http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-10-n36.html
I urge you to look at the page he has there. You may care to take a dated archival copy in case of any of the threatened lawsuits eventuating.
- d.
On 11/10/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I urge you to look at the page he has there. You may care to take a dated archival copy in case of any of the threatened lawsuits eventuating.
Ah, more comedy lawyer threats.
What I especially love about Daniel Brandt is the fact that he has made revealing inside and private information about people and companies his life's work - but somehow when it's about HIM, it's all different.
-Matt (User:Morven)
Matt Brown wrote:
On 11/10/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I urge you to look at the page he has there. You may care to take a dated archival copy in case of any of the threatened lawsuits eventuating.
Ah, more comedy lawyer threats.
What I especially love about Daniel Brandt is the fact that he has made revealing inside and private information about people and companies his life's work - but somehow when it's about HIM, it's all different.
He wouldn't happen to live in TRENTON, NEW JERSEY would he? :)
On 11/10/05, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
He wouldn't happen to live in TRENTON, NEW JERSEY would he? :)
Isnt that the other guy?
Ian
On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, David Gerard wrote:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-10-n36.html
I urge you to look at the page he has there. You may care to take a dated archival copy in case of any of the threatened lawsuits eventuating.
He does have a point about his article: anyone can come along & add information that would put him in a negative light.
So he decides to do the dumb thing & insist that the article either gets locked down or deleted. Which ignores the fact that if you get sufficient attention, you will eventually become the subject of a Wikipedia article. (Hmm. If we adopt this as an axiom like "Murphy's Law", what should we call it? "Wikipedia's You Can't Hide Law"?)
And if one has sufficient attention, then it would benefit that person to try to play nice with Wiipedia. Ask for help with editting that article. Offer images under GFDL. Create some goodwill so that editors who spend a lot of time will help watch over the article.
Because the only thing worse than someone succeeding in adding defamatory information to your Wikipedia biography, is to find that it was a 100-word stub, & the only edit was a sentence along the lines of "He's not as handsome as his brother or his dog" to the article, & you're the first person to notice in over 20 months. (Now *that* would be a convincing argument that the subject was non-notable.)
Geoff
Geoff Burling wrote:
And if one has sufficient attention, then it would benefit that person to try to play nice with Wiipedia. Ask for help with editting that article. Offer images under GFDL. Create some goodwill so that editors who spend a lot of time will help watch over the article.
Yes.
But of course I hope that we, being Wikipedians, will offer very warm goodwill to Daniel Brandt, despite the fact that his primary contribution to the article has been to attempt to suppress perfectly valid links to sources which are critical of him.
The article should be neutral, clear, high-quality, and on many many people's watchlists, and whenever Brandt interacts with any of us, he should be treated with the utmost courtesy, kindness, and respect, no matter how he chooses to behave himself.
This might be difficult, but we're Wikipedians. It's what we do.
--Jimbo
I was always in favour of deletion of pages, and disagreed with those who wanted to keep every irrelevant, impossible-to-make-encyclopædic article. But rampant deletionism has hit ridiculous levels on WP now. I daren't even go near the article deletion page because of what goes on there. Now the template deletion page has become ridiculous.
While it is understandable to delete most single use templates, it seems to have hit a stage where perfectly valid, obviously usable templates are been dumped.
It shouldn't be too hard to tell the difference between a once-off template that is unlikely to have a use on more than one page, and one that obviously has widespread uses now and in the future, but simply hasn't been put into all the articles they may be used for 'yet'.
I created one as part of a wholescale rewriting of articles on the government of Northern Ireland. Because of problems saving stuff due to those goddamned error messages I worked on two articles on my desktop. I put the template into one (it already was in the first one to be written) to find that it had already been proposed for deletion. Anyone with elementary cop-on would have realised from its contents that it was going to be used in up to 10 articles.
Single use templates with massive amount of codes are being deleted and substituted even though firstly that makes them are easier to vandalise, secondly they make an article difficult to edit if there are a lot of codes all over the place, and thirdly it then means that they cannot be used elsewhere even though their contents make them ideal for multiple use as a template.
We could no with a page of ''useful templates'' where existing templates could be picked out for use in new articles.
It seems to be the same 'greek chorus' of deleters who do the blanket nominating and do blanket voting to delete everything in sight. They seem all too often to drown out protests from others that their deletionitis is out of control.
Once it was the case that only crap was deleted. Now it seems that crap survives while the delete gang propose good articles, good templates and good infoboxes for deletion.
Wikipedia needs to do something to reign in the delete brigade. Deletion used to be used to keep up standards. Now it is bringing down standards, doing damage to content and design and seriously pissing off users who are doing serious work and have to spend their days fighting off attempts to delete things. The final twist is that many of the most fanatical deleters seem to be down damn all writing themselves, simply proposing large numbers of things for deletion all the time, irrespective of quality, usefulness or benefit to Wikipedia.
Thom
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Tom Cadden wrote:
I was always in favour of deletion of pages, and disagreed with those who wanted to keep every irrelevant, impossible-to-make-encyclopædic article. But rampant deletionism has hit ridiculous levels on WP now. I daren't even go near the article deletion page because of what goes on there. Now the template deletion page has become ridiculous.
As someone said in #wikipedia the other day: "the deletionists go around deleting stuff; the inclusionists just whinge on wikien-l about how bad it is." So: stop complaining, and start telling people *why* they need to be kept.
<snip>
We could no with a page of ''useful templates'' where existing templates could be picked out for use in new articles.
See [[WP:TM]]. It's a bit of a mess, but it's the best place to start.
It seems to be the same 'greek chorus' of deleters who do the blanket nominating and do blanket voting to delete everything in sight. They seem all too often to drown out protests from others that their deletionitis is out of control.
Once it was the case that only crap was deleted. Now it seems that crap survives while the delete gang propose good articles, good templates and good infoboxes for deletion.
Wikipedia needs to do something to reign in the delete brigade. Deletion used to be used to keep up standards. Now it is bringing down standards, doing damage to content and design and seriously pissing off users who are doing serious work and have to spend their days fighting off attempts to delete things. The final twist is that many of the most fanatical deleters seem to be down damn all writing themselves, simply proposing large numbers of things for deletion all the time, irrespective of quality, usefulness or benefit to Wikipedia.
Notifying the creator/last editor of such templates would be a Polite Thing To Do. But no, it's far easier to subst: and {{d}} something, because that way you can get away with it.
Deletion is Evil.
--- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
As someone said in #wikipedia the other day: "the deletionists go around deleting stuff; the inclusionists just whinge on wikien-l about how bad it is." So: stop complaining, and start telling people *why* they need to be kept.
Unfortunately the greek chorus of deleters all group around chanting ''delete, delete delete. Begone you nasty template'' like something out of Lord of the Flies.
And they don't like anyone saying 'Hold on a minute'. You get the image they all turn around and mutter in unison: did someone dare speak on our page? How dare he? He isn't one of us.' lol
Notifying the creator/last editor of such templates would be a Polite Thing To Do. But no, it's far easier to subst: and {{d}} something, because that way you can get away with it.
I'm beginning to think they do it that way in the hope people who might disagree with them won't notice.
When recently a whole blitz of Irish templates were put up for deletion by the one user (He seemed to be having one of his 'and today I will wipe out Ireland' moods) I dared to contact Irish users to suggest they look at the proposed deletions. One of the deleters went beserck. How DARE I "spam" users to tell them about the deletions. She went on and on and on and on in the "How dare I" rant in message after message. Obviously users are meant to have psychic powers to know that she and her colleagues had now picked Irish templates for wipeout. And for daring to disrupt the smooth running of deletions by bring aliens who might vote 'no' onto the page. (She made snide comments about how they were all doing my bidding when they dared disagree with her.) she promptly nominated a another template I had created on the page even though WP was perfectly happy with it and using it all over!!!
The Deletioners and their antics makes Lord of the Flies sound positively heavenly.
Thom
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Model Search 2005 - Find the next catwalk superstars - http://uk.news.yahoo.com/hot/model-search/
Maybe if you turned it into a general rewrite tag that can be used on all articles, it might be kept...
Mgm
On 11/12/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
--- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
As someone said in #wikipedia the other day: "the deletionists go around deleting stuff; the inclusionists just whinge on wikien-l about how bad it is." So: stop complaining, and start telling people *why* they need to be kept.
Unfortunately the greek chorus of deleters all group around chanting ''delete, delete delete. Begone you nasty template'' like something out of Lord of the Flies.
And they don't like anyone saying 'Hold on a minute'. You get the image they all turn around and mutter in unison: did someone dare speak on our page? How dare he? He isn't one of us.' lol
Notifying the creator/last editor of such templates would be a Polite Thing To Do. But no, it's far easier to subst: and {{d}} something, because that way you can get away with it.
I'm beginning to think they do it that way in the hope people who might disagree with them won't notice.
When recently a whole blitz of Irish templates were put up for deletion by the one user (He seemed to be having one of his 'and today I will wipe out Ireland' moods) I dared to contact Irish users to suggest they look at the proposed deletions. One of the deleters went beserck. How DARE I "spam" users to tell them about the deletions. She went on and on and on and on in the "How dare I" rant in message after message. Obviously users are meant to have psychic powers to know that she and her colleagues had now picked Irish templates for wipeout. And for daring to disrupt the smooth running of deletions by bring aliens who might vote 'no' onto the page. (She made snide comments about how they were all doing my bidding when they dared disagree with her.) she promptly nominated a another template I had created on the page even though WP was perfectly happy with it and using it all over!!!
The Deletioners and their antics makes Lord of the Flies sound positively heavenly.
Thom
Yahoo! Model Search 2005 - Find the next catwalk superstars - http://uk.news.yahoo.com/hot/model-search/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Maybe the people who are adept at editing are not as adept at playing tag. The multiplicity of tags, templates and incomprehensible shortcuts are imposible to remember. In many case plain language would be more meaningful than shortcuts designed to save writers a few seconds.
The process that Tom describes in relation to the Irish articles appears to be organized vandalism by the wiki's Hell's Angels. Ec
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
Maybe if you turned it into a general rewrite tag that can be used on all articles, it might be kept...
Mgm
On 11/12/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
--- "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
As someone said in #wikipedia the other day: "the deletionists go around deleting stuff; the inclusionists just whinge on wikien-l about how bad it is." So: stop complaining, and start telling people *why* they need to be kept.
Unfortunately the greek chorus of deleters all group around chanting ''delete, delete delete. Begone you nasty template'' like something out of Lord of the Flies.
And they don't like anyone saying 'Hold on a minute'. You get the image they all turn around and mutter in unison: did someone dare speak on our page? How dare he? He isn't one of us.' lol
Notifying the creator/last editor of such templates would be a Polite Thing To Do. But no, it's far easier to subst: and {{d}} something, because that way you can get away with it.
I'm beginning to think they do it that way in the hope people who might disagree with them won't notice.
When recently a whole blitz of Irish templates were put up for deletion by the one user (He seemed to be having one of his 'and today I will wipe out Ireland' moods) I dared to contact Irish users to suggest they look at the proposed deletions. One of the deleters went beserck. How DARE I "spam" users to tell them about the deletions. She went on and on and on and on in the "How dare I" rant in message after message. Obviously users are meant to have psychic powers to know that she and her colleagues had now picked Irish templates for wipeout. And for daring to disrupt the smooth running of deletions by bring aliens who might vote 'no' onto the page. (She made snide comments about how they were all doing my bidding when they dared disagree with her.) she promptly nominated a another template I had created on the page even though WP was perfectly happy with it and using it all over!!!
The Deletioners and their antics makes Lord of the Flies sound positively heavenly.
On 11/13/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The process that Tom describes in relation to the Irish articles appears to be organized vandalism by the wiki's Hell's Angels.
I think that's taking it too far. The issue seems to be that what's in the guidelines for how templates should be used (content that's in multiple articles) is contrary to what a number of editors have been doing (using them to separate out complex table and infobox markup from the main page).
That being said, it seems to me that once it became obvious that the true issue was one of POLICY, the issue should have been removed from [[WP:TFD]] and discussed somewhere else, a consensus formed on whether using templates to extract complexity from a single article is a good idea or not, and THEN clean things up if needed.
IMO, the argument of 'server performance' being used as the justification to remove such templates is spurious. The significant hit on server performance is when a template that's used on LOTS of articles gets changed - then, the cached rendering of each page using the template must be flushed and each page must be regenerated on the next use. The transclusion of a template into only one article is not that heavy a load - if it were, we wouldn't be doing template transclusion at all.
I tend to the conclusion that what I really dislike about the deletion pages is the attempt to make policy in them. Policy issues should not be decided lynch-mob fashion under a deletion deadline. In this way, those who frequent the deletion pages - no matter what "side" they're on - are trying to set Wikipedia policy for the community as a whole, without attempting to involve the wider community in that "consensus building".
-Matt (User:Morven)
--- Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/13/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The process that Tom describes in relation to the
Irish articles appears
to be organized vandalism by the wiki's Hell's
Angels.
I think that's taking it too far. The issue seems to be that what's in the guidelines for how templates should be used (content that's in multiple articles) is contrary to what a number of editors have been doing (using them to separate out complex table and infobox markup from the main page).
That being said, it seems to me that once it became obvious that the true issue was one of POLICY, the issue should have been removed from [[WP:TFD]] and discussed somewhere else, a consensus formed on whether using templates to extract complexity from a single article is a good idea or not, and THEN clean things up if needed.
IMO, the argument of 'server performance' being used as the justification to remove such templates is spurious. The significant hit on server performance is when a template that's used on LOTS of articles gets changed - then, the cached rendering of each page using the template must be flushed and each page must be regenerated on the next use. The transclusion of a template into only one article is not that heavy a load - if it were, we wouldn't be doing template transclusion at all.
I tend to the conclusion that what I really dislike about the deletion pages is the attempt to make policy in them. Policy issues should not be decided lynch-mob fashion under a deletion deadline. In this way, those who frequent the deletion pages - no matter what "side" they're on - are trying to set Wikipedia policy for the community as a whole, without attempting to involve the wider community in that "consensus building".
-Matt (User:Morven)
I agree. The problem is that one fanatical deletionist can propose vast numbers of deletions. The same group of like minded individuals can all en block vote for deletion. Then when someone comes along and says 'hey, this is ridiculous in this case' the chorus jumps up and says 'that's policy. We've deleted 'x' number on these grounds. If you oppose this you are opposing policy'. Others then think that if it is policy it must have been defined and discussed somewhere, so they, even though it seems illogical, don't stand up to the block, meaning more and more articles or templates get deleted in effect by an ad hoc policy set by a few likeminded individuals who are always on the page voting. And because they don't even notify people in advance, the first thing a user knows about a deletion is when a perfectly good template has disappeared, and they are left muttered 'what the hell???'.
Thom
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Yes sir, those fanatical deletionists are out to destroy the Wikipedia again. Those like-minded thugs are the definition of evil.
There's an "ad-hoc" policy that every single school gets kept, thanks to "fanatical inclusionists" who as a "group of like-minded individuals can all en block vote" to keep them. "Then when someone comes along and says 'hey, this is ridiculous in this case' the chorus jumps up and says 'that's policy. We've kept 'x' number on these grounds. If you oppose this you are opposing policy'. Others then think that if it is policy it must have been defined and discussed somewhere, so they, even though it seems illogical, don't stand up to the block, meaning more and more articles get kept in effect by an ad hoc policy set by a few likeminded individuals who are always on the page voting."
See how that works the other way too?
-Travis Mason-Bushman FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia
--- Travis Mason-Bushman travis@gpsports-eng.com wrote:
Yes sir, those fanatical deletionists are out to destroy the Wikipedia again. Those like-minded thugs are the definition of evil.
There's an "ad-hoc" policy that every single school gets kept, thanks to "fanatical inclusionists" who as a "group of like-minded individuals can all en block vote" to keep them. "Then when someone comes along and says 'hey, this is ridiculous in this case' the chorus jumps up and says 'that's policy. We've kept 'x' number on these grounds. If you oppose this you are opposing policy'. Others then think that if it is policy it must have been defined and discussed somewhere, so they, even though it seems illogical, don't stand up to the block, meaning more and more articles get kept in effect by an ad hoc policy set by a few likeminded individuals who are always on the page voting."
See how that works the other way too?
-Travis Mason-Bushman FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia
No. Not at all. There is no policy. There is a group of people who are engaging in mass deletions, not of stuff worthy of deletion, but of often high quality stuff on the basis of made up grounds which they justify on the basis of past deletions which they themselves masterminds. They usually do it without even informing the creators of the work of their proposed deletion and go ballistic if their pseudo-policy is questioned. (Many of them do not then even bother to fix the problems deletions cause but leave it to others to inform people of proposed deletions, to try to introduce some sanity into the manner in which deletions are handled, and to repair broken articles after the stuff has been deleted.
Thom
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Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
Yes sir, those fanatical deletionists are out to destroy the Wikipedia again. Those like-minded thugs are the definition of evil.
There's an "ad-hoc" policy that every single school gets kept, thanks to "fanatical inclusionists" who as a "group of like-minded individuals can all en block vote" to keep them. "Then when someone comes along and says 'hey, this is ridiculous in this case' the chorus jumps up and says 'that's policy. We've kept 'x' number on these grounds. If you oppose this you are opposing policy'. Others then think that if it is policy it must have been defined and discussed somewhere, so they, even though it seems illogical, don't stand up to the block, meaning more and more articles get kept in effect by an ad hoc policy set by a few likeminded individuals who are always on the page voting."
See how that works the other way too?
I do. We end up deleting information and keeping crap.
End result: the encyclopedia sucks. We still make the internet not suck, but it could suck even less if were sensible about it.
From: Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie
--- Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I tend to the conclusion that what I really dislike about the deletion pages is the attempt to make policy in them. Policy issues should not be decided lynch-mob fashion under a deletion deadline. In this way, those who frequent the deletion pages - no matter what "side" they're on - are trying to set Wikipedia policy for the community as a whole, without attempting to involve the wider community in that "consensus building".
-Matt (User:Morven)
I agree. The problem is that one fanatical deletionist can propose vast numbers of deletions. The same group of like minded individuals can all en block vote for deletion. Then when someone comes along and says 'hey, this is ridiculous in this case' the chorus jumps up and says 'that's policy. We've deleted 'x' number on these grounds. If you oppose this you are opposing policy'.
That argument works both ways; when I looked over AfD recently I saw a number of voters whose predictable vote was "Keep. We always keep this kind of article". And keep in mind, given AfD policy's inherent conservativsm (i.e. bias towards keeping articles), you need 3 "deletionists" for every "inclusionist" for this to happen, so this strategy works far better for "inclusionists" than for "deletionists".
And finally, again, please ratchet down the rhetoric; use of adjectives like "fanatical" (or frankly, even nouns like "inclusionist") cheapens the level of discourse.
Jay.
Jay.
Jay.