[WikiEN-l] BJAODN: a proposal

[phoebe ayers]

On 6/3/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/3/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
> >
> > Guy Chapman aka JzG schreef:
> > > On Sun, 3 Jun 2007 19:22:17 +0100, "James Farrar"
> > > <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > >> You think.  Me, I think it might have been exactly as stated: OK,
> > > >> let's finally grab this tiger by the tail.
> > > >
> > > >Yes, per [[IDONTLIKEIT]].
> > >
> > > Or possibly per the reason stated.
> >
> > No, apart from [[WP:IDONTLIKEIT]], [[WP:BLP]], [[WP:NPA]], [[WP:FU]] and
> > [[WP:NOT]], there was not a single reason for deletion of these pages,
> > and it's a scandal that they have not been undeleted already.
>
> The failure to recognize that  BJAODN deliberately violates the norms of
> the
> rest of Wikipedia in order to make the culture healthier and the
> encyclopedia better (similar to how people can experiment in the Sandbox,
> but not the mainspace) is extraordinarily disappointing.
>
> It's called Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense for a reason.


Yes.
----
In general, in comment on all the comments about BJAODN:

Any example of how a part of BJAODN violated the GFDL can be refuted with
another part that doesn't violate the GFDL.

For every non-funny joke, there was one that had me in stitches, and
probably you too.

For every dozen puerile misuses and 1/2 page cut there was -- if you looked
hard enough -- something that would make you laugh, and you'd realize you
were laughing because it was a joke about Wikipedia and you were a
Wikipedian, and that is a good feeling.

No argument about how it was "a massive waste of time" or "a complete
copyright violation" or "it was great through and through" or anything
similarly broad and undiscriminating is going to fly in the face of a group
of pages that were nearly six years old and incredibly diverse.

So: in the interests of not sitting through more copyright arguments and
more deletion procedural arguments -- remember, every time you quote an
acronym God kills a kitten -- let's get back to basics.

I'd like to propose leaving the old BJAODN pages alone for the moment --
recognizing that they are (hopefully) preserved in a dump and the deletion
logs for the dedicated and foolhardy to sort through, remove the funniest
bits for a future archive and credit if necessary. Anyone who wants to
figure out how to make these available for non-admins to work on I'm sure
would be welcomed, and hopefully the pages won't completely die by being
left alone. If others want to fight to get them undeleted, or act boldly to
undelete, my bias is that this would be a good thing, but doing so
immediately and unilaterally will just cause further drama.

In line with this, I would love to see a discussion about keeping or
deleting the pages with the participation of many more experienced
Wikipedians and those familiar with the GFDL; there have only been a few
loud voices so far, and while not a "crucial" page, BJAODN is a page that
predates most of the policies and 90% of the content on this site. Thus I
feel sure that many people beyond the people who have spoken up so far have
opinions and strong feelings on it.

I'd also like to propose a new BJAODN page -- BJAODN for the 21st century --
that could come into being over time, where we work out a way to keep a
small portion of the funny stuff; perhaps equitable basic policies for
quoting pages, removing any hint of BLPs or attacks, and only quoting
fair-use sized chunks of deleted pages. Yes, it's not encyclopedic; but yes,
there is always going to be an urge to share that All-Time Best Vandalism
Evar that had you cracked up for 20 minutes with your friends. I've had that
urge; so has everyone who's ever added to BJAODN. How do we make a place for
this? [1]

Lastly, I would love to see a discussion of whether this was appropriate
behavior by the deleting admin -- he's gotten praised by some and abused by
others. Does this sort of thing fall within being bold? Is this unilateral
behavior desirable? Something to encourage or revile? Let's leave aside
current policy about speedies, copyvios etc and think about what we *want*.

Finally, three challenges. First, I'd like to challenge those who care about
it to improve the existing BJAODN page, maybe giving a short explanation of
this phenomena -- especially for the sake of the many, many incoming links
-- and showcasing some of the early diffs, which are pretty funny. It would
also be great if an admin could retrieve the page titles of the various
BJAODN collections, and post them as a reminder of what we had.

Second, I'd like to challenge everyone who is arguing about copyright on
this mailing list to take the amount of time you've spent sending emails,
double it, and spend that amount of time checking articles and new
contributions for copyvios from material in the outside world. I guarantee
you'll find a few, and this is a MUCH bigger problem than BJAODN ever was.

Thirdly, for everyone who thought that the collection of jokes wasn't funny
or encyclopedic and therefore should go: a challenge to remember that good
faith and tolerance of a lot of random crap is what makes any of us put up
with this website at all. While no one is more self-righteous about making
this a serious encyclopedia than me, we're talking about 60-odd pages out of
7,000,000, and things like BJAODN are like amateur comedy hour, or karaoke
-- you may not like it, and it may be painful to listen to, but that doesn't
mean you have to go on a crusade against every karaoke bar in the city and
get a court order to shut them all down.[2]

Thoughts?

phoebe

[1] The last thing I added to BJAODN *still* makes me laugh when I think
about it.
[2] though if you do, I won't stop you; I can't stand the stuff.