User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 133

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Page view stats crashing on some, but not all, articles

See: "wp:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_110#Sudden drop in pageviews" and
see: "wp:Village_pump_(technical)#Relinking Google for SSL https". -Wikid77 16:55, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
List of pages: wp:Google https links. -Wikid77 13:49, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Hello Mr Wales. I have noticed recently that a number of important articles have suffered a precipitous decline (two thirds to three quarters) in page views over the last month. E.g., Schizophrenia, Cancer and Depression. (I just checked the stats of seven medical articles, and these three were exhibiting this peculiar pattern.) I've asked at the Village Pump Misc. and Tech. but got no explanation. I've just left the question on a tech. staff member's talk page, but I was wondering if you might have any idea what's behind this. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 06:47, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Pageviews drop 75% with Google https secure-server links: For the articles "Schizophrenia" and "Cancer" with Google links by "https:" prefix, the pageviews can be expected to drop by 75% in April 2013, as with articles "Gone with the Wind (film)" and "Parabola". There have been prior extensive discussions (here+wp:PUMPTECH) about the drops, which began near the end of March, but coincided with Good Friday to Easter drops in readership, which clouded the impacts at the time. I tried to rename "Parabola" temporarily to "Parabola (mathematics)" (which Google newly linked by "http:" prefix), but an admin went bonkers and renamed it back, proving that a double-rename within 2 days does not clear the "https" link, but thwarting any further attempts to fix the "https:" links. For example, if "Schizophrenia" were renamed as "Schizophrenia (medical)" then it would likely supplant the current Google "https:" link to "Schizophrenia" (after a few weeks), and perhaps the overall pageviews would increase back to typical prior levels. Another issue, complicating the pageview counts is the potential for an accounting error as severely under-counting the https-protocol pageviews (by 80% too few?). That's the status so far. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:11, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
I didn't understand much of that. Are 66%-75% fewer people visiting those articles, or is it just an accounting thing? Are you saying that Parabola exists on both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabola and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabola; Google now links its readers to https version, but we're only counting readers of http version? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:32, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
See answer below. -Wikid77 15:28, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
You should speak to User:West.andrew.g. He's the expert on pageviews around here. Pass a Method talk 13:37, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
I've asked. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:18, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
Hard to know where to post in this busy thread. I do indeed consume the raw data and store it locally to support the WP:5000 and my anti-damage research (you may also find my Signpost article interesting). Rather than stirring up discussion here (where few/none of the technical players are watching), there is an analytics mailing list that would put you in touch with those knowledgeable about how the raw data is generated. I highly suspect this is a technical issue in the HTTPS counting operation, rendering this discussion of Google gamesmanship/hacking unnecessary. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 06:25, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
Heya, this is Diederik from the Analytics Team @ WMF. We are looking into this issue and I will report back once I have a satisfactory explanation. Drdee (talk) 20:27, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Current discussions indicate fewer readers view those pages so fix Google links: The data tends to indicate that 66%-75% fewer people have visited those articles with Google https-links, because the related developers think https Internet requests are properly logged (after recent software changes) as not an accounting error of undercounting pageviews. Hence, my fear is the https-links are actually detering user pageviews, perhaps due to https security certificate warnings in some browser, which might scare readers to say "no" when asked to continue viewing page. Meanwhile, Bing.com does not have "https" (only "http:") links for those pages. If allowed, I would rename pages and wait a few days/weeks for Google to favor http-protocol titles:
  • As long as the renames leave the original title, as a redirect, then all prior links, or navboxes, will continue to connect the pages. However, the new page titles will be listed by Google as normal http-protocol, rather than SSL secure-server, https-protocol links. And, within a few weeks, the new titles will rank higher (above the renames) in Google Search. The problem is that, for many people voicing opinions, these renames might seem like "playing Chess" to solve a problem (aka "my brain hurts"), but we need to solve this problem, even if mind-numbing, before it continues to deter pageviews for another whole month. -Wikid77 15:28, 5 May, 14:30, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Why would a rename make Google index the http link instead of the https link? And why on earth should we consider it a good thing to have Google link to the http link instead of the https link? --Conti|✉ 15:51, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Renaming pages is a move in Google-Chess to reindex pages: The action of renaming a Wikipedia page, in the past, has caused Google to index the new title by a normal "http:" protocol link, while the prior name becomes a redirect, still linked by https secure-server link. After a few days, the new title is likely to be listed on the typical search-results page, while the old redirect drops lower. However, there is no "make Google" to do anything, because this whole process is somewhat of a "Google-Chess" game, where the opponent is free to react with other moves, and we would perhaps counter with other new actions. When Google links to a page by "https" prefix, then some browsers warn the user to allow a security certificate mismatch, perhaps asking several times before the pageview would occur, and so some users are likely to say "no" and the https-link page title does not get viewed by their browsers. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:51, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
      • This is surely a stupid question, but... why would a professionally maintained site like Wikipedia be generating security certificate mismatch errors anyway? (I know it happens on other such sites, I just don't understand it.) Wnt (talk) 19:34, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
      • This all seems a bit tragic. If my small sample of medical articles is anything to go by, and these results are real not a counting mistake, Google linking to an article via https reduces our page views to, I don't know, 2007 levels? Is there someone at the Foundation who's in a position to give authoritative answers to these questions? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 21:58, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
        • Yes, and xe gave an answer several weeks ago on the Technical Village Pump. If you want such things, the archives of the Pump are the place to look, not Jimbo Wales' user talk page. Here, you only get garbled re-tellings with randomly boldfaced sentences. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 12:55, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
That link is all questions and no answers. The only explanation there is a correction of previously double-counted https traffic. But the pattern is a sudden drop of between two thirds and three quarters - more in some cases - not a 50% drop. Perhaps there's nothing to worry about here, but we don't yet know that. I asked at User talk:Eloquence and User:West.andrew.g. Should I be asking someone else? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:17, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Why doesn't the WMF provide this information?

The page view statistics are not provided as part of Wikipedia or even as a service on the often unreliable toolserver but from a third-party site. I assume that the owner of this site is not compensated for this service and is under no obligation to continue providing it. I'm sure this question has been asked many times before, but why does the WMF not provide these statistics themselves? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:54, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Yeah, and why don't editors get paid, either? It almost seems like the WMF exploits voluntary work! I know it's all fun finding yet another argument why the WMF is the devil incarnate, but if people voluntarily provide stats like that, it's kind of hard to fault the WMF for letting them do that. --Conti|✉ 23:29, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Provided they're reliable. If the Foundation could provide more accurate/detailed figures, I wish they would. I'd like to know what percentage of readers spend less than 1 minute and more that 5 minutes on the page for one thing. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 00:15, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
      • I've been asking for years why the WMF doesn't support stats. They are, after all, a key measure of how much readership Wikipedia's getting and it really wouldn't be hard to do. However, apparently fluff like Wikipedia:Notifications has a higher priority. C'est la vie. Prioryman (talk) 07:02, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Conti, I'm not trying to find fault with the WMF, I'm simply asking why they don't do this themselves. It doesn't make sense to me that we are relying on a third-party site to provide something that is obviously valuable to some users of WP. Valuable enough that a link to the site is included on the history page of every article. It seems simple enough for the WMF to provide this service using their servers (and perhaps enhancing it with data that third parties would not be able to access, like showing which countries page viewers are coming from). Delicious carbuncle (talk) 13:36, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Read the about page on that site. The is hosted here - Kingpin13 (talk) 07:25, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Yes, raw data, but not analytics. The latter is done by the privately-hosted stats.grok.se toolserver. It's the latter that the WMF needs to take on. Prioryman (talk) 07:33, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

I'd provide a long explanation of why it's impossible, absent a gross invasion of the privacy of millions of people, to tell whether people read a WWW page on their browser screens for 1 minute or for 5 minutes, but there's an encyclopaedia around here that already explains (albeit somewhat inexpertly) Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the client-server model, pull technology, stateless protocols, representational state transfer, and indeed web analytics and Internet privacy. Uncle G (talk) 12:55, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

You can't give us the executive summary? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:51, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
The executive summary is that it can be done, and already is in enterprise-level analytics products, without any "invasion of privacy". It's simply a matter of recording the interval between sequential page views from a particular combination of IP address and user agent. If my IP and user agent accesses Talk:Jimbo Wales at 08:15 and then goes on to access WP:AN/I at 08:20, it can be inferred that I've just spent five minutes reading Jimbo's user talk page. Prioryman (talk) 07:16, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
I think this is a prime example of the WMF spending time, money and effort on zero gain projects like WikiLove or the New discussion crap and not focusing enough or at all on projects that do have value like fixing the RFA process, improvements to the new pages patroller tool or things like the page view stats. Even some of the bots should IMO could or should be done by the foundation. There was a banner recently asking about how to spend money. There is an idea, maintain the toolserver and do some of these tasks that are important instead of wasting time and effort on Zero sum gain projects that no one cares about, wants or doesn't add value to the project. Kumioko (talk) 14:58, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
I care about pretty much everything the technical team is doing. Notifications is useful (though the implementation is clumsey and a bit tone deaf); their mobile and tablet work is essential; as is wysiwyg editing; and I'm getting very sick of the appalling carping I've seen directed toward them. But I agree there are other technical issues that need addressing. Perhaps we need an RfC discussing what the editing community's tech. priorities are - to inform the Foundation. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:32, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
The most frustrating thing is that, were the WMF to actually provide viewer numbers like that themselves, this page would now be full of people complaining that the WMF is wasting money because they basically duplicated the information that is already present and readily available to all (and the old stats site looks better, anyhow!). More likely than not, it would have been the same people complaining about it, too.. --Conti|✉ 23:10, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
There's no need for the WMF to duplicate. Just take over the stats.grok.se service and have it supported by WMF technical staff. Prioryman (talk) 07:13, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
All of this is dependent on what was being counted. If the page view counts aren't removing bots and spiders then you'll have wildly inaccurate data. For example one stats package I used always reported twice the number of hits than other packages because it didn't filter out the googlebot crawls. John lilburne (talk) 09:35, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
  • For example 101,000 daily pageviews of 'Cat anatomy' page: Where the WMF could help is perhaps explaining how to skip the automated views, or whatever process, had caused article "Cat anatomy" to log 70,000–135,000 pageviews per day (pageviews-201305), formerly 350/day until October 2012 (pageviews-201210). I am thinking to skip data where an IP requests the same page more than 10 times in 30 seconds, or similar. A daily 70,000 pageviews is over 48 views per minute, almost 1 per second. -Wikid77 14:30, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
  • These odd spikes without explanation are somewhat common. If you look at WT:5000/Top25Report, there is a weekly discussion on trying to mine out what unusual spikes are the work of mis-configured bots / scripts / etc... "Cat anatomy", "G-force", and some others have been recurring for quite lengthy periods. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 23:03, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Now 300 major articles have Google https

List of pages: wp:Google_https_links

After 3 separate reports of low pageviews, I created "wp:Google https links" as an essay/list of Wikipedia pages with Google "https:" protocol links. The results are staggering, with more than 300 major articles now requiring secure-server access if clicked from Google Search. Perhaps the https links are related to fixes on the mobile website, where pages, with domain "en.m.wikipedia.org" were set as "rel=canonical" but with https prefix to enwiki. In many cases, the daily pageviews have dropped nearly 60%-75% during March/April 2013. The https links include many common terms and major articles in various fields of study:

As noted, over 300 of the articles cover major topics in each field of study. Although many users can still gain access to pages by "https:" protocol (or retype as typical "http:" prefix), the reduced pageviews, for each major article, have skewed the measurements of reader interest in each topic, giving the false impression that those major articles no longer have a strong base of supporters. Several major articles even give the illusion of leaving the Top 1,000 most-viewed, such as "Cancer" or "Oxygen" in March 2013, or "Nikola Tesla" or "Mark Twain" or "Shakira" or "Lady Gaga" in late April 2013, as if their daily pageviews were actually below 6,200 per day, rather than 7,000-12,000 or higher. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:49, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Analyzing patterns of https articles and pageview drops: The next step, after this data collection of 500 pages in essay wp:Google_https_links, is to look for patterns which might reveal why some articles are relinked in Google with secure-server "https:" prefix, while others are not. Also, some articles have dropped in pageviews by only ~58%, yet others dropped 75% of pageviews. I am thinking the likely culprit of the "https" prefix, comes from relinking the mobile website pages (with domain name "en.m.wikipedia.org") to force the re-indexing option as "canonical" onto typical domain "en.wikipedia.org" but with prefix "https" to overpower the typical "http" prefix of prior enwiki pages. Some combination of re-indexing options, with Google, has elevated the impact rank of "https" prefix to be considered crucial for Google ranking; however, it might have occurred weeks ago, and perhaps Google has been re-evaluating the PageRank ever since that time. Another possibility is that Google has recently changed the general importance of "https" pages to outrank "http" alternatives in specific cases. Some webpages of site "iTunes.apple.com" or others, also show https prefix in Google. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:20, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikpedia rules and the disabled

This could be a false alarm, but it seems to me that WP:OVERLINK may leave Wikipedia open to being criticised and/or sued some day for institutional discrimination against disabled people, specifically those with poor eyesight.

WP:OVERLINK currently states (among other rules):

Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, links may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead.

I could be wrong, but I suspect there is no valid justification for this rule, in the sense that its costs (in inconvenience and irritation, of which I have some experience) almost always outweigh its alleged benefits, of which I have no experience, having never found an article to be colourfully unreadable through being overlinked, nor having ever had a problem with not knowing which links are important to click (as long as the link is to the relevant Wikipedia article) - and this is despite the fact that a high proportion of Wikpedia articles seemingly are 'overlinked' according to this rule (and also according to many other equally dubious overlinking rules). However, the irritation caused by this rule does not seem equally visited on everybody - it seems greater for those with poor eyesight, who are likely to find it harder to spot the one link allowed in the article. Quite likely such increased irritation is also increased stress and thus also marginally increases their risk of death or incapacity from diseases like heart attacks and stroke. All of which could some day result in Wikipedia being criticised and/or sued. However to discuss this in the normal forums would probably achieve nothing more than putting the idea of suing Wikipedia into people's heads, which is not my intention, so I thought I'd raise the matter here instead (If you don't want this post to put that idea into people's heads, please feel free to delete it once you've read it).

Please don't feel obliged to reply to this post - I thought I ought to bring the matter to your attention 'just in case', but having done that, I don't see any obvious need for any further involvement by me, regardless of whether it's a false alarm or not. Tlhslobus (talk) 09:31, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

This is not an institution, so it can't be sued as you claim. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 09:38, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm not a lawyer, so you may be right, especially technically. The expression "Wikipedia sued by" currently gives over 44,000 hits on Google. Quite likely they are technically actually suing (or trying to sue) something like the Wikimedia Foundation, which is described as a not-for-profit organisation governed by the laws of California, one of whose projects is Wikipedia. I'm no lawyer, but it would greatly surprise me if such organisations cannot be sued - indeed I had always assumed that the strict rules concerning Biographies of Living Persons and Copyright Violations were at least partly the result of threats to sue which I vaguely remember hearing about in the media a few years ago, but of course I could be wrong. Believe it or not, when writing my message, I was actually well aware that 'Wikipedia' was probably not the correct legal term, but since I was addressing Jimbo Wales, who presumably knows all this a million times better than I do, I didn't think it necessary to waste my time researching the legal technicalities. In any case, being no lawyer, I didn't 'claim' that Wikipedia can be sued, I merely expressed concern that it might be, while twice mentioning that this may be a 'false alarm'. I also expressed concern that it might be criticized (while adding that this might be a false alarm). Incidentally, the expression "Wikipedia is an institution" currently gives over 83,000 hits on Google.Tlhslobus (talk) 12:21, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
IAAL, for what it's worth. Yes the Foundation as a legal entity can be sued; "Wikipedia" cannot be, although individual contributors could be, and I think have been, sued. You are also correct that a number of Wikipedia policies have been developed in part in an attempt to isolate the Foundation from liability.--ukexpat (talk) 12:58, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Ukexpat, nice, concise, and clear, even if it did take me nearly a minute to work out that IAAL probably meant 'I am a lawyer' :) Clearly I'm even deeper into my second childhood than I had supposed :) Tlhslobus (talk) 13:16, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
[facepalm] The point was "as you claim". Where does it say we are legally required to give a crap about disabled people? Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 13:24, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Links are not related to disability - at all. There is no reason to believe that if Wikipedia disabled all internal single-word links that anyone would be harmed, as computers (the things we use) have the ability to select words and phrases and search for them. Thus this is all a bit of hot air as an issue, and would certainly also apply to all websites, not just Wikipedia if some lawyer actually dreamed he could pursue it. Cheers. Collect (talk) 13:18, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Never believe Google when it estimates thousands of results. It's just really, really deceptive advertising. If you page down those 44,000 results they run out at 111. Search "Wikipedia sued by" -"german killers in privacy claim" and you get 17. Looking them over:
I think that is all the Google hits for that phrase - though of course, there may be other stories that don't use it. Wnt (talk) 13:25, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Wnt. See my comment below (at 14:54, 9 May 2013 (UTC)) Tlhslobus (talk) 15:10, 9 May 2013 (UTC)


So if I have this straight, the argument basically boils down to "there is a very slim chance[citation needed] that a person with a visual disability may die[citation needed] because Wikipedia discourages the practice of repeating a link multiple times in the same article"? That is... very creative. It is also rather silly, given that is actually the standard practice of a great many websites. 14:27, 8 May 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Resolute (talk • contribs)
To be fair, I think what the OP has in mind is that in some jurisdictions (particualrly in the EU - see this summary of the UK position for instance) web site providers have a legal obligation to make adjustments which may be needed to make the site more accessible to the disable - particularly the visually impaired. My guess, however, is that this website, governed as it is by the law of the State of Florida, is untrammelled by such obligations. DeCausa (talk) 16:27, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

As with many such debates, I'm struck with how irrelevant most discussion of the law is. We should strive to be accessible to as many people as possible, including those with various disabilities including poor eyesight, and should never accept the simple status quo if it is not working. Having said that, we also need to be fact-driven and balance a lot of competing interests. I am not an accessibility expert, but I presume that it is likely not an either/or in the sense of having to present the site exactly the same way to everyone - this is the point of modern CSS web design, really. There's no theoretical reason why we can't present the site to the vast majority of people in one way, and to people using screen readers in another way. I spoke at the recent board meeting about the importance of the issue, and while we didn't take a specific vote on a resolution (it wasn't that kind of discussion) there was no dissent from the concept that accessibility is important.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:49, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Jimbo. By the way, if you're going to put resources into making two (or more) versions available, if possible can you please try to ensure that the two (or more) versions are also available (at least whenever it's reasonably practical) at least as options to the non-disabled (i.e. not just to people using 'screen readers', whatever they are), as, for example, I find it quite hard to imagine any circumstances in which I would choose to read articles conforming to the current standard for banning so-called overlinking if an alternative was available, and I somehow doubt that I'm the only person who feels that way. And I suspect there may well be plenty of other instances where different people may prefer different article formats, etc...Tlhslobus (talk) 09:50, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

By the way, thanks for the Google details, Wnt. But 'Google distinct page count issues' explains why Google NEVER returns more than 1000 distinct results (in this case 111). This does NOT mean that there are only 111 such pages. It just means the 1000 most popular pages (those with the most pages linking to them) get reduced to 111 once duplicates are removed. For instance searching for "Microsoft" currently gives 971 million pages, but when you go looking for them you currently only get about 368 pages - this is clearly NOT because there are only 368 pages with the word "Microsoft" on the Internet. On the other hand the duplicates presumably mean that 44,000 overstates the real number, though perhaps not by all that much if one assumes that there are many unpopular pages which are much less likely to be duplicated than the most popular ones. So there is no clear reason to conclude that the estimates of 44,000 and 971 million are 'just really, really deceptive advertising', though I guess it is at least possible that that's all they are. Tlhslobus (talk) 14:54, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Wow - thanks for the heads up. Google's results are even more useless than I thought, then. I wonder who has access to the real search results now so they can actually research a topic properly? Wnt (talk) 15:19, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
I'd venture a guess that often nobody has access to the real search results, because they probably don't really exist, at least when the figures are as large as 971 million, which is probably based on fairly sophisticated statistical extrapolation from a much smaller sample, a bit like an opinion poll. Quite likely the same is also true with smaller figures like 44,000 (otherwise why not give the exact figure?), but again that's just a guess on my part. Of course if they really wanted to do some deceptive advertising of their supposedly brilliant search engine, they could give us a fake precise figure, like 971,465,819 instead of 'about 971 million', but perhaps there are laws against that, or the risks outweigh the benefits. Or maybe someone like the US Department of Homeland Security has paid Google to come up with a quick but reasonably reliable estimating technique, but maybe Homeland Security then uses a completely different much slower but much more thorough search engine on those rare occasions when it concludes that it wants to be sure to access all the hits. Tlhslobus (talk) 11:57, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

teensy query

I have seen some news articles recently about the FBI and various intelligence agencies (US and non-US) asking for details from Google and Facebook about users, including contents of messages. etc. Has the WMF been so asked for such information without warrants, and has the WMF acquiesced to giving out such information about users and editors here? Including contents of emails, revdeled edits, and articles accessed? Just a teensy query on my part. Collect (talk) 17:21, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Yes - the WMF handed over the IP addresses of a number of editors after a company accused them of slandering it in its Wikipedia article - Video_Professor#Video_Professor_lawsuit. I dare say there's far more details in the "usual websites". Black Kite (talk) 18:49, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
IIRC, that was in response to an open subpoena in a civil case? I was asking about cases where no actual "paper trail" for a warrant existed. Collect (talk) 18:53, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
See National Security Letters - I would not be confident in believing a U.S. organization had not turned over such details even if they deny it (or especially if they say nothing) because they risk nothing by lying to you and serious punishment if they tell you the truth. More to the point, I would be absolutely stunned if the intelligence agencies didn't have message contents and logs for all the contacts (including the "https") by spying on the "backbone" directly. As I recall, in the 1990s AOL and others built their new and improved backbone sites right next door to preexisting NSA facilities on the Dulles Technology Corridor. (See e.g. [7]) Wnt (talk) 19:02, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
In January 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation made this announcement: "Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA." Ashburn, Virginia (version of 17:11, 14 April 2013) is "part of the Washington Metropolitan Area".
—Wavelength (talk) 20:55, 8 May 2013 (UTC) and 22:56, 8 May 2013 (UTC) and 14:27, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
  • The WMF doesn't have much information about users except what is already visible. Compared to the amount of personal info on Google, Facebook, etc., I can't imagine the government caring about watchlists and preferences. So it's not a big concern. -- Ypnypn (talk) 20:00, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Presumably their interest would run more along the lines of knowing everyone who ever accessed pressure cooker bomb... or methamphetamine... or Black Panthers... or BitTorrent... The recent https: in theory should make it harder, but I'm afraid I just don't believe it; even so, it might create legal obstacles, if they matter, whereas the bare URLs in plaintext may be totally fair game [8]. Wnt (talk) 22:32, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
To my knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation has never been the recipient of one of these National Security Letters nor anything similar. The reason is likely what was identified by Ypnypn: we don't really hold that much data about people. This explains our policies on subpoenas, and so as Collect points out, we have sometimes responded to subpoenas. Also pay close attention to the reserved right to judgment calls to give up information "[w]here it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the Wikimedia Foundation, its users or the public." For more details, you'd best ask Geoff.
Speaking personally, I'm deeply opposed to the concept of National Security Letters and would personally risk prosecution if, in my judgment, the situation warranted it by exercising my First Amendment rights to speak openly about it. Fortunately, I've not been approached with any such demands. (If you ever ask me this question and I give a different answer of any material kind, you may speculate freely that the situation has changed and that I'm fighting it behind the scenes somehow. But that isn't the case. :-) )--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:42, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Glad to hear that! Also I was pleased to find [9], so far as it goes. Wnt (talk) 22:32, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Ypnypn wrote "I can't imagine the government caring about watchlists and preferences. So it's not a big concern." Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but personally I find it slightly hard to imagine the US government NOT being interested in certain kinds of watchlists, for example the kind of watchlist that might indicate that there was a relatively high chance that the user was some kind of radical Muslim. As I'm not a Muslim, radical or otherwise, and not American either, this is not a big concern for me, but if I were then it might be. Of course quite likely the government has no need to ask the Wikimedia Foundation for such information, because it has electronic means to automatically get hold of it without asking permission (but I'm no expert, so I could easily be wrong). Tlhslobus (talk) 11:30, 9 May 2013 (UTC).

Template refreshing glitch

I created a template that doesn't seem to refresh it's later edits (after the first edit) not unless you go to the edit portion of the intended article. Call me crazy but I don't think it's supposed to do that. I did notice Wikipedia did that before while I was editing the same navbox yesterday (but it didn't last) although this one takes the case as being worse because this one doesn't seem to refresh at all. I went on here because I am not sure where to go about it and I know somebody would listen on here. Jhenderson 777 20:11, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia:Help desk#Template refreshing glitch is a better forum for this question. Or Wikipedia:village pump/Technical. Wbm1058 (talk) 00:05, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. :) Jhenderson 777 15:41, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Facebook Problem (reflecting on Wikipedia)

There have multiple complaints recently on the Help Desk to the effect that Wikipedia is displaying pictures of their babies without their permission. Discussion on the Help Desk talk page has concluded that Facebook has a misfeature so that, first, it is displaying different material for different users on the same Facebook page (possibly a feature), and, second, it is attributing the material to Wikipedia incorrectly. While this is a Facebook problem, it is being seen as a Wikipedia problem. There is consensus on the Help Desk talk page that Wikipedia needs to request that Facebook correct the misfeature. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:09, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

For a little additional context, the recent history of infant and talk:infant show some of the responses we've gotten from Facebook users that think Wikipedia is showing their private family photos to the whole world. Deli nk (talk) 17:17, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
I nominated File:Happiness.jpg for deletion. We can't host it on commons without consent. We don't know which country, private or public, if the parents need to consent etc. I know it isn't the image in question but deleting it may stop some of the flak.--Canoe1967 (talk) 17:25, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Well, it has been hours, days even, since Facebook chose to do something asinine as it relates to user data. They were due. Sad to see we've been caught up their latest round of incompetence, however. And I agree with the people at the help desk. We need to ask them to fix their latest mistake. Resolute 17:27, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Views on commons

Hello Jimmy. I was away for a few days and the bot wiped away my question. What are your views on the situation at commons with respect to WP:IDENT and WP:BLP? Thanks, InconvenientCritic (talk) 19:25, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

I think that commons policy is enforced inconsistently and also needs some revision. I think that some of the people who are admins at commons are among the weakest admins that we have in all the projects, and that this is a core part of the problem. I think that far too many people on both sides are prone to framing this as having anything at all to do with "prudishness", rather than having to do with what are fundamentally issues of human dignity. I encourage anyone who is concerned about these issues to coordinate carefully, get involved at commons, and work to improve things. I don't have the time, and my own personal conflicts with people at commons lead me to think that I would do more harm than good trying to get personally involved.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:34, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for taking the time to spell out your position. I really do appreciate it. InconvenientCritic (talk) 22:22, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
@InconvenientCritic I think the main page for discussion is at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Photographs_of_identifiable_people . See also: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people .--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:50, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
+commons:Commons:Requests_for_comment/images_of_identifiable_people. Rd232 talk 21:56, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
InconvenientCritic - I'm not alone in supposing that your single purpose account is designed to cover your true identity. I would suggest that your work in helping with this problem would be more effective if you didn't resort to such measures. The cloak and dagger drama is off-putting to many, not least me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:16, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm sorry, Jimmy. Given the vitriol [10] [11] [12] I've encountered from people when I post on your talk page, I cannot agree with your conclusion. Perhaps some of the less polite people need to be reminded of WP:CIVIL or asked to stay away if they cannot abide by it. InconvenientCritic (talk) 01:39, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
So your hiding behind a sock account is justified by the fact that nobody is impressed that you are hiding behind a sock account? That's just beautiful bullshit, I must say. I may be very much opposed to DC's methods, but at least he has the courage to post from his regular account. I do respect that. Resolute 01:44, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Does anything in Wikipedia:CheckUser#Grounds_for_checking apply in this case?--Canoe1967 (talk) 01:50, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Checkuser isn't for fishing expeditions. Obvious sock may be obvious, but I don't follow the Wikipediacracy set closely enough to guess as to which person this is, or whether they are editing despite a ban or other reason that warrants such scrutiny. The irony here is that hiding behind the sock is counterproductive, since their arguments are undermined by the question of why they feel the need to hide their usual identity. Resolute 01:57, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

WP:SCRUTINY may cover it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 02:02, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Canoe1967 and Resolute: With all due respect, please stop responding to my posts, especially when they are directed at another person. Please leave me alone. Thanks. InconvenientCritic (talk) 07:44, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

There's no call for that whatsoever. This isn't an editing debate where things like WP:COI may be an issue if we don't know who someone is - it's fully covered by address the argument, not the person who made it. Rd232 talk 08:04, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
If you want a true one-on-one conversation with Jimbo, then the place to do that is via e-mail. Everyone here...including an obviously not-new-editor such as yourself...knows that Jimbo's talk page is more or less an informal 2nd Village Pump, with lots of eaters and contributors. Tarc (talk) 12:22, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
It is such a shame when you aren't the only "inconvenient critic" around, isn't it IC? We're all wondering why you are seeking to evade scrutiny, and I am afraid that wrapping yourself around a circular cause and consequence fallacy isn't going to cut it. And RD232 - Jimbo himself made a point of addressing the question of who is hiding behind this sock, and the sock themselves replied to that argument. The conversation is about who this person is. Resolute 13:24, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
It's bizarre that you're responding with such vitriol to me asking a question of Jimmy Wales. It is not up to you to decide how I will post on wikipedia. Again, please leave me alone.InconvenientCritic (talk) 14:26, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Jimbo's comments were rather more measured, and certainly didn't accuse him of trolling or even "seeking to evade scrutiny". Rd232 talk 16:29, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
What does Wikimedia Commons purport to be? Is it a repository of quality free images that people might want to reuse, or is it a repository of images of dubious antecedence, where the age of the subject is indeterminate, and where the subject has not agreed for their image to be reused under a CC license? On a line with the LoC at one end, "Is Anyone Up"/ and r/jailbait at the other, which end is WM Commons nearest? The Commons community seems intent on pushing to the later end than the former. John lilburne (talk) 12:32, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
As I understand it, the LoC has some child porn content,[13] though I'm unable to confirm what may or may not be an urban legend that they hold it with legal immunity and Congressmen check it out freely. (Since police agencies can and have made use of the material without permission from/payment to those depicted to argue for new laws, it isn't really that implausible) They actually do print Playboy in Braille, though.[14] Wnt (talk) 14:35, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
You'll have online links to the content then. John lilburne (talk) 15:43, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Here's the NYT about the Playboy in Braille [15]. The archive.is link above links to an index where apparently you can look up that Library of Congress holding, but I haven't checked it. Wnt (talk) 19:01, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm bemused as to why you think to mention this Playboy does not contain content of dubious antecedence, where the age of the subject is indeterminate, and where the subject has not agreed for the use. Playboy is a responsible publisher, not some web forum discussing the merits of an upskirt photo, or a grainy photo of what might well be a child's genitals. In that respect playboy is closer to the LoC than Commons, reddit, or the old "Is Anyone Up" could even dream of being. John lilburne (talk) 08:49, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Commons' scope is essentially free educational media (commons:Commons:Project scope) - the problem is that while "free" has a clear (if debatable) definition, "educational" does not. As to subject consent (many images don't actually contain living people... restricting Commons to those would be a drastic but effective solution!): I don't know anything about how Library of Congress handles this, but given the way they've absorbed various different private archives, I rather doubt their situation is as 100% iron-clad as you seem to think. Commons should try to learn from other archives if possible, but there is a tendency among critics of Commons to ignore the imperfections of others (eg Flickr) - imperfections which serve to illustrate that the various problems aren't that easy to solve. Rd232 talk 16:29, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Commons' scope is randomly determined by quantum fluctuations and by whatever users show up at a given time. Before you do anything about "free media" or reusing and stealing content scattered around, you need to educate people about what can be done with the software and what should be done with it. Can and should are important key words. You can upload thousands of stupid pictures which are just there as a mirror for narcissisim, that doesn't mean you should do it. Kord Kakurios (talk) 13:33, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
  • So: Commons should be staffed by paid individuals, well-versed in copyright, internet searches to verify image ownership, tact, common sense, OTRS-type access, categorization and organizational skills. Anyone else should be able to propose an image, or request an image, and little else. Problem solved. (✉→BWilkins←✎) 10:38, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed stats.grok pageviews omit https views

Re: "/Archive 133#Now 300 major articles have Google https".

Experiments with viewing images have confirmed how https-protocol pageviews are not counted by stats.grok.se, so readers still view those articles via Google, but we do not know how many. Noted yesterday, Diederik (User:Drdee) from the Analytics Team @WMF is investigating. Meanwhile, I have confirmed the stats.grok.se omits the https-protocol pageviews when counting "http" views. In tests run during 12 hours on 9 May 2013, over 60 https-prefix pageviews of a Space Shuttle mission-patch image file were ignored, while "http:" views were counted for both images:

Both mission-patch image pages ("http" for STS-98 and "https" for STS-99) were viewed within minutes of each other, repeatedly during 65 intervals, in the day-long testing of pageviews. The choice of Shuttle images was just one of many subjects with Google https links, and I am not at a NASA site now. The stats.grok.se website has counted only the "http" pageviews and omitted all https-protocol pageviews. Based on prior pageviews of major articles (see list: wp:Google https links), it is suspected that other pageview tools also omit the https-protocol page requests in the counts. -Wikid77 22:22, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Need to periodically monitor pageview-count accuracy: The recent massive drops in pageview counts (60%-85% lower) for hundreds of articles, during the past 7 weeks, perhaps due to a combination of problems in logging data and Google's switch to https-protocol in over 300 major articles, indicate the need for independent testing of pagecount levels. I guess we need to run periodic (monthly or quarterly) tests to view several rare pages and check the pageview-counts of the related days. Apparently, thousands of other articles also dropped in pageviews, most-likely where the https-protocol prefix was carried to each wikilink from the first https page viewed. So, along with https-page "Hexagon" dropping 82% in April's pageview count (stats-201304), the pageviews of related pages, linked in the navbox, also dropped, such as 35% lower pageviews of "Heptagon", "Octagon" or "Nonagon" where those pages were connected by https-prefix, as follow-on wikilinks from https "Hexagon" navbox. Of course, if all https pages had been counted (rather than all omitted), then the pageviews would be higher for the thousands of articles wikilinked from the original Google-https pages. For people who were relying on pageview counts to help judge readership levels, this has been a major fiasco, as a shared problem between MediaWiki not counting https-protocol views and Google re-indexing many Wikipedia articles with "https:" prefix, requiring secure-server access, in March/April 2013. -Wikid77 12:31, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
  • So what is being done to ensure that stats.grok.se counts https stats in future? Prioryman (talk) 17:45, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
There has been an "over-correction" to remove all https-protocol page requests, from the Wikipedia Internet logs, so the developers are likely to soon pinpoint the recent bug (from 25 March 2013?) and restore logging of requests with https-prefix. Remember, the pageview counts only report page-requests, so even redlinked or non-existent page titles have been logged for pageviews. That makes testing for exact pageview counts extremely easy:  just try to view, with https-protocol, any unusual invented page title, and if logged properly, then stats.grok.se will report the exact count of those logged page-requests, once tallied after 01:00 each night. I am finding similar 65% pageview drops in German WP (during March-May 2013), where many major German articles have Google https-prefix links, but not the same as the English WP articles. I am hoping the https-requests were actually logged, with mis-stamped data items, which could be retro-edited (or accepted as auto-corrected data) to be recounted for prior months, but at least a rapid fix, soon, could correct the pageview counts for the remainder of May, and we could estimate the interim 7 weeks of data, from having accurate counts for parts of March and May 2013. So far, I am estimating correction factors of 2x-2.75x, to multiply by interim pageview counts, where the Google https-links were propagated to all related wikilinks. This reminds me of the early, blurred images from the Hubble Space Telescope (before the repair/upgrade mission), where some astrophysicists were able to mathematically, partially "un-blur" the images and still pinpoint details 50x sharper than with earlier telescopes. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:33, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
Have you seen this related story: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-wikipedia-early-stock.html --Canoe1967 (talk) 01:51, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

You've got mail!

Hello, Jimbo Wales. Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 19:50, 11 May 2013 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

AutomaticStrikeout  !  C  Sign AAPT  19:50, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Hey Jimbo!

Go check out WP:ITN/C and see what a terrific place it is! No wait - it's a mess and is the joke of this mostly fine project. It's a battleground, which a user just pointed out is "highly visible" to the public via it being linked to the talk page of the front-page. I've been browsing it for a year and never seen you on there - maybe you might consider stopping by?--82.8.226.105 (talk) 23:55, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

WTF? Now the edit button is moved?

Jimbo, WTF? Why are all these changes made with no notice. And why can't the people who don't like them have the option to keep it the way they like? Now the edit button is not on the right and is over by the section heading. My hand keeps going to the right and nothing is there!! Bottom line: change stuff if you want, but: 1) notify the community not just the Inner Jimbo Sanctum 2) Don't force crap down our throat, leave us the option to keep what we like. PumpkinSky talk 01:01, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

My guess is that you WMF guys are doing this to bring in new editors, but there will NEVER be a substantial increase in the active user base until the problems in this blog are fixed. PumpkinSky talk 01:08, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
I thought I'd visit that blog and pass along any useful recommendations to the tech team. Point 1 is "The inherent pettiness, greed, and selfishness of mankind." With all due respect to our excellent engineers, I do not think fixing that is within their capabilities.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:17, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#.5Bedit.5D_moved. Seems it can be fixed.--Canoe1967 (talk) 01:35, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
Calling a post in VP-TEch "an announcement" doesn't cut it. And requiring coding to undo WMF's fuck ups is UNSAT. PumpkinSky talk 01:39, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
Another example of the WMF stepping up and making some decisions. If we as a community aren't going to do it then I'm glad the WMF is even if I don't like the changes they are implementing. The edit button is no big deal but the discussion change and removal of the orange bar was just plumb dumb. Kumioko (talk) 02:06, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
This is probably not the forum to discuss it though. Should we remove our comments and this section? I doubt Mr. Wales can influence it without consensus.--Canoe1967 (talk) 02:09, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
I believe he likes to monitor the pulse of the community, so doesn't mind these threads, as long as they don't go overboard. On the merits, I like the change, in fact, I had enabled it via gadgets months ago. On the announcement, this fits in with a recent theme, where a number of changes have occurred which have turned out to be surprises for the community. While the response has been to point to multiple places it was discussed, we might consider a better way to communicate these announcements. Neither Village Pump Technical nor Village Pump Miscellaneous strike me as ideal venues for such announcements.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 12:19, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
It was clearly mentioned in the Signpost: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-29/Technology report. It would have been nice to consider making a new gadget to return to the status quo ante available when the change happened... which falls under the banner of generally improving how WP:interface changes are handled. See also Wikipedia:Petition to the WMF on handling of interface changes and Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Developer.27s_Noticeboard. Rd232 talk 15:52, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
I agree with the blog, anon editing is a two edged sword. It protects the innocent and allows the bad guys to hide. I'm not saying it should be or not be abolished, but it is indeed a source of one of wikis many problems. These problems seem insurmountable and prevent wiki from being all it is capable of. PumpkinSky talk 02:03, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
  • With respect to the blog cited by PumpkinSky, I concur that Wikipedia's Cult of Anonymity is one of the primary sources of the plague. Without (real name registration + sign in to edit) there is no way to identify commercial conflict of interest, no way to enforce the removal of bad actors — who can merely grab a new name and continue. The tendency of anonymous people on the internet to be meaner to one another than they would be in real life also seems to me to be an axiomatic truth. We are expected by users to create a reliable encyclopedia, but there is no way to connect the sources of information with the real life people who have added them. Multiple accounts are used simultaneously by single people. All this is a deep and pervasive flaw, and change will only come top-down, by WMF fiat. Unfortunately, WMF remains not only pro anonymous editing, but pro-IP editing, so we've clearly got a long time to wait for a fix... —Tim Davenport, Corvallis, OR /// Carrite (talk) 15:47, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
We have seen all too often that editors who use real names have been very improperly harassed by those with some agenda, including on off-wiki forums we can't control. For every time an editor is driven by careerist/reputational pressures to say or do the right thing, there will be another time when one is driven by those same forces to omit something out of fear of being stigmatized for talking about it. There would be no net benefit anywhere to interfering with anonymous editing, nor would we have the power to do so with any reliability even if we tried - and unreliability in this case translates to the defamation of real people whose names are used by trolls and vandals. Wnt (talk) 16:13, 7 May 2013 (UTC)
Hear hear. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:02, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Indeed, and if we were to edit with our real names to deal with COI, we would have to give the WMF our complete CVs and other details about our private lives as well. Also, to be sure the person who logs in as X is indeed X and not someone else, you would have to use sophisticated verification techniques for logging in such as e.g. fingerprints or voice recognition and then continuous monitoring to make sure that after logging in, the computer remains under the control of the person who actually logged in. Count Iblis (talk) 15:26, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Quite: the technical problems of identity verification in Wikipedia's setup are not easy to solve comprehensively. But when even proposals for optional verification measures are squashed from a great height, it seems we're not going to get anywhere with this any time soon. Rd232 talk 15:56, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Rd232, that's a rather misleading summary of the discussion to which you linked. As the proposer, even you admitted that you had no idea over how it would, should, or could be used. And even then, your 'optional' suggestion was that it might (eventually) become mandatory for adminship and other elevated privileges; in your words, "Create the system, and we'll find uses for it". TenOfAllTrades(talk) 02:16, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
It was a proposal for an optional mechanism and the proposal was squashed from a great height - there's nothing misleading about that summary, whereas your claim that I had "no idea over how it would, should, or could be used" is (I won't reiterate here, the discussion is linked above). That an optional thing might eventually become mandatory if it proves its worth (eg seatbelts...) is besides the point. However that you feel the need to jump up and down at the mere mention of the idea proves the point I was making in the post above - that identity verification, even optionally, isn't going anywhere any time soon. Rd232 talk 08:11, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Your proposal also was rather tenuous on exactly what was being verified. Technically, it seemed less about verifying an individual's identity, and more about verifying that the individual happened to have a credit card that hadn't previously been used to register a Wikipedia account. It was all kind of fuzzy on how – or even if – there would be any visible, confirmed matching of, say, a Wikipedia username to the name on the credit card. Yes, the community "squashed" your proposal, but not because it was about identity verification per se. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:03, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Well, there was a marginally more constructive discussion about identity verification in 2012, which I'd forgotten about: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_93#Verifying_editor_identity. Anyway, the point stands that there's little willingness to even create optional verification methods. Rd232 talk 16:39, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
Who needs to create them? If you want to prove your identity, you say you're so-and-so in X City. Anybody who cares can look up so-and-so in the phone book (confirming elsewhere online for extra credit) and call him and ask him about the Wikipedia username. I can't picture anything Wikipedia could do to make that easier. Wnt (talk) 05:10, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Frankly, anonymity will be necessary as long as harassment sites like Wikipediocracy (of which Carrite is a vocal member) exist. If Wikipedians didn't have good reason to fear that they would be harassed by anti-Wikipedia trolls - many of whom, hypocritically, hide behind pseudonyms while calling for the outing of others - then using pseudonyms on Wikipedia would be far less necessary. Prioryman (talk) 08:00, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Frankly, if Wikipedia and Wikipedians treated human beings with dignity, there would have been no need in such sites as Wikipediocracy. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 15:54, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
You are completely correct IP and I have been so adamant about changing that and calling out the most vicious abusers I am being viewed in the same way as I view them. Until Wikipedia starts to deal with the abusers and start treating editors with some respect and stop protecting the ones who are the harassers this site will continue to degrade. But this is rather off topic.
Back to the topic, its time to let the issue go about the changes the WMF is implementing. They are not going to revert them no matter how much we complain. The majority don't like the changes and do not want them but yet the changes we do want aren't done and some may never be. The developers keep mentioning this fictitios agreement but every discussion is filled with complaints about the new changes or how they were implemented. With that said the community here cannot decide on anything other than banning the most prolific and beneficial editors and promoting people to admin who don't use the tools so we deserve what we get. I for one hope the WMF continues to step up and make the changes that the site needs to continue until the community can pull our heads out of our butts and start showing we can make some of the decisions. As it is we cannot, we know we can't and so does the WMF. If we don't like it then we should do something to change that perception other than just complain about the changes. The WMF's decisions aren't the symptom, they are the result of the problem that has been allowed to grow. Kumioko (talk) 16:12, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Frankly, if anonymity was made a thing of the past at Wikipedia, a very great percentage of the outrage and manufactured crises by some of the posters at the Wikipedia-criticism message board Wikipediocracy (of which Prioryman is a regular reader and rather tiresome counter-critic) would be undercut. At its best, the opposition press (Wikipediocracy) lances boils and helps to remedy infections at WP. At its worst, it engages in the outing of anonymous Wikipedians — who would no longer exist in a Wikipedia without anonymity. As I say, these changes will ultimately need to come from WMF, not En-WP as a community — and we are many years from them, by all indications. Which is not to say that such a change would not be beneficial and that the change will not ever come. Carrite (talk) 18:21, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
  • History shows that COI is almost always an irrelevant issue (because what ultimately matters are the edits and the sources that back them up), that editing disputes can sometimes escalate beyond bounds by people personalizing conflicts, with ArbCom having to solve the problems by playing the role of the Kindergarten nanny here. Knowing the real life identity of editors would only add fuel to such conflicts here. Count Iblis (talk) 15:43, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

Administrator

Hello sir can you please give information how to become administrator.

From, LMANSH (Ask me!) (I'm autobot of transformers) 07:43, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Administrators (shortcut: WP:ADMIN).—Wavelength (talk) 14:24, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
...and Wikipedia:Guide to requests for adminship. JohnCD (talk) 14:35, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

Velvet divorce (again)

Executive Summary: Jimbo, is the WMF ever going to respond one way or the other to the Harrises 2010 suggestion that maybe Commons should be split off from the WMF?
Full Question:Jimbo, in October of 2010, Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris published the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content, for which the Foundation paid and was sort of a big deal. It was a study, not a policy paper, and they did not exactly prescribe actions, but they did say:

"...Commons has a double mission... it is our belief that these two goals are increasingly at odds with each other, contradictory to each other in some fundamental ways, and that as Commons matures and goes forward, these contradictions will become more apparent, and may potentially be a liability for Commons’ increased and future health."

and

"Even if there is agreement that such a universal, “big-bucket” image bank is desirable, where the collection of every image of everything becomes a goal, there is a second question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation is the appropriate institution on the Internet to host such an archive. If Wikimedia’s goal is to be educational, thus, in some way selective of information, perhaps this is a project that fits more appropriately outside of the Foundation’s ambit."

and some other stuff; I've elided much but not taken these quotes greatly out of context, I don't think. (The original source is at m:2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content: Part Three#Commons Dual Mission).

(I've written before about how such a "velvet divorce" could be entirely amicable and be a win-win for both Commons and the WMF, won't repeat that but am willing to if asked.)

Anyway, I grant that the Harrises said :"[N]o formal recommendations have been made on this subject", but still, this raises the following question:

Well?

By which I mean, what is the response of you and the Foundation to this? This was published over a quarter of decade ago now after all. Would you or someone respond to this point? Not deciding is a decision, not responding is a response, and to my mind your (unpublicized) response has to be one of these four:

  1. We thought about such a velvet divorce, and have basically decided not to to that. We're better together.
  2. We have thought about such a velvet divorce, haven't decided, and we wish to wait some more years, either to see how things continue to develop in the fullness of time, or for some other reason.
  3. To be frank, we really don't have the structure in place to make such a velvet divorce. The political and organizational structure here is such that there really isn't any one person or group to definitely address and decide this either way, and push it through if the decision is to go ahead with the divorce. Sorry! We know that's kind of mediocre, but many or even most organizations have the same problem. That's people for ya!
  4. To be perfectly honest, we haven't really considered such a velvet divorce in detail and probably won't. We're busy! There is a lot of stuff to do to here. Just running things day to day is hard enough. This is a big decision! We'd rather just avoid it: it'd be a lot of work to plan and implement, would generate walls of text and firestorms of criticism whichever way we decide, and (like all decisions) puts the decision-makers in the spotlight -- not a pleasant place to be if it doesn't work out. Sometime (although we wouldn't admit this out loud) we doubt ourselves (like every sane person) and wonder if we're even up to making such a big decision. What if it goes sour? Sleepless nights! Who needs all that? We're human. We want to do our jobs, but also enjoy our lives without adding to our woes. So we filed the report somewhere.

Well which is it? All four of these are reasonable responses in my opinion. But which is it? It's got to be one of these three, I guess, unless I'm missing something. I know what my response would be: #4 (or maybe #3). But then, I'm just a mook. I don't have the responsibility of running a big thing like the Wikipedia movement, wouldn't take it, and would be horribly bad at it if I was. But you guys are supposed to be able to do this and that's partly what the top WMF folks get paid for. So if it is #3 or #4 could you try to step it up a bit and make and announce a decision one way or the other? Or if it is #1 or #2, could you please say so? And if you won't or can't, I guess a lot of people will probably assume its #3 or #4, you know, which is non-excellent and kind of demoralizing (although perfectly understandable). So if its not #3 or #4, you should definitely say something, in my opinion. Thanking you for your consideration, Herostratus (talk) 18:58, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

As we have not brought such an issue to a formal vote, and as we haven't discussed the issue of commons in a while, it would be unwise for me to attempt, even to the level of trying to give the overall sense of the board in an informal way, to answer for the board as a whole.
Speaking only for myself, then, I'm undecided about what I think - even in fantasy - would be the best way forward. I would be excited to see the creation of the "big bucket" alternative for the reasons outlined up above - there is tension between the narrow mission of commons and that broader concept, and the tensions between the two are causing a lot of problems for the movement as a whole. I'm not sure I want to endorse your language of "velvet divorce" because I think that puts this whole thing into a frame of reference that I think may not be the most helpful. But it sure would be nice to be able to tell people who are radically inclusionist of every kind of nonsense that there is a place where they can go and be happier.
The problems with the way commons handles these issues are many fold. I can seldom spend more than a minute looking at the site to find outrageous violations of editorial good sense. Here's my example of the day - I just now wanted to make a comment about the sheer number of self-uploaded penis pictures but without even trying I found something much more absurd. Go to the Human penis category at commons (NSFW, obviously) and notice something: most of the images are identified using scientific language, as in "flaccid caucasian penis" and "human penis and scrotum". Three, however, are identified as "black cock". The source? No source, of course, it's an upload of "own work" by a single purpose account. Now, to be clear, I do not think that the predominantly male and white editors at commons intend to be actively racist. I'm sure that no one ever noticed this before. (Really, I am not being sarcastic.) But what happens is that they are so bad at their jobs that blatantly ridiculous situations are routine and they do nothing about it. You'd think there would be something similar to our Wikiprojects to go through and make sure that the defense of sexual images in commons is rock-solid and simple.
I think no area of the entire Wikimedia movement would benefit more from easier participation than commons. The solution is to overwhelm the people who aren't doing their jobs there with people who will. That's not something I'm in a position personally to achieve, though.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:15, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Do you think that crowdsourcing will be essential to bringing more people who agree with the spirit of the mission, and therefore help weed out the lazy users who don't help? But even more importantly, if they get there, are users EXPECTED to help, if they're all volunteers with no restrictions and obligations? Kord Kakurios (talk) 21:37, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
So, we need a crowd of people interested in curating the images the way you call for but no way to produce them, especially since many volunteers aren't even interested in looking at those images, let alone curating them. Not promising. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:46, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
There isn't enough manpower to control all images, that's why a bot was created to upload (or leech, eh) images from flickr. Too bad that flickr has so many users that don't pay attention to licenses, and rights. So you now need actual humans to do a double check at commons, and work twice as much to solve a big problem. Kord Kakurios (talk) 22:01, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Has anyone ever taken the time to see what that bot's error rate is, what is being uploaded, and if it is a valuable tool, despite the additional work you mention? Resolute 22:22, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
If you want a subjective overview of the error rate, have a look at Russavia's talk page history. Russavia uploads tons and tons of pictures from Flickr, and he gets tons and tons of deletion requests for all kinds of reasons for some of the pictures he uploads through a bot. And that's for images that are, all in all, perfectly harmless. I can only guess that the error rate for explicit pictures (which are usually not uploaded in bulk on Commons) is even higher. --Conti|✉ 11:40, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Isn't there is also another bot which checks the licences from Flickr? Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:13, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm sure there is. The licenses have also to be checked manually, though, to reduce abuse. The deletion requests on Russavia's talk page are not related to that, however. There are tons of reasons a picture should not be on Commons: Personality rights, bad quality pictures, violations of freedom of panorama, or more subtle copyright violations, etc. --Conti|✉ 16:08, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Crowdsourcing will reflect the interests of the participants. It is no secret that for some bizarre reason Commons receives vast numbers of penis uploads without encyclopedic purpose. (Heck, the remaining preview from those now-deleted "black cock" images cropped the end off the frame) When a lot of people want to upload something pointless, and not so many people want to get rid of stuff that is out of scope, invariably you have some leftover bits to spot in the directory now and then. But that's democracy at work, and what does it matter? One user's use of a rather innocuous phrase during an upload does not make the whole enterprise 'racist' or anything else.
Having a "big bucket" solution is a great idea, but many here argue that Commons is nearly as big as we can get away with for various tedious legal reasons, except the scope issue. I think all Commons needs is a "junk" directory to move out-of-scope images to, and it qualifies as a "big bucket". Those wishing to make a "small bucket" for some reason are then free to index subsets of the Commons material for whatever purpose they have in mind, but of course each will have their own priorities and criteria, which I suppose is why they've never managed to get anything going. Wnt (talk) 17:39, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I've taken the liberty of fixing the links to the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content in the initial message. Graham87 08:35, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Viagogo editing

Jimbo, what do you think of the contribution patterns of the following editors? User:MatthewViagogo, User:Laurabrown11, User:Sophiebrown11, and User:Ses62... Every one of their edits are to the Viagogo article, and some of the edits blatantly attempt to remove content that's critical of the company. Do you think this could be conflict of interest advocacy? - 2001:558:1400:10:497A:21E0:B03:CF47 (talk) 19:01, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

WP:COIN is that way. Please don't clutter up this page with things that can be dealt with perfectly well elsewhere. Prioryman (talk) 19:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
WP:DONTBITE is this way, User:Prioryman. Please don't clutter up this page with things that can be worded in a nicer, more helpful, way.97.85.242.177 (talk) 02:23, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Art forgery by one of the Wikipedia reviewers

I do not know how to pass this request properly, so write here. User:Arthur goes shopping uploaded picture on Apr 14, 2013 Image:Arthur_Wellesley_with_shopping.jpg which he attributed as his own work, however it uses 99% of George Dawe's painting. Interesting, this user has power to review articles. Is the image and user status OK from Wikipedia and Wikipedians' point of view? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.141.135.124 (talk) 19:46, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I fixed it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 20:04, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Thank you, you fixed the evidence - however without any records left about the initial issue and change you've made. Any further actions are expected? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.141.135.124 (talk) 20:32, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
The original upload did have the urls to the original works and still does. I just added them as thumbnails for visual reference as well.--Canoe1967 (talk) 20:35, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Hello 85.141.135.124. You can view all versions of the image history, including how I originally uploaded it and the subsequent changes made by Canoe1967, at this link. The original version as uploaded by me, this one, makes it entirely clear that my "work" in creating Image:Arthur_Wellesley_with_shopping.jpg was merely to combine "http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wellington_by_Daw.jpg (PD) and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trashy_Smart_Bag.png (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)" (quoting from that page).
I am entirely unconvinced that this is "forgery", but I would certainly be open to Mr Wales' opinions on that, since you have brought the matter here. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 08:05, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I think the image description page should mention the author of at least the shopping bag image, as required by cc-by-sa-3.0. darkweasel94 (talk) 11:52, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I wasn't aware that was necessary when it is linked to the original image. Thanks (again) to Canoe1967, it now does mention both authors. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 12:25, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

That is an issue I noticed when people use the CC-by templates. They rarely activate the method of attribution switch. {CC-by-3.0|1=attribution method here}. When re-users ask at commons help desk we either get them to ask the creator on their talk page or just "User:XXX at Wikimedia commons" if the user is gone from the projects. I fixed the image again and added both creators.--Canoe1967 (talk) 12:30, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

As if ever went to Ghana. The Duke was Prêt-à-Porter man through and through. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:34, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Actually I tended to rely on Fortnum & Mason for many of my provisions. In the modern era, though, they seem to be the target of regular controversy, which I find disrupts my shopping expeditions there. My use of remanufactured bags for my shopping is just a nod to these newfangled ethical and ecological concerns and other such fads. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 13:10, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Commons: same ol' same ol' getting worse and worse

No comment necessary: [16].Volunteer Marek 20:16, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

(one comment is necessary: Ottava Rima's and Scott's supports are the only one that make sense).Volunteer Marek 20:16, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

...Really? That's all you can think of to complain about? You're scraping the barrel. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:15, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
I am sooooo gonna spam that thing onto the talk page of every user who pisses me off.Volunteer Marek 22:49, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Revenge editing? How purile. In regard to your initial post, does that mean you believe all users who support keeping the template (before Ottava commented - the ones after are sarcastic at best) are not arguing in good faith? It appears to me like a rather inconsequential DR, hardly anything to make a fuss over. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:56, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Obviously I was joking - though I do wonder what Jimbo would do if someone tried to give him that barns star. But the fact that you don't see a problem with this just illustrates how out of touch you and your buddies on commons are.Volunteer Marek 23:00, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Clearly we need a derivative work with a big cross through it. That would more adequately represent Jimbo's efforts. -mattbuck (Talk) 23:13, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Jimbo could only get this barnstar if he had been very active with uploading pictures on sexual matters. So, I don't see a problem in principle with this barnstar. I do see that this barnstar can be abused, e.g. if some editors where to give it to people who would object to it, but that's not a relevant issue right now. Count Iblis (talk) 23:35, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

Is this really what we want our project to be known for? InconvenientCritic (talk) 23:28, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

We should not censor sexual content because of that, because then the project would be known for censoring sexual content, which is worse than being known for not censoring anything, not even sexual content. Count Iblis (talk) 23:39, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Personally I think that we should become known for "encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content" [17], rather than for providing a dumping-ground for porn. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:45, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
Where in the World are the authorities most concerned about protecting people from porn and how well is the educational system in these places? Count Iblis (talk) 00:04, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Is their children learning, you mean? Formerip (talk) 00:22, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
The UK? And surprisingly good.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 00:12, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
The single incident in the UK was instigated by an NGO, there were no "authorities" involved. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:31, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
You're arguing a false dichotomy. The fact that there is porn on Commons (and the various Wikipedias) and the fact that people are going to whine, bitch and cry about it doesn't mean the foundation isn't also succeeding at that goal. Resolute 01:36, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Question: Is there a reason we haven't auctioned off that cesspool to Joe Francis or somebody yet? Evanh2008 (talk|contribs) 00:09, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
  • That barnstar gave me great mirth. In the spirit of NOTCENSORED, somebody should do a much more graphic version of that award for presentation en masse to the people who upload Truly Classic Images to Commons — and those who defend them at XfD. Two thumbs up! Carrite (talk) 01:43, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Call it the COMMONSISNOTCENSORED Barnstar... Ho ho! I love it... Carrite (talk) 01:47, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Better yet, emblazon the barnstar with Fae's Aussie wonderjock image. They'll be tripping over their feet in the haste to award it to each other. Tarc (talk) 13:01, 13 May 2013 (UTC)


Streisand Effect anyone? No one had heard about that barnstar until 2 days ago.... -mattbuck (Talk) 07:47, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
I'd say it was more analogous to shining a spotlight on a cockroach nest, but YMMV. Tarc (talk) 13:01, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Matt, I thought the Streisand Effect was more about actions drawing unwanted attention to something one wished to hide. In this case, I believe that several of the people involved would be quite happy to have more attention given to things like this on Commons. If it takes a news story to get the WMF motivated enough to clean up Commons, this one practically writes itself - the "Hot Sex Barnstar" created by a user with a conviction for distributing child pornography and who was banned by the WMF after Commons could not reach agreement to ban him? The tabloids would eat that up. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:43, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
First off, under WP:Child protection (though I don't approve of this aspect of the policy) you're not supposed to make such allegations and all this should be deleted! Also, that isn't right. WMF has a a process to ban editors quickly, so obviously they can outpace Commons once relevant data starts to come out in a Commons discussion. However, WMF does not and did not explain its actions, and such allegations remain unproven. Wnt (talk) 21:04, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm not making allegations, I'm stating facts. All of this was openly discussed on Commons at the time because they had no similar policy. They still don't, incidentally. Anyone who wonders why such a policy is a good idea need only look at that discussion. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 23:17, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Lol, "unproven". There was reams and reams of evidence provided in that case at the time, you have to be either blind or in complete denial to reject it. The Commons admins declined to block him, that is why the WMF had to step in to protect the project from a sex offender, by globally locking his account, i.e. a de facto ban. Hell, Saibo to this day still maintains a bitchfest in his Commons userspace about his dearly-departed friend; User:Saibo/WMF. People like Wnt only seem to care about the Wikipedia's "child protection" policies when it comes to silencing their opponents. Tarc (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Nonsense. I've gone on the talk page for that policy something like three times already trying to get them to repeal that part of the policy, and every time I get nothing but Nein, nein, nein! ... even though nobody and I mean nobody enforces the policy they have written. I don't pretend to understand that, I just keep commenting on it in the hope somebody will do something someday. But the thing is, there's a difference between holding a one-time wide-ranging discussion in a special noindexed forum to decide whether a user, to a preponderance of the evidence, may be blocked based on child protection concerns - and going on widely read talk pages like this and, for any small reason, repeating claims that the person is definitely X. I was persuaded, to a preponderance of the evidence, in the Commons discussion - I never reached reasonable doubt, but I didn't think I needed to. I think other people were changing their opinions as the discussion proceeded, and more might have joined and continued to push the vote in the direction I'd gone. But the thing is, we're talking about a living person who someone can fairly easily figure out who it is we're speaking of, and according to stuff like BLP we don't make negative assertions about them confidently based on preponderance of evidence, or indeed, even on 'reasonable doubt' of an open talk or administrative forum. We'd need multiple secondary sources independent of the subject and all that. So while I favor having some leeway to discuss these things, we should avoid pretending that we really know for sure when there are so many ways for bullies online to deceive us. Wnt (talk) 00:55, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
  • It's an old, old thing going on here, now and in similar thread usually started at Jimbo's page, like the one below. There are people offended by images of naked people doing something they reject personally and quickly putting it in the "porn" folder. Those people obviously never have seen some real porn in their live but despite that or better said, b/c of that lack of knowledge, they try to force their own limited judgement on everybody else in this world we're living instead of being happy that real porn didn't make its way into Wiki and related. No question about certain images about certain sexual practises that are unlawful in most countries and especially the US where Wiki's servers are located which are to be deleted on sight (like child pornography I.e.); But others should remain as free content. Those who are looking for porn most certainly won't search Wiki or Commons for it. There are plenty of sites out there to get real pornography for free. Welcome to the real world where you can get almost everything you always wanted to know about sex within a few clicks... w/o Wikipedia/Commons/etc. TMCk (talk) 01:21, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Oh you'll find that this isn't that people are anti-porn. What one wonders is why WP needs to host 1000s of amateur pics which serve no educational purpose at all. Why does WP need to illustrate every sexual act that happens to find its way onto urbandictionary? The result being that when you search for images changes are good that no matter how innocuous the search terms are you'll get porn. It is an issue of time, place, and appropriateness. If one searches for penguin images one might well get videos of naked nuns being fucked by dogs. John lilburne (talk) 01:44, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Commons is for educational purposes, not for disturbing, useless, and distracting images of penises. There are numerous more-appropriate venues for such images. I personally feel that the WMF needs to use an iron fist to resolve the idiotic problems there, until a community-based central governance solution can be found. Wer900 • talk 01:45, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

To both of you commenting above (John and Wer900): Commons is about hosting free images that might or might not be used in an article, but sex related categories are the only ones that people try to censor and cut down. The only reasonable conclusion for this is that more (or maybe just more verbal) people are offended by those. I actually wonder how those users get offended. I never saw any sexual image unless I willingly searched for an article that might have (for some disturbing) images. I somehow must assume that those complaining are looking on purpose to find images they'll be offended by, kinda like a peeping Tom who later complains about what he "had to look at". I remember a case where a guy went to a nude beach, taking pictures of nude people and then filed a lawsuit b/c of what he was exposed to. He was fined as a peeping Tom since even he knew about the nudity at the beach, he went there and took pictures, invading the privacy of those people at the beach. Get it?TMCk (talk) 02:14, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm not trying to censor sexual images, but I don't agree that our donation to be spent on hosting media files which is remotely useful to any Wikimedia project (unless WMF green-lights a Wikiporn project). And these type of files is alarmingly and increasingly occupying our resources. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 02:46, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
TMCk, I have made a deliberate effort to look through the many images of nudity and explicit sexuality on Commons. This isn't because they offend me, or because I am trying to censor anything. It is because these images have the greatest potential to cause embarrassment to the subjects of the images. Many of those images were taken from image sharing sites and uploaded by hit-and-run contributors (which makes them copyright violations because of the false claim that they were created by the uploader). Some of those images are almost certainly "revenge porn". In any case, we do not have any mechanism for verifying that the subject consents to their upload and further use. The reason why some users focus on sexual images may have nothing to do with their attitude about sex or porn. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 03:22, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Let me put it like this: If, as far as images actually used on WP was concerned, copyright was abolished and each article could have a free pick of any image it wanted, Commons would NOT chose to be curate any of the current crop of penis images. It wouldn't chose to collect every 'free' one editors could find on the basis that someone else might want to use it. If someone really needs a penis photo they can source one for a couple of bucks, do there own search on flickr, or failing that take a trip to the toilet, or just hotlink to one as everyone else does. John lilburne (talk) 07:06, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Making images easier to report on Commons

Hi Jimmy, over a week ago, I alerted you to a discussion on Commons (as per Commons:User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#How_Commons_deals_with_child_pornography) which I started to make reporting images easier to do, both for registered and IP editors. I also sent Philippe and legal an email, so that they could provide input on how it could work in terms of so-called "innocent" images. After this discussion with Eric Moeller, he has offered his moral support and has started a dedicated discussion page at Commons:Commons:Reporting abuse where I will get more ideas and discussion on the table in the coming days. Is there any chance you could come across to Commons and lend, at least, your moral support in making any type of problematic image easier to report to community. I am sure the Commons community would appreciate it, and would welcome any constructive ideas you might have. Would you care to come and join us? Cheers, Russavia (talk) 21:10, 15 May 2013 (UTC) P.S. Sorry for the number of different threads, these are all separate issues. Russavia (talk) 21:10, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Does Jimbo ever post on this page? (Concerns about what this page is used for)

When does User:Jimbo Wales ever get a turn to say something on his own personal User Talk page?

To my mind practically all of the topics on this page properly belong on other pages such as Help pages, Village pumps, etc. By placing some topics here I think there may be a real risk of proper established procedure being subverted and circumvented - this is effectively a "walled garden" operating outside of the procedures prescribed in various policy, administrative and guidance pages established by long standing consensus. For example when discussing a user's actions at ANI there is an definitively established requirement to notify the subject, no such onus to notify exists here. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

He closed this entire discussion, didn't he?! What the hell more ya want?! Basket Feudalist 14:00, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Yes, and when ever he wants, to answer your questions. --Malerooster (talk) 20:23, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
You've answered only the relatively trivial opening question - how about addressing the far more substantive issue I'm raising? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:29, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Well, talk pages are for others to talk to you... -mattbuck (Talk) 20:47, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Jimbo has encouraged open discussions, initiated topics, or hatted/deleted off-topic rants: Jimbo has shown 101 ways to reply (or not) about topics on this talk-page. There is a spirit of wp:IAR, so feel free to contact the accused, or redact insults which others have posted here at times. I think many people perhaps misunderstand what happens on this talk-page, and do not recall Jimbo has invited open talks, here, and explained how he periodically reads (perhaps "speed-reads") topics here, sometimes following "75-reply" threads in excruciating detail which would zone out insomniacs on a caffeine IV tube, or else retro-reading threads which were archived after a few days, and choses whether to reply here, or some linked forum, or email, or hat the off-topic tangents, or just keep silent. However, Jimbo also reads several other discussion pages frequently, on other websites, and judges when to comment, or not. So, just imagine someone with an I.Q. of 250 or whatever it takes to speed-read this whole page (carefully!) and ponder the endless issues, or prioritize when to remind someone their actions are out-of-line with proper decorum. Many threads here are also (concurrently) being discussed in typical forums for each topic. Perhaps read some talk-archive pages: /Archive_132 or /Archive_120 or /Archive_110 (or such) and scan for responses. I think you will be amazed at the detailed responses amid a vast sea of topics, while Jimbo also reads various outside sources about those subjects. Also, this is not a substitute for the established WP forums. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Did you know that Gregory Kohs and EricBarbour are trolling you and the community does nothing?

Useless discussion of banned users.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:47, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Sweet or salt?

Hi again Jimmy, you may wish to look at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#List_of_Wikipedia_controversies.E2.80.8E. You were probably aware that you have been getting trolled by these clowns, but you should know that the general admin corps is too scared to do anything about it. You may remember the Kazakhstan issues, when on Quora you "liked"/"upvoted"/"whatever" my statement which essentially said that the Wikipediocracy crew are trolls, and anyone willing to be associated with the likes of Kohs and Barbour should be ejected from the project. Perhaps you could have a word to admins here on English Wikipedia and direct them (I believe you still have some power here) to block these jokers (Kohs and Barbour) on sight. Permabanned trolls should not be allowed to run riot in this community with impunity. And anyone who disagrees should be shown the door too. Russavia (talk) 20:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

No true Wikipedian could possibly disagree. Bielle (talk) 21:07, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Wikipediocracy forum". AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:22, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
I believe I once suggested that as cause for immediate banning on Commons. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:25, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
In that case, as an admin on Commons and a moderator there, you should just get on with it and ban me now. Furthermore, if I provide a list of names of accounts on Commons that have accounts on Wikipediocracy, do you promise to ban them, too? I can think of a few folks that need to go - Alison ❤ 21:28, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Well gee Alison. You're a special case because you're A) a member of Wikipediocracy (an admin there even) and B) not a moron, troll, blackguard, or even a pathetically unhappy chronic whiner. That's pretty unusual, and so good for you, but you probably shouldn't throw up your special sui generis status to valorize and run interference for those who are -- that is, most of your Wikipediocracy buddies. Ezra Pound was pretty talented too, but so what. Herostratus (talk) 04:06, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Could an admin remind people that No Personal Attacks applies even on Jimmy's page? Calling people as a group morons, tolls, blackguards and whiners violates the spirit of the NPA rules. Thanks. InconvenientCritic (talk) 07:10, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

One of their site admins suggested that I did indeed have an account there. From which you can draw the obvious conclusion as to whether I did or not. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:26, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

(redacted}Black Kite (talk) 22:32, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Prioryman, could you please redact your statement? It contains personal attacks, which you know are forbidden on wikipedia. Thanks. InconvenientCritic (talk) 21:40, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

WP:NPA is normally read as forbidding personal attacks on active contributors. A loophole. Formerip (talk) 21:49, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
The second point of WP:WIAPA ("Using someone's affiliations as an ad hominem means of dismissing or discrediting their views") is clearly violated by that post, and so I have removed it. Black Kite (talk) 22:32, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
O.k. I'll volunteer. I've got a Wikipediocracy forum account. Who is going to take me to ANI/ARBCOM/THEDUCKINGSTOOL, and what are the charges? AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:35, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Ducking? The giant ducks are having difficulties apparently. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:39, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Sweet please. Albacore (talk) 22:50, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Jimmy, as you can from the above, a simple discussion on Kohs and Barbour manages to go into irrelevant tangents. So that these 2 permabanned trolls don't cause disruption on this project, perhaps you could simply make it clear to all that any edits they make are to be reverted on sight, and for their offending IPs to be blocked. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who know that these two trolls are trolling on this project, and do nothing about it and actually participate in it, so perhaps editors such as myself will just have to revert them on sight. You'll also then find out pretty quickly who is here to contribute and who is here to troll. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 22:51, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Russavia, I suspect Jimbo would put you and Greg Kohs into the same category, given only those two choices. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 23:30, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
As an aside...Russavia, I ask kindly that you cease edit-warring over another editor's comments on Jimbo's own talk page. DC's comment above is not IMO any sort of egregious personal attack that necessitates redaction. If you feel otherwise it would be best all-around to get an outside opinion by bringing the matter to WP:ANI. Though I do not know if that would go very well; you're asserting that DC is calling you a troll by allusion, but complaining about that doesn't really look good with your repeated and direct use of "troll" and "trollish", etc...above when describing living people, regardless of their on-wiki status. Tarc (talk) 00:16, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Do note that both Delicious Carbuncle and Tarc are long-time Wikipediocracy members. And, yes, they will do anything to derail a discussion about that site, they always do. SilverserenC 01:35, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Er, I am pretty sure all involved here are well-aware of who is a member of what website by now. Should we add a "Btw, Seren is a member of the Rescue Squad" postscript to every XfD that you participate in? Guilt by association to discredit someone's words isn't very effective or honest in the long run. Tarc (talk) 02:10, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
I think it's rather relevant when the person is attempting to defend the group they are associated with. SilverserenC 02:41, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Silver seren, I think people are aware that I have written blog posts on Wikipediocracy, since I have posted about a few of them on this very page. Like this one about how child pornography is dealt with on Commons. Why do you think Commons is talking now about finding better ways to deal with possible child pornography? Why do you think there's a discussion going on here about "speedy deletion" of possible child pornography? As for "derailing" the discussion, I'm not sure there's actually anything here to derail. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 03:58, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
I have far less of a problem with the blog posts that actually deal specifically with Wikipedia. I have a bigger problem with the ones that delve into people's personal lives and attempt to smear them because of it. Such things are petty and childish and, sadly, the norm on Wikipediocracy. SilverserenC 04:06, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Why we all so negative about trolls all the time? They just short little hairy dudes (or dudettes! No sexist!) who live under bridges and annoy Spanish girls and their adorable talking monkeys with riddles. No real harm from that. Ya' gotta have love for the people.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 04:15, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Could one of you who is a member of that other site find out what Eric Barbour claims he has on me? He recently posted an ominous message that had all sorts of McCarthyite overtones about the dossier he claims to have on my on- and off-Wiki sins. I think it will probably make hilarious reading, but not worth actually joining that other site for. --Orange Mike | Talk 02:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Joining the site wouldn't give you access anyways. They have their own wiki that you have to be given permission to access. They claim to have dossier's on dozens of Wikipedians. The sad part is that, a fair amount of the time, they make one on someone just because someone holds an opinion they disagree with and has nothing to do with any actual criticism of Wikipedia. SilverserenC 03:19, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Orangemike, if you don't act scared, it makes Russavia's fearmongering look silly. The least you could do is not laugh. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 04:00, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Well yes - if you actually look at what goes on there, it is mostly vacuous whining by people with a grudge about something or other, gossip about people that hardly anyone cares about anyway, and endless petty arguments between people with too much time on their hands. As a venue for serious criticism of Wikipedia, it is an abysmal failure. Not to be taken seriously... AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
You could have just said "It's like Wikipedia" to cover all that.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 04:48, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Heck, Delicious: I'm the president of a Wisconsin State Employees Union local: I wake up to a daily barrage of lying abuse from a batch of corrupt scum and felonious hirelings every day, plus talk shows on Sunday! There's nothing the Wikipediocracians could hurl at me that could match what my people endure every day. I'm just wondering if they have conflated me with the Will Smith character from Bad Boys. --Orange Mike | Talk 04:52, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar
Thank you! That is all.. Dohertyben (talk) 22:47, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm fed up

I will not denote anymore money to Wikimedia fundraising and tell the others follow suit because of how passively the issue of pornography in Commons being handled. Commons is being infected by a cancer called exhibitionism FOR YEARS. I see no point to increase more servers just to preserve those totally utterly useless media files. I will not pity its death by the hands of Commons admins, they're the same as US gun defenders. This disease is incurable already because no one had the vision to stop it earlier. This is not an appeal, because I expect nothing from you. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 01:54, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

If nothing can be done, then de-associate WMF (and Wikipedia) from the Commons. It's a mess. Dump them. Let them do whatever the hell they want but let them do it under their own name, not under WMF/Jimbo's name. As a long time contributor to this project I resent the fact that I even get associated with that place simply because en-Wikipedia and Commons have something in ... common. The same sentiment has been expressed in the past by other long time contributor's and en-Wikipedia members like User:Risker who said that she never goes on Commons because she always "feels dirty" even stepping over there. I think most responsible editors here feel the same way. It's a big ugly stain on the people who are working to create a serious free reference work.Volunteer Marek 03:40, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Same with me, I rarely venture over to commons and never ever ever go there at work (unlike Wikipedia and Wiktionary which is a staple at my job). Kumioko (talk) 03:42, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Commons looks more and more as a free porno site. The question is, if English Wikipedia is any better: [18] [19];[20];[21];[22];[23] and so on, and so on. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 04:05, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
IP, are you complaining that you went to an encyclopaedia, looked up sexual topics and found sexual images there? Oh my god, however could they be there! In articles about the subject! This is a disgrace!
As ever, don't search for "porn" and you're unlikely to find it. -mattbuck (Talk) 07:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Mattbuck, Encyclopedia Britannica has no article about scrotal inflation, and what a disgrace(!) it has no article about erotic electrostimulation either. Does it make it less of encyclopedia? 76.126.142.59 (talk) 13:47, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it does make it less of an encyclopedia. Coverage of such topics in one aspect where WP is superior. --Cyclopiatalk 15:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
That is a nicely absurd position to take. And one which I find so unconvincing as to US and international law that I suggest the WMF staff would find it ludicrous as well. Collect (talk) 08:03, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
I find nothing illegal with his point of view? Please explain how pornography has now become illegal everywhere overnight? 99.39.113.250 (talk) 12:46, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Try looking up laws about child pornography etc. I suggest you will find it is generally regarded as "illegal." Really. Collect (talk) 15:55, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Given this line originated from the argument that one is unlikely to find porn without looking for it, I am at a loss to understand how this is anything but a red herring. Resolute 16:02, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Innocent searches are irrelevant to the original complaint here; indeed, the ongoing work to keep this material by hiding it from casual users emphasizes how much of it appears to be irrelevant to any encyclopedia and is just Flickr with even looser rules. It's hardly surprising that the majority of the world, whose standards are less prurient than ours, would object to having their money used to fund someone's stash of objectionable and unencyclopedic material. Mangoe (talk) 18:20, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Are there complaints from people who search for some subject unrelated to sex, who get wrongly directed to pages with explicit sexual images? Or is this simply about not wanting to have an encyclopedia that contains topics on sexual matters with explicit images in as much detail as any other subject? Count Iblis (talk) 12:55, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Don't get me wrong. I'm totally fine with "pornographic article" with proper image to assist it as long as the article is well sourced. I can't stand that Commons admins constantly insist images uploaded by exhibitionists to be "useful IMO". Those images are hardly useful in any Wikimedia project. I've suggested that sensitive image with no chance of being rationally used in other project's article should be deleted, but this suggestion has been taken lightly or challenged by Commons admins/defenders with "it's only useless in YOUR opinion" or something like that. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 13:33, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Commons acts as the central repository for Wikimedia projects, but its scope is not limited to Wikimedia. I'm not going to defend the need for dozens of penis pictures, but I don't find "it's not used on Wikipedia" to be an outstanding argument in general. Resolute 14:44, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
I said "it's not used on any Wikimedia project". More importantly, when has Commons become the repository for projects outside of Wikimedia? I only find such argument solely justifies that dozens of unused penis pictures. I just don't understand, if someone wants to publicize their own penis or vulva, why it has to be Wikimedia Commons? There are dozens of more appropriate websites to host those images. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 15:13, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. And if you are going to view everything as black and white absolutes, then this discussion really won't be worth continuing. Like I said, I won't defend the need for as many such images as we do have, but an argument for deletion of "unused at Wikimedia" isn't a qualifying delete rationale in my view. Resolute 15:26, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
I read it differently from your interpretation. "You can use the files as you please" doesn't mean "you can upload the files as you please". Again, I don't want my donation spent to support those exhibitionists, that's my bottom line. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 15:36, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
That's fine, I won't tell you how to spend your money. But in a project with 17 million images and millions of articles in 200 languages, the "exhibitionism problem" is really quite small in the grand scheme of things. Resolute 15:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
This points to the general dilemma. Any reflective person would probably agree that a free repository of educational images would have some images that they themselves find offensive, even substantially offensive, like some of these. So, how to deal with that. Probably the ones who view, keep, and maintain such images should be more sensitive to that, and the ones who find them offensive should be more tolerant. Both stances would be easier if there was more meeting in the middle. The WMF, however, appears to be the only one in a position to mediate. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:53, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Barf. Commons does not "make available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language". It scrapes content from other sites. If Wikimedia Commons did not exist the images would still exist and would still be available elsewhere. There are 100s of websites that host poor quality amateur porn. For each image on wikimedia commons there are 1000s of others in the same category, of better quality(NSFW), and almost certainly with better descriptions. The sex content on this site is woefully inadequate, and most likely wrong, it tends to dwell on the bizarre, freakish, and sensationalist, at the expense of what most people do. Any one that says the sex content on WP is in any way educational is either lying or deluded. John lilburne (talk) 20:27, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Yes, there have been many complaints that sexualized imagery pops up in unexpected places on the Commons, such as searches for "skittles" or "toothbrush". Tarc (talk) 13:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
That's probably a matter of incorrect categorisation, should be quite simple to fix. Does Commons have an equivalent of our New Page Patrol that can fix such problems proactively. Is there a specific category for images of an "adult" or NSFW nature, which can be used as a filter by those who need it? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:15, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately no, it's due to the search engine. We do have a category "Nude or partially nude people with electric toothbrushes" so that nude images don't show in the main toothbrushes category, but the only way to stop such images showing when you search for toothbrushes would be to remove the string "toothbrush" from the file completely, which rather goes against the point of having such an image to begin with. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:46, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
And what encyclopedic purpose does a nude person brushing their teeth serve...or is something that need not be repeated here going on with these toothbrushes?--MONGO 17:29, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
The file name should be enough for you: File:Woman masturbating with improvised vibrator.jpg. It was originally known as File:Masturbating with a toothbrush.jpg although User:Mike Peel renamed it after the search results became a topic of discussion elsewhere. All too frequently, the specific examples raised are dealt with like this but the general problem remains unaddressed. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Precisely as I expected.--MONGO 18:16, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
"Encyclopedic purpose" is irrelevant, Commons is separate from the hundreds of encyclopedias hosted by the WMF. Images on Commons can be used for any purpose. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:21, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Yes, people bring this up from time to time, that the vast Commons repository is for the world to link to and make use of. I'm curious about the licensing though, how do the Commons staff and admins and such verify that the CC-BY-SA is being adhered to by non-WMF entities? Tarc (talk) 18:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
They wouldn't, any more than they spend time verifying that our encyclopedic content is being used in compliance with the license. It is up to the uploader (who owns the license) to enforce it, if they so choose. Resolute 18:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
So if an image of a topless woman is scraped off of, say, Flickr, that is where any responsibility ends? I then create a website that charges for access to pictures of topless women, with links back to Commons-hosted images. As long as the original Flickr uploader doesn't show up to complain, Commons is golden? Tarc (talk) 18:58, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
This is kind of off-topic but can't all pictures there be used commercially? That would leave attribution, which if the link is back to Commons gives the attribution. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:16, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
You would want to talk to a lawyer about the legalities of it, but my understanding is that yes, Commons would be okay from that perspective. If the image is licensed CC-BY-SA and we are properly attributing the file and properly licensing any derivatives, then yes, WMF should be okay. When you license CC-BY-SA, you are explicitly allowing commercial reuse. If subsequent reusers are violating the terms, then that is an issue between that reuser and the copyright holder. I have several of my images reused elsewhere. Most that I have seen have credited me. Of those that haven't, I chose not to make a big deal out of it. But that was my choice, and ultimately my responsibility as the copyright holder. Resolute 19:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Is commons separately funded and run? If not, then it isn't separate. Also, our own article claims that "Given its primary function as a supporting project for the other Wikimedia web sites, the main content policy for files uploaded to Commons is that they must be potentially useful on any of the Wikimedia projects." That seems to me to be in conflict with the assertion that "encyclopedic purpose is irrelevant." Mangoe (talk) 19:02, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Encyclopedic purpose is irrelevant...then what's the purpose of Commons. This sort of thing is not what I've used it for. The image linked by DC above does not indicate the age of the person, nor is the image used on en.wiki.--MONGO 19:17, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Commons' purpose is educational content, not encyclopedic. The definition of "educational" can be as broad or narrow as anyone wishes to make it, however. Resolute 19:21, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
First, that's in conflict with the statement I've quoted, which I have to think has better authority behind it than your opinion; and second, I do not agree that "educational" is devoid of meaning. In particular, I'm quite happy to make the claim that the disputed images are not educational, and I would guess that a typical person would make the same assessment. Mangoe (talk) 19:39, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
It is only in conflict because the Wikipedia article is imprecise. I am quoting from Commons' own policies. Also, images of nudity and sexuality, as a broad category, are educational. In a very broad encyclopedia, such as Wikipedia, then a broader range of images likewise qualify (much in the same way that we have millions of articles you'll never find in a traditional encyclopedia). That the meaning can be argued in a broad sense does not render it "devoid of meaning". Resolute 19:56, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
"But it's educational" is the kind of lame excuse boarding school boys used to give to masters when their stash of girlie magazines was uncovered in room inspections. Images of nudity and sexuality are not intrinsically educational simply by showing those subjects, and indeed are as a rule not educational except in certain narrowly defined contexts. It seems to me that the properties which render an image "unencyclopedic" are precisely those which render it "not educational", even in a very broad sense. "Educational" is not a "get out of having to justify" card. Mangoe (talk) 20:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Well...once we head down the censorship path we never know where it will end. The main concern is whether we hosting images of underage subjects and the liability that comes from that.--MONGO 20:27, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
If that Project is going to rely on consensus-editorial-discretion to determine "educational," as it has been set up to do, it is likely it will get a broad definition, approaching, "able to convey information" and "not illegal." -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:33, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Personally, I disagree on the argument of being intrinsically educational. Also, Commons, by its nature, does not provide context. I think most would agree that placing an image of someone's breasts in the breast article can be expected to use that image in an educational context. By extension, any image of breasts can become similarly educational, and therefore fits Commons' scope. Likewise, as long as we have articles like exhibitionism, then exhibitionist images can easily fit within the scope of "it's educational". There aren't many image types that can't be made to fit this scope. The real issue, imnsho, is not the value of an individual image or of a single category of images, but the number. A hundred individual penis images can be argued as having educational merit. The single category of penis images can as well. But the question really should be "do we need 100 images?" I think framing the debate along these lines has been attempted before, but my (unsupported) recollection is that these debates usually end up polarized and trainwrecked. Resolute 20:45, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
That's a signal that the community is incompetent— not necessarily because individual members are so, but because the decision-making process allows its exploitation by those to whom it is advantageous to prevent it from setting any standards. Mangoe (talk) 20:45, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
If there's an entire Commons category for images of people masturbating with electric toothbrushes then I think that probably tells you more about the place that a couple of megabytes of circular arguing on here. Black Kite (talk) 20:37, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
It is an entire category of one single image, created on the grounds of principle of least astonishment. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:22, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Cos obviously no other solution was available like the delete button. I don't suppose that just placing it under female masturbation was a possibility either. Its a wonder it wasn't catted as "Nude or partially nude people with electric toothbrushes in right hand, lying on a green mat, wearing a gold coloured watch on the left wrist, and with ceramic tiles in the background". John lilburne (talk) 21:38, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
That it's a toothbrush is rather important to the image, so no it should not just be under female masturbation. As for deletion, iirc it survived several DRs on the grounds that improvised vibrators are a common thing. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I need to point out here that the issue of separability is being ignored in this. If the community cannot come up with a standard of "educational" that has any teeth, I expect that individual donors can, and that it would not be "Flickr with no content standards whatsoever." I see no reason to hurt funding for other WMF projects simply because Commons is really nothing more than a media webhost. Mangoe (talk) 20:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

How are Wikimedia, as a secondary producer, and the editors uploading this material, as secondary or primary producers, in compliance with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which is the law of the land? Who is keeping the detailed records of the performers to ensure that they are of legal age? Whether you like the law or not, it is the law, and it could be enforced at any time. Jehochman Talk 20:59, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

The uploaders are in the frame, those taking part in the discussions are in the frame, those exercising judgement calls over the content are in the frame. The WMF is behind the sofa claiming "Not us Guv! its them over there, and here are the names IP addresses etc". John lilburne (talk) 21:09, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
That would be an interesting prosecution, as in who is prosecuted and who has to keep it. Someone mentioned above the Flickr "has standards." What are those? Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:08, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
Yahoo T&C

You agree to not use the Services to: a. upload, post, email or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

and they uphold them whenever a breach comes to their notice. Screw with flickr and you are likely to lose every photo you uploaded there. Screw with yahoo and you'll lose your email accounts, really screw with yahoo and everything you ever posted on any yahoo site will be scrubbed. John lilburne (talk) 21:20, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
All-in all, that is kinda vague, as these things often seem to be. That second link you give for Flickr has this to say: "If people want to publish content that's not suitable for children (or would be generally offensive to most people) they may. Then, it becomes member choice to elect to see that sort of content, using SafeSearch (or not using it, in this case). Note that this doesn't mean illegal or prohibited content is OK - it's definitely not." That's not much standard. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:29, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
They do blank out some material if you aren't logged in, so it isn't the case that all material uploaded is visible to everyone. Mangoe (talk) 02:37, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
They allow general adult content so long as it is appropriately tagged as such. If someone is incapable of doing that then they'll do it by marking the entire account adult. Non logged in users, those identified to yahoo as under 18, and Germans cannot see adult content. Others get to chose, so they can browse at work with safe switched on, and browse at home with it switched off. Otherwise yahoo has types of content that they will not allow examples are incest, shit play, racism, sexualisation of kids, voyeur content where the person photographed is unaware that they are being photopgraphed, upskirts and down blouse stuff. Basically if you want to be an arse to other people then go do it some place else, I think Commons has been mentioned as that place from time to time. John lilburne (talk) 07:11, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
OK. To construct a list of defined prohibited content, a site needs an editorial controller to make a list. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:07, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps but Y! has no published public list as to what is or is not acceptable. For example, a documentary type photograph of kids smoking is OK, an account that has a lot of photos of kids smoking will be deleted. Y! does not countenance the glorification of kids smoking falls under the category 'harmful' above. BDSM images are OK but not when it involves blood. Using cucumbers as sex toys, or fisting images, are similarly not allowed. Accounts that appear to be offering services or hookups are another no go area. Again there is no published list, probably to avoid people prodding at the boundaries, this is just what has been observed by a number of people over a number of years. Yahoo has a Corporate or editorial policy over what it wants to be associated with. In many ways it is fairly liberal and flickr probably contains the largest collection of adult material outside of a dedicated porn portal, in others it is surprisingly conservative. WMF similarly needs to be clear as to what it wants to be associated with. Whether it wants to be a site that hosts jailbait or anyoneup type content. John lilburne (talk) 16:10, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Right. Which means it takes editorial control to define and enforce the policy. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:22, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
The secrecy of the list (or the deliberate lack of definable criteria) seems to be a universal characteristic of censorship wherever it is applied, public or private. This is one reason why censorship is invariably the tool of villains; because the lack of definition means that there is no possible way that it can be defined to exclude purely self-serving, politically motivated attacks. It also means that there is no way that anyone posting can ever know that he will not get into trouble, which further reinforces the importance of his being personally agreeable to the censor. Nonetheless, censorship fails at every purpose, or else we would never have been able to make headway against it, because there is an innate spark of goodness in the human spirit that no censor can ever predict or encompass, which must eventually unravel every scheme. Wnt (talk) 17:31, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I let some people into my apartment and don't let others. I have no definable criteria for deciding who I will let in. It's entirely up to me, which means that if I want to refuse to let someone in for a self-serving, politically-motivated reason there's no way to prove that. Still, it's the only practical way to decide who gets to be in my apartment. Ken Arromdee (talk) 20:49, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Yeah, but who said Commons was your apartment and not my apartment? or the apartment of the people who actually do watch over its content and generally get rid of many troublesome things at substantial personal legal risk. Wnt (talk) 21:18, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Yahoo own the servers. Their rules. They decide what they are comfortable with hosting. They don't go looking for non-compliant content. But they react when it is brought to their attention. The result is that the "getting it on" crowd and the "ducks and bunnies" crowd can mostly intermingle without a huge fight breaking out across the site. Several years ago there were 100s of accounts where someone had followed some women as she walked through the mall photographing her arse. Or they'd hung out around the parking lot snatch photos of women bending over to stow their shopping/kids. You don't tend to see that so much. There are still fuckwads posting crude comments on photos of someone's teenage kid, they don't stay around so long. John lilburne (talk) 19:31, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
Wnt, pens and paper are also "invariably the tool[s] of villains", so I simply do not see the logic. It's difficult, usually even impossible to draw absolute lines between acceptable and unacceptable human behavior, but so what? It has never stopped anyone from placing any given act on one side or the other. "Wikimedia is not censored" is not the same as "Wikimedia has no standards other than those the law thrusts upon us." I don't don't think that the latter is really adhered to anyway. There's only so far I have time to go wading through commons looking for stuff (especially with the risk of displaying something that someone else in the room is going to object to) but my impression is that the offensive material in question is being protected from review because it is offensive, whereas if it were more innocuous the fact of its lack of utility would be brought to bear. We delete tons of stuff off the English Wikipedia not because it's offensive but because it's useless, e.g. old user pics and various other random pictures which nobody is ever going to link to. I don't run across a lot of this stuff on commons so it's pretty clear that either people don't bother to upload it, or it's getting deleted quickly and without fuss. Mangoe (talk) 20:43, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
It seems to me that if someone wants to post nude images they don't have a hard job finding them. And it doesn't seem to matter what the subject is either. Frankly who is going to source erotica from Commons, even if they are into dicks, Commons is hardly the place one would go for choice. They should concentrate on curating quality images that are educational instead of curating dumb shit that perhaps a dozen sad gits are ever going to use. Then when kids look for photos of Prince Albert or Pearl Necklace then that is what they get even with safe search off. John lilburne (talk) 22:02, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I haven't read the voluminous threads on this subject, but let me ask a silly question. Why doesn't the Foundation step in and say, "no"? The Foundation needs to be the adult in the room and say, "no, we're not running a pornography website here". You're never going to convince people to change their moral values and if someone sees no problem with hosting pornography in plain view of children on something that's supposed to be an encyclopedia, no amount of rehashing this topic is going to make them see the light. The Foundation needs to be the adult in the room, require that useless explicit files be deleted, and require that the ones retained be completely excludable by some sort of filter. How hard would it be to add an extension to MediaWiki that if you search for a term that returns an image in category:xyz will omit those images and prompt you to either opt in or opt out at that point, and store a cookie with your choice? For those who absolutely have to have their wikiporn, this makes you click on one more button to get to it. I've never understood the logic that just because Wikipedia/Commons is not censored, everyone who uses it is now required to submit to seeing casual porn if they accidentally click on the wrong thing. I'm sure that the same people who want Wikipedia/Commons to be a porn site will then want to argue that there's no difference between an encyclopedic image of nudity (like the one found at human body) vs the closeups of pierced genitalia with semen, but I would think that the adults in the room could make the differentiation. It's time for an adult to step in and just fix the problem. --B (talk) 23:08, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
I wish you could understand why we find it annoying for you to declare yourself the adult and us the children, when you're the one who can't bear to look at routine images of the human body and we're the ones who don't have a problem with it, and haven't had a problem with it for a full decade now, with no sky fallen. Wnt (talk) 00:58, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Of course, this completely misses the point. We're not talking about routine images of the human body. Human body has routine images of the human body. We're talking about obscene images on an educational site. Why is it that a simple one-click opt-in/opt-out is a horrible infringement on your right to see Commons porn? --B (talk) 11:56, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
B, you maybe haven't met Wnt here before if you're surprised at his completely missing the point. He elevates it to an artform in discussions like this. You were correct when you said "if someone sees no problem with hosting pornography in plain view of children on something that's supposed to be an encyclopedia, no amount of rehashing this topic is going to make them see the light". So we're left with appeals to authority in the form of Jimbo (who agrees but says he can't act), and the WMF. I think the "adults" you are looking for are behind the sofa, avoiding the ringing of the phone and the doorbell on this one. Begoon talk 12:09, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Wnt,in his usual hamfisted way, is try to make the following point:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html

He's hoping for a sledge come Christmas. John lilburne (talk) 12:26, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Heh - nice illustration. He can have my sledge. I prefer a nice solid set of stairs. You can go whichever way you decide on those. I've even been known to turn around halfway down and go back for something I forgot. Begoon talk 13:31, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Wnt, I understand it perfectly: I have teenagers in the house, and they continually express their annoyance when I call them on the use of that particular rhetorical device. I don't feel in any way constrained by your personal failure to hold to any standard, but I also don't believe that the people who are uploading this stuff think that it's innocuous. I suspect that most if not all of them know that it isn't innocuous, and that at least part of the reason it is being uploaded is because it isn't innocuous. It's ironic that I find myself in this discussion while I've been reading a memoir/history of a faculty member from my high school, because it's the same battle all over again. I remember myself weaselling out of one particular disciplinary infraction on some legalistic grounds, when there was no question that I had committed the act and no issue that the fellow who caught me was in a position to object to it. No, B is precisely right in identifying the problem is that lack of any adult supervision. Mangoe (talk) 12:16, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
What you're calling "adulthood" is the acceptance of a specific set of cultural taboos that only certain people believe in. If for some people you know it is correlated with increasing age, that is only because your taboos are in conflict with the state of nature. If people were entirely free from such mad ideology, they would have the right to stroll through the gates of Eden, and (among other things) they would do so naked.
The cost of your proposal, however, would be high - despite claims above, there really isn't any difference between showing a penis to illustrate the anatomy and showing it exhibitionistically; it still looks the same. If we begin concealing articles about sexual topics from children, the inevitable cost will be unwanted pregnancies and lethal disease. Pornography infects no one. We cannot accept your agenda without agreeing to make a blood sacrifice. Wnt (talk) 16:56, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
You gotta hand it to B. We should have stopped with "if someone sees no problem with hosting pornography in plain view of children on something that's supposed to be an encyclopedia, no amount of rehashing this topic is going to make them see the light". I'd reply, Wnt, but experience tells me that when I hear that funny music and Rod Serling's voice, and things start turning black and white, it might not be worth continuing. A bientot. Begoon talk 17:10, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Wnt, even in what you are saying there is a difference, because one illustration is anatomical illustration, and the other is a bold strike against prudery. I to hold that the latter is an adolescent act. As soon as you said "articles", you lost your momentum, as you know very well that the articles are not the issue (though I find the enthusiasm for, um, atypical sexual practices telling in its way). No, it's the smut that was created as such and uploaded as such and which will never see inclusion in any article, not even in articles about smut, which is most supremely indefensible except through childish arguments about defying authority. Mangoe (talk) 18:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
It would appear it is your faction which is interested in defying Commons' authority right now, not ours. The WMF remains inscrutable, but requires no 'defying' by us right now either. The user base showed no particular interest in even a voluntary opt-in image hiding, let alone a purge of whatever you don't like today from Commons, so I see no reason for any of that to change in the near or far future. Wnt (talk) 20:05, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
To stick with the image I've been using: commons has "authority" the way a class full of sophomores gains authority when the teacher steps out of the room. Mangoe (talk) 02:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
So the guy who sets up the classroom, writes the textbook, and does the teaching is the "sophomore", and the one who does nothing but condemn the whole school because he disagrees on a doctrine is the "teacher"? There's something very al-Qaida-on-girls-schools about that. Wnt (talk) 02:54, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
You don't get it; things clearly aren't going to improve soon; I'm done here. Mangoe (talk) 13:28, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Gee, if only Wikimedia had a full-time lawyer employed to handle legal issues. It's too bad we have to rely on anonymous laypeople to interpret U.S. law for us. And on a related note, Wikimedia hosts detailed information on how to construct nuclear weapons and how to produce/obtain all manner of lethal poisons. What educational value does this have?! Wikipedia is out of control!!! --108.38.191.162 (talk) 21:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

A message for wikipediocracy users

This seemed the fastest way to reach you. In this topic you say you found a photo of me with a water balloon. As you might have noticed, the person pictured doesn't have the same name as me, and that's because it's not me. Also, by posting it to imgur without attribution or a link back to flickr you violated the terms of the CC-BY-SA-2.0 licence. Cease and desist. -mattbuck (Talk) 07:08, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

How can it be possible that a holder of advanced permissions on a wikimedia project can come to Jimmy's talk page and commit blatant violations of WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA? Why is this OK? Aren't we supposed to be better than this? InconvenientCritic (talk) 11:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
(EC) Ironic, as the fastest way to get action on many things on wikipedia is to post it on wikipediocracy. Per the terms of the CC-BY-SA licence, attribution needs to be provided where/when the image is published/disseminated etc to the public, and available on request. Due to the nature of online storage (and even corporate cloud-based storage) this is not always where the image is actually hosted/located. This is somewhat of a grey area regarding CC-BY-SA-2.0 which they have still not worked out. Online data storage is not, as per the terms of the CC-BY-SA licence, strictly 'publishing' or even disseminating as they define it until its actually linked to. The thread you linked makes the attribution perfectly clear. Also web forums are rarely responsible for the content of their contributors except under certain circumstances. Like the WMF, most of them off-load the legal implications to the contributor. So wikipediocracy is no more responsible for its members posts than the WMF is (legally) responsible for commons porn stash. Tell me, are you keeping up to date records of the age of the models in the adult pictures you upload to commons? As its your legal responsibility under US law to do so, even if you scrape them from flickr, not the WMF's or the original flickr uploader. But if you wanted to reach the individual you feel is violating the CC-BY-SA licence, you could have just, you know, messaged them since you clearly are watching the forum. Instead of doing the usual commons deflection tactic of by screaming 'bad people at wpo!' when under the spotlight. Its kind of a shame really, as Jimbo's views on commons fall neatly in line with most of the critics at wikipediocracy, if they could all be sat down for a nice meal they could probably work out their differences. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:35, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Note that as explained at Commons:Help:Sexual content and in particular [24] the exceptional claims regarding 2257 enforcement are pure threat and chilling effect without a valid legal basis. WMF Counsel actually considered the question and gave advice that Commons does not need to maintain 2257 documentation. Wnt (talk) 17:55, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
RE:copyright. You are in error. The use of this image on imgur is clearly a copyvio, as a staticflickr link does provide neither credit nor license information, both required per CC-BY. In my country, courts have decided that even merely hosting an image on your server (without showing it on your web surface) constitutes copyright infringement. --Túrelio (talk) 09:24, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
(EC) Unfortunately its not the same in every country regarding hosting. Hence 'grey area'. The laws around linking are even more murky. Last time I looked the UK had about 3 conflicting court cases all with different decisions that could have gone either way. (Incidentally this caused my company to ban all CC licensed content because absolutely no one, either at the location where they were getting the pictures, or the hosts, was abiding by all the provisions of the licence.) - This discussion can go to my talkpage though if you want to continue it, I would be interested in the law you quoted regarding hosting material. Would rather not digress here too much. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
You already know that they are hypocrites. They will criticize Wikipedia for copyright issues, but then ignore the fact that they are violating copyright left and right by their own actions. But do you really expect any better from them? It's because of their hypocrisy that their opinions are largely irrelevant. SilverserenC 08:20, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
You do realize that WP doesn't properly license the CC content it hosts. John lilburne (talk) 10:27, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
SS, having looked through that thread and poked around a bit further, I see (a) one person storing an image off-site, and (b) another thread in which how they should host their own image. Besides, copyright and hosting pornography are quite distinct issues. Mangoe (talk) 11:36, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Anyone that cares knows how to get from a flickr jpg url back to the photopage anyway. But the DMCA is mattbuck's best friend. John lilburne (talk) 11:42, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Mattbuck and crew only care about copyright and personality rights when it suits them. When it does not, they fight tooth and claw to retain any image for any reason, such as Mardi Gras topless photos scraped from Flickr. The hypocrisy is astounding. Tarc (talk) 12:25, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Really? You're still astounded by it? I used to be - but it's getting too old to astound me any more. It still annoys me, but I suspect that's most of the problem, and most of the reason for doing it - because they can, and because it annoys. We need to remove the "because they can" part, imo. B hits the nail on the head in the other discussion when he points out lack of "adult" supervision as the main problem. That's the missing part of the mechanism, and that's what the infrastructure doesn't provide. I think that's largely why these discussions always end up on this page too - in a hope that Jimbo can help that framework to happen, even if he can't do it himself. Begoon talk 13:17, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Mattbuck is absolutely right. I do not understand why these trolls from wikipediocracy decided to use a non-free image of a different person, if Mattbuck has released this image of himself with a free license? This real image of Mattbuck (look at his face) clearly illustrates why Muttbuck left this message to the talk page of Beta_M who together with Mattbuck keeps busy voting to keep every low resolution porn image71.198.248.45 (talk) 15:32, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
To clear things up, the reason I posted here was that it seemed the easiest way to connect to wikipaedocrats in the limited time I had available this morning. I didn't make any sort of personality rights case, I simply stated that the person they were claiming was me was in fact not me. As for copyright... I'm a commons admin, so yes, I care about copyright. I don't see how anything I said counts as a personal attack, or even being incivil. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:01, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Ohhhh, I called them trolls, right. Yes, I did that. My mistake, someone changed the title on me. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:06, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Mattbuck, leaving alone everything else, but if you truly believe that Jimbo's talk page is "the easiest way to connect to wikipaedocrats", you're not competent enough to edit Wikipedia. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 16:35, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
It seems a reasonable assumption, given they practically live on this page. Resolute 18:51, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
It was that or sully myself with a wikipaedocracy account. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:09, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Someone eventually used the support@wikipediocracy.com email account Wikipediocracy created in cooperation with Commons.→StaniStani  19:17, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
Hey, Mattbuck.

A cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity (cease) and not to take it up again later (desist) or else face legal action.

We have this policy about not making legal threats. You might want to read it and then redact what you said. — Scott • talk 11:30, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
And you might read what the initial paragraph on that page says: "if you make legal threats or take legal action over a Wikipedia dispute" (bolding is mine). His remark was not about a "Wikipedia dispute", but about an external website. --Túrelio (talk) 12:08, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
You're trying to lawyer that policy into what you want it to mean. The text you quote is, in fact, from the third paragraph. Immediately before that is the unequivocal instruction "Do not issue legal threats on Wikipedia pages." That is universal. Wikipedia is not the venue for anyone to make legal threats against anyone. Period. Legal threats over Wikipedia disputes are a subset of that. — Scott • talk 12:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
And you're trying to lawyer three words, taken out of context of the overall statement, to try and... what? Resolute 13:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
WP:NLT doesn't apply when people on Wikipedia discuss suits that could be filed against third party sites for infringement of Wikipedia copyrights or trademarks. Still, it never seems to amount to much when they do. Wnt (talk) 13:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Request 'hat' of this discussion by uninvolved admin/trusted editor. I'm sure Jimbo would rather not see it here.→StaniStani  19:32, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
I think we've all learned a lot from this thread, actually. Carrite (talk) 16:23, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I sure have! Crocodile Dundee couldn't have thrown a better boomerang. Hillbillyholiday talk 20:00, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Inappropriately named files on Commons

Hi Jimmy, thanks for coming across to Commons to advise us that some images need renaming. You are right that naming our male genitalia photos with "cock" in the name is probably not appropriate. We normally ask that inexperienced editors use the {{rename}} template to alert us to such issues, but it would be great to get you more involved in Commons (as it would be great to get other editors involved). As I noted here, I have used admin discretion and have given you the filemover right, as I don't believe you'll abuse that tool. :)

By doing this, when you are looking at penis photos on Commons, you will be able to do this on the spot. Just be sure to look at our file renaming policy before helping the community with renames.

Again, I appreciate you bringing that issue to the community's attention, and perhaps we will see more of you on Commons too. Drop us a line if we can be of further assistance. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 20:11, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi again Jimmy, sorry to come back here, I know you are a busy guy, and you would probably rather leave things like this to community to deal with.
But, earlier today I posted this to the thread you started on Commons, in which I suggested we use a colour picker to determine the pantone/HEX/RGB colour of the penis and rename them that in order to avoid having to deal with the "colour" issue. I thought this issue was jokingly raised by another editor, I didn't see that you yourself brought that issue up -- I simply saw the penis-cock issue that you raised, not noticing that you thought "black" might be racist. So sorry if you saw that and thought I was taking the piss out of you; we try to keep a jovial, mellow atmosphere on Commons, and that was just part of that. But as it was a serious concern on your behalf, we should look at it seriously.
Here's the dilemma, I'm not really sure how this could reasonably be addressed. Obviously we want to take your opinion into account, so perhaps you could make a suggestion on how to name such penises? Obviously calling it a Negro penis is out of the question because it is quite an offensive term. Using the word "coloured" might be considered offensive, especially if we were to rename a South African penis that way given the stigma of that term during apartheid. Calling it a black penis might be considered offensive by say Australian Aboriginals considering the history behind its use, although acceptance to its usage is increasing. Looking here on this project, I see Black people states this is an everyday English term for, well, black people, and there isn't really any racist overtone to it's usage (unless it is mean to be by way of its usage).
But I decided to check off this project on a site where I know people upload photos of their penis as part of their profiles, and see how it's done there. When I edit/create my profile on Gaydar, maybe you've heard of it, the options for ethnicity are:
  • "Asian" - obviously means say "East Asian" (Chinese/Japanese/Filipino/etc)
  • "South Asian" - obviously means from the Indian sub-continent
  • "Caucasian" - obviously means what could be called "white people"
  • "Hispanic" - obviously means from Latin America
  • "Middle Eastern" - obviously means someone from Middle East (usually say Turkish)
  • "Arab" - obviously means Arab
  • "Mixed Race" - obviously means inter-racial
  • "Other" - every thing else
  • "Black" - obviously for everything covered in "black people"
  • "Rather not say" - in my experience this is an option that is chosen by people who want to either hide their ethnicity for fear of not hooking up, or the odd closet case who wants to keep anyone from knowing that they are, well, queer.
Given that site was founded in South Africa, and they have always used black instead of coloured (or other such terms) I think that "black penis" would be fine. I'm not sure how it is on straight websites, but if it's important, you might want someone else to check that to confirm. But if you still believe that this is an issue that could be construed as racist, the last thing we would want is for the issues I've raised from being publicised; given the recent events on how categorisation on this project is sexist and broken.
I'm sorry that I've come to your talk page with this, I know it might be embarrassing under the circumstances for me to be asking you to discuss penises as openly as I am, but we really need to know about the issues above. If you would prefer to discuss this in private, feel free to contact me, and I'd be happy to discuss this and any other "penis"/"sexuality" related issues that you'd like to get off your chest. I'm all ears. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 17:01, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Ignoring the fact that there is no objective criteria that would allow the cultural heritage of a human penis to be determined from an image...Under what circumstances would the information be useful? What are the anatomical differences between Asian and Hispanic penises? — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 19:38, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Are you arguing that photos of caucasian penises are sufficient and we don't need photos of penises of other races? -mattbuck (Talk) 20:54, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Absolutely not, but the question does raise another issue; How do we label the images in a manner that avoids representing one as the "standard" by which all others are judged? Russavia's suggestion may actually be a good solution to the problem. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 21:40, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Btw there is a weird thing over there. When you search 'purpose' you get a very vulgar image at the top of the search. The same happens with 'result' but the image is File:PieCrust masked.jpg. It may be just a glitch but it could be someone playing with the search function as well. The two search words are not found anywhere on the file pages. If someone is playing and gets caught I hope I get to hear about it. Someone may wish to delete the one image before the Streisand effect happens.--Canoe1967 (talk) 10:22, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
    • There's probably a redirect or piped link to it somewhere. Peter James (talk) 13:45, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

AfD for comprehensiveness of article on controversial subject seems contrary to WP goal

Editors object to an article being comprehensive. Being informative is confused with promotion. An AfD is pending on Success Academy Charter Schools, which are highly controversial in New York City education circles, as is its founder/CEO, a city politician who said she'll likely run again. An admin wants a speedy deletion and some editors want stubification. An AfD on the article about the founder led to keeping after major chopping (I largely restored after talk). Talk is ignored by almost everyone except me. Good faith and civility are disappearing. Please help. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:05, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the proposal for speedy deletion was inappropriate, and that AfD process that is now in progress is the correct approach. However, both the length of the article and the length of its principal proponent's comments in AfD are too long. The principal proponent's comment in AfD appear to be a filibuster. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Not a filibuster: Everything was on point and when charges are made we need to respond in anticipation that it will be credited. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I doubt it will be deleted. I think the main issue is that "the sum of all knowledge" has turned to "the sum of all knowledge we can easily source on the internet". I have seen similar articles that start very large and get shaved down to one sentence/one source. It has 250,000 bytes now with 472 individual references. I can see why it can be so large being a 'different' school in NYC. It will have lots of comprehensive content that is well sourced because of that. The main problem may be that many editors will compare the article size to there own schools. Your school may be smaller but at the same time may rate a larger article. The article may be doomed for a huge butchering not for the sake of the project but because it just seems too large for an article on a school. Welcome to Wikipedia.--Canoe1967 (talk) 17:33, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
Plausible, the comparison to other schools. I also used offline books and not all knowledge, but I see your point. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Article size does not seem to be a clear indicator of importance or significance. See Bradfield College (I'm sure there are much better examples). --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:09, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
It looks a certainty from the AfD that the Success Academy Charter Schools article isn't going to be deleted. Instead, it will be reduced to a stub, and then rewritten as a proper encyclopaedic article, rather than the grossly-bloated collection of everything under the sun that it is now. There is nothing whatsoever in Wikipedia's 'goals' which justifies such a lengthy, rambling and trivia-filled rag-bag article, and it does a disservice to anyone actually interested in the subject to have to read through such endless waffle. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
You are, of course, completely misrepresenting why DGG took the article to AFD. Not because it is "comprehensive", but because several editors find its tone to be promotional, and because it is evidently being used as a WP:COATRACK. I skimmed through parts of the article, because it is nearly impossible to read as a whole, and found pointless trivia, a paragraph dedicated to pointing out people associated with these schools have Wikipedia articles, micro stub sections that have no point - "Governor" being one, "Congress" isn't much better. But perhaps most notably, the CEO, Eva Moskowitz, is mentioned one hundred and thirty one times. Many of those are preceded by "according to". That lends me to worry about POV, primary sources, and several other aspects of our alphabet soup of policies. Any concerns brought up seem to have been met with tl;dr responses that could quite accurately be described as filibustering. Truthfully, having now been alerted to this article, I find myself agreeing with those who want to torch it and start over. Resolute 22:35, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
No misrepresentation occurred. The nomination was not based on what subsequent editors at the AfD said, since they came after the nomination, unless they were in prior communication not at the article's talk page or AfD. If the article's tone is promotional, then surely someone can pick one sentence and write the same content with a nonpromotional tone; that hasn't been attempted with present content and that's why I don't think tone is the issue, but I appreciate your thought that it is. TLDR doesn't apply to answering charges with reasonable concision, as I did, because otherwise only charges and not disagreeing responses should be considered, producing bizarre results at best. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
@Nick Levinson. I added the commons media category to the article in external links. There is only one picture of your schools that I could find there. You could have some fun with students and faculty to take good school images and upload them. Have contests to get the best ones etc. You could also reward students by letting them choose images and add them to the article. The lucky ones get to choose the 'image of the day' type thing and change it in the article. I don't think this violates policy. They are also very welcome to take pictures for other articles as well. You will probably run into problems changing out the ones that have good pictures. Category:Wikipedia requested images has a whole bunch of articles that they can look through. I may actually create Category:Articles with lame images if it doesn't exist yet.--Canoe1967 (talk) 04:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm not with the schools. If anyone wants to ask the schools they can, but school-submitted work would almost certainly be subject to COI and school-prepared work would need attribution in a caption as a primary source. The article briefly had an indoors photo with children combined with a logo such that each was about half the image; and somewhere in Wikimedia I raised a question about whether it was allowed because it was posted either as being in the public domain or under the standard Wikipedia licensing (I forgot which) but not under fair use, and I doubted the logo would have been released under the first two ways; another editor looked for but did not find a release on the schools' website and the image was shortly tagged and deleted from Wikimedia. I think I looked in Google long ago for free images but didn't find any. An image with children would also raise an issue about their rights of publicity that likely bars use of such images here. Since their schools are co-located, it may be that there wouldn't be many acceptable images that would be very different from the present one (I imagine that many of their schools have their logos on the outsides of buildings, often dull buildings, but that most other scenes or more interesting scenes would probably not qualify, but I have never been to any of their schools despite my relative proximity). However, relative to the article's eventual length, a few images would help; I just don't have anything more to offer. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC) (Corrected two misspellings: 16:38, 17 May 2013 (UTC))
Subjects are always allowed and encouraged to provide images for articles about them. I spam them with email almost daily. They get the same !vote as anyone else for inclusion though. Our aim it to have the best images available for inclusion. If they provide better than what we have then we are are pretty well forced to use them because consensus shouldn't decide on including images of lower quality. They would need to be a 'free licence' with 'consent' of indentifiable people when not taken in a place with public access and no expectation of privacy. I created File:Visual consent image.jpg that I hope commons will tweak and accept as an easier form of consent than the backlogged OTRS for images taken in private places. We would just need to do a 'stacked' upload like File:Pamela Reed 1977.JPG which has other versions of the same file to prove public domain through lack of copyright. I should actually write a wp:essay about image issues. Uploading, consent, licencing, copyright, public domain, and inclusion !votes, etc. We discovered a treasure recently with File:Nighthawks by Edward Hopper 1942.jpg that has been in the public domain since 1969ish and very few knew this or why. The place that owns it may be very choked when others clue in. They still licence it for big bucks to publish. They also sell prints, bags, and umbrellas of it, I think. If you, the schools, or any others would like to contact me for help with images for any articles then feel free to do so. The easiest way would be to create accounts at commons, read the 'images nutshell' that I hope to write, and just start uploading. Images can take a long time to delete once uploaded so that gives us time to sort out any upload boo-boos they may make. They can also create Flickr accounts for free. We can transfer from there as long as they don't use the NC or ND limits which we don't allow on commons. CC-by or CC-by-sa are the most common. I avoid the SA limit with my images because it may make it harder to combine and re-use my images.--Canoe1967 (talk) 17:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I didn't know subjects could provide photos of themselves and it's surprising if they can, since presumably they can alter it in Photoshop or Gimp in ways that would bar use or require disclosure if analogous alteration was done to text being submitted by a subject or, say, a publicist representing a subject (as for a movie star), which is why COI would apply to text, so I think it would apply to imagery (and I have been proceeding on that basis relevantly here).
I'm not going to ask the schools to submit photos. If you think it's a good idea to ask them, that's up to you, but I don't recommend it, because of COI.
With modern creative work, the lack of a copyright notice is irrelevant to copyright existing, since it exists upon creation of the work, even though adding the notice adds more protection for the owner. I don't know when copyright notice became optional (that has to do with a treaty), so I don't know whether that applies to the 1977 photo.
I don't know who had the right to renew an individual's copyright when the terms were 28 and 28 years, in that I'm not sure the right could not have been transferred outside of, say, a family of a deceased owner, to perhaps a gallery, although the owner under such a renewal would still be the original owner, so that someone else renewing would be likely to do so only if they held a license from which they could benefit if the copyright was renewed regardless of who did the renewing.
I did not try to sort out everything in the Hopper and Reed image deletion discussions to which you've already posted.
The right of privacy is important in many jurisdictions but the right of publicity is a separate right recognized under various terms in all states and sometimes in Federal law, and is especially important respecting children. Wikimedia, as of the last time I checked, does not have a system for registering publicity consents and relying on rights owners (maybe photographers) to keep those consents and make them available when Wikipedia asks maybe years later is probably too unreliable. Because liability attaches even when an advertisement is disguised as editorial content and COI editing can cause an advertisement to appear in Wikipedia and not be removed for a long time, we have to be extra cautious about using an image that might require written consent to publicity.
I'm dubious whether posing with a sign is legally equal to signing a consent and don't recall coming across that as a legal theory. I sit in a subway train with an advertisement behind my head and visible to passersby without that constituting my endorsement of what is advertised. I have seen film/video work being done and signs about consent being implied by a person walking somewhere that's public, but I don't know if that's binding; it may just be persuasive to a point, like clauses denying liability on tickets and packages, which are often without legal effect. Your sign's phrasing, especially "all involved with images of people in this picture", is legally vague and definitely needs tweaking, but that would not be hard.
Nick Levinson (talk) 17:49, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree that it does need tweaking and then I can print one. Like most lefthanded people my handwriting isn't the best. Most of our images are hosted at commons and I don't think enough are aware of using the 'personality' and 'consent' tags we have for them. I usually add them above the CC license as I did with File:Visual consent image.jpg because I feel we should make these two issues more prominent. Someone could actually create versions in bright red to make sure they are noticed. Copyright, consent, and personality rights are three very different issues and hopefully anyone that re-uses images from commons understands personality rights. Commons is only responsible for the first two and re-users for the third. We may not need an ironclad document to prove consent but my sign may stand up in court better than an email sent saying 'yes, it is me'. Mine would fail if I had someone that couldn't read English holding it. Commons does have issues, but as more learn the rules then the issues should lessen. I think I will start writing my image essay to put most of it in a nutshell instead of policy pages all over the WMF servers and legal documents all over the net. Someone claiming to be a friend of Talk:Quin Snyder said that Mr. Snyder didn't like his image here. We removed it and gave them almost a month to replace it. I even emailed his bosses but my English may have caused problems as I never heard back. I would rather see a doctored photoshop one then the one in the article now. Many of our images come from sites like Flickr where they could be doctored as well. I doubt subjects would doctor them too much. I had File:Kathy Hilton.jpg doctored at commons to remove lip glare. File:Leona Helmsley cropped mug.jpg is a crop from her mugshot that we could actually remove the lines on and simply include her height in the infobox. I see an all too common problem on en:wp with BLP infobox images. We keep uploading ones from fans as they get older and older. Then the day they die we replace them with youthful images. I fluked out with Malachi Throne and found a PD image or two a week before he died. I think the media used the ones from commons in a few articles after he died. I still don't know if I should grayscale it to remove the sepia tone. I may ask opinions at help desk unless someone here can advise.--Canoe1967 (talk) 20:11, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Child protection

Jimmy, we need clarity that the Wikipedia:Child Protection policy applies to the uploading or inclusion of sexually explicit photos or videos of minors on Wikipedia. Current written policy does not address whether users can upload (or include from Commons) sexually explicit images without any evidence that the subjects are of legal age. In my opinion, such images are a way to facilitate inappropriate adult-child relationships, but it would be easier to clean up this place if the rule was made very clear. Can you have legal staff review this? Can you apply some force of logic to the argument in the interrim? Most of our sexuality articles use drawings or paintings that don't raise any issue, or else they have medical type photos that may be nude or graphic, but are not sexually explicit. I don't think the encyclopedia would be harmed at all by raising standards in this regard. Jehochman Talk 23:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you completely, but wonder - is this an actual problem? (I'm talking here about English Wikipedia primarily, the conversation about Commons is of course a different one to some extent.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Unfortunately it is a problem here on Wikipedia. Some of the sexually explicit images on Commons are being migrated into Wikipedia articles. For example you could review the conversation I'm having at Talk:Fingering (sexual_act)#Legal issue regarding my edit [25]. The article ejaculation has images of somebody's penis, and we have no idea how old that person is. Could it be one of our 15 year old editors? (The uploader's user page on commons has a solicitation. [26])The burden should be on those uploading or using sexually explicit images or videos of people to provide evidence of the age (not the burden on the editor removing an image to prove the subject is under age). While I understand that Wikimedia doesn't want to admit responsibility for section 2257 compliance, it is certainly possible to establish a policy requiring age verification based on a moral obligation to protect minors from being exploited. Just add a line to Wikipedia:Child Protection that says something like, "to protect minors from exploitation, all sexually explicit images in Wikipedia must have evidence that the subject(s) are at least 18 years old". This would also have the benefit of cleaning up Commons if the policy were extended there. People keep asking why Wikipedia is such a hostile place for female editors; the excessive and irresponsible uploading of porn is part of it. Jehochman Talk 11:09, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Have you tried that approach you suggest and then see how it flies beginning on the talk page of the policy, perhaps an RfC, etc.? It could be relatively easy to change that, ... and then you go to the harder row of enforcement (note you are likely to get questions about the meaning of explicit, and whether that is just left to consensus or not). Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:19, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
"Sexually explicit" has a legal definition 18 USC 2256 which we can import, and while there may be some edge cases requiring discussion, a policy would let us clean up the easy cases quickly. I've tried initiating discussions at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#New criteria 2 and Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#New criteria, but ran into objections, most notably that Wikipedia:Child protection already covered age requirements. Unfortunately, when I try to use Wikipedia:Child protection as justification to remove problematic images, editors then say, "The policy doesn't say that". The policy need to be made clear on the issue of age verification. Jehochman Talk 11:32, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
OK. So, shouldn't you address it at Child Protect laying it out in a well sourced and un-provocative fashion (eg here are the issues, here is what should be considered, here is a proposal)? Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:44, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I was under the impressions that WP:CHILDPROTECT had substantial input WMF, and was not entirely derived from the community. My request is for Jimmy to bring this matter to WMF legal's attention so they can draft a suitable addition to the policy that does not complicate WMF's legal obligations. This is the place where our policies intersect with the law, and we need the lawyers to check it carefully. Jehochman Talk 11:49, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I know that Geoff is very busy and also the WMF is understandably eager that policies be developed with strong community consensus and strong legal foundation as twin pillars of a wise and ethical approach to these and related matters. Therefore, I propose that we follow Alanscottwalker's suggestion and hash out some exact wording that we in the community would like to see, and then run it past WMF legal to make sure it meets their approval as well. (Although note well: it is extremely unlikely that a policy like this could cause problems for the WMF - NOT having a policy like this seems much more likely to cause problems, but IANAL.) As with many such things, my personal view is that going too quickly to "legal reasoning" tends to take the conversation down a bad path, as people start to think that the point is mere compliance with the law. Of course we do want to comply with the law, but we ALSO want to adhere to the highest ethical standards, which should generally far exceed legal minimums.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:10, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Link: Wikipedia_talk:Child_protection#Images. Jehochman Talk 13:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
This isn't up to the community. I've already seen what loose reasoning legal has applied regarding the display of the Virgin Killer album "art". I recognize we're not in a position of liability hosting that image, but it kind of, let's say, set the standard that others feel can occasionally be breached, if for no other reasons than to test the boundaries. We're either in compliance with the laws or we aren't, and that sort of thing isn't up to community debate. What your suggesting is just going to be a big dramafest, when what's needed is simply an implementation of law and reminders that anyone that isn't willing to be in compliance can go find a new playground. I'm already thinking that there may be a half dozen contributors at Commons that need to be given a free pass to troll elsewhere...I'm not paying for them to have free storage space for unused, unencyclopedic "art" that doesn't even have any proof that the subject in the image is of legal age.--MONGO 13:35, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Jehochman, I am pleased to see that these concerns are finally getting some serious attention. As you probably know, I have been trying to draw attention related issues on Commons for some time. Let's take a closer look at your example from Fingering (sexual_act) - File:Fingering close-up.jpg. This file was uploaded to Commons from Flickr by Commons admin TwoWings, one of several Commons admins who have worked diligently to increase the percentage of sexual content on Commons. (Note that Flickr, unlike Commons, would not have shown this image to users who did not wish to see sexually explicit material and would have provided a way, unlike Commons, to report the image if it had not been properly categorized as sexually explicit.) The Flickr account is now closed (which is often a sign that the images have been scraped from elsewhere). This image is actually part of a larger set of images, posted elsewhere on the internet before it was uploaded to Flickr or Commons. I think it is unlikely that a lower resolution copy was posted on Flickr by the creator (in this case, the subject herself). We have no way of knowing if the subject of this set of images consented to it being distributed, or if this is "revenge porn". In cases like this, consent is more of a concern to me than the possibility that the subject was underage (although that is a reasonable concern). Delicious carbuncle (talk) 13:47, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I've already nominated the image for deletion for those reasons, actually. --Conti|✉ 14:23, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Note that Flickr, unlike Commons, would not have shown this image to users ... Also flickr has on every page a link to a page where anyone can report an image to trained flickr staff. One of the options on that page "Other concerns" is monitored 24/7 the underage stuff gets deleted within hours of reporting. Flickr staff are also in direct contact with law enforcement, and as said above have the training to deal with these types of issues. John lilburne (talk) 15:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
You're surely not suggesting we just do it properly are you? I'm sure that must already have been considered, and there are good reasons we can't. Begoon talk 15:32, 17 May 2013 (UTC)


While we must stick to the law, we must also consider that the relevant laws are motivated by particular moral values which don't always have a direct relation to "child protection". Sometimes in the US, children are actually jailed for uploading pictures of themselves because they violate child porn laws by doing so. There can thus be a tension between sticking to the law and actually protecting children. Count Iblis (talk) 15:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Despite that tension, we must, as you say, stick to the law. If that leads to children being jailed for posting explicit images of themselves here, that is a terrible result but not one that is of our making. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm sure you're probably right, CI, and I've heard that said before, but [27] gives me nothing (probably crap Goole-fu on my part), so [citation needed] if you can, would be nice - not doubting you at all, but I'd like to be appalled at a real case rather than an implication. DC is basically right, though, as you are. Begoon talk 16:25, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I understand some people who think children should not be prosecuted for downloading, posting, or texting explicit pictures of themselves to others under their own free will, but as DC stated- it's against the law. To me, at least, I see no connection to a conspiracty theory about the moral police that the children are being "jailed" (and I assume it would be juvinile detention at worse, not jail, most likely a PINS petition, Boys or Girlstown, or some sort of probation, and/or suspension from school). It is not a moral issue, it is a legal issue- it is illegal. Children KNOW it is illegal, if an adult were to ask for the same pictures they would know to report it. Because they are sending them of their own free will does not absolve them in the eyes of the law (only NAMBLA I assume would defend their right to do so). Frankly I dont care about children's "rights"; I care about what the black and white letter of the law states; if a child gets arrested for breaking the law, well they broke they law. We shouldnt craft our policies based on morals (or being against a certain religious groups morals) or feeling sorry for children, we should base them on the law.97.88.87.68 (talk) 20:04, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
There are the US laws to content with but we also need to take into account this whole issue of child protection in general which paradoxically includes the possibility of persecution for precisely uploading illegal pictures. This means that while we should remove illegal pictures, the child protection policy should focus on all aspects of this issue, which includes not just the danger posed by pedophiles, but also the fact that many countries have repressive laws, that children can be bullied by other children etc. etc. If we only take the law into account, we would not do a good job of preventing problems. Count Iblis (talk) 20:31, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Ok, CI. Give me the citation I asked for above for "Sometimes in the US, children are actually jailed for uploading pictures of themselves because they violate child porn laws by doing so." That's not a challenge - it's an illustration of how these conversations need to be held. If you can provide one, then the comment is worthy of further discussion - if not, well, we need to move past it for now, because otherwise anyone has a license to derail any discussion by throwing in any old guff. It may not be guff, as I said, I've heard it said before, but if you're serious about this, then those are the rules we need to play by. Otherwise it's a pointless opinion shop. Until there can be a proper, evidence based discussion, what both you or I say is worthless. I don't need to cite the law for you, I think, you know it. You're implying it should not be the be all and end all, so pony up - concrete examples of any child jailed by not being allowed to upload child porn, or by being reported to law enforcement for doing so. Then we have an issue to discuss. Dead end otherwise. Once we have the example you can explain how/whether it could have been prevented by a different approach, or we can discuss it. Sorry if that sounds uncharitable, but vague handwaving won't move us forward. Begoon talk 21:37, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Count Iblis, we are not in a position to know if the uploader of child pornography is an adult or the child themselves - lacking that information, I see no other option than removing it from public view and alerting the appropriate authorities in each and every case. Do you have another option? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:44, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
How about not letting the image reach public view in the first place? Hillbillyholiday talk 21:58, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
DC, we should remove problematic pictures, but we should do more than just sticking to the law; the current text of the policy page suggest that we have taken the wrong approach, i.e. the idea that by just sticking to the law as rigorously as we can we will automatically protect children the best we can. The section on advice to children which should be the main and most detailed section is very short. Begoon, I think there were such cases in Florida, no one may actually have been jailed, though. Count Iblis (talk) 13:55, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
See that's where these conversations always go wrong. Please don't take this as a criticism of you, but it's a great illustration of why we need to look at real evidence instead of what we think we know (perceived wisdom). You started by saying "Sometimes in the US, children are actually jailed for uploading pictures of themselves because they violate child porn laws by doing so." You thought you knew that was the case. I remembered hearing the argument before, somewhere. Now it turns out we were maybe both remembering uncorroborated stuff from somewhere or other. We simply cannot base important decisions on that sort of woolly premise. We've both possibly wasted many words on something that may be an urban myth. (It also may turn out to be true, and someone may pop in with a link, but my point still stands, even in that case - we should not have entertained the diversion until we had solid evidence.) Sometimes this happens purely by accident, as I assume it did here, but sometimes it is used as a deliberate diversionary tactic to derail a discussion. We can prevent that if we treat our discussions like we do our articles, and refuse to entertain supposition until it is supported by fact. </rant> Begoon talk 14:13, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
I agree with the general point you are making, but then the details about such prosecutions are actually a side issue here. Obviously, you do have in the US legal system a different approach toward sexuality when it comes to people younger than 18 compared to Europe. And if you take a world wide view, you do see that the law on sexual matters in general (not just in relation to children) can be quite repressive. We're not talking about just a few countries here (e.g. the extreme cases of Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia), but many more Westernized countries like Dubai or Uganda have quite repressive laws. Count Iblis (talk) 16:35, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Count Iblis, I believe you have agreed, twice now, that WP must follow the law. The law of the United States, not Saudi Arabia. Given that, I'm not sure why you are going on about the possibility of prosecution of children for posting images of themselves. You may make an argument following the law is not ultimately in the best interest of a hypothetical child who has posted explicit sexual images of themselves on WP, but since we are agreed that WP should follow the law, that discussion would be a distraction from the real issue. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:47, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Child protection policy should also include some regulations to prevent bullying of children on the sites that belong to the Wikimedia Foundation because bullying is a big problem here. As it stands now the Foundation does absolutely nothing to stop bullying, and the Arbitration Committee protects bullies with the administrative tools instead of protecting children. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 16:35, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • The dais, the ditch, and the roads: We may wish to start with three levels of arguments. The ditch being the lowest standard which includes interpretation or bending the road which is the laws. The dias we could peg somewhere between the top of the beanstalk and The Vatican. Once we create these three sections of the discussions then we populate them with their common arguments. The best outcome would be a second, and much higher road, that would be our accepted standards.--Canoe1967 (talk) 18:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
    • What?--MONGO 20:47, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Basically most of us know the points that will be brought up by all factions. It may be easiest to list them at the start and then hack away at them from there until consensus is reached on higher or lower accepted standards for en:wp and commons. I see no reason why we can't have a 'not allowed on en:wp' category at commons.--Canoe1967 (talk) 22:09, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I can list a million reasons why this is a horrible idea. -- A Certain White Cat chi? 19:00, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Child protection

This issue is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Child protection. Why don't we take this discussion there to avoid duplication? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:39, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Nonsense the last post there was 3.5 years ago. The discussion is here not there. John lilburne (talk) 20:54, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
That's a weird redirect due to case sensitivity. I have corrected it. There is discussion now that I have corrected the old weird redirect. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:57, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Actually it was the space after the colon that prompted the redirect. I've corrected the link and further directed the target but I have to say that I don't see the issue you raised as being equivalent to the discussion above. I'm not entirely convinced that it has merit as this is not a matter that a parent can overcome through permission. My76Strat (talk) 21:08, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
My question about parental consent was not related to the suggestion to go to the proper Wikipedia Talk page rather than using a user talk page to discuss procedural updates. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I've redirected to the entire page, not to the paragraph. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:12, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
My bad. My76Strat (talk) 21:20, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Why not take a full shortcut and delete images which can be judged with values from "ambiguous" to "inappropriate"? Wikipedia being better than Britannica because of all these images about sex and kinky stuff is just a joke, the real facts are that Wikipedia is indeed better than Britannica for the general population because it helps people solve their homework and check for quasi-correct facts when they have a question about them at any time during the day. Kord Kakurios (talk) 20:45, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

I saw you in a video I watched in U.S History class about the North VS the South in the mid 1800's. Good job, Jim. I <3 Wikipedia. Good luck with the foundation un upcoming years. Sincerely, WorldTraveller101(Trouble?/My Work) 21:15, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Why was Jimbo in a video about the North versus the South in the mid-1800s? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 14:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Is it policy now that Jimbo is required to ask permission from Wikipedia editors before doing anything as a private citizen? --108.38.191.162 (talk) 20:21, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Demiurge1000, I have no idea, but I just thought it was cool. And to IP 108.38.191.162, I have no idea. Thanks guys. WorldTraveller101(Trouble?/My Work) 20:37, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Is there a policy?

Is there a policy that dictates us to avoid deliberately placed imprecise words? Like instead of a precisely known number we put "many" to appease people. I am highly confounded could anybody please help me? I thought introduction of clarity and eradication of blurry claims was one of our goals, isn't it common sense or something that is prerequisite for an encyclopaedia? Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 06:29, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

[28] Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Is that a response or an insinuation? You shouldn't have presumed that it was only about that article and I don't care about anything else about Wikipedia. The issue is bigger than this. We should not discriminate basing on potential controversiality of an article here. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 08:27, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Not knowing any context behind this discussion, I would cite WP:W2W, which is in the MOS. But of course, there is also a balance, with the other end being the addition of excessive detail or losing the forest for the trees. In the diff by Anthonyhcole, I think the edit being reverted has other issues. It takes only one statistic to replace the word "many" (looks like the number is 58 + 790 + 254 = 1102 in this case) and the reverts were probably based on the other additions. Arc de Ciel (talk) 09:13, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
"In the diff by Anthonyhcole, I think the edit being reverted has other issues." - you bet. BTW, if you want to comment on that discussion then kindly visit the talk and comment there. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 09:30, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
You agree with me that your edit has issues? :-) Thanks for the invitation, but the topic is outside my interests. Arc de Ciel (talk) 09:45, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
As I am sure Arc de Ciel knows (because they mentioned MOS and are uninvolved) but Mrt3366 may not, W2W is a guideline, not policy. Excuse the dreadful grammar. - Sitush (talk) 09:49, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for throwing yet another assumption against me Sitush. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 10:06, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
I didn't assume anything about you and was merely clarifying, since you asked about policy: I have no idea what you do or do not know and thus worded it carefully. You are effectively shopping here, btw. You have a go at Anthonyhcole for perceived presumption in linking an article, then you suggest that Arc should comment on a discussion for that very same article. And your accusations below clearly relate to that same article - the timing of everything that you are doing suggests that - and are largely unfounded. Anyway, I'll let you get on with it. Sitush (talk) 10:43, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
I don't have any money for shopping. I have not brought up the diff, have I? Anthony did, I didn't like it. You're assuming bad faith. But I understand your skepticism. I have not invited anyone to comment there by the way, if someone feels invited then that is not my problem. That is me clarifying. I am merely saying that this is not about Modi's article. Look what I wrote below. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 10:48, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Ok. It is not for me to judge. - Sitush (talk) 10:53, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Kindly read Mr. Wales

The whole idea of consensus depends on the presupposition that

  1. a fair percentage of honest and competent people would be involved in shaping the consensus.
  2. the preponderance of the commenters would be honest in their evaluation,
  3. most would be competent enough to acknowledge and admit the fairly objective assertions

The problem is most of the times when biased editors knowingly support a stance that is antithetical to the goal of our project itself and decreases credibility of Wikipedia, there is no provision for any speedy action to be taken against them or those admin who make numerous mistakes in closing such debates without due regard to the rationality of "votes". There is not enough deterrence in place. Consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity, I know, but majority can be wrong too. May be I am not being articulate enough but I hope you get the idea. (I am not saying I am infallible by the way, I have my predilections too.)

Mr. Wales, this is worrying. How can we revert the community-wide biases and accepted but harmful status quos? Is there a mechanism in place for that? Wikipedia may become a propaganda piece if this is allowed to go on. I don't know what the solution is but I am certain that we need some mechanism to address the issues and although assuming good faith is good in day-to-day editing but there is no reason why we should preclude the possibilities that some special types of biases may take hold on Wikipedia's more controversial articles. One may say that these controversial articles are nugatory in number, I agree, but nevertheless our goal includes them too. You may not believe me but I have partaken in online discussions where they argued Wikipedia is not least bit neutral when it comes to controversial article (sometimes key info are omitted, sometimes unsourced synthesis is included, sometimes undue weight is given to minuscule assertions all these in the name of "consensus") and the reason they say is our flawed presumptions before building a consensus. I am worried! Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 08:27, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

I beseech others, on this page at least focus on the claims not my image that would be more conducive. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 08:35, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Support better governance for Wikipedia, including giving more power to ArbCom. To assume that "consensus" works for anything other than low-level content decisions is nothing but technolibertarian masturbation—we need to create a proper institutional structure on this encyclopedia. I've said many times already that Wikipedia has been hijacked by self-serving, angry cabals, and that that needs to change. Wer900 • talk 01:49, 19 May 2013 (UTC)
As it seems then you and I are on the same page on this issue. I wouldn't say "hijacked" but yes there is that "cabalistic" mental attitude in work. More power to ArbCom? The ArbCom is a like an apex Court, now I wouldn't call it speedy action if I had to go to ArbCom for such actions. It is really so darn hard that I don't know where or how to begin. There has to some sort of a new editing "privilege" or "user-right" that is bestowed upon only the most "trusted" users (much like CUs) and don't let everybody vote, let the Stewards, CUs and the Bureaucrats vote (I don't think every Admin is a trusted user) in the nominations. We are not a democracy there is no reason to pretend as though everybody should have equal scope when this is clearly not the case. Then create a noticeboard where only the accuser and the accused will leave their terse remark. And based on their succinct remarks and the contribution history, the proper course of action may be chosen by the jury.
When I talked about editors knowingly supporting a stance that is antithetical to the Project's goal, I wasn't leaving anything up to assumption. If somebody "reports" a guy with a reason, and the accused, in front of the jury (←just a temporary word to refer to those who may have the proposed user-right), can't justify up to a reasonable extent that why (s)he thinks that his/her vote will have improved the project, then they will be blocked or temporarily/partially banned from that discussion. If they can describe their action, then the accuser's edits/behavior would be reviewed.

P.S. That's just a sketchy idea of what I am hoping for. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 06:58, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

With capability comes responsibility. Wikipedia, I believe, has already reached a stage from where it can influence a sizeable portion of general population. Schools, Colleges, etc, have started to encourage their students to use Wikipedia as a starting point for any research. The possibility of biases must not be ignored.
Misplaced trust can cost, or rather, is costing the Project its credibility. Mr. Wales, do something to counter it, before it's too late. I am not scaremongering here, btw, I am far from that. I am merely saying that we must have some sort of effective deterrence (mechanism for speedy action) in place for systematically biased group of editors. Maybe I am one of those, who knows? Even 5,000 article-edits would be very hard to trace back, and separating chaff from the wheat would then be nigh impossible. Mr T(Talk?) (New thread?) 09:09, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Salon shames Wikipedia

Jimbo, have you read the article Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia? It makes Wikipedia look pretty bad. I'm sure Andrew Leonard isn't a real journalist, though. Maybe his editor at Salon can be contacted, asking for his removal from the Wikipedia beat. - 50.144.87.194 (talk) 15:57, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Obviously a sarcastic suggestion. I found it refreshing to see really good investigative journalism, which is a rarity these days. Carrite (talk) 16:10, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Be careful here, the BLP police is watching this thread. Count Iblis (talk) 16:21, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Actually, the boredom police are watching too... AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:24, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
The user self-identified as "Bob Young" on Wiki, I don't think even the most crazy-eyed opponents of Wikipediocracy would have objections to linkage to this piece (or the related thread there, for that matter). Carrite (talk) 18:07, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
The linked article says "Wikipedia is one of the jewels in the Internet’s crown, an amazing collective achievement, a mighty stab at realizing an awesome dream: a constantly updated repository for all human knowledge. It is created from the bottom up, a crowd-sourced labor of love by people who require no compensation for their work but also don’t need to jump through any qualifying hoops." Seems fair. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 18:25, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
Yep. But a jewel that must be defended constantly and vigorously from complacency and to correct those systemic flaws that tend to undermine its truthfulness, neutrality, and accuracy. Carrite (talk) 20:16, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Well, crowd-hacked yet righted by veteran editors: Consider "sourced" versus "soured". I guess it does no good to try explaining to magazines how a "crowd-sourced" encyclopedia is called a "blog" but WP survives by having veteran editors and Bots diligently revert or rewrite 70-90% of the crowd-souring of the pages. In fact, I think it could be shown, if pages were left to the quality of the crowd-based edits, then the readership would vanish like a ghost town, because people would close articles after about the 5th nonsense or ranting phrase which they read, especially after about the 5th such page. Even this year, I have confirmed many mid-range-article edits are over 80% hack edits+reverts. We know now, even with this diligence, how the wp:wikirot (with wp:linkrot) has still been a widespread problem, where some editors must rewrite whole sections to re-align the text with current data, common phrasing, or reduction of wp:data hoarding. As I recall, one sports-manager article had over 27 bottom navboxes. So, when many people "don’t need to jump through any qualifying hoops", then the reality is other people are jumping through those hoops for them, or over, under and around them. Just a reminder: WP is crowd-hacked while veteran-salvaged. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:40, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Useless edits exceed 80% hack edits+reverts: In reviewing the large number of hack edits, which are typically reverted within minutes, I also noticed other questionable, useless edits, such as removing 2nd comma in "1, 2, and 3". Other useless edits included altering footnotes to link to advert websites, or borderline, off-topic claims which need to be reworded or removed when the text gets rewritten later. However, most fringe claims are part of the 80% edits+reverts, often reverted instantly as "unsourced". Anyway, the 80% level tends to be a conservative estimate of "crowd-sourced" clutter. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:53, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Turkish Wikipedia

When Turkish Wikipedias tackle other problems? -Writer: User:Aguzer 11:10, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Could you explain the question? You have written on this page before about abuses in the Turkish Wikipedia, but I don't know what question you are asking now. Looie496 (talk) 15:10, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

WP fixed for https/IPv6 pageview stats

This is just an FYI to relay the news that future stats.grok.se pageview counts are hopefully fixed now, and will, today, be re-including views via https-protocol links or any views by IPv6-format IP addresses. As promised, on 10 May 2013, by Diederik (User:Drdee) of the Analytics Team @WMF, the logged page requests were studied, and several software changes were made, to restore the pageview entries and fix related problems on 14 May, within just 4 days. I thanked him for the quick fix, as expecting a 2-week delay for some software-update cycle. Plus, note how two major populations of readers had been omitted from counts, not just https-protocol viewers (of the bogus Google-https links), but also anyone reading pages over an IPv6 address had missing pageviews.
Recent pageview tests confirmed other "missing" pageviews were not due to https-protocol omissions, because the totals were still hundreds too low after https-views had been discounted. With the recent fix to GWTW, renamed temporarily as "Gone with the Wind (1939 film)", the pageviews reported by stats.grok.se totalled only 3,600-3,800/day, as compared to former levels over 4,500/day for the GWTW film. The mystery remained about hundreds of missing readers, because we did not realize IPv6 pageviews had also been omitted. However, tonight, at 01:00 UTC, the 15 May pageview counts should return near March-2013 levels for many of the 300+ major articles which still have Google-https links, plus the thousands of other pages/images wikilinked from those articles. Meanwhile, the Google-https links remain firm (but counted) in search-results, while some Mobile-site pages "en.m.wikipedia.org/*" are still listed separately in Google, confusing many people, plus who has time to think about all these mega-problems even if they were simple, rather than intertwined complexities. More later. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:50, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Confirmed https pageviews resumed 14 May 2013: I have run tests (on 15 May 2013) to verify exact pageview counts for either http or https-protocol, pages or images, on both enwiki and dewiki (German WP also fixed). The pageview data logs, such as for stats.grok.se, have been fixed (at 18:44, 14 May 2013) to re-enable the https/ip6 stream to webstatscollector, where Google https-protocol links, for over 300 major enwiki articles (see stats: 201305/Email or 201305/Parabola or 201305/Shakira, and thousands of wikilinked pages), had been 55%-80% under-reported during late March, April and early May (see essay: wp:Google https links). The typical pageview counts, from March 2013, have resumed in pageviews, as 2x-3.5x times higher for https-prefix pages/images, during 15 May 2013. German WP pageviews were also fixed for different pages (see stats: /de/201305/Euklidischer Raum "Euclidean Space" or /de/201305/Oval). All https page requests had been omitted during 26 March 2013 to 18:44, 14 May 2013, and so there will be permanent low spots in the pageview stats of some pages during those 50 days (~7 weeks), for various articles, images, talk-pages, templates or categories which were viewed mostly via https-protocol links on some of those 50 days. Many thousands of pages/images were not affected, and those pageviews will seem relatively stable during that 50-day period. As of 15 May 2013, the http/https pageviews have been re-confirmed to log exactly "to the penny" and so, if a page/image was viewed 17x times during a day, it will show a total of exactly 17 pageviews for that day. -Wikid77 06:39, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Seems to be OK again, thanks: First article where this was spotted is back at old levels, 4 times as high as during the past few weeks. Fram (talk) 07:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
      • Thanks for your diligent work on this, Wikid77. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 11:53, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
      • Well, I was surprised how many people still think pageviews are unimportant (and it took several people to keep complaining about the low pageviews to get them fixed), while some editors were decidedly ignoring or ridiculing all worries about more pages (over 600) dropping to low pageviews (including "Cancer" or "email" or "Oxygen" or "Shakira" or "Calculus" or "Lady Gaga" or "Film noir" or "Lolita" or "Alan Turing" or "American football" or "Geometry" or "Basketball" or "Hexagon" etc.). I guess we are seeing more direct evidence of the "age-old" warning: unless customers (the "readers") are directly mentioned in a computer system's goals or priorities, they will be ignored by pressures to appease worker hobbies rather than the customers. That also explains the self-focused wp:Data hoarding to create lists or giant navboxes, which few people would read. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Late pageviews after 23:30 seem logged next day: As another issue in verifying the exact counts for current pageviews, I have noticed several days where pageviews made after 23:30 UTC, did not get logged until the next day. I am thinking there is some time of "buffering delay" where the queue of page-request entries gets tallied, to update the daily counts for stats.grok.se, soon after midnight UTC, but that might cause most/all pageviews after 23:30-23:45 to get counted on the next calendar day. However, further tests failed to find the pageviews on either day (as if pageviews after 23:30 were lost), and so more tests are needed. More later. -Wikid77 01:28/20:40, 18 May, 18:42, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed loss of new-messages notifications

Within the past weeks at wp:PUMPTECH, more people have been complaining about yet another, yet more questionable, unneeded changes to the Wikipedia user-interface features, and the omission of the age-old  new-messages barline  was noted as a problem, with the new Special:Notifications(?) stuff. Some browsers give no notification, but show instead "(1)" [message] in the menu. I am thinking, of writing a blurb, to encourage former editors to return:

"Come back again to Wikipedia, where nothing works as it used to,
except severe limits in template operation or nesting, and nothing
seems intuitive now, but there are rulespam diatribes everywhere."

I think if vandals actively invented ways to make Wikipedia more difficult or confusing, for the greatest number of editors, I can't imagine better vandalism than rejacking the user-login dialog, redropping the 180-day login to 30-day timeouts (during edit-preview), dropping the new-messages bar for user-talk, removing the special-characters copy/paste box (wp:PASTE), removing fast Classic or Nostalgia browser skin, showing 2-page rulespam for every edit, or shifting the "[edit]" button away from the right-side of headers. It reminds me of anti-virus software which is so slow and disruptive to screen formats, wanting to be installed on every computer, that it has become a virus in its own right, delaying user actions, while trying to get infected into every other computer. Meanwhile, people have begged to fix "edit-conflict" to auto-correct and simply re-insert the non-interleaved text sections, but instead, we get suppression of the new-messages bar as a so-called improvement. This has been a general mood at wp:PUMPTECH, and I think you can see why techically-minded editors view the many such changes as excessive annoyance, where they spend hours discussing ways to un-rejack the features to simulate the old operations. It has reached the point where asking for important fixes is like asking a used-car salesman to fix the brakes on a car. It's just not a priority, despite the need for reliable brakes, it does not matter enough. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:38, 15 May, 06:39, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

This is a very pessimistic complaint, and I would like to contradict it. But I can't. The orange message bar has been restored in some form, but the astonishing thing is that it was removed in the first place, (1) without adequate prior notification, (2) without any regard for the disruptive effect on new users who don't know they have a personal talk page or the fact that then vandals can claim convincingly that they did not see the warnings, (3) without a solution for the problem of lumping together talk page messages and esoteric notifications such as "someone linked to a page you created", (4) without testing the feature on screenreader users (for whom the new Echo notification is even less apparent, and appears in a confusing area near the bottom of the page).
The obvious conclusion seems to be that user interface decisions are being taken by people who have no serious understanding of Wikipedia's processes (see 2 and 3), are not doing due diligence before changing a top 10 website (see 4), and have a problem with illusory superiority (see 1). I hope I am wrong. Hans Adler 20:27, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
  • We need another method to prioritize real issues and get them improved: It is only pessimistic if considered hopeless, but instead it is realistic, and there are alternatives. Obviously, it is a top priority to keep the new-messages bar (to alert for thousands of new-user "improper edits" or for busy editors who do not check talk-pages every few hours). There should have been a setting in Special:Preferences to "Hide new-messages bar" such as for admins or wikignomes who get new messages every 10 minutes. There has been massive effort invested into new features, such as the Special:Notifications to contact each user when their username gets wikilinked, so we know WP has the resources to solve problems. Again, fixing the most-common "edit conflict" scenarios to auto-correct, where a user inserts a reply message into an active talk-page or changes a few words into a re-edited article, would be a relatively simple task, compared to rewriting the user-login dialog or implementing the score-tag "<score>" (April 2013) to generate a cached-image for a printed staff of musical notes. We need to focus on bigger issues. Definitely, more people need to voice concerns at the Bugzilla-sort-out meetings, etc. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

You ain't seen nuthin yet: WP:FLOW. Johnuniq (talk) 00:15, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

  • Fortunately the WP:FLOW software doesn't exist yet: So, people wary of WP:FLOW messages can be reminded to try LiquidThreads ("LikewiseDreads") to see how slow and rambling and no View-history provided for message edits, unable to see who changed what when. Meanwhile, focus on autocorrection for edit-conflicts. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:49, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Anyone who attends any sort of IT course understands the basic flow diagram - Analysis > Design > Test Implementation > Testing > Feedback > Implement Live. Uniquely amongst top 10 websites, your employees appear to have forgotten this basic concept, and instead have modified it to the following complete screw-up; Analysis (amongst no-one who actually uses the site) > Design (based on Analysis of ... er ... no-one) > Implement Live. This has therefore gained the additional stage of "everyone who actually uses the site telling them they've fucked up". Yet oddly, no-one appears to be willing to actually (a) adnit the problems, or (b) fix the problems. Well done. Black Kite (talk) 00:39, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I can see your point. I also see WMF projects as having a smaller budget and nothing to lose. Wikipedians should accept lower budget upgrades and learn to adapt to them. Turnkey upgrades are for those that can't handle driving a car for two miles with a flat tire. If you don't like the ride then get out and hitchhike.--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:31, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • People should run for the board on a sane technology platform. Remember, the biennial Board of Trustees election is coming up. II | (t - c) 00:42, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
I am thinking if more people could re-emphasize what problems bother them, and if there were a recognized list of "Top 10 New useful features" then, perhaps, the whole organization (with the developers) could easily remember, "Oh right, many people are stunned by frequent edit-conflicts, especially adding phrases into hot-topic articles, or trying to reply during a busy conversation" and so something like having an Edit-merge preview page, rather than only Edit-conflict previews, could help numerous editors to better cope when trying to update busy pages of current-affairs topics. Instead, Wikipedia seems to break down, or crater, as unable to inter-connect contributions from multiple editors when a major event occurs. We need to find more ways to prioritize important improvements, over someone-might-like-this-feature enhancements. -Wikid77 01:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
I assume you mean breaking news events. That is a common problem when CNN comes on at 10pm with updates and too many want to 'scoup' their edit into the article. I doubt spending time, money, and effort will ever change that. It will just be bingo as to who can edit/save fastest no matter how much we try to make a level field for all editors.--Canoe1967 (talk) 01:37, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Most edit-conflicts are medium-paced, minor & fixable: Actually, in tests of busy discussions, the edit-conflicts have been auto-corrected easily, because there is ample time to re-preview and re-SAVE an Edit-merge when conflicts only occur every few minutes. Most discussions involve adding replies, rather than changing the words, so I am thinking the auto-correction of edit-conflicts in talk-pages should append later replies, after any earlier replies at the same relative line numbers, to treat multiple replies as stacked in date order. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:40, 18 May, revised 22:22, 19 May 2013 (UTC)
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