *permanently* semi-protected articles. You could not claim that the level of openness for articles like [[George W Bush]] has increased, for instance. Comparing http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages… against http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages I think these claims may be in trouble. Now, I haven't taken into account the increase in total number of pages in this time. But, it's easy to see that the total number of pages protected a year ago was about 1.5 pages, whereas currently it's about 2.5 pages, with nearly another 3.5 pages semi-protected. So, you're talking 6 pages of entries of semi or full protected pages (yes, an imprecise measure) compared to 1.5 pages. Has the number of pages gone up 4x in that period (~370 days)? I doubt it. Steve

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia.com&gt; wrote: There is. Long term semi protection really only hits a very small number of subjects. The number of subjects that enough people feel strong about to cause a problem is unlikely to increase. We don't have pageview data. -- geni

George Herbert wrote: Empirically I find it to be true. It's amazing how many people will fight tooth and nail to get their POV into [[X]], while being oblivious to [[History of X]], [[X and Y]], [[X-Z effect]], [[list of Xes]], etc, all of which will have extensive material inconsistent with the wanted POV. (My unkind belief is that POV pushers are simply not smart enough to figure out that the encyclopedia has more than one article.) There are alway outliers of course - I'm no longer amazed at how even the most obscure topic can push *somebody's* button. We have talk pages with three-year-old streams of invective that have yet to find anybody else who cares... Stan

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:46:04 +0100, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: But before there was only protection, which was a blunt instrument and caused significant pain. Now there is sprotection which allows most editors to go about their business so there is much less resistance to its use; it is not a surprise that it is used to prevent spates of short-term drive by vandalism, where previously we just put up with the pain and kept reverting. Even then articles like Safety, a constant target for IP vandalism, do not remain protected for long because the protected log is watched by a number of admins who make it their business to keep protection periods down to sensible levels. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

Steve Bennett wrote: To me it means "To the maximal extent consistent with keeping vandalism down to a dull roar, we try to let as many people edit as many things as we can with as little barrier as possible. When we are forced to enact some barrier, we try to keep it as narrowly focussed as possible, and as short term as possible." It does not mean, and has never meant, "Come one, come all, even if you are a jerk or complete idiot there is a home for you here." The Germans have it right, in my opinion, on their homepage: "Gute Autorinnen und Autoren sind stets willkommen." "Good authors are always welcome." I think that the upcoming experiental implementation of a "stable article" feature (to be introduced first in the German community, most likely) is going to be a nice step in the right direction, because almost all article protection can be completely dropped. --Jimbo -- ####################################################################### # Office: 1-727-231-0101 | Free Culture and Free Knowledge # # http://www.wikipedia.org | Building a free world # #######################################################################

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:25:39 +0200, "Steve Bennett" &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The missing piece of data is: what proportion of anonymous editors are good contributors? If it's very small, then it's a non-issue. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 6/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG &lt;guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net&gt; wrote: I have a theory that for any change made by an anon editor: - if it's a deletion, it's probably vandalism - if it's the addition of more than a sentence, it will probably be unsourced and get reverted - if it's only a net change of plus or minus 5 characters, it's probably a useful copy-edit Anon make a lot of typo corrections, but are rarely bold enough to fix major problems in articles. Steve

On 6/23/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) &lt;alphasigmax(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: "gay" takes only 5 bytes now? What an ingenious unicode storage format we must have :) Steve

On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Or someone who sees something false about them or someone they know in an article. We get complaints mailed to Wikimedia all the time that "I was trying to remove this false statement about me and then I was blocked for vandalism!" Or someone who is really confused. A German usability study found some people who clicked "edit" and got confused submitted a blanked page. (Yes, I scratched my head when I read that, too.) See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Usability/Test_Februar_2… -- text is in English. Most logged-in users' additions are unsourced, too. Actually additions of a few sentences are usually at least on the right track (note: my watchlist is mainly classical music; YMMV). Not sourced, generally, true, but mostly verifiable if someone went to go find a cite; also often well-meaning but misguided insertion of opinions or original research. Of course, text dumps of full paragraphs or articles, generally unwikified, are too often copyvio. :-/ Generally agreed. (Sometimes it's sneaky vandalism. :-P) ...though when they are, they are often accused of vandalism, especially as most haven't gotten the memo about talk pages or edit summaries yet. On the whole I am in favor of as few restrictions on anonymous editing as necessary. It may be true that most vandalism comes from anons (I don't have data for this). However, it doesn't follow that most anon contributions are vandalism. (I don't have data for this either, but I suspect most of it is not. The majority of it may well be in need of cleanup or sourcing, but that could be said of most newbie edits, logged-in or not.) And raise your hand if you *didn't* make a few anon edits before signing up. Anyone? A few? I think I would have been put off if most of the things I wanted to edit when I initally saw the site were semiprotected. I do like semi-protection as a defense against the hordes of drive-by vandals who come by in bursts for some reason or another. But I think we should keep it to a minimum, and be careful not to use protection -- full or semi -- where it has not been shown to be needed. (IMO, the most problematic edits don't come from newbies, anyway, but from more seasoned users who have an agenda to push and know how to game the system... but perhaps that's colored by my doing more dispute resolution than RC patrol.) -Kat -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | G/AIM:LucidWaking mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone The good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving -- Lao-Tzu Wikia: creating communities - http://www.wikia.com

Steve Bennett wrote: I've been noticing that this seems to vary based on subject matter. There are articles where no anon has ever made a useful contribution other than typo fixing, but there are also others where we get useful and well researched additions just popping out of the blue. I believe what I'm seeing here is a variation in the pool of off-wiki subject enthusiasts who are aware of the article but don't otherwise contribute to Wikipedia. For some subjects, these people tend to be more clueful than for others; also, for some subjects the culture of this group makes the useful contributors more likely to register than for others. When these two groups intersect, such that there are many clueful unregistered people tracking a specific article, that's when you get these high-quality anon edits. Off the top of my head, [[Siamese Fighting Fish]] seems to be a good example of an article with many good IP edits and little vandalism. Presumably there are many others, but they're not the ones one usually encounters while carrying out admin duties. -- Ilmari Karonen

On 6/24/06, George Herbert &lt;george.herbert(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: "Sign here and come back in 4 days" isn't that trivial. You can open a bank account quicker than that. Hell, you can probably get a loan quicker than that. Steve

Even if the restrictions are minor, any level of separation between anons and regular users does have social consequences: it's a barrier, if a permeable one, and it will effect how many people join wikipedia (and what types of people), how users treat outsiders, etc. Semiprotection is necessary, but we shouldn't pretend it's inconsequential. (Hey, maybe those consequences are /good/, like encouraging people to create accounts and become invested in the project. And maybe they're not.) On 6/25/06, mboverload &lt;mboverload(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com

On 6/26/06, mboverload &lt;mboverload(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Remember, semiprotection blocks new users, not just unregistered users. Steve

Somebody please put it back. Its like instruction creep for global tabs. Svertigo __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

This has been fixed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki%3AViewsource&diff=6… ----- Original Message ----- From: "stevertigo" &lt;vertigosteve(a)yahoo.com&gt; To: "English Wikipedia" &lt;wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org&gt; Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 7:02 PM Subject: [WikiEN-l] Ugly == "edit this page (read only)"

I noticed that the News report mentioned [[Islamophobia]] as a protected article. Islamophobia has been protected fro quite some time now. I think the issues that caused it to be locked down have subsided and that article should be unlocked. -Scott Stevenson [[User:Netscott]]

Erik Moeller wrote: What is embarassing even more is that these stories spread all over the world. Journalists call locals (such as me) to say "did you read the last NYT article ? Can you tell me more about the last decisions ?" Me : "there are no new decisions" Journalist : "but it is written on the NYT !" Me : "so what ?" Journalist : "Ah...well... still, it is no more open to everyone - I would like to explain french readers that new articles can not be created by anonymous any more" Me : "well, I recommand you do not, because on the french speaking wikipedia, anonymous can still create articles" Journalist : "but Jimmy Wales said that..." Me : "Okay. But things are not so simple. Maybe I could explain to you how decision making is done in the different language versions and maybe introduce you to our governance system. This is a fascinating topic you know ?" Which reminds me... did we get press coverage for the hiring of the CEO ? Aside from Wikipedia being open or not being open to editing, I think hiring a CEO should be food for thought and speculation from at least some of the magazines. Did any magazine questionned whether it would change the governance of the organisation ? Did anyone wonder if it would somehow impact the international dimension (such as would it impact latin america or india engagement ? would it impact china block ?). Could it change our relationship with service providers or potential partners ? Did someone wonder if that would change something in terms of staff ? What would be the related main benefits and threats ? No ?

Anthere wrote: <snip> ... the *940* admins, and a million registered users, and who knows how many anonymous contributors. And that's just for the English Wikipedia! What about on de:, fr:, ja: and the rest? -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

On 6/19/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Where are the usage statistics (number of users making X edits/month or whatever) kept, anyways? Thanks. -- -george william herbert gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 6/20/06, Fastfission &lt;fastfission(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: There have been several surveys. You don't need to ask *everyone* their age to make an estimate... Steve