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Ethical Paid Editing Idea
Main Concerns About Paid Editing (please add more if I left some out)
Ethical treatment of content
Paid advocacy
Paid sock/meat puppeting
Commercialized atmosphere on Wikipedia
Ideas for addessing those concerns
Do you think a uniform and templated userbox that is only allowed on the User Page that describes the editor in third person, a brief history, along with suggested contact information might be a useful solution? For example:
Paid Editor Notice for
Golding Bird
Ethical Disclosure: This editor is interested in paid editing opportunities.
All edits and content added or removed from Wikipedia shall be done in a ethical manner and in compliance with the Neutral Point of View policy. Advocacy or promotional material is forbidden.
Paid Editor Notice for
Golding Bird
Ethical Disclosure: This editor has confirmed their current status as an employee of "Rube Goldberg Machines, Inc." as commisioned for the purpose of editing on Wikpedia.
All edits and content added or removed from Wikipedia shall be done in a ethical manner and in compliance with the Neutral Point of View policy. Advocacy or promotional material is forbidden.
Would a userbox formatted with these conditions seem to meet people's concerns and if strictly limited to such userboxes, encourage a modest tone and neutral approach to an editor promoting their own skill in editing? Does this just create another problem to solve? Ideas? Comments? -- Avanu (talk) 01:28, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Throwing userboxes at the problem is not going to change the essential nature of paid editing. Paid editing is a business with a customer. The customer is the entity that is paying for the editing. To be successful, a good paid editor has to have a set of happy customers. No amount of userboxes is going to change the fact that the needs of the client come ahead of the needs of wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Userboxes with words like "ethical" and "compliance" will have about as much effect as they do on Wall Street. --regentspark (comment) 01:41, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
The problem with that stance is that it assumes an adversarial relationship between wikipedia and a paid editor. That the two would have contradictory objectives. Now in some cases, particularly paid advocacy, this will undoubtably exist. But it doesn't have to. There are undoubtably companies, schools, and even wealthy individuals whose objective would simply be to improve the Encyclopedia. Now they might be interested in doing so in certain silos, but I have zero doubt that given the opportunity, there are people who will be paid who can do so objectively within the confines of wiki-policy.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 01:54, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
You're right that there are benefits to advocate editors (paid or unpaid) and that the relationship doesn't have to be adversarial. But, assuming that paid editors and unpaid editors will act in the same way is naive (with apologies). Money has its own logic and an unfortunate reality of life is that we humans like to get our hands on as much of it as possible. Every paid editor will act in a way that is beneficial to the client but not necessarily to wikipedia because those repeat consulting contracts will only come from happy clients. An "ethical" paid editor can, for example, keep within policies through the sin of omission rather than that of commission or by actively pushing policies at the margins, or by simply following a 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back' policy with other paid editors. Unethical paid editors will simply delete negative information and leave it to the community to detect and add it back in again. We can't just assume that a userbox and a disclosure or two is going to make this conflict of interest go away. Instead, we need to think about how to make this work in a way that allows paid editing to be done in the open but with minimal damage to the free spirited ethos that we have here. Jimbo's suggestion of restricting paid editors to the talk page is one such idea since every edit will then be appropriately whetted. That doesn't mean that underhand paid editing will disappear but that we'll have the tools, and the right, to deal with it if it is detected. --regentspark (comment) 02:18, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
This looks like a very useful suggestion, per reasons expressed here. Also, because per COI there should be some way of indicating an editor accepts pay. There should also be a place, in the userbox or somewhere, where an editor can share a list of articles which they have been/are being paid to edit, as shown, since this is the information most relevant to the community. But the contact link may be too much. Be——Critical 02:50, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
It would be rather easy to put in a pull down list with a show link. We can do that manually with our current coding anyways. SilverserenC 02:57, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Paid editors should be restricted to the talkpages. They can argue their case and if they are good at that they will get their edits included. But the hard part is changing the policy to reflect any choice we as editors make. It's been a while since I registered but I would assume that during the registration process there would be a number of direct questions all in regards to paid editing and advocacy to filter out those that are specifically being paid to edit by a specific company and there will probably need to be some way to discourage the misuse to both the editor and the company hiring, perhaps even a task force and a notice board to deal directly with reporting specific behavior similar to 3RR. I agree with RegentsPark however, we need the tools to deal with it and I don't see a box being the answer. I think Wikipedia may have to add a new user lever like "users", "Autoconfirmed Users" and now perhaps - "Confirmedpaid users". Perhaps this is something that only the company itself would be able to register for as the "payer for" and not allow the individual to do. In fact this would allow the company to even make a direct donation to the Wikimedia Foundation and I think rightly so.--Amadscientist (talk) 03:36, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
FYI: I changed the style of the box just a little bit, changed the icon also. -- Avanu (talk) 03:49, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
"This editor is interested in paid editing opportunities" is not a disclaimer...its a classified ad. It sounds like a request becuase you worded it as a simple "interest". Something you would see on a userbox, but being paid is a "professional" decision and therefore the disclaimer would be more along the lines of "This editor has been confirmed as an employee of "Company name" as commisioned for the purpose of editing on Wikpedia".--Amadscientist (talk) 05:30, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I would assume that it might say "interested" if you are not being paid by anyone yet, and your "confirmed" text or something if they were actually being paid. -- Avanu (talk) 05:35, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
That would not be allowed as promotional in itself. Are you serious...? You want people to declare they are just INTERESTED in getting paid to edit? And you think that will be acceptable?--Amadscientist (talk) 05:43, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't particularly care or want any specific outcome, but the idea that they might declare such an intent seems to be one of the possibilities being discussed, so I made that example to demonstrate such a possibility. -- Avanu (talk) 05:47, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
By the way, the fictional company named above, Rube Goldberg Machines, Inc., has a fantastic fictional motto: "Accomplishing simple things through complex means since 1914." I'd love to see how Wikipedia might adopt some of Rube's fantastical approaches to getting a task done. Seemed to fit considering how the debate on this has gone so far. Hope you don't mind me interjecting a bit a lame humor. :) -- Avanu (talk) 06:12, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
It is probable that paid editors will eventually be made to declare such. I just do not believe an infobox is the answer as it only appears on the user page. The user should also be a seperate user level and be green linked like a red linked user with no userpage and be limited to discussion on the talk page.--Amadscientist (talk) 06:19, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure I'm completely following you. My thought was that this would be front and center on their User page (especially if they ARE being paid). I'm not quite following the 'separate user level' comment and the red link, green link part. -- 06:24, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
He's essentially saying that we should make paid editors a different class of user in terms of actual abilities with their accounts and that are exhibited by green usernames, thus marking them forever as a lower class of editor on Wikipedia. SilverserenC 06:35, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. Surely each company time edit made by a paid editor can be marked as such in some way so that it can recieve extra scrutiny for NPOV. Like edits marked minor (m) paid editors' edits could be marked with p, linking to the wikipedia's policy page on paid editing. Their paid editing should be part of a COI statement, with no solicitation for email enquiries. SkyMachine(++) 06:39, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Then we need to do that for everyone else who has a COI and add a little "c" next to their edits. Since everyone has a COI with only a very small amount of exceptions, we should probably take the necessary steps to just have the little c implemented for all user accounts. SilverserenC 07:15, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
The trouble is that money talks just about louder than anything else, even pride & ethics. Only reputation is as powerful an influence on our behaviour, which is why there is a market for paid editing in the first place. SkyMachine(++) 07:29, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
The thing is, I don't agree with that. If you are being paid, you are being paid to get your content onto Wikipedia and to make sure the content stays there. It being deleted kinda ruins the point and just upsets the client. Therefore, the best way to make sure the content stays is to actually follow the rules. Thus, paid editors are much more likely to follow the rules of Wikipedia than other people who have other kinds of COI are. The zealous fan only cares about getting their way in an article and don't care if the content is removed, they'll just put it back in. And it's the zealous fans that turn into the sockpuppeteers. SilverserenC 07:34, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
While it is great if professionals can follow the rules, it is even greater if they can follow an even more thorough rule set designed to mitigate foreseen problematic ethical dilemmas they may face. If a p marked edit is deleted for poor reasons it can be restored by pointing out the poor reason and outlining good reasons to keep it. SkyMachine(++) 07:50, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
What would be the point of marking content that is often not an issue? We would be much better off marking users who are actually a problem to the encyclopedia, like most of the users who edit in the Arbcom sanctioned areas. SilverserenC 07:53, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
People are more likely to act ethically if under social pressure to do so and if they are likely to be found out if they have done wrong. They are more likely to act unethically if it is unlikely their behaviour will be discovered for what it is. Marking the edits fulfils this transparency role. SkyMachine(++) 08:08, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
The thing is, you're relying on people to state that they are paid editors. And that admission, in itself, would imply acting ethically and would, thus, be entirely useless for stopping or deterring the unethical ones. It would be much easier to just stick with the current process we have, which is talk page usage, though paid editors are allowed to make uncontroversial edits, such as grammar fixes. SilverserenC 08:17, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, not happening. No talk page restriction, no badge of shame. That's not the policy, nor is it the practice, nor likely to be. Not that if you can't even get an ad off Cla's page, you are very unlikely to get people to go along with your proposition that at present paid editors are restricted to talk pages.--Wehwalt (talk) 08:24, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of pre-making the templates to cite certain statistics. The FA game can be tough enough already without making it a tangible financial asset of paid editors according to an enforced rating scheme. I think that there's already a certain amount of cliquishness in terms of people working together to get certain sorts of articles through, and if this sets in ... it's going to be a very political "you scratch my back I scratch yours" sort of process for groups of paid editors looking to increase their banner stats. This only makes it worse. There's a real risk that the FA status, and therefore, Main Page content, will become more or less property of paid editing groups, guarded jealously. Wnt (talk) 07:45, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
It seems like a good idea to get paid editors on board with a branding kind of concept - wearing a scarlett letter, if you will, that indicates exactly what they are. Some may like it, some may not - the whole point is to get paid editors on board with our culture and our policies. I don't think the "marking all edits with a p" is at all feasible or even likely, so there's no point in talking about that. At least there would be a category attached to the template which would list all paid editors as such.-Stevertigo (t | c) 08:30, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
As I said, badge of shame. Nonstarter. What I think you are not getting is that there's really no incentive for paid editors to compromise and allow restrictions when the Cla68 userpage dramah has shown the paid editing police have no guns.--Wehwalt (talk) 08:39, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Though it would admittedly be amusing to see the crucifixion Wikipedia would get in the media for fabricating its own Star of David. SilverserenC 08:51, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
mixing your metaphors there. SkyMachine(++) 09:01, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Somewhat purposefully. SilverserenC 09:10, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
"You shall not press down upon the brow of editors this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify Wikipedia upon a cross of gold." That's self promotion, that is. Advertising.--Wehwalt (talk) 09:10, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Marking the Nazis might be prudent though, so that you can know them when you see them. As for the media you don't really need to gift them a headline, they can always just go and make one up. SkyMachine(++) 09:32, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Let me be clear on this. Anyone making the argument that requiring disclosure of paid advocacy is somehow equivalent to the racist practices of the Nazi Germans cannot ever be taken seriously. Such argumentation is a disgusting insult to people who have real concerns about this issue. I think more than anything else, this kind of desperate rhetoric shows how weak the support is, and the total lack of coherent arguments in favor of allowing paid advocacy.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:54, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Jimbo, you can't disallow paid editing any more than the government can disallow drugs or file sharing. The choice is to let the community know who's a paid editor, or to disallow such knowledge. Be——Critical 13:40, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I never ever said that requiring disclosure is the same, I fully support disclosure. I said that marking them in some way (adding a p to their edits in this case) and making them use a user account that has less actual priviledges than a normal account is similar to the practices of a badge of shame like the yellow badge. Quite a bit of difference there. SilverserenC 14:00, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
As I say, this is an absolutely morallly reprehensible statement - disgusting. You should be ashamed, and you are hereby formally invited to stay off my talk page until you apologize.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:20, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
About yellow badge: Anyone unaware, of what Jimbo is noting, should read the 2 articles "Yellow badge" and "Yellow triangle" and consider the prior analogy. -Wikid77 23:36, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
Quite a bit. Anyway, it's not going to happen. Considering the level of revulsion toward paid editing, very few paid editors, if rational, would declare themselves. But disallowing such a declaration by the few honest ones (who should be congratulated) is just burying the communal head in the sand. Be——Critical 14:07, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
It wouldn't be a badge of shame but a badge of begrudging tolerance. We would rather they not be here, but they are, and you can not control them if they remain underground. Create a realm of tolerance where they declare their COI in a highly visable way so that they are under scrutiny of the community to ensure proper professional ethics and core wiki policies are maintained. There needn't be any tolerance for paid editors outside this monitored realm, the rules are the rules. SkyMachine(++) 15:47, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
And they are somehow breaking some ephemeral, non-existent rule by merely existing, I presume? SilverserenC 16:02, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I think that the idea of engaging constructively with paid editors should be explored further, but carefully. For example, as I said above, I'm concerned about paid editors accumulating FA count as a tangible asset. That said, there are tangible assets paid editors could accumulate that would not be so disruptive - i.e., a portfolio of the actual paid editing work that they've done. Since a company presumably is less interested in the ability of an editor to work on an easily featured topic than on his ability to do the sort of paid work they're hiring him for, I think a portfolio would make a better asset, and it happens to have the advantage that it doesn't require the paid editor to try to win games that were meant to be good-natured competititons among volunteer editors. Wnt (talk) 16:18, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
My concern is that this is being seen in terms of the editor and not the company using cold, hard cash to WRITE any information into a Wikipedia article. Not just influence or advocate NPOV. This issue has brought up a few other issues such a COI, advocacy, blocking policy and implementation as well as POV, OR, and synthesis concerns etc.. I can't help but wonder if this is REALLY NOT about editors alone and that we are not addressing the other half of the situation. The Company. Right now we only have a discussion of concerns but I see few major problems. The barbarians are not at the gates...the gates are open as they have always been and any control of content has been through the application of policy, guidelines and any applicable brightline rules. Clearly there are some who want some kind of change to policy but we need to discuss the current policy as written and how, or if it is a roadbloack at all to advancing the discussion so that concerns can be addressed. We have paid editors. We need to define as a community what a confirmed paid editor is. We may or may nor need to adjust the prose in a particular guideline but the question of whether a fundamental change such as "Greenlinking" JUST the user name. That wouldn't mark their contribution IF the community agreed that confirmed paid editors are restricted to arguing their cases on the talk page. Actual information going into the article would be done as a reguest. Greenlinked users would essentualy be blocked from contributions to article space, etc. and also limited or excluded from policy consensus. Now this is just the editor as I said, perhaps the suggestion of even allowing a company to register with Wikipedia may be controversial and I am not sure if it could even be implimented, but yes....the Company WOULD have to register themselves AND the editor they are paying for and individual editors would NOT be allowed to register themselves to avoid BLP issues of false claims of payment from any named company that isn't doing so. If this sort of thing (or something similar) could be implemented with current policy it could be a discouragement to companies to do this without full disclosure, by editing in the open as restricted by whatever community consensus.--Amadscientist (talk) 18:34, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I can see the point if the point is cash paid to "manage" a WP article and delete unfavorable information. But let's say the Baseball Hall of Fame, concerned at how few HOFers have FA, decides to hire a noted FA writer with experience in sports articles to get 5 HOFers to FA for, say, $10,000. Problem with that? What if they are called HOF Wikipedian in residence and get to go to Cooperstown for their annual baseball history conference in May and get a photo pass for the big ceremony in August? What if they have to repay any portion of the salary, oh, let's call it stipend, that they fall short on? Short of a bright line no cash for editing nohow (and, I think, that fortress has fallen), the endless nuances of a situation makes it impossible to draw a bright line. The editor is certainly entitled to trumpet it on his userpage, and perhaps to link to stories. In the final analysis, I think people will avoid or evade any restrictions on paid editing or the advertisement thereof, and we may as well accept it's going to happen and start working on managing the very real effects that will have on Wikipedia.--Wehwalt (talk) 10:09, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
You speak of writing to "get to FA" as if it were purely a quality issue, but I think there is a lot of politics involved. Long, highly encyclopedic topics on broad scientific issues tend to fail because there is always something to add or argue about. What succeeded, for a long time, were articles about specific video games, usually related in some way to a game about to be released on the market. The argument being that because every last scrap of data possibly available about the game had been wrung from the industry magazines and game designers' comments (playing it, that is - Wikipedia never expects people to understand how to make or market one), the article was comprehensive. It got to the point where video games were one of the major categories of Wikipedia features. During all this time, editors who don't otherwise believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy were entirely willing to believe that these were being written by devoted fans. Now, you can say that the video game articles really were Wikipedia's best work, but I don't believe it - I think the goalposts were moved to make them FA quality, and I think the same will happen whenever people are paid to bring things to FA. But what really makes me wonder is --- anyone see video game articles featured on the front page recently? What happened to all those "fans"? Wnt (talk) 15:05, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't disagree with you which is why I will not tread that path until it is worn smooth by the slippers of other pilgrims.--Wehwalt (talk) 16:14, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
If I may butt in, I'd say I can't decide which is sillier, pretending that paid editing does not exist on wikipedia, or punishing the tiny portion of paid editors who want to be open and honest about it.
Is the objective here to make sure all paid editing is hidden away and hard to identify by discouraging integrity ?
Personally I'd say give them a break, I'd certainly prefer someone who says 'hey I'm a paid editor, you should check WP:COI, you should check my POV, you should check this and this and this,' rather than the sneaky subversive sockmasters who cause no end of grief to so many and make editing and using an article talkpage such a headache. But hey, let's all escape to fairyland where paid editing doesn't exist, it's such a lovely place and going through our day to day activities on wikipedia in a delusional state is going to be easier somehow ? Penyulap ☏ 02:32, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) #Fundamental problems with MOS:IDENTITY I've raised a concern that two important wikipedia guidelines: that we use the most common name found in secondary sources to determine an article title, and that we prefer titles that reflects the names that people and groups use for themselves. Current policy offers no clear way to determine how to handle a case where the most common name is not the name used by the person or group. So far I've seen this conflict arise in two articles on controversial subjects, Arab citizens of Israel, where it was resolved in favor of using the term preferred by the group, and Bradley Manning, where it appears that editors prefer the term used most commonly in the media (although there is some dispute over how Manning chooses to identify himself). I've proposed a solution to this inconsistency at the Village Pump and I would appreciate editor feedback. GabrielF (talk) 06:22, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
Global editor counts rise after 5 years
The other-language Wikipedia editor counts have been posted for March 2012, and the total active global Wikipedians was 81,986 active editors (>5 edits per month), rising slightly (+2%) for the first time in 5 years:
Although March 2012 was the first springtime in 5 years for the global editor total of all-languages to exceed the previous year (March 2011), the past 12 months have shown solid strength which indicated that the trend for the year was to grow higher, rather than lose editors, as in the prior 4 years. While the editor counts for the English, German, and Swedish Wikpedia have been sluggish, the overall global increase came from growth in several other languages: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Italian, Armenian, Hebrew, etc. I will refrain from any humor about this strong support from worldwide editors, due to frustrations which some editors might still be experiencing. However, the increased active-editor count, as a wide-spread global trend, indicates that the world is writing Wikipedia, with a steady interest. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:48, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
I Just Had To ...
... post you personally, Mr. Wales, and say THANK YOU for the opportunity to contribute to the INCREDIBLE project known as Wikipedia!
My parents bought me a set of World Book Encyclopedias when I was born (back in 1960), and they let me access these treasure troves of knowledge ad libitum from birth. It's wildly nostalgic to pull them out and look at them now, nearly a full half-century later, and still run across the occasional petrified fragment of peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich lurking deep in the cracks of the various volumes! LOL! My access to the World Book allowed me to stay wayyyy ahead of my peers in reading skills and breadth/depth of knowledge - literally from Day One. This gave me a HUGE amount of self-esteem, not to even mention the ability to win a ton of bets on "trivia" over the years!
Along with taking care of my beloved and incredibly beautiful stepdaughters, Beth and Somer, your/our project has: (a) given me great motivation to keep on living, (b) allowed me to create things that are WORTH passing on to future generations, and (c) made it possible for me - in a weird way - to "pay back encyclopedias for what they have done for me".
While I dearly loved those old World Books, THEIR @#$%^&* BUREAUCRATS WOULD NEVER LET ME EDIT THEM!!!
In their defense, though, they were INFINITELY more useful than your/our encyclopedia with regard to being able to "stash" secret stuff, like money and "love notes"!
Deletionpedia: something that I haven't heard anyone talk about in the Wikisphere for quite some time. Was suddenly thinking about it yesterday and wondered why it became defunct in 2008...and why it has remained defunct ever since. More details here. Any thoughts would be awesome. I want to facilitate discussion around this.--Coin945 (talk) 06:59, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Deletionpedia still fast and crisp: I had almost forgotten that a wiki could display articles so quickly as Deletionpedia still does. It still runs some old fast version of the MediaWiki software which was extremely fast (as a monobook skin), before all the peculiar "improvements" were made, here, to simplicomplify the formatting of how articles are displayed. Dpedia has at least 124,000 entries, because each article has a short redirection title, where the typical deletion timestamp "(deleted 29 May 2008 at 20:55)" has been omitted from the short title. Of course most of those articles, from February-September 2008, have no bottom navboxes, so they are already twice as fast to display. I wonder if it would be possible to have an optional "WP-classic" interface which could display articles using that old lightning-fast MediaWiki software from 2008. I am still stunned that Deletionpedia works so fast, even though I have known for a long time, by "Wirth's Law" that computers get slower every year. It happens everywhere, not just here. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:24, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
If its still going strong, then why hasn't it gotten passed 2008 articles (i clicked "random articles" at least 8 times and all of the articles were deleted in 2008 so assume this statement is correct)? How come Wikipedia bots can create an insane amount of stubs on cities in a insanely short time, but Deletionpedia is still so far behind? I'm really intrigued to see some deletionpedia articles from the past few years, but I can't :( --Coin945 (talk) 12:00, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't know why, but any site open to user comments/contributions on the Internet that says it is "down for a week or two" is dead for the count. The second you see a message like that, just scratch it off your list. Wnt (talk) 16:27, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Well, if it is still working but just incredibly slow, can we update the software (or whatever it wuld be... sorry, not that good wiki computer-related terminology) to get it running faster? If it is completely "dead for the count", then can we get it (or a new similar thing) up and running again?--Coin945 (talk) 01:39, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
If you look at the Recent Changes page there's something odd; the most recent changes are listed as being from 1 December 2012. --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 13:24, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I'd think that a wiki for deleted articles should avoid having any deleted BLPs. The reasons should be obvious, I hope. BLPs are often deleted for reasons which indirectly amount to avoiding harm to the subject, even though "avoid harm to the subject" is never written out directly. Keeping the BLPs around causes the same problems that policies like BLPPROD, BLP1E, BIODEL, etc. are meant to solve in the first place, and it's not right to do that. A quick check shows that Deletionpedia does have BLPs hanging around. Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:43, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
As I mentioned in the Village Pump discussion, copyvio article must also be kept off Deletionpedia.--Coin945 (talk) 15:12, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Series episodes
Although it might be comical, if I get an answer, I'm probably totally excited. I can better translate English to German than German to Englisch. So I hope that you understand everything. I have a matter to you and hope to your opinion. On Meta-Wiki: Wiki is not paper stands, and you have also agreed to it, that it could exist to each episode of a series an article in Wikipedia. This almost all language versions support but not the German language Wikipedia. They demand for an episode this (hopefully I have translated it correctly):
Individual episodes of series are considered relevant if they have
received a relevant award or
experienced separate and independent public reception. Simple references in listings magazines or publications themes (e.g. series guides, fanzines or similar.) are not considered public reception in this sense.
IMHO, the German Wikipedia appears to have the right idea (talk→BWilkins←track) 11:56, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
How does that second clause differ from the WP:GNG? Fact is, most every episode of every show has multiple, independent, non-trivial coverage in reliable sources published on the Internet these days. Major entertainment websites tend to have recaps for anything, which is fine. The real question in my mind is, in light of this, why not just presume each episode from any notable show is notable? Jclemens (talk) 19:53, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
The reason for making them sections instead is that they would be more useful--most such shows have running elements, and anyone who looks up one of them is likely to want to look up several. Writing them together permits more intelligent coverage of the plot as it develops, without having to repeat everything from the beginning to make it intelligible. .But articles or sections, there's a problem getting people to write them sensibly: most are either way too sparse and like a TV-guide or over-detailed and like a fansite.
It basically does not matter whether something has a separate article or a section--this is hypertext and can be arranged however anyone thinks is useful: making this into a question of "notability" just confuses the important question, which is how to write the material on the topic. For companies, a separate article matter to them -- Google et al greatly priviledge words in the title of an article-- but this shouldn't affect an episode. (the only reason I've ever defended separate articles is to keep the contents from becoming a two line plot teaser, which is what the fiction minimalists always do if not prevented. (and this is our recurrent problem of having workable procedures for dealing with disputes over whether there should be an article, but not about what should be in an article DGG ( talk ) 20:10, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Picture this
Just like templates have documentation, imagine that every single article had a similar page that was an "elevator pitch" version. Imagine that the mainarticle template not only linked back to the original article, but displayed the elevator pitch version. You could have consistent short versions any time the original article was used in a mainarticle format. You could full-protect the short form to ensure that they were of a) quality and b) immune to vandalism. (talk→BWilkins←track) 21:04, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
From Simple WP articles: Several people, including Jimbo, have requested similar, concise overviews, but the "doctoral dissertation" crowd have a way of complifying the lede of each article (including the "contagion vector" of each disease), so perhaps get a simple intro from Simple WP. Many articles on enwiki have become almost unreadable for teenagers, especially many articles in computer science, where even I (with 2 degrees in Comp Sci) will try to read those and ponder how those articles ever became so unreadably convoluted. Try to keep a simplified intro on Simple WP, and then we can consider cross-displaying the text. With Simple WP, at least there is a mission to keep it simple, as a chance to introduce "brain surgery" to an average teenager, rather than risk the typical complexity which some want to add, such as: "Brain surgery is a portmanteau ad publium for the endocranial suturing prima facia of the frontal and temporal lobes inter alia with the extracranial cerebrovascular system in restoration or suboptimization of endocephalic synaptic operations". On Simple WP, a simpler description could be written to avoid that type of "intellivandalism" or unneeded complexity. -Wikid77 11:03/12:44, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Signpost
Along the lines of clarifying your views on paid editing, would you be interested in doing an interview for the Signpost's Does Wikipedia Pay? series? I would love for you to speak about topics like the 'brightline rule', how views towards paid editing and COI have (or have not) evolved over the years, your experience working with PR organizations and firms like Bell-Pottinger, and how you view the future of paid editing in this community. I could give you the questions well in advance for you to work on over time. And all interviews are reprinted in full with exceptions only for brevity, sequence, or clarity. Cheers, Ocaasit | c 16:07, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Sounds great. Would like to do this in about a month or so, after my FAQ is well-established.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:08, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Awesome. I'll keep an eye on the FAQ and keep it in mind for my questions. Talk to you then. Cheers, Ocaasit | c 00:26, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Just a follow up on Manuka Honey: you posted a comment at Talk:Manuka_honey#Many_puffed_up_claims last year concerned about the many puffed up claims in that version of the article [1]. It seems that while the honey does appear to have legimate antibacterial properties in vitro, in vivo studies (seen from the reviews) indicate there is only evidence that it is possibly useful for the most superficial of burns (the article was updated accordingly). IRWolfie- (talk) 23:43, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
As expected, the pageviews of article "RMS Titanic (and related articles) were very high for April, with the centennial date centered on 15 April 2012. In fact, for several days during April 2012, the pageviews of "RMS Titanic" (Titanic-stats) even exceeded views of "Wiki" (which has been viewed 65,000-105,000 times every day). The high pageviews of RMS Titanic were similar for the other-language Wikipedias, with peaks on both 11\16 April, one day each after the anniversaries of the departure and sinking, except in Spanish Wikipedia (es-Titanic-stats), where curiously, the peak pageviews included the exact days of the departure and sinking, rather than 1 day after, as in other languages. Anyway, the reader interest is a real tribute to all the dedicated work that numerous Wikipedians, in all languages, added during recent weeks, and the detailed coverage in various related articles was amazing. Meanwhile, all during April, the overall English Wikipedia readership was steady, with "Main_Page" viewed nearly 7.3 million times every day (Main-Page-stats), similar to the March 2012 readership. Hence, the elevated interest in RMS Titanic did not affect viewing of the enwiki Main_Page. Wikipedia continues to be a steady, general resource for a vast array of topics. -Wikid77 06:48/20:34, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for raising this, Wikid77! I'd like to highlight the fact that a number of editors collaborated very effectively for the weekend of April 14/15 and delivered one Featured Article (Sinking of the RMS Titanic), one Good Article (Titanic (1997 film)) and 16 DYKs which appeared on the Main Page over that weekend. The Main Page Titanic articles collectively recorded nearly 1 million page views during the centenary weekend. This was a huge success and shows what can be achieved by editorial collaboration. I'd also like to highlight the help given to this project by Wikimedia UK, who generously provided a grant to assist with the development of the Titanic articles. Prioryman (talk) 09:27, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Planned collaboration explains numerous improvements: OK, all that planning explains why the improved coverage about the RMS Titanic was so broad. There have been other events with anniversary dates where the event did not generate such a wide, balanced coverage. However, in this case, I noticed major text being added about Titanic in March, at least a month in advance, which gave more time for wider views of the topics. -Wikid77 11:48, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Well, the featured article work began as far back as last November, so it's definitely been in gestation for a while. To be honest it would have been nice for the main RMS Titanic article to have been made a featured article as well, but there wasn't enough time for that - it's worth noting that if it had been a featured article it would have probably been in the top 3 all-time most viewed FAs. Even without being a FA, it got more views on a single day than any FA other than Barack Obama and John Lennon. But overall I think we can be proud that we got so much done collectively and provided such a good set of articles on the centenary weekend. Prioryman (talk) 00:24, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps plan 4 months for FA of special event: As a recap for Jimbo, in planning lead time for a special featured article, then it looks like a 4-month window should be anticipated to adequately cover a single event. For example, there might be a centenary interest in the February-1914 launch of HMHS Britannic, especially if a 3D, blockbuster film was planned as a "Titanic sequel" to follow the intriguing lives of several people, or friends, who sailed on Titanic and then 4 years later on Britannic, which sank so much faster, with hospital staff onboard. Certainly, articles about the comparison of the ships, and the rapid launching of lifeboats so much faster, would be potential sub-articles. I am just imagining a single, focused event, with related tangent articles, and wondering how much time to plan to cover them to be ready within days of the anniversary. -Wikid77 17:46, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Apology accepted. I hope you'll join the talk page with more questions and any objections to the proposed answers. You are precisely the type of person who I think should get behind this - or leave Wikipedia with dignity if you can't.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:19, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Paid Advocacy FAQ
This seems to redirect here for talk... The original statement "Paid advocates are encouraged to follow the Wikipedia:Bright Line engagement strategy..." will fly. Current version "Paid advocates will be required to follow the Wikipedia:Bright Line engagement strategy..." if retained will be the cause of, ummmmm, some debate. Putting it mildly... WP:BRIGHTLINE is an opinion essay. Carrite (talk) 16:48, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Right, I think you have a valid point. This particular piece should not link to other pages, but should contain all the concepts in one place, not least of which becasue paid advocates are attempting to subvert every page related to this topic.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:07, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
This is an essay in which Jimmy Wales expresses his strong opposition to paid editing. As it stands, there is a certain amount of contradiction of existing policy on WP:COI. This allows editors to make uncontroversial edits, such as removing obvious vandalism. There is also a view that a outright ban on paid editing would be hard to enforce, and cause editors with a COI to fly under the radar. Personally, I am not opposed to anyone removing disruptive material as quickly as possible, although under the Bright Line engagement strategy this would be disallowed. The real problem comes when, for example, people are paid to create articles about obscure pop groups and curate them simply because they are being paid to do it.--♦IanMacM♦(talk to me) 19:20, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Please add this as a question to the FAQ?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:13, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
RE: "...not least of which becasue paid advocates are attempting to subvert every page related to this topic." - Actually I see a lot of Wikipedian activity and very little "subversion" by paid editors. I realize it's hard to tell the players without a scorecard, but there is a huge range of Wikipedian opinion on this matter — aside from the fact that the PR people are anything but of one mind and one voice on the matter themselves. Essentially, here's my takeaway as a Wikipedia participant at CREWE, which Phil Gomes speaks to in the current Signpost: There is no huge effort among the PR people for direct editing. They are agnostic. The essential concern is that mechanisms for the repair of erroneous information are inadequate. I see no great desire for whitewashing of content, just a desire that Wikipedia's goal of NPOV coverage of encyclopedic topics is realized as living fact, not just standing in space as an idle goal. They see great deficiencies in pieces with very high search engine juice on a fairly massive scale and are increasingly unwilling to put up with 2004 content standards in the current environment of developed mainstream acceptance of Wikipedia as a factual source. If anything like voluntary brightline is to work, it must be coupled with a new mechanism for the rapid correction of bad content. Carrite (talk) 23:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC) Last edit: Carrite (talk) 23:57, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Related topics at RfC/COI: For months (since 27 February 2012), there have been related topics discussed at WP:Requests_for_comment/COI, and some of the topics might cross-connect (On 9 May, User:Balloonman quoted several old comments from there posted months ago). Also, I wonder if more people have considered the impact of some paid museum employees coordinating volunteers to update articles which relate to items in the museum's collection. It makes sense that museum officials would want Wikipedia to fairly represent the museum, and its major artefacts, but by perhaps "inspiring" the museum volunteers to update articles in a certain manner. The museum goals would come from paid employees, but most editing would be by museum volunteers, or a similar organized effort. However, it might be a "hobby" of a particular museum employee who wants to keep Wikipedia "aligned" with the museum's current collection or practices. -Wikid77 06:32, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
@Jimbo. I'm confused. (not for the first time). Is it your intention that editors ask questions at User:Jimbo Wales/Paid Advocacy-FAQ and you, and only you, will anmswer them? Currently other editors are answering which really makes the whole FAQ pointless. Answers get changed and edited and altered. I see extreme value in the Question part of the page. But, I see no value whatsoever in the Answer part unless they are YOUR answers... and they remain your answers without being changed. ```Buster Seven Talk 12:50, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Your visit to Kyiv
Dear Jimbo,
Here I've read you are planning to visit Kyiv. Is it true? If so, ukrainian wikipedians are much interested to meet you, and would be very glad if you could allot some time for us.
Sincerelly, A1, wikipedian from Kyiv. — Preceding unsigned comment added by A1 (talk • contribs) 06:26, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I will be in the Ukraine twice in the upcoming month. I'd love to visit with Wikipedians at that time, and I'm in touch with someone from the chapter (by email) to talk about the timings.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:15, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
MyWikiPro
Since I know someone is going to make a section here at some point, I might as well be the one to do it. I think we can firmly say that MyWikiPro is an example of how not to do paid editing. The setup of the site is very obviously designed to hide information so that we don't find out who it is or the clients. It is most definitely this sort of thing that we need to be discouraging, not the people who are open about their affiliations. I don't know if it's completely accurate, but it does appear that User:Bernie44 is the account in question. Not sure if he's a sockmaster or not. Considering the site says that it has the resources of a "confirmed Wikipedia contributor", I would have expected someone a bit more...not newish? Though I guess the idea was to be able to hide behind the scenes.
There's also a Wikipediocracy thread about this, which I will not link to here, per Jimbo's desires.
I will note though that, more or less, the subjects the account has been working on do appear to be notable. The user just doesn't seem to know how to format pages entirely proper yet or what references one is supposed to use.
I will also add that the retaliation AfD made on him seems kind of petty. Extremely petty, actually. But, whatever, not like I expected any less in that regard. SilverserenC 06:49, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
On a separate note, can people please learn that if you add a non-descriptive tag to an article (like a NPOV or COI tag), you have to also explain on the talk page what exactly in the article violates NPOV. Otherwise, the tag is completely useless, because no one else knows what you're talking about. Just because you have a COI on a topic doesn't mean you can't write neutrally, which is why we have the Connected contributor template for talk pages. It's just annoying having to switch all of these out. SilverserenC 09:04, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
I believe Jimbo has re-iterated his viewpoint ad nauseum. If a person edits ethically and in line with the NPOV pillar/policy, then it doesn't matter if they are paid for that. If, however, they become an advocate, continually introduce promotional or biased content, and use unethical methods to prevent normal Wikipedia processes from occuring, they shouldn't be here, again regardless of whether they are paid, but if they are paid, it is that much worse. In the end it is about editor behavior, not where they get their paycheck from. -- Avanu (talk) 09:09, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
Agreed. If they had been open about all of this, it would have been fine. The articles they write are rather nice, like the Chicago Jewish Star. The issue here is that they were purposefully trying to go under the radar (more or less) on this and therein lies the problem. Of course, if they are up for doing this out in the open now, not that they have much of a choice, we can move on from this and they can keep contributing good content. I should probably go let them know about the Wikiproject. SilverserenC 09:19, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
A discussion was opened 20:16, 4 May 2012 regarding Mywikipro.com/User:Bernie44 at the COI noticeboard. Please feel free to add your thoughts there. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 17:26, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
My own objection, as I've said before, is that paid advocates edit their own company's article for very similar reasons to why people edit their own BLPs. Yes, it's often self-promotion. Yes, it's a conflict of interest. Yes, the editing can be done as a whitewash. Those are all true of BLPs too, yet we understand that despite all of these problems, sometimes editing your own BLP is necessary anyway. We should recognize that the same is true when a company (via its workers) edits the company's article. Ken Arromdee (talk) 16:55, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
I agree with all of that completely, but I also feel that the editing should be done openly. And I disagree with the part of Bernie's statement that refers to announcing your COI not being a requirement in WP:COI. We should probably get that changed. SilverserenC 18:06, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
1) I don't believe that announcing anything is necessary when editing your own BLP.
2) Anyone who announces their COI immediately gets a target painted on themselves, particularly by users who think the COI editing requirements are stricter than they actually are. That was one of the things that the Cla68 deletion discussion demonstrated (although there were other factors involved, since that was more than just an announcement of COI). Ken Arromdee (talk) 14:39, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
the articles on the newspapers were interesting in being an area under-covered by Wikipedia, and where that coverage which we do have is usually much more superficial articles. It's a shame that people should have to pay for it--we need a campaign to be proactive and write articles in all such fields in advance -- as well as any commercial business that might be notable. We might have less trouble with the promotional articles on the mildly notable if we ourselves wrote non-promotional articles. They would of course still have to be monitored, but we'd divide that up the usual way, by each of us monitoring the ones that we write. DGG ( talk ) 20:01, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Just a heads up, the story was picked up by Time Magazine on their 'Moneyland' blog: [2]. Ocaasit | c 01:23, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
So what happens when an article written for a client by a paid editor gets deleted? I'm very concerned about the legal ramifications of doing so, given that money is involved. --MuZemike 19:08, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
legal ramifications for who? We make no promises that articles submitted will be kept. As for them, it's between themselves and the client.
Talkback Picture Permission
Apparently nothing to do with me, that I can see
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Hello, Jimbo Wales. You have new messages at GoShow's talk page. Message added 00:00, 10 May 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
GoShow, please see my reply to your identical message at the Help Desk.--ukexpat (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Fear Jimmy
I fear I'm doing something wrong. I have submitted an article entitled "Commitment-based Management" several times, but have not had a sausage in response. I'm an handicapped with brain cancer, and this article is the start of a series, documenting everything I have learned about this incredibly powerful method. It is my legacy. Can I have some help in getting this published? Thank you
David Le Brocquy dlebrocquy@vision.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dlebrocquy (talk • contribs) 10:49, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Your perspective would be of value
Hi there. I would appreciate it if you could visit Talk:Muhammad. The article, Muhammad, has changed significantly since it originally passed WP:GA several years ago. It now exclusively states in the opening paragraph that Mohammad is the Founder of Islam. It has relegated to a footnote that Muslims, numbering more than a billion today, don't ascribe to this Western belief. I have started a discussion on the talk page concerning this and also initiated a GA Reassessment here. I would value your input. Thanks so much. Veritycheck (talk) 01:41, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
In that discussion you are a model Wikipedian. Thank you. I'm not an expert on Muhammad, so I don't have a strong view on the content issue although I did find your argument persuasive (and it seems to be generally supported by most people who are putting forward actual arguments and by all people who are putting forward actual arguments that make sense to me). I'm always disappointed to see a great thoughtful post like your first one in that discussion responded to with fairly outrageous screams about disruption and archives and so on.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:46, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
We've been having a lot of discussions on this page for the past months about paid advocacy. I find many of the arguments that are raised have already been answered multiple times, so I want to make a nice concise page of Q&A about my position so that people can get to up to speed quickly. While I think this page should ultimately reflect my position (it's a subpage of my user talk page), I'd like us to work on it collaboratively, since many people understand my position quite well, and I want even those who disagree with my opinion to have the opportunity to pose legitimate questions there (which I'll likely reword to make more general).
This is a good idea, and I would ask for paid editing issues to take a break from Jimbo's talk page for the time being. The key points have been raised and discussed in numerous different threads recently, so it would be better to work towards a set of FAQ answers.--♦IanMacM♦(talk to me) 09:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Although your contributions to that page reflect our current community viewpoint I doubt it reflects Jimbo's viewpoint, which is different. Whilst interesting, Jimbo's viewpoint is quite different from the broader community view - so I'm not sure I see the overall utility. --Errant(chat!) 10:51, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I think my view is the one with the strongest community support. A handful of noisy advocates try to create a different impression, that's all.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:22, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Behind the scenes all Wikipedia is is a "handful of noisy advocates" :) (seriously; do you think being uncivil and dismissive is helpful?). Appeals to the silent majority are, more often than not, straws to be clutched at. --Errant(chat!) 15:05, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm not appealing to a silent majority, you are. There are only a handful of people who take the extreme minority position that we should welcome paid advocates. You pretending that this is community consensus is just wrong and ignores the evidence.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:12, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I disagree; the recent discussion on COI is clear that there is much divergent opinion on this point. Take, for example, the rather useless definition of paid advocacy on the FAQ page; I am sure it is obvious why the metric "promote the interests" is entirely useless. I, and many others, are concerned of two things; that a) this is just a weaselly way of introducing (longer term) tighter restrictions on general paid editing and b) missing the point entirely (i.e. focus on the word "paid" rather than the actual problem: "advocate"). If you are so confident of your viewpoint why not take it through the proper community process - i.e. a focused RFC - with a direct proposal. And as a final comment; my viewpoint is supported 100% by the current guidelines. Yours is not. --Errant(chat!) 15:25, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
You can repeat it until you are blue in the face. Won't make it true.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:11, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
WP:COI; Avoid editing or exercise great caution when editing articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with. Jimbo Wales: Paid advocates should never directly edit any article on a topic for which they are an advocate. Seriously; I can forgive you being a step out of touch with some elements of the community (being more engaged with the off-wiki side of things), but you could at least read the relevant existing guideline... --Errant(chat!) 20:31, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Are you deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue? I've read the relevant guideline many times, and it is out of step with the views of the community and I am advocating for a change. It stays that way because a tiny handful of people prevent the change. That's going to change when we have a proper RfC that reflects the very very widespread views of the community. That's the whole point. You're out of step and out of line.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:44, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
The main reason I keep coming into this discussion is because I see your blustery and superior attitude, and it frustrates me... so, sorry, I will let you get on with this process. And I look forward to the RFC, which I am (unfortunately) confident will be shot down. And thus the problem will be brushed aside yet again. --Errant(chat!) 20:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
If you think it unfortunate that the RfC will be shot down, you might want to help rather than perpetuating the myth that the community wants paid advocacy.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:03, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Firstly; outright misrepresenting my comments in an attempt to invalidate my contribution is upsetting to see. This is the not first time you have done so in this area - either that or attacked me (directly or indirectly) in a vaguely uncivil way. Please do not do so again. In terms of engagement; honestly I have tried. I tried to engage with you and your supporters (who I think could equally be seen as a "noisy" minority trying to subvert community process); but just got indirect incivility, bluster and poorly focused ideas (i.e. on "paid", not "advocacy"). The discussion so far has spectacularly failed to intelligently engage the core issues or consider the significant areas Wikipedia fails in protecting companies from harm (you FAQ being a case in point; it focuses on the, important, negative aspects of paid advocacy - but doesn't contain any helpful self-criticism). Then I tried to engage the paid advocates, but your Bright Line comments appear to have alienated most of those from being interested in dialogue. So I keep doing my bit on the sidelines addressing actual content issues; it's not glamorous but it at least picks away at the core matter. What upsets me most is that you seem to be casting my viewpoint (that a bright line is impractical and wouldn't change much, that we don't handle issues with company articles well at all, that being paid to write about something doesn't mean you can't ever be objective) as "ErrantX thinks the community wants paid advocates to be able to advocate on Wikipedia". That strongly discourages me from engaging! And what is more when I do, I feel you've struggled to address any of these thoughts. So in the interests of a final attempt; if you are seriously willing to consider my thoughts in any depth I would be very willing to write them up for you. --Errant(chat!) 21:35, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Add your question to the FAQ. Other than that, I think you are not listening to me, so I see no point.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:33, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Well, if you don't think I am listening, we are at an unfortunate empasse. However I now see, inexplicably, that you have changed your stance and now agree with what I have been saying all along... so there seems little else to disagree over :S --Errant(chat!) 05:36, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
I have not changed my stance. I removed a link, which someone else placed, to an essay that I did not write.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:15, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
It might have been better to use User:Jimbo Wales/Paid Advocacy FAQ so that page's talk could be used for general discussion. People with an interest in this topic might like to see Signpost where I just left a snarky comment. Johnuniq (talk) 10:42, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Done! Good idea, thanks!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:28, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Some sort of definition of paid advocacy would seem to be in order.--Wehwalt (talk) 11:52, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
For practical purposes, anyone working in the PR industry can be considered a paid advocate. People are rarely paid to say or do things with which their bosses disagree.--♦IanMacM♦(talk to me) 12:02, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I think that's right, but too narrow. So far I've defined it through some intuitive examples. I don't think there are many very complicated edge cases. This is actually pretty simple. Not all paid editing is paid advocacy, although the advocates of paid advocacy often try to confuse the issue by pretending they are the same thing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:50, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
In fact, your second question does exactly that. You lump the two together, Why should there be a ban on accepting payments for editing Wikipedia articles.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 19:10, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
What you say here is false. No advocates against paid advocacy confuse the two things. The text is now in flux, and I will fix the question you reference.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:12, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to respond, "no Advocates against paid advocay confuse the two things?" I'm not sure what that means---it ain't clear at all. But if you are saying that opponents of paid editing don't confuse the two things, then you are mistaken. A lot of the people who are arguing against paid editing, do so from the premise that paid editing = paid advocacy; that anybody who is paid is by definition evil and can't be trusted to edit wikipedia. The two are not necessarily the same.
A person could be paid to edit/improve articles and not violate our expectations relative to NPOV/V/RS/etc. I am in favor of modulating and regulating paid editing (e.g. establishing controls over the subject of what is/is not expected), part of that would be to control/regulate paid advocacy. I am not in favor of banning paid editing as paid editors can bring something to the project---but they need to be identified to help identify potential COI/Advocacy breaches.
I also don't think your "bright line" approach is the ideal one. I think it will just encourage more obfuscated editing that already occurs.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 19:26, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Straw man. Show me any oppponent who thinks that a professor editing in an area of expertise is the same as a PR person editing to make a company look good. You can't because they don't exist. You can find advocates of paid advocacy making that argument, because it confuses the issue.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:10, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Have you been following the arguments made on your own talk page and elsewhere related to this? Apparently you have not. Throughout your page and the RfC people have issued blanket condemnations of paid editing seeing no difference between paid editing and paid advocacy... if you refuse to see it and want to believe otherwise then I don't know what to say. But the facts here and elsewhere belie what you say. I started to go through the edits, but decided that if I provided a list of every edit where somebody said something negative about paid editing as a whole and condemned it blanketly, that you might construe it as the norm. BOTH SIDES conflugate the issue between paid editing/advocacy.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 21:25, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
As to grey areas, of which you see few. How would you address a paid Wikipedia-in-Residence as a museum editing (regularly) the articles about their employer? There are several examples of this happening - on which side of the divide to they fall? Does it make a difference if the articles in question are currently Good Articles? --Errant(chat!) 21:38, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
For me? Who says I see few? I see many. It is the people who want to draw a bright line who see few.
But to answer your question, I would want their edits to be closely monitored, but I have no problem with their doing so if they can adhere to our policies/guidelines. If they prove to be advocates and unable to do so constructively, then we can act---and act knowing their role. But a Wikipedian-in-Residence has an incentive not to rock the boat here. Since their identity is know, if they violate policy/create waves/get taken to ANI/ArbCOM over edits they make here, then that reflects on them AND their employer. If they are a paid employee, let it be obvious in their sig so that people could pay special attention to the edits.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 21:53, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Ha, sorry - I was picking up on something Jimbo said to you above. As to your answer; that pretty much reflects my view too. However I feel it highlights that the issue is not black/white - as such an editor still has the incentive to try and present their workplace in a positive light. --Errant(chat!) 21:57, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
They do, but if they incentivized to reveal their real world identity/position, there is also an incentive to play by the rules. Think of it this way, the Acme corp hires a "Wikipedian in Residence" (WIR) Their job is to monitor not only articles on Wikipedia, but also to improve articles related to Acme's areas of interest---let's say "oil." Well, what type of job would this "Wikipedian in residence" be doing if their articles were always being taken to AFD? Tagged with NPOV? If they were taken to ANI/ArbCOM for advocacy? By self identifying their positions, they put themselves at risk professionally in a manner that encourages proper behavior here. They also claim a certain amount of subject matter expertise. Make the WIR use their real name and have a name that indicates their editing. Require that they register their "Personal account" with OTRS/ArbCOM. Don't let them use their personal accounts on articles they are paid to edit/monitor, but highlight their affiliation/potential COI. Imagine the career success one would have if hired as a Wikipedian in residence and getting banned/indef blocked?---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 22:12, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
To repeat my challenge above: Find me one example, and we'll go chat with them. I don't think there is a single person, outside of advocates of allowing paid advocacy in article space who makes the ridiculous claim that a professor editing in an area of expertise is the same thing as a PR person editing to make their client look good. But you can easily prove me wrong: find me someone.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:36, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
So let's get this right. You presume that only proponents of paid advocacy convolute the terms Paid Advocacy and Paid Editing. I pointed out that this is not the case, that there are plenty of users who see any paid editing as being detrimental and lump the two terms together. People who refuse to acknowledge the possibility that a paid editor might be able to work within our guidelines. Yet, you deny it claiming that stance to be a straw man and that nobody who is against paid editing is out there convoluting the two? Well, these people seem to. Each one of them condemns paid editing blanketly and each one of them sees no difference between being a paid editor and paid advocacy. They convolute the terms and refuse to see differences between paid advocacy and paid editing.
If paid editing is now to be welcomed, I cannot help fearing for the continued viability of what I took to be a collaborative volunteer project. Rivertorch (talk) 08:31, 27 February 2012 (UTC) and What I do presume is that paid editing is uniquely problematic because it lies outside the collaborative volunteer environment Rivertorch (talk) 20:38, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
Paid editors should disclose that they are being paid, and should not be allowed to directly edit articles John Broughton (♫♫) 17:47, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
are not here editing to support our pillars and abide by our content guidelines. They are here to further their own goal, or the goal of someone who pays them. They do that for advancing their own situation, they do that to for financial reasons, or they are paid to do so to advance the situation or financial situation of someone they represent. --Dirk Beetstra T C 05:59, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
5.Paid editing represents a special sort of conflict that I think rises above personal traits, fandoms, and affiliations. It does require special attention. Not outright banning, but where paid editing is occuring, it should be under a higher level of scrutiny. --Jayron32 19:12, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
But in reality, paid editing almost invariably involves advocacy, because for the most part if a paid editor displeases his employer, he will lose his job or commission. So a paid editor can only be neutral if the employer requests it, or chooses to allow it...But a paid single-purpose account arriving at Wikipedia for the sole purpose of editing in a certain direction will not have that background, and it is hard to imagine in such cases that payment will not, as a matter of fact, equal advocacy. SlimVirgin TALK|CONTRIBS 02:33, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
In fact, its their job to make sure that consensus is always on their side. The rest of us are volunteers unaware of the reason for their fervor to win. ```Buster Seven Talk 09:28, 28 February 2012 (UTC)(NOTE: false premise here, he describes paid advocacy.) (Note by B7---Inacurrate interepretation by User:Balloonman. I describe Paid Political Operatives)
Getting paid creates an obligation to the person that paid them. Unless the near-zero chance occurs that the payer's orders were to to further the interest of Wikipedia, such is inherently an actual COI. North8000 (talk) 23:03, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
I would have never joined if I knew that some people were being paid to edit. For me, paid editing destroys my entire dream of what I'd like Wikipedia to be. Gandydancer (talk) 03:24, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Paid editors have but one function: Controlling content to the satisfaction of the client. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 08:44, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
The quality and content of an editor's outpout is directly affected by any financial motivations they have for editing. That an editor could be unpaid and also edit with a bias is beside the point. ThemFromSpace 21:42, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
2.Oppose; I think we should have drawn a bright line in the sand long ago: if you're a paid editor, you're inherently so conflicted that we don't want you here. --Orange Mike | Talk 17:33, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
Paid editors can be sacked or lose there commission if they fail to produce expected results and they are more concerned about it than Policy,guidelines of Wikipedia..The inherent conflict of interest editing is incompatible with the aim of producing a neutral, reliably sourced encyclopedia.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 16:25, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
When a person argues a point because they are paid to take it, it is really their employer who needs convincing. The paid editor is not, therefore, arguing in good faith. Other forms of advocacy or editorial intransigence aside, paid editing is inviting lengthy disputes and discord, and our policy aught to be aimed at minimizing it. --TeaDrinker (talk) 01:02, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
We SHOULD discriminate against paid editors, because they're being paid to provide content for someone to promote that person's views. That's an inherent NPOV problem. 86.** IP (talk) 22:47, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
Paid editors, even when they appear to follow policy, have an inherent NPOV problem. Nobody is willing to pay for a purely neutral perspective and paid editors will always have an obligation to side with (or against, depending on whose doing the paying) the subject they are working on. ThemFromSpace 21:57, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
I could go on... I only reviewed about a third of the current RfC on COI and didn't event touch the AFD on Cla's page (where some outrageous statements were made) or your own page. But plenty of users cast all paid editing as being no better or different than paid advocacy--plenty fail to see any difference. I now fully expect to see you reach out to each of them and chat with them. I would also invite you to talk to Fred Bauer---he seems to have a particularly dim view on paid editing.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 03:16, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
I will reach out to each of them. I don't think any of them are taking the position that you think they are taking, but we'll see. Could you tell me where you took this text from, so that I can click on their names to leave them a message rather than having to do a lot of cutting and pasting?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:18, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
They are all taking the position that paid editing is bad and shouldn't be allowed period; and that it is bad for the reasons that you and I describe as paid advocacy.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 14:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't think they are taking that position. I think they are speaking loosely. I think if we ask them about it, they'll all say (or nearly all) that they don't mean all paid editing. I don't think, and this is what we disagree about, that they are deliberately conflating the two or failing to see the difference between the two. But we'll ask.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:52, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Read the RfC. They may agree that advocacy is worse, but many people refuse to acknowledge that there is any meaningful difference between paid editing and paid advocacy. They believe that once $$$ is involved, then all else doesn't matter. That somebody by their very nature of getting paid, is by definition a paid advocate... hell, I think I quoted a few people above who said just that.---BalloonmanPoppa Balloon 15:06, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Can you give me the link? It will be helpful for me to be able to click through and ask my question, thanks!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
It is, moreover, antithetical to Wikipedia's long-term goals to accuse such editors of being "paid editors" which, more properly, should apply only to editors who create an article with an expectation of financial remuneration for articles which do not actually obey WP:NPOV. Thus the current WP:COI is more a problem than it is a solution to the actual situation now faced by the project. It leads more to an accusatory environment than is proper per the core values of professional conduct towards other editors. And most certainly no change should be used to reward those who have been found to have improperly used the system to attack other editors as having had a COI in the past.Collect (talk) 12:37, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Jimbo, most of those responses are in opposition to my position (second item in the TOC bearing my name; the first is a summary of the TimidGuy remedy), that "paid" vs. "not paid" isn't really the issue, advocacy is, a position that (despite how poorly I may have phrased it) essentially mirrors your from the 2009 Paid editing RfC. I'd encourage you to look at the dialogues throughout that page, starting with the opposes to my view, and see how badly the community is fractured on this. There really and truly is a large body of editors who cannot see the difference between paid editing and paid advocacy, even with presented with concrete examples like the Google medicine initiative where experts were apparently paid to improve Wikipedia in an encyclopedic and NPOV manner. Jclemens (talk) 16:46, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Question re commons
Hi Jimbo and talk-page watchers. About a month ago, I nominated a bunch of files which were uploaded on Commons by one user at Commons:Deletion requests. I checked back today to see if they had been deleted, and it turns out that they had not. I felt that these images fell beneath being obviously copyright violations, but there was reason to doubt the uploader's claimed authorship. So I checked to see if my deletion request was an exception, only to find out that there are unclosed deletion requests from December 2011, many of which are suspected copyright violations. My question after all of this, is: is there something Wikipedia can do to block these files from being used here? The community at Commons seems unable to deal with the volume of requests for deletion, and the volume of material which are potential copyright violations. If these files were hosted here, they would be dealt with relatively quickly at WP:possibly unfree files. I'm not anti-Commons, but I wonder if the community here can have confidence in Commons' ability to keep their project copyvio-free. Thanks, 109.76.208.76 (talk) 12:26, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Doesn't seem very feasible. Have you said at Commons that you believe your particular case is urgent for some reason? I'm waiting around on another lot there which I'm rather sad about, it looks like we'll have to remove most images of modern origami because folding a model from a design doesn't give the right to commercial use of its image, and commons allows commercial use. In a number of cases at commons the right decision isn't obvious and the implications are nasty so people need to check up and be sure. Dmcq (talk) 16:27, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Allowing people to upload images and have them be immediately available for use without any kind of vetting that those images are not violating copyright and are in keeping with the stated purposes of Wikimedia Commons is such an obvious shortcoming that any suggestion that the WMF respects copyright is laughable. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:54, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Can't we vocally disassociate from Commons and advice users of en wikipedia to upload here not there and keep local and have an on en wikipedia reassessment of copyright and project scope of files we accept via commons? Youreallycan 17:18, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Well I don't think that my case is any more urgent than any of the similar cases which also have been ignored for months, I didn't write here to get my case looked at, just to raise the wider issue. Maybe one of the problems is that there seems to be no triage to deal with urgent cases first. It is also worrying that at Commons:Commons talk:Deletion requests there is talk of cases "falling though the cracks", i.e., not being dealt with at all. I've no problem with the upload first, ask questions later philosophy, as long as there are enough people patrolling new uploads to catch all of the violating stuff, this is patently not true of commons, given the amount of copyvio material I have seen there that have been around for ages. 109.77.71.82 (talk) 17:19, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Any backlog exists becuase there are not enough people monitoring. Stupidly shortsighted "solutions" like wanting to disassociate from Commons does not fix anything. All it does is deny the other language Wikipedias from using our images and deny our ability to use theirs. The only solution then is to have individuals at 100+ projects upload the same files locally, which is a massive waste of time and resources, creating 100+ backlogs to monitor and patrol. The question here is how best to encourage more people to help out at Commons. People trying to turn it into an "us vs. them" situation are, frankly, doing active harm to Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Encouraging a silo mentality is damaging to this project. Resolute 17:37, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
It is not a silo mentality to desire not to be associated with a broken aspect of the project. Damage to the project .. is creating an environment where focus is on out of scope content and copyright issues are not addressed whether willfully or because there is not the manpower, because no one wants to contribute in such a toxic environment - Asking users to go contribute to Commons in the current environment there is not really an option. All users that feel there are problems at Commons that are not being addressed should imo already be dissociating themselves as individuals and uploading local only. - Youreallycan 17:54, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Additionally, preventing commons images from being used here (I wouldn't go that far) would not prevent commons, and therefore the other Wikipedias, from using images uploaded here, in much the same way as free images uploaded here are routinely moved there. Also, nothing would prevent editors here from uploading images from Commons, as long as due diligence is done. 109.77.71.82 (talk) 18:12, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
That's a very interesting point.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:57, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Huh, I nominated an image for deletion at Commons in January and it's still there. I was worried I hadn't done it right, but I guess I'm not the only one who has seen this happen. Mark Arsten (talk) 18:25, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Punish rude users here by blocking until they delete 2,000 Commons images: I am a firm believer in directing troublesome users to perform tedious work to regain access, such as deleting 2,000 images from Wikimedia Commons, before being unblocked. You've heard the expression, "If I had a nickle for every...". If every person who posted a severe insult were blocked until deleting 2,000 images from Commons, then both problems would be reduced, and people would be fighting to be the first to delete (and find more) invalid images. As quality improves, lower the task to "deleting 1,000". Of course, there must be thousands and thousands of invalid, unsourced images there among the many millions, based on random samples of image-searches. And there is, likewise, no shortage of rude comments on enwiki to incur KP duty CDP (Commons Deletion Patrol). -Wikid77 19:57, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
The flaw in that suggestion is that not everyone invested in this discussion has the tools to just go in and delete, and even if we did, the "keep 20 copies of blurry penises" cabal would just undo the deletions anyways. Tarc (talk) 20:01, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
As much as we may disagree from time to time, Tarc, I have to hand it to you: you nailed this one.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:55, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Would tag speedy by {copyvio}: The alleged concern was to quickly remove the copyvio images, while identifying each copyvio webpage, and tagging as "{{copyvio|1=Copyvio from webpage...}}". The work would include finding the webpage of the original image, to allow speedy delete (which the cabal allows!). However, there might not be that many obvious copyvio images, in reality. -Wikid77 23:04, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Haha! :) Anyway, as to the suggestion of en.wiki disavowing Commons usage; things are pretty dire there, but not much better here. And I think we are no longer equipped to handle images properly - I say this as someone who has worked on images and copyright. Lots of stuff used under fair use is actually misused (and to borrow Tarc's comments there is a "blurry penis" brigade with a very very liberal view of fair use). And even worse many images apparently uploaded under free licenses are copyright infringement - we just do not handle it. Losing Beta was a massive blow to control of fair use/copyright images, and despite some sterling work from a few other editors things are in a serious mess. --Errant(chat!) 22:37, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Anyway shouldn't Commons do something straightforward like even if there are still questions about about whether an image should be deleted or not we should just delete it anyway after a couple of months on precautionary grounds? They needn't loo at any of the arguments, if it hasn't been saved it is lost. Making certain things couldn't drag on too long would concentrate minds. Dmcq (talk) 23:35, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Beware deleting undefended art: The problem with 2-month "sunset deletions" would be the loss of undefended art, where the artwork seemed "too good to be true". Many great artists or scientists are absent-minded and do not dwell here to defend their work. Hence, we risk the danger, "Those 600 classical compositions by that User:Mozart seem way too good to be self-made, so let's delete as copyvios after 2 months". Well, the problem is Mozart had help to compose so many, and perhaps some "suspiciously good" images or videos were made by talented people, along with talented friends and family. The irony would be: the most artistic, flashy photos would be deleted because "no one creates images that good without copyvio" as the suspicious deletionist view. Meanwhile, only the blurry, tilted self-made photos would remain undeleted, as "too poor to be copyvios". We should beware the suspicion in thinking that all talented people are copyvio fakers, and drive talented photographers (or their helpers) to "dumb down" their work to avoid deletion debates. It really comes to proving an image was copyrighted on another website or in a book. -Wikid77 06:05, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
File:Cisne de Yoshizawa.jpgIf people start noticing things disappearing then perhaps they'll take more notice of the deletion debates on Commons. Things can be retrieved if a good reason is made. Overall I believe one should guillotine debates like that if there is a legal aspect and there is a safe path. Anything longer would need an actual real legal case to support I think. You don't have to go to back to Mozart either, the accompanying image of a swan designed by the founder of modern origami would have to be removed for instance. Maybe one could get permission from the estate of Akira Yoshizawa but who's going to do do the searching around for most things like that? Dmcq (talk) 10:14, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
It's clear that Commons should be able to close deletion discussions one way or another in less than five months. But that does not mean some delete-by-default craziness - the deletionists would gladly exploit the opportunity, nominate every image for deletion until the every discussion was bogged down, and take great satisfaction in seeing the project emptied out and destroyed as they have proposed here on numerous occasions over the past month. Instead, I would suggest that maybe WMF can recruit one or more legally trained people to participate in the discussions and give people a more definite idea of what is allowed or not. Wnt (talk) 17:10, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps have experienced imagers contact uploaders: I also wonder if there are patterns of multiple uploads of the semi-popular copyvio images, where direct talk-page contact, by seasoned imagers, could help reduce the problems. Also, there might be desperation in the deletionists because the uploaders are still unclear why so many images are copyvios, for various aspects of copyright laws (such as must be public domain in country of origin, not just in their region). It can be very difficult to accept that images posted by "every blogger" worldwide are still off-limits in Commons, and require tedious fair-use screening instead. -Wikid77 15:45, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Poor behavior by fae on commons
I'm staying out of this one.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Hi Jimbo, I am not sure which "friend of Kohs" is posting above, however your opinions about how handle inappropriate on-wiki links to attack websites as discussed at Commons:Requests_for_comment/offsite_discussions (as the above single-purpose account has linked to), would be most welcome. Considering some of these sites support generally defamatory material, false personal allegations (including fraud and sexual claims) and privacy invading material on the personal lives of Wikimedians, we probably ought to take some small measures to protect our volunteers in this regard. Cheers --Fæ (talk) 15:07, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Wow. Do WP:NPA and WP:AGF no longer apply here? I don't know Kohs, I've made no attacks and I've appealed to Jimbo to prevent you from smearing a good admin, alison, over there. Bull by the horns (talk) 15:13, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Since User:Fæ became upset about the things he is repeating everywhere - (his so called traveling circus) he appears revengeful and his contributions to discussion is I think clear to anyone watching a train crash on the horizon that will end up in the hands of the Arbiters. Commons , is already a train that has crashed and I advice users not to bother joining in any discussion there as a small controlling bunch of users seem to be in total control and policy is flying out of the window there, with some previously apparently well meaning/intelligent users becoming characitures of themselves.Youreallycan 15:25, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
You can call whatever you like about me - that doesn't change, and won't stop the train wreck that this thread alludes to - the outcome of which will likely also negatively affect the WikipediaUK chapter reputation. Youreallycan 15:46, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
A more effective venue for this concern might be commons:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems. I am concerned about a number of aspects of Fæ's behaviour in that discussion (like his passive-aggressive identification of newbies, his characterisation of Wikipediocracy as a "travelling circus", etc.) and I think others on Commons would feel similarly. We all have resentment for the hurtful, destructive acts committed by WR/Wikipediocracy members in the past, but all discussions should be conducted with respect and good faith towards others regardless. Dcoetzee 15:47, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
It would be handy if those with a history of posting to such websites, for whatever reason, would be transparent about it in related discussions like these. Don't you agree Dcoetzee? --Fæ (talk) 15:51, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
In my opinion "Traveling circus" would be a suitable description. --／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼署名の宣言 15:35, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Dear Jimbo, This is a part of a longer post on the Alkaline Diet page called Harry Potter is a Girl. As I am a newbie I don't know how to do links so copied it here. Sorry for taking your space up on your talk page. Also sorry for WP:TLDR. Please delete this if it is of no interest to you. I can't know what is and what is not of interest to you, and following WP:BOLD I am making my statement and you can decide what to do next. I have put it here as I wanted you to know of my experience here at Wikipedia and how after a few days due to repeated WP:BITE I am leaving Wikipedia editing never to return. Because the people between you and me are the problem I thought to go straight to the top. Sometimes the people at the top don't get told what is going on below them. Anyway thanks for Wikipedia. Good luck and perhaps reduce the number of rules / guidelines as I think they are being manipulated and misused. Maximus 86.93.139.223 (talk) 18:22, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Will be archived: If you ever want to return, Jimbo can discuss this message (and your ADMINISTRATORS comment below) from his talk-page archives. See more comments further below. -Wikid77 23:36, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Extended content
THE ADMINISTRATORS: Dear administrators. As I am leaving Wiki editing after three days of being involved in it. I shall leave you with this information which I doubt you will read or care about, for my own self respect that I said it. I made a comment about the user Ronz for the administrator WormTT to read. As a newcomer to Wikipedia I followed the WP:BOLD rules and made a comment with uncertainty. I did not know if it was appropriate or not and I explained that with the very clear "Sorry if this is not the appropriate way to communicate this, and please fell free to delete and ignore this message if that is the case." WormTT might have said "Thanks I need to know that as I have to monitor that guy." Or WormTT might have said "I don't need to know that, what were you doing telling me that?!" Being a newcomer I didn't know the answer to that question. As there is another administrator dealing with the Alkaline Diet issues there was no intention to bring this administrator into that discussion. Therefore I was not trying to get support against Ronz. And since I'm not returning to Wikipedia editing, this post is also not made to get any support. Now that I have read some of the rules thrown at me these last 3 days, I can say that your comments here are WP:BATTLEGROUND and also WP:BITE. Rather than respecting my ignorance and reading my clear acknowledgement of this ignorance you have instead attacked me. Having been here three days I have noticed that those who have been here longer like to use countless unexplained WP:XXXX links to justify whatever they say, when ignoring those rules the links refer to. I was warned in WP:BOLD to not be fooled by this. I was also told in WP:BOLD to stand my ground. For example one editor criticized me for being impolite by me saying the words "Funny isn't it?" about another user attacking the very source he was defending, when he thought the comment was from me. Then the editor used the word "Bulls#!t" in a tirade against me. Then he sought to have me blocked. It's ok for him to break the rules but not ok for me the newbie. The same editor entered into a dispute resolution process with me while also asking for me to be blocked, thus cutting me off during the very dispute resolution he initiated. This allowed him to make his points with no way for me to respond. Then he claimed he didn't do that, while posting on a discussion board that he was happy I was blocked. Seeing I was blocked he didn’t say to the administrator “He is a newbie, I’m trying to educate him and resolve this, please unblock him.” Of course this block was also supported by the administrator who blocked me who could have seen I was in a dispute resolution process. I don't know how to block someone. But why would I want to? A few harsh words were said to me. Big deal. I'm an adult and I know that sticks and stones can break my bones, but words cannot hurt me. WP:CONS Consensus can only be reached when both sides can communicate, not just one side, because the other side is blocked from expressing their opinion. This would be against the Wikipedia rules WP:TALKDONTREVERT and WP:BOLD. Yet me having real points worth discussing has seen me blocked for a WP:BATTLEFIELD mentality. It's not such a mentality, it is just me knowing what I am talking about, while also being a newcomer. Some more experienced editors who know nothing of the topic are controlling the article as if they own it. See WP:OWN, WP:GANG, WP:TAGTEAM. None of you administrators have done anything to help that newcomer other than block him. Perhaps you could acknowledge my relative WP:COMPETENCE and follow the principle of WP:DONTBITE. And please don’t say that I was offered a mentor to guide me. This guy had attacked me repeatedly without any knowledge of the topic, and rather than wanting to resolve this article, wanted to take me on a journey following him around Wikipedia to see him edit articles I would probably know nothing about. I mean WP:WTF? Having had 3 days to look over the rules I have seen that most of what experienced editors claim against me are followed by WP:XXXX, yet they are not in line with the actual rules they quote. Once I looked up the rules I saw that they were often acting totally against the rule they were quoting. Fortunately an administrator has taken up my points as he knows the rules and knows that the comments against me were false. Since the administrator cannot easily be blocked the people that blocked me have had to actually communicate with him. Having seen them do that, they now agree to my points about the article. This only happened when those points came from an administrator, not me. I now see the WP:TAGTEAM that blocked me twice have been defeated by an administrator. With your help though they were able to block me twice, directly against the principles of WP:BOLD and WP:BITE. The debate about the accuracy of one source in the article has been the same for the administrator as it was for me. Yet when this opinion came from a newcomer it was dismissed and I was blocked. When it came from an administrator, who is not even as WP:COMPETENT as me, it was listened to and agreed with. So well done for biting the newcomer and now I am leaving Wikipedia. See WP:DONTBITE. Rather than contributing to an article I know a lot about, it will remain with those people who have no knowledge of the topic, who misrepresent the topic, misquote a secondary source, give it undue weight WP:UNDUE. They have been repeatedly accused of bias, abuse and destructive editing over a period of time by a number of other editors. Just look up on the talk page and you will see this. My original post was added to their comments and Ronz kindly moved it down to the bottom so that I seemed like a lone voice in the wilderness, rather than yet another person with concerns about this article. See WP:GANG. 86.93.139.223 (talk) 18:22, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Looking at this for the first time, it appears 86.93 ran afoul of the WP:3RR rule, one of the few simple bright lines for keeping edit wars under control, and it was discussed at [3]. A 31-hour block was hardly draconian. The topic of his edit-warring was to use a commercial supplement site for information. [4] Despite their claim to be "The Web's #1 Alkaline Diet Source!", it appears other editors were skeptical. ;) Now looking into the topic myself, it may be that there is information favorable to the diet which should be added - notably, see the NCBI search, with references such as PMID 22132958 which appears to support its quite widespread use by gout sufferers, at least in the short term. But when a new editor comes in inserting a source that doesn't meet our specifications over and over, beyond the rather generous 3RR limit, and seems more interested in advocating a viewpoint, perhaps even a specific company, more than getting the article written, well... he may run into that a speed bump or two. Wnt (talk) 21:07, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Wnt. I was wondering how Jimbo would follow an unlinked mention of "Alkaline diet" when thrown the rare tangent to Harry Potter. The IP editor had such familiarity with WP shortcuts, and policy details, that it was difficult to believe the "3-day newbie" claims above, which seemed either a joke or whatever. Perhaps it was "4 days" or perhaps 'nuff said. -Wikid77 23:36, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Your visit to Kyiv
Dear Jimbo,
Here I've read you are planning to visit Kyiv. Is it true? If so, ukrainian wikipedians are much interested to meet you, and would be very glad if you could allot some time for us.
Sincerelly, A1, wikipedian from Kyiv. — Preceding unsigned comment added by A1 (talk • contribs) 06:26, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I will be in the Ukraine twice in the upcoming month. I'd love to visit with Wikipedians at that time, and I'm in touch with someone from the chapter (by email) to talk about the timings.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:15, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Unfortunately we could not figure out a person in chapter who is in touch with you. Could you please contact with executive director of WM UA - Yuri Perohanych (m:User:Perohanych). --A1 (talk) 16:49, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Rich-text editing
I've brought this up before – but it was sidetracked by politics, so I'll rephrase it. What is your opinion about Wikipedia and other WikiMedia projects enabling rich-text editing? It may attract new editors who might otherwise be intimidated by wikitext. – Confession0791talk 00:50, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Seek helpers and beware WYSIWYG edit-conflict: Again, always remember that the best "text editors" are helpful, experienced people who are willing to collaborate, and perhaps tediously format some data which a new person wants to add. Years ago, someone helped me tediously edit 250 articles, using a standardized format, and spent several hours each week to help edit the articles, until some "troll-ish" grump had a fit and started reverted or scrambling all the changes, and then the helpful person naturally quit WP ("helpful" does not mean "loves being insulted" after scheduling weeks of work). Anyway, there are other helpful people (who have not been driven away) and can assist college professors or others to format data. As for WYSIWYG, the concept of "what-you-see" to become "what-you-get" is imagined to be "what you want" rather than fighting "what other people want" with edit-conflict or wholesale reverting of all the precise WYSIWYG changes. A WYSIWYG interface can work well, with no other people interrupting the view, but I would hate for someone to get comfortable making "55 changes" only to SAVE as edit-conflict and not know how to interleave, merge, and salvage the prior work, because it was not copy/paste wiki-markup, but rather, hundreds of careful keystrokes entered over the past 2 hours. Please warn WYSIWYGers to prepare to save changes periodically, and not imagine that merely what they want is "what-you-get". Resolving edit-conflicts and revertaholics is much harder than coding wikitext for "<small>small text</small>". Of course, the most helpful human text-editors could help resolve those conflict issues also. -Wikid77 07:10, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I am a strong proponent and advocate for rich-text editing. We have been using it with great success in terms of attracting and retaining good editors at Wikia, and I have no doubt that the same will be true here. I understand but don't really agree with, Wikid77's skepticism.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:17, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I support it too, but given the current state of development, I wonder whether the foundation can really have it live by July.--Jasper Deng(talk) 19:12, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I'd be happy with syntax highlighting, but if we really want to attract new editors, we need a much better editting UX. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 19:22, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
That's why I no longer edit on Wikia sites, it's just too limiting. Wikimedia markup allows such wonderful things (like nice tables, using formatting templates like Infoboxes) that are just so frustratingly difficult to replicate on a Wikia page. Banaticus (talk) 23:19, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Even a limited WYSIWYG could give users the illusion of easy editing, until they learn how the current system can be even faster. Compare to a calculator that starts in simple mode, then switches into a financial or scientific calculator, to calculate monthly compound interest at 9% nominal APR for 10 years. Many people starting with the simple-calculator mode might be shocked to realize how soon they can learn more. Most people have tremendous capacity to learn more than the basics. -Wikid77 20:18, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
My response to Wikid77's concerns: I edit on Wikia quite a bit. When I started there, I didn't know a thing about wiki markup. But I learned by myself, and taught others how to do it. There are many editors at Wikia who are very skilled at template-making and other tasks – some of them in their early teens! We just need the community support of teaching others the skills of editing wikitext, like we should have now. – Confession0791talk 20:32, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
With all due respect, that's not very realistic. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes. With widescreen desktop displays and the next generation of surface computing (where you will also be able to use multiple devices to create a much wider screen space, such as placing two iPads close together to handshake, at which point the screen size is doubled) we should be thinking of extending the editing window space such that editors can input text on either the side or top and see the result on the other side or on the bottom. We already have that in some way, by clicking "show preview", but one should be able to type and have it display in real time, with intelligent agents suggesting spelling, headings, and Manual of Style recommendations. The problem is that nobody designs these things from a content creation POV, but rather from a coding, technical support POV, which is the wrong way to go. If we want to attract content creators, then we should be designing the interface to allow editors to input text with a seamless, transparent approach. The future isn't in learning markup on the frontend, but in being able to type, point, gesture, look, and speak, and get the result that you want. This is the transparent computing paradigm that we need to be working towards, where the interface becomes indistinguishable from the real world. Viriditas (talk) 01:38, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Use side-by-side editing but markup is purposely limited: Many users do not realize that Wikipedia's markup language has been purposely limited to thwart adding of complex, intelligent helper modules. Meanwhile, I have already written an essay (see: "WP:Advanced article editing") that emphasizes how much easier making hundreds of changes can be, by using side-by-side edit windows. Simply start editing an article, and then copy the browser window as a 2nd window, and compare side-by-side during edit-preview. It is amazingly faster to use 2 windows, rather than scrolling past the top text, to re-edit in the bottom edit-buffer. As for "speak-input", I recommend "speaking" to other editors for help, such as posting questions at WP:Help_desk. However, some of the text-checking improvements can come from the markup language, such as new smarter templates. For example, we have numbers-to-words conversions, which are barely allowed by artificial limits on template complexity:
{{convert/spell |341|mi|km}} → three hundred and forty-one miles (549 km)
{{convert/spell |6,004,009|kg|lb}} → six million four thousand and nine kilograms (13,236,574 lb)
{{convert/spell |6,004,009|kg|lb|words=out}} → six million four thousand and nine kilograms (thirteen million two hundred thirty-six thousand five hundred and seventy-four pounds)
There are many things that templates could do to help editors, if allowed, such as warning if a stable section of an article has been accidentally changed:
Hypothetical: {{Warn_if_changed|...text...|version=1 June 2010}}
Templates could be written to warn users if stable text were accidentally being changed, during an edit-preview, or templates to check whole, long sections of an article for spelling errors, while omitting other sections where spelling should not be restricted. In a sense, the markup templates could be extended to be clever gadgets applied to only some parts of an article, during editing at the preference of the current user. When text has been entered as "ALL CAPITAL LETTERS" then we could have a book-title fixer template:
Hypothetical: {{Fixcaps|GONE WITH tHE WIND}} → Gone with the Wind
Currently: {{lc:GONE WITH tHE WIND}} → gone with the wind
Many users writing articles about India have written some WHOLE PARAGRAPHS in all-caps. Perhaps an entire section of all-caps book titles could be fixed by using a single template, to rewrite the text section into proper format. Such templates are currently being thwarted by artificial limits on template nesting, but I guess the way to show the value of smart markup templates is to keep creating ever-smarter templates, pushing the limits of what is allowed to function within the artificial restraints. The way of the future is to have smarter markup templates, but that ability is currently restricted by some artificial limits set in the MediaWiki software. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:52/08:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Template:Fixcaps added: The hypothetical is now a real feature: {{Fixcaps|GONE WITH tHE /WIND}} → Gone with the Wind. -Wikid77 06:54, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
One thing which would be really useful is for sections to be saved independently of the page. With much-edited and long pages, so many edit conflicts arise because someone else has edited an entirely different section. This should surely be easy enough to overcome? Pesky (talk) 09:03, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Smarter edit-conflict resolution: Non-overlapping edit-conflicts of a page can be severely frustrating, especially with numerous changes to the isolated sections which no one else had changed, and for new users who are unaware how to copy/paste the markup text, to salvage most of their tedious work. Talk about a reason for a newcomer to quit! Some improvements have been made, to recombine page sections where no direct edit-conflict has actually occurred. However, if a new section is inserted between the other, unchanged sections, then the differencing might get out-of-sync, and the whole page declared a hopeless edit-conflict. Larger sections could be resynced by changing the "difference bracket" of how much text to scan (including newlines) to determine a re-match to the prior text. I agree that smarter edit-conflict resolution would be a "massive improvement" to the user interface, especially on hot-topic articles, or talk-page threads, where many people edit during a short time. On at least 2 occasions, people have merely deleted an entire bottom section I had added (confirmed by "diff"), to resolve the conflict (for them). Meanwhile, we can learn the tricks of how edit-conflict can be avoided now, such as have several subheaders, or talk-page subthreads, to encourage section edits. Hence, STEP 1: Add short subsections and save. STEP 2: Re-edit to expand subsections. -Wikid77 05:51, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Adding bottom thread causes edit-conflict: I have confirmed, today, that editing the bottom thread, to append a new section thread will still cause edit-conflict, against ongoing replies inside the prior thread. There is no "non-overlapped merge" of the prior section with the added bottom section as "==xxx==". Instead, editing to add a bottom thread is treated as a conflicting reply. Hence, use the menu option "New section" to reduce the common edit-conflicts at the bottom of a talk-page. Another trick would be to preemptively add a New-section tangent topic for other bottom editing, when the prior bottom topic is likely to be busy, and by that method, reduce edit-conflict with other users seeking to add another bottom tangent topic. I guess we need essay "WP:Avoiding_edit_conflicts". -Wikid77 (talk) 06:54, 13 May, revised 13:37, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
You should discuss some of these things with the people at MediaWiki. I'm sure they would appreciate your ideas :) – Confession0791talk 20:32, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
No Commons copyvios in 70x Random_file but bizarre deletions
Not deleted. KJV 1st edition title page, survived deletion on Commons.
On Commons, looking at random images, I have found only valid images, nearly 60% with Metadata of the camera settings, by running Special:Random/File over 70 times on Wikimedia Commons. The risk of copyvio images seems very low, and many random images were in large official collections uploaded as professional catalogs. Amost 10% were book-page images of old Germanic books (in Fraktur font); in fact, one of the 70 random pages was from the 17,500(?) text-image pages of Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4th Edition, 1885-92 (Vol. 7, page 757). Most images were buildings, nature scenes (many from geograph.org.uk), art objects, book pages, U.S. Navy photos, cars, or archaic logos, but no blurry images of body parts. Hence, my conclusion is that Commons, to an ordinary random viewer, seems well-organized with proper images. The copyvio images are so rare that most people are unlikely to notice. Meanwhile, and get this, someone wanted to delete the title-page image for the King James Bible, 1st edition. This image:
Note well: not just any edition, but the title page of the 1st edition of KJV was submitted for deletion. The consensus was: "Thy hell no. Get thee behind me, Satan" (or perhaps it was "Keep"). Actually, they tried the UK royal loophole in "Copyright calculus" which applies to the KJV text. If Wikipedia did not exist, no fiction author could write more Astounding Science Fiction. Yes, perhaps delete the KJV 1st edition title page. Stay tuned, as Martians take control of Commons. Anyway, view 70 random images to check image licensing. -Wikid77 06:05, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Interesting work. But your methodology doesn't lead to any strong conclusions about "an ordinary random viewer" because it is not weighted by popularity. I'm willing to guess that the 10% of Commons that is made up of old Germanic books is viewed by almost no one. Copyvios are more likely for popular topics like pictures of celebrities, etc.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:50, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
While that is true, the very popularity of those articles should ensure a higher level of scrutiny over the legitimacy of the images. As an example: hockey player Dion Phaneuf was traded from Calgary to Toronto a couple years ago. Given the (relatively) high profile his article had, a lot of people felt it necessary to update his lead image with one of him in a Toronto uniform vs. Calgary. For about a year, we had people repeatedly uploading copyrighted images. In nearly all cases, the article was reverted within minutes, and the image deleted (usually on Commons) within hours. The problem went away when I finally had a chance to take a new picture myself. Now, the flaw in this example is the fact that the image needs to be added to an article for the eyeballs here to see it is a copyvio, but in my experience, people uploading such images generally don't do so just to have it there. They want the image in the articles. Resolute 16:20, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Fixes in popular articles are the typical case of a "self-correcting problem" where the most-likely-seen become the most-likely-fixed images. Hence, I conclude the risk is not in random images, nor popular images, but rather in semi-popular images where enough people view the copyvio photo, but not enough for image-policers to notice fast enough for quick deletion. -Wikid77 16:55, 11 May, revised 06:16, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Most images are "never" viewed again inside Commons: Well, I was considering the results from Google Image Search (or similar), as displaying the Commons images, externally, in highly random matches for typical users. However, your guess about the rare direct viewing is backed by pageview stats, which show how a typical Germanic-page image gets, maybe, 1 direct view in 4 months. In fact, many of those random photos, which I checked for licensing, had not been directly clicked in several months. Hence, for the vast majority of images, Commons is the "bit bucket" where images go, never to be viewed again (or rarely) except thumbnailed in Google or Commons searches. I am focusing on search-engine displays, otherwise 99.99% of images are "never" viewed directly, while the popular images are directly clicked: File:Titanic.jpg (clicked 39,400x in April), or some celebrities as you noted (File:Justin_Bieber.jpg, viewed 61,472x from enwiki), or the KJV Bible title page (clicked 1,461x in enwiki, 39x from Commons in April). -Wikid77 16:55, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
I thought the Bible was the word of God, the public domain notice says 'life of the author plus 70 years', are we really saying God is dead? ;-) Dmcq (talk) 10:38, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Nietzsche would agree it's PD by now. --damiens.rf 11:57, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
However, according to the Crown of England, the King James Bible (text, not title page) is still under copyright, since 1611, so evidently God is still alive after another 401 more years. -Wikid77 16:55, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Heaven has no copyright treaty with any country I'm aware of, not even the Vatican, and they're definitely not a signatory to the Berne convention. There is currently or was a discussion on commons about how to deal with such cases, except heaven doesn't even have any sort of copyright laws I'm aware of so it seems the outcome of that discussion is irrelevant as I believe the question was whether we should follow those laws we have no requirement to follow, not whether we should add our own standards of copyright protection if non exist. Of course even though it may be a derived work of god, if there is sufficient creativity etc by the authors of whatever specific version of the word of god, then we still have to worry about the copyrights of anyone besides god who contributed to it. Nil Einne (talk) 13:57, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Actually my memory is a little faulty. The discussion I was thinking of is on en, Wikipedia talk:Copyrights#RfC: What to do with respect to the copyright of countries with which the US does not have copyright relations?, although largely is as I've described. (I didn't mention this but traditionally we've followed local laws even for countries who aren't party to any treaties with the US.) There was actually a recent discussion on Commons:Commons:Village pump/Archive/2012/03#PD-Afghanistan (and associated discussions) however it didn't relate so much to whether we should respect any local (since in most cases commons requires an image to be PD or otherwise free in both the country of origin and in the US so it's more questionable if there's any reason to ignore local laws just because they are irrelevent elsewhere) but other issues. There was actually some concern on commons about how we should handle cases when there are no local copyright laws. But from a quick glance, I think this concern arose because of the belief and history suggesting when the country gets laws, they will retrospectively introduce copyright protections. Therefore people are wasting time and creating more work by collating stuff which will likely have to be deleted in the future. That being the case, I don't think these concerns apply to heaven as the chance of copyright laws seems slim. Nil Einne (talk) 14:26, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
So, no reciprocality then when the US says 'In God we trust'. ;-) Dmcq (talk) 19:49, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
No, I checked the fine print, and Deuteronomy 4:2 says "Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the LORD your God that I give you." I don't think that license is suitable for Wikipedia, since our users cannot modify the content under the terms of the license (and they've been pretty hard on offenders in the past, see for example Wicked Bible). The keep the command stuff is none of our business, though.--Wehwalt (talk) 22:35, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Although I think that a crude approach such as yours is unlikely to uncover much in the way of copyvio, I was curious what I would find if I replicated your test. I looked at about half as many images and stopped when I had two examples of things that I found questionable. That is not to say that they are copyright violations, only that I felt there was reason enough to look more closely at the information given. (The nondescript images of fields from geograph.org that came up more frequently than randomness would suggest they should may well have been copyvios, but I didn't bother to check.) The first image with questionable copyright status is File:William Roos - Bywyd Llonydd gyda Phetris (1841).jpg. The source is the National Museum Wales. If I read this page correctly, the museum holds the copyright for its images even though the painting itself may be considered in the public domain. I seem to recall a similar situation involving another museum, but I don't know how that one was resolved. The second questionable image is File:Castro in marathon.jpg. The source is Stars and Stripes (newspaper). Although there is a template claiming it is in the public domain, Stars & Stripes states "Stories and photos by Stars and Stripes staffers are copyrighted, and may not be reprinted or used without permission". Although none of the images in the 30-odd that I looked at were obvious copyvios, I only looked at four or five of them in any detail and turned up two examples. If I were actually trying to find copyright violations on Commons, I doubt I would have any trouble. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:13, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
See Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag. The "museum copyright" is an absurdity of foreign copyright law that Commons does not recognize, with the support of the WMF. Think about it. If public domain material becomes property of someone else simply by them copying the content, or possessing the content, then the photo belongs to the museum. But if they license it, and a volunteer uploads it, it is property of the volunteer. If the volunteer releases it, maybe it is the property of the owner of the scanning or video processing software he uses, or the network that he uses to contact WMF. After it gets here, at any time, it could be claimed as WMF property, and if not by us, then certainly by the next person to reuse it. There's no such thing as public domain if you accept such a theory. Wnt (talk) 03:22, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Count only confirmed copyvios in 70x random images: When describing an image as a copyvio problem, then the status should be exact, not merely suspected. For example, the "suspected" images from geograph.org which I checked were valid, not copyvios. Both images suspected, above, were confirmed as valid (not copyvios). For File:Castro in marathon.jpg, I found a 2nd source, which names the author, an employee of the U.S. Army MDW Public Affairs (see: image page). Also, look at larger samples, such as 70 images. Otherwise, the risk is a "non-representative sample" such as a person looks at only 1 image, and it happens to be a celebrity-magazine copyvio, and then concludes based on 1 image, that Commons is entirely filled with all copyvio photos from magazines and probably no other images (invalid conclusion due to insufficient sample size). However, I will check the 2 images you mentioned to set their exact status. Remember: Try a larger sample, and get the exact copyvio status, not just counting a suspected problem. Then report the exact count of actual copyvios in the larger sample. The issue is to simulate a typical user view of Commons images, as from Google Image Search, rather than go to a list of known copyvios and declare all users also see that list every time they view any other image in Commons. Instead, I concluded that the typical user sees "zero" invalid images, when viewing 70 images at random, on average. -Wikid77 04:33/05:14, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Is your goal here to find and resolve copyright issues on Commons, or to put forward a poorly reasoned defence of Commons? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 12:21, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Focus is on minor risk of copyvios: I am viewing the total situation, about potential image problems, in the overall perspective of what typical users are likely to see. Earlier, there were unfounded claims that Commons was hopelessly overrun with copyvios while demanding to shutdown Commons to throw away the millions of images. Instead, I found that most (on average) of Commons images are precisely valid, even whole gallery collections (although most are "never" directly viewed), so a shutdown would seem to unfairly delete the 99.99% of pages which are fantastic, awesome images (well perhaps "valid" would be saying enough). I hope that clarifies the focus, for people who joined the argument in the later stages. -Wikid77 13:54, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
This is a reminder for speedy deletions of Commons images. In past conversations, there have been concerns that improper images have been left in Wikimedia Commons, and talk about the numerous valid images has been seen as "avoidance" of the real copyvios or problem images. Instead, I think we should remind people how easy it is to request speedy deletion of many improper images. Consider the following templates, on Commons, to request the speedy-deletion of images which have been displayed inside enwiki pages.
On Commons, use {{copyvio|1=Copyvio from webpage www.xxxxxxx.com}} - to edit an image and request speedy deletion of a copyrighted, non-free image pinpointed in the named webpage. There is little need to debate deletion, if an image can be shown to be non-free, in another webpage, unless a later alternate source reduces that former copyright to allow display.
On Commons, use {{duplicate|File:Other_file_name.jpg}} - In many cases, Commons is bloated with duplicates, or resized images, almost identical to another image, and just cluttering the collection.
Those 2 sets of requested speedy-deletion images are continually checked by Commons admins, for quick deletion. See Commons category:
In that category, images will appear after tagging with "{{duplicate}}" and within a few hours, most tagged images will disappear, as having been deleted. The fact that "Category:Duplicate" is almost empty, at any given time, is evidence of how quickly the requested images are processed, where even rejected requests will be edited to become valid image style. Anyway, users on enwiki should beware invalid, but rare, images on Commons, and help to get them quickly deleted, such as using the Commons templates explained above. -Wikid77 18:41, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Commons category over 150 copyvios but fleeting: Although there often have been more than 150 images tagged for {{copyvio}} in Commons:Category:Copyright_violations, many seem to be deleted within a few days, although some were uploaded in 2008, 2010, 2011 or such. With so many images tagged each day, then the logistics tend to keep over 150 images in process, each day. -Wikid77 05:47, 16 May, 08:34, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Can you moderate or control pro-Chavez activists on sp.wikipedia?
Dear Jimbo, first of all allow me to congratulate with you for your wonderful creation called "Wikipedia". But, as you know, some people try to use it for their personal propaganda, mainly in the political arena. That is why I wish to request your control (or the one from your staff) in order to moderate a group of wiki admins of the Spanish wikipedia. This group controls all the articles related to Hugo Chavez and seems to be under the leadership of user:Edmenb, a fanatical supporter of this Venezuela president. This admin (with his group) has blocked every writing that is not supportive of Chavez and often bans those who dare to make critics to "Chavismo". He sometimes laughs at you Jimbo if somebody complains that he is not the owner of sp. wikipedia articles about Venezuela and Chavez, and remembers him that you Jimbo want a NPOV encyclopedia ( see [6]Sinceramente_no_me_pareces_apto_para_ser_bibliotecario]). Best regards.--LLanero1978 (talk) 18:17, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
It probably doesn't help that the IP requesting an NPOV encyclopedia compared Chavez with Hitler in the thread linked to - suggesting an agenda of his own - not exactly NPOV. I wouldn't be too quick to judge Edmenb based on this testimony alone. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:39, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
I didn't say which side was the problem, just that there's apparently a problem there too. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 20:47, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
For those new to this, it's apparently the longest running BLP issue involving continuous off-wiki canvassing and frequent multiple blocks on both sides. If there ever was a reason for arbcom's existence, this is it. Maybe some guidance that there are more important things than vendettas against top performing admins would help. 71.212.246.55 (talk) 18:47, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps allow content-forks for supporters/critics articles: When the very concept of the other viewpoint seems to be censored, then dedicating an entire sub-article to that viewpoint could help ensure broader coverage, without problems where the truth is not really a 50-50% split, so a priori notions that the debate is evenly divided cannot stop the 2 sub-articles from covering the details. A similar problem occurred with the claims made by Amanda Knox in Italy, that some police officer had hit her head, twice, from behind her back, to force her to state a false statement of events. Several editors kept trying to reduce that concept, but sources noted evidence which supported Knox's claim and those police officers were also claimed by other citizens for similar beatings, and then finally, even the prosecutor (who attended some interrogations) admitted that "perhaps" Knox had been hit by the officers. Wikipedia was trying to present as much sourced text as possible but really, there needed to be a sub-article explaining the suspect's version of events (even claiming hits from police), rather than try to force a 50-50 coverage which limits the explanation of such beatings in other cases or admitted by some officials. A single article can suffer from seeming to have WP:UNDUE attention to negative or positive text, unless the article is dedicated to whichever negative/positive view and related supporting evidence. Naturally, the choice of splitting to content-forks should be justified, and in these cases, it appears to be. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:55, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
I just read through the article on Spanish Wikipedia and...wow, it's definitely way worse than our article. At least you can tell in ours, from both the article itself and the talk page discussions, that we are striving to make it neutral, even if we aren't quite getting there. But the Spanish Wikipedia version...it's practically dripping with approval. Any discussions of human rights violations is minimized. There is even a section on the talk page where someone brought up that information should be put in about the decade report from Human Rights Watch, but was shot down by other users who said HRW is controlled by US multinationals and that one of the people in charge of it is biased against Chavez because they were involved in the politics of the region back when he came to power. SilverserenC 20:59, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps it comes with the culture, though; I would contend that just as many people in Spanish-speaking countries would support Chavez as the amount of people in English-speaking countries that would oppose him. --MuZemike 21:17, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
But we're at least trying to show both good and bad, like I said, we're striving to make it neutral. They...aren't. That Spanish Wikipedia article isn't an encyclopedia article, it's a political piece. SilverserenC 21:20, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
What are the problems with the article? It seems no more biased in favor of the biographed subject than for example our own article on Vladimir Putin.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:23, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Vladimir Putin could also definitely use some work, but comparing it to another article doesn't change the fact that there are issues in Hugo Chavez on es.wiki as well. SilverserenC 18:06, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
But that kind of work is obviously best solved at the talkpage of the article in question no? So why don't you make a section at es:Hugo Chavez describing the problems you see with the article preferably with suggestions for sources that can be used to correct it?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:28, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Might exceed balance of Spanish sources as fringe ideas: If the media is "controlled" to suppress negatives, then the negative text could be considered a "fringe" idea, not really allowed in a main article. Just as with any topic, there should be a fringe subarticle, such as "Dissident fringe views of Hugo Chavez" so that the main article would not be used for soapboxing rare topics (rarely found in controlled Spanish sources). For example, it might be difficult to find negative German sources from 1935 about Hitler, depending on the level of censorship near the time they burned the books of Albert Einstein (world-famous since 1919) as "Jewish science". However, the good news for eswiki is that a fringe-idea article should be allowed to exist, as a first step, and that can provide a voice, although limited, for the opposing views about Venezuela and Chavez. In the USA, with a huge Spanish "sub-culture" (Miami is the Hispanic Hollywood), then many Spanish sources should exist to verify the "fringe ideas" without wp:notability scraping from English sources to justify inclusion of those ideas. -Wikid77 15:19, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
It is extremely unlikely that this is what is going on. The Spanish language media worldwide is large and diverse, from Spain to South America to Mexico to the United States. What is necessary to understand here is that it has been common when ordinary Wikipedians aren't watching for people who are either paid operatives or POV pushing activists come in and make ludicrous arguments to justify the exclusion of what are by any normal standards considered quite properly to be gold standard reliable sources. I'm speaking here of what I have seen in English. I'm quite sure that there are plenty of well-documented reports in the Spanish language media of (for example) food shortages in Venezuelas, criticism of their human rights record, etc. It is not a matter of the Spanish language press loving him and the English language press hating him.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:38, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
Spanish article is rarely edited: The checking of Spanish sources does confirm some negative reports, but now the problem is that there is no obvious evidence of suppressing negative text in eswiki, because that article is rarely edited (perhaps 5 times per month, only 3 edits 1-15 May). The history-log on Spanish WP:
Unless dissenting users are blocked, or topic-banned, it should be possible to translate some sourced, controversial text from enwiki "Hugo Chávez" and see if any 5 edits per month remove those views. This is an equally high-profile article on both eswiki/enwiki, in terms of pageviews (perhaps 2880x per day on eswiki, or 2840x on enwiki), so expect nearly 87,000 views per month for each language. One negative source in Spanish addresses religious concerns, "Chávez y sus 'demonios' " (source: Jornada.unam.mx): "Chavez and His Demons" -
"A pesar de que un cardenal advierte el peligro de una "dictadura de tipo marxista", la relaciones del chavismo con el resto de la jerarquía católica parecen marchar por un terreno terso tras largos años de pleito. En ese escenario, el gobierno venezolano expulsa hoy a un grupo evangélico que ha estado 60 años en su territorio."
That covers "...expulsion today (2006-Feb-12) of an evangelical group which had been 60 years in the territory". It is puzzling that the eswiki page is not edit-warring, so perhaps dissenting users have been driven away by now, as happened with editing about Knox in Italy. -Wikid77 22:43, 15 May, revised 04:31, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Asked user to trying updating Chávez on eswiki: Since any past resistance might have subsided, I have contacted the user to request another attempt to update "es:Hugo_Chávez" on eswiki, and to report back here if new problems. See: that user talk-page at "Try updating Chávez on Spanish WP". Let's confirm if text is rejected. -Wikid77 04:31, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I've left a note on the talk page of the Spanish Wikipedia article on Pres. Chavez of this discussion, here.--Wehwalt (talk) 10:32, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
The response is pretty much what I expected, i.e. an insult. SilverserenC 18:01, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
What part of the response do you find to be insulting? The user rightly mentions that the first place to start changes for the es.wiki article is on its talkpage. There is no current discussion on the talkpage about neutrality issues. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:08, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Translating a bit for the English, I have an issue with the last sentence that reads, "Greetings to the democratic Godkings and alike, should they come to moderate or control our community's editing." SilverserenC 19:31, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
You don't think we would reat similarly if someone on another wiki was discussing how to solve problems on en.wiki without involving us?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:38, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Except we're not trying to solve their problems. If we were creating es.wiki accounts and trying to directly edit the article, then I would understand that reaction. But if we're just pointing out that it doesn't seem balanced, I would hope that we would start a discussion to see about fixing it. And discussion is now going on at our Vladimir Putin article, for example, to see about improving it and this section is showing that we seem to have an issue with IP addresses and SPAs that are pushing a pro-Russian agenda, which explains why the article is so pro-Putin, so that's something we need to deal with now. I would love your involvement in that and the lower discussion. We really need to put some balance into the article and less Singing and Painting. SilverserenC 03:23, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Dear Jimbo, I agree with you "that it has been common when ordinary Wikipedians aren't watching for people who are either paid operatives or POV pushing activists come in and make ludicrous arguments to justify the exclusion of what are by any normal standards considered quite properly to be gold standard reliable sources". I am one of the thousands of Venezuelans who were forced to move out of Venezuela and come to Florida because of Chavez. But we fear "consequences" for our families left in Venezuela, and that is why I did not answered quickly to comments from Jimbo & others. Let me explain better: two days ago some military police showed at my father's home in Caracas and questioned him about me and my comment (erased here, by the group of user:Edmenb) that I knew personally Hugo Chavez. Indeed I knew him when he was a young officer, working in Maracay and coming to Caracas to participate in training at the "Poligono de Tiro" of Fort Tiuna in Caracas in 1978. I remember we competing at the Poligono used to nickname him "Llanero loco" (crazy man from venezuelan plains) and probably he was disgusted by this. But in those years he was a very clever young man, who was able to listen to commentaries from those who disagreed with his POVs: now the "excessive" power has changed him totally. And, unfortunately, he is even a vengeful person (as many know in Venezuela): that is why I am forced to not trying to improve the wp:NPOV neutral balance in the sp. wikipedia articles of Hugo Chavez & his Venezuela. May be you cannot understand my decision, because you live in a free country. But those who live or have lived in Latinoamerican countries understand me: from "desaparecidos" to harrassment in private life/work, the range of possible abuses is very huge.... Anyway, I hope others (like Wehwalt or Wikid77) will post those NPOVs and "control" abuses by fanatics like Edmenb & co. in sp.wikipedia. Best regards.--LLanero1978 (talk) 17:44, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I have no intention of getting involved thanks.--Wehwalt (talk) 20:49, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Personal involvement of Llanero1978 with the subject which is being edited may suggest conflict of interess and definitely creates problems of archiving neutrality when dealing with it... FkpCascais (talk) 05:20, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm starting to find all this discussion here unseemly. Shouldn't this be as that es.wiki editor suggests, on the talk page there? Talking about getting someone to post "to overcome past resistance" on another wiki could give ArbCom days merrily chasing their own tails over what is, and what is not, meatpuppetry (there seem to also be canvassing issues that have arisen). I would suggest that pains be taken to remain well within our policies, and to be seen to do so.--Wehwalt (talk) 12:31, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Commercial vs. non-commercial use
Wikimedia Foundation is operated as a not-for-profit charitable organisation (giving it certain tax exempt benefits), yet all content hosted on its servers, including images, are required to be licenced free-for-commercial use. This means that huge amounts of content, particularly images, available for non-commercial use remain unusable in Wikipedia. Why? Apart from corrupting Google book searches with commercial publications of articles we have contributed our free time to, what is the point of this requirement that content be free for commercial use? In what way are the goals of Wikipedia better served by the exclusion of free non-commercial content? --Nug (talk) 11:31, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
For one, the offline releases of Wikipedia content (Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team) is considered commercial, notwithstanding the fact that the Foundation is a not-for-profit. Monty845 14:29, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
This is a good explanation of what is bad about NC licenses.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:05, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
Lessee, I'm getting out of that link: "Non-Commercial licenses are good because Wikipedia requires non-commercial licenses and Wikipedia is good." What's the rationale for banning off graphics freely donated TO Wikipedia, for use ON Wikipedia, but prohibiting additional reproduction? I've bumped into this from the likes of material from Duke University Archives and a fairly famous journalist who is the subject of a WP piece but not willing to let anybody do anything anywhere for any reason with his image — which is exactly what WP tries to require. It makes no sense to me. Carrite (talk) 02:56, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
If that's all you got out of the article, you must not have actually read the article. Your question is answered there in detail. Please go read it again.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:54, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I have to say, though, that points 2–4 make a much stronger case; whoever wrote this should've moved point 1 to the bottom... Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556> haneʼ 07:01, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
The way I see it, the difference comes down to restriction vs. freedom (i.e. libre and not gratis). CC-BY-SA allows users the freedom to reuse content, with attribution, for any purpose, whether it be commercial or non-commercial. CC-NC-SA restricts that freedom of usage to only non-commercial use. In theory and per our foundation/early years, we strive to be as free as open as we can with our content, which is why we don't accept CC-NC-SA content. --MuZemike 01:45, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Concur with Jimbo and with MuZemike. It would be nice to have, but it is more important that our stuff be "free" to the user. That's what were all about, kinda.--Wehwalt (talk) 13:32, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
George Mason University professor promoting Wikipedia vandalism
I think it's time for somebody at Wikimedia to file a complaint against George Mason University. A professor there seems to be on a crusade to vandalize Wikipedia articles as part of an experiment: link. 90.163.10.74 (talk) 12:09, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Someone needs to give that professor a dictionary, so he can look up the difference between "professor" and "con artist". I think the university should have him stay after class, and write 500 times on the chalkboard:
· "I will not vandalize Wikipedia in class, with my class."
· "I will not vandalize Wikipedia in class, with my class."
· "I will not vandalize Wikipedia in class, with my class."
I can imagine some of his next classes, "Hoaxes in bank robbery and when to give the money back" or perhaps "Advanced wife-beating" then maybe a graduate class in "Thermonuclear pranks". I guess we could get various contact addresses for George Mason University, and then each write some letters of concern. -Wikid77 14:27, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Note that this experiment actually vindicates Wikipedia, in large part. From the article: "The loose thread, of course, was the Wikipedia articles. The redditors didn't initially clue in on their content, or identify any errors; they focused on their recent vintage. The whole thing started to look as if someone was trying too hard to garner attention." So an elaborate conspiracy, dozens of people, months of effort, in many online media, all fell apart right here. That's the good news.
The bad news is that as the article also says, "Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed. ... Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site." I disagree with this analysis slightly - I think that part of the issue is that people here are continually derided with WP:NOTAFORUM, rather than encouraged to engage in more free-ranging discussions, though the Refdesks are a partial release from that. In any case, while Wikipedia helped shatter the hoax, it needed this external assistance due to some internal deficiency. Wnt (talk) 15:59, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I think it is also worth considering for a moment what "ethics", in the modern sense, actually apply. This course is part of George Mason University's "MA in global affairs. Students in this degree program develop a wide range of global competencies as well as specialized knowledge in a particular thematic concentration—everything from global health, to global media, to global economic development, to global history and culture. Graduates of the master's program are prepared for work in a variety of global contexts, including employment by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, businesses with a global presence, and various international organizations." As seems universally agreed in modern society, the purpose of a university is not to train people to learn, but to train people to work, and work involves not the cultlike pursuit of the Truth, but absolute loyalty to a master, right or wrong, including the ability to competently lie and mislead. Such is never so true as for government agencies working in and around Arlington, Virginia. For a professor to accept students' money - backed by taxpayer guarantees on their loans - and produce a person with a religious attachment to the Truth, who is not willing to manipulate, confuse, and destroy a site like Wikipedia, let alone the things that he might actually be called upon to do - well, this is just dishonesty; such a professor takes his salary either from defaulted loans or from the basement-dwelling unemployed graduate's parents and is therefore a mere parasite demeaning the reputation of his institution. Whereas one who finds a snazzy way to show that his students will bend and break ethical boundaries and publicize their work to the world... that is a paragon of virtue. Wnt (talk) 16:34, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
More proof how students will do anything to get a grade, while paying $thousands to attend. "Wir war only following orders für der Führer". Been there, done that, got a World War. Perhaps we need to update some essays about ethical uses of Wikipedia, as reminders to college professors. -Wikid77 05:23, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Not that I advocate doing so but I suspect if people suddently started vandalizing some of the George Mason University related articles with an edit summary referring to the professor and the class his campaing of vandalism would come to a screeching halt pretty quick. Also, although I do not agree with everything Wnt said above, I do also agree this project and our purpose in it was largely vindicated by the fact that they didn't get away with it or rather didn't get away with it for long. Kumioko (talk) 19:40, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I would also note the statement, which I have been complaining about for months, seemingly to the walls, that "It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining". With the recent Arbcom ruling against Rich F and his bots, my sharp decrease in edits as well as others you can count on that declination to increase considerably. Kumioko (talk) 19:48, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
There is more information about Professor T. Mills Kelly on the following pages.
Note that following the Reddit thread, a sockpuppet investigation was filed concerning this, which can be found here. I was oblivious to the background at the time though. Jimmy, is there scope for having a word with Professor Kelly? As a Reddit user wrote, this is like beating up the nice guy to show he isn't tough. WilliamH (talk) 21:57, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the heads up! Meh!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:16, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Hi Jimbo. This was flagged up by one of the bots and thought you might be interested (sorry if you've seen this before). Bomispedia and the Bomismedia Foundation. Not a fork, but.. I'm not sure we care but thought you might want to know. Secretlondon (talk) 14:03, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
An encyclopedia of all life where Animalia is a redlink and most of the recent changes are about Indian politicians? If there's something wrong with Wikispecies and Tree of Life Web Project, I don't see this as surpassing them any time soon. ;) Wnt (talk) 16:48, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
You might advise them that I'll do the work personally for free.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:50, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
It is odd that someone would hire an editor for a deletion discussion. Do they feel their article is being deleted unfairly? I posted my comments on the COIN board mostly under the presumption they were actually hiring you to write the article if the deletion discussion went their way. I would be interested in hearing about your experience afterwards and I'm sure plenty of people will be curious which deletion discussion it is. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 22:51, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Can anyone send me a copy of the original article? I would be interested in seeing it to get perspective, but I believe only admins can see deleted article history. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 17:32, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Help me again
Hello, and sorry for another unglobal, unimportant and personal request. I edit in fawikipedia and today i want to archive my talk page (in fawiki) but i move my main talk page there to a mistake and undesired page (this one) and after that i use copy/paste in my talk page to correct my first mistake so i lose my talk page history in my desired talk page archive. I request from you or your friend that help and first if it is possible revert my main talk page to this edition please and if it is not possible, i want you to merge my main talk page (in fawiki) with this page and their history, you now i want my main talk history come back to its page. sincerely. --H.b.sh (talk) 07:46, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi, there are probably helpful people over on the fa.wiki site that could help you just as easily. This is the en.wiki and alot of the editors here don't have accounts on the fa.wiki. I'm not sure how the process is over there, but you could maybe place a {{helpme}} on your talk page with your question underneath it, and someone will help you. MrLittleIrish(talk)申 12:43, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
History perhaps shows user talk-page already restored: As with a prior message from that user, a look at their fawiki talk-page history, shows many multiple revisions, this time by multiple fawiki usernames, which seems to indicate the long-term history was recovered by un-moving the pages to restore the original history log. See history log:
I assume the user made multiple other requests, and the fix has happened already. -Wikid77 14:39, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
sorry but nothing happen, i can ask it from administrator in fawiki but i think in simple personal request other user there or meta can help us, there is no section in meta that deal with request like this and i want to test something (only for my personal desire) that if we face a complex and big trouble in fawiki e.g in edition of page or have a global problem there can we hope on help from meta or administrator? but i see no hope maybe for myself, i find two vandalism in fawiki that puppetry effected in global for a special page, but i feel no one there has not desire to help me. Thanks very much. --H.b.sh (talk) 15:19, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Talk-page archives do not clone original history: The archive cannot also show the same history log. Copying of several talk-page threads to a "User_talk:H.b.sh/Archive_2" will show only the ONE entry for adding "92,202 bytes", and not also copy the precise history of all the edits which contributed those messages. There is no way to "clone" (or duplicate) the history of the talk-page into the archive, as that would appear misleading as a faked history of how that page had been edited, when in reality, the text was added by single, large additions of many talk-page threads by just one username in each edit, not several small edits by many usernames. I hope that explains why talk-page archives cannot have the same history-log entries of the original talk-page. -Wikid77 15:32, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Persian fawiki admin must do history-merge of old archive: An administrator on fawiki must be contacted to perform a history-merge of an old "Archive_1" back into "User_talk:H.b.sh" and then the text can be copy-pasted into a new talk-page archive file. However, consider the following:
STEP 1: Undo new text added to the first archive 1 (containing the 84 threads), with its detailed history log.
STEP 2: Move the current talk-page into a "User_talk:H.b.sh/Archive_2" taking the recent history log to that page.
STEP 3: Edit the remaining User_talk:H.b.sh to return to being a typical user-talk page.
It is fine to consider each large talk-page archive file (of multiple archive files) to be the renamed version of a current talk-page, where each numbered archive file (Archive_1, Archive_2, Archive_3, etc.) then contains the exact history log of how the threads had been added when it was named User_talk:XX. There is no restriction to have only 1 talk-page archive page. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:21, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Scanner ass
Closing discussion as unnecessarily hostile. Fae in particular is hereby formally invited to permanently stay off my talk page. Your false insinuations about other users, and badgering responses, are exactly what stand in the way of thoughtful progress on this and related issues.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:38, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
- Keep This is an illustration of a cultural phenomenon, and it shows the texture of the scrotum quite well. User:Handcuffed (talk) 04:35, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
- Keep, unique usage of light and shadow in depiction of popular cultural phenomenon. -- User:Cirt (talk) 22:16, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Kept: As per handcuffed and cirt User:russavia (talk) 03:45, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
That page confirms only 2 Keep !votes during 9-16 May, and hence Kept after 7 days. I wonder how people find these images to keep; I guess they periodically check the deletion lists, just in case a photo like that can be saved. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:49, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Q for Jimmy
This is what is going on at commons - ya couldn't make it up - The user:Handcuffed is the uploader , its his ass - User:Cirt was the only other commenter in the deletion discussion - both he and the User:Russavia , both commons administrators , are severely restricted here an en wikipedia via arbitration, one, User:Cirt is not allowed to to edit BLP articles at all and the other, User:Russavia is currently en wikipedia site banned six months, Commons is currently controlled by such as these people. This type of situation and comments from the same users and a few others are being repeated at multiple similar pictures. This one, a picture of no encyclopedia value and without probable chance for inclusion in any wikipedia article. Jimmy, is this the type of content you imagined the commons content repository would include, and do you consider it within the Wikipedia foundations project scope ? Youreallycan 05:38, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
I think it should be noted that there is no indication that the ass depicted in the image under discussion belongs to User:Handcuffed. It is from Flickr user "stnu". Although Wikipedia users have been known to upload their own images to Commons from their Flickr accounts, there is no reason to suspect that is the case here. In fact, Handcuffed is a prolific uploader of, uh, "adult" images from Flickr, especially those involving bondage or domination. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:02, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Youreallycan, rather than trying to create dramah on Jimbo's Wikipedia page (rather than going to his Commons page) by forcing him and others to look at Handcuffed's recently created student prank arse photo (currently getting 7 to 10 views a day until you posted this link), you could try just raising this image for a second deletion request on Commons or start a discussion on Commons somewhere like the village pump in order to challenge the interpretation of Commons scope. I know you just love using Jimbo's talk page as a great big dramah soapbox, but the look-at-this-porn-listen-to-me-OMG-think-of-the-children routine was tired a long, long time ago and this image hardly lives up to the high bar of the bestiality video [argument] that Jayen466 has been spending his time promoting and shouting about, so often and on so many platforms. --Fæ (talk) 06:25, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
You User:Fæ appear to be part of the problem at commons, so please don't attempt to point me in the right direction - I asked Jimmy a question , not you. Youreallycan 06:30, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, I thought you posted this publicly to attract other people to read your opinions. Perhaps in future if you don't want people to read your comments to Jimbo, you should think about emailing them to him privately? Thanks --Fæ (talk) 06:36, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
I await your train crash with baited breath - Youreallycan 06:38, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Fae that is not the point. The point is creating a comprehensive and reliable reference work, of truly encyclopedic quality. The bunch of people controlling commons are not helping towards that goal, and indeed they have a negative impact of putting off those who want to contribute something of an encyclopedic nature. Quisquiliae (talk) 06:34, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Commons is not Wikipedia, it has quite different policies that focus on a wide educational scope rather than encyclopaedic value. Discussing Commons this way on Wikipedia where people are wearing Wikipedia tinted spectacles is pointless if the intention is to improve Commons policies. If you want to help improve Commons, have the discussion on Commons. --Fæ (talk) 06:40, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
the bestiality video that Jayen466 has been spending his time promoting - What the fuck Fae, did you really just write that? As in, explicitly stating that another user is promoting bestiality videos? WHY. ARE. YOU. NOT. BANNED. FROM . THIS. PROJECT????? Come on Jimbo, it's about time for a little bit of common sense here.
This really has reached Level: Insane.VolunteerMarek 06:46, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Fair comment, added the word "argument" that I missed out. If you want me banned, use the right process, don't expect Jimbo to by-pass the community processes based on your personal appeals. As a tip, if you do want to complain about me, it might go down better if you avoid shouting. Thanks Fæ (talk) 06:50, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Edit conflict response below. Response to direct comment here. "Fair comment" my ass. You just put a little word in a little bracket into the middle of a heinous insinuation. Let me spell it out. You. Just. Wrote a bullshit comment. Which directly insinuated that a particular person "promoted bestiality". And you really think that putting that little bracketed caveat inside your previous odious comment makes it all better? You just slandered the hell out of another person. This isn't even BLP, this is just outright nasty shitty low down stinkin' fucked up shit. And you are an administrator? On this project? If you want me banned, use the right process, - yes!!! I want you banned! Anyone else makes this kind of comment they'd be indeffed within seconds! Why the hell are you not? And if I'm shouting (which I'm not) it's only because this is a kind of a situation which deserves it. VolunteerMarek 07:03, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict)
I'm sorry but I just got to add that that comment is sooooo messed up on sooooo many levels that one can't even start to think about the fact that this is a Wikipedia administrator doing this kind of thing. Honestly. Any other user insinuates that someone is promoting bestiality, no matter how coy they are about the wording, they get their ass banned. And rightly so. What is going on here?VolunteerMarek 07:03, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Volunteer Marek try unclutching your handbag for a moment. Jayen466 has spent a month posting links to the same sex video in emails, on multiple Wikimedia projects and off-wiki; one of the obvious outcomes has been to increase traffic to the video. It was obvious from my comment that the word "promoting" related to Jayen466's blatant soapboxing of his argument, not that Jayen466 was known for selling pornography. My comment is incredibly mild compared to your "friends" off wiki calling me a pedophile image promoter, a pervert, a "fae got", criminally fraudulent and the Gestapo. Now, get over yourself, your ranting is not going to impress anyone, least of all Jimbo. --Fæ (talk) 08:59, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Marek - sending around links to content and getting people to watch it is indeed 'promoting', regardless of the political orientation of the person doing so. And if we could have editors banned from the project for (allegedly) falsely stating that someone is promoting bestiality, does that also mean that we can get editors banned for falsely claiming Commons is full of kiddie porn?
A small group of people keeps bringing up the sort of marginal images from Commons typified above as if it's a big deal, but it's not. Commons' purpose is to keep and expand its collection of useful content for the world - not to carefully sort through every image pondering over its morality. If Commons doesn't field hundreds of volunteers breathlessly pawing over this deletion proposal to ensure butt scans are removed, what does that tell you? That the people there have decided they have better things to do! Wnt (talk) 12:04, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
I will have to disagree with you that this user upload is in any way part of any useful collection of content for the world. Whatever those people have decided they have better things to do is, its not deal with copyright violations quickly, ones I have pointed to are still sitting ignored after over a month and yet this ass scan was commented on by User:Cirt and the uploader/owner of the ass almost immediately.Youreallycan 15:07, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
The copyright violation issues that were cited here were modern legal counterparts to pinhead angel-gazing. I mean, the copyright status of nearly century-old versions of fraternity pins and photographs of the Titanic! Photos for which no owner has been or will be found to claim his rights, leading people to dither back and forth about whether they were renewed or not. They've certainly gotten a lot more attention and thought than the butt-scan; it just wasn't enough for anyone to decide. Looking down the list of those old issues, I wouldn't be eager to try to close any of them - which, of course, is the problem for everyone. Wnt (talk) 16:28, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Fae wrote: Commons is not Wikipedia, it has quite different policies that focus on a wide educational scope rather than encyclopaedic value. - This is true, but Wikipedia is Wikimedia's flagship project. When Commons was formed, it was with the understanding that it would be a help to the encyclopedia. What we are discussing now is the matter of whether Commons catch-all self-concept is or is not being a harm to Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia which you and any nine-year-old can edit. Discussing Commons this way on Wikipedia where people are wearing Wikipedia tinted spectacles is pointless if the intention is to improve Commons policies. If you want to help improve Commons, have the discussion on Commons. - We generally talk here on Jimbo's talk page to bring things to his attention and maybe solicit support for an idea about how to improve the encyclopedia. I know JW is interested in Commons because what goes on at Commons directly impacts and affects the encyclopedia. It was Jimbo himself who a couple years ago took the initiative and attempted a well-intentioned cleanup of Commons. So, Wikipedia is central, and Jimbo's talk page is likewise central. Your ideas about treating Commons like an island unto itself don't hold water. IMHO, -Stevertigo (t | c) 04:16, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Did you know that Jimbo has a user page on Commons? You can find it at Commons:User talk:Jimbo Wales. Thanks --Fæ (talk) 05:22, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Seriously, how could anyone close that as keep? It has zero value as anything as the nominator pointed out and there is no way the two keep arguments of depiction of a "cultural phenomenon" somehow make it worthy of being kept. In what possible setting could this image be used ever for anything even remotely educational. IRWolfie- (talk) 10:50, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Renomination
I want to renominate it for deletion, but it was just closed yesterday. I assume the rules for deletion nomination there are similar enough to here, which means it is very much frowned upon to renominate after such a short time frame. Options? SilverserenC 07:36, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Are we sure things like this can't be identified in the future? The person who uploaded it to Flickr might be identified. I'd go and ask for a model release via commons:Commons:OTRS. And if they can't be identified how can we check up on copyright anyway? Dmcq (talk) 09:06, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
God willing, Homeland Security won't be implementing scrotal recognition for decades. Wnt (talk) 12:11, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Last time I went through airport security I went through a body scanner. Pretty much the same thing I understand. Do we have any images of those types of pseudo-nude body scans on Commons? --Fæ (talk) 12:23, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
None of this really helps in regards to getting the image deleted. SilverserenC 22:36, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Who is promoting a bestiality video?
User:Fæ, the Wikimedia UK chair, accused me above of promoting a Wikimedia-hosted hardcore porn video that depicts bestiality (to wit, sexual relations with a dog). I would like to examine this claim in a little more detail.
First, let's look at the page views this video has received:
In other words, the file averaged well over 1,000 views a day virtually from the day it was uploaded. It must indeed have been well promoted. It still averaged more than 1,000 views a day in February, but dropped below that number in March, which is when I first became aware of the file and its content. It is currently at just under 500 views a day – still considerable for a file that is not used in any other project than Commons. It has been one of the most viewed pages in Commons, ranging in the top 100 to top 500 since it was first uploaded, based on page views per day.
Now, I first learnt about the fact that Wikimedia hosts this video, and its actual content, on March 7. I believe the first time I posted an (indirect) link to it was on 8 March, in the comments section of Larry Sanger's blog post (which itself contained a direct link to it). But March was the first month in which page views for the video dropped below 1,000 views. So just as a matter of fact, my having mentioned the file on several occasions in March did not cause the number of page views the file received to rise above January and February levels.
It should also be noted that the video was enthusiastically discussed on social network sites such as Reddit: [8].
Still, the links I posted will unquestionably have caused a number of people to view the video. The Wikimedia UK chairman appears to imply that I should not have done so, and that it is a bad thing for people to have viewed the video. He himself has said that he has not viewed it, because he does not wish to be upset by it.
But if that is how he feels, why is he, along with the rest of the international Wikimedia leadership, happy to host the video for unfiltered public viewing on a Wikimedia site? And why is he unhappy for public content hosted by Wikimedia to be advertised in public, if he considers the content educational?
If anyone has promoted the viewing of this video, it is Wikimedia. This R18 film has been viewed 100,000 times on Wikimedia Commons in the past few months – far more people than will ever have seen this film in a private sex club (the only type of place allowed to screen it in the UK). Wikimedia has well and truly popularised this video.
Wikimedia – an educational charity, no less – has quite likely, at least in practical effect, also promoted the viewing of this video by minors, because there is no adult filter on any Wikimedia project, and any schoolchild who enters the French word for "homework" or "holiday" as a search term in Wikimedia Commons is presented with this video as the first search result.
I have verified that the video has been viewable on UK school computers, and I have no doubt that it has been viewable on French and Canadian school computers as well.
I see no sign from the Wikimedia UK or Wikimedia Foundation leadership that they are in any way concerned about the present situation. I believe it is profoundly detrimental to the aims of the Wikimedia Foundation (and Wikimedia UK), to make such material available unfiltered, pumping it into schools and teenagers' bedrooms. If Wikimedia had an adult filter, a whole separate discussion could be had about what we as an educational charity should host or not, but we are very far from having even an opt-in filter, let alone an opt-out one.
As long as Wikimedia hosts this material unfiltered, it is in the Foundation's interest to draw attention to the material on its own servers. If I am right, and the Foundation's policy is untenable, then this public attention is necessary to end this sorry state of affairs, and prevent it getting worse – because every day, more unfiltered sexual material is added to Commons.
And if the present Wikimedia leadership is right, and it is in line with the educational aims of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the aims of its donor base, for tens of thousands of minors and adults to view this R18 video and others like it, then education will have profited – even if this seems to me like quite an extraordinary stance for an educational charity to take, and I cannot imagine the wider public endorsing such a view.
Either way, nobody in the Wikimedia leadership should complain if I or any other editor draw attention to this or similar material hosted unfiltered on Wikimedia sites. It is simply hypocrisy. If you don't want attention drawn to it, delete it, or host it responsibly. JN466 02:57, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't know if Fae is unhappy that you're promoting the film, but I'm not. It goes to show that, whatever our differences, in the end it all comes down to getting people to put aside their fears and prejudices, watch the movie, and decide what they think. The only thing that worries me is when people imagine that sensible Wikipedians would actually believe in this "R18" nonsense scheme, which surely must look pretty stupid even in Britain. We're here to understand things, not suppress them. Wnt (talk) 03:37, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Possession of that file may well be illegal in the Uk - as Jayen states, "As long as Wikimedia hosts this material unfiltered, it is in the Foundation's interest to draw attention to the material on its own servers." Youreallycan 04:20, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
No "may well be" about it; the laws on bestiality were changed a couple of years ago - watching the video is a "slap on the wrist" offence. Possession means, at least, a criminal record or a suspended sentence. And they are cracking down on that sort of offence. --Errant(chat!) 09:09, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
One may well argue that the lawis anass, but it's still the law. Under UK law, it is an offence to supply video works to individuals who are (or appear to be) under the age of the classification designated, just like it is an offence in the States to serve alcohol to anyone below the age of 21 (which is an idea that causes mirth or incomprehension in much of Europe). I hope you are consistent in your convictions, and will turn up at Wikimania serving minors free beer, because the point of beer is that one should try it, and understand it! Cheers. :) --JN466 04:28, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
(Note added) For the record, I haven't seen the video, but the most relevant UK legislation would appear to be Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, in which videos depicting bestiality are specifically singled out. Such videos would not receive an R18 certificate, and in one case an adult simply downloading such videos led to a 12-month jail sentence followed by deportation. Mere curiosity, or the following of a WP discussion thread, would not be acceptable as an excuse. WP users in the UK need to take active care not to let anything like this get near their computer. That may mean that users from the UK cannot participate in an informed way in this discussion. Jheald (talk) 09:05, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
According to the British Board of Film Classification website, the movie received an R18 certificate in 2003. [9] I cannot see anything to indicate on that BBFC page that this certificate is no longer valid, but users in the UK and elsewhere would be well advised to check the legal situation in their jurisdiction before viewing. --JN466 09:54, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Ah, OK. Material which is certificated is exempt from the 2008 Act. I have no idea what would be passed today; but if it has been classified and certificated then that is what is relevant. Jheald (talk) 10:21, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
A question that occurs to me is whether the company republishing these old films in this cinema release did enough sweat-of-the-brow work to create a new copyright. In which case all the videos from the series would be copyright violations. --JN466 10:00, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Ah, but there's the thing - I'm not suggesting to keep things prohibited by US law (however much I would prefer to), but Wikipedia doesn't need to go by UK law. If the UK didn't have so many problematic laws - ranging from this to the excessive libel claims to the copyright on the King James Bible - maybe Wikipedia or some equivalent would have started there, and then we would, but surprise surprise, that's not how it happened. We can't follow the laws of every country in the whole world at the same time - there'd be nothing left. Wnt (talk) 04:47, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Ah, but Wikimedia wants its tax exemption in the UK. It does not look good if you claim that you are serving the UK public and are entitled to tax relief, but then say at the same time that you will break UK law, because you think it's silly. If you want to break UK law, take an honest stand, and pay your taxes. JN466 04:54, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
I assume you're talking about Wikimedia UK, an organization which doubtless will attempt to follow UK law in their UK-based activities, no? The fact that they contribute free content to the same public domain, or the same Internet, or indeed the same server, as free content from other countries with different laws --- that should not disqualify them. Wnt (talk) 04:58, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Of course it should. If you're collecting money to financially support someone who wilfully breaks UK law, to the perceived detriment of UK citizens, that jolly well should disqualify you from charitable status in the UK. JN466 05:15, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Videos and images that explicitly depict beastiality don't belong on Wikipedia, and therefore they don't belong on Commons. There is nothing educational about a video of someone destroying themselves. -Stevertigo (t | c) 04:39, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Nobody "destroyed themselves" on that video, though I should say the man is very fortunate that that dog never learned to snatch hot dogs from the picnic table! Wnt (talk) 04:47, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
The video depicts someone fornicating with a beast? Is that correct? This is a rather self-destructive kind of behaviour. Although the word gets misused, we sometimes refer to such types of sexual immorality as "sodomy." The term is used to indicate a type of sexual deviancy which only serves to separate an individual from their divine nature, sometimes irreparably so. That is what I meant by "destroying themselves." Regards,-Stevertigo (t | c) 05:21, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Soapboxing again Jayen466? I pointed out that this was a video that you have been spending a large proportion of your time promoting an argument and shouting about, often, and on many platforms. Jimbo's user page seems your favorite haunt, how many times have you posted here issuing your diatribes? As you are a member of Wikimedia UK (by the way, I supported your application as I believe you support our charitable mission even though you argue like hell about these matters), I thought you realized that I reply here as me, a real person with an opinion, I do not have permission or authority from the Wikimedia UK board to do so and I frequently disagree with other trustees on various issues; that is a sign of a healthy board representing a diverse range of viewpoints. Harping on about me being the UK Chairman does not censor me from having my opinions or hamper me from pointing out your aggressive lobbying rather than using processes of community consensus on Commons, the sort of action that might pragmatically change policy rather than just winding people up and creating dramah. --Fæ (talk) 05:39, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Fae, you smeared Jayen in a discussion above. Then, when Jayen defends himself and explains his motive behind his actions, you accuse him of "soapboxing". That isn't very helpful or honest. Anyway, I guess the only way to resolve some of the problems with Commons' admins is to get more editors involved in Commons' deletion and other admin-related discussions. So, Jimbo's talk page is a good place to do that. Cla68 (talk) 05:51, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
I think I recognize character smearing seeing as how I am such a persistent target for the worst kinds of it off-wiki.
Cla68, if you or other readers are bored with these diatribes and prefer a p0rn free good news story about Wales and Wikipedia, you may want to take a look at MonmouthpediA which officially launches tomorrow. In fact, I think I'll go and do something to help out there rather than reply further here. Cheers --Fæ (talk) 06:04, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Fae, I acknowledge that you are entitled to speak as an editor, and that not every word you write is you writing with your "chairman hat" on. (If can strike those bits if you like.) And thank you for supporting my membership application; someone lesser might not have. Regards. --JN466 08:39, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks back at you. It is worth noting that I am not "happy to host the video for unfiltered public viewing on a Wikimedia site", this is your assumption about my opinion. You are aware that I am open to grown-up discussion on these issues and I will support pragmatic solutions that are not unnecessary censorship, such as additional warnings or wiser page layout, as I recently stated to your lobbying questions here (questions 12 to 14). --Fæ (talk) 09:20, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Jimbo, why's this discussion about an article's onsidedness and lack of neutrality repeatedly blanked?
closing discussion about nonsense--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:04, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
From the article (World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories): "On September 11, the North Tower (1 WTC) was hit by American Airlines Flight 11 and the South Tower (2 WTC) was hit by United Airlines Flight 175, both Boeing 767 aircraft. The South Tower collapsed 56 minutes after the impact, and the North Tower collapsed 102 minutes after."
At this point, with all the latest revelations all over the net regarding the non-identity and fabrication of the victims' names and photographs, it can be said that the only people who still take this myth seriously are die-hard partisans of the US Government. I wonder how seriously this position can be called "neutral" when only the US government, alone among world governments, and its most hard core die-hard supporters, still insist on such a fairy tale. 71.246.156.241 (talk) 06:43, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
The anon's statement may justifiably be called a "fairy tale". — Arthur Rubin(talk) 07:11, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Artur Rubin, all anyone has to do is just a little elementary digging into the word VICSIM. As only about a million more people do every day. So the only known pictures of nearly all the 3000 victims are photoshopped images of each other, eh? That's some coincidence! And the vids of people falling out of buildings? Come on, video games nowadays look far more realistic than that amateur crap. You can't keep up a good lie forever, Rubin. 71.246.156.241 (talk) 07:45, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Fuck September Clues. It's all over Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, etc etc etc. VICSIM! VICSIM! VICSIM! VICSIM! (Look it up sheeple, I dare you!) 71.246.156.241 (talk) 08:00, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
None of those are reliable sources. Very few, if any, are even credible (e.g., if I see a twit tweet stating this, it does not not lend credibility to the content.) — Arthur Rubin(talk) 08:12, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Hmmm... Maybe I don't care whether YOU find the information reliable, and I'm really just here to shout out loud to the last cobwebbed corner of the 'net that still hasn't seen about the stuff produced about the VICSIMS. Then, ask how "reliable" are sources that lie to you even after the game is, well, pretty much basically, up. VICSIMS! Yeah! Hey, I know -- maybe the meme is big enough to merit an English wikipedia article explaining the meaning of the popular term VICSIM for those folks who aren't familiar with the term! You could even fill it with all the "reliable sources" you like, Arthur! lolololol! 71.246.156.241 (talk) 08:37, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Quoted by 71.246.156.241
Not sure whether the above material should be on Jimbo's page, but let's let Jimbo decide, since there seems to be contention about whether to keep it. (I put the table around it so it was more clear that the original poster (the IP) was quoting something from another page, and not just engaging in debate on this page.) I'm also not sure why the IP user posted it on Jimbo's page, but anyway, its Jimbo's page, he can do what he prefers with it. -- Avanu (talk) 12:40, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Since this IP appears to be alleging that Wikipedia editors are co-conspirators in mass murder [10][11] (see edit summaries), the above appears to be feeding the troll, but have it your way. Acroterion(talk) 13:02, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Content vandalism
Just thought I'd let you know about this. Wikipedia:WikiProject Film/Vandalism by 201.19.*.* is a page set up to track down the edits of a single vandal, operating out of Rio. The number of vandal edits is quite large (in the thousands) and the edits are deceptively plausible, for example adding actors and producers to movies in which they didn't actually appear or work on etc. Anyway the reason I'm bringing this here is that this guy should have been noticed a long time ago - there should be greater coordination in dealing with things like this. What do you think of the idea of on occasion using the banner space for site-wide broadcasts of fixit requests like this one? -Stevertigo (t | c) 23:38, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps limit tactics to anti-vandalism task force: I'll leave space for Jimbo to answer, above, but I think there is much danger in wide-ranging discussions of vandalism tactics. The effect can be like WP:BEANSish examples getting copycat followers, or like the Streisand effect, where the negatives become amplified by widespread notifications. Part of the danger comes from "boasting about the successes of vandals" which is part of the vandalism, and also inspires other vandals, likewise, to see their exploits announced in system-wide notices. Instead, expand a large, healthy group in the anti-vandalism task force and limit detailed discussions to those venues (and private email exchanges). Otherwise, it is like "telegraphing your punches" as to what the vandals are likely to do, where their punches hurt the most, and planned responses which they could out-wit faster by having advance notice. Now, while Jimbo's talk-page gets large readership, it is not the magnitude of the Main_page (with 7.3 million views per day), so discussions here should not be considered as risky as system-wide announcements could become. Again, for months, I have studied pageviews related to articles mentioned on Jimbo's talk-page, and I see no evidence that the "whole world" watches this talk-page to plan all their activities (yet some people do). However, when posting some system-wide announcements, then beware the inverse consequences which might occur. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:57, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
A fixit banner could be made visible only to logged-in users. -Stevertigo (t | c) 05:40, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
Sounds like a vandalism award to me. Dmcq (talk) 23:38, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
Wikilove
Laurier WP
Thanks for Wikia and all your contributions. Eurobas (talk) 20:34, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
April 2012 editor counts rise after 6 years
Data of username editors, not IPs
The April editor-count data has been posted, and unfortunately, more good news in editor retention: April counts exceeded the March highly active editors (>100 edits/month), for the first time since April 2005.
Perhaps 2012 is the transition year, where some counts will still fall slightly, while others rise higher. There is not yet a dramatic increase compared to last year, but the April 2012 count (as 3,459 editors) was 99.2% of the April 2011 count of 3,488 busy editors. The reversed trend is the small uptick in April over March, where typically, the April "spring-break" counts have always dropped by 90-120 or so, not risen by 35 editors (1%) in April. Meanwhile, the count of the occasional active editors (>5 edits) did fall, slightly, but only by 605 (to 33,781), rather than the typical April drop over 1,300 active editors, leaving after March each year.
I know this good news must be very frustrating for users who want everyone to leave in anger, but if the active editors will not leave, then perhaps other ways must be found to work with them to fix the problems. The April 2012 data again supports the concept that the decline has bottomed out at 34,000 active editors, and 3,500 highly active editors (average) each month. -Wikid77 07:28, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Shucks that terribly annoying. Which problems would you suggest would most reduce the number of active editors if we fixed them? ;-) Dmcq (talk) 08:24, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
That is sorta good news but I can only hope that we can maintain it. I think with Rich F and his bots blocked thats going to cause a fairly big drop in edits, at least for a while. I'm not doing anything close to the numbers I was doing and several others are the same way. Unfortunately Wikipedia from the start of things been very reliant on a small group of extremely active editors and that group is shrinking. So although I agree that the numbers sound good I also think that we still have a lot of work to do. I also think that although this data is encouraging we should also look at how many editors are staying compared with those that do a dozen edits and leave. I know that some stats have bene done that compares some of this but I think it would be interesting to see a chanrt that shows a line for new editors with 5-10 edits, editors with 100+ edits and editors with 1000+. What I suspect is our efforts to get new recruits are working for a while and then after a few edits they leave. I don't know that for sure though. Kumioko (talk) 14:19, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
I hate to be cynical...oh who'm I kidding, I love to be cynical, but I'd be curious as to how much of that is related to the US presidential election season and the users that flood in with the usual POV based editing every 4 years.--Cube lurker (talk) 14:28, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Paid staffers or election volunteers may remain afterward: Even if many people are drawn, every 4 years, to enwiki for the U.S. presidential election which coincides with the 2-year/6-year Congressional elections, there might be long-term retention, among those editors, of some who want to stay though the next year, hooked how the sourced information they add gets read every month, every year. As for April specifically, the April 2008 editor-counts did not rise in that election year, but instead the 2008 counts fell after March, even though 2008 was a wide-open presidential election year, with no encumbent eligible to re-elect (and new tickets McCain/Palin versus Obama/Biden). With the election in early November 2012, I think it will be difficult to separate whatever influence from the election-year editors, where even late November and December edits could be updates about impacts of the election. -Wikid77 15:19, 17 May, revised 03:39, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Problems of WP:CIVIL and WP:OWN: I guess my message could be interpreted as wanting more editors to leave, but it was intended the other way round. Several editors have been frustrated by unresolved cases of insulting remarks which violate WP:CIVIL or WP:OWN, where the attitudes and remarks make editors want to quit, but overall, more editors join. I still think a solution would be per-article edit-limits, perhaps on a 3-month basis, which could force some editors to skip various articles or talk-pages, once they reached a personal edit-limit for some troublesome pages. I suppose another person's user-talk page could also be set with a limit, so that they would be less likely to see wp:Wikihounding on their user-talk page by a specific user. -Wikid77 14:39, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
One thing I've learned studying the history of radical political parties in the 20th Century, which used to count their members based upon "dues stamps actually sold" from month to month, is that to really see trends don't look at the month-by-month figures -- look at quarterly totals and then compare them to previous year figures for the same quarter. I've run that excellent series of "very active editors" linked above into a spreadsheet and generated quarter-by-quarter stats.
Basically, the Very Active Editor numbers — THE key statistic for WP editors, in my opinion, the "cadres" of the organization — has been flat for the last 4 quarters: 3469 — 3456 — 3422 — 3438. Those numbers are not trending anywhere; we've had for the last year approximately 3450 "activists" in English WP. That's the good news. The bad news is that quarterly figures compared to previous year are still trending down. Here's the series for the last 4 years:
Q-I: 4200 — 3945 — 3628 — 3438
Q-II: 4351 — 4103 — 3751 — 3469
Q-III: 4239 — 3999 — 3701 — 3456
Q-IV: 4069 — 3797 — 3539 — 3422
Every single quarter has posted declines against the previous year. That's not good. The bottom line is that is appears that attrition of key volunteers has been staunched for about a year now, but we really won't know for sure for another year or so. Now where is that WYSIWYG editing software that we need so badly? Carrite (talk) 04:15, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
Another year might reveal major growth: The past year has been level, but is that glass "half-empty" or "half-full" compared to next year? Thanks for re-analyzing the data by a different method, and I have also noted to Jimbo that the decline had ended during the entire past year. I have stated it as: the prior decline has bottomed out at 34,000 active editors, and 3,500 highly active editors (average) each month. Even though that might seem ho-hum, the alternative fears were of a massive "free-fall exodus" of hundreds of editors quitting in disgust every month (no evidence of that), where instead, the numbers show editors returning, or new editors joining, to maintain the ranks of active editors. For the busy editors (>100 edits), that means, typically, more than 3 edits per day all month. I see the whole situation as a "population growth problem" where populations drop severely due to massive catastrophes, such as plagues, wars, or drought famines. The only wiki-catastrophe I found was during 2007-2008 when school boards banned the use of Wikipedia in numerous schools (or universities) within a few months, and editor counts radically fell around the same time, likely due to fewer students using Wikipedia than in prior years. The editor counts fell further, but the decline slowed, over the years, and halted during the past year. Lacking a new wiki-catastrophe, I see the trend as moving to higher editor counts, which is what the global editor-counts have shown, when analyzing the other-language Wikipedias (which are rising except German, Swedish, and a few others). However, another bizarre change to the user interface could be a wiki-catastrophe, such as the 2011 MediaWiki 1.18+ forced disruption to disable/lockup the MSIE Internet Explorers 6, 7 and 8 compatibility mode. So, as a computer scientist, I fear that the implementation of a WYSIWYG interface, if it went awry to further disable the current UI, could be another wiki-catastrophe to decimate the population of active editors. However, the data of the editor-count stats will help track the impact of such changes. -Wikid77 05:30, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
Penyulap has presented you with the Donut of DOOM in the spirit of WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day a little more gothic. Bon appetit! Spread the smell of DOOM by adding {{subst:Give doom}}.
Statistics alone won't light the way into the future for anyone, they can for example indicate the cream of the crap is being collected. The editors who fight for the pillars versus the selfish and despicable. You can lose the war and pick up numbers along the way. There are those who don't care and are along for the ride, writing about a butterfly in Madagascar, they don't care if corporate interest is winning or wikipedia is every zealot's personal webspace, because it doesn't effect them. The editors who used to fight for the principles are losing and leaving and being replaced by people of a different nature.
What will die is wikipedias reputation, neutrality will be for the butterflies. That will be the reputation, who will donate to support that ? Web hosting for corporate interest and fanatics, for free ? Wikipedia won't switch off like a light though, it will fade out like a dot com.
Sorry my forecast is gloomy, I should try? to cheer you up with a donut (I'm not very good at cheering people up I have found, but I do try. Auntie Pesky is often cheered.) I try to be in a cheerful mood and not worry, but I just get too upset where I can clearly see the decline ahead, (the present is not something I am as focused on as most people). Andy was a good editor, he carried the flame in his heart, defending the pillars was his struggle, and following the IAR to the letter (by dropping his pants and taking a dump on the "rules", but all the while defending the spirit despite that)
You probably shouldn't eat that donut, or even nibble it, it seems to kill everything that touches it. I'd steer clear of it if I were you. Penyulap ☏ 22:48, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
Ah, a little gothic sunshine to brighten up the day. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that "The Pillars" are being forsaken in favor of any sort of New School editors that don't care about the things that really matter: Verifiable accuracy, Substance, and NPOV. ("Accurate stuff in bigger quantities, written neutrally.") The thing is, I'm guessing and you're guessing — the foundation has done an extremely poor job analyzing the composition of that core of 3450 editors. Here's what I think they are: male, we know, probably in an 85:15 ratio, maybe even 90:10. A majority from the UK and the USA, but also a substantial contingent from English-As-A-Second-Language Europe and Australia. Predominantly caucasian. Predominantly college students or college graduates. Stable in terms of longevity and output. Older than the foundation thinks they are — with content writers significantly older than vandal fighters, on average. Socially liberal. Possessors of specialist knowledge about one or more subjects and driven by a desire to expand the information pool on the net. That's my guess anyway. Carrite (talk) 03:47, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
I should see if I can update the bias page so more editors can see the problem. Penyulap ☏ 08:35, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
@Carrite Spot on, especially re the age of editors. I'm pretty confident that the silver surfers are becoming more important on wiki, and that our demographics are changing rapidly with the average age going up by more than a year a year. This influences the expected length of a wiki career - the newly retired may stay as editors for many years longer than the adolescents and teenagers - though it will be many years before we know what proportion of our younger editors come back at later times in their lives. ϢereSpielChequers 23:06, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
I wish the Foundation had made an effort to analyze the demographics of content-creators more carefully, because I think it will be something that illuminates the path forward when they do. My theory is that many of the more prolific content-creator (vs. vandal fighters) are in the 50-65 age range. It's a question of time + specialist knowledge. As WP moves from a less developed state to a more developed state, the need for specialist knowledge will become greater. And, who has time + specialist knowledge? Retired or tenured-and-coasting professors! That should be the number 1 with a bullet recruitment demographic, more than global South or female or any other social category... I'm pretty certain about that. I'm also pretty sure, however, that until the user interface is as simple as doing a MS Word or Apple Pages document, it's like waterskiing through a mud hole behind an ATV trying to get the Older Academic sorts up to speed to edit... All things in due time, but we need that WYSIWYG interface post haste. Carrite (talk) 04:27, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Age of bio-page articles reflects younger crowd: A look at the birth categories of the bio-pages shows a curious skew that most notable people are in their 20s, not 40s or 50s. Meanwhile, the user-demographic data has reported the bulk of editors as being "twenty something" with a peak around 27 years, growing 1 year older each year, as shown among the German Wikipedia editors. That gives the impression that the editors are staying with Wikipedia and growing older at the same rate, ageing with the 'pedia. The bio pages show a similar trend, with a bias to write about more people in the same age groups as the editors. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:45, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
The new Terms of Use appear to have been developed in violation of your "Statement of principles"
The second principle in your Statement of principles seems to have been severely neglected in the process of developing the new Terms of Use document that is proposed to become effective a week from now.
Firstly, the discussion was no where near as open as it should have been since it was not well advertised. While some people on the discussion page say they remember the discussion being advertised at some time with a banner on en.wikipedia.org, that seems doubtful to me since I have a record of many edits throughout September 2011 (the month the discussion was announced in other places), so I know I would have noticed a banner then, and there is also no mention of the word "banner" in any context where it would refer to a site-wide banner in the whole page archives. Even if there was a short-running banner (much shorter than the banner running this month to announce the enactment), the page history shows an extremely low participation rate by people outside of what your Statement of principles calls the "cabal"; as a way of estimating non-"cabal" contributions, I looked at the number of red-linked meta.wikimedia.org usernames (only red-linked usernames and not IP addresses, since red links just stand out more in the list; IP contributions may be proportional, or possibly not), since anyone who bothers to create a meta.wikimedia.org user page seems suspiciously enthusiastic about the management of Wikimedia projects (obviously this is not a perfect way of defining "cabal"). There are only sixteen total red-linked usernames in the entire edit history before the draft was frozen on January 1; even more disturbingly, there are only four total red-linked usernames in the edit history prior to December 1 (one of which made only one edit), by which time I imagine the draft had already accumulated an aura of inevitability.
Secondly, since a Terms of Use document is at least as much a "security measure" in the traditional sense of security as anything in a wiki server's codebase, the process of developing them should have been far more modularized to achieve "strict scrutiny". The proposed document is very wide-ranging and was developed all at once without clear articulation of each "compelling community interest" that the individual terms are intended to address; it seems to totally sweep aside and displace (at least selectively displace, without being clear about its selections) ten years of Wikipedia policy documents, even as it for the first time explicitly backs its policies up with legal threats against users by the Foundation. Also, the Terms of Use are of course intended to not be "virtually invisible for newcomers" since they must be visible to be enforceable (the old Terms of Use were already a major barrier for new users, but the extra length and wide-ranging subject matter (not just copyright) make the new ones far worse), but I do not think that that can totally be fixed.
What do you think about the Foundation's handling of this, or about the future of your second principle? Esetzer (talk) 20:00, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
As one of the people who took part in the TOU discussions, and by your definition as a cabal member, I'm going to chip in here. Firstly your definition of the cabal is off, both because it includes people who created userpages on meta after they started participating in the TOU discussions, and because you are including me in the cabal - if I was a member of the cabal would my Meta RFA have tanked so badly? and more importantly I'd have a cabal T shirt by now. But more seriously your methodology is off. The acid test as to how wideranging a discussion was is whether someone can reread the debate and identify issues that were omitted. I suggest that you read the archives of meta:Talk:Terms_of_use and see if you can come up with issues that weren't raised there but that you think should have been. ϢereSpielChequers 21:32, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
I can only second this. The process was plenty open, but even if some people were unaware of it and didn't participate, it isn't as if it's absolutely closed to change. Amendments with broad community support will surely be considered.
So to answer Esetzer's question: What do of think about the Foundation's handling of this? It was superlative. What do I think of the future of my second principle? It's stronger than ever, and has a robust future.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:22, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
The biggest question is why people (such as I, and several others who both managed to find the still-unadvertised discussion page and bothered to comment) were unaware. There is no definitive record of what advertising was done that anyone has been able to lead me to. As someone interested in the Foundation's Terms of Use but not very interested in the Foundation's day-to-day operations, I was looking out for any news about the Terms of Use in what I thought would be the obvious places, based on common sense and my knowledge of precedents such as the 2009 licensing update and Terms of Use promulgation (which is documented well at meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Timeline and the other pages linked to from the navbox there). Places where I would have expected a notice and link to the discussion (and would, myself, have seen it and then proceeded to the discussion) include:
"CentralNotice" (link leads to a page I just found that seems to refute the idea there was ever a Wikimedia-wide banner advertising the discussion)
The notification area at the top of Special:Watchlist (I might have missed that during certain portions of the comment period due to "WP:Wikibreaks")
The conceptually related discussion of OpenStreetMap's license change and new Terms of Use that was ongoing during the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use comment period (obviously that page is not Wikimedia's responsibility, but I think it is an interesting omission on someone's part).
(I would put this list in the section of the Terms of Use discussion page dealing with suggestions for the next time a Terms of Use revision is proposed, but the new Terms of Use already make it clear that "WikimediaAnnounce-L" will be the official place to check for proposed changes, so I will try to avoid confusing the issue for next time even though WikimediaAnnounce-L is not the ideal place for such notifications for many users)
Also, note that the perceived cover-up of the Terms of Use discussion's existence is actually still ongoing, in a way: I and several other commenters at meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terms_of_use have been asking why there is no link to that page (or any other non-protected discussion page) from the current banner announcing the Terms of Use change or from any of the pages that the banner's links lead readers to.
Of course, if many people actually cared about the Terms of Use discussion, word probably could have gotten out last year without Foundation-sponsored advertising (there could have been a Wikinews article, an invocation of the Emergency Broadcast System, etc....), but I do not think that the fact that that did not happen excuses the Foundation from treating the Terms of Use as an important community issue. Among those who show they care on the Terms of Use discussion page, the advertising issue seems to be the most frequent complaint since the banner announcing the change appeared, so I wanted to cover it fully, but I will respond to your other points soon. Esetzer (talk) 05:17, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
Look, you're forumshopping the crap outta this, and you've been at it for weeks now; as I told you before, you missed the party. I don't have an IRC account, I don't frequent any off-wiki forums, and I'm not on any of the mailing lists; yet even I found and participated in the discussion. And people responded to some of my concerns; the legal council was extremely patient with and open to even some of the dumbest questions that came up. It is clear from the whole way you approach this complaint of yours that you envision a very different type of website and organization; good for you. As User:WhatamIdoing told you, go ahead and found your own website. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556> haneʼ 06:15, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
I have been discussing topics like this on the Terms of Use discussion page for weeks (since the Terms of Use banner appeared); I certainly have not been "forumshopping" for weeks. At the top of this page it says "Please don't consider alerting [Jimbo] to any topic to be canvassing". Besides just raising an alert, I took the time to present things in relation to "statement of principles", which I think many Wikipedians will find relevant. Esetzer (talk) 17:37, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
I misunderstood one of the comments there, so I should not have been quite so critical, but I think the link is still very relevant to the discussion. Only User:Michaeldsuarez is suggesting that any significant fraction of editors (much less of users) be directly informed. Very few editors (or readers) are likely to look at every WP:Village Pump headline or Foundation blog post. Esetzer (talk) 20:17, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
The link I just posted above can, I think, serve as an example of an issue that was raised during the discussion (in other words, not totally "omitted") but that was not discussed by a representative set of editors. I think that it is far from the only one. Just because many issues were discussed to some extent by some people does not mean that discussion was "wideranging" when the invitations were sent so selectively. Within the discussion archives, it appears that many of the users who made interesting suggestions that were not just a minor tweak of the draft initially proposed appear to have been trickling in after stumbling on links to the page in unexpected places, only to have their suggestions dismissed by the more active editors on the page who had the advantage of being there from the start (in other words, the advertising strategy constituted preemptive WP:Canvassing, which presumably can be far more effective than ordinary canvassing at creating a WP:False consensus; I am not very experienced with Wikipedia disputes (see my very non-controversial pre-April25th edit history), so WP:DBN if my characterizations seem harsh or imprecise). By the way, I would be interested to know how WereSpielChequers found out about the Terms of Use discussion since I noticed that he or she is one of the earliest non-WMF names that appears in the Terms of Use discussion page's history. Esetzer (talk) 21:59, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Usage of national TlDs
One reason why I think the vast majority of our users are English is the lack of things like wikipedia.fr. Just a thought.--Jasper Deng(talk) 05:39, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia.fr works fine for me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:17, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Majority of active editors are non-English: I am not sure what "vast majority of our users" could be called "English" (or from England?), unless that refers to readers who read the English Wikipedia versus the other-language Wikipedias. However, the 82,000 active editors (who make over 5 edits per month) are mostly working on non-English Wikipedias, as 58% of all active editors, whereas editors on enwiki are only 42% of the global editing. Below is the March 2012 data for the 232 active Wikipedia languages, where "34386" is the count of active editors on enwiki:
Active editors in non-English: 47,614 = 82,000 - 34,386 ~= 58% of total
In fact, the number of active editors in non-English languages has been grower even larger, so the "majority of active editors" as non-English has been becoming even "more non-English" during the past year. -Wikid77 12:25, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Blocked or Banned
I think this person, Gwern Branwen, User name User:Gwern should be considered for blocking or banning. According to the information in Mon, May 21, 2012 8:10:37 AMWikiEN-l Digest, Vol 106, Issue 14,(I cannot link but can copy and paste it if necessary to prove an obvious point) it would seem that he or she has a "hacker's mentality", performing unauthorized tests on Wikipedia and further has consistency shown no respect for Wikipedia's editors rules and procedures and therefore has no business on Wikipedia. This in an answer which describes the problem and his and my objection. It is a question to User:Gwern. I quote from the newsletter: Again, what if hundreds or thousands of users, whose methodologies are undiscussed and potentially flawed, were to take it upon themselves to conduct such "experiments" without consultation or approval? ?That's the hypothetical scenario to which I referred.
To which the response was: It's unfortunate that I am such a prominent figure and powerful thought-leader that hundreds and thousands of Wikipedians have even a tiny chance of mimicking my actions; but that's a risk you just have to take when you are as world-renowned as I am. I'm sure Kant would understand. These are informational discussions to similar activities: [[12]] Mugginsx (talk) 14:23, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
My reply to Gwern (from the mailing list): "I meant that there would be nothing to stop multiple editors, whose methodologies are unknown and unproven, from *unknowingly* duplicating each other's efforts." —David Levy 16:28, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
[13] A college professor did a test where they removed external links from articles to determine uh... not sure what they were trying to prove. Seems a bit odd. DreamFocus 15:29, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
User:Gwern is a respected editor, so always link direct evidence as diff-links: To avoid WP:Witchhunts (WP:HUNT), please include direct diff-links to specific edits where a user seems obviously in violation of Wikipedia policies or core principles. The contributions of User:Gwern go back to 2006, and was given a barnstar-award by Sue Gardner on 3 October 2011 (dif-663). Please link to extensive evidence of problems. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:34/16:23, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
As Mugginsx noted, the discussion is occurring on the WikiEN-l mailing list. Are public links to specific messages permitted? (I seem to recall a rule against them, but I might be thinking of a different list.) Gwern has admitted to performing an "experiment", wherein he/she is using IP proxies to vandalise 100 articles by removing an external link and evaluating other editors' reactions or lack thereof. Gwern, whose methodologies have been challenged, has ignored all requests to cease this behavior and seek community consensus or WMF permission. —David Levy 16:28, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Vandals intend to harm, not find loopholes in quality-control: Please remember that WP:Vandalism requires an intention to harm the project, so I do not see vandalism in the concept of removing sources in 100 articles to see if a quality-control alarm is raised. In technical tests of competence, it has been common to introduce spurious errors to see if those can be detected, along with live errors in the system. That is not considered vandalizing the test. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:12, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that Gwern intends to harm the project. I'm referring to the experiment's parameters; the idea is to gauge editors' reactions (or lack thereof) to "blatant vandalism" (Gwern's description of the edits). Note: Gwern has again described the edits as "vandalism" in this section. —David Levy 18:27, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
As I've commented on the mailing list, I don't assert that such a study lacks potential merit. The problem is that Gwern has acted unilaterally, with no verification that the methods and procedures are sound or permission (from either the editing community or the WMF) to proceed. Polite requests to stop have been ignored, apart from one instance of mockery:
"There's nothing to answer; and I've been copying the most informative or hilarious quotes for posterity, such as an active administrator in good standing wondering if it might actually increase article quality and not constitute vandalism at all!
The whole thing was worth it just for that quote; I could not have made up a better example of the sickness."
I have had the honor and the pleasure to interact with many scholars since I joined Wikipedia and in my experience, without exception, the more educated and/or intelligent the individual, the more polite, considerate, respectful of other's rights and humble they are. As for respect, it is earned and must be maintained by the individual who wishes the respect. If an average editor vandalizes once they are warned, twice, they are blocked. What happens if they do it 100 times? I guess we will see. Mugginsx (talk) 16:51, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Respect is assumed, disrespect is insinuated: In polite society, a common level of respect is granted in advance, as common courtesy, so that high-level events might proceed faster without proving that every person is respectable before conducting affairs of the day. That respect is strengthened by actions along the way. Most businesses do not search customers for money and background checks before allowing them entry. However, for exclusive events, or interaction among street people, then there are tests to "earn respect" and those situations can proceed slowly due to the extra hurdles imposed. Generally, WP:AGF is a faster method, with emergency reactions for unforseen problems. Meanwhile, questioning the motives of scholars is likely to be seen as a grave insult, as personal attack, so be careful when asking people to justify their actions. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:30, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
I have always respected you Wikid77 but I will have to respectfully disagree with your analysis above and have to wonder at the reference to street people. As for respect it is earned not assumed- Not in America at least.Mugginsx (talk) 17:52, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Fun fact: neither IP that I used has been banned, blocked, warned, or had their talk page edited for any reason whatsoever.
What does it say about Wikipedia if my account can be sanctioned, but the IPs are completely and utterly ignored? I do intend to revert all the edits if that matters to anyone. --Gwern (contribs) 17:19, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Gwern, for taking time to clarify the misunderstandings. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:30, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
What misunderstandings? —David Levy 17:46, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
It only means that Wikipedia has many fine volunteers that work as administrators, rollbackers, bots, etc., to keep the standards of Wikipedia while observing the rules, but sometimes unauthorized or inappropriate activities get through. Eventually, the problems are all addressed and solved. Happy to hear the activity is stopped and I withdraw any inference of vandalism as it is understood on Wikipedia. Apparently Gwern has a different definition of vandalism. I agree with his. Perhaps "unauthorized vandalizing-type interference" would have been a more appropriate description. Mugginsx (talk) 17:39, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Happy to hear the activity is stopped
I don't believe that Gwern has indicated that. The edits might or might not be ongoing, and we know that they haven't been reverted yet.
and I withdraw any inference of valdalism as it is understood on Wikipedia.
Gwern described his/her edits as "blatant vandalism". —David Levy 17:54, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
...If you read the methodology I posted or even just noticed how I keep using the past tense, you'd know that the vandalism stopped weeks ago. --Gwern (contribs) 18:06, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
I read your writeup of the procedure, which uses the present tense. The above reply is the first mention that "the vandalism stopped weeks ago" I've encountered. When you were asked via the mailing list to cease the vandalism if it was ongoing, you provided no indication either way. Your above reference to "neither IP that I used" could have referred to your edits thus far, so I thank you for clarifying. —David Levy 18:27, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Agree with David, you do not use the past tense in Issue 14 which was yesterday.Mugginsx (talk) 18:28, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Shouldn't this be at AN? or ANI? Dougweller (talk) 18:03, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm not at all bothered by Gwern's experiment here (especially considering the usefulness of many external links), but I think that this clearly meets the normal definition of vandalism. If someone else were doing the exact same thing, it would be called vandalism. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:10, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
To repeat the question posed above by, I believe, David, what is to stop others from doing the same thing? (I am paraphrasing) Notwithstanding Gwern's statment that no one is that good. (I am again paraphrasing) See my first edit for exact quote in which he seems to compare himself with Kant. Mugginsx (talk) 18:40, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
In fairness, Gwern was sarcastically citing his/her lack of Kant-like influence.
But my point wasn't that others will imitate Gwern. It was that indiscriminately permitting editors to perform such experiments without discussion or consultation is likely to result in unintentional duplication of effort (thereby exposing the encyclopedia to far more vandalism than necessary), with no assurance that the methods and procedures are valid and will generate useful data. —David Levy 19:03, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Funds Dissemination Interview
Hi Jimmy, our team at Bridgespan wishes to thank you for providing insights on the Funds Dissemination process and committee. Your perspective will play an invaluable role as we identify a process to distribute funds raised from the Wikimedia movement to the highest and best use around the world. Notes from our discussion can be found here. We encourage anyone with comments or questions about this process to visit the Funds Dissemination Committee page. Divya (talk) 15:52, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
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