On 5/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Semi-protection works because it's applied only to a few articles. Once you start mass-using it, gaming will become common. Don't go there. Erik

David Gerard-2 wrote: It almost always is :-) -- Phil -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Proposal%3A+limited+extension+of+semi-protection+poli… Sent from the English Wikipedia forum at Nabble.com.

On 5/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: To be fair I think he reacting to the proposal to extend it. We have open editing? Is the block button there for decoration? -- geni

Of course we do. Does the fact that, for example, felons can't vote in the U.S. mean it's not a democracy?

Jimmy Wales wrote: Hasn't he trolled us before? -- 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

Philip Welch wrote: If you find his ideas interesting/intriguing you could subscribe to his newsletter/journal... -- 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 5/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Or maybe he's just wrong. What's definitely trolling is calling such a statement notable. Anthony

On 5/24/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: Many serious people have made that argument in all seriousness. To be more precise, only certain states prevent felons from voting. The practice, one can more easily argue, is one of the reasons the US isn't a very good democracy.

On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> In those days you had to send an email to someone (I forget who) with an image attached to add an image to a page. That's a restriction isn't it?

On 5/25/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote: I just posted a comment. As it was the first thing i posted is was being held in a moderation queue so that he can review it to make sure i am not a troll i suppose. Of course his blog is not wikipedia, and he has never made a claim that anyone can comment but it made me smile anyway. Theresa

On 5/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: How early on?

On 5/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Deleting vandalism is very different from locking pages from editing. Maybe it's inappropriate to make such strong claims about features always being used --in an attack on someone else -- if you don't actually remember.

The Cunctator wrote: Well, the features were always used. You asked how early on, and that I do not remember exactly. Within the first month, though. -- ####################################################################### # Office: 1-727-231-0101 | Free Culture and Free Knowledge # # http://www.wikipedia.org | Building a free world # #######################################################################

On 5/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Not that your argument through statistics is in any way meaningful. 154 /1,151,768 is more than 100 ppm; 100 ppm of carbon monoxide, mercury, arsenic, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, vinyl chloride, formaldehyde, benzene, ammonia, etc. would kill you dead. Or at least give you any number of horrible cancers. Water is fluoridated to 1 ppm. Motorcycles cause 0.22 deaths per million vehicle miles. New Zealand has 100 maternal deaths per million births. Drugs kill about 100 per million people in US urban areas. In other words, that 154 articles are semiprotected out of a population of 1.2 million could be insignificant, great, or terrible. But on its own it's just a factoid, not a counterargument.

On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is pretty rich coming from someone who just complained that we shouldn't argue with appeals to emotion. If comparing semi-protection to mothers dying while giving birth to babies isn't an appeal to emotion, I don't know what is. All your analogies are useless. The chemistry ones are just ridiculous, there is no analogy between how poisons damage the body to how semi-protection damages the encyclopedia. There's to much science you're ignoring, the way chemicals work. The deaths per millions analogies are not only pretty cheap shots, they are also just as flawed. The reason why 100 maternal deaths per 1 million births is not a tragedy because it's such a high number (because it isn't), it's a tradgedy because people are *actually* dying. 1 death per million would be tragic. 1 death per billion would be tragic. The numbers are meaningless. The fact is, the numbers do provide a good argument in this case. Calling for the death of wikipedia as a wiki because of semi-protection *is* ridiculous when there is only a vanishingly small fraction of articles that are semi-protected (and lets remind everyone that any user that is actually dedicated to the project can edit any semi-protected article. It's not that horrible, semi-protection.) So no, the numbers are not just a factiod, they're a very good counterargument. --Oskar

On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: Internet Archive shows when the main page was locked (made "read-only"). It can't really be used to prove that nothing else was locked before that, though (hard to prove a negative). Of course, I think it's pretty clear that things have gotten more locked-down over the years, regardless of whether or not things were ever 100% completely open. Anthony

On 5/26/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: On the other hand, it's very easy to demonstrate that there are far more unlocked pages than there used to be. More than a million more, in fact. Steve

On 5/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote: I was only pulling out death statistics because they're easy to find and because death is the topic. I stuck in the floridation example. I could have (and probably should have) put in more random stats, say of how much zinc we need. I wasn't attempting to make any analogies between semi-protection in floridation or motorcycle crashes. I don't think there's any equivalency. I was merely pointing out that being "vanishingly small" is dependent on the situation.