Jimmy-
I know nothing about what was going on with Anthony Del Pierro and Eloquence.
I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add their site to the list.
That being said, it would have been preferable to use a per-page ban in this case, but that feature is not yet available.
As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly), nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...), and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.
One thing I have always been missing in the Wikipedia community is trust. There's nothing wrong with some healthy paranoia regarding all forms of authority. But I'd appreciate a little more awareness of the very real threat that persistent and annoying trolls represent to the coherence and productivity of our community. And no, these people do not have a "right" to test our defenses.
Trolls sometimes pretend to be working against "groupthink", but in reality their only goal is to disrupt things, to see how much damage they can do. Trying to deliberately sabotage the construction of a free encyclopedia takes a special, even more disgusting type of troll.
Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary. Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more swift in enforcing them.
Of course I'd love to see the arbitration committee be quick in making decisions in such cases, but work by committee is rarely fast or efficient.
Regards,
Erik
More trolling by anthony a couple of hours ago; listing wikipedia on [[Wikipedia:Copies of Wikipedia content (low degree of compliance)]]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Copies_of_Wikipedia_con... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copies_of_Wikipedia_content_(und...)
I and a couple of others should also have received a "YHBT, HAND" notice after engaging in a discussion on IRC with anthony where he claimed that wikipedia is not an encyclopedia because it isn't printed on dead trees. (And some other equally strange criteria which I've since forgotten)
Best, Sascha Noyes
Erik Moeller wrote:
I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add their site to the list.
I'm not sure I'd call it "vandalism". He was adding an obscure site to the page that you did not think should be listed, and linking to the Wikipedia article on the site (which was listed on VfD) instead of to the site's URL (which may or may not have actually existed). This is a poor edit that shouldn't be on the page, but not quite to the level of what I'd consider *vandalism* (especially since it later turned out that the site did in fact exist). It may or may not be trolling, but I don't think it's vandalism.
I also disagree that protection wasn't an option. Any contributor is supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]], but that doesn't stop us from protecting it when necessary. Sure, it's inconvenient when someone happens along that has information on Gdansk that we don't have, and they cannot edit because it's protected, but that's how it goes. I don't see why this one page should be special in that regard, especially since, unlike [[Gdansk]], it doesn't even hold information that's part of the encyclopedia.
As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly), nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...), and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.
On the copyright issue, I happen to agree with his interpretation, and it seems one or two other people might as well. The issue is that if I create a GFDL work, and you make a derived work of it, you *must* license *all* your edits under the GFDL. If you add a fair use image to which you do not own the copyright, your edit is not under the GFDL, so you are violating the GFDL's terms (and thus my copyright). You might even add a fair use image that my company isn't allowed to redistribute, which would put me in the position of not being able to distribute a derived work of my own text! Which is exactly what the GFDL was written to prevent.
See [[meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?]] for additional discussion on this point.
As for whether he's a troll, that you may have a point on. I'm not sure, since I've only encountered him on Wikipedia once or twice, but I'm quite willing to believe that there are people here who are up to no good, and he may well be one of them.
Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary. Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more swift in enforcing them.
I guess I don't like that solution much. In my experience, allegations of trolling are just as often false as they are true, and I think implementing some undeserved bans is more damaging than neglecting to implement some deserved bans. They're both bad, but the former makes us enemies (who may become long-running persistent thorns in our side) and damages our reputation of "anyone can edit here and the admins aren't a power-wielding cabal". That's not to say we shouldn't ban anyone, we should just avoid doing it a lot, and make sure that we only do it when really necessary.
FWIW, I also think we should go a little easier on banning anonymous users than has been done lately. Certainly if somebody vandalizes a bunch of pages they should be banned, but I don't think it's necessary to ban an IP that's had two minor vandalism edits, especially if they're the sort that might be unintentional (just adding "hi" or something, often done by newbies to test if you really can just edit any page, as advertised). We can end up discouraging potential contributors with stuff like that, and the downside of having to revert a few more edits isn't really a big one (it's pretty easy to revert, after all). I personally tend only to ban users who insist on vandalizing the same page, or have vandalized somewhere more in the range of 8-10 pages; the rest usually either turn into good users or give up and leave before banning them is necessary.
-Mark
I just now wrote:
FWIW, I also think we should go a little easier on banning anonymous users than has been done lately. Certainly if somebody vandalizes a bunch of pages they should be banned, but I don't think it's necessary to ban an IP that's had two minor vandalism edits, especially if they're the sort that might be unintentional (just adding "hi" or something, often done by newbies to test if you really can just edit any page, as advertised). We can end up discouraging potential contributors with stuff like that, and the downside of having to revert a few more edits isn't really a big one (it's pretty easy to revert, after all). I personally tend only to ban users who insist on vandalizing the same page, or have vandalized somewhere more in the range of 8-10 pages; the rest usually either turn into good users or give up and leave before banning them is necessary.
I forgot to add--I also think that when anonymous users of that sort *are* banned, the ban messages should make some attempt to be at least tersely polite and directed towards the banee rather than towards the sysops reading the ban log. For example, "yawn, another vandal" isn't as good as "please do not vandalize articles" or something of that sort.
Also, perhaps the ban message should tell them it's only a 24-hr ban? Something like "Your ban will automatically expire in 24 hours, after which you may resume editing Wikipedia in accordance with our policies. If you persist in vandalism or other violations of our policy, however, you will be permanently banned."
-Mark
Delirium-
I'm not sure I'd call it "vandalism". He was adding an obscure site to the page that you did not think should be listed
I don't care about his so-called "fork". I don't care about his website, which has the trollish name "slashdotsucks.com". I have no problem with it being listed, as it evidently uses our software. At the time of his listing, however, the page on Wikipedia was already deleted, so all there was in the list was a red link "McFly". He refused to provide a URL in spite of being asked to do so several times in the edit comments. He reverted other people's removal of the site. And he added it to the official list of "Wikimedia projects" once.
At this point I asked him calmly to stop adding a site without providing any evidence for its existence, as information in Wikipedia needs to be verifiable and helpful to the reader. His reply:
"No."
He continued to add his site to the list, so I decided to ban him. Evidence for its existence was provided later (a URL added by Tim Starling); at that point I immediately unbanned Anthony.
I consider my actions in this matter absolutely justifiable, and I find it extremely silly to talk about such a triviality. Anthony plainly only used the page for trolling purposes, and I see no reason why we should tolerate that kind of crap.
I also disagree that protection wasn't an option. Any contributor is supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]]
That's not quite the same. It's hard enough to get people to list their sites on the official list at all. The last thing we need on that page is an edit war and a protection notice. If it was at least an edit war about something that reasonable people can disagree on -- but his edits were pure vandalism, plain and simple.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
If it was at least an edit war about something that reasonable people can disagree on -- but his edits were pure vandalism, plain and simple.
I think that's the key here.
We have to be cautious, of course, that we not silently expand our understanding of "pure vandalism" too far.
But Erik has cogently and correctly made the point a few times recently that "Wikipedia is not about 'rights'. Wikipedia is about creating an encyclopedia. All this trolling distracts from that goal."
I can imagine, and I would probably enjoy (for a little while) a wiki with no purpose, no rules, no bans, anything goes, freewheeling, random, chaotic, with that anarchic structure (or should I say 'anti-structure') being the primary value.
But that's not wikipedia. Our open atmosphere is a means to an end, and it's the end that is our primary focus, our loving passion, the thing that brings us all together: the encyclopedia.
So while I'm certainly on the cautious end of the scale, very near to Cunctator in fact, as to the merits of bans and rules and so on, I do think it's very important to keep our priorities straight.
That's why I was supportive of Angela banning "UnbannableOne". That's why I banned "The Fellowship of the Troll" yesterday.
There are people in the world with active mental pathologies. It's difficult for good and benevolent people to really grasp that someone could have the time and energy to come to a charitable humanitarian project that tries to be open and friendly and inclusive and neutral simply for the purpose of causing trouble. We tend to try to project our happy loving values on their actions, assuming that they are just trying to help us remain neutral or whatever.
But sometimes, that's just not true. As difficult as it is to imagine, some people just are plain and simple assholes.
An important concept here is "the sanction of the victim". Leonard Peikoff defined that term as "the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the 'sin' of creating values."
We fall into that trap fairly often, I'm afraid. Our own good values are used against us. We are open, patient, inquiring after truth, intested in fairness, neutrality, community, harmony, justice. And so we put up with a fair amount of nonsense, more than we should.
--Jimbo
Delirium wrote:
See [[meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?]] for additional discussion on this point.
I think that your position, and that of Anthony, is mistaken. I have discussed this with experts, and frankly, not only did they think this was mistaken, they seemed bemused that I should ask such a silly question in the first place.
Further discussion of this should take place on wikilegal-l, but I do recommend that people read the comment I just added on the page Delirium cited above.
The essential point is that the GNU FDL is not a restriction that authors impose on users that goes beyond copyright, but instead is a conditional giving up of restrictions normally imposed by copyright.
--Jimbo