[Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian

[Craig Franklin]

As someone said previously, the mailing software truncates stuff after the
word "From", if it begins a sentence, probably because it thinks that's part
of the mail header.  No conspiracy or cloak and dagger stuff, just a bug
that probably ought to be looked at.

I'd take this opportunity to ask if there's any other background to what
Kohs is talking about there.  I know that he twists stuff and he's an expert
at making himself look the victim, but I've seen that particular story a
couple of times and the way he was quickly kicked from IRC does look pretty
bad.  What, if anything, is he omitting from the story?

Cheers,
Craig Franklin



On 24 July 2011 04:01,  <foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:17:50 +0200
From: Mike  Dupont <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Greg Kohs and Peter Damian
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
       <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
       <CAF0qKV3nvKKZN0boR-Wp3ZBRRrDigbfW5=i4PSk_2xqW-Ew-mg at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

It looks like my message here was truncated from the mailing list archive,
so I am reposting it.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061709.html

Mr Kohs pointed this out here :
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=34460
thanks,
mike
--------------- Original Text ----------------------------------

Hello,

>From what I have seen about Greg Kohs is that he does have some
interesting points to make, but I do see that he is jumping to
conclusions and does seem to have a biased viewpoint.

People want to make their own decisions and have enough information to
do that. We don't want to have important information deleted away
because it is uncomfortable.

Banning him makes it less likely for him to be heard, and these
interesting points which are worth considering are not heard my many
people : this is depriving people of critical information, that is not
fair to the people involved.

Just look at this article for example, it is quite interesting and
well written, and why should it not be visible to everyone on the
list.

http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikimedia-foundation-director-admits-to-sweetheart-contracts

Deleting and banning people who say things that are not comfortable,
that does make you look balanced and trustworthy.

The Wikimedia foundation should be able to stand up to such
accusations without resorting to gagging people, it just gives more
credit to the people being gagged and makes people wonder if there is
any merit in what they say.

This brings up my favorite subject of unneeded deletions versions needed
ones.

Of course there is material that should be deleted that is hateful,
Spam etc, lets call that evil content.

But the articles that i wrote and my friends wrote that were deleted
did not fall into that category, they might have been just bad or not
notable.

We have had a constant struggle to keep our articles from being
deleted in a manner that we consider unfair. Additionally, the bad
content is lost and falls into the same category as evil content.

Also there should be more transparency on deleted material on the
Wikipedia itself, there is a lot of information that is being deleted
and gone forever without proper process or review.

In my eyes there is a connection between the two topics, the banning
of people and the deleting of information. Both are depriving people
from information that they want and need in an unfair manner.

Instead of articles about obscure events, things, and old places in
Kosovo you have a wikipedia full of the latest information about every
television show, is that what you really want?

I think there should be room for things in places that are not not
notable because they are not part of mainstream pop culture, we also
need to support the underdogs of Wikipedia even if they are not
mainstream, Mr Kohs definitely has something to say and I would like
like to hear it. And the Kosovars have something to say even if the
Serbs don't want to hear it. The Albanians have something to say even
if the Greeks don't want to hear it, etc. There are many cases of
people from Kosovo and Albania driven out of Wikipedia and depriving
the project of important information because they are not able to get
started and the contributions are so far way from the dominating
political viewpoint of the opposite side that they don't even get a
chance to be heard.

We need to make a way for these people to be heard and to moderate the
conflicts better, that will make Wikipedia stronger and more robust.

thanks,
 mike