Greetings:
I am the attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation in the US. I work for
the Board. Among my responsibilities is keeping the Foundation out of
legal trouble and responding to lawsuits, actual and threatened. I have
had a long chat with Eric Moeller about the circumstances that resulted
in his ban (since reverted by someone Being Bold). I also believe that
the misunderstanding, although in good faith, still presented a risk to
the Foundation.
The issue of blocked articles is a complex one, and in many instances
can be the visible result of careful consideration on the part of
Foundation board members, staff, and other admins/bureaucrats/sysops who
have knowledge of the facts and circumstances. Often the community at
large will not have any idea what the facts and underlying
considerations are. Not everything that involves Wikipedia is public,
nor should it be. The typical user or admin doesn't have all the pieces
of the puzzle. Don't let hubris get the better of you.
There may be those of you who have yet to experience the American legal
system in any fashion, save for a movie or two. Dealing with lawsuits
is what I do for a living. Avoiding them is also what I do for a
living. My job is to make sure that the Foundation has the best legal
advice and best options open to it to keep things running smoothly, and
to not land in court unless all other avenues have been exhausted.
The WP:OFFICE policy is still in its infancy. People will challenge it
through their words and actions. Everyone is entitled to his or her
opinion. But I believe everyone who believes in the future success and
sustainability of the project must also recognize the need for judicious
use of confidentiality at the Foundation level. The Foundation officers
and Board members have a fiduciary obligation to the organization, as I
do as a lawyer for my client.
Certain members of the community (and notably, not Mr. Moeller) have
expressed dissatisfaction about WP:OFFICE and its use. There is a
healthy debate yet to be had about it. We can have that debate, but I
also have to make clear that the Foundation's obligations are greater
than loyalty to any one user. Even someone with the history of
contributions to Mr. Moeller.
-BradPatrick
Bradford A. Patrick, Esq.
Fowler White Boggs Banker
501 E. Kennedy Blvd.
Suite 1700
Tampa, FL 33602-5239
bpatrick(a)fowlerwhite.com
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces(a)wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces@wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Erik Moeller
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 2:57 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; English Wikipedia;
wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by User:Danny
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
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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I understand that the indefinite ban was reverted by Danny and
reinstituted by dannyisme for 48 hours.
I don't believe Eloquence should receive a death sentence either.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Barrett [mailto:sean@epoptic.org]
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 5:03 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org; Patrick, Brad; jwales(a)wikia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Indefinite block and
desysopping by User:Danny
Thank you for your explanation. As an Arbiter, I have some slight idea
of how ... interesting ... situations can become, and I full support of
the OFFICE policy as a tool to use in handling those situations.
Can you explain the reasons why Eloquence must be prohibited from ever
editing the English Wikipedia again? Danny is apparently using OFFICE
to justify what looks like a lifetime ban (something even the
Arbitration Committee cannot impose) that he refused to explain.
I can understand that the Foundation's obligations are greater than
loyalty to any one user. Is it the case that the Foundation cannot
explain why this one user is being permanently banned with no
explanation of why he must be sacrificed?
- --
Sean Barrett | I've had a perfectly wonderful evening.
sean(a)epoptic.org | But this wasn't it. --Groucho Marx -----BEGIN PGP
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If you desire a formal opinion on a particular tax matter for the purpose of avoiding the imposition of any penalties, we will discuss the additional Treasury requirements that must be met and whether it is possible to meet those requirements under the circumstances, as well as the anticipated time and additional fees involved.
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Confidentiality Disclaimer: This e-mail message and any attachments are private communication sent by a law firm, Fowler White Boggs Banker P.A., and may contain confidential, legally privileged information meant solely for the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please notify the sender immediately by replying to this message, then delete the e-mail and any attachments from your system. Thank you.
At 20:49 18/04/2006, you wrote:
>2006/4/18, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t(a)gmail.com>:
> > How can we prevent the advocate from knowing which side contained
> the donor?
> >
> > Do we really want people to be able to pay to get an "express service"
> > in the dispute resolution process?
>
>I don't think we do... At least I would not want anything that looks
>like sponsor influence on content.
I'm just saying that I would; and I guess that it doesn't matter if
the advocate knows who the sponsor is, as it doesn't matter if an
administrator or arbitrator knows who brings a regular case to their attention.
I just feel that my time can be better spend editing articles, rather
than having spent 80% of my time arguing over them.
And it can't hurt to try it out?
Regards,
Ian Tresman
My earlier post on policy clarification leads me to suggest a good
way to raise a continuous stream of money.
If I had the option, I would stump up a $50 donation in an instant,
to acquire an "advocate" to ensure that policy is followed, while I
attempted to edit an article "by the rules". The advocate would NOT
take the side of the donor.
At the moment, administrators can quickly assess contraventions of
3RR (three revert rule) and vandalism. Other issues on policy are
typically judged by consensus which depends on the knowledge and
experience of editors on policy. There is often a conflict of
interest, and often poor understanding of policy.
I envisage policy advocates, who would initially take a short online
test to assess their competence, and may then be called upon to
uphold policy, either on a question by question basis, or on an
article by article basis.
If there are only a limited number of such advocates, their services
could be acquired by bidding.
At no time will an advocate take sides, and nor is an advocate
guaranteed to resolve a dispute. But in those cases where they can, I
think their services would be invaluable.
Regards,
Ian Tresman
I think I speak for most of the Dutch Wikipedians if I say:
* Neither the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation (Stichting Wikimedia
Nederland) nor the Dutch Wikimedia Association (Vereniging Wikimedia
Nederland) has the right to influence the content and procedures of
the Dutch Wikipedia
* The board of neither has any formal special position on the Dutch Wikipedia
* At least the Dutch Wikimedia Foundation should not be allowed to
speak in name of the Dutch Wikipedia
* The Wikimedia Foundation is hereby requested not to give the Dutch
Wikimedia Foundation the status of chapter or any similar status
Thank you.
--
Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines
The Wikipedia policy and guidelines pages says that one way that
policies are decided, are by Jimbo himself.
Does Jimbo have to physically update the policy page himself for his
word to become law, or do his mailing list comments on policy
clarification carry equal weight, or does the community have to
decide on his comments and have a consensus?
Regards,
Ian Tresman
I've now found clarification of this issue, from Jimbo Wales in a post here:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-September/006653.html
This seems to provide verification of the issue.
I replaced the existing paraphrased text with Jimbo's verifiable
quotes, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&d…
But editors are telling me that:
1. Policy pages aren't subject to the verifiability policy
2. Jimbo is not the supreme lawgiver. The only thing he has made
"law" is that having a policy of writing from a neutral point of view
is a must. Everything else he has said are contributions from a
respected member of the community, as the policies are community-decided.
Comments?
Regards,
Ian Tresman
I would like to start a Wikipedia in a language called Europanto. I
attached the Wiki article that explain it better than I can. Looking
foward for hearing from you.
Yours faithfully
Alfredo Carpineti
From Wikipedia.org:
Europanto is a constructed language, a linguistic jest with a
hodge-podge vocabulary from many European languages. It was created in
1996 by Diego Marani, a translator for the European Council of
Ministers in Brussels. Marani created it in response to the perceived
dominance of the English language; it is an emulation of the effect
that non-native speakers struggling to learn a language typically add
words and phrases from their native language to express their meanings
clearly.
The single outstanding feature of Europanto is that there are no fixed
rules -- merely a set of suggestions. This means that anybody can
start to speak Europanto immediately, on the other hand it is the
speaker's responsibility to draw on an assumed common vocabulary and
grammar between himself and the audience, to make himself understood.
Effectively, Europanto as it is used, tends to have a grammar much
like English, with words borrowed from various languages and adapted
to be easily understood. It is sometimes considered a parody of the
international auxiliary language genre, particularly the "Euroclone"
variety, namely their preceived tendency to very strongly formalize
speech, and impose strict, but arbitrary rules on it.
The name Europanto is a portmanteau combination of European and the
Greek stem πάντ- (all), and resembles Esperanto.
Marani wrote regular newspaper columns about the language and
published a novel using it. As of 2005, he no longer actively promotes
it.
[edit]
Sample
Eine terrible menace incumbe over el Kingdom des Angleterra. Poor
Regina Elisabeth habe spent todo seine dinero in charmingantes hats
und pumpkinose carrosses und maintenow habe keine penny left por
acquire de Champagne dat necessite zum celebrate Prince Charles
anniversario op el 14 Novembro. (Diego Marani)
(Which translates as "A terrible menace has come over the Kingdom of
England. Poor Queen Elizabeth has spent all of her money in charming
hats and pumpkin carriages, and now is left without a penny to buy the
Champagne which is necessary to celebrate Prince Charles' birthday on
November 14th.")
[edit]
Help! Flood Attack at Chinese Wikipedia Now!
Some evil guys attack Chinese Wikipedia by registing new users endlessly,
please help us to disable new user register.
Thanks.
This is the story of a real case on en: Wikipedia, prompted by a
journalist query on the subject. I'm sending it to wikien-l and
wikimediauk-l as it's on topic, and Aphaia suggested wikipedia-l would
benefit from it as well.
Full credit to en:user:Average Earthman on this one - he did an excellent job.
This shows how Wikipedia deals with hoaxes: patiently and carefully
the first time around, less patiently the second, shoot-on-sight the
third.
The (Glasgow) Daily Record articles:
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16929538%26method=full%26site…http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16929536%26method=full%26site…
The eventual Times article barely mentions Wikipedia:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2130227.html
- but I got a nice thank-you note back from Mr Lister and I think we
can say another journalist has successfully been informed.
I also blogged it: http://reddragdiva.livejournal.com/307381.html
- d.
Original query:
My name is David Lister and I am a journalist for The Times. I am
doing a story today about a man called Alan McIlwraith, a call centre
worker in Glasgow, Scotland, who has been passing himself off as an
Iraq war hero. Mr McIlwraith, who claimed he was a sir and had
received the Military Cross, was exposed by a Glasgow tabloid
newspaper today; the British Army says that he has never even served
in its ranks. He also had an entry in wikipedia - which I am assuming
he wrote himself - in which he was described as someone who "can get
things done and is thought of as a hero…by the UK and NATO". His entry
has now been deleted: can you please tell me when it was removed? I am
assuming that he wrote this entry himself - what are the procedures
that one has to go through to submit an entry on your website?
My reply:
Creating an article is easy - the only requirement is that you
create a WIkipedia user account, which is about thirty seconds'
effort. (This requirement was put into place in November last year,
which is actually after the Alan Mcilwraith article was first
created.) This means it's very easy to create something. The figures
as of November last year were about 4000 new articles a day, 2000 of
which were deleted within 24 hours. We've become ridiculously popular
since then, so I'm sure the numbers are much higher now.
We get a lot of rubbish, but we operate on the principle of "keep
it open and clean up later" because it generally works well enough and
*most* jokes and hoaxes are easily spotted. Ever since the John
Seigenthaler hoax late last year, we've kept a *particularly* close
eye on the biographies of living people, which helps in areas such as
the current case.
The article "Alan Mcilwraith" was created and deleted a few times.
I have administrator powers on English Wikipedia ("administrator" =
"janitor", rather than any sort of "senior editor" - an admin has
various cleanup powers, the ability to block vandals, delete and
undelete articles, etc.), so I am able to look up the history of the
article.
It's actually a pretty typical example of how Wikipedia deals with
people putting rubbish or hoaxes in, so I'll detail exactly what
happened for you to give you an understanding of the process. We get
this sort of thing all the time, and we have reasonably effective
procedures for dealing with persistent hoaxers.
The article was first created 18:28 GMT, 5 October 2005 by an
anonymous IP-address user. It was a badly-spelt and ungrammatical
article detailing Mcilwraith's improbable heroics, and reads like
something a high-school student would create as a prank - a lot of
deletable articles are of that description, and we're used to this
sort of thing. The creator kept working at the article, also creating
a username (User:MilitaryPro) to continue working on it - that
username doesn't appear to have written on any other subject.
(MilitaryPro did add Alan Mcilwraith to "List of honorary British
Knights" on 21:18 GMT, 4 October 2005, but someone removed him two
hours later, at 23:19 GMT, with the comment "del Alan Mcilwraith -
Google has never heard of him - pretty good for someone supposedly
knighted this year". Lists of this sort tend to be on a lot of
editors' watchlists.)
MilitaryPro uploaded a purported picture of Mcilwraith:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Alan.No2.jpg , uploaded 22:36 GMT,
9 October 2005. Note that he marked it "may be reused for any
purpose", so if MilitaryPro is Mcilwraith and he owns the image, he
has in fact legally released it for free reuse if you need a pic :-)
The article triggered the suspicions of Wikipedia editors in
fairly short order. One user, "Average Earthman", tagged it
"cleanup-verify" at 17:49 GMT, 10 October 2005, with the comment "This
smells like a hoax to me. What year was he made a CBE then?" The
"cleanup-verify" tag not only warns the reader, but adds tagged
articles to a category for dubious articles, so others can easily look
over what needs an unforgiving eye.
Ten days later (19:48 GMT, 20 October 2005), with no verification
having been added to the article, another editor (user "RussBlau")
marked it for deletion. You can read the deletion debate at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Alan_Mcilwraith
- typical for an obvious hoax or joke article with no-one coming
forward with anything to verify otherwise. So it was deleted at 11:50
GMT, 26 October 2005.
Interestingly, the same IP address that had created the article
had come back on 24 October and blanked the article, before its
deletion but after the first two comments on the deletion debate.
MilitaryPro came back and created the article again at 18:39 GMT,
21 December 2005, working on it for a few days further, both as a
logged-in user and as an anonymous IP address. (The same IP address
also tried twice to delete the previous deletion discussion from the
list of old discussions, though these changes were quickly spotted and
reverted.)
"Average Earthman" spotted the recreation at 12:44 GMT, 22
December 2005 - presumably he had the article on his watchlist - and
tagged it for deletion again, then re-tagged it 24 December for speedy
deletion as recreated deleted content, with the comments: "No, forget
the AfD, it's already failed in the past. Same lies again. It's a
hoax. And in case it isn't speedied, I still think it's a hoax. Uni at
14? Advisor to Generals at 22? No google hits? Really?" It was then
deleted the second time at 17:50 GMT, 24 December 2005.
MilitaryPro came back to create the article a *third* time at
10:53 GMT, 17 February 2006. It was tagged two minutes later, at
10:55, for speedy deletion as "patent nonsense." MilitaryPro then
blanked the page at 11:00; "Average Earthman" tagged it for deletion
*again* at 11:09. (The more persistent the hoaxer, the easier they are
to deal with.) It was deleted for the third and final time at 16:19
GMT, 17 February 2006, and the page was locked with a "do not
recreate" notice (as you can see at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mcilwraith ) a few seconds later.
Interestingly, the hoax has been noted on the talk page of the
article (the "discussion" tab at the top):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Alan_Mcilwraith . Now that he's
making the papers, we have the question of whether his newfound fame
as a hoaxer makes him notable enough to have a Wikipedia article!
