On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote:
> What are the articles this person has been changing?
For 66.108.155.126:
20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet
20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root
20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
For 208.24.115.6:
20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
For 141.157.232.26:
20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements.
Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker.
For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist
and look at the contribs.
--mav
Dear all,
Most of you would be aware of some of the discussions that have occurred
around Wikipedia in the Norwegian languages. Since the last round of
discussions on this list, there has been a lot of internal debate, as
well as what seems to be a fairly widely accepted agreement following
voting.
This e-mail intends to, after a brief recap on Norwegian language and
wikipedia issues, take those interested through the latest development
and will stake out the road ahead. It is also intended to inform the
international community about the current agreement on no.wikipedia, so
as to prevent misunderstandings in the future.
Finally, we will mention an unfortunate reaction to the vote by a small
number of users at the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (no:) wikipedia who want
to disregard the result of the voting and are planning to create a
_third_ Norwegian wikipedia with the sole mission of mixing the contents
of the two current Norwegian versions.
== A short language history of Norway ==
Spoken Norwegian ("norsk") (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "no") is in a fairly
unique situation compared to most other languages of the world in that
it has two widely accepted written standards, Bokmål (ISO 639-2 alpha-2
code "nb") and Nynorsk (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nn"). By national
legislation they are both regarded as official written forms of
Norwegian. In addition, many people still make a distinction between
Bokmål and its precursor which still is in use, Riksmål.
Briefly speaking, Bokmål and Riksmål are descendants of the Danish
written language. Until the 1800s, Danish was the only widely used
written language in Norway as a result of four centuries of union with
Denmark. With increasing independence came a wish to norwegianise the
Danish standard, with Knud Knudsen at the forefront for changing parts
of the vocabulary and orthographics. Thus, Riksmål, and later Bokmål,
resulted. These forms together are today probably used by about 90% of
Norway's population, or somewhere around 3,500,000 people.
Parallel to this development, a new written standard was created by Ivar
Aasen. He travelled extensively throughout Norway, and based his new
language, landsmål, on the grammar and vocabulary of dialect samples
from around the country. This was later renamed Nynorsk. Modern Nynorsk
differs significantly from modern Bokmål, and may be linguistically
looked upon as as different (or as similar if you like) as Swedish is to
Danish. For English or Dutch/German speakers, the differences may be
likened to those between (Lowland) Scots and English or Low German and
Dutch. Today it is estimated that about 500,000-600,000 people have
Nynorsk as their first written language.
More information about the Norwegian language history can be found in
English, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese on the website of the
Norwegian Language Council:
http://www.sprakrad.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=653
== A short history of Wikipedia in Norwegian ==
The first Norwegian wikipedia started 26 November 2001 on the subdomain
no.wikipedia.org. As most wikipedias, its contributor and article count
started really picking up around the end of 2003. At the time, it
accepted all written standards of Norwegian, although the amount of
Nynorsk was minimal. There were already several debates about the
feasibilty and appropriateness of keeping the two languages united on
one Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004 a Wikipedia for Nynorsk was created.
The creation of nn:, however, split the community at no: wikipedia. Many
felt that given that Nynorsk now had its own wikipedia, no: should
become a Bokmål/Riksmål Wikipedia only. Others disapproved and claimed
that there was no need to change and that it should continue its
language policy of accepting all and keep its interwiki link name of
"Norsk".
Nynorsk Wikipedia soon proved a success, as it within the next few
months gathered several people who had felt uncomfortable in the
(mainly) Bokmål environment at no:. The name displayed in interwiki
links became "Norsk (nynorsk)" (languages are not spelt with upper case
in Norwegian). To date it continues to be one of the fastest growing
wikipedias, with a steady article increase, now at over 6000 articles
and >50 editors with more than 10 edits since arrival.
== Votes ==
The issue of no:'s language policy has come up time and again, and a
vote was held in March ([[:no:Wikipedia:Målform]]) as to which policy to
adapt. Independent of the method of the tally (whether or not to include
new contributors etc.) there was a majority for switching to a
Bokmål/Riksmål only language policy (50% for Bokmål/Riksmål, 43.2% for
Bokmål/Riksmål/Nynorsk/Høgnorsk, and 6.8% for the official variants
Bokmål/Nynorsk only).
Following this result, there is now going to be a vote on which
interwiki link name will most appropriately reflect the current language
policy of no:. The result of this vote will most likely be either "Norsk
(bokmål)" or "Norsk (bokmål/riksmål)".
Understandably, there has also been a debate as to whether the subdomain
should change from "no" to "nb", as this is the correct representation
of Bokmål according to ISO 639-2. However, there is some resentment
towards such a move and currently a general acceptance in letting the
Bokmål wikipedia stay at "no". The alternative some have suggested is a
server-side redirect from "no" to "nb", in the same way that "nb" today
is a server-side redirect to the equivalent page on "no".
== Summary of the problem ==
Unfortunately, a small group of users (who all write Bokmål/Riksmål) are
ignoring the results from the vote, and are claiming they want to
re-establish a wikipedia for all written standards of Norwegian. They
claim they have been in touch with people centrally in Wikimedia
(developers? stewards?) and that they have so far received positive
comments. With this email, we would like to state the fact that there
have been no official decisions about creating a third Norwegian
wikipedia containing both Bokmål and Nynorsk, it is merely an unofficial
initiative from a small group of users which started a sign-on list at
[[:no:Bruker:Norsk_Wikipedia]]. A spontaneous list with signatures
against this activity was immediately created at
[[:no:Wikipedia-diskusjon:Fellesnorsk]]. The process of creating a third
Norwegian wikipedia has not gone through a voting process in any of the
two existing Norwegian wikipedias (no: and nn:) and can not be
considered as a decision by the Norwegian Wikipedia community.
We believe the creation of a third wikipedia under the Wikimedia
foundation would have a serious and unfortunate impact on the existing
wikipedias in Norwegian, no: and nn:, and would undermine Wikipedia's
reputation in Norway. This being said, we are all for extensive co-
operation between the four Scandinavian language wikipedias (including
Swedish and Danish), as evident by the recent creation of
[[:meta:Skanwiki]], the Scandinavian meta-pages, and the use of featured
articles from neighbour wikipedias.
== Conclusion ==
Hopefully, this letter will help people better understand the
complicated language situation of the Norwegian Wikipedia community, so
as to give a background on which discussion can take place on this list
in the future, such as the inevitable debate following a possible
request for a re-establishment of the common (and third!) Norwegian
Wikipedia.
>From the community of no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org,
Bjarte Sørensen [[:meta:User:BjarteSorensen]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on nn:)
Lars Alvik [[:no:User:Profoss]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on no:)
Øyvind A. Holm [[:no:User:Sunny256]] (Administrator on no:)
Onar Vikingstad [[:no:User:Vikingstad]] (Administrator on no:)
Jon Harald Søby [[:no:User:Jhs]] (Administrator on no:)
Chris Nyborg [[:no:User:Cnyborg]] (Administrator on no:)
Guttorm Flatabø [[:no:User:Dittaeva]] (Administrator on nn:)
Gunleiv Hadland [[:meta:User:Gunnernett]] (Administrator on nn:)
Jarle Fagerheim [[:nn:User:Jarle]] (Administrator on nn:)
Øyvind Jo Heimdal Eik [[:en:User:Pladask]] (Administrator on nn: and no:)
Kristian André Gallis [[:nn:User:Kristaga]]
Vegard Wærp [[:no:User:Vegardw]]
Nina Aldin Thune [[:no:User:Nina]]
Thor-Rune Hansen [[:no:User:ThorRune]]
Claes Tande [[:no:User:Ctande]]
Arnt-Erik Krokaa [[:no:User:AEK]]
Rune Sattler [[:no:User:Shauni]]
Hello All,
I have a wiki, currently running the GeSHi syntax highlighting extension[1].
I wish to use this from within a template page (Template:HF). This template
page contains the following wikitext
Click [http://john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}} here] to download this
file.
<bash-file>/var/www/john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}}</bash-file>
According to the extension, the file between the <bash-file> tags should be
parsed and displayed inline when I call
{{HF|test.sh}}
from another page.
But because the order that extensions and templates are processed all I get
is
Click here to download this file.
Could not load /var/www/john.greenbirdsystems.com/files/{{{1}}}
See how the template var is not expanded. The extension gets called first.
Can anyone suggest a solution to my conumdrum?
When not in template form the plugin works great. Its source code is
available at [1]. I have done quite a bit of research trying to get tis to
work but couldnt find anywhere that said anything about this situation. Help
would be appreciated.
Cheers
John
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ajqnic:GeSHiHighlight
Essjay wrote:
> Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make
> sure this was announced as widely as possible:
>
> Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for
> Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and
> deflag bot accounts on their projects.
THANKS ROB !!!
Apologies if Rob has already posted this elsewhere, but I wanted to make
sure this was announced as widely as possible:
Developer Rob Church has enabled the [[Special:Makebot]] feature for
Wikimedia wikis; this feature allows local bureaucrats to flag and
deflag bot accounts on their projects.
Discussion on this proposal went on for quite a while, with almost
unanimous support from both stewards and bureaucrats alike; it was
approved by Jimbo (in March, I believe) for implementation.
A big thanks to Rob for working up a great extension (I've already used
it on en.wiki, and it works beautifully), and to those who supported
it's implementation.
As a side note, I suppose this means that stewards will be getting out
of the bot flagging business on projects with local bureaucrats? (I've
started a thread on [[m:Talk:Requests for bot status]] on the subject,
if anyone would like to comment.) I may be being a bit bold in doing so,
but I encourage those who read the list to make the communities on their
respective wikis aware of this new responsibility for bureaucrats.
Essjay
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Speaking of research into collaborative media : here's the lead article
about a recent Economist survey. Wikipedia gets a kind tip. Has anyone
read the full report?
The entire survey is available as a PDF for $5...
<http://www.economist.com/members/survey_paybarrier.cfm?story_id=6794156>
(thanks to aslam for the tip)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
AMONG THE AUDIENCE
Apr 20th 2006
The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and
participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change
both the media industry and society as a whole
THE next big thing in 1448 was a technology called "movable type",
invented for commercial use by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from
Mainz (although the Chinese had thought of it first). The clever idea
was to cast individual letters (type) and then compose (move) these to
make up printable pages. This promised to disrupt the mainstream media
of the day--the work of monks who were manually transcribing texts or
carving entire pages into wood blocks for printing. By 1455 Mr
Gutenberg, having lined up venture capital from a rich compatriot,
Johannes Fust, was churning out bibles and soon also papal indulgences
(slips of paper that rich people bought to reduce their time in
purgatory). The start-up had momentum, but its costs ran out of control
and Mr Gutenberg defaulted. Mr Fust foreclosed, and a little bubble
popped.
Even so, within decades movable type spread across Europe,
turbo-charging an information age called the Renaissance. Martin
Luther, irked by those indulgences, used printing presses to produce
bibles and other texts in German. Others followed suit, and vernaculars
rose as Latin declined, preparing Europe for nation-states. Religious
and aristocratic elites first tried to stop, then control, then co-opt
the new medium. In the centuries that followed, social and legal
systems adjusted (with copyright laws, for instance) and books,
newspapers and magazines began to circulate widely. The age of mass
media had arrived. Two more technological breakthroughs--radio and
television--brought it to its zenith, which it probably reached around
1958, when most adult Americans simultaneously turned on their
television sets to watch "I Love Lucy".
SECOND INCARNATION
In 2001, five-and-a-half centuries after Mr Gutenberg's first bible,
"Movable Type" was invented again. Ben and Mena Trott, high-school
sweethearts who became husband and wife, had been laid off during the
dotcom bust and found themselves in San Francisco with ample spare
time. Ms Trott started blogging--ie, posting to her online journal,
Dollarshort--about "stupid little anecdotes from my childhood". For
reasons that elude her, Dollarshort became very popular, and the Trotts
decided to build a better "blogging tool", which they called Movable
Type. "Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing
because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant
or grandiose," says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is
extremely shy and rarely talks. Movable Type is now the software of
choice for celebrity bloggers.
These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very
approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media
that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however,
also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era,
which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This
culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings,
especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of
the transition at all, find it puzzling.
Calling it the "internet era" is not helpful. By way of infrastructure,
full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of
the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, "always-on", broadband
access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and
Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years
behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the
previous era, not the coming one. Almost everywhere, download speeds
(from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload
speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants
that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be
another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media
industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which
users might put as much into the network as they take out.
THE AGE OF PARTICIPATION
Exactly this, however, is starting to happen. Last November, the Pew
Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers
create content for the internet--from text to pictures, music and
video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the
Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively
"consume" media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but
actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in
whatever form and on whatever scale. This does not have to mean that
"people write their own newspaper", says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent
blogger and software engineer at Yahoo![1], an internet portal. "It
could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie
they saw," or as sophisticated as shooting a home video.
This has profound implications for traditional business models in the
media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences
and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the
new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small,
and usually tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants
competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms
and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be
making money from the content they create; others will not and will not
mind, because they have other motives. "People creating stuff to build
their own reputations" are at one end of this spectrum, says Philip
Evans at Boston Consulting Group, and one-man superbrands such as
Steven Spielberg at the other.
As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for
society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With
participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators
become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the
founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many
"lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are
transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as
the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The
mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow
at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is
to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because
institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting
fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume
equality and eagerly concede fallibility.
Today's media revolution, like others before it, is announcing itself
with a new and strange vocabulary. In the early 20th century, Charles
Prestwich Scott, the editor, publisher and owner of the MANCHESTER
GUARDIAN (and thus part of his era's mainstream media), was aghast at
the word "television", which to him was "half Greek, half Latin: no
good can come of it." Mr Scott's equivalents today confront even
stranger neologisms. Merriam-Webster, a publisher of dictionaries, had
"blog" as its word of the year in 2004, and the New Oxford American
Dictionary picked "podcast" in 2005. "Wikis", "vlogs", "metaverses" and
"folksonomies" (all to be explained later in this survey) may be next.
WORD COUNT
"These words! The inability of the English language to express these
new things is distressing," says Barry Diller, 64, who fits the
description "media mogul". Over the decades, Mr Diller has run two big
Hollywood film studios and launched America's fourth
broadcast-television network, FOX Broadcasting. More recently, he has
made a valiant effort to get his mind around the internet, with mixed
results, and is now the boss of IAC/InterActiveCorp, a conglomerate
with about 60 online brands. Mr Diller concedes that "all of the
distribution methods get thrown up in the air, and how they land is,
well, still up in the air." Yet Mr Diller is confident that
participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry.
"Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,"
he says. "Talent is the new limited resource."
"What an ignoramus!" says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He
advises companies on the uses of new media tools. "Look around and
there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs," he says. "Diller is
assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner
it. He's completely wrong." Not everything in the "blogosphere" is
poetry, not every audio "podcast" is a symphony, not every video "vlog"
would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia[2], the
free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes
Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers,
radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will
be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and
what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on
human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on
collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration
technologies that are now being developed. "The old media model was:
there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are
multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out," says Joe Kraus,
the founder of JotSpot, which makes software for wikis.
The obvious benefit of this media revolution will be what Mr Saffo of
the Institute for the Future calls a "Cambrian explosion" of
creativity: a flowering of expressive diversity on the scale of the
eponymous proliferation of biological species 530m years ago. "We are
entering an age of cultural richness and abundant choice that we've
never seen before in history. Peer production is the most powerful
industrial force of our time," says Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED
magazine and author of a forthcoming book called "The Long Tail", about
which more later. (Mr Anderson used to work for THE ECONOMIST.)
At the same time, adds Mr Saffo, "revolutions tend to suck for ordinary
people." Indeed, many people in the traditional media are pessimistic
about the rise of a participatory culture, either because they believe
it threatens the business model that they have grown used to, or
because they feel it threatens public discourse, civility and even
democracy.
This survey will examine the main kinds of new media and their likely
long-term effects both on media companies and on society at large. In
so doing, it will be careful to heed a warning from Harvard's Mr
Weinberger: "The mainstream media are in a good position to get things
wrong." The observer, after all, is part of the observation--a product
of institutional media values even if he tries to apply the new rules
of conversation. This points to the very heart of the coming era of
participatory media. It must be understood, says Mr Weinberger, "not as
a publishing phenomenon but a social phenomenon". This is illustrated
perfectly by blogging, the subject of the next article[3].
-----
[1] http://www.yahoo.com/
[2] http://wikipedia.org/
[3] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=6794172
Ahh, just beat me to it :-)
They're not taking applications yet, and the #summer-discuss IRC
channel is inexplicably hosted on SlashNET, but that's extremely cool.
Congrats to Brion and everyone working on this... last year, Google
sponsored an average of 10 students per project/org on their list.
Huzzah!,
SJ
* likewise Creative Commons, One Laptop Per Child (which is doing cool
things with wikis and wants to fit Wikimedia content on its laptops),
and Xiph.org, which is moving closer to providing a truly robust free
audio and video toolchain. A reason to smile... :-)
On 4/23/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after wandering through the archive of those lists, it seems that
> nobody has yet mentioned that Wikimedia was accepted as a mentoring
> organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2006.
>
> http://code.google.com/soc/wikim/about.html
>
> Students may apply for this in the first 8 days of May.
>
> Please have a look at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2006 for suggestions
> regarding possible projects.
>
> It would be a great opportunity for us, yadda yadda etc. please apply.
>
> Mathias
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
--
++SJ
Wikipedia: Success factors
Wikipedia's success mainly depend on its users - the Wikipedians. In
theory, everybody can be a Wikipedian. This thread is supposed to find
out if the theory holds true in practice.
The idea is that the Wiki-community of Wikipedians is a special group
of people, who have special characteristcs. To account for these
special characteristics, I have provided the following Factor
Model:
User factors: - Openness - Neutrality -
Flat hierarchy- Computer Skills - Motivation -
Knowledge factors: - Tacit & Explicit knowledge - Fast changing rate - Peer
review
Technology factors: - Easy usability - Fast access - Infinite reach,
multilingual - Flexible structure - Safe
All these factors play together to accomplish the goal of succesful
knowledge creation and knowledge sharing.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Success_factors
Comments, feedback and own ideas are very welcome!
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Wikipedia%27s-Success-Factors-t1494063.html#a4049267
Sent from the Wikipedia General forum at Nabble.com.
I have been a Wikipedian since 2001 and a MediaWiki developer since
2002. I was Chief Research Officer of the Foundation from May to
August 2005. I initiated two of Wikimedia's projects, Wikinews and the
Wikimedia Commons, and have made vital contributions to both. I have
made roughly 15,000 edits to the English Wikipedia, and uploaded about
15,000 files to Wikimedia Commons. A list of my overall contributions
can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence
and the linked to pages; this does not include my numerous
international activities such as conference speeches, as well as my
book and articles about Wikipedia. I have never been blocked before,
nor have I ever been subject to an Arbitration Committee ruling (in
fact, I was one of Jimmy's original suggestions for the first ArbCom,
and one of the people who proposed that very committee).
I have just been indefinitely blocked from the English Wikipedia, and
desysopped, by user Danny, under the new nickname "Dannyisme", as an
"Office Action" for alleged "reckless endangerment" which was not
specified further. I have called Danny on the phone, but he said that
he was not willing to discuss the issue, and that I should instead
talk to the Foundation attorney instead. To my knowledge, this is the
first time office authority has been used to indefinitely block and
desysop a user.
What happened?
Yesterday, Danny radically shortened and protected two pages,
[[Newsmax.com]] and [[Christopher Ruddy]]. The protection summary was
"POV qualms" (nothing else), and there was only the following brief
comment on Talk:NewsMax.com:
"This article has been stubbed and protected pending resolution of POV
issues. Danny 19:26, 17 April 2006 (UTC)"
There was no mention of WP:OFFICE in the edit summary or on the talk
page. Danny did not apply the special Office template, {{office}}, nor
did he use the "Dannyisme" account that he created for Foundation
purposes, nor did he list the page on WP:OFFICE. Instead, he applied
the regular {{protected}} template.
Given that Danny has now more explicitly emphasized this distinction
between his role as a Foundation employee and a regular wiki user, I
assumed he was acting here as a normal sysop and editor, and
unprotected the two pages, with a brief reference to the protection
policy. I also asked Danny, on [[Talk:NewsMax.com]], to make it
explicit whether the protection was under WP:OFFICE. I would not have
reprotected, of course, if he had simply said that they were, and left
it at that.
I apologize if this action was perceived as "reckless", but I must
emphasize that I was acting in good faith, and that I would much
appreciate it if all office actions would be labeled as such. I was
under the impression that this was the case given past actions. In any
case, I think that the indefinite block and desysopping is very much
an overreaction, and would like to hereby publicly appeal to Danny,
the community and the Board (since Danny's authority is above the
ArbCom) to restore my editing privileges as well as my sysop status. I
pledge to be more careful in these matters in the future.
Thanks for reading,
Erik