[Wikipedia-l] Re: toki pona

Thu Sep 23 08:21:33 UTC 2004

Node, some friendly advice - Wikipedians are some of the most
forgiving of folks on the 'net.  Being so argumentative is puzzling.
Just say sorry and move on.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:08:14 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you're objecting to articles, yes. What you do is replace the
> > copyrighted text with a copyvio notice.
> 
> Yes. I suspected that the text of each and every single one of the
> articles I replaced was copyvio (with the exception of a couple I did
> by mistake which had no content at all).
> 
> > The problem here, as I hope you've figured out, is that you weren't
> > accusing specific articles of being copyvio. You were accusing a whole
> > project of being a copyvio.
> 
> No, I wasn't. I wasn't "accusing" anything of being anything.
> 
> Regardless of that, there were quite a few pages (mostly talk pages)
> that I left up.
> 
> > Thus the specific article replacement
> > served only to make a mess that was hard to clean up. Pretty much this
> > falls under "don't disrupt Wikipedia to prove a point." You picked a
> > disruptive and difficult to deal with way of expressing your concern of
> > copyvio that made a lot of work for people, was rude to people, and was
> > rightly read by people as a slap in the face to an entire Wikipedia.
> 
> ...
> 
> I did it out of concern and with nothing but the best intentions. I
> would hardly call it "disrupting wikipedia" as if you look at RC on
> tokipona: there have been no revisions since Angela rv'd my edits and
> an edit or two I made a few hours after that. Nobody even noticed what
> I had done for nearly 24 hours after I stopped doing it, and over 24
> hours after I started doing it; before I started there hadn't been any
> new articles for quite some time anyways and most non-new-article
> edits were very minor, and even they were few and far between (compare
> this to other Wikipedias with similar or even smaller contributor
> pools such as kw:, lb:, etc which have at times grown enourmously in
> the course of a week or less; although to be fair there are wikipedias
> with similar or [possibly?] larger contributor pools that grow at the
> same [or lower?] speed as tokipona:)
> 
> Nobody came to me about the notices - had they discussed them with me
> and I realised that was not the way to deal with the issue, I would've
> taken them down myself.
> 
> The intention was not to be rude to people. If I wanted to be rude to
> people, I would've done it on en:, and it would've probably been a lot
> worse than a couple of hundred copyvio notices.
> 
> As to whether or not I support the existance of a Toki Pona wikipedia:
> 
> Independent of all other concerns, yes. It's a conlang - I still
> support it. I also support Wikipedias in other conlangs; but given
> recent decisions on policy regarding wikipedias in such languages it
> seems very unfair. That doesn't mean I think Toki Pona should be
> removed.
> 
> If you really care about whether or not I support conlang Wikipedias, get this:
> 
> After a long heated discussion on the length and purpose of en:'s
> Template:Wikipedialang, Raul654 - the sysop who banned me for a short
> period of time for ths very incident - was the one who removed
> tokipona:, a Wikipedia with more than the required 100 articles, from
> the template citing "no original research". In none of my edits did I
> remove the link to the Toki Pona wikipedia, and any other links I
> removed (such as tlh:, jbo:, etc) were only in the interest of a
> peaceful resolution of the argument over the template (I was for
> keeping it long, like it used to be). Of course one could argue that
> by not adding it back, I was thus explicitly declaring my contempt for
> tokipona:. But I have learned from the past that edit wars are
> generally not nearly as important as they seem in the beginning and I
> recognised that for the best solution to the problem both Raul and I
> would have to make concessions, which is of course very true in real
> life as well (If you think I need to learn life lessons, look at all
> the heads of state in the world today who do not seem to recognise
> that in a conflict major concessions are required from both sides,
> regardless of who is "right").
> 
> That's nothing against Raul, many people clearly don't like tokipona:,
> but I would generally not count myself among their ranks. FWIW, I
> truly cannot consider myself entirely for conlang Wikipedias, because
> I do think that perhaps the best solution for these Wikipedias today
> is to search for a home more accepting of them, which would obviously
> not be reached by abrupt content removal and such would not prove a
> point in that direction either.
> 
> > You could have posted to the mailing list, to Meta, asked in IRC, or
> > even, since I know you've had a conversation with Sonja on IRC, asked
> > her specifically, since you knew she was involved in the project. You
> > did none of these things. Instead, you caused trouble.
> 
> 1. Sonja is not on IRC all the time. When she is, she's not always
> active in #wikipedia. The same is true for all non-bots.
> 2. As I noted before, I was under the mistaken impression that as far
> as copyvios go, policy said to act first and ask questions later to
> protect the interests of Wikipedia (as I have said before, IANAL, and
> apparently even in cases of blatant infringement there is plenty of
> time to take such things down, especially if legal action hasn't been
> threatened/taken)
> 3. As I said before, her comments on IRC were indicative of her not
> being too involved in the Toki Pona wikipedia.
> 4. I *had* asked her a day or so before, and she responded that she
> was basically worn out from all the attention she gets over Toki Pona
> and thus did not want to talk about it - that was the answer I got
> from her. The Toki Pona website otoh has the very ambiguous "(c) toki
> pona blah blah blah blah blah blah" which can obviously be taken to
> mean that Toki Pona itself is copyrighted. It has of course been noted
> that copyrighted material can be released, but as I said before in a
> cursory google search I found no implicit or explicit release on the
> part of Sonja.
> 5. "Instead, you caused trouble" implies that my actions were in bad
> faith, which I continue to assert they were most certainly *not*.
> 
> > As I said, I hope you understand this point. Because, quite honestly,
> > if you don't, that's even more troubling than your removal of a whole
> > Wikipedia.
> 
> What's troubling to me is that people have told me over and over how
> bad I am for doing that, that I shouldn'tve done it, that it was
> wrong, etc etc etc ad nauseam. I fail to see how one single person can
> believe that if they repeat to me basically the same things said
> before, many of them seemingly in contradiction to and without
> refutation or explicit dissent towards things I have already said.
> 
> While the volume of mail from the ML alone about this is annoying in
> and of itself, it certainly doesn't help that I have had been
> reprimanded similarly by just about everybody in #wikipedia whether it
> was gently or harshly, often more than once; I have also had (minor)
> issues in other chatrooms and on Wikipedia itself.
> 
> What I'm saying here is not that it's unreasonable for people to
> respond to an action they find objectionable, but rather that if it's
> been said already, you don't need to say it again because I heard it
> the first time and quite frankly if this never stops I will probably
> end up turning into a bad user (If you think I'm a bad user now, you
> wouldn't want to imagine me in that situation). If you want to turn
> this into a quickpoll/lynchmob, then fine, but if you're going to turn
> it into a tell-him-exactly-what-he-did-wrong-in-2-or-more-paragraphs
> fest, please leave me out as I've already heard it all.
> 
> --node
> 
> 
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-- 
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com