I have been thinking it over and decided to face reality. I have lost all my believe in the wikimediaprojects. So much even that I am now adding content to places outside of the wikimediaprojects instead of having to deal with all the 100000000000000's of procedures and rules being implemented by people who do not even know how to write an article.
The projects have been taken over by a group of people, mostly teenagers, whom apparently have lost all sight of realism and have taken other people's work hostage, without creating one bit of content themselves. Who feel that adding templates, writing rules and policing (the process) is more important than what we set out to do. Also there is a very very very strong western bias in the projects. Ideas and processes are launched which might work perfectly in a western world (like the rules for verification) but which fall flat on their face when applied to non-western items. When someone actually rises this point on the lists (me) it is ignored.
Also Jimbo's statement that en: wikipedia has covered most subjects disappoints me. This might be true for subjects on developed countries. But the projects are heavily lacking in the same sort of content with regards to the developing world. While every lake in the US probably has an article. Most Asian / African / South American countries have barely got articles describing these kind of features. And if someone does write an article about it, it gets deleted as non-encyclopedic. Also wikipedia's become very nationalistic like the nl: wikipedia where a fairly large group feels non-Dutch and non-Belgian topics should not be covered in the Dutch language edition! And they actually wrote rules to enforce this.
The amount of people who only care about their own backyard (the west) and wanna delete everything they do not understand has grown to big. Also other idiocism like on nl: wikipedia where procedure is 100x more important than the smooth running of the project, resulting in an everyone can insult everyone situation and no-one get's actually blocked is taking to much time and stress.
Jimbo invented the wheel with the wikimedia projects. Unfortunately the wheel never evolved, nor will it in the current climate. Every form of progress of the projects in something meaningfull and working gets blocked or grinded in bureaucracy by a group of people who want to be the boss.
Meanwhile on the boardlevel politicians rule who only give a shit about themselves and about political games. I have seen many of these games played out over the years. Also the projects diversify to much and to much new niches where new small groups start that take their particular niche hostage (commons being a prime example) are started. Instead of looking at how things can co-operate people start their own new kingdoms and fiefdoms (like wikitionaryz, which is GerardM's fiefdom) into things that are not our core imho. We are about creating content, not spreading it, let other people do that job.
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia projects will always exist, and the original idea was great. Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.
Waerth
Waerth,
I am very sorry to read this. When you make noise on the foundation list, for instance, even if it is a bit too much noise, you are not ignored. Your comments about verification are a good example... sometimes it is just hard to answer effectively.
I agree that projects should look more towards cooperation with others -- other languages and other types of projects. You are right that lack of cooperation is a problem. En:wp has a policy as of this year not to allow usernames with non-latin character sets. I have no idea where that came from, but it is a shame. But this is nothing new -- if I recall correctly, wiktionary was started thanks to division and bickering about what belongs in an encyclopedia, not solely thanks to a desire to have separate useful projects...
I hope you will eventually come to have more faith in the long-term process of rule development, and the long-term motivations of wikimedians... and that you will still shout, from the sidelines or the field.
SJ
On 10/25/06, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
I have been thinking it over and decided to face reality. I have lost all my believe in the wikimediaprojects. So much even that I am now adding content to places outside of the wikimediaprojects instead of having to deal with all the 100000000000000's of procedures and rules being implemented by people who do not even know how to write an article.
The projects have been taken over by a group of people, mostly teenagers, whom apparently have lost all sight of realism and have taken other people's work hostage, without creating one bit of content themselves. Who feel that adding templates, writing rules and policing (the process) is more important than what we set out to do. Also there is a very very very strong western bias in the projects. Ideas and processes are launched which might work perfectly in a western world (like the rules for verification) but which fall flat on their face when applied to non-western items. When someone actually rises this point on the lists (me) it is ignored.
Also Jimbo's statement that en: wikipedia has covered most subjects disappoints me. This might be true for subjects on developed countries. But the projects are heavily lacking in the same sort of content with regards to the developing world. While every lake in the US probably has an article. Most Asian / African / South American countries have barely got articles describing these kind of features. And if someone does write an article about it, it gets deleted as non-encyclopedic. Also wikipedia's become very nationalistic like the nl: wikipedia where a fairly large group feels non-Dutch and non-Belgian topics should not be covered in the Dutch language edition! And they actually wrote rules to enforce this.
The amount of people who only care about their own backyard (the west) and wanna delete everything they do not understand has grown to big. Also other idiocism like on nl: wikipedia where procedure is 100x more important than the smooth running of the project, resulting in an everyone can insult everyone situation and no-one get's actually blocked is taking to much time and stress.
Jimbo invented the wheel with the wikimedia projects. Unfortunately the wheel never evolved, nor will it in the current climate. Every form of progress of the projects in something meaningfull and working gets blocked or grinded in bureaucracy by a group of people who want to be the boss.
Meanwhile on the boardlevel politicians rule who only give a shit about themselves and about political games. I have seen many of these games played out over the years. Also the projects diversify to much and to much new niches where new small groups start that take their particular niche hostage (commons being a prime example) are started. Instead of looking at how things can co-operate people start their own new kingdoms and fiefdoms (like wikitionaryz, which is GerardM's fiefdom) into things that are not our core imho. We are about creating content, not spreading it, let other people do that job.
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia projects will always exist, and the original idea was great. Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.
Waerth _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Waerth, I am sorry to see you in trouble. I would like you to remind people tend to hesitate to express their reaction for several reasons. Complexity of problems, feeling as outsiders (in the view of mentioned issues) and so on. And as SJ pointed out, even if you have received not so many responces as you would have expected, your postings to foundation-l hasn't been completely ignored.
On 10/25/06, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that projects should look more towards cooperation with others -- other languages and other types of projects. You are right that lack of cooperation is a problem.
Sure, I would like to add it could happen even if all involved parties are on a good faith. One can be ethnocentric and still on a good faith; good faith based on unproper idea can cause disasterous end, that is a moral of history. And we won't always know what our deeds fruit.
En:wp has a policy as of this year not to allow usernames with non-latin character sets. I have no idea where that came from, but it is a shame.
It could be forseeable though, my complaint about its cultural centricism and disrespect for non Western culture that was simply rejected because they allowed us non Westerners still to edit on that project, so it was not discriminative. I think I heard similar statements once somewhere else in documents in the age of colonialism, and it is for me enough to decide to leave it.
Also, I am very shocked no one didn't alert us about that when we were going to reject vote eligiblity to the people who were blocked indefinitely from somewhere else. There were, in fact, people who shouldn't be treated as such, since their guilty of banning was only they used their usernames in their own scripts. Fortunately or unfortunately I haven't seen votes from such people as Election Official; so now I fear if we Election Officials sent a wrong sign for those people who had accepted such sanctions and didn't oppose.
On the other hand, English Wikipedians seem not to feel guilty to block trusted people of Wikimedia project only in the reason they didn't prefer their usernames. That is a surprise for me and I would like to say there are fearing SUL would bring them their current policy to apply all the project. As past Election Official, I stress the coming change should encourage "one user, one account" policy - or the next Election cannot be feasable. Even in this year, hand counting was a stressful nightmare. And the English Wikipedia policy would be an obstacle to ensure such a policy unless it will be changed.
I expect English Wikipedians change their mind and become aware Wikipedia project consists in diversity, and also I expect such kind of ethnocentrism is only a phenomenon on English Wikipedia and not on other English projects.
2006/10/25, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com:
I agree that projects should look more towards cooperation with others -- other languages and other types of projects. You are right that lack of cooperation is a problem. En:wp has a policy as of this year not to allow usernames with non-latin character sets. I have no idea where that came from, but it is a shame.
This feels like an awfully bad decision, in particular once single login has been created. I would like to strongly ask the English Wikipedia to reconsider this decision when single login comes out, if not before.
On 10/25/06, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
En:wp has a policy as of this year not to allow usernames with non-latin character sets. I have no idea where that came from, but it is a shame.
I don't follow username policy but it is likely to do with issues related to certain cyrillic characters (ie they look like latin characters).
geni wrote:
On 10/25/06, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
En:wp has a policy as of this year not to allow usernames with non-latin character sets. I have no idea where that came from, but it is a shame.
I don't follow username policy but it is likely to do with issues related to certain cyrillic characters (ie they look like latin characters).
That problem's now fixed.
The visual resemblances of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters are taken into account by the software when comparing new usernames against already-registered usernames.
In addition, mixing script systems within a single username is now forbidden.
However, the remaining problem, which is that most Latin-script readers can't easily discern the differences between names in radically different writing systems (and indeed, in many cases, that such names cannot be displayed at all in their browsers) is still a major issue, and one that will need addressing when single-sign-in is fully implemented.
One possibility is the automatic transliteration of names when used in wikis whose "home script" is different; another is allowing users to create their own disambiguating pseudonyms for use on wikis with different default writing systems, so that their names might, for example, be represented as "???? (Xiao Zhou)", where "????" stands for Unicoded Chinese characters which are not readable by most westerners.
Any such disambiguating pseudonyms would, of course, also need to be unique within the same namespace as ordinary usernames.
-- Neil
On 10/25/06, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
However, the remaining problem, which is that most Latin-script readers can't easily discern the differences between names in radically different writing systems (and indeed, in many cases, that such names cannot be displayed at all in their browsers) is still a major issue, and one that will need addressing when single-sign-in is fully implemented.
People could always just click the name and check the contributions and the like (hey I'm dyslexic I have to do that anyway).
On 10/25/06, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote: <snip>
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards
to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline.
dear waerth,
{{done}} - lemme know if i forgot something?) looking forward to hearing from you again at some time, be it shouting from the sideline to the wikimedians, irl in bangkok (since it's the way from europe to taipeh) or on tv perhaps, or talking on skype? keep heart and i do hope your actor's career will further develop as well as it has so far i gather.
all the best and greetings, oscar
Walter, all I can say is, this situation isn't going to get better by you going away. You need to fight for the good cause and get the idiots (I'm not mentioning names because I don't know any) to go away.
On 10/25/06, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
I have been thinking it over and decided to face reality. I have lost all my believe in the wikimediaprojects. So much even that I am now adding content to places outside of the wikimediaprojects instead of having to deal with all the 100000000000000's of procedures and rules being implemented by people who do not even know how to write an article.
The projects have been taken over by a group of people, mostly teenagers, whom apparently have lost all sight of realism and have taken other people's work hostage, without creating one bit of content themselves. Who feel that adding templates, writing rules and policing (the process) is more important than what we set out to do. Also there is a very very very strong western bias in the projects. Ideas and processes are launched which might work perfectly in a western world (like the rules for verification) but which fall flat on their face when applied to non-western items. When someone actually rises this point on the lists (me) it is ignored.
Also Jimbo's statement that en: wikipedia has covered most subjects disappoints me. This might be true for subjects on developed countries. But the projects are heavily lacking in the same sort of content with regards to the developing world. While every lake in the US probably has an article. Most Asian / African / South American countries have barely got articles describing these kind of features. And if someone does write an article about it, it gets deleted as non-encyclopedic. Also wikipedia's become very nationalistic like the nl: wikipedia where a fairly large group feels non-Dutch and non-Belgian topics should not be covered in the Dutch language edition! And they actually wrote rules to enforce this.
The amount of people who only care about their own backyard (the west) and wanna delete everything they do not understand has grown to big. Also other idiocism like on nl: wikipedia where procedure is 100x more important than the smooth running of the project, resulting in an everyone can insult everyone situation and no-one get's actually blocked is taking to much time and stress.
Jimbo invented the wheel with the wikimedia projects. Unfortunately the wheel never evolved, nor will it in the current climate. Every form of progress of the projects in something meaningfull and working gets blocked or grinded in bureaucracy by a group of people who want to be the boss.
Meanwhile on the boardlevel politicians rule who only give a shit about themselves and about political games. I have seen many of these games played out over the years. Also the projects diversify to much and to much new niches where new small groups start that take their particular niche hostage (commons being a prime example) are started. Instead of looking at how things can co-operate people start their own new kingdoms and fiefdoms (like wikitionaryz, which is GerardM's fiefdom) into things that are not our core imho. We are about creating content, not spreading it, let other people do that job.
On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia projects will always exist, and the original idea was great. Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.
Waerth _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
A valid point. It is only natural for sane editors to avoid swimming in piranha infested waters. This has the unfortunate effect of creating circumstances in which idiots can breed like <s>rabids</s> rabbits. Ec
James Hare wrote:
Walter, all I can say is, this situation isn't going to get better by you going away. You need to fight for the good cause and get the idiots (I'm not mentioning names because I don't know any) to go away.
On 10/25/06, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
I have been thinking it over and decided to face reality. I have lost all my believe in the wikimediaprojects. So much even that I am now adding content to places outside of the wikimediaprojects instead of having to deal with all the 100000000000000's of procedures and rules being implemented by people who do not even know how to write an article.
<snip>
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org