Wikipedia-l April 2002

wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

40 participants
147 discussions

Apology to The Cunctator and the list
by Daniel Lee Mayer 12 Apr '02

12 Apr '02

I will make this brief since this type of post is not really appropriate for such a list as this: My previous statement indicating that The Cunctator had more bias than the boiled down stuff the 24 is spewing out was a mischaracterization on my part based upon numerous posts and material left by Larry Sanger. Larry may have had very good reasons to characterize The Cunctator this way in the past, but a random sampling of The Cunctator's current edits does not indicate that Larry's views are currently valid. Please do not disregard the rest of the original email in question though. I apologize to the list and to The Cunctator for my lack of tact in this regard. Yours, -- maveric149

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Where to read up about trolls and trolling
by Larry Sanger 12 Apr '02

12 Apr '02

Here's a good place to start to read some really fascinating stuff about trolls and how they operate: http://www.google.com/search?q=trolls+and+trolling Frankly, it has been years since I read such stuff. For me, the obvious question is: why *wouldn't* trolls, in the strict or looser senses, attack Wikipedia? And it seems to me the answer is equally obvious: there's no reason they wouldn't, and they already have. Larry

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Wikiwait
by Manning Bartlett 12 Apr '02

12 Apr '02

Hmmm...just adding my voice to the growing chorus - the site sure has crawled to a near halt lately. I spent 4 mins opening a moderate sized page over a cable link last night (0300, 12 Apr, Server Time) - although the Search was normal speed, go figure. Manning

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Trolls and other nuisances
by Larry Sanger 12 Apr '02

12 Apr '02

I'm just now visiting the recent archive of Wikipedia-L: http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001879.html I guess I'll resubscribe at least temporarily in case there are replies to the following... :-) I'd like to add my $0.02 on a number of issues that have been raised. This is important, I think, because we've got to pull together against elements who are, to put it nicely, wasting our time. To pull together, though, we've got to get very clear on what "trolls" are or might be, and develop a robust, *well-thought-out*, *reasonable* idea of what to do when the trolls attack. (As they will continue to do as long as Wikipedia is open for business.) Each of us has to come to his or her own conclusions on the issue; but the greater degree of consensus we can achieve (*for* neutrality and productivity and *against* bias and kookiness), the more effective we will be in showing trolls the door. (Without, ideally, actually kicking them out the door.) First, I really don't like the idea of putting Meta-Wikipedia comments on the Recent Changes page. That was the whole point of having the Meta-Wikipedia, if you'll remember: meta-discussion (partly in the form of trolling by certain members of the project, along with responses to them), had become such a serious problem, eating up the resources of the project, that we wanted to move the wrangling away from the article production. Please, let's keep it that way. For historical perspective, see: http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Moving+commentary+out+of+Wikiped… Next--I think Manning's post, "Some 24 comments and the cabal," was a bullseye that said a bunch of stuff that sorely needed to be said: http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001807.html To reiterate in my own words: our resident trolls, bless their twisted hearts, have harped over and over again about issues of the politics of Wikipedia, either stating or not-so-subtlely implying that some element of the leadership of the community is pulling the wool over the eyes of the community, that someone is usurping power. As Manning says, the main authority behind the project rests with the community itself, and particularly with the people who accept the basic defining features of the community. Insinuations that a cabal, other than a "cabal" in this sense, is taking control and foisting its views on the rest of us are only so much guff, very possibly motivated by a dislike for the neutrality policy, or so it seems to me. I agree that "troll" is sometimes falsely used to mean little more specific than "annoying person," which is way too broad. Originally (or so the etymology and received wisdom has it), I think the term referred to people who were *merely* trying to get a rise out of newbies, with no deeper agenda than that. There are relatively few trolls in that sense, and it's entirely plausible that The Cunctator, 24, and Michael Irwin aren't trolls in *that* sense. But I think there *is* a broader and much more useful sense of the term, that is very often used by perfectly net-savvy people--at least as often as the original use, and probably more often. This is how "troll" is used in this page (#1 result for the "Internet troll" Google search): http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm According to this broader sense, trolls *thrive on being the center and focus of controversy*. It is, seemingly, what they live for, at least when it comes to Internet forums. Perhaps most importantly, **they do not respond to reasonable criticism** in the way that most ordinary intelligent people do; they treat dialectic as *merely* a game. They don't seem to realize or care that they are speaking to *people* with all that that entails. Reasonable discussants are willing to stop and acknowledge that others can and do have different points of view. Trolls, in this slightly broader sense, almost always take personal offense that other people disagree with them, so that when others express their disagreement, the trolls lash out in hostile, abusive, and often strangely cryptic ways (as if they were mainly speaking to themselves). Most reasonable people go out of their way not to give offense to others (except, perhaps, when it's warranted); trolls go out of their way to think up clever ways to give offense to people who never did them any harm. Reasonable people (indeed, this might a basic criterion of being a reasonable person) recognize and accept that, in a community, there must be general standards of protocol, and they make a point of discovering what those standards are and respecting them. If they criticize basic, well-accepted community standards, they realize that they are taking what might be received as a sort of extreme action, and they will word their criticisms with appropriate delicacy and diplomacy. Trolls, by contrast (and here again I'm speaking in the slightly broader sense), seem to take *delight* in not only flouting basic standards of protocol, but criticizing them openly and rudely as well. Any old hand on Usenet or mailing lists knows this all too well. When called to task by a moderator or administrator, the troll often will attack the moderator or administrator, complain that his feelings are being hurt, and object that his freedom of speech has been infringed. No reasonable person would behave this way; he would instead stop and ask himself, "What have I done wrong?" or instead say, "Oh, I see; these people aren't playing by the rules I want to play by. I'll find a different group of people to play with." I can't really put it any better than what the above-referenced URL has: "Trolls are utterly impervious to criticism (constructive or otherwise). You cannot negotiate with them; you cannot cause them to feel shame or compassion; you cannot reason with them. They cannot be made to feel remorse. For some reason, trolls do not feel they are bound by the rules of courtesy or social responsibility." Now, there's a problem in *defining* "troll," even in this broad sense, for the wiki context. Trolling up till now has been the abuse of Internet *discussion*. But Wikipedia isn't a discussion; it's a content-creation project. Of course, part of the trolling we've seen has been on talk page discussions, but another large part of it (depending on the troll) has been in article posting, viz., posting biased and kooky stuff in open defiance of policy. I think this is a perfectly acceptable, robust application of the concept to a new sort of context, though. There's also a special problem in *dealing* with trolls on Wikipedia (or any wiki): whereas on an ordinary discussion forum, one can simply killfile the miscreant, on Wikipedia, we can't. Remember, we're actually *doing something*. We're building a resource. The troll's disruptions (in the form of totally and consciously biased, kooky, and otherwise worthless repeated postings) can't be "killfiled." Somebody has to go around after the troll and actually clean up. If nobody does, the biased, kooky, worthless dross stays put; if it accumulates, Wikipedia's quality and reputation is under some amount of threat (depending on how prolific the troll is). Given this, it might perhaps be better to apply the word "vandal" to someone who posts really worthless stuff on Wikipedia. But I would distinguish vandals from trolls as follows. Vandals are interested in getting mere infantile jollies in seeing people temporarily shocked by usually toilet humor. Trolls actually want to build (hostile) relationships with people in order to abuse them more satisfyingly. For more on the relationship between trolling and abuse, the following is thought-provoking: http://www.firelily.com/support/depression/trolls.html I don't know how accurate the psychologizing is, but it's interesting nonetheless. So, as you can see, I do think that trolls exist on Wikipedia, and we would do well to acknowledge this fact and respond appropriately. Larry

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Trolls and other nuisances
by Larry Sanger 12 Apr '02

12 Apr '02

I'm just now visiting the recent archive of Wikipedia-L: http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001879.html I'd like to add my $0.02 on a number of issues that have been raised. This is important, I think, because we've got to pull together against elements who are, to put it nicely, wasting our time. To pull together, though, we've got to get very clear on what "trolls" are or might be, and develop a robust, *well-thought-out*, *reasonable* idea of what to do when the trolls attack. (As they will continue to do as long as Wikipedia is open for business.) Each of us has to come to his or her own conclusions on the issue; but the greater degree of consensus we can achieve (*for* neutrality and productivity and *against* bias and kookiness), the more effective we will be in showing trolls the door. (Without, ideally, actually kicking them out the door.) First, I really don't like the idea of putting Meta-Wikipedia comments on the Recent Changes page. That was the whole point of having the Meta-Wikipedia, if you'll remember: meta-discussion (partly in the form of trolling by certain members of the project, along with responses to them), had become such a serious problem, eating up the resources of the project, that we wanted to move the wrangling away from the article production. Please, let's keep it that way. For historical perspective, see: http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Moving+commentary+out+of+Wikiped… Next--I think Manning's post, "Some 24 comments and the cabal," was a bullseye that said a bunch of stuff that sorely needed to be said: http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-April/001807.html To reiterate in my own words: our resident trolls, bless their twisted hearts, have harped over and over again about issues of the politics of Wikipedia, either stating or not-so-subtlely implying that some element of the leadership of the community is pulling the wool over the eyes of the community, that someone is usurping power. As Manning says, the main authority behind the project rests with the community itself, and particularly with the people who accept the basic defining features of the community. Insinuations that a cabal, other than a "cabal" in this sense, is taking control and foisting its views on the rest of us are only so much guff, very possibly motivated by a dislike for the neutrality policy, or so it seems to me. I agree that "troll" is sometimes falsely used to mean little more specific than "annoying person," which is way too broad. Originally (or so the etymology and received wisdom has it), I think the term referred to people who were *merely* trying to get a rise out of newbies, with no deeper agenda than that. There are relatively few trolls in that sense, and it's entirely plausible that The Cunctator, 24, and Michael Irwin aren't trolls in *that* sense. But I think there *is* a broader and much more useful sense of the term, that is very often used by perfectly net-savvy people--at least as often as the original use, and probably more often. This is how "troll" is used in this page (#1 result for the "Internet troll" Google search): http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm According to this broader sense, trolls *thrive on being the center and focus of controversy*. It is, seemingly, what they live for, at least when it comes to Internet forums. Perhaps most importantly, **they do not respond to reasonable criticism** in the way that most ordinary intelligent people do; they treat dialectic as *merely* a game. They don't seem to realize or care that they are speaking to *people* with all that that entails. Reasonable discussants are willing to stop and acknowledge that others can and do have different points of view. Trolls, in this slightly broader sense, almost always take personal offense that other people disagree with them, so that when others express their disagreement, the trolls lash out in hostile, abusive, and often strangely cryptic ways (as if they were mainly speaking to themselves). Most reasonable people go out of their way not to give offense to others (except, perhaps, when it's warranted); trolls go out of their way to think up clever ways to give offense to people who never did them any harm. Reasonable people (indeed, this might a basic criterion of being a reasonable person) recognize and accept that, in a community, there must be general standards of protocol, and they make a point of discovering what those standards are and respecting them. If they criticize basic, well-accepted community standards, they realize that they are taking what might be received as a sort of extreme action, and they will word their criticisms with appropriate delicacy and diplomacy. Trolls, by contrast (and here again I'm speaking in the slightly broader sense), seem to take *delight* in not only flouting basic standards of protocol, but criticizing them openly and rudely as well. Any old hand on Usenet or mailing lists knows this all too well. When called to task by a moderator or administrator, the troll often will attack the moderator or administrator, complain that his feelings are being hurt, and object that his freedom of speech has been infringed. No reasonable person would behave this way; he would instead stop and ask himself, "What have I done wrong?" or instead say, "Oh, I see; these people aren't playing by the rules I want to play by. I'll find a different group of people to play with." I can't really put it any better than what the above-referenced URL has: "Trolls are utterly impervious to criticism (constructive or otherwise). You cannot negotiate with them; you cannot cause them to feel shame or compassion; you cannot reason with them. They cannot be made to feel remorse. For some reason, trolls do not feel they are bound by the rules of courtesy or social responsibility." Now, there's a problem in *defining* "troll," even in this broad sense, for the wiki context. Trolling up till now has been the abuse of Internet *discussion*. But Wikipedia isn't a discussion; it's a content-creation project. Of course, part of the trolling we've seen has been on talk page discussions, but another large part of it (depending on the troll) has been in article posting, viz., posting biased and kooky stuff in open defiance of policy. I think this is a perfectly acceptable, robust application of the concept to a new sort of context, though. There's also a special problem in *dealing* with trolls on Wikipedia (or any wiki): whereas on an ordinary discussion forum, one can simply killfile the miscreant, on Wikipedia, we can't. Remember, we're actually *doing something*. We're building a resource. The troll's disruptions (in the form of totally and consciously biased, kooky, and otherwise worthless repeated postings) can't be "killfiled." Somebody has to go around after the troll and actually clean up. If nobody does, the biased, kooky, worthless dross stays put; if it accumulates, Wikipedia's quality and reputation is under some amount of threat (depending on how prolific the troll is). Given this, it might perhaps be better to apply the word "vandal" to someone who posts really worthless stuff on Wikipedia. But I would distinguish vandals from trolls as follows. Vandals are interested in getting mere infantile jollies in seeing people temporarily shocked by usually toilet humor. Trolls actually want to build (hostile) relationships with people in order to abuse them more satisfyingly. For more on the relationship between trolling and abuse, the following is thought-provoking: http://www.firelily.com/support/depression/trolls.html I don't know how accurate the psychologizing is, but it's interesting nonetheless. So, as you can see, I do think that trolls exist on Wikipedia, and we would do well to acknowledge this fact and respond appropriately. Larry

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24, possums, and is the site really slow lately??
by Julie Hofmann Kemp 11 Apr '02

11 Apr '02

Hi all -- Just thought I'd point out that 24 has at least made it to "rules to consider" , read through, and signed (either for or against. A couple of the 'against' don't give me warm fuzzies, but at least he/she is expanding his/her horizons a bit. On the subject of possums (or, as we call them in my family for reasons unknown, possels), I think that the article already exists under Opossum ;-) And is the site really slow lately?? It seems to take forever for pages to load, and I'm not getting that at other sites.... Have a good day, all! Jules _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

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Word Wide Lexicon
by Kurt Jansson 11 Apr '02

11 Apr '02

Dear Wikipedians! Today I read an article in a mailinglist which lead me to a slashdot discussion about a project called "World Wide Lexicon". There seem to be some wrong expectations about it so I mailed the author of WWL to ask him and to point him to Wikipedia. I think it's a very interresting project, but you can take a look at it yourself: the project: www.worldwidelexicon.org the /. discussion: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/04/05/1911255.shtml?tid=95 the answers to my emails: -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Brian McConnell <brianmsf(a)yahoo.com> An: Kurt Jansson <kurt(a)jansson.de> Gesendet: Sonntag, 7. April 2002 19:55 Betreff: RE: Why "Lexicon"? Kurt, Thank you for your email. I called it the worldwide lexicon because the system can be used to retrieve definitions for words as well as translations. For example, if you are doing a monolingual search, you can submit several different types of queries to a WWL server, including: - syn : returns synonymous words and phrases - ant : returns antonymous words and phrases - def : returns verbose description for a word or phrase - pcat : returns parent categories that the word, phrase or resource locator belongs to - ccat : returns child categories that are associated with the entry - vis : returns words that represent visually similar objects I like Wikipedia, and would like to talk to someone about joining it to the WWL system. I think it could be very useful in processing monolingual queries. All they will need to do is write a PHP script that recognizes several SOAP simple methods. I would also like to talk to the wikipedia software developer about the possibility of modifying the system to be used as a translation dictionary. I don't like to reinvent the wheel, and it seems that the system they have built can be modified to host a user supported database of language pair translations. The benefit of joining Wikipedia is the system will appear as a data source along with other web dictionaries, lexicons and semantic network servers. The most useful feature of our system is that it will enable client applications, a browser plug in for example, to locate WWL data sources on the fly, and then submit standardized queries to them. Thus, one fairly simple piece of code can talk to lots of dictionaries throughout the web (you might use it one day to lookup translations for words in a Spanish document, and another to look for verbose definitions for words in your home language). The main goal of WWL is to create a GNUtella like system for locating and communicating with dictionary and semantic network servers on the web (there are many). The problem today is that each system has its own proprietary front end, so all of this information is fragmented. By creating a simple protocol for locating and talking to systems, it is possible to create what appears to be a single worldwide dictionary/semantic network that can be accessed with a few lines of code. Thanks for writing. Best regards, Brian Mcconnell -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Brian McConnell <brianmsf(a)yahoo.com> An: Kurt Jansson <kurt(a)jansson.de> Gesendet: Sonntag, 7. April 2002 23:53 Betreff: RE: Why "Lexicon"? Kurt, Thanks for the quick reply. Another point... WWL does not do full text translation. It is designed to assist word and phrase translation, as well as monolingual dictionary or encyclopedia searches. As you know, translating full text without human intervention is a very difficult problem. While I could see translation systems using WWL to query dictionaries (to expand the scope of their vocabularies), the WWL specification does not say anything about full text translation. Our primary goal is to create a distributed dictionary/encyclopedia protocol that is very easy to implement in client and server software, and that does not require dictionary servers to make changes to their systems besides writing a few scripts to generate SOAP responses instead of HTML. WWL's purpose is to make it easy to automatically locate and communicate with WWL-aware dictionary and semantic net servers. I like to describe this as GNUtella for dictionaries. You are welcome to forward this my email to the wikipedia list or developers. As I mentioned, I think you could do some interesting things by making your systems accessible via the WWL SOAP interface. Thanks again for your email. Best regards. Brian McConnell

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Article on Wikipedia/Nupedia in swiss news magazine
by Tobias Hoevekamp 11 Apr '02

11 Apr '02

Dear Wikipedians! There is an article about Wikipedia and Nupedia in the latest issue of Switzerland largest weekly news magazine (http://www.facts.ch). It's in german though and not available online... Anyhow, if you don't have a chance to buy a copy of 'facts' you might want to have a look at a jpg-image of the 2 page article (300 kByte) http://www.vt.ilw.agrl.ethz.ch/~hoevekam/tmp/facts.jpg. (I'll ask the author of the article to provide an online version...) I think it's a nice article giving a well-balanced introduction to - mainly - Wikipedia. OK, the picture of Larry with it's title is kind of out-dated and it wasn't clear to me, that they will include it, when I 'proof-read' the article. BTW, I am the guy hiding behind some books on the second picture... Hope that makes up for some of the trouble with 24 etc... Bye Tobias TOBIAS HOEVEKAMP mailto:tobias.hoevekamp@ilw.agrl.ethz.ch http://www.vt.ilw.agrl.ethz.ch/~hoevekam WORK: ETH Zurich, LFO E21, CH-8092 Zurich, +41 1 632 3304 HOME: Anna Heer-Str. 2, CH-8057 Zurich, +41 1 350 5986 ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP 3.0 at http://email.ethz.ch/horde/imp

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Re: FYI, Baha'i
by Manning Bartlett 11 Apr '02

11 Apr '02

Yeah, Jimbo, I guess we need a staff meeting on this one - JHK said she'll bring the donuts. OK - I'm not a Baha'i and my reasons for my editorial stance are fairly straightforward: 1 - The Orthodox Baha'is are a TINY fringe group (sub-2000 members) of a religion with 6 Million members. Hence any article should give fair balance to that proportionality. 2 - I have maintained since the beginning that the main Baha'i article should contain the principles of the faith (common to all divisions) and any other pages on divisions should focus on the nature and manner of the distinction. 3 - The main Baha'i article IS weak on outlining the principles. Not feeling adequately informed, I approached the newsgroup to summon other "experts" to enhance the main Baha'i article.. If any 'mainstream" Baha'is were then to attempt to eliminate the OB article, the same rules of NPOV would apply and I would defend the OB page. 4 - By "us" I was making the assumption that the majority of the community would support my editorial stance on this - something I'm still fairly confident of. So far this person has had three 'pedians give them the same story (SJK, BV and myself), although none of us have communicated amongst ourselves AFAIK. Sorry to have you dragged into this, Jimbo. I hope I'm still allowed to come to the company social. Cheers Manning PS - Rabo Karabekian is a character from Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions", I've been using is as a handle on NGs for years. Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] FYI, Baha'i From: "Brion L. VIBBER" <brion(a)pobox.com> To: wikipedia-l <wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com> Date: 10 Apr 2002 15:08:11 -0700 Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com See also duplicate of the complaint post and further discussion, including Manning's response, on the wiki at: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Talk%3AOrthodox%20Bahai%20Faith While I do get the general impression that the mainstream Baha'is don't seem to like the Orthodox Baha'is very much, I've seen no evidence of misbehavior in the case of the wikipedia articles except on the part of 66.219.221.xxx him/herself, which he/she has yet to explain. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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list of 24's "contributions" already on the 'pedia + some reflections....
by Daniel Lee Mayer 11 Apr '02

11 Apr '02

On Wednesday 10 April 2002 01:49 am, Jimbo wrote: > kband(a)www.llamacom.com wrote: > > Are there other entries? Or is the hooplah mostly about his meta-rants? > > I'd like to second the call for lists of entries on the main site that he's > screwed up. It'd help if we were all "on the same page" in terms of > knowing what he's doing. > > His meta-rants are annoying and strange, but can easily be ignored if > absolutely necessary. > > > I don't see that much evidence that he's trying to violate the mission > > of Wikipedia, or even subvert it to his own kooky ends. He seems to > > respect the mission, and thinks that people don't have the right > > understanding of what NPOV means. > > Well, he's so incoherent that it's sort of hard to say... > > --Jimbo Somebody has something at [[wikipedia utilities/Pages needing attention]] -- you can also check out 24's list of contribs which is accessed through his/her user page at [[user:24.150.61.63]]. I have no idea why the contributions link works since Ed Poor created the page -- not 24 by a login. Also, I don't know if the contribs link is accurate or up to date (does this work for any IP?). Most of what he/she contributes is discoherent -- although some is actually mildly interesting after you cut out the fat. I gave up on trying to keep up with edits to this person's material because there is just so much of it. Others seem to jump in quite often though -- God bless them. Much of the most recent stuff really isn't THAT non-NPOV -- although it takes an entire article of words for this person to say, maybe, a couple of sentences of information (much of the leftover stuff is even not as non-NPOV as what Ed Poor or the Cruncrator contributes....). It is a bear to wade through this stuff. Apparently this person is beginning to understand that NPOVing his/her stuff at least a little helps prevent a quick REVERT or removal of text to a talk page. As I stated before, this person doesn't seem to engage in edit wars -- which I still think is strange (given all the other things this person has done). Perhaps the power of the wiki is beggining to take its effect -- we can only hope. WojPob is right; this issue is taking up WAY too much of our human resources --- It's still a good idea for Jimbo to proceed with trying to contact this person and see what he/she is about. And for all of us to keep a watchful eye to make sure 24 has been tamed a bit. If this person is on a similiar non-NPOV level as Ed or Crunc I can live with that. (talking about level of severity, not ideology) Although, the current lull in 24's submits may just be causing me to automatically (once again) give this person the benefit of the doubt when this person really doesn't deserve it. I guess we will see when he/she starts to massively submit again. maveric149

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Wikipedia-l April 2002