John- That happened when? Sysops have no irreversible powers and are accountable to their own peers as well as the entire community. On the English Wikipedia, there is a ridiculously complex procedure for dealing with obvious problem users, which in most cases never amounts to anything. Trolls and morons violate policies with impunity on a regular basis. Just check the history of any controversial article on Wikipedia. Developer "powers" were actually recently reduced by creating a new class of privileged users trusted by the community, stewards. Developers have no privileges when it comes to policy decisions over normal users. Important policy decisions have been increasingly *democratized* in the last few months, and a board was elected in order to replace the previous benevolent dictator model. Before that, there even was a time when Wikipedia had an Editor in Chief who quite aggressively pursued a singular vision of building the project. So, given that the trend is the exact opposite of what you claim it is, I can either deduce that you know nothing about Wikimedia's history, or that you are living in a parallel universe superimposed over own where time runs in the opposite direction. Which is it? Anons were *never* trusted, and for good reason. Trust is based on experience, and you cannot build experiences with someone you don't know. Even so, using technological improvements like templates, people send polite messages to even vandals and spammers before they are blocked: Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has now been removed. Please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for any other tests you want to do, since testing material in articles will normally be removed quickly. Please see the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. We have an almost masochistic relationship to abusers, we tolerate them until it starts to bleed. For every deletion, there is a debate, and when the debate becomes long, that usually means the content isn't deleted (no consensus!). We tolerate the crappiest articles you can imagine about the most insignificant fictional character in a minor video game franchise. If you suggested publicly that as a project with 1,000,000 articles we no longer need to allow people to edit who are not even willing to go through a 15-second-registration-process, the resulting outcry in the wikisphere would cause major floods and earthquakes. Yes, we are actually thinking about running a trial to get certain features *which users ask for* or *which the Wikimedia Foundation and its democratically elected Board of Trustees deem useful* implemented. We might use money donated for that purpose to promote the development of open source software. We might give people who cannot directly contribute to software development the *choice* to contribute to the progress of the software by other means - the horror! Of all the online projects I've ever been involved in, Wikimedia is the most paranoid about power and money. I prefer facts to paranoia, and progress to stagnancy. Regards, Erik

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:00:12 -0400, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Well-put, Mark. "Stagnant" isn't a word that I normally associate with Wikipedia. As for your previous feature suggestion, it emphasizes an important point -- the best filtering features aren't based on global properties that have been applied to a particular *user* or *article* (this article has a Quality Rating of 7.4, this user is Highly Trusted)... since this implies a level of certainty about the judgement of some users which other users may doubt. The best features allow the viewing user to choose whose opinions to aggregate. I think a mark of a good filtering system will be that it both allows normal editors to watch edits by trolls, and allows trolls to watch edits by their favorite antagonists... and allows everyone to watch for edits by vandals. -- +sj+

Hi, Le Monday 13 September 2004 01:24, Erik Moeller a écrit : I agree with Erik here. We have the same problems in the French Wikipedia. We needed four months to throw out a vandal who never really produced a single good and NPOV article. During the summer, we had several bad users who managed to create a suspicious atmosphere by insults, allegations, religious attacks, etc. And for the last year and half, we have had a troll who, althrough he created some good articles, attacked and insulted collectively other contributors, especially sysops when they tried to correct the situation. He was banned already twice temporarly, including once with a direct permission from Jimbo after the community failed to deal with the problem. He also used suck-puppets to generate support for him. He apparently left last month after being blocked again for a day. Yes, let the trial go, then we can see if it's beneficial or not. Technically, I feel the system is still not as reliable as it should, although the situation improved quite a lot. So maybe that an area where we want to put some money. Regards, Yann -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux

Jens- Aside from the fact that new people always advance within the existing hierarchies - a good thing, I'm sure you will agree -, I see no evidence that privileges have actually been extended in any significant manner. Not on the projects I've worked on. What are you talking about? If people provide logical arguments, then we should discuss them and try to refine our reasoning and our conclusions. I for one remain unconvinced that the larger Wikimedia projects benefit from anonymous editing, and there's little empirical evidence either way. Putting the account creation form on the edit screen would probably filter out many random vandals and spammers while still assuring near-instant participation. "IMHO inane" is quite dismissive - especially given the fact that people have actually provided very coherent arguments here. I only "categorically state" things when they are obvious, or when I've provided a line of reasoning to do so, as I have here. You have provided no evidence for your above assertion and nor has the original poster. I refuse to pretend that I see insight where I see fear, but I acknowledge that the sarcasm was slightly over the top and apologize for any hurt feelings. Please let's have discussions based on sound arguments rather than on emotional themes from George Orwell books. That is more productive and more respectful towards everyone involved in this project. Sysops and developers fulfill many thankless duties. There's no need to constantly praise them, and they are obviously not beyond reproach. But criticism should be constructive ("actionable") and have a clear, empirically demonstrated basis in reality. Erik

On 14 Sep 2004, at 19:58, Erik Moeller wrote: You've just answered that question yourself. (Hint: some, POV reference in my prev email.) You have remarkable faith in your own POV and are remarkably dismissive of other's. This -- the implicit accusation that John's and my POV are "not in Kansas anymore" -- is what I regard as detrimental to otherwise possible attempts at a constructive discussion. -- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com