I welcome Jimbo's forthright statement that "political or, more broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project", and his thoughtful and considerate request that editors contemplate helping to reduce the userbox culture by "simply removing your political/religious/etc. userboxes and asking others to do the same. This seems to me to be the best way to quickly and easily end the userbox wars."
I know this is going to meet resistance, so I'm trying to think of a way in which those who think that expressing their opinions on their userpages helps wikipedia and have so far chosen to do so using userboxes, can be asked to do so in a way that doesn't contribute to the very divisive culture that has ground up specifically around userboxes.
I've come up with a suggestion as follows:
1. that if he disagrees with Jimbo's request, the user should instead consider using the subst command to place the content of the template directly into his userpage. This would reduce the "viral" transmission of userboxes somewhat and, for the user, it would have the benefit of divorcing the fate of parts of his userpage from the fate of individual userboxes--whether editing or deletion.
2. that having done this, he should take the opportunity to edit the text so that it more precisely expresses his individual views. In my opinion this would be more in keeping with the *good* effects of userboxes in enabling self-expression, while being more in keeping with the principle that Wikipedia is a wiki in which we edit content, and not a cookie-cutter website in which we reduce our complex beliefs as individuals into regimented blocs that serve no purpose but to emphasize the cultural divisions.
I think of this as "grandfathering". Ultimately we should be able to foster a benign culture of fearless expression of our editorial biases, without enabling the subversion of our relatively fragile neutrality principle by alliances between single-issue campaigners--however justifiable they may feel this subversion to be.
On 1/21/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
I welcome Jimbo's forthright statement that "political or, more broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project", and his thoughtful and considerate request that editors contemplate helping to reduce the userbox culture by "simply removing your political/religious/etc. userboxes and asking others to do the same. This seems to me to be the best way to quickly and easily end the userbox wars."
I know this is going to meet resistance, so I'm trying to think of a way in which those who think that expressing their opinions on their userpages helps wikipedia and have so far chosen to do so using userboxes, can be asked to do so in a way that doesn't contribute to the very divisive culture that has ground up specifically around userboxes.
I've come up with a suggestion as follows:
- that if he disagrees with Jimbo's request, the user should instead
consider using the subst command to place the content of the template directly into his userpage. This would reduce the "viral" transmission of userboxes somewhat and, for the user, it would have the benefit of divorcing the fate of parts of his userpage from the fate of individual userboxes--whether editing or deletion.
- that having done this, he should take the opportunity to edit the
text so that it more precisely expresses his individual views. In my opinion this would be more in keeping with the *good* effects of userboxes in enabling self-expression, while being more in keeping with the principle that Wikipedia is a wiki in which we edit content, and not a cookie-cutter website in which we reduce our complex beliefs as individuals into regimented blocs that serve no purpose but to emphasize the cultural divisions.
I think of this as "grandfathering". Ultimately we should be able to foster a benign culture of fearless expression of our editorial biases, without enabling the subversion of our relatively fragile neutrality principle by alliances between single-issue campaigners--however justifiable they may feel this subversion to be.
Well said, Tony. I agree fully.
-- Sam
THIS IS A REPEAT MESSAGE, I AM HOPING THE NEW HEADER WILL GET IT SOME ATTENTION. THANK YOU.
I posted earlier about this brouhaha, but evidently because I had not yet subscribed, the message is in limbo. So there may be another one coming on this situation. I would truly appreciate some feedback from those who are more acclimatized to Wikipedia. The summary:
I was contacted over a year ago by an author who was working on the Frances Farmer article for Wikipedia. He had linked my web article "Shedding Light on Shadowland" and recognized I had a certain expertise in this subject. He invited me to come to Wikipedia and begin revising/correcting the Farmer article (as well as others that linked to it), which I happily did. Prior to this, I had never even heard of Wikipedia (sad, but true). Over the past year, I have pretty much completely rewritten the article, adding a lot of salient information and correcting a lot of misinformation in the article, trying at all times to keep it completely factual, non-sensationalized and as free of POV as possible. I should state here for the record that my Farmer research has received worldwide attention and served as source material for several books and newspaper articles, as well as documentaries on both NPR and A&E Biography. So I feel, hopefully rightfully, that I know whereof I speak on this subject.
About two days ago a user named Wyss started making wholesale edits to the article, which in and of itself doesn't bother me at all--if you look at the edit history I have let many a revision pass if it contains factual information. However, several of Wyss' edits contained outright factual errors. I don't want to pester you with details, but if you go into the edit history, you will see my first fledgling attempts to correct them.
I then posted to her Talk page (evidently incorrectly, as I did it at the top and didn't sign it, which completely set her off), asking her please to fact-check her material before posting it. She then posted vaguely threatening messages to my Talk page, including such sinister sounding lines as "I don't know what you're up to" and "I'm watching this page." She then reverted her edits back to the incorrect version. She also denied she had made any errors. I ultimately provided her with a URL of her edit history, describing the errors she had made, and hopefully showing her that she had indeed made them.
When I posted this to her Talk page, she, actually quite laughably, posted to my Talk page calling me a "bonehead." She then, rather incredibly, spent the next several hours denying she had called me a "bonehead." (I know, it's ridiculous, but it gets better or worse, depending on how you look at it).
So anyway she has continued to edit, adding completely wrong information repeatedly. She also began wholesale copying of my copyrighted article "Shedding Light on Shadowland," which I, again, posted to her talk page about, warning her that she was pushing the limits of Fair Use and that she was facing possible legal action if she continued quoting my research without citing it.
This is where is gets incredible to me: she then had me banned indefinitely for "making threats and harrassing." Interestingly, the person who banned me then immediately went "inactive."
Now Wyss on both the Farmer talk page and her talk page is accusing me of having "cloned" her, whatever that means, and of harrassing her anonymously. I have made NO anonymous edits to any article prior to my editing privileges being revoked, and I certainly do not have the Wiki-knowledge to clone someone's user page. As Wyss herself took me to task for, I couldn't even post to her Talk page properly, and I have to struggle to make edits to Wikipedia.
I state for the record I am a near-50 year old husband and father who, quite by accident, ended up spending 20 years researching Frances Farmer and who gained a certain renown as a Farmer expert. My web article has been read by tens of thousands of people and commented on by such notable people as Leonard Maltin and Washington Post reporter Jack El-Hai.
So here I am, "banned" from Wikipedia, still struggling to correct Wyss' incorrect edits (though I am "banned" I can still edit--maybe someone can explain that to me), while I also am suffering from what I personally consider to be her near-slanderous comments that I have "cloned" her and/or harrassed her. She is also now claiming that I am not Jeffrey Kauffman and I did not write "Shedding Light on Shadowland." Hopefully my email address is some proof for you, but I also refer you to my website:
http://jeffreykauffman.net/about:blank
I even posted to the Farmer Talk page what I believe has happened: I am rather well-known in the Farmer fan community and I know for a fact there are several others who have been following Wyss' incorrect edits for the past few days. These are all younger folk, the Cobain contingent as I call them, and they certainly have more Wiki-knowledge than I. It is quite possible that Wyss is being targeted (wrongly, as I myself posted on the Talk page) by one of these people, but I again state it is *not* me who is doing this.
In the meantime, Wyss has just in the past 10 minutes added several more inaccuracies to the Farmer article, which, when I try to correct them (providing source material, as I always attempt to do), she immediately reverts back to her incorrect versions. All the while insisting I'm not "me."
I would very much like someone to offer me a little help. If I have done anything wrong, I apologize. But I have worked for a very long time to make sure only the facts about this actress are published on Wikipedia, and it pains me greatly to see someone come along and destroy over 12 months' of very careful, considered work.
UPDATE AS OF 1/21
Wyss has drastically rewritten the most egregious copying from my article.
However, she is now once again making edits that are provably factually inaccurate. Just go to the Edit summary and you will see whenever I try to edit in facts, including providing sources, she immediately reverts to the incorrect version. At this point I have no wish to even have my old user ID editing privileges restored, but I wish someone could please stop Wyss from desecrating this article with misstatement after misstatement. Thank you.
--- JEFFREY KAUFFMAN jeffrey_kauffman@msn.com wrote:
This is where is gets incredible to me: she then had me banned indefinitely for "making threats and harrassing."
You were banned for making legal threats, which are not tolerated on Wikipedia; you said, "you and Wikipedia are about to hear from my attorney".
Please don't waste our time.
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
"Matt R" matt_crypto@yahoo.co.uk wrote in message news:20060121205704.96069.qmail@web25013.mail.ukl.yahoo.com...
--- JEFFREY KAUFFMAN jeffrey_kauffman@msn.com wrote:
This is where is gets incredible to me: she then had me banned indefinitely for "making threats and harrassing."
You were banned for making legal threats, which are not tolerated on Wikipedia; you said, "you and Wikipedia are about to hear from my attorney". Please don't waste our time.
Just out of interest, I note that the user in question is claiming that his copyright has been violated.
So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become "making a legal threat"?
Should a copyright holder whisper very gently "you're violating my copyright, but that's OK, we wouldn't want the lawyers involved"?
Having dropped this question into the thread, I am now going to attempt to find out WTF this brouhaha is all about...
Luigi30 wrote:
So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become "making a legal threat"?
Saying "you'll hear from my lawyer" before telling them kindly to remove it, I imagine.
I guess we all react to this kind of thing differently. I don't interpret legal threats as much of a big deal. Outlawing them seems a bit like changing the rules of poker to forbid bluffing. I prefer to respond with comments like, "I dare you!" or more simply, " :-P ." I refuse to be intimidated by such nonsense.
Ec
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Ray Saintonge stated for the record:
Luigi30 wrote:
So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become "making a legal threat"?
Saying "you'll hear from my lawyer" before telling them kindly to remove it, I imagine.
I guess we all react to this kind of thing differently. I don't interpret legal threats as much of a big deal. Outlawing them seems a bit like changing the rules of poker to forbid bluffing. I prefer to respond with comments like, "I dare you!" or more simply, " :-P ." I refuse to be intimidated by such nonsense.
Ec
The reason for getting rid of them is that a person who has stated (almost certainly as a bluff, but possibly not) his desire and intention of either ruining an editor's life or of financially destroying the project is clearly not an asset to the encyclopedia. We don't simply want someone who want to do us harm to have write-access to the sum-total of human knowledge.
- -- Sean Barrett | A book should serve as the ax for the sean@epoptic.org | frozen sea within us. --Franz Kafka
Sean Barrett wrote:
Ray Saintonge stated for the record:
Luigi30 wrote:
So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become "making a legal threat"?
Saying "you'll hear from my lawyer" before telling them kindly to remove it, I imagine.
I guess we all react to this kind of thing differently. I don't interpret legal threats as much of a big deal. Outlawing them seems a bit like changing the rules of poker to forbid bluffing. I prefer to respond with comments like, "I dare you!" or more simply, " :-P ." I refuse to be intimidated by such nonsense.
Ec
The reason for getting rid of them is that a person who has stated (almost certainly as a bluff, but possibly not) his desire and intention of either ruining an editor's life or of financially destroying the project is clearly not an asset to the encyclopedia. We don't simply want someone who want to do us harm to have write-access to the sum-total of human knowledge.
Perhaps then the views of the treatened person should be taken into account. Some oof us are more thick-skinned than others.
Ec
On 1/23/06, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become "making a legal threat"?
Should a copyright holder whisper very gently "you're violating my copyright, but that's OK, we wouldn't want the lawyers involved"?
The point of the "no legal threats" policy is that legal threats end discussion. Once lawyers and courts are involved, discussion is over and you're on to adjudication. In other words, when someone is actually carrying out legal action, talking about it on Wikipedia is pointless- which means that legal threats have absolutely no value for any kind of rational discussion.
So, as you are asking, how should someone enforce their legal rights? Answer: By pointing out their legal rights, without making threats. "This item is my intellectual property and you do not have permission to use it." At that point, we should remove it immediately. There is no need to mention, or benefit from mentioning, lawyers or lawsuits.
Ryan
The point of the "no legal threats" policy is that legal threats end discussion. Once lawyers and courts are involved, discussion is over and you're on to adjudication. In other words, when someone is actually carrying out legal action, talking about it on Wikipedia is pointless- which means that legal threats have absolutely no value for any kind of rational discussion.
So, as you are asking, how should someone enforce their legal rights? Answer: By pointing out their legal rights, without making threats. "This item is my intellectual property and you do not have permission to use it." At that point, we should remove it immediately. There is no need to mention, or benefit from mentioning, lawyers or lawsuits.
I don't think we should penalize copyright holders for serving WP with a cease-and-desist for a copyvio, whether formally or informally, although we might want to require them to, as a prerequisite for their future participation, state that their grievances are met and that no further action will be taken.
If a copyright violation is not promptly removed for some reason, the person or entity complaining needs to be pointed to our designated agent
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Designated_agent
Such contact is not a legal threat but an appropriate action which allows Wikipedia to solve the problem.
There is no reason someone could not continue editing under those circumstances.
Keep in mind that a copyright holder has the right to demand and enforce removal
One thing that happens, of course, is that demand is often made by some one that has little or no claim to the copyright they seek to enforce. Verifying whether a claim is valid is a legal matter which can be resolved after contact is made with the designated agent.
Fred
On Jan 25, 2006, at 1:26 PM, Philip Welch wrote:
The point of the "no legal threats" policy is that legal threats end discussion. Once lawyers and courts are involved, discussion is over and you're on to adjudication. In other words, when someone is actually carrying out legal action, talking about it on Wikipedia is pointless- which means that legal threats have absolutely no value for any kind of rational discussion.
So, as you are asking, how should someone enforce their legal rights? Answer: By pointing out their legal rights, without making threats. "This item is my intellectual property and you do not have permission to use it." At that point, we should remove it immediately. There is no need to mention, or benefit from mentioning, lawyers or lawsuits.
I don't think we should penalize copyright holders for serving WP with a cease-and-desist for a copyvio, whether formally or informally, although we might want to require them to, as a prerequisite for their future participation, state that their grievances are met and that no further action will be taken.
-- Philip L. Welch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 1/25/06, Philip Welch wikipedia@philwelch.net wrote:
I don't think we should penalize copyright holders for serving WP with a cease-and-desist for a copyvio, whether formally or informally, although we might want to require them to, as a prerequisite for their future participation, state that their grievances are met and that no further action will be taken.
In general, we don't and shouldn't punish copyright holders for good-faith requests for copyright violation removal.
What we do want to punish, and strongly, is what has become the common /modus operandi/ of Usenet kooks; constant threats of legal action against anyone who disagrees with them.
'No Legal Threats' stops that behavior dead in its tracks. It either makes the nuts play nice at least to that degree (because they don't actually intend to sue anyone, just intimidate by the threat) or gets the incorrigible ones banned in short order. WP:NLT is a great nutjob filter.
As a practical matter, we want our contributors to settle their differences peacefully rather than escalate the argument arms-race to lawsuits.
-Matt
On 1/21/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
I welcome Jimbo's forthright statement that "political or, more broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project", and his thoughtful and considerate request that editors contemplate helping to reduce the userbox culture by "simply removing your political/religious/etc. userboxes and asking others to do the same. This seems to me to be the best way to quickly and easily end the userbox wars."
I know this is going to meet resistance, so I'm trying to think of a way in which those who think that expressing their opinions on their userpages helps wikipedia and have so far chosen to do so using userboxes, can be asked to do so in a way that doesn't contribute to the very divisive culture that has ground up specifically around userboxes.
I've come up with a suggestion as follows:
- that if he disagrees with Jimbo's request, the user should instead
consider using the subst command to place the content of the template directly into his userpage. This would reduce the "viral" transmission of userboxes somewhat and, for the user, it would have the benefit of divorcing the fate of parts of his userpage from the fate of individual userboxes--whether editing or deletion.
- that having done this, he should take the opportunity to edit the
text so that it more precisely expresses his individual views. In my opinion this would be more in keeping with the *good* effects of userboxes in enabling self-expression, while being more in keeping with the principle that Wikipedia is a wiki in which we edit content, and not a cookie-cutter website in which we reduce our complex beliefs as individuals into regimented blocs that serve no purpose but to emphasize the cultural divisions.
I think of this as "grandfathering". Ultimately we should be able to foster a benign culture of fearless expression of our editorial biases, without enabling the subversion of our relatively fragile neutrality principle by alliances between single-issue campaigners--however justifiable they may feel this subversion to be.
I think that one of the reason more users aren't using subst is because they don't know the option exists. During one of today's discussions, one of the strongest and most vocal supporters of userboxes asked me to fill him in on the "secret" of subst. He had been complaining about the userboxes on his user page being changed without his consent, but seemed to be unaware of what subst even was. Ideally, I'd like to see all POV userboxes exist only as code that was pasted onto a user's page. If this isn't feasible, then strongly encouraging the use of subst might be the next best option.
On a related matter, can anyone come up with even one good reason why user categories should be part of POV userboxes? In fact, can anyone come up with a reason why we have POV user categories at all?
Carbonite
I wonder if the coders could fix it so that templates are auto-substing in userspace by default. We would probably want to make an exception for certain templates such as those that are related to page protection and are used for housekeeping purposes, though in practice it would probably be enough to "includeonly" a category.
Carbonite wrote:
On 1/21/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
I welcome Jimbo's forthright statement that "political or, more broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project", and his thoughtful and considerate request that editors contemplate helping to reduce the userbox culture by "simply removing your political/religious/etc. userboxes and asking others to do the same. This seems to me to be the best way to quickly and easily end the userbox wars."
I know this is going to meet resistance, so I'm trying to think of a way in which those who think that expressing their opinions on their userpages helps wikipedia and have so far chosen to do so using userboxes, can be asked to do so in a way that doesn't contribute to the very divisive culture that has ground up specifically around userboxes.
I've come up with a suggestion as follows:
- that if he disagrees with Jimbo's request, the user should instead
consider using the subst command to place the content of the template directly into his userpage. This would reduce the "viral" transmission of userboxes somewhat and, for the user, it would have the benefit of divorcing the fate of parts of his userpage from the fate of individual userboxes--whether editing or deletion.
- that having done this, he should take the opportunity to edit the
text so that it more precisely expresses his individual views. In my opinion this would be more in keeping with the *good* effects of userboxes in enabling self-expression, while being more in keeping with the principle that Wikipedia is a wiki in which we edit content, and not a cookie-cutter website in which we reduce our complex beliefs as individuals into regimented blocs that serve no purpose but to emphasize the cultural divisions.
I think of this as "grandfathering". Ultimately we should be able to foster a benign culture of fearless expression of our editorial biases, without enabling the subversion of our relatively fragile neutrality principle by alliances between single-issue campaigners--however justifiable they may feel this subversion to be.
I think that one of the reason more users aren't using subst is because they don't know the option exists. During one of today's discussions, one of the strongest and most vocal supporters of userboxes asked me to fill him in on the "secret" of subst. He had been complaining about the userboxes on his user page being changed without his consent, but seemed to be unaware of what subst even was. Ideally, I'd like to see all POV userboxes exist only as code that was pasted onto a user's page. If this isn't feasible, then strongly encouraging the use of subst might be the next best option.
You should direct them to [[Help:Template]].
On a related matter, can anyone come up with even one good reason why user categories should be part of POV userboxes? In fact, can anyone come up with a reason why we have POV user categories at all?
Historically, most of this stuff has gone on [[meta:]] for the very good reason that Wikipedia is an NPOV encyclopedia, and the crazier aspects of user categorisation have gone over there. Perhaps we should encourage this approach above all others; you can do whatever the hell you want, /so long as it's on meta/.
On 1/22/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Historically, most of this stuff has gone on [[meta:]] for the very good reason that Wikipedia is an NPOV encyclopedia, and the crazier aspects of user categorisation have gone over there. Perhaps we should encourage this approach above all others; you can do whatever the hell you want, /so long as it's on meta/.
My first thought was "what a sensible idea", and I was about to suggest that I export the userboxes to meta--there are around 4500 of them and throttled to a rate of 2 per minute to avoid overload the job should only take about 24 hours.
But I suspect that it's already too late for that.