Wikipedia-l November 2002

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

84 participants
422 discussions

Once again: Please revoke my sysop status
by Jeroen Heijmans 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

Once again, because my previous post did not result in any action: To those with the power to do so: could you please revoke my sysop status? I no longer have the will and the time to carry the responsibility that comes with administratorship. Reading discussions (e.g. on Wikipedia-L) is taking too much time and bringing too little enjoyment or satisfaction for me to continue doing it. I'd much rather withdraw myself from that and focus on writing and editing instead, without being "bothered" by the - implicit - responsibilities of a sysop. Jeronimo

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about agendas
by elian 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

Hello, I want to speak of agendas in two senses: first of the agendas some people try to impose upon wikipedia and second of an agenda as a suggestion for better organization of this mailinglist. First: concerning trolls, obstructive users and so on: I see Wikipedia first of all as a scientific project with the remarkable feature that not only scientists are working at it but also "normal" people. But that doesn't mean that we should give up the standards of scientific research. Wikipedia is big and attractive enough - we don't need contributors who can't behave according to the rules set in Wikiquette and NPOV. More than more restrictive and/or effective banning rules we need rules for ourselves: - Don't give people seeking attention the desired attention (this for the Anti-American page) - Warn politely and _ignore_! - Ban if people violate warnings and continue with their behaviour. - Don't attack a sysop because of a quick ban if the banned person contributed nothing remarkably to wikipedia other than quarrels. Last week I read in another enclycopedia (about theory of science) - ethics of science, Mertons four norms I think we should adopt: - the quality of research should not be judged by social characteristics of the researcher (like race, religion...) - results of research should be open and free, not secret ;-) - the working attitude of the scientific community should be organized scepticism. Each source or belief should be critically examined. - the researcher should have no interest in the outcomes of his research. These are ideal norms (like our NPOV), but I think people whose sole interest is to "prove" something (that USA are evil, that "Freiwirtschaft" will solve all economical problems, that Karl the Great didn't exist at all, that the Beatles were the greatest rockband ever) have no place in Wikipedia. ============== Second: discussion here often seems to be unproductive. A subject is discussed, several ideas are presented and nothing is done in the end until the same subject comes up a little bit later again. What I propose is some sort of agenda, maybe with a corresponding page at Meta wikipedia. Items can be put there and removed when they are solved for the moment. I'd also like to see f.e. Erik's software patches put there. It's often difficult to distinguish between "just an idea" and an "I'll do it if nobody refuses" up to an "I just implemented it, it's now already on the server." It easier to solve a clearly defined problem than to keep track of differing opinions presented in no clear order. An example agenda for actual issues (I added some new which I consider as necessary) * Solution for dealing with uncooperative users needed. * the question of www.wikipedia.org * technical: identifying and removing bottlenecks in the software, tuning the database, implement more intelligent caching/ switching to Postgres (I fear that the constant slowliness of the software may drive more (especially new!) contributors away than Lir & Co. will ever do) * adjusting the focus of the mailinglists: creation of enwiki-l. (Problems with users of the English wikipedia are of absolutely no interest for us international people who have to subscribe to wikipedia-l because people forget to inform the international community of important decisions.) * designing an emergency plan for an attack of automatized vandalism by bots which can happen any time! * decide on a decision making process. This project has become too big for the fuzzy decision making process used till now. * getting a clear policy for unclear copyright issues Discussions are great, often necessary but in the end we should solve the problems! How to organize this is another question... I imagine groups of people willing to solve a problem, discussing it, work out possible and clear defined solutions and present this as a result to the whole community who should decide then upon which solution is to be taken (without big discussion - for this they should have joined the working group) proposed steps: * put an item on the agenda (maybe also assign a priority) * form a working group of all people interested in and work out solutions. * present the solutions (with pro and contra arguments) to the community * let the community decide * implement the solution * remove item from the agenda This procedere requires a lot of discipline but discipline is something we all have in abundance, don't we? ;-) Since Ed mentioned my name as one of the frustrated contributors who might be driven away by Lir & Co, one clarification: I will never leave because of some trolls, but if most discussions here continue to go in circles without other results than the status quo I will restrict my activities to my field of expertise in the German wikipedia, unsubscribe all mailinglists other than the German and give up the German embassy. I really like politics but if this here remains a debating club I better go to write articles. greetings, elian -- heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger."

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Wikipedia moderators and moral authority (was Re: Repost: clear guidelines and the power to enforce)
by Throbbing Monster Cock 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

Ortolan88 wrote: > TMC states on his user page that he believes the > Wikipedia is "doomed to to failure at worst or > uselessness at best" I do believe this, but that doesn't mean that my objective is to hasten the process. I'd love to see wikipedia succeed, but I think it has basic structural problems. Recognizing those problems doesn't make me an enemy of the project. > and explicitly states his opposition to NPOV. I do no such thing. I do refer to the existence of something I have called the "Tyranny of Neutrality", but that is not the same as saying I oppose neutrality. Again, it is just an awareness that Neutrality, absolutely applied, will cause certain problems and can become a tyranny of itself. > pretense that the name is pure poultry, he is so > embarrassed by his user name that he never uses it, > even on his own pages. I am not embarrassed by my chosen user name. If you read my talk pages you would see that Tarquin asked me long ago to begin using a nickname instead of my full name to sign my posts, and I have done so fairly consistently since then. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos http://launch.yahoo.com/u2

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Database Lock is getting old
by Daniel Mayer 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

Can somebody unblock the database at least for logged-in users? An uneditable wiki is a dead wiki and I've already mentioned that people can read our articles via Google cache so it is stupid to disallow edits just so people can read. The reverse would make more sense in these situations; not serving any pages to non-logged-in browsers (which I don't think is possible but would be a nice alternative to the current db block). -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Re: Arms race.
by Daniel Mayer 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

On Monday 11 November 2002 04:43 pm, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote: > >People have stated that the percentage of vandalism by anonymous users > >has gone up recently. > > > >Is this simply because we have instituted IP blocking, and increasingly > >use it? > > > >It's hardly unlikely. In fact, it's what normally happens when hard > >security measures are taken. > > Surely you mean to say "logged in users" at the end of the first line? > Then yes, this is what happens when people meet with hard security, > they find ways to work around it. > > > -- Toby That is why we should always try to follow vandals around and fix their vandalism first before resorting to a block. --Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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Strong request: Make the == presentation smaller
by Tom Parmenter 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

The time has come to present the ==Header== in a more modest type face. People are beginning to use it consistently, but it is still godawful big and I am tired of apologizing for it every time I write about how to be a good markup citizen. The size of the presentation holds back proper markup. Even outstanding citizens like the guy who can't spell Brian and the guy who can't spell Maverick argue against the ==Header==, largely because it is ugly, and it is in most browsers. I understand some browsers may not cooperate, but we can certainly change the default presentation style on our end, can't we? Tom Parmenter Ortolan88

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Integrating Two Integrative Sites?
by Kris ROOSE 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

Integrating Two Integrative Sites Hi, I'm the webmaster and principal author of the Integration Website http://noosphere.cc. A fascinating thrill went through me when I discovered the Wikipedia Website and the Wiki Websites System in general. The similarity in the purpose of this site and Wikipedia is striking: both sites aim at constructing, by open Internet cooperation, a thesaurus of integrative knowledge. Still, there are two differences: (1) the Wikipedia site uses an automated software, allowing visitors to edit existing pages online, while this site is manually edited, and (2) the Integration site features an advanced concept of integrative editing, while the Wiki system is described as "a collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia", and uses the "open content" paradigm. Although the Open Content approach is completely compatible with the Integration approach, the latter goes further because (1) it proposes a series of explicit editing rules (while the Wiki context is much more permissive, and its rules are more intuitive and inspired by common sense), and because (2) this Integration concept assumes that by respecting these rules, if adequately applied, a degree of plausibility probably comparable to scientific certitude can be reached. As I describe in the Future of this Site page, integration with such an integrative site as Wikipedia will be sought. In a first stage I'll try to add progressively our contents to the Wikipedia site. If, for some reasons yet to discover, this kind of integration proves impossible, we'll try to start up a new Wiki-like site, or introduce the Wiki software into this site. Any comments? Kris Roose 10 Nov 2002, 14.30 CET

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Soft Bans?
by Erik Moeller 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

If we set a cookie in the browsers of all Wikipedia visitors, anonymous or not, we could the assign them random global user IDs. Instead of banning users by IP, we could ban them by GUID, which would eliminate the risk of accidentally banning legitimate contributors. While the majority of users have cookies enabled, a minority does not, so "soft bans" as I like to call them would not work for them. Other users might be smart enough to turn cookies off to avoid the ban. But I consider both beyond the technical understanding of most vandals, so I think soft bans might be quite efficient. What do you think? Regards, Erik -- +++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more http://www.gmx.net +++ NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr für 1 ct/ Min. surfen!

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Re: 90,000 articles
by Daniel Mayer 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

On Monday 11 November 2002 01:25 pm, wikipedia-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote: > Why don't we just say "thousands and thousands of articles"? > > Since we've agreed that there's no certain way > to automatically detect which articles are "real", > making milestones like 100K even more meaningless than usual, > we shouldn't pretend than any one figure is correct. > Anybody that's interested in a total count, > using any of the various automatic definitions of "article", > can look at [[Wikipedia:Statistics]] for that information. > Anybody that believes a particular method of counting to be useful > can announce milestones based on it on [[Wikipedia:Announcements]]. > > We can even link from [[Main Page]] to [[Wikipedia:Statistics]] > directly from the phrase "thousands and thousands of articles", > so even newcomers can get an easily accessible precise count -- > deciding for themselves which precise count is most accurate. > > > -- Toby Bad idea. It is important to have a running count of our progress in the most visible place - the Main Page. We already have a definition for what we consider an article to be and what we let the software count as an article. All we need to do is change the definitions so that bot-generated entries are not counted as articles until x number of human non-minor edits have been made to them. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article

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Arms race.
by The Cunctator 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

People have stated that the percentage of vandalism by anonymous users has gone up recently. Is this simply because we have instituted IP blocking, and increasingly use it? It's hardly unlikely. In fact, it's what normally happens when hard security measures are taken.

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Wikipedia-l November 2002